Fallout: New Vegas Interviews

Two recent interviews with Fallout: New Vegas associate producer Theresa Treadwell have hit the web, both of which look to have been conducted during or around QuakeCon.

AusGamers:

AG: In terms of the companion system, what was the decision behind expanding that to the extent you guys have? Obviously there were examples of it in the other games, but it seems you guys have crafted a deeper, more robust system here…

Tess: Yeah, so one of the things Obsidian is known for is our companions (the other is our writing and story stuff). And that’s a big deal to us, to have companions who feel like people; you know they have a story, they have a personality, you know, they all talk a certain way. So in our game, the first thing we tried to address is the complaints and frustrations people had with the companions in Fallout 3. You know, they’d get in the way, or they wouldn’t equip what I wanted them to, or they’d just let themselves die… So with ours, we’ve got a really quick and easy companion wheel. It’s just one click and you can tell them “use a Stimpak”, “go over here”, “get away from me”, you know.

They also each have their own back-story; they also have their own quests, so let’s say this one character says he wants to check out a certain place and here’s my reason, can we go do it, and you can say yeah, sure, let’s go and do it and by doing that for them, they might give you something or help you out with something you want to do. And also every companion gives you a Perk and you’ll only have the Perk when they’re with you.

And, er, Gay Nerds covers some general questions about her video game career:

GN: Game development is one of the holy grails of nerdery. How did you get into it?

Tess: I started out poking around in hex files for PC games, working as a translator on fan patches for Japanese and Korean games, pretty minor stuff as a hobby. As a university student, I played Natural Selection (Half-Life total conversion mod) obsessively and got on the QA team, which was probably the tipping point; once I got my degree, I landed a job with an MMO publisher as a community manager, and was eventually shanghai’d into becoming a producer. And here we are!