GB Feature: Fallout: New Vegas and DLC Post-mortem Interview, Part One

Chris Avellone has been instrumental in crafting some amazing CRPGs during his career, with his most recent contribution to our role-playing game collections being Fallout: New Vegas and its four story-driven DLC packs. To learn more about the concepts, ideas, and design elements that went into the game and its add-ons, we fired off a massive set of post-mortem questions to Chris, and have just finished publishing the first half of the Q&A:

You explored different themes with each DLC. What themes would you say were the most important in these add-ons, and do you feel that Fallout’s story traditions suit focusing on such themes?

Lonesome Road was purposely built around the final image at the end of Fallout 1 – the Vault Dweller walking off into a lonely future. The idea of a protagonist whose home is lost to him, walking off into the wilderness after helping to nurture and protect a place that ultimately exiles him (or where he simply no longer belongs) is one of the hallmarks of Fallout. The sense of abandonment and the lone wanderer connection was important in Lonesome Road, except you’re not walking into a lonely future, you’re walking into your character’s past and seeing what it’s done in the present. Ulysses hints that it’s possible the player left the West and left NCR because he didn’t belong, and that’s why he walked the road to the Mojave – but that’s Ulysses’ perspective, and the motivations for your character are your own.

I think Old World Blues and Lonesome Road had two themes that strongly hooked into Fallout, and have always been there. The theme of Old World Blues was always “the optimistic atomic future of what might have been,” and the idea that all of these technological marvels could have saved the world if they had simply had a better guiding hand – it’s not the technology to blame, it’s the thought behind it.

Dead Money was more of a survivalist horror experience, and the theme of greed and human nature was an experiment that I felt fit with the adventure arc, so I went with it. I did feel that Fallout could use some more struggle-for-survival elements, and that was part of it as well – in short, I wanted miracle items like Stimpaks to feel amazing again rather than cause players to shrug.

There’s a lot more info yet to be spilled, so check back in a couple of days for the second half.