How to Write Fallout: New Vegas DLC

Joystiq has put online a brief transcript of a talk Obsidian’s Chris Avellone gave at the recent GDC Online, focused specifically on the writing of Fallout: New Vegas’ downloable content packs. People who have followed Avellone’s thoughts on the subject should already know quite a few of the things he says, but it’s still an interesting read.

Here’s a snip:

Once dialogue is written, Obsidian stages table reads. However, these don’t involve the voice actors; rather, team members each take the part of a character they didn’t write, and then go through the dialogue, each noticing where others stumble, mispronounce words or show any other disfluency. This process helps streamline the recording process later, “because studio time is incredibly expensive,” Avellone said, “and the last thing you want is some actor spending five minutes debating this line with you to try to get it fixed when you have 300 more lines you still have to read and you have no idea how they’re going to get done.”