Bethesda Game Studios. “The Making of Fallout 3.” Fallout 3 The Collector’s Edition. DVD. Video, 39:00.
(The video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr5olzm9jXg)
FALLOUT 101
Todd Howard: We wanted to have more than one thing in our pocket that we didn’t just want to do an Elder Scrolls, then an Elder Scrolls, and an Elder Scrolls… We knew we wanted to be in a similar vein in terms of a more open world, we wanted, you know, kind of role-playing elements and things like this. And we made a list of things that we might want to do. At the top of the list was Fallout.
Emil Pagliarulo: Fallout 1 to me is like the pinnacle of that post-apocalyptic gameplay and looking at the story and the characters in there really inspiring.
Todd Howard: We felt, in that world, and the systems they have in Fallout 1 coupled with the way we put things together, sort of became obsessed like, this is the game. We have to make this game.
A bunch of the people who run the company knew the people at Interplay, and we pestered and pestered them like, “Are you guys using Fallout?” They weren’t doing anything with it. Can we do something? And eventually, they said “Yes.”
Pete Hines: It’s now ours and we have always taken the approach that Fallout 3 is being made as if we made the first two. Well that means we do what we do, which is, we reinvent, we look at what works, what didn’t, and we’re not afraid to make changes, we’re not afraid to try new things, and we’re going to try and sort of move the genre forward and move the gaming forward.
Emil Pagliarulo: Our game is set, 30 something years after the events of Fallout 2 so we didn’t want to step on their fiction, but the story itself is something that we came up with based on the themes of the original Fallout. It’s 30 years after the events of Fallout 2 but it’s 200 years after the original atomic holocaust, so in our game, things have gotten actually worse, you know, society hasn’t progressed, you know, humanity is struggling to survive. There is radiation sickness, and people don’t have fresh clean water, and like, people are pretty well screwed. You leave the safety of your vault into this world, you know, it’s your big decision. Am I going to help these people, or am I going to, you know, do my own thing and serve my own selfish needs?
Todd Howard: We felt we needed to do something new with role-playing and guns. We couldn’t just do a pure first-person shooter thing. Well, how can we kind of bridge that gap between what my character can do that I’ve made in the game and what I, the player, can do? Something we always wrestle with.
Emil Pagliarulo: Our game is primarily first-person so when you have guns in first-person the bar has been raised, you know, you’ve got Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, you gotta approach that level but it’s tough because we are an RPG, not a shooter, but what we definitely wanted to do with the gun stuff is not do everything that everyone else has done, so, you know, we have some weapons that you can craft and some unique weapons, you know, like the rocket launcher that shoots all the crap you find in the world, that can shoot it as projectiles.
One of the things we realize with Oblivion, most of the combat is melee combat, so everybody’s, you know, charging you in up-close and personal, not so with guns. People stay back, they take cover… We really had to compensate for that.
Todd Howard: What we’re doing technically with Fallout 3, we’re drawing twice as much stuff on the screen and faster, right, so, our actual ability to put things on the screen and have them look cool or be cool or do more with characters, explosions, whatever we want. It’s, you know, a large factor above Oblivion. Our problem is we can’t stop ourselves. Fallout is one of those examples of the game, when we started, was about half the size.
Emil Pagliarulo: Right, look at the game overall and it’s remarkably similar to, you know, what we had envisioned. There are some really big plot points that changed for the better.
Todd Howard: You emerge from these vaults and you don’t know what’s happened, so it’s the optimism of this retro 50s world and it’s all destroyed, that people are still getting on. They’re still trying to do their hair right and if they had hairspray, they’d use it, and it’s like “You know what? Don’t look at the destroyed crater and the smoking thing behind me. It’s all cool, we’re cool. We’ll have some cigars and martinis later.”
Sentinel Lyons (Game NPC): You just manage to get yourself into all sorts of trouble, don’t you?
Emil Pagliarulo: That’s what I love about Fallout, it doesn’t take itself too seriously because the reality is so frightening and so depressing. It feels like you leave that vault and the only thing you take with you is a piece of technology strapped to your wrist. It becomes your own, sort of, lifeline. It’s that emergent thing that’s keeping you in the game.
Pete Hines: We’re big believers in immersion because ultimately our goal is we want to see productivity decline. We want sick days to go up. We want people staying up until five o’clock in the morning because they had no idea what time it was and they just had to do that one more quest. They have to get up for work in an hour.
Todd Howard: I think one of the things we try to do really well are the worlds that are very very realized, so for the moments you’re in them the amount of times you say “I wonder if I can… Oh, I can. I wonder if I can… Oh, I can.” It gives you a level of attachment, you know, to the person you’re playing in the game.
Ashley Cheng: Fallout is just such a unique wonderful world to explore. I think it fits the kind of game that we make perfectly. It’s an open-ended environment, lots of characters, really interesting game systems.
Todd Howard: If you can make, whatever the repetitive action is, really entertaining, like, that’s where the rubber meets the road in a lot of these games. So, this is something I know the players going to do thousand times. Make that as entertaining as you can and the rest of it is pretty much great.
Emil Pagliarulo: We had the story written and we had the outlines for all the quests but then, you know, we have a lot of talented designers here we wanted to pass that stuff on to them so they would be given the rough outlines of these, you know, miscellaneous quests and then they would have the freedom to flesh those out themselves.
Doc Hoff (Game NPC): Ah, welcome weary traveler. You look like a traveler in need of relaxation and the finest of chemical assistance.
Emil Pagliarulo: Design is an iterative process. You need to leave room to change as you go, so having a design doc that thick at the outset is actually not that healthy. I think we did a much better job this time around than we did with Oblivion. We had builds of the game and we actually themed those builds according to the things we wanted to see in the game, so we had a combat build, a creature build…
Todd Howard: We had a build that was just called ‘Guns,’ and all the build was about was shooting guns, like, how do they feel in your hand, and so, there was no “it must do this, it must do this, it must do this…” It’s just about guns, and that, kind of, will get us on a path of something, that is just a lot more fun.
We can sit in a meeting for hours and debate, you know, there’re pluses and minuses of it, and then, we’ll put it in the game, and in 30 seconds anybody watching this would go “this is terrible,” or “great!” Hey, you sometimes just overthink it so, we try to force ourselves more to put it in the game and play with it as soon as possible, and you just know instantly.
Emil Pagliarulo: There have certainly been first-person RPGs that have had guns before but I think it’s been a while since PC players have had a game like that. On the console side, I think people have been wanting something like that for a long time, you know, “Give me a game that has the gunplay of Gears of War or Call of Duty with the depth of an open-world RPGs.”
Pete Hines: And I hope that eventually, someday, maybe many years from now, that, we’re just as well-known for Fallout as the Elder Scrolls because right now they both are our children.
Emil Pagliarulo: It is so different. It’s just weird, like Tomorrowland gone awry, and that in itself is gold for someone like me to come in and try to, you know, help create that world, so it’s pure escapist entertainment. It’s crazy, and you try not to get wrapped up on the seriousness of it.
Todd Howard: There are moments where you think about it and you wonder if you’re being irresponsible. The good news is the people that the game is for, get it, but sometimes you talk to people and I’m the worst person at a cocktail party, I mean you go and there’s “Oh, what do you do?” I say “I make video games,” “What kind? The kind where you shoot people?” “Yeah, kind of,” “Are they really violent? Where is it set?” “In DC,” “Oh, that’s cute!” “Yeah, it’s all blown-up,” and then they just turn around. They won’t talk to you anymore. “That guy is sick.”
Ashley Cheng: It’s the signature of a Bethesda Game Studios game is you’re going to have a big open-ended world, you’re going to be able to walk anywhere you want. If you see something in the distance, you’re going to be able to walk to it and you’re going to get to open it up and you’re gonna find lots of cool stuff there.
Emil Pagliarulo: We’ve gotten better with our animation stuff, is leagues above what it was in Oblivion. Our portrayal of characters as realistic people. I think we’ve gone above and beyond.
Liam Neeson (voice acting James, a game NPC): It’s a big world out there, honey. Full of all sorts of people. What about you? What sort of person are you going to be?
Liam Neeson: It’s very very interesting that there is a group of people who have hope for what’s left of humanity. It’s a very compelling story of the young hero or heroine who has to go through a series of tests, both ethical and moral, as well as physical, am I right? I think it’s very very good.
Todd Howard: Despite the destruction and despite, like, how depressing some of the scenes may be, they’re a pure charm, and some of those are like, violence done in a ridiculous manner, and some of those are a line somebody says…
Andy Stahl (Game NPC): Moriarty pisses in his still. Crazy bastard thinks it's hilarious.
Todd Howard: There are very few ideas that you can’t put into a Fallout game, you know, something else that’s more serious fantasy you’d say “Nah, wrong flavor,” but here, you know, you can have a robot that goes around asking for friends and cutting their heads off, you know, anything you want to do. Being private and publishing our own stuff lets us take risks that a lot of people can’t. We’re in a pretty fortunate position of having the time and the creative freedom to do games like this. They sort of feel like, we like it a lot and if we execute it well, it’ll find an audience that it makes us enough money to do the next game.
Pete Hines: (When) you have a smaller group of people, they tend to cling to each other a little more tightly. We tend to believe in each other a little more, you know, sort of the idea that it’s us against the world. No other help is coming. If we’re going to get it done, it’s going to be the folks here, and I started in the 99, it was a little group of folks, you know, the development team was 10-12 guys. It was Todd and his small little band, working away on Morrowind then. Even though we’ve grown and gotten a lot bigger, I don’t think we’ve lost that feeling. I think that there are enough of us from those days, and just about everybody from that first team is still here.
Emil Pagliarulo: Someone was playing and did the Megaton quest and it was priceless. He just hit the switch and you see the mushroom cloud in the background, he just, sort of, sat back to his chair and with this big smile on his face, and then he checked his PipBoy to check his karma. It said evil and he said, “Yep, that’ll do it.”
Todd Howard: That’s a pretty big element in the game. When you do something evil, we’ve tried to make it very visually entertaining, and then the game tells you, “You’ve lost karma. You’re a bad person.” That was a lot of the reason we wanted to make it, but it was “Oh this is just so cool” and the pushback that I would get “That’s like, 10 years old” Cool is cool forever, man. This is going to be cool 50 years from now.
Emil Pagliarulo: Fallout 1 to me is like the pinnacle of that post-apocalyptic gameplay and looking at the story and the characters in there really inspiring.
Todd Howard: We felt, in that world, and the systems they have in Fallout 1 coupled with the way we put things together, sort of became obsessed like, this is the game. We have to make this game.
A bunch of the people who run the company knew the people at Interplay, and we pestered and pestered them like, “Are you guys using Fallout?” They weren’t doing anything with it. Can we do something? And eventually, they said “Yes.”
Pete Hines: It’s now ours and we have always taken the approach that Fallout 3 is being made as if we made the first two. Well that means we do what we do, which is, we reinvent, we look at what works, what didn’t, and we’re not afraid to make changes, we’re not afraid to try new things, and we’re going to try and sort of move the genre forward and move the gaming forward.
Emil Pagliarulo: Our game is set, 30 something years after the events of Fallout 2 so we didn’t want to step on their fiction, but the story itself is something that we came up with based on the themes of the original Fallout. It’s 30 years after the events of Fallout 2 but it’s 200 years after the original atomic holocaust, so in our game, things have gotten actually worse, you know, society hasn’t progressed, you know, humanity is struggling to survive. There is radiation sickness, and people don’t have fresh clean water, and like, people are pretty well screwed. You leave the safety of your vault into this world, you know, it’s your big decision. Am I going to help these people, or am I going to, you know, do my own thing and serve my own selfish needs?
Todd Howard: We felt we needed to do something new with role-playing and guns. We couldn’t just do a pure first-person shooter thing. Well, how can we kind of bridge that gap between what my character can do that I’ve made in the game and what I, the player, can do? Something we always wrestle with.
Emil Pagliarulo: Our game is primarily first-person so when you have guns in first-person the bar has been raised, you know, you’ve got Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, you gotta approach that level but it’s tough because we are an RPG, not a shooter, but what we definitely wanted to do with the gun stuff is not do everything that everyone else has done, so, you know, we have some weapons that you can craft and some unique weapons, you know, like the rocket launcher that shoots all the crap you find in the world, that can shoot it as projectiles.
One of the things we realize with Oblivion, most of the combat is melee combat, so everybody’s, you know, charging you in up-close and personal, not so with guns. People stay back, they take cover… We really had to compensate for that.
Todd Howard: What we’re doing technically with Fallout 3, we’re drawing twice as much stuff on the screen and faster, right, so, our actual ability to put things on the screen and have them look cool or be cool or do more with characters, explosions, whatever we want. It’s, you know, a large factor above Oblivion. Our problem is we can’t stop ourselves. Fallout is one of those examples of the game, when we started, was about half the size.
Emil Pagliarulo: Right, look at the game overall and it’s remarkably similar to, you know, what we had envisioned. There are some really big plot points that changed for the better.
Todd Howard: You emerge from these vaults and you don’t know what’s happened, so it’s the optimism of this retro 50s world and it’s all destroyed, that people are still getting on. They’re still trying to do their hair right and if they had hairspray, they’d use it, and it’s like “You know what? Don’t look at the destroyed crater and the smoking thing behind me. It’s all cool, we’re cool. We’ll have some cigars and martinis later.”
Sentinel Lyons (Game NPC): You just manage to get yourself into all sorts of trouble, don’t you?
Emil Pagliarulo: That’s what I love about Fallout, it doesn’t take itself too seriously because the reality is so frightening and so depressing. It feels like you leave that vault and the only thing you take with you is a piece of technology strapped to your wrist. It becomes your own, sort of, lifeline. It’s that emergent thing that’s keeping you in the game.
Pete Hines: We’re big believers in immersion because ultimately our goal is we want to see productivity decline. We want sick days to go up. We want people staying up until five o’clock in the morning because they had no idea what time it was and they just had to do that one more quest. They have to get up for work in an hour.
Todd Howard: I think one of the things we try to do really well are the worlds that are very very realized, so for the moments you’re in them the amount of times you say “I wonder if I can… Oh, I can. I wonder if I can… Oh, I can.” It gives you a level of attachment, you know, to the person you’re playing in the game.
Ashley Cheng: Fallout is just such a unique wonderful world to explore. I think it fits the kind of game that we make perfectly. It’s an open-ended environment, lots of characters, really interesting game systems.
Todd Howard: If you can make, whatever the repetitive action is, really entertaining, like, that’s where the rubber meets the road in a lot of these games. So, this is something I know the players going to do thousand times. Make that as entertaining as you can and the rest of it is pretty much great.
Emil Pagliarulo: We had the story written and we had the outlines for all the quests but then, you know, we have a lot of talented designers here we wanted to pass that stuff on to them so they would be given the rough outlines of these, you know, miscellaneous quests and then they would have the freedom to flesh those out themselves.
Doc Hoff (Game NPC): Ah, welcome weary traveler. You look like a traveler in need of relaxation and the finest of chemical assistance.
Emil Pagliarulo: Design is an iterative process. You need to leave room to change as you go, so having a design doc that thick at the outset is actually not that healthy. I think we did a much better job this time around than we did with Oblivion. We had builds of the game and we actually themed those builds according to the things we wanted to see in the game, so we had a combat build, a creature build…
Todd Howard: We had a build that was just called ‘Guns,’ and all the build was about was shooting guns, like, how do they feel in your hand, and so, there was no “it must do this, it must do this, it must do this…” It’s just about guns, and that, kind of, will get us on a path of something, that is just a lot more fun.
We can sit in a meeting for hours and debate, you know, there’re pluses and minuses of it, and then, we’ll put it in the game, and in 30 seconds anybody watching this would go “this is terrible,” or “great!” Hey, you sometimes just overthink it so, we try to force ourselves more to put it in the game and play with it as soon as possible, and you just know instantly.
Emil Pagliarulo: There have certainly been first-person RPGs that have had guns before but I think it’s been a while since PC players have had a game like that. On the console side, I think people have been wanting something like that for a long time, you know, “Give me a game that has the gunplay of Gears of War or Call of Duty with the depth of an open-world RPGs.”
Pete Hines: And I hope that eventually, someday, maybe many years from now, that, we’re just as well-known for Fallout as the Elder Scrolls because right now they both are our children.
Emil Pagliarulo: It is so different. It’s just weird, like Tomorrowland gone awry, and that in itself is gold for someone like me to come in and try to, you know, help create that world, so it’s pure escapist entertainment. It’s crazy, and you try not to get wrapped up on the seriousness of it.
Todd Howard: There are moments where you think about it and you wonder if you’re being irresponsible. The good news is the people that the game is for, get it, but sometimes you talk to people and I’m the worst person at a cocktail party, I mean you go and there’s “Oh, what do you do?” I say “I make video games,” “What kind? The kind where you shoot people?” “Yeah, kind of,” “Are they really violent? Where is it set?” “In DC,” “Oh, that’s cute!” “Yeah, it’s all blown-up,” and then they just turn around. They won’t talk to you anymore. “That guy is sick.”
Ashley Cheng: It’s the signature of a Bethesda Game Studios game is you’re going to have a big open-ended world, you’re going to be able to walk anywhere you want. If you see something in the distance, you’re going to be able to walk to it and you’re going to get to open it up and you’re gonna find lots of cool stuff there.
Emil Pagliarulo: We’ve gotten better with our animation stuff, is leagues above what it was in Oblivion. Our portrayal of characters as realistic people. I think we’ve gone above and beyond.
Liam Neeson (voice acting James, a game NPC): It’s a big world out there, honey. Full of all sorts of people. What about you? What sort of person are you going to be?
Liam Neeson: It’s very very interesting that there is a group of people who have hope for what’s left of humanity. It’s a very compelling story of the young hero or heroine who has to go through a series of tests, both ethical and moral, as well as physical, am I right? I think it’s very very good.
Todd Howard: Despite the destruction and despite, like, how depressing some of the scenes may be, they’re a pure charm, and some of those are like, violence done in a ridiculous manner, and some of those are a line somebody says…
Andy Stahl (Game NPC): Moriarty pisses in his still. Crazy bastard thinks it's hilarious.
Todd Howard: There are very few ideas that you can’t put into a Fallout game, you know, something else that’s more serious fantasy you’d say “Nah, wrong flavor,” but here, you know, you can have a robot that goes around asking for friends and cutting their heads off, you know, anything you want to do. Being private and publishing our own stuff lets us take risks that a lot of people can’t. We’re in a pretty fortunate position of having the time and the creative freedom to do games like this. They sort of feel like, we like it a lot and if we execute it well, it’ll find an audience that it makes us enough money to do the next game.
Pete Hines: (When) you have a smaller group of people, they tend to cling to each other a little more tightly. We tend to believe in each other a little more, you know, sort of the idea that it’s us against the world. No other help is coming. If we’re going to get it done, it’s going to be the folks here, and I started in the 99, it was a little group of folks, you know, the development team was 10-12 guys. It was Todd and his small little band, working away on Morrowind then. Even though we’ve grown and gotten a lot bigger, I don’t think we’ve lost that feeling. I think that there are enough of us from those days, and just about everybody from that first team is still here.
Emil Pagliarulo: Someone was playing and did the Megaton quest and it was priceless. He just hit the switch and you see the mushroom cloud in the background, he just, sort of, sat back to his chair and with this big smile on his face, and then he checked his PipBoy to check his karma. It said evil and he said, “Yep, that’ll do it.”
Todd Howard: That’s a pretty big element in the game. When you do something evil, we’ve tried to make it very visually entertaining, and then the game tells you, “You’ve lost karma. You’re a bad person.” That was a lot of the reason we wanted to make it, but it was “Oh this is just so cool” and the pushback that I would get “That’s like, 10 years old” Cool is cool forever, man. This is going to be cool 50 years from now.
RETRO-FUTURISM
Istvan Pely: In terms of the art design of Fallout 3, we had several goals. One of them was to be true to the original games and to, sort of, look at those for inspiration, but at the same time update it to brace standards as far as the technology goes, and also just kind of inject a lot more realism and detail that you expected from a primarily first-person game, but as far as the aesthetics go, it definitely was a challenge in terms of creating a huge destroyed devastated world, that was still pretty, fun to explore, and felt like the DC area.
Adam Adamowicz: I try to draw what I see in my head and the part that I see the clearest, I tend to draw first, so I try to make things very story-driven and that’ll help me when I’m really really stumped. I’ll say “Alright, what do I see in my head?” and “If we’ve got work cleaver and he’s kind of scared but, you know, he found some whiskey and a shotgun. All right.” You know, things start to coagulate and I think a lot of times these characters and situations are really, for me, they’re found, and I feel like I’m documenting something that I found and if it’s unclear, it’s because, well, I haven’t quite found it yet.
Istvan Pely: In terms of the art specifically and I, kind of, give it a lot of liberty, sort of, decide how we want it to be interpreted, the game, because there’s always so much you can do, you know, jumping up from 64 by 64 pixel sprites to full-screen things, so a lot of it was just based on instinct in terms of the artist and, you know if we were going to redesign a certain character if we were going to, like, take Mr. Handy and what’s the new Mr. Handy going to look like. It’s like, you know, we wanted a connection there, but at the same time, we wanted to do something new and take a new direction to give it a new spin, to make it feel a little more fresh.
Adam Adamowicz: I have an interest in all things 50s because I think there’s a certain charisma with the music with the automobiles with the clothing style, the sort of Jet Set, Frank Sinatra, Rat Pack in a flying car with a martini in one hand and he’s going to a big band concert. There’s something that’s always fun about that, and so designing any of these characters, and then throwing them into the wasteland, the dark humor kicked in for me when I imagined Ward Cleaver being pushed out of his bunker and now he’s in the wasteland, and he is looking for, you know, fresh tobacco for his pipe, and here comes a Raider over, the, you know, the top of the horizon. What better kind of thing to draw do you have? I mean that’s a comic book in itself.
Istvan Pely: The game designs an underlying tone of humor which is appropriate for the franchise, for Fallout, it’s definitely a staple of it. How we reflected that in the artwork is more subtle, but there are little things that, for example, we were trying to come up with a list of “All right, what sort of objects in clutter items we’re going to use in our urban landscape, in DC, just to fill it up, to clutter it up,” and our concept artist, Adam, came up with, he did a sketch of, like, a coin-operated Fallout shelter. This is like a little steel tube that you put 50 cents in, go in, and close yourself in, you’re in a little one-person Fallout shelter in case the bombs happen to drop when you’re out shopping, and you know, in downtown or something like that, and it’s a ridiculous idea, but it’s thematically very appropriate for, sort of like, the culture of the time period the 1950s kind of [INCOMPREHENSIBLE] to that we were trying to achieve.
The world is more focused in that it’s a very specific area, DC, and the surrounding suburbs. It’s a large-scale map and it’s a pretty huge world but it’s very tight in that it’s basically one region, it’s very cohesive.
Todd Howard: I was thinking of setting it on the west coast and Emil really pushed “We should do it out here,” I was like “Eh, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s the right Fallout feel, you know,” but the more we thought about it, it was “Oh yeah, we got it. Who can blow up Washington DC better than us?”
Joel Burgess: If you look at the Fallout universe it was necessary to make a split to take the series where we wanted to go with it. We wanted to get away from the west coast, we want to get away from the playground that we knew, in 1 and 2, so we came all the way over here. It’s what we know and then there’s just a lot of great symbolism in Haven DC, in a post-nuclear landscape. There’s lots of great architecture that we all know and love from the area so it was just a natural fit I think.
Adam Adamowicz: I spent a lot of my time on weekends going through DC with a digital camera and when you’re going around the White House taking pictures of manhole covers, people want to know why you’re taking pictures of manhole covers around the White House, and I always thought to myself “Oh my answer would be very simple: I’m just imagining what this would all look like if it was blown up.”
Todd Howard: We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how the wasteland around here would actually look, and going and visiting buildings they had knocked down in DC. They knocked down a few buildings and we would go and “Click click click click click,” just to see what destruction down there would look like.
Adam Adamowicz: For me, a lot of times we design the architecture, and especially in a sci-fi sense, and then you walk down that street, there’s a lot of material for you to play with, looking at a lot of buildings. I would walk, in Adams Morgan and see a cluster of houses and I’d say “Wow, that’s amazing. All right,” we put a lot of chrome flanges on them but just the configurations of things would give you ideas and one would bounce off of the other so it was a continuous process.
Joel Burgess: We were able to really stick to the modern vision of DC with DC’s quirks, its art deco stuff, stuff that never existed in our that would have existed in their world if we extrapolate on what these people and their core values, important to them, so the ??? architecture and stuff like that. That all appears, it’s there on the sides of the buildings and it’s sort of tacked on, so you see an ancient neoclassical building that’s got metal barricading just sheeted on to the side of it, in case of a nuclear strike, like, profiteering third-party companies putting the coin-operated vault shelters on the side of the streets so you can put a quarter in, in case there’s a blast, and hide in there. Just lots of neat little things like that we tried to do.
Todd Howard: The landmarks we use and the flavor of it, if you’re from around here, there is enough of it, where you get it, but not so much that it’s any sort of handicap to someone who isn’t, and the fact that we kind of had an alternate history helped a lot, so because the Fallout universe splits around 1950, we could take great liberties with DC, so we’ve all these books in Washington DC, so that the things that were pre-the-time-when-we-split, we’re careful about after that, you know, if a certain thing was built after that we try actually not to even have it or we’ll build it in a different way, in a way that we think suits the game better and our excuse going to be “Well, in our timeline, they built it different.”
Joel Burgess: All the majors are there, right? We’ve got the Jefferson, plays a big part, the Washington, the Lincoln, the Capitol, the White House, more contemporary stuff like the Air Force memorial obviously wouldn’t be there in their world but we do try and capture inspirations of some things.
Emil Pagliarulo: We have so much fun doing this it’s so, like, it’s almost a guilty pleasure for us. It really is the best job in the world, so it’s like, you feel kind of guilty in the game, or like, in the Capitol building fighting super mutants and like, you know, body parts are blowing up but it’s just a big joke, you know what I mean? It’s just, it’s pure escapist entertainment, it’s crazy and you try not to get wrapped up on the seriousness of it.
Istvan Pely: It’s a massive world and there’s a lot of small elements that had to be individually created which will all come together at some point to sort of finish off, the spaces, all the clutter, you know, all the architecture, all the environments, the lighting, the effects… There are so many elements, and that, you know, a lot of it is just kind of, you know, guessing “Okay…” [Lights go off for a brief moment] Whoops, that was a big one.
Reporter: Reporting a major storm swept through the area. There were four separate reports of tornadoes across the region.
Ashley Cheng: We had some electric storms pass through and basically downed power lines, trees went down, it was pretty insane. We lost power for a good, I would say about eight to ten hours, happened around three o’clock yesterday. It’s a little weird because usually, you know, when it rains around here, we do lose power for, like, a brief two-three minutes, so, you know, it was kind of like ‘business as usual,’ but then the power never came back.
We have a big milestone coming up next week, so that meeting actually was all about how do we get the game ready for this milestone and, you know, there are people who will stay here as late as they need to get stuff done. We’ve had stuff like this happen before. We’ve put builds on planes and flown people, you know, to save time. It’s amazing the things that you’ll do to get things done.
Todd Howard: When the power went out the other day, a bunch of us went over to the, “Let’s get out of here, the power is out,” so we went over to the supermarket, and the power was out there, but they had enough mercy power to run the cash registers, so they’re “Feel free. You can buy whatever you want,” but all of the aisles are dark, so I start walking the aisles and I, you know, “Do you have like a, you know, Starbucks bottle thing, something like that? I might need some coffee,” so we start wandering the aisles. It’s all pitch black and using my iPhone as like a flashlight and I said one of the guys, like, “This is how the world ends, man. This is cool, like, we’re in the game, like, what else should we get?” One guy’s like “Antibiotics.” You know, like, “Get antibiotics before food!” and, we’re, like, working it out in the aisle at Safeway. Just the other day, so yeah, sometimes it creeps in your head.
Adam Adamowicz: I try to draw what I see in my head and the part that I see the clearest, I tend to draw first, so I try to make things very story-driven and that’ll help me when I’m really really stumped. I’ll say “Alright, what do I see in my head?” and “If we’ve got work cleaver and he’s kind of scared but, you know, he found some whiskey and a shotgun. All right.” You know, things start to coagulate and I think a lot of times these characters and situations are really, for me, they’re found, and I feel like I’m documenting something that I found and if it’s unclear, it’s because, well, I haven’t quite found it yet.
Istvan Pely: In terms of the art specifically and I, kind of, give it a lot of liberty, sort of, decide how we want it to be interpreted, the game, because there’s always so much you can do, you know, jumping up from 64 by 64 pixel sprites to full-screen things, so a lot of it was just based on instinct in terms of the artist and, you know if we were going to redesign a certain character if we were going to, like, take Mr. Handy and what’s the new Mr. Handy going to look like. It’s like, you know, we wanted a connection there, but at the same time, we wanted to do something new and take a new direction to give it a new spin, to make it feel a little more fresh.
Adam Adamowicz: I have an interest in all things 50s because I think there’s a certain charisma with the music with the automobiles with the clothing style, the sort of Jet Set, Frank Sinatra, Rat Pack in a flying car with a martini in one hand and he’s going to a big band concert. There’s something that’s always fun about that, and so designing any of these characters, and then throwing them into the wasteland, the dark humor kicked in for me when I imagined Ward Cleaver being pushed out of his bunker and now he’s in the wasteland, and he is looking for, you know, fresh tobacco for his pipe, and here comes a Raider over, the, you know, the top of the horizon. What better kind of thing to draw do you have? I mean that’s a comic book in itself.
Istvan Pely: The game designs an underlying tone of humor which is appropriate for the franchise, for Fallout, it’s definitely a staple of it. How we reflected that in the artwork is more subtle, but there are little things that, for example, we were trying to come up with a list of “All right, what sort of objects in clutter items we’re going to use in our urban landscape, in DC, just to fill it up, to clutter it up,” and our concept artist, Adam, came up with, he did a sketch of, like, a coin-operated Fallout shelter. This is like a little steel tube that you put 50 cents in, go in, and close yourself in, you’re in a little one-person Fallout shelter in case the bombs happen to drop when you’re out shopping, and you know, in downtown or something like that, and it’s a ridiculous idea, but it’s thematically very appropriate for, sort of like, the culture of the time period the 1950s kind of [INCOMPREHENSIBLE] to that we were trying to achieve.
The world is more focused in that it’s a very specific area, DC, and the surrounding suburbs. It’s a large-scale map and it’s a pretty huge world but it’s very tight in that it’s basically one region, it’s very cohesive.
Todd Howard: I was thinking of setting it on the west coast and Emil really pushed “We should do it out here,” I was like “Eh, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s the right Fallout feel, you know,” but the more we thought about it, it was “Oh yeah, we got it. Who can blow up Washington DC better than us?”
Joel Burgess: If you look at the Fallout universe it was necessary to make a split to take the series where we wanted to go with it. We wanted to get away from the west coast, we want to get away from the playground that we knew, in 1 and 2, so we came all the way over here. It’s what we know and then there’s just a lot of great symbolism in Haven DC, in a post-nuclear landscape. There’s lots of great architecture that we all know and love from the area so it was just a natural fit I think.
Adam Adamowicz: I spent a lot of my time on weekends going through DC with a digital camera and when you’re going around the White House taking pictures of manhole covers, people want to know why you’re taking pictures of manhole covers around the White House, and I always thought to myself “Oh my answer would be very simple: I’m just imagining what this would all look like if it was blown up.”
Todd Howard: We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how the wasteland around here would actually look, and going and visiting buildings they had knocked down in DC. They knocked down a few buildings and we would go and “Click click click click click,” just to see what destruction down there would look like.
Adam Adamowicz: For me, a lot of times we design the architecture, and especially in a sci-fi sense, and then you walk down that street, there’s a lot of material for you to play with, looking at a lot of buildings. I would walk, in Adams Morgan and see a cluster of houses and I’d say “Wow, that’s amazing. All right,” we put a lot of chrome flanges on them but just the configurations of things would give you ideas and one would bounce off of the other so it was a continuous process.
Joel Burgess: We were able to really stick to the modern vision of DC with DC’s quirks, its art deco stuff, stuff that never existed in our that would have existed in their world if we extrapolate on what these people and their core values, important to them, so the ??? architecture and stuff like that. That all appears, it’s there on the sides of the buildings and it’s sort of tacked on, so you see an ancient neoclassical building that’s got metal barricading just sheeted on to the side of it, in case of a nuclear strike, like, profiteering third-party companies putting the coin-operated vault shelters on the side of the streets so you can put a quarter in, in case there’s a blast, and hide in there. Just lots of neat little things like that we tried to do.
Todd Howard: The landmarks we use and the flavor of it, if you’re from around here, there is enough of it, where you get it, but not so much that it’s any sort of handicap to someone who isn’t, and the fact that we kind of had an alternate history helped a lot, so because the Fallout universe splits around 1950, we could take great liberties with DC, so we’ve all these books in Washington DC, so that the things that were pre-the-time-when-we-split, we’re careful about after that, you know, if a certain thing was built after that we try actually not to even have it or we’ll build it in a different way, in a way that we think suits the game better and our excuse going to be “Well, in our timeline, they built it different.”
Joel Burgess: All the majors are there, right? We’ve got the Jefferson, plays a big part, the Washington, the Lincoln, the Capitol, the White House, more contemporary stuff like the Air Force memorial obviously wouldn’t be there in their world but we do try and capture inspirations of some things.
Emil Pagliarulo: We have so much fun doing this it’s so, like, it’s almost a guilty pleasure for us. It really is the best job in the world, so it’s like, you feel kind of guilty in the game, or like, in the Capitol building fighting super mutants and like, you know, body parts are blowing up but it’s just a big joke, you know what I mean? It’s just, it’s pure escapist entertainment, it’s crazy and you try not to get wrapped up on the seriousness of it.
Istvan Pely: It’s a massive world and there’s a lot of small elements that had to be individually created which will all come together at some point to sort of finish off, the spaces, all the clutter, you know, all the architecture, all the environments, the lighting, the effects… There are so many elements, and that, you know, a lot of it is just kind of, you know, guessing “Okay…” [Lights go off for a brief moment] Whoops, that was a big one.
Reporter: Reporting a major storm swept through the area. There were four separate reports of tornadoes across the region.
Ashley Cheng: We had some electric storms pass through and basically downed power lines, trees went down, it was pretty insane. We lost power for a good, I would say about eight to ten hours, happened around three o’clock yesterday. It’s a little weird because usually, you know, when it rains around here, we do lose power for, like, a brief two-three minutes, so, you know, it was kind of like ‘business as usual,’ but then the power never came back.
We have a big milestone coming up next week, so that meeting actually was all about how do we get the game ready for this milestone and, you know, there are people who will stay here as late as they need to get stuff done. We’ve had stuff like this happen before. We’ve put builds on planes and flown people, you know, to save time. It’s amazing the things that you’ll do to get things done.
Todd Howard: When the power went out the other day, a bunch of us went over to the, “Let’s get out of here, the power is out,” so we went over to the supermarket, and the power was out there, but they had enough mercy power to run the cash registers, so they’re “Feel free. You can buy whatever you want,” but all of the aisles are dark, so I start walking the aisles and I, you know, “Do you have like a, you know, Starbucks bottle thing, something like that? I might need some coffee,” so we start wandering the aisles. It’s all pitch black and using my iPhone as like a flashlight and I said one of the guys, like, “This is how the world ends, man. This is cool, like, we’re in the game, like, what else should we get?” One guy’s like “Antibiotics.” You know, like, “Get antibiotics before food!” and, we’re, like, working it out in the aisle at Safeway. Just the other day, so yeah, sometimes it creeps in your head.
DUCK AND COVER
Todd Howard: We felt we needed to do something new with role-playing and guns. The original inspiration was “Imagine Burnout crash mode with body parts,” and we talked about it, and then Emil came up with the name.
Emil Pagliarulo: The acronym is sort of an homage to the FEV vats in Fallout 1. It’s, you know, where the super mutants got created from. We were sort of looking for an homage, and that’s just sort of fit the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System. Sure, I could shoot a guy in the legs and run-and-gun, but in V.A.T.S. you have a certain amount of action points, so it allows you to actually make a measured precise shot on the legs, cripple him, so he’ll move slower, take up the arms, hope he’ll be less accurate with the gun, the head has a higher chance of critical, so might blow up, but it’s hard to hit, so really taking all the stuff from Fallout 1 and 2, and sort of trying to bring that into a new next-gen type of game.
Todd Howard: That was one of our goals initially. We didn’t want to just be a shooter, that the kind of stuff we do, we want to try something that attaches you to your character, that lets you have your character on the screen, do something you, the player, can’t do, that your character can go in and enter V.A.T.S., blow the leg off one guy, the head off another, and the arm off another, in some Equilibrium style. “Pop! Pop! Pop!” that you, unless you were like Call of Duty ninja master, you could never do as a player. It’s like, we want you to feel super powerful in those moments because your character in the world is super powerful, even though you were born with an extra big bred thumb or something.
Steve Meister: Todd’s fond of saying that “great games are played, not made,” and that’s certainly true because we knew what we wanted to do with it, we knew we wanted to have the ability to queue up shots at somebody on specific parts of their bodies, and then, play that back in a cinematic fashion, and that’s what we knew that we wanted to do.
Emil Pagliarulo: We had talked originally about, you know, “Let’s not have it pause a screen, let’s have it, you know, be a sort of slow-motion thing,” and I was like, “How many times you’ve been playing, like, a first-person game and be startled by something and just want to break and just want to be able to stop and assess the situation tactically, and pausing the game, and allow you to target the body parts allows you to do that, so a little happy with the way that came out.
Todd Howard: We’ll put something in with as many dials, tuning things, as we can, and then we’d sit there and tune it week by week. “Well, now it’s more like this,” and if people say “How should I be using it?” “I don’t know, go use it, and then tell us what you think,” and the one thing everybody loved were the playbacks. You know, when people died in fabulous ways or it showed your character’s doing something really cool, so we had to separate V.A.T.S. really into two entities. One was the gameplay part of it, the numbers: What is my character doing when he shoots your arm, one of the numbers, how fast do I get him back. And then there was the playback, which all went to art in terms of being a cinematic joy-buzzer.
Gavin Carter: The thing that excites me most is the combat, or the violence content, especially it is just a fantastic amount of fun to get a shotgun and blow mutant’s head off in slow-motion and watch the eyeballs flying all over the screen.
Grant Struthers: The mandate was to push it really far over the top. We didn’t want it to be realistically disturbing, we wanted it to be cartoony. I’ve done a lot of it, I haven’t done it all. Our previous character lead, thankfully the person who actually scoured websites and found a lot of the photo references we wind up having to use. Awful stuff, don’t recommend it, and people were walking by and getting very very very very sick, and telling me that I should, you know, put a warning up, and so I did because I thought it was funny.
Todd Howard: I’m a big believer that if you can make, in a game like this, where you’re killing lots and lots of things, if you can make that repetitive action really entertaining, like, that’s where the rubber meets the road in a lot of these games, so this is something I know the players going to do 10,000 times, make that as entertaining as you can, and the rest of it is pretty much great.
So we spent a lot of time just on that moment, how does it sound, what is the physics like, what’s the camera like, and then, adding lots of cameras so it doesn’t get repetitive.
Steve Meister: I think it really adds something that’s really fun and entertaining to the game that we haven’t really seen before.
Emil Pagliarulo: Our game is primarily first-person, so when you have guns in first-person, the bar has been raised but it’s tough because we’re an RPG, not a shooter, so it’s a mixture of, it’s not just the player skill, it’s your character skill, too.
Gavin Carter: The first thing we did was we took a bow and arrow from Oblivion and we made a bow and arrow gun. It shot rapid fire arrows and it didn’t quite work, right? So we had to build up that whole system from scratch. The hardest part has definitely been how you do gun combat within an RPG, how your stats affect your aim, affect your damage… We’ve been over that hundreds and hundreds of times, how much the guns spread, how much damage they do, in trying to make you feel like you’re getting better as you get more powerful.
Emil Pagliarulo: It’s not like Oblivion. You level up automatically because it’s an experience point-based game, so that will happen organically as you play the game. If you have different weapon skills, too, so a small handgun is determined by the small gun skill, so if you jack that skill up, you know, a small handgun will be pretty damn effective, you know, it fires more quickly you’ll get more chuck shots off in V.A.T.S. It’s a constant balancing act for us to find that right balance between, you know, RPG skill and player skill and making the guy take long enough to die but have it feel realistic, too.
Steve Meister: The designers made a lot of decisions about what they wanted to do in terms of the weapons. We had some fantastical sort of weapons that we made, that are fun, like, we have a weapon that shoots junk. You just jump random junk you collect around the world and you just load it up into it. You can shoot out teddy bears and, you know, and tin cans, and typewriters, and that sort of thing, but in terms of how to make them work realistically, most of that was just playing the game. We have a lot of numbers, we can adjust the numbers, how fast does this weapon fire, how long does it take to reload it, what sorts of ammo does it take, animations, and all that are all done by the art department but mostly its feel, in terms of how the weapon works as opposed to, “This is exactly how this particular weapon in the real world fires.” You want to make it, you know, again, you want to make it fun to play and compelling to play.
Emil Pagliarulo: What we definitely wanted to do with the gun stuff is not do everything that everyone else has done, so, you know, we have some weapons that you can craft and some unique weapons, you know, like, the railway rifle that shoots railway spikes, and, you know, so we had a lot of fun with doing that type of stuff.
Todd Howard: Our lead artist, Istvan, that guy is from Mars, man. He can do anything, and he designed a lot of the guns, the laser rifles. You could build that thing. He knows how it works. It’s that part of it that I think maybe people don’t see behind the scenes when we concept the stuff, you know. We know what the knobs do.
In the original games, there was actually Pip-Boy, who is the mascot of the device, so the device is Pip-Boy, and there’s also a little Pip-Boy guy.
Emil Pagliarulo: It’s like your link to survive. It’s this device you have that’s helping you manage your life. It feels like you leave that vault and the only thing you take with you is this piece of technology strapped to your wrist. It becomes your sort of lifeline.
Todd Howard: What’s really fun is when you just have, like, your stuff, in the Pip-Boy, or you’re looking at a stat, and it can be very dry if you just lay them out on paper. “This is what Strength does, this is what Intelligence does, and there’s this perk called Animal Friend and it will make animals not attack you,” but when you pull it up in the game that’s your Pip-Boy flips up, it’s this retro device and it says Animal Friend and has a stupid picture of Vault Boy with like this giant rabbit and they’re just like, you know, like, it’s funny, and, so it makes the act of looking at your character stats, another thing that player does all the time–they kill things all the time and they look at their stats all the time–so you make both of those things entertaining. We spent forever on the Pip-Boy.
Emil Pagliarulo: The acronym is sort of an homage to the FEV vats in Fallout 1. It’s, you know, where the super mutants got created from. We were sort of looking for an homage, and that’s just sort of fit the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System. Sure, I could shoot a guy in the legs and run-and-gun, but in V.A.T.S. you have a certain amount of action points, so it allows you to actually make a measured precise shot on the legs, cripple him, so he’ll move slower, take up the arms, hope he’ll be less accurate with the gun, the head has a higher chance of critical, so might blow up, but it’s hard to hit, so really taking all the stuff from Fallout 1 and 2, and sort of trying to bring that into a new next-gen type of game.
Todd Howard: That was one of our goals initially. We didn’t want to just be a shooter, that the kind of stuff we do, we want to try something that attaches you to your character, that lets you have your character on the screen, do something you, the player, can’t do, that your character can go in and enter V.A.T.S., blow the leg off one guy, the head off another, and the arm off another, in some Equilibrium style. “Pop! Pop! Pop!” that you, unless you were like Call of Duty ninja master, you could never do as a player. It’s like, we want you to feel super powerful in those moments because your character in the world is super powerful, even though you were born with an extra big bred thumb or something.
Steve Meister: Todd’s fond of saying that “great games are played, not made,” and that’s certainly true because we knew what we wanted to do with it, we knew we wanted to have the ability to queue up shots at somebody on specific parts of their bodies, and then, play that back in a cinematic fashion, and that’s what we knew that we wanted to do.
Emil Pagliarulo: We had talked originally about, you know, “Let’s not have it pause a screen, let’s have it, you know, be a sort of slow-motion thing,” and I was like, “How many times you’ve been playing, like, a first-person game and be startled by something and just want to break and just want to be able to stop and assess the situation tactically, and pausing the game, and allow you to target the body parts allows you to do that, so a little happy with the way that came out.
Todd Howard: We’ll put something in with as many dials, tuning things, as we can, and then we’d sit there and tune it week by week. “Well, now it’s more like this,” and if people say “How should I be using it?” “I don’t know, go use it, and then tell us what you think,” and the one thing everybody loved were the playbacks. You know, when people died in fabulous ways or it showed your character’s doing something really cool, so we had to separate V.A.T.S. really into two entities. One was the gameplay part of it, the numbers: What is my character doing when he shoots your arm, one of the numbers, how fast do I get him back. And then there was the playback, which all went to art in terms of being a cinematic joy-buzzer.
Gavin Carter: The thing that excites me most is the combat, or the violence content, especially it is just a fantastic amount of fun to get a shotgun and blow mutant’s head off in slow-motion and watch the eyeballs flying all over the screen.
Grant Struthers: The mandate was to push it really far over the top. We didn’t want it to be realistically disturbing, we wanted it to be cartoony. I’ve done a lot of it, I haven’t done it all. Our previous character lead, thankfully the person who actually scoured websites and found a lot of the photo references we wind up having to use. Awful stuff, don’t recommend it, and people were walking by and getting very very very very sick, and telling me that I should, you know, put a warning up, and so I did because I thought it was funny.
Todd Howard: I’m a big believer that if you can make, in a game like this, where you’re killing lots and lots of things, if you can make that repetitive action really entertaining, like, that’s where the rubber meets the road in a lot of these games, so this is something I know the players going to do 10,000 times, make that as entertaining as you can, and the rest of it is pretty much great.
So we spent a lot of time just on that moment, how does it sound, what is the physics like, what’s the camera like, and then, adding lots of cameras so it doesn’t get repetitive.
Steve Meister: I think it really adds something that’s really fun and entertaining to the game that we haven’t really seen before.
Emil Pagliarulo: Our game is primarily first-person, so when you have guns in first-person, the bar has been raised but it’s tough because we’re an RPG, not a shooter, so it’s a mixture of, it’s not just the player skill, it’s your character skill, too.
Gavin Carter: The first thing we did was we took a bow and arrow from Oblivion and we made a bow and arrow gun. It shot rapid fire arrows and it didn’t quite work, right? So we had to build up that whole system from scratch. The hardest part has definitely been how you do gun combat within an RPG, how your stats affect your aim, affect your damage… We’ve been over that hundreds and hundreds of times, how much the guns spread, how much damage they do, in trying to make you feel like you’re getting better as you get more powerful.
Emil Pagliarulo: It’s not like Oblivion. You level up automatically because it’s an experience point-based game, so that will happen organically as you play the game. If you have different weapon skills, too, so a small handgun is determined by the small gun skill, so if you jack that skill up, you know, a small handgun will be pretty damn effective, you know, it fires more quickly you’ll get more chuck shots off in V.A.T.S. It’s a constant balancing act for us to find that right balance between, you know, RPG skill and player skill and making the guy take long enough to die but have it feel realistic, too.
Steve Meister: The designers made a lot of decisions about what they wanted to do in terms of the weapons. We had some fantastical sort of weapons that we made, that are fun, like, we have a weapon that shoots junk. You just jump random junk you collect around the world and you just load it up into it. You can shoot out teddy bears and, you know, and tin cans, and typewriters, and that sort of thing, but in terms of how to make them work realistically, most of that was just playing the game. We have a lot of numbers, we can adjust the numbers, how fast does this weapon fire, how long does it take to reload it, what sorts of ammo does it take, animations, and all that are all done by the art department but mostly its feel, in terms of how the weapon works as opposed to, “This is exactly how this particular weapon in the real world fires.” You want to make it, you know, again, you want to make it fun to play and compelling to play.
Emil Pagliarulo: What we definitely wanted to do with the gun stuff is not do everything that everyone else has done, so, you know, we have some weapons that you can craft and some unique weapons, you know, like, the railway rifle that shoots railway spikes, and, you know, so we had a lot of fun with doing that type of stuff.
Todd Howard: Our lead artist, Istvan, that guy is from Mars, man. He can do anything, and he designed a lot of the guns, the laser rifles. You could build that thing. He knows how it works. It’s that part of it that I think maybe people don’t see behind the scenes when we concept the stuff, you know. We know what the knobs do.
In the original games, there was actually Pip-Boy, who is the mascot of the device, so the device is Pip-Boy, and there’s also a little Pip-Boy guy.
Emil Pagliarulo: It’s like your link to survive. It’s this device you have that’s helping you manage your life. It feels like you leave that vault and the only thing you take with you is this piece of technology strapped to your wrist. It becomes your sort of lifeline.
Todd Howard: What’s really fun is when you just have, like, your stuff, in the Pip-Boy, or you’re looking at a stat, and it can be very dry if you just lay them out on paper. “This is what Strength does, this is what Intelligence does, and there’s this perk called Animal Friend and it will make animals not attack you,” but when you pull it up in the game that’s your Pip-Boy flips up, it’s this retro device and it says Animal Friend and has a stupid picture of Vault Boy with like this giant rabbit and they’re just like, you know, like, it’s funny, and, so it makes the act of looking at your character stats, another thing that player does all the time–they kill things all the time and they look at their stats all the time–so you make both of those things entertaining. We spent forever on the Pip-Boy.
THE ART OF NOISE
Mark E. Lampert: Compared to previous projects that I’ve done here which was the Elder Scrolls series where everything is medieval fantasy, and magic, and swords and sorcery, things like that, Fallout 3, everything is rusty, and metal, and broken, so from a sound perspective it’s a lot more fun because there’s a lot of foley work that I can do that I couldn’t do before including machinery.
A lot of the iconic sounds that I think of it’s going to come from a lot of the voices but also a lot of the environmental sounds, like the sound of the vault, being in the wasteland, in the Enclave military base, and places like that where I got to really put together something different.
The vault is very very sterile. It’s a lot of AC noise. It’s the sound of being in an office like this maybe. Everything’s very clean and controlled, and sterile.
A lot of the voice, I think, in particular the robots, and that has more to do with the writers than anybody else because they put a lot of work into making each robot very unique. There’s the clearly military guy but it’s got a humorous side to it, and we’ve got the Mr. Handy robot, it was British butler inspired but not so much C3PO as he is Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers.
Godfrey (Game NPC): Allow me to introduce myself. I am Godfrey, your personal robotic butler.
Mark E. Lampert: And so that kind of stuff I think in particular is what’s gonna stand out to people or what they’re gonna remember.
James (Game NPC): Good work. That’s one less Radroach to deal with. Let’s get a picture together. Capture the moment.
Mark E. Lampert: Most of the casting was actually done here, just right in over here in our little booth. There was a little bit done in LA as some of the bigger names like Liam Neeson.
Liam Neeson (voice acting James, a game NPC): There you go. My goodness. Just a year old and already walking like a pro.
Liam Neeson: On video games, you have to rely a lot on your voice because you’re not gonna be seen, you know, so, and over the years I’ve done quite a lot of, maybe not video work, but have done a lot of audio work, and my early days a lot of radio plays with the BBC in London. Ireland. There’s a shift of focus here that you have to make, you know, and trying to convey something through your voice and through your, the rhythm of the words, that you wouldn’t have to worry about as much if the camera was on you, you know.
Liam Neeson (voice acting James, a game NPC): Come on over here son. Come on. Walk to Debbie. There you go. My goodness. Just a year old and already walking like a pro.
Malcolm McDowell: You’re main character, you know, an authoritative character obviously, president Eden. It’s self-explanatory.
John Henry Eden (Game NPC, through radio): Old mines are like old horses. You must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.
Malcolm McDowell (voice acting John Henry Eden, a game NPC): The government should not be guided by temperate excitement, but by sober second thought.
Malcolm McDowell: You know I love doing video games and stuff like that because I’ve got kids because they always loved that. I guess I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it.
Malcolm McDowell (voice acting John Henry Eden, a game NPC): And you my darling America, deserve that. Don’t you deserve a future free of war and fear and terrible uncertainty? Of course, you do.
Mark E. Lampert: Malcolm McDowell in particular has done lots of VO work in video games before. He just, kind of, jumped in and we did a little bit of background on the character and then he just started having fun with it. It was great because it seemed like he was relaxed and having fun and he knew he wanted to ad-lib some stuff or go a little crazy with some of the lines. It’s good that way because it almost seems to me that video game acting is kind of like makeup for a stage performance. You kind of have to exaggerate things a little bit. When they go a little bit more over the top sometimes, it seems like what you and I would consider normal in a film whereas when you hear it just by itself, then you’re like, “I don’t know that’s gonna stand up like a sore thumb,” but in the context of the game it’s great, so I felt like that’s what Malcolm McDowell brought to the project as well.
Malcolm McDowell (voice acting John Henry Eden, a game NPC): You’re simply existing, America. Postponing death for a day or two. Well, I’m going to tell you right here, right now. Those days are at an end. The Enclave is back, America. We brought clean water with us.
Mark E. Lampert: We have everything from a BB-gun to the plasma rifle, not to forget the Fat Man, the miniature nuclear bomb launcher, so when you fire it, it’s this blast of pressurized air and rattling metal and it’s got a stupid dinner bell ring that I pun on it when it’s ready to fire the next round. Energy weapons were much much harder. Those were the hardest of the bunch. There is not a lot out there in terms of stock recordings to start from, or any starting point. A lot of the stock recording stuff sounds really bad. It’s easy to make something sound silly, it’s really hard to make it sound like “This is a really powerful weapon, and I’m doing a lot of damage with it,” not just have it be “Pew! Pew! Pew!” you know, or something like that.
I actually start with the stock, with the weapon recordings in fact, but I take the low-end of this one, this one has a real heavy “Boom” low-end slap, you know, that you’re going to hopefully feel in your chest every time you shoot it, and then the high-end of this one, and then a little bit more of its faux lead.
I’ll show you a few of the items I’ve got here. This is the booth where we normally record all the voice actors, so it’s usually just one voice actor in the chair, script in front of them, and then the mic, and then me in the other room directing, but I also use this room for a lot of the in-house fully recording that I do, and a lot of it is not necessarily something that I know right away what I want to record for the game like there’s a specific robot, or a specific gun, or any kind of thing like that, usually it’s something at the beginning of the project, and I’ll come in, find a bunch of props, whatever I think I can find from construction sites around the office, stuff like that, things up the loading dock, and just record, making every little sound, I bang on things, I bend it, and file it all away in our sound effects library for later, and then, as the game progresses, as I need to find something to use that sound, and then, it’s on hand and hopefully I’ve got it organized and named in such a way that I find it when I need it, so one thing I found during this project was, I got one of these 5-gallon water jugs from one of the nice folks up in QA, and I just found if I kind of inserted the neck of the bottle without hitting the microphone, and you get this massive, kind of, real deep chest bass sound if you just tap it very very lightly on the bottom.
So I’ve got some of the bullet shells that you’re going to hear in the game. This is a 30-06, so you might hear some of these with the sniper rifle, whereas we used some of the smaller caliber pistol ammunition like a 9mm, which was actually used on the 10mm, but don’t tell anybody that. Classic Fallout sound, bottle caps, every time you get bottle caps off of somebody or give them bottle caps, or just pick them off a dead body, you’re going to be hearing these. These are just different sorts of beers that I drank and saved up, so it’s basically just me, passing them from one hand to the other, and that’s about it.
This is an ordinary wrapper from, like a snack pack kind of cereal, and, Cap’n Crunch or Cheerios or what have you, and this is the sound of the giant ants in the wasteland. A lot of the sound they make when their feelers are out, or when they’re moving around looking for something. I don’t know, kind of squeaky a little plasticky sound and I’m basically just taking this thing and then, scrunching it all together. It makes all these little squeaks and rips, and tears, and stuff like that, so it’s a lot of that mixed with other pieces of plastic, and clear wrap, and liquids, and things like that, for the ants.
Some of the weapons, a lot of them, are me just banging HVAC ductwork. Anything where I can get a big metal “Ka-chunk,” you know, when it fires. A little bit of that is in the double-barreled shotgun.
John Henry Eden (Game NPC, through radio): You're listening to Enclave Radio. I'm John Henry Eden, President of the Enclave, President of America.
Mark E. Lampert: That was something I had to figure out very early on, was the sound of anyone being broadcast over the radio, so sound-wise, there is that because the rest of the sound, it takes place in the modern-day of Fallout 3, which I can then go back to making it sound as post-apocalyptic and wrecked as I want to make it sound.
A lot of the iconic sounds that I think of it’s going to come from a lot of the voices but also a lot of the environmental sounds, like the sound of the vault, being in the wasteland, in the Enclave military base, and places like that where I got to really put together something different.
The vault is very very sterile. It’s a lot of AC noise. It’s the sound of being in an office like this maybe. Everything’s very clean and controlled, and sterile.
A lot of the voice, I think, in particular the robots, and that has more to do with the writers than anybody else because they put a lot of work into making each robot very unique. There’s the clearly military guy but it’s got a humorous side to it, and we’ve got the Mr. Handy robot, it was British butler inspired but not so much C3PO as he is Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers.
Godfrey (Game NPC): Allow me to introduce myself. I am Godfrey, your personal robotic butler.
Mark E. Lampert: And so that kind of stuff I think in particular is what’s gonna stand out to people or what they’re gonna remember.
James (Game NPC): Good work. That’s one less Radroach to deal with. Let’s get a picture together. Capture the moment.
Mark E. Lampert: Most of the casting was actually done here, just right in over here in our little booth. There was a little bit done in LA as some of the bigger names like Liam Neeson.
Liam Neeson (voice acting James, a game NPC): There you go. My goodness. Just a year old and already walking like a pro.
Liam Neeson: On video games, you have to rely a lot on your voice because you’re not gonna be seen, you know, so, and over the years I’ve done quite a lot of, maybe not video work, but have done a lot of audio work, and my early days a lot of radio plays with the BBC in London. Ireland. There’s a shift of focus here that you have to make, you know, and trying to convey something through your voice and through your, the rhythm of the words, that you wouldn’t have to worry about as much if the camera was on you, you know.
Liam Neeson (voice acting James, a game NPC): Come on over here son. Come on. Walk to Debbie. There you go. My goodness. Just a year old and already walking like a pro.
Malcolm McDowell: You’re main character, you know, an authoritative character obviously, president Eden. It’s self-explanatory.
John Henry Eden (Game NPC, through radio): Old mines are like old horses. You must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.
Malcolm McDowell (voice acting John Henry Eden, a game NPC): The government should not be guided by temperate excitement, but by sober second thought.
Malcolm McDowell: You know I love doing video games and stuff like that because I’ve got kids because they always loved that. I guess I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it.
Malcolm McDowell (voice acting John Henry Eden, a game NPC): And you my darling America, deserve that. Don’t you deserve a future free of war and fear and terrible uncertainty? Of course, you do.
Mark E. Lampert: Malcolm McDowell in particular has done lots of VO work in video games before. He just, kind of, jumped in and we did a little bit of background on the character and then he just started having fun with it. It was great because it seemed like he was relaxed and having fun and he knew he wanted to ad-lib some stuff or go a little crazy with some of the lines. It’s good that way because it almost seems to me that video game acting is kind of like makeup for a stage performance. You kind of have to exaggerate things a little bit. When they go a little bit more over the top sometimes, it seems like what you and I would consider normal in a film whereas when you hear it just by itself, then you’re like, “I don’t know that’s gonna stand up like a sore thumb,” but in the context of the game it’s great, so I felt like that’s what Malcolm McDowell brought to the project as well.
Malcolm McDowell (voice acting John Henry Eden, a game NPC): You’re simply existing, America. Postponing death for a day or two. Well, I’m going to tell you right here, right now. Those days are at an end. The Enclave is back, America. We brought clean water with us.
Mark E. Lampert: We have everything from a BB-gun to the plasma rifle, not to forget the Fat Man, the miniature nuclear bomb launcher, so when you fire it, it’s this blast of pressurized air and rattling metal and it’s got a stupid dinner bell ring that I pun on it when it’s ready to fire the next round. Energy weapons were much much harder. Those were the hardest of the bunch. There is not a lot out there in terms of stock recordings to start from, or any starting point. A lot of the stock recording stuff sounds really bad. It’s easy to make something sound silly, it’s really hard to make it sound like “This is a really powerful weapon, and I’m doing a lot of damage with it,” not just have it be “Pew! Pew! Pew!” you know, or something like that.
I actually start with the stock, with the weapon recordings in fact, but I take the low-end of this one, this one has a real heavy “Boom” low-end slap, you know, that you’re going to hopefully feel in your chest every time you shoot it, and then the high-end of this one, and then a little bit more of its faux lead.
I’ll show you a few of the items I’ve got here. This is the booth where we normally record all the voice actors, so it’s usually just one voice actor in the chair, script in front of them, and then the mic, and then me in the other room directing, but I also use this room for a lot of the in-house fully recording that I do, and a lot of it is not necessarily something that I know right away what I want to record for the game like there’s a specific robot, or a specific gun, or any kind of thing like that, usually it’s something at the beginning of the project, and I’ll come in, find a bunch of props, whatever I think I can find from construction sites around the office, stuff like that, things up the loading dock, and just record, making every little sound, I bang on things, I bend it, and file it all away in our sound effects library for later, and then, as the game progresses, as I need to find something to use that sound, and then, it’s on hand and hopefully I’ve got it organized and named in such a way that I find it when I need it, so one thing I found during this project was, I got one of these 5-gallon water jugs from one of the nice folks up in QA, and I just found if I kind of inserted the neck of the bottle without hitting the microphone, and you get this massive, kind of, real deep chest bass sound if you just tap it very very lightly on the bottom.
So I’ve got some of the bullet shells that you’re going to hear in the game. This is a 30-06, so you might hear some of these with the sniper rifle, whereas we used some of the smaller caliber pistol ammunition like a 9mm, which was actually used on the 10mm, but don’t tell anybody that. Classic Fallout sound, bottle caps, every time you get bottle caps off of somebody or give them bottle caps, or just pick them off a dead body, you’re going to be hearing these. These are just different sorts of beers that I drank and saved up, so it’s basically just me, passing them from one hand to the other, and that’s about it.
This is an ordinary wrapper from, like a snack pack kind of cereal, and, Cap’n Crunch or Cheerios or what have you, and this is the sound of the giant ants in the wasteland. A lot of the sound they make when their feelers are out, or when they’re moving around looking for something. I don’t know, kind of squeaky a little plasticky sound and I’m basically just taking this thing and then, scrunching it all together. It makes all these little squeaks and rips, and tears, and stuff like that, so it’s a lot of that mixed with other pieces of plastic, and clear wrap, and liquids, and things like that, for the ants.
Some of the weapons, a lot of them, are me just banging HVAC ductwork. Anything where I can get a big metal “Ka-chunk,” you know, when it fires. A little bit of that is in the double-barreled shotgun.
John Henry Eden (Game NPC, through radio): You're listening to Enclave Radio. I'm John Henry Eden, President of the Enclave, President of America.
Mark E. Lampert: That was something I had to figure out very early on, was the sound of anyone being broadcast over the radio, so sound-wise, there is that because the rest of the sound, it takes place in the modern-day of Fallout 3, which I can then go back to making it sound as post-apocalyptic and wrecked as I want to make it sound.
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