INTERVIEW: Fallout 3



£34.99

Last week we attended an event in London which allowed us to preview the up and coming title, Fallout 3, a post apocalyptic first person shooter, RPG. You can read our impressions in our preview, we have to say that we were very impressed.

We managed to get a hold of Pete Hines, vice president of public relations and marketing at Bethesda, and more importantly, the product manager for Fallout 3. Cornered, we attacked him with a list of questions which he very kindly answered.


Thanks for joining us and thanks for putting on this event for us to have a look at the game.

No problem.


We've seen the game, so let's start right from the beginning. Where and how does the game start and what's your stat status?

You actually start the game witnessing yourself being born. The whole first part of the game takes place in one of the underground vaults that were built for people to go to when the nuclear bombs starting falling. They would reserve space for their family in the vault and live happily until they were able to come back above ground. So you're born in one of these vaults and [at the beginning of the game] you flash through different periods of your life, so you get to experience growing up in the vault. You flash to when you're one, then when you're 10, then 16 and then 19. In each stage at this part of the game you're doing tutorials, you're learning a little bit of how to play the game, you're creating some of your character, building up stats and attributes of the kind of character you want to play. You wake up when you're 19 and your father has gone. He leaves the vault and leaves you behind. Significant because in two hundred years no one has ever left or entered the vault and so that's your jumping off point for leaving the vault as well, trying to figure out where your dad go and what's so important for him to leave you behind. The whole main quest has to do with that, but ultimately it's up to you how you want to play the game. It's set in Washington D.C. and it's a big, post apocalyptic sandbox for you to explore and play.


You say it's a sandbox, and we've seen it work like that, but in places there are loading times. What's that about?

The outside world is one seamless space, so everything you see you can travel to in real time, there's no loads. There are loads when you go from interior to exteriors and vice-versa. There are short loads when you go into those spaces.


So talk to us about the place it was set...Washington D.C., the capitol of the United States. How true is the area and maps to the real Washington D.C.? And how big, as a sandbox, is it in kilometers, miles?

It is based on the real D.C., it is accurate to the actual topography of the area in and around D.C. We haven't actually measured how big it is, so I'm not sure how many kilometers it is. What we actually did was compress the scale and space between locations so that not only does it include a portion of Washington D.C., but you can go out and explore Maryland and Virginia and the suburbs and wasteland outside of D.C. Compressing that space allows us to get you between distances that would normally be far too far to walk or explore in a game. You can spend, literally, almost a hundred hours just exploring.


As far as the games references and influences are concerned, there are a lot of references to Sci-Fi books and films. Were they major influences to the games story line, or were they just something that happened?

The main influence for the game is the original Fallout's. They set a baseline for this world to be created in. Fallout's story is that the world progressed on a different timeline after WWII (ed: that's World War II, not some Blizzard event...!) and created this kind of leave-it-to-beaver world with this super duper technology so everybody was super happy and super optimistic and then it all gets blown up in a nuclear war, so there was a lot of source material to draw from from the original games. But yes, you've got every post-apocalyptic TV show, movie, book, that we've drawn on. Everything from The Road to Mad Max to A Boy and His Dog has been read or absorbed by one or more people on the team.