Chris Avellone - Interview P2 @Sugerbombed

@Sugerbombed Part 2 of a 3 part series interview with Chris Avellone has been released. You can read part 1 here. This part focuses on New Vegas, his thoughts on Pete Hines' and Bethesda's marketing abilities and they ask him about quest design.

SB: Now onto New Vegas. Since you designed New Reno in Fallout 2, how did you and the other developers go about differentiating New Vegas from it? And what influence did you take from it (New Reno)?

CA: I don't know if there were any conversations on differentiating New Vegas from New Reno, the level designers for the city might know (I don't know if they played Fallout 2). BTW, New Reno wasn't solely mine, I inherited the design from the Troika guys before they left Black Isle, so I had that template to build on (the crime families, the Enclave, jet production, etc.) The worst parts of New Reno you can blame me for, don't blame the Troika guys. ;)

Looking back the only thing I regret in New Reno is that I should have cut out one of the crime families (four was too many with everything else that was going on) and made Myron more systemically valuable to the party (his combat build and crafting abilities weren't helpful). Cassidy ended up being a better companion for systemic considerations, even with his heart condition. I did a post about companion design based on this learning experience a while back on the Obsidian forums, but I don't know if it's still up there (Obsidian locked me out of my profile after my departure, and they've refused to delete my account). The companion system design principles are not being used in recent Obsidian titles, so it may have been removed.

SB: For you when you look back on New Vegas, which turned 6 years old last month, what part of the game or what particular moment are you most proud of?

CA: I enjoyed working on the DLCs, but the proudest moment isn't mine - it was when one of the level designers Jessica Johnson got the Robobrain sequence in Old World Blues where it becomes self-aware working - and it worked great. Jessica has since moved on to other things - she was part of the mass layoffs, unfortunately, along with a number of other designers I wished we could have kept.