Chris Avellone - Interview @ RPG Nuke
A Russian site called RPG Nuke has a new interview with Chris Avellone of Obsidian Entertainment, and yes the enitre interview is in english.
DLC Lonesome Road was inspired by Roger Zelazny's Damnation Alley and Fallout universe as a whole was inspired by David Brin's The Postman and Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. What books influenced your other works?
So as part of the design process, I read and watch a lot of movies related to the era/situation. For WL2, for example, I had to bring myself back into the 80s mindset as well with Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, which Brian Fargo recommended to us, and re-watching a bunch of movies from that era to get some lingo down. Other book and movie influences recently (for WL2) were Food of the Gods, the Road Warrior, Day of the Triffids (book and series)... to name a few. For other projects it’s been Lois McMaster Bujold’s Chalion series (Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls), as well as Don Quixote, the Jack Vance Dying Earth series (just finished Cugel the Clever), almost every one of Iain Banks’ Culture series (which I highly recommend – if a game developer needs a place to start, start with Banks’ The Player of Games, which was amazing and it’s one which game devs and game aficionados can get into pretty easily).
Glen Cook’s Black Company has always been a big source of inspiration (I loved how the RTS Myth from Bungie made it feel like you were playing in the Black Company world), Stephenson’s Snow Crash (there’s game ideas on every page, if not every paragraph) and I loved Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Roadside Picnic” as well, which felt like the inspiration for the Stalker video games. :)
David Gerrold’s Chess with a Dragon was also used as inspiration for some sci-fi ideas we had in previous projects as well.
In any event, I could go on and on, but those are some that jump to mind.
Each Fallout: New Vegas DLC didn't just add new content but also told a standalone tale, explored different themes. If you could make another one, what would it be about?
Going east to explore more of Legion Territory (especially the united/divided tribes who were crushed under Legion rule), or Denver would be interesting. Denver was a significant location in the first Van Buren iteration, and to be able to flesh that out in more detail would be welcome. Failing that, a DLC that continued the game and allowed you to travel west to explore at least a segment of NCR would be interesting. It’s a little hard to speculate because the existing DLCs were intended to be wrapped narratively around each other, and tell a complete tale. I was tempted to consider DLC that dealt with what happened to Cassidy from Fallout 2, but I don’t think the audience knew or cared very much about his fate, so that was an easy call.
There’s a new Fallout mod coming out that explores Texas called Fallout: Lonestar that explores another chunk of the Fallout world – if you need more Fallout in the interim, that’s worth supporting and checking out. The concept pieces are amazing.
Year and six months after your studio got money for Pillars of Eternity, can you still say that working with the backers is simpler than with a publisher? The "collective mind" of backers seems pretty mettlesome and wayward.
While it has different challenges, it’s still easier. You spend much more time interfacing with fans up front and during the process, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all – even if there are conflicts, if you’re able to explain your points in an intelligent fashion, we’ve found that people understand. Being able to share how the pipeline process works (which normally we can’t do) also helps educate fans on what’s possible and what’s not with game development as well. Also, if fans don’t want something, it sure saves time from implementing it – and not discovering it was unnecessary feature 6 months before ship when it’s revealed to the public.