Fallout 3 - Roundup #8

Let's get straight to it.

The Bethblog is pointing out a new blog entry from the Prima Guides author.  This sixth part has an overview of the Tour of the Capital Wasteland chapter.

Bethsoft world artist Nate Purkeypile has a dev diary describing a playthrough with one of his characters named Edward the Cannibal.  A sample:

Edward was always very talented with small guns and how to repair them, when he was growing up in the Vault he always dreamed of being a hero and making his father proud. Initially, he was just a good guy who was wandering the wastelands checking out all the wonderful things to see. Since he was mostly just roaming around and not doing specific quests for people, a couple of times, things went wrong. Sometimes, a grenade would be thrown, and someone who was not supposed to be there, died accidentally. Eventually he started to get a reputation as an “evil-doer”. This made him very sad, because he thought he was being a hero of the wastes. A clean-shaven one at that, beards were for evil people as far as he was concerned.

One day, they started to send hit squads after him. At this point, he was very talented with small guns, and due to his skill at repairing weapons, he was able to build a massive stockpile of weapons. The result of this is that they had pissed off a badass with a lot of caps to burn. This is when things started to turn sour. He decided that if they thought he was evil, he was going to show them just how evil he could be. He joined the slavers, he grew a beard and he started stealing things. He was no longer a hero to the people.

Lead Designer Emil Pagliarulo writes for Edge Online about Fallout 3 and violence:

I often struggle with whether or not we as game developers should have a heightened sense of social responsibility when creating entertainment.

Fallout 3 is an M-rated game—made for adults. Its violence is over-the-top and has been a central focus of not only our game, but the entire franchise. This is a series that in previous installments allowed players to kill children, right? When Bethesda first started developing Fallout 3, we had early conversations about whether you’re going to be able to blow the kids’ heads off . (Let’s be clear, with the ESRB’s rating system, that’s not something that would fly anyway.)

GameSpy looks at the sound design with an interview with Lead Sound Designer, Mark Lampert:

GameSpy: Was it difficult coming up with musical inspiration for a game that takes place after the bomb?

Mark Lampert, Lead Sound Designer: Inon Zur composed the game's musical score, and I think he really enjoyed approaching the music with "desolation" as the ultimate goal. The key was to let the music provide a thick fog of atmosphere but also not get in the way or steal the show, and I think he did a fantastic job of creating the sound of the ravaged Wasteland while still managing to retain a sense of curiosity for the player.

It's certainly dark, but there are small pockets here and there in the music which make me feel more like I'm in a strange land worth exploring as opposed to everything being utterly hopeless. A lot of his instrument choices that you'll hear in the public areas such as towns were meant to evoke ideas of Middle Eastern bazaars or the American western frontier.

...and Worthplaying has a last-minute interview with Pete Hines:

WP: Karma. There are a lot of numbers and a lot of stat values in Fallout 3, but with everything our player had, we didn't see any specific numbers for Karma, although we did see a lot of "Karma up," "Karma down" notices while playing through the game. What can you tell us about Karma?

PH: Karma is intentionally meant to be a bit ambiguous in terms of, you get some feedback about whether you're good, neutral or evil and how good, neutral or evil. There are different ranks of Karma, but we didn't want to assign a number to it and say, "Your Karma is now 14," or "It is now -32." We'd prefer it to be a rough guide, a rough barometer of how you're playing the game, how good or evil or neutral you're being in the world based on your actions and the decisions that you've made. We want to allow the player to adjust that as they go along by the kinds of things that they do. If they find themselves being too much of a Goody Two-shoes and they want to go out and wreak some havoc and terrorize people, they can, and their Karma score will slide down appropriately. Or vice versa, they've done evil things and decide that they want to try and repent and do better, then they can spend a lot of time doing nice stuff and getting their Karma to go up. We wanted it to be ambiguous, and it's not the focal point of the game, it's just another aspect of how you're acting in this world, what kind of person you're being.