Obsidian Entertainment - MCA on RPGs

This piece at Kotaku AU about Chris Avellone's presentation at a Melbourne gaming conference has the provocative title RPG Designer Hates RPGs but the hate is actually for the genre conventions as far as I can tell:

While at Black Isle Studios, Avellone worked on Fallout 3 on-and-off for about six years, before it was cancelled and Bethesda purchased the rights. His vision of Fallout was also built on this idea of hate, specifically that he was sick of tracking down and killing the big, evil, bad guy.

Avellone realised that in all RPGs, the most powerful bad-ass in the world wasn’t the “big bad”, but the player-character’s adventuring party. So Fallout 3 was designed around there being another party of adventurers out there in the world at the same time as you. Over the course of the game you will encounter this other party and experience how their actions have influenced the world. Along the way you’d have to decide whether to cooperate or work against them.