Desslock is a game journalist some of us know for running Desslock's RPG News site at GameSpot and who is currently the RPG columnist for PC Gamer. He conducted a post-release interview with Fallout 2 lead designer and producer Feargus Urquhart prior to the game's release.
In the spirit of Fallout's 10 year anniversary, Desslock released this interview, originally conducted December 1998, to No Mutants Allowed.
Images added by No Mutants Allowed, not from original interview.
Regarding the Story of Fallout 2
Desslock: Last year Fallout swept the gaming world and was unanimously declared the best role-playing game of the year (in addition to other awards it earned). Just over a year later, you've released Fallout 2 using substantially the same engine. Is it fair to state that you knew you had something special with Fallout, and wanted to release a better, but substantially similar, version of the same game? A "better Fallout"?<table width="140px" align="right"><tr><td>
</td></tr></table>
Feargus Urquhart: I think the goal was to give players more of what they liked with Fallout. We thought about just doing an expansion disk, but predominantly what people wanted was a much bigger game world. To do that we really needed to create enough content that would make a full game. And to do that we needed about 15-20 people (sometimes more) to really do justice to it. With that many people working for a year it really felt more like a full product rather than just an expansion.
I know we will have some critics that say it is only an expansion product because not every piece of art is different and most of the interfaces are very similar, but I think that what makes an RPG is the content that goes into it. The designers put more than 400,000 words of dialog in the game, which are spoken by more than 1200 characters.
Desslock: Fallout 2 is set approximately 80 years after the end of the original game. Why did you choose that time frame for the sequel, instead of starting it immediately after Fallout? How has our favorite little post-apocalyptic world changed since the events in the original game?
Feargus Urquhart: We chose the time frame because we wanted to tell a new story, not just continue the story of the player's character from Fallout 1. If we had the player continue from Fallout 1 then we would be tied to starting with him leaving the Vault and players who would have wanted to go back and kick the Overseer's ass.
We also chose the timeframe because we were very worried with allowing the player to continue with his character at the end of Fallout 1. We had little to no idea what level, type of character, items etc. that the player's character might have at the end of the game, so balancing a new game under those conditions would be almost impossible. We talked about normalizing the player's character against some sort of default character, but we felt that would just irritate players more than make them happy that they got to keep their characters.
Now for the world, it's changed in some ways but stayed the same in others. There are still small settlements of people who are just scraping by. However there are bigger cities where civilization has grown - in good ways and bad. One of the new cities, called Vault City, is an example of a Vault opening when it was supposed to - in fact the player has the chance to learn all about the whole Vault System in Fallout 2. Vault City is very pristine, and is made up of people who wish to keep themselves separated from those who have lived in the Wasteland since the war.
On the opposite end of Vault City is New Reno. On the crumbled remains of Reno, the Mafia has built the prostitution, drug, gambling, and pornography center of the wasteland.
Desslock: It seems clear that a lot of the changes that you did make to Fallout's gaming engine were made, at least in part, in response to gamers' comments on the first game. Since so much worked well in the original game, you seem to have focused on improving a few key aspects, such as the artificial intelligence of non-player characters. What were the main features you wanted to improve upon in the sequel?
Feargus Urquhart: The non-player characters really were the main focus. We centered on the control of party members for the player, and better combat AI for the NPCs that the player goes up against in combat. The player is now able to tell his party-member to behave in certain ways once they are in combat. Enemies on the other hand no longer do certain dumb things that made combat a lot easier for the player.<table width="140px" align="left"><tr><td>
</td></tr></table>
Regarding Character Development
Desslock: When we spoke at the E3, both you and Producer Eric DeMilt indicated that while you definitely intended to improve certain features of Fallout, you might reduce the scope of some of your planned improvements if you found that it was impossible to make the kind of changes you wanted without having to significantly re-write aspects of the original code that already worked well. As the game continued in development, did you find that you were unable to implement any of your original plans for Fallout 2? Hey, you've got to save something for another sequel...
Feargus Urquhart: Well, I think we did pretty much all that we set out to do with Fallout 2, but we had to compromise in certain areas, particularly in the areas of combining weapons and upgrading party-members. Instead of coming up with a broad based system where players could attach grenade launchers to M16's, we had to choose a select number of weapons that could be upgraded by certain NPC's in the game. We came up with a list of 10 or so weapons, but it doesn't give the same flavor as I would have hoped.
As for party-members, we came up with a system that has them go up levels every few levels that the player goes up. Each party-member has a minimum level that the player must be for them to start going up levels. The number of player levels it takes for them to go up a level is also different from party member to party member, as is how many different levels. For example Sulik has about six different levels, while Goris only has 4. This was based off of when we thought the player might meet them in the game. Anyway, I had hoped to be able to have had the player go on quests and "teach" the party-members what they wanted - and controlled their advancement a little more. It was something we just ran out of time for.
Desslock: One of the aspects of the original game that received a lot of praise was the comprehensive character creation and development systems. Understandably, since those aspects of the game were so popular, you seem to have made very few changes to those systems in the sequel. Other than substituting one available trait, "Night Person", with another "Sex Appeal" (interesting substitution!), the core list of available skills and traits are the same in the two games. Did you try to design the sequel so that some of the less useful, but cool, skills like Repair; Science, etc. would be more useful? Did you make any other changes of note to the skills or traits? How about that substitution <grin>?
Feargus Urquhart: Well, you are right, we did not end up substituting in any more skills - this was more because we could not come up with ones that really made sense, rather than running out of development time. As to the other skills that were less useful in the first game, they get a lot more use in this game. We probably didn't use Repair as much as we hoped, but it is used in a number of key places. Science on the other hand really makes a big difference in the game, and is one of the key reasons for the player to get Myron for a party-member if they do not have a high Science skill themselves.
Desslock: You did add a number of new perks to the sequel, which allow gamers to further personalize their characters throughout the game. What were your goals in deciding new perks to add which might be fun, and dismissing some of the older ones? Uh, what are the differences between the "strong back" and "pack rat" perks, other than the base requirements?
Feargus Urquhart: Well the difference between those were, ummm..., uh..., well it sounds cooler.
Anyway, we did end up adding a whole lot more Perks, because we really felt Perks were what allowed players to make their characters more the way they wanted them. The Perks really helped players visualize the type of character that they were playing, and also made for some hard calls when the player knew it would be another three levels before they could try a second perk out that they were considering at their current level.
Now for the perks that we took away, they were mostly removed or changed for balance purposes. Some were removed or changed because they were pretty lame and we found that no one very used them.
Regarding Non-linearity and Combat
Desslock: Another great feature of the original Fallout was its non-linearity, both in terms of the different types of behaviors that characters could exhibit and still be successful (i.e. you could often choose to help different factions within the game, or avoid them altogether) and the fact that you could basically explore the gaming world in any way you saw fit. There were also often a variety of solutions to quests or puzzles in the game, further enhancing the game's non-linearity in that respect. Did you try to keep Fallout 2 as non-linear as the first game, or did you find that some gamers found such open-ended gameplay intimidating?
Feargus Urquhart: It's funny in some ways we found that players wanted both things, but didn't want both things. They did not like the fact that the water chip quest was timed - which in some ways forces some form of linearity on the game, but in Fallout 2 I have received some E-mail where players feel they are not that pressed enough to find the next point in the plot. I think there is some balance in the middle where we press the players enough that they will get back onto the main plot track, but don't feel like they are being utterly forced to do it. In some ways I think Fallout 2 did this right, but we could have maybe done a few more things that got them on the right track.<table width="140px" align="right"><tr><td>
</td></tr></table>
Now having said all that I believe that Fallout 2 is as non-linear as the first one. I think we started out trying to make it a little more linear, but it degenerated into a game that was as non-linear. There are very few things in the game that you have to do - I think you can count them on one hand, but there are over 100 or 150 large and small quests for the player to play around with in the game.
Desslock: One of the problems, of course, with a game as non-linear as Fallout is that it gets pretty difficult to ensure that conversations and other scripted events occur in a logical manner, since you can never be certain which prior events or non-player characters the gamer has already encountered. How did you structure Fallout 2 in order to minimize such problems? Did you make any significant changes since Fallout?
Feargus Urquhart: Well, we tried to force a certain structure with how plots moved forward in the game. In some cases this worked, while in others it didn't. Personally, I think more NPCs react correctly to what the character does than they did in Fallout - but in some ways that is open to interpretation. Because we allow players to solve things in so many ways, it's often difficult to really make the system respond to every possibility.
We also had about seven designers writing dialog for the game, so this made enforcement of structure a little more difficult. However, like I said above we did get some of it to work better.
Desslock: While Fallout's tactical combat with modern, or even futuristic, weaponry was generally very well implemented, it was also the area (in my opinion) that could be the cause of the most frustration for gamers, largely because of the behavior of non-player characters in your party of adventurers. It seemed to be the norm for party-members to blast the player character (or each other) in the back of the head whenever there was a character between the firing party-member and his or her target. Poor old Dogmeat, man's best friend, was often the unintended target of such traitorous attacks. How successful do you think you've been at improving the combat AI of characters in the sequel?
Feargus Urquhart: It is better. Not as good as I would have wanted, but the player does have more control over the party, and party-members seem to survive for a much longer time. We also added a lot more party-members to make sure that the player could always get another one.
Also, we are making sure in the patch of the game that party-members do not get angry if they are accidentally hit in combat.
Desslock: Hand-to-hand combat is definitely one aspect of the game's tactical combat that you seem to have significantly enhanced with several new types of effective attacks. What are some of the other changes you made to Fallout's turn-based combat system?
Feargus Urquhart: To tell you the truth, other than the new hand-to-hand attack styles, we didn't change a whole lot. The system works very well and we didn't want to break. I guess one thing that we did from a game balance perspective was to make the player progress a little slower with what weapons they had access to. We did this so they would be able to go through combat using all the different styles of weapons, rather than going from the 10mm pistol to the Turbo Plasma Rifle as some people did in Fallout 1.
Regarding Bugs, Bugs, Bugs...and the PIP-Boy Riot
Desslock: By making Fallout 2 a significantly lengthier game than Fallout you addressed another one of the few complaints gamers had concerning the original game. You also decided to get rid of the time limit on the game's main quest. Was that a difficult decision to make, since the time limit added some dramatic tension to the original game's plot?
Feargus Urquhart: We did not do it lightly. We also ran into problems when QA told us that they felt there was no reason to continue playing the game or ever returning the GECK to Arroyo. So we implemented the dream sequence that the village shaman, Hakunin, sends the player on. They gave the player some sense of urgency about completing the quest for the GECK, but did not really require them to do it within any timeframe.
Desslock: You were already well into development on Fallout 2 when Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson left Interplay to form their own company, Troika Games. Other than causing an understandable delay, how was the game's development affected?<table width="140px" align="left"><tr><td>
</td></tr></table>
Feargus Urquhart: Well the real effect was the delay. I wish we had the 1 or 2 months that we lost to them leaving back.
Desslock: The initial release of Fallout 2 contains quite a few bugs. Although it's still possible to play through the game, and you're currently working on a patch to fix all known problems, do you have an explanation for the quantity of bugs in the game?
Feargus Urquhart: Black Isle fixed between 4000 and 6000 bugs in Fallout 2. I am embarrassed that we missed the bugs that we did. Unfortunately due to the complexity and our current testing methods a game like Fallout 2 is almost impossible to get bug free. I am pretty confident that if we held it another month we would have caught a few more of the bugs, but there would still have been a good sized list that we would still have missed.
Having said that it is hard to get bug free - that does not mean that we are not going to try harder in future. Black Isle needs to look at the whole QA process and come up with methods to make sure that it does not happen again. Unfortunately our playtesters start getting into "ruts" on how they play the game, and we need to figure out how to make sure this does not happen. When they get in "ruts" they often play quests the same way again and again - and stop trying to play them differently. Not really their fault - it's more human nature.
Most of the bugs that have been reported since we shipped are ones that we missed. I know that many users are frustrated because some of them seem very obvious - this is where the playtesters getting into "ruts" causes very obvious things being missed. Again not their fault entirely - it is something we should have known and figured out a solution for.
To sum up, we tried very hard to get the game as bug free as possible. Towards the end there were often over 25 people playtesting the game for 12 or more hours a day - which adds up to thousands of hours of playtest. However, we missed a number of major things that have really disappointed some people who have bought the game.
On a final positive note, of the over 2000 E-mails that I have received concerning Fallout 2, about 75% of it is positive and that people are having a lot of fun with the game. One user wrote me that he's on his third or fourth game (I can't remember which) and he's put 145 hours into it already.
Desslock: What's next for the Fallout series, assuming the game is at least as successful as the original game? Don't worry, we won't hold you to anything <grin>
Feargus Urquhart: We are kicking around ideas for Fallout 3. Nothing official yet, but we are thinking of making it using a 3D engine. I don't want people to panic here, because it is not going to be a 1st person shooter. We are just going to use the 3D engine to display an isometric world in 3D. So people will still play the game much the same way as they are doing now in Fallout 1 and 2.
Desslock: Lastly, and most importantly, how was Dogmeat's release party bash? Can that mutt still pound them back? How about that PIP-Boy riot?
Feargus Urquhart: Well I didn't get to drink as much as I wanted. But I was amazed at the turn out, and all the people who signed the large poster awed the team. As to the PIP-Boy riot - well I had a feeling that was going to be a problem. I also got yelled at for handing out some of the big boxes when I wasn't supposed to - but no one told me that I couldn't. Pretty much the normal state of affairs around here.
Desslock: Thanks for taking the time out to answer these questions...
Feargus Urquhart: Not a problem!
<center>
</center>
In the spirit of Fallout's 10 year anniversary, Desslock released this interview, originally conducted December 1998, to No Mutants Allowed.
Images added by No Mutants Allowed, not from original interview.
Regarding the Story of Fallout 2
Desslock: Last year Fallout swept the gaming world and was unanimously declared the best role-playing game of the year (in addition to other awards it earned). Just over a year later, you've released Fallout 2 using substantially the same engine. Is it fair to state that you knew you had something special with Fallout, and wanted to release a better, but substantially similar, version of the same game? A "better Fallout"?<table width="140px" align="right"><tr><td>
</td></tr></table>
Feargus Urquhart: I think the goal was to give players more of what they liked with Fallout. We thought about just doing an expansion disk, but predominantly what people wanted was a much bigger game world. To do that we really needed to create enough content that would make a full game. And to do that we needed about 15-20 people (sometimes more) to really do justice to it. With that many people working for a year it really felt more like a full product rather than just an expansion.
I know we will have some critics that say it is only an expansion product because not every piece of art is different and most of the interfaces are very similar, but I think that what makes an RPG is the content that goes into it. The designers put more than 400,000 words of dialog in the game, which are spoken by more than 1200 characters.
Desslock: Fallout 2 is set approximately 80 years after the end of the original game. Why did you choose that time frame for the sequel, instead of starting it immediately after Fallout? How has our favorite little post-apocalyptic world changed since the events in the original game?
Feargus Urquhart: We chose the time frame because we wanted to tell a new story, not just continue the story of the player's character from Fallout 1. If we had the player continue from Fallout 1 then we would be tied to starting with him leaving the Vault and players who would have wanted to go back and kick the Overseer's ass.
We also chose the timeframe because we were very worried with allowing the player to continue with his character at the end of Fallout 1. We had little to no idea what level, type of character, items etc. that the player's character might have at the end of the game, so balancing a new game under those conditions would be almost impossible. We talked about normalizing the player's character against some sort of default character, but we felt that would just irritate players more than make them happy that they got to keep their characters.
Now for the world, it's changed in some ways but stayed the same in others. There are still small settlements of people who are just scraping by. However there are bigger cities where civilization has grown - in good ways and bad. One of the new cities, called Vault City, is an example of a Vault opening when it was supposed to - in fact the player has the chance to learn all about the whole Vault System in Fallout 2. Vault City is very pristine, and is made up of people who wish to keep themselves separated from those who have lived in the Wasteland since the war.
On the opposite end of Vault City is New Reno. On the crumbled remains of Reno, the Mafia has built the prostitution, drug, gambling, and pornography center of the wasteland.
Desslock: It seems clear that a lot of the changes that you did make to Fallout's gaming engine were made, at least in part, in response to gamers' comments on the first game. Since so much worked well in the original game, you seem to have focused on improving a few key aspects, such as the artificial intelligence of non-player characters. What were the main features you wanted to improve upon in the sequel?
Feargus Urquhart: The non-player characters really were the main focus. We centered on the control of party members for the player, and better combat AI for the NPCs that the player goes up against in combat. The player is now able to tell his party-member to behave in certain ways once they are in combat. Enemies on the other hand no longer do certain dumb things that made combat a lot easier for the player.<table width="140px" align="left"><tr><td>
</td></tr></table>
Regarding Character Development
Desslock: When we spoke at the E3, both you and Producer Eric DeMilt indicated that while you definitely intended to improve certain features of Fallout, you might reduce the scope of some of your planned improvements if you found that it was impossible to make the kind of changes you wanted without having to significantly re-write aspects of the original code that already worked well. As the game continued in development, did you find that you were unable to implement any of your original plans for Fallout 2? Hey, you've got to save something for another sequel...
Feargus Urquhart: Well, I think we did pretty much all that we set out to do with Fallout 2, but we had to compromise in certain areas, particularly in the areas of combining weapons and upgrading party-members. Instead of coming up with a broad based system where players could attach grenade launchers to M16's, we had to choose a select number of weapons that could be upgraded by certain NPC's in the game. We came up with a list of 10 or so weapons, but it doesn't give the same flavor as I would have hoped.
As for party-members, we came up with a system that has them go up levels every few levels that the player goes up. Each party-member has a minimum level that the player must be for them to start going up levels. The number of player levels it takes for them to go up a level is also different from party member to party member, as is how many different levels. For example Sulik has about six different levels, while Goris only has 4. This was based off of when we thought the player might meet them in the game. Anyway, I had hoped to be able to have had the player go on quests and "teach" the party-members what they wanted - and controlled their advancement a little more. It was something we just ran out of time for.
Desslock: One of the aspects of the original game that received a lot of praise was the comprehensive character creation and development systems. Understandably, since those aspects of the game were so popular, you seem to have made very few changes to those systems in the sequel. Other than substituting one available trait, "Night Person", with another "Sex Appeal" (interesting substitution!), the core list of available skills and traits are the same in the two games. Did you try to design the sequel so that some of the less useful, but cool, skills like Repair; Science, etc. would be more useful? Did you make any other changes of note to the skills or traits? How about that substitution <grin>?
Feargus Urquhart: Well, you are right, we did not end up substituting in any more skills - this was more because we could not come up with ones that really made sense, rather than running out of development time. As to the other skills that were less useful in the first game, they get a lot more use in this game. We probably didn't use Repair as much as we hoped, but it is used in a number of key places. Science on the other hand really makes a big difference in the game, and is one of the key reasons for the player to get Myron for a party-member if they do not have a high Science skill themselves.
Desslock: You did add a number of new perks to the sequel, which allow gamers to further personalize their characters throughout the game. What were your goals in deciding new perks to add which might be fun, and dismissing some of the older ones? Uh, what are the differences between the "strong back" and "pack rat" perks, other than the base requirements?
Feargus Urquhart: Well the difference between those were, ummm..., uh..., well it sounds cooler.
Anyway, we did end up adding a whole lot more Perks, because we really felt Perks were what allowed players to make their characters more the way they wanted them. The Perks really helped players visualize the type of character that they were playing, and also made for some hard calls when the player knew it would be another three levels before they could try a second perk out that they were considering at their current level.
Now for the perks that we took away, they were mostly removed or changed for balance purposes. Some were removed or changed because they were pretty lame and we found that no one very used them.
Regarding Non-linearity and Combat
Desslock: Another great feature of the original Fallout was its non-linearity, both in terms of the different types of behaviors that characters could exhibit and still be successful (i.e. you could often choose to help different factions within the game, or avoid them altogether) and the fact that you could basically explore the gaming world in any way you saw fit. There were also often a variety of solutions to quests or puzzles in the game, further enhancing the game's non-linearity in that respect. Did you try to keep Fallout 2 as non-linear as the first game, or did you find that some gamers found such open-ended gameplay intimidating?
Feargus Urquhart: It's funny in some ways we found that players wanted both things, but didn't want both things. They did not like the fact that the water chip quest was timed - which in some ways forces some form of linearity on the game, but in Fallout 2 I have received some E-mail where players feel they are not that pressed enough to find the next point in the plot. I think there is some balance in the middle where we press the players enough that they will get back onto the main plot track, but don't feel like they are being utterly forced to do it. In some ways I think Fallout 2 did this right, but we could have maybe done a few more things that got them on the right track.<table width="140px" align="right"><tr><td>
</td></tr></table>
Now having said all that I believe that Fallout 2 is as non-linear as the first one. I think we started out trying to make it a little more linear, but it degenerated into a game that was as non-linear. There are very few things in the game that you have to do - I think you can count them on one hand, but there are over 100 or 150 large and small quests for the player to play around with in the game.
Desslock: One of the problems, of course, with a game as non-linear as Fallout is that it gets pretty difficult to ensure that conversations and other scripted events occur in a logical manner, since you can never be certain which prior events or non-player characters the gamer has already encountered. How did you structure Fallout 2 in order to minimize such problems? Did you make any significant changes since Fallout?
Feargus Urquhart: Well, we tried to force a certain structure with how plots moved forward in the game. In some cases this worked, while in others it didn't. Personally, I think more NPCs react correctly to what the character does than they did in Fallout - but in some ways that is open to interpretation. Because we allow players to solve things in so many ways, it's often difficult to really make the system respond to every possibility.
We also had about seven designers writing dialog for the game, so this made enforcement of structure a little more difficult. However, like I said above we did get some of it to work better.
Desslock: While Fallout's tactical combat with modern, or even futuristic, weaponry was generally very well implemented, it was also the area (in my opinion) that could be the cause of the most frustration for gamers, largely because of the behavior of non-player characters in your party of adventurers. It seemed to be the norm for party-members to blast the player character (or each other) in the back of the head whenever there was a character between the firing party-member and his or her target. Poor old Dogmeat, man's best friend, was often the unintended target of such traitorous attacks. How successful do you think you've been at improving the combat AI of characters in the sequel?
Feargus Urquhart: It is better. Not as good as I would have wanted, but the player does have more control over the party, and party-members seem to survive for a much longer time. We also added a lot more party-members to make sure that the player could always get another one.
Also, we are making sure in the patch of the game that party-members do not get angry if they are accidentally hit in combat.
Desslock: Hand-to-hand combat is definitely one aspect of the game's tactical combat that you seem to have significantly enhanced with several new types of effective attacks. What are some of the other changes you made to Fallout's turn-based combat system?
Feargus Urquhart: To tell you the truth, other than the new hand-to-hand attack styles, we didn't change a whole lot. The system works very well and we didn't want to break. I guess one thing that we did from a game balance perspective was to make the player progress a little slower with what weapons they had access to. We did this so they would be able to go through combat using all the different styles of weapons, rather than going from the 10mm pistol to the Turbo Plasma Rifle as some people did in Fallout 1.
Regarding Bugs, Bugs, Bugs...and the PIP-Boy Riot
Desslock: By making Fallout 2 a significantly lengthier game than Fallout you addressed another one of the few complaints gamers had concerning the original game. You also decided to get rid of the time limit on the game's main quest. Was that a difficult decision to make, since the time limit added some dramatic tension to the original game's plot?
Feargus Urquhart: We did not do it lightly. We also ran into problems when QA told us that they felt there was no reason to continue playing the game or ever returning the GECK to Arroyo. So we implemented the dream sequence that the village shaman, Hakunin, sends the player on. They gave the player some sense of urgency about completing the quest for the GECK, but did not really require them to do it within any timeframe.
Desslock: You were already well into development on Fallout 2 when Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson left Interplay to form their own company, Troika Games. Other than causing an understandable delay, how was the game's development affected?<table width="140px" align="left"><tr><td>
</td></tr></table>
Feargus Urquhart: Well the real effect was the delay. I wish we had the 1 or 2 months that we lost to them leaving back.
Desslock: The initial release of Fallout 2 contains quite a few bugs. Although it's still possible to play through the game, and you're currently working on a patch to fix all known problems, do you have an explanation for the quantity of bugs in the game?
Feargus Urquhart: Black Isle fixed between 4000 and 6000 bugs in Fallout 2. I am embarrassed that we missed the bugs that we did. Unfortunately due to the complexity and our current testing methods a game like Fallout 2 is almost impossible to get bug free. I am pretty confident that if we held it another month we would have caught a few more of the bugs, but there would still have been a good sized list that we would still have missed.
Having said that it is hard to get bug free - that does not mean that we are not going to try harder in future. Black Isle needs to look at the whole QA process and come up with methods to make sure that it does not happen again. Unfortunately our playtesters start getting into "ruts" on how they play the game, and we need to figure out how to make sure this does not happen. When they get in "ruts" they often play quests the same way again and again - and stop trying to play them differently. Not really their fault - it's more human nature.
Most of the bugs that have been reported since we shipped are ones that we missed. I know that many users are frustrated because some of them seem very obvious - this is where the playtesters getting into "ruts" causes very obvious things being missed. Again not their fault entirely - it is something we should have known and figured out a solution for.
To sum up, we tried very hard to get the game as bug free as possible. Towards the end there were often over 25 people playtesting the game for 12 or more hours a day - which adds up to thousands of hours of playtest. However, we missed a number of major things that have really disappointed some people who have bought the game.
On a final positive note, of the over 2000 E-mails that I have received concerning Fallout 2, about 75% of it is positive and that people are having a lot of fun with the game. One user wrote me that he's on his third or fourth game (I can't remember which) and he's put 145 hours into it already.
Desslock: What's next for the Fallout series, assuming the game is at least as successful as the original game? Don't worry, we won't hold you to anything <grin>
Feargus Urquhart: We are kicking around ideas for Fallout 3. Nothing official yet, but we are thinking of making it using a 3D engine. I don't want people to panic here, because it is not going to be a 1st person shooter. We are just going to use the 3D engine to display an isometric world in 3D. So people will still play the game much the same way as they are doing now in Fallout 1 and 2.
Desslock: Lastly, and most importantly, how was Dogmeat's release party bash? Can that mutt still pound them back? How about that PIP-Boy riot?
Feargus Urquhart: Well I didn't get to drink as much as I wanted.
But I was amazed at the turn out, and all the people who signed the large poster awed the team. As to the PIP-Boy riot - well I had a feeling that was going to be a problem. I also got yelled at for handing out some of the big boxes when I wasn't supposed to - but no one told me that I couldn't. Pretty much the normal state of affairs around here. Desslock: Thanks for taking the time out to answer these questions...
Feargus Urquhart: Not a problem!
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