Vagrant Bard

Well, my name is Emil Pagliarulo, and I’m a senior designer at Bethesda Game Studios. Currently, I’m doing a lot of design and writing work on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I served as the lead designer and writer of Fallout 3, and before that I was a designer on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. My first design job was with Looking Glass Studios, working on Thief 2.My job is pretty amazing, I have to admit. I find that when I tell someone what I do for a living, and they respond with, “Wow, that sounds awesome,” I usually find myself grinning like an idiot and telling them they’re right. I’ve been having a ton of fun lately on Skyrim, doing everything from writing guard dialogue, to working on quests, to coming up with the the Dragon Language (which was featured on the cover of Game Informer). It’s something new every day.

2) Talking about the gorgeous Fallout 3, what was Bethesda’s goal when it first acquired the Fallout license and how do you manage to work in a game previously developed by other studio?

Back before we had the license, we had talked about what old game franchises we might like to revive, and Fallout was at the top of that list. It was never really a matter of us wanting to make a post-apocalyptic game; we wanted to make Fallout. So when we did get the license, it was like a pipe dream come true. Then our minds started racing – Oh my God, we can make a Fallout game the way we make games. We can make an immersive, first-person Fallout experience. We’ll be able to let players live in the Fallout world. Because that’s what we feel we do with our games. We make worlds, and allow people to live in them. So knowing we were going to be able to do that with Fallout? It was an honor, plain and simple. That’s how we saw it, and screwing it up wasn’t even an option.

3) Has the original Fallout team been involved in Fallout 3?

Very early on we did get input from some of the original creators of Fallout, but it was a much more of a friendly, casual interaction. Actual development of the game was done solely by the team at Bethesda Game Studios. What you have to remember is that there are handfuls of people who could claim to be the “original Fallout team,” and they’re spread all over the place, at different game studios, if they’re even still in the industry at all. So we felt very comfortable taking on the challenge of making a new Fallout game on our own.

4) Create a sandbox and give the player unlimited options to tell the same story, making each new game experience something unique without losing the main focus, is a big challenge for a game designer. How did you had developed this concept? Did you have any references from other games?

With each new massive role-playing game we make here at Bethesda, I think we get better and better at defining the type of gameplay we specialize in. So we’ve learned a lot; we’ve tried out a lot of things, and have a lot of experience to draw upon. Ultimately, we’ve found that players love to explore our worlds. You know, we craft the game’s central story, what we refer to as the “main quest,” and we hope players get invested in that – but we know people love to just go off and get lost in the environment, and do whatever it is they’re going to do – so we fully support that. What we always do, though, is provide players with a means to get back on track. In Fallout 3, if you leave Vault 101 and take off into the Wasteland, that’s totally cool. But you’ve always got an objective in your Pip-Boy that point back toward your quest to find your father. So we allow you to explore… but we never really let you get lost. That’s the important distinction.

5) I’m a big fan and really addicted (in a good way, of course) of the Elders Scrolls and Fallout series. After 3 years playing Oblivion, and then playing Fallout 3 later, I’ve noticed many similarities in the mechanics of both. The buttons were similar, the HUD, the movement of the characters… Some people said that Fallout 3 was a kind of “post-apocalyptic Oblivion”. I’d like to know what the benefits and the greatest caution that you had to take using mechanics so much alike?

There’s an old adage about writing: “Write what you know.” That basically means your best creative endeavors are ones based upon experience and personal familiarity. The closer you are to the subject matter, the better your art will be by default. You could say the say thing about video game development, especially when you’re creating a title in a genre in which you’ve previously succeeded. With Oblivion, Bethesda really showed the world that we know how to make giant, open-world, single player RPGs. And as we developed that game we learned a lot of lessons. So it only makes sense that those lessons were applied when we made Fallout 3. We feel, at this point, that we have a good understanding of what our players not only want from the RPG genre, or from a  large open-world game, but from a Bethesda title as well.

So sure, when you play Fallout 3, a lot of things are going to feel familiar. The trick as a developer is balancing that familiarity with enough new and exciting elements that your next game feels unique, and not stale. Part of that for us, of course, is iterating on our technology so we can do all the awesome things our games are known for, but offering players plenty of new elements as well. During the Fallout 3’s development, the joke around the office was, “Is Fallout 3 Oblivion with swords? Only in the best ways.”

I would like to point out, though, that I think gamers can sometimes have a bit of a skewed memory when it comes to this kind of thing. I challenge anyone to play Oblivion, and then play Fallout 3 – there’s a sense of familiarity there, yeah, but the differences between the two are pretty staggering.

6) What are biggest differences between the original Fallouts and Fallout 3 (and now Fallout New Vegas)?

When you go back and look at Fallout and Fallout 2, you’ll notice there are a lot of differences between the two, in terms of tone, fiction, and humor. Fallout tended to be very serious, whereas Fallout 2 started to veer into more comedic territory, with a lot of pop-culture references, sex jokes, that sort of thing. So when we started developing Fallout 3, we knew we wanted to emulate the darker, more serious tone of the original Fallout as closely as we could. That’s not to say we didn’t want the game to be humorous – we did. But for us, the Fallout humor is much darker. It’s finding the funny in the insane; it’s laughing because, if you don’t, you’ll cry.

Fallout: New Vegas is obviously similar to Fallout 3 simply because it’s based on our engine and systems. But, as it was developed by Obsidian Entertainment and not by Bethesda Game Studios, it’s got its own fiction and tone, and doesn’t have much to do with Fallout 3.

7) Some criticisms were made about the engine used in Fallout 3 (the same one used in Oblivion). Fans were expecting a new engine for Fallout New Vegas, but it remained the same. Why you didn’t change it in New Vegas the way it has been already done in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim?

The plan was always for Obsidian to develop their own standalone game, based on the technology and fiction of Fallout 3. The tech used in Skyrim was developed by and for Bethesda Game Studios, and was continually evolving during the course of Fallout: New Vegas’s development. So Obsidian using the Skyrim tech was never really a feasible option.

8) Is there a “limit” of how long a game can be explored in its post production, speaking of the DLCs, without harming the original storyline?

What I love about this question is that it’s one that can only be asked in relation to video games. Because in any other medium, I’d say the answer is usually a resounding “yes”… but games offer such unique experiences to their consumers, that I don’t know if this always applies.

Look, Han shot first, right? Everybody knows it, everybody loves it. So when George Lucas changed that scene in Star Wars, when he went back and basically rewrote history, he angered a lot of his fans. Wasn’t the movie “done”? Couldn’t he have left it alone? If Monet were alive today, would he want to add something to The Garden at Giverny? And if he did… would the world let him? Probably not. Because there’s a sense that non-interactive pieces of film, or art, or literature reach a point where they’re “done.” And then then become part of the public consciousness. And people generally don’t want you going back and screwing with them.

Now take video games. In Fallout 3, the game ended. You play your 30-60 hours, and you’re done. That’s it. We felt like we wanted to end the player’s story. So at the game’s finale, if you want to do the right thing, and save the purifier, the only way to do that is to sacrifice your own life in the process. We loved the emotional resonance of that. The finality. And then a funny thing happened… The game came out, people played it, and got to the end… and a great majority of them were disappointed. They wanted to keep playing. They wanted to live in the world we had given them. So we did something completely unexpected, and we actually changed the fiction of the end of the game. We gave the player a stay of execution. So if you have the Broken Steel DLC or Game of the Year Edition of the Fallout 3, it actually changed the ending: you survive, it’s two weeks later… and you get to continue living in the world. The moral of this story is that in a video game – in an interactive experience – that experience is more important than the static fiction you’ve created. Gameplay trumps story.

As long as you’re providing experiences people want, so long as you, as the creator, are happy with any changes to the fiction you’ve created, there will always be room for things like Broken Steel for Fallout 3, or Undead Nightmare for Red Dead Redemption.