Fallout 3 - Community Q&A

The community Q&A at the official Fallout 3 forums is ready with Todd Howard answering the questions submitted by forum members over the past weeks. It's a pretty good collection with some detailed answers (the VATS desription is too long to reproduce, for example). Here's a question from GhanBuriGhan:

14. You have talked a lot about choices and consequences in the quest design. Are you aiming for immediate feedback, or long term (and possibly unforeseeable) consequences? In addition to moral choices, will different characters be able to tackle tasks using their different skill sets? [GhanBuriG]

It’s a bit of both, overall I think the player needs something immediate, or they don’t know if they actually accomplished anything, or felt what they just did had any meaning whatsoever. The longer term stuff is great to surprise the player with, whether it’s positive or negative, but if it’s a surprise, you need to be careful, because that can be frustrating, so you give the player another route, or simply treat the consequence as a flavor thing, and not a game-changing thing.

In regards to using different skills, most definitely, yes. We’re really pushing on that, and I think that’s the crux of the game - what skills you use, so each quest or goal of the player’s can be accomplished in different ways using different skills. Even in dialogue we’re using a lot of different skills, depending on who you’re talking to So if you’re talking to a scientist, your Science skill may give you an extra dialogue option.

Thanks, Briosafreak.
More information.

I made the news!
And they mauled my name

I like the answers to my own questions, mostly, but I am dissapointed about VATS. I hoped that they would at least have included inventory use in it, and also it seems to involve the game cheating (in your favor) during the cinematics. Rather meh on the combat, therfore.

Not having descriptions on items will take away from any PnP feel of a game. Text descriptions would give quite a bit of colour to an objects, items or characters.

To assume that its cheating and it needs to be done in game is not only shortsighted but a little naive. Ask anyone that's made a NWN mod (and probably Morrowind too) and spent hours getting those placeable just right for their players, only to find them sweeping in and out, taking whatever, killing whatever, and then sweeping right out.

Having text descriptions adds another element to the game. It gives the player another later of interactivity that they'd miss. Otherwise, you're just makign a TV show.