GenieKnows Games Narrowing the field

Bethesda has taken the time to answer twenty-five fan questions, shedding new light on to what expect in Fallout 3.  If you're a fan of the Fallout series, I recommend you check out the link provided below to see what's in store in the upcoming game.  Here are some of the more interesting questions and answers:

1) Which of the following, if any, will be featured in Fallout3; Romance, Sex, Homosexuality, Nudity, Prostitution, Slavery, Cannibalism, Children, Child killings, drugs, addictions? And of the things that won't be featured, can you explain why they won't be included in the game?

It touches on most of those. Slavery, children, drugs and addiction more than the others, as those factor for into the setting more. In regards to nudity and child killings, no, it features neither of those, as they don't really add to the flavor of the game (I'll get into children in the next question more). I think if you look at Fallout 1, and the footprint it has with the topics you ask about, Fallout 3 is pretty much the same, in that it features the types of things you mention at about the same rate, no more, no less. Drugs and drug addiction play a larger role perhaps, as it's a key gameplay device. I think the heart of this question is "has the harshness and maturity of the world of Fallout 3 been tempered from the earlier games?" and I can certainly say "No, it hasn't been."

15) How will the real-time combat skills work? Will the chance of missing be larger as the skill is lower, or does it affect the amount of damage done? Or will this be featured in weapons swaying and/or recoil compensation?

The skill affects both how well you aim (your hand wobbles on screen), and how much damage you do with a shot. Over the course of the project, we really dialed back the skill wobble, and dialed up the damage effect. It's really not fun to miss all the time, it just made the game feel terrible. You can also "aim", like many shooters. You use the right mouse button, or left trigger on a console, and your character aims at the target. You can't run while you are aiming, but it negates most of the skill wobble. Not all of it, but enough to compensate for a really bad skill. What you find is, as your skill raises, you don't have to rely on aiming as much, so it's a good balance.

Keep in mind the guns have condition too, which affects how much damage they do as well. The gun condition used to also affect rate-of-fire as well as the spread of bullets, but we took those elements out, it was just too much going on, and you usually started the game with a bad skill and a bad gun and it just felt "broken", with bullets shooting off in all kinds of crazy directions. Now the gun condition affects damage and how much the gun jams when you reload it, which ultimately equates to a rate-of-fire, but feels better when playing.

17) How much can you tell us about the stats, skills, traits and perks featured in the game? And what skills/perks were carried over and which were dropped from previous Fallout games? And why choose the ones you did carry over and why did you not choose the ones that were dropped?

Big question, and I can't discuss all the specific stats yet. I do know the skill list is coming out in a few weeks, perhaps by the time you read this. Perks will not be until much later, as we're still doing some final tweaks on them. I think when you see the skill list, the choices will be obvious, and they're the ones most of you would agree with.

Ok, time for some, perhaps, bad news. Traits have been rolled into Perks. That was a hard decision for us, and one that took, literally, years. We kept coming back to it, and re-discussing it, and once we were playing the game, found that the difference between the two systems was so similar that even half the entries in the community "design a perk" contest were actually traits. Take "Bloody Mess" for example, probably the most famous trait. Is the game really more fun if that can only be taken at the very start? Why can't you pick it at level 6? What's so important about having it only at the start? The perk choice is probably one of the most fun parts of the game, and to relegate certain ones to only be chosen when you first start, before you've even played the game and know how any of it feels, just didn't prove as fun to us. How do you know you want Bloody Mess if you haven't seen how bloody the current mess is? (did I just type that?) Anyway, trust me when I say this one was a debate, a long one, and a decision we're not naive enough to think will be understood or applauded by everyone.

Anyway, many traits from Fallout return, but as perks. And many perks return, as perks. Another change over the last year is that you now pick a perk every time you level, and the perks have been balanced accordingly. Like I said before, we found the level-up-pick-a-perk experience to be so enjoyable, it was actually confusing people why they couldn't do it every level. Perks also still have prerequisites for certain stats, including your level. New perks open up at even levels, so while you still get to pick a perk at the odd levels, you won't see any new ones based on your level, but may see a new one based on say, your Science skill.

The good news is that there are a ton of perks, around 100 if you include the multiple ranks. And with a level cap of 20, you still have only 19 times you get to pick one, so you need at least 5 playthroughs of the game to use them all. It was important to us with all of this, that the choices were hard for the player, no matter what the skills/traits/perks were, and that you couldn't see it all the first time through.