PCG: So you’ve concentrated on higher-tech weapons than Fallout 1 and 2, where there were spears?
Todd: We have melee weapons, so we don’t have any spears, but we have a range of things. You can use pool cues, you can use the baton, you can use lead pipes, the board with a nail in it.
Emil: We have gotten a little bit away from the tribal stuff from Fallout 2, and setting the game in this area it didn’t seem as appropriate for the setting.

PCG: Does the range of weaponry go higher-tech than it did in the first games?
Todd: No, they go pretty high-tech there.
Emil: We have all the custom-made weapons too, a lot of the crap you’re finding you can actually find schematics and use that stuff to build your own weapons. They’re not necessarily higher-tech, but they’re kind of cobbled-together. So we have that whole suite of weapons as well.
Todd: The Fat Man is our super-crazy weapon, you don’t get to use it a lot. You might make the argument that it’s higher-tech but it’s really not, it’s kind of a prototype.
Emil: Even the high tech weapons feel beat-up and overused.

PCG: Are there custom armor types to go along with the custom weapons?
Emil: No, you can’t make your own armor.

PCG: What kinds of new creatures are there that you can talk about?

Todd: Just the ones you saw—you saw the Centaurs, with the spit attack, you saw the bloat flies, we do have deathclaws, we do have mole rats. You saw the sentry robots—we have a nice suite of robots. They kind of break into camps of the mutated creatures, ghouls (and feral ghouls) and then the super mutants. And then we have different human ones; the raiders, and we have another group called the Talon Company which is a group of mercenaries that also have a lot of robots. So there’s a lot of variety in terms of the enemies. Oh, and the ants you saw, and radroaches and radscorpians.

PCG: What’s your favorite homage to old-school Fallout in Fallout 3?
Emil: Grenade planting is, I mean, that’s big on my list. That was a definite wishlist thing from previous Fallouts we wanted to get in there.
Todd: I would say there are probably two things: One is the music, right? When you’re playing the radio and “Maybe” comes on, I think that’s the best. Walking through the wasteland with Dogmeat listening to “Maybe” as the sun sets? The Vault suit was a big one, the armored Vault suit. We struggled with where to put that in. So we did that quest early, Moira and the wasteland, and she has it. And we didn’t even request it, and the artist who did it—we have a lot of Fallout fans here—the artist who did it was like, what can I do with it? And we were like, put it on display there so you walk in [to Moira’s] and you see it [on the wall].
Emil: He had the 2D image with the Vault suit on display from [the beginning of] Fallout 2.
Todd: We really dickered around with having it be a Vault 13 suit and all this stuff, but no, it should be 101. And eventually, we just made it so that you take the quest and she gives it to you, so you got a cool piece of armor right out, and you look kinda geared up. A lot of times when we take screenshots, we pretty much always have the armored Vault suit on, because it’s classic.
Emil: We wanted to give the player a viable option to have that 101 on their back for as long as possible, to feel like you’re still part of the vault.
Todd: The suit design is, to a tee, except for the sleeve is ripped, what he has on is the screenshot at the end of Fallout 1 where he’s walking off. It’s to a tee, where the belt and the pads are.

PCG: But it’s a little baggier
Todd: Yeah, we decided not to go with the spandex superhero suit, we wanted something that was more of a utility suit that people would wear for 100 years underground.

PCG: Of the perks that you’ve shown, what are some of your favorites?
Todd: Did I mention Mysterious Stranger? That’s currently my favorite one.
Emil: That was another thing for us, making sure that if you take those perks like Child at Heart or Lady Killer, when you talk to a significant female NPC or a child NPC, you can use those. It all makes a difference.
Todd: Obviously the cooler ones are later. Bloody Mess, mysterious stranger.



PCG: So is Bloody Mess a perk or a trait?
Todd: We’ve rolled traits into perks. This was a system change that we really debated here. We kept wanting to do it, and there are many reasons for it, but the key reason for it was it made the game flow better. We had the game with traits, where it was one of the first things you did, and you hadn’t really touched the game yet. You didn’t really know, “do I want to pick that?” and were ambivalent about it. So take Bloody Mess. It’s a great example—in the old games, it’s a trait, and you pick it in the beginning of the game. In Fallout 3, Bloody Mess is a perk that opens up later, and it also makes you do a little bit more damage. So you get to see the game without Bloody Mess, and then you pick it, and it’s like “Whoa, this is great.” So you see that jump, as opposed to someone who’s going to pick up the game and click Bloody Mess, and never see that. And it was very hard to sort of put down a strong reason for “Why can’t I pick Bloody Mess later? I can pick Lady Killer when I want, but I can only pick this set in the beginning?” So after much debate, we decided to roll them into perks. At the same time did the same thing where perks happen every level rather than the even ones, and now it’s got a much nicer flow. Because when you play character generation you’re constantly getting new things, and when traits were in there, we found ourselves and other people would just stop. It was the wrong point. So what we do is, it builds up. You pick your S.P.E.C.I.A.L.S. with the baby book, and then later through character gen you do your skills with the whole G.O.A.T., and you get to play with your skills, and when you step out of the vault you get enough XP to level up, and then you get a perk. So it was a much better sort of building up of your character.
Emil: And that was one of those decisions where the design team was pretty split. So at one point we would test each other. Those of us who thought it was ultimately a better decision to get rid of traits would ask people, “What’s your favorite trait?” And they’d say “Well, it’s this.” Guess what, that’s a perk. So they were so close that even in their heads, people couldn’t even make the distinction between them.

PCG: So do some perks now have negative side effects like traits did?
Todd: Not really, no. We decided to make them all positive. We went through that debate, and what we decided was that the negative is really what you didn’t pick. Our main goal was to make sure somebody couldn’t do everything in a playthrough, so they felt they only saw a percentage, they played this type of character, and so they didn’t get all-powerful at everything.