PCG: Why the decision to give a perk every level instead of every couple of levels like in FO1 and 2?
Todd: Well, here’s another thing: there’s that progression, you step out of the Vault and you hit level two and people would level up and do their skill points, and they get to pick a perk. And then they’d hit level three, and they’d get their skill points, and… where’s the perk? They don’t even understand. It’s like “I thought you get a perk when you level up?” “Yeah, every other one.” And then we decided that the most fun in leveling up, the absolute most fun, is picking a perk. It’s so fun. So we decided to balance them so you get to do it every level. It makes leveling up. That’s what leveling is about.
Emil: Definitely not something we planned, but as we played it, it was like that carrot on a stick thing. “Man, level three and five suck, I want a perk!”

PCG: Why the cap at level 20
Todd: That’s another debate. I don’t know if we have a glorious reason for that, other than we wanted to not make you all-powerful. If we keep letting it go, at some point you can get everything. And we’re very used to the Elder Scrolls where you keep doing this and get all-powerful, it’s kind of what that is more about. So we balanced this game so that if you play a long time and you do most of the quests and lots of stuff, you’re going to hit level 20. But a lot of playthroughs, finishing the main quest  you’re going to maybe 12  or 13. It takes a while to get to 20. It’s let us balance the game better to say “these creatures are this hard, Deathclaws are this hard,” and then not have you at level 40 and Deathclaws are just falling over. 
Emil: You can still make the game easier by jacking the difficulty down, but we figured that for overall balance, and we didn’t want to design the game so that it could be a cakewalk at any point. It didn’t feel right for the wasteland.
Todd: And that’s another thing, we’ve debated that, even recently. It’s like, “Let’s let them keep getting more powerful.” What’s more fun? We’re still on the side of it being more fun to get to level 20 late in the game and have done a lot of stuff, and then say, “I’m about to finish this game, but when I finish I’m going to start over, because I didn’t get to pick everything.”

PCG: I’d kind of like to be able to continue, even if it becomes prohibitively time-consuming, just because it’s another thing you can do.
Todd: We’ve extended it a bunch. In a couple of our playthroughs, people were getting to 20 too quickly, so now it’s extended more. So the time it takes you to get from 15 to 20 is long. So our hope is that by the time you feel that way, you will have done most things in the game anyway. That’s our hope anyway.

PCG: At which point why stop someone from continuing with their character?
Todd: See, now we should change it.
Emil: I can answer that. Going into this game, we really didn’t want people to have the Oblivion experience where they can be all things to all people. You choose a path. We are much more comfortable with the player replaying the game as a different character than playing it infinitely to whatever level and switching from good to evil and good again, and doing this and doing that. We were more comfortable saying the player has to play the game again to get this kind of stuff.
Todd: It makes the decisions harder. Because if I tell you “You can go as many levels as you want,” instead of “You can only pick 19 perks,” just that moment when you go from level four to five, a more important decision. I guess I hope that it makes that more fun, as opposed to “I’ll take this one, and I’ll get that one next time.”



PCG: You could always just stop giving perks at level 20.
Emil: What’s the point of leveling then?
Todd: Don’t make us feel worse about it.

PCG: Why did you decide not to have a drivable car like in Fallout 2?
Todd: A lot of that was, A) they weren’t in the first game. I think inserting a vehicle that would drive at a speed that any player would want from a vehicle would want from a vehicle would change the dynamic of this game so much…
Emil: That would make it a totally different game.
Todd: I could debate whether horses should have gone in Oblivion or not pretty easily. And a lot of that, too, was we wanted to focus on the on-foot experience, because adding vehicles would be a whole other realm of gameplay, and everything like that. And despite the one in Fallout 2, I don’t think it’s really hallmark of Fallout to be driving around in vehicles in the wasteland. Everyone wants to ride a brahmin.

PCG: After you finish the main quest, can you continue and do whatever you want?
Todd: No, when the main quest ends, the game ends. Roll credits. We’re pretty good about letting you know when that’s going to happen.
Emil: We’re not big fans of timed sequences. As long as the player feels the tension there, we don’t like the sort of arbitrary time limit. There’s no Fallout 1 equivalent of return the water chip in time or the game ends.

PCG: What inspired you to include player housing in the game?
Todd: We did some of that stuff in Oblivion, and it’s incredibly popular. The lairs, and having a house, everybody wants it. We like it too. We went through a few designs of how that works—we won’t talk about the other ones, but the one you got, you can decorate it and there’s things you can buy to upgrade it, and you can collect your bobbleheads in it. The butler used to be something you had to buy, but he’s so cool we said OK, because when you went in and there’s nothing there, it’s like “Who cares?”
Emil: Some people like to just play the game and move through it like an action game. Other people like to hang out and set up a base of operations, and having a house lets you do that. It lets you store your stuff and feel like you have a center. For example, getting a house in Megaton, you consciously decided not to destroy the town, and now you’re living there, you become a part of it. It’s more meaningful.
Todd: For a lot of people, the way that Z-key grab works, a lot of it is so you can do like this [Todd rearranges items on the table in front of him]. You can decorate everything, you come in, there’s the gun shop…it’s fun. It’s dress-up with a room.

PCG: So it doesn’t serve much of a gameplay purpose beyond storage?
Todd: No, the things you can add to your house are definitely gameplay related things.

PCG: Such as?
Todd: Such as, wait and see! Have you not seen enough, sir?

PCG: Never enough!
Emil: You can definitely buy useful things for the house.
Todd: Even the bed, that well-rested thing [that gives you an XP bonus for a while after sleeping], that wasn’t in the original design. So we put that in, and we recently changed it. We like the XP thing.

July 21, 2008