This is the latest edition of an interview series, “Unmasking the Gamers,” humanising the people who play video games: the real character controlling that fictional character; the person behind that First Person game. Previous interviewee(s): Brendan Stapley, Andrew Doherty, Cody Winn, Chris Avellone Part 1, Chris Avellone Part 2, Jason Bergman, Chris Avellone Part 3

Following the release of Fallout: New Vegas’ final DLC, Lonesome Road, and with the upcoming Gun Runners Arsenal add-on approaching, this edition of the series features a chat with the Lead Project Designer Joshua E. Sawyer about getting into the industry, linking in-game worlds with real life considerations, religion, overcoming game cancellation disappointment…and cats =)

WO: Hi Josh, thank you for your time. Please tell us about yourself, your role at Obsidian, and what your interests are.

JS: Hi, Will. I’m glad to be a part of the series! I’m a project director at Obsidian and I’ve been in the game industry for about twelve years, most of that as a designer. Project directors are the “lead of leads”, on the team, the individuals who define the high-level goals and scope of the project and help keep things focused on quality and consistency. Though technically part of the production staff, project directors have a somewhat adversarial relationship with the project’s lead producer (in the case of Fallout: New Vegas, Larry Liberty). The project director defines the direction, but the lead producer tracks resources and effectively “writes the checks”, serving as a voice of sanity for scope and scheduling.

My game development interests are primarily in finding ways to give the player more meaningful choices in how they build and use their characters and in how they can influence the story. I’m also a fervent, possibly fanatical, advocate of strong core mechanics. “Good for an RPG” is an insult, and no player or developer should settle for that level of quality. Outside of video games, my interests are varied but shallow. I enjoy bicycling, motorcycle touring, firearms, languages, music, history, and a bunch of other things I never feel I explore in enough depth.

~

[Gamasutra Feature] & [Fallout Wiki] 

This is the latest edition of an interview series, “Unmasking the Gamers,” humanising the people who play video games: the real character controlling that fictional character; the person behind that First Person game. Previous interviewee(s): Brendan Stapley, Andrew Doherty, Cody Winn, Chris Avellone Part 1, Chris Avellone Part 2, Jason Bergman.

As we near the release of Fallout: New Vegas‘ fourth and final DLC, Lonesome Road, this edition of Unmasking the Gamers similarly sees the last instalment of a discussion with Obsidian Entertainment’s Mr Chris Avellone, lead designer for three out of the four content add-ons. Having spoken previously about RPG design, his work on Alpha Protocol and personal interests, this interview finale focuses specifically on Fallout, the creation of New Vegas, as well as the goals of its narrative-driven DLCs.

WillOoi: Could you see the Fallout series taking place in a different setting? Seeing the post-apocalyptic world from the perspective of a Chinese character, for instance.

Mr Chris Avellone: Character perspectives aside, the ability to properly give context to that setting is more difficult the more removed the developers are from that location. There’s likely a good reason why Bethesda did F3 in Washington DC, for example, and why Obsidian took the West Coast/SoCal region – we know more about the area where we live (or the areas that the Project Director, JE Sawyer, can ride to on his bike) than, say, China. Not having intimate insider knowledge of a location I feel makes the level design for those areas weaker as a result, not to mention the comments you’ll likely get from folks living in those areas about getting various details wrong.

WO: You were initially the lead of the cancelled Interplay Fallout 3, Van Buren. Did much of your original vision of the game differ from Josh Sawyer and the rest of Black Isle’s final design documents?

MCA: I believe most of it was changed, except for Denver, which remained largely the same as far as I could tell from the docs. The revised take on the Circle of Steel was different (for me, they weren’t evil, they were just hardliners who thought the rest had drifted from the original principles of preserving tech and policing their own rogues – kind of like Internal Affairs), same with the central prison/quarantine facility, the Hanged Man, etc. Still, that just gave me the opportunity to include locations like Old World Blues’ Big MT in the DLCs, so it all worked out. And plus, it’s always fun to drop references to the old tribal groups that I’d created (Twin Mothers, Hangdogs, the Ciphers, etc.). Also, the Prisoner’s Dilemma was a core theme in the original spec, as well as the conflict with the rival “player character group” and the reactivity spawning out of that.

All that being said, Van Buren was shaping up to be great with the direction, it’s a shame it got cancelled. I feel Interplay could have made it clearer they had no interest in PC-only titles earlier and saved a lot of expense and time.

[Gamasutra Feature] & [Fallout Wiki]

This is the latest part of an interview series, “Unmasking the Gamers,” humanising the people who play video games: the real character controlling that fictional character; the person behind that First Person game. Previous interviewee(s): Brendan Stapley, Andrew Doherty, Cody Winn, Chris Avellone Part 1, Chris Avellone Part 2.

Following the recent trend of Fallout-related interviews in Unmasking the Gamers, this edition features a discussion with Bethesda’s Jason Bergman, Producer for Fallout: New Vegas.

WillOoi: Hi Jason, thank you very much for agreeing to take part in this interview. Please tell us about yourself, and how you ended up at Bethesda?

 Jason Bergman:  Gosh, that’s a long story. I’ll do my best to summarize my career, since it’s a long and probably not very interesting story. I started writing about games while I was a college student in the mid-90s for various online and print publications. When I graduated, did that full-time, and during that period I met some of the guys here at Bethesda (most notably Todd Howard).

Unfortunately the bottom fell out of the online advertising market and I was forced to get a day job to supplant my income as a journalist. That wasn’t much fun, so I looked around for a full-time job in games, which led to my joining Take-Two as a PR manager. I worked out of the Rockstar Games office on the non-Rockstar titles, and that team eventually formed what’s now the 2K Games label.

I enjoyed PR, but I really wanted to get more involved in games production, and in time they made me a producer. At 2K I was able to work on some pretty amazing projects, like the Civilization series, Sid Meier’s Pirates! and Bioshock.

In 2007, 2K Games merged their offices with the 2K Sports division out in California, which meant moving to the west coast. I stuck it out for a couple of years, but as a life-long New Yorker, I really, really missed the east coast.

So I contacted some people at Bethesda to see if there was an opportunity for me here, and sure enough there was, in the form of Fallout: New Vegas. The rest is some kind of history.

[Gamasutra Feature & Fallout Wiki]

This is the latest part of an interview series, “Unmasking the Gamers,” humanising the people who play video games: the real character controlling that fictional character; the person behind that First Person game. Previous interviewee(s): Brendan Stapley, Andrew Doherty, Cody Winn, Chris Avellone Part 1.