John Deiley spills the beans on FO3's story

[Spazmo]

<strong>[Game -> Update]</strong>

<!-- BBCode Start --><B>John Deiley</B><!-- BBCode End -->, previously (or currently, doesn't matter, really) of BIS fame, did an interview with <!-- BBCode Start --><A HREF="http://www.gamebanshee.com" TARGET="_blank">GameBanshee</A><!-- BBCode End --> all about FO3 and what might have been. Here's the lowdown on the story.
<br>
<br><blockquote>The game would begin with the player in a prison cell. Because of this the player was given a choice. He could be an innocent that was imprisoned because of some misunderstanding, or he could choose to be a criminal and take bonus traits that would bolster some of his skills.
<br>
<br>The player would awaken in a prison cell, but not the one he remembered falling asleep in. Suddenly the floor rocks violently from an explosion and the player is knocked unconscious. When he awakens he finds his cell door open and a hole in the wall leading outside. Leaving the prison, he is under attack by some unknown assailant. Deciding that discretion is the better part of valor, the player flees into the night to explore his new world.
<br>
<br>Unfortunately, his new found freedom may be short lived. The player is relentlessly pursued by robots who want to return him to the prison. As he explores the world and tries to outwit his pursuers, he begins to uncover an underlying plot. Why was he in a different prison than the one he fell asleep in? Why can't he remember being transferred? What was the attack on the prison about in the first place?
<br>
<br>The game offered a myriad of new places to discover and explore. It spanned a good portion of Utah, Colorado, and the surrounding areas. The player could repair railways and locomotives for fast travel to distant locales with train stations. Or, he could find and repair several vehicles that allowed access to areas outside the railways. Or... the player could hoof it.
<br>
<br>There were old friends and new enemies in the game. The Brotherhood of Steel was back but fading from glory. The player could rebuild them or destroy them. There was a group of fanatics who worshiped a mad goddess and her life/death religion. Mad the goddess may be, but the genetic knowledge she turned into a religion was helping the wasteland. The player could take her down and free the people from her tyranny (and possibly weaken them in the long run) or let her religion prosper (and build a heartier stock of people that could better survive the rigors of the wasteland). These were just two of many factions in the game.
<br>
<br>There were recognizable places to visit like Denver, Boulder, Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, and many others. There were new places to discover like the Twin Mothers, the Nursery, New Canaan, and many more.
<br>
<br>In size the game was somewhere between Fallout 1 and 2. We decided to go for quality of content over size of the overall game. There is so much more I could say about the game, but I'll save that for another time.</blockquote>
<br>
<br>As has been pointed out elsewhere, that's pretty much stole from all the wrong games. It's really a mish-mash of Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate II and Lionheart (*shudder*). I guess we weren't missing much after all.
<br>
<br>Spotted at <!-- BBCode Start --><A HREF="http://www.rpgcodex.com" TARGET="_blank">the RPG Codex</A><!-- BBCode End -->.

[Thorndyke]

I love this man.

[EvoG]

One thing about the comment regarding this being a mish-mash of other games...in this day and age of mass media, 99.9% of all ideas have been 'done before'. This goes for movies, books, comics, rpg's, board games, computer games; its about time people learn that its about the 'delivery' of the content makes any one story idea good. This isn't saying that these guys would necessarily have made this story interesting, but nothing about what I read is bad on any level. Maybe its just me filling in the blanks with what I would do if given the design, but all in all until we see it executed, who can say. On this note, I'm playing Killswitch for the PS2 right now, and believe me, this was a "meh, I just need a rental", because I'm on that dang blasted gamer pass at blockbuster...so I force feed games to myself just so I can get the exposure, ANYWAY, there is a weird robocop/universal soldier vibe I'm getting from the dialog through my com unit ( I'm a one-man hi-tech soldier in the field sorta deal ) and these bizzare cut scenes implying some sort of uplink to my brain and feeling like I'm some sort of new weapon...when I die, my screen fizzles out like the monitor/tv powering down. This idea has been done before ( in the aforementioned movies ) yet this was an interesting surprise, and despite the gameplay being rather repetitive ( albeit fun ), I noticed I kept playing a lot longer due to the way they were delivering the story ( again which was a surprise to me; I thought this was just a military shooter ).

Some stories sound bombastic or just plain silly right off....so no amount of good writing could help them, sure, but nothing here seems too ridiculous that it couldn't be fun given to a savvy designer(s). Hell, I thought PST was a fucking brilliant piece of written work, and its only a shame that I lost momentum when I got to that upper city shit with the brothel and blah blah...I just forgot what to do and even with a walkthrough its just too daunting, but I digress, I got chills when I found the tomb and the writings on the wall...awesome...so nothing wrong following in those footsteps.

Cheers

[4too]

Time Honored Tradition

... As has been pointed out elsewhere, that's pretty much stole from all the wrong games. It's really a mish-mash of Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate II and Lionheart (*shudder*). I guess we weren't missing much after all.
...

"The plot" of borrowing plots is a time honored, or defacto, rule of the road.

Whether the "thief" can RE-sell it as "original" depends on how well the work generates it's own aura or mythos.

If it tastes bad, one "could'' start trundeling out the w-h-ine tasters' technology: ""it initiates on the tongue with the minty flash of P:Torment, and is then blugeoned by a heavy mediocre redundancy liken to BG2. Yes, ... , this is a truely, sociopathic vintage, with a schizoid Lionheart, back beating a bipoler rythmn, and more likely to be promptly regurgitated than warmly digested....."".

If one were able to trace the "influences" of any author or school of authors, and could make a literate arguement, one could ride that to a graduate degree in many academic diciplines. If one was to trandscend the merely readable and aspire to "literary", one could fly that to tenure and constant fast rotation on the talk show curcuit. Fame. Fame. Fame.

We start out shadow boxing the shades of truth, and gradually accept the acclaim generated by the choreography of our gesticulations.


4too

[Megatron]

what he said

Some of that stuff has been suggested in the fo3 forum here so HYE! KEWL! I didn't play any of the mentioned games either so I guess I'd have liked fo3 mebbe. 2 bad.

[Mihail]

I'm sure it would have been better then it sounds but it does sound rather lame, atleast to me, Altho I am sure I'd still would have got it

[chrisbeddoes]

Well the plot execution matters a lot more than the plot itshelf.

But now we will never know.

[Franz Schubert]

Of course it's common to borrow ideas, but starting in a jail cell, breaking out, seeing an assailant and running away... that JUST happened! By the same damn company too!

[Sarge]

At least it wasn't designed to be linear. From the sounds of it, it does sound like they were on the right track.
I mean, if you were expecting this to be a carbon-copy of FO/FO2, give your head a shake.
The rail-trasport thing sounds like it was a good idea.
And the escape from jail thing? Well, hey: you gotta start somewhere. Might as well be breaking out of jail.

[EvoG]

Anyone here remember 'Dragon Wars'? REAL old skool ( god I hate that )....anyway, it starts off in a medival prison for which you had several options on how to escape, one of which passing yourself off as a dead body and hide among the pile thats about to be launched over the wall. Begining in prisons/captivity to then escape has always been a cool premise for me.

[S4ur0n27]

When he awakens he finds his cell door open and a hole in the wall leading outside.

The player is relentlessly pursued by robots who want to return him to the prison.?

Well that sure sounds like a cheap movie or some light fantasy shitty book.

There was a group of fanatics who worshiped a mad goddess and her life/death religion. Mad the goddess may be, but the genetic knowledge she turned into a religion was helping the wasteland.

Sounds familiar anyone?

I think I'm happy the game was canned after all...
Tho it sound like it would have been pretty open-ended and not linear at all.

[EvoG]

Let's just wait for something new, the FO sauce has been streched over a bit too much..

FO fans stretch their sauce all over when they're playing with it.

[Slave_Master]

Anyone here remember 'Dragon Wars'? REAL old skool ( god I hate that )....anyway, it starts off in a medival prison for which you had several options on how to escape, one of which passing yourself off as a dead body and hide among the pile thats about to be launched over the wall. Begining in prisons/captivity to then escape has always been a cool premise for me.

When executed well, unlike the "prison escape" beginning that's been in so many Black Isle games. Varying options make it interesting, but BIS managed to only come up with some deus ex machina opening your cage and saying "Get off your ass. What, you're an evil asshole who could care less about saving the foozle? Like I give a damn. Get your shit and let's go." or the amazing "You're suddenly free! Except eeeevil people are after you! Quick, get to Town A and find Ye Olde Arcane Plott Device!".

Off the top of my head, I can think of three ways to exit the prison. Finding a guard's uniform and conning your way out, killing your way out, or sneaking. Plus one or two creative methods, such as what EvoG described above. That's with thirty seconds of distracted thinking.

So why can't the professional game designers flesh out an old plot device like the prison escape, or better yet, use a better one? I'm willing to give the devs the benefit of the doubt, since Interplay's recent focus into the console market has led to...reduced dev cycles for PC games. But it still doesn't seem well-planned out at all.

[chrisbeddoes]

Let's just wait for something new, the FO sauce has been streched over a bit too much..

FO fans stretch their sauce all over when they're playing with it.

So I guess that project phonix will not start in a prison.


If i made my own game the player would start in a Bordello.

From an accident involving probably too much sex and drugs the player has lost his/her memory and his/her wallet and now he/she cannot pay and he/she runs away naked while customers and guards hunt you down in order to settle the debt .Oh and a great conspiracy in the background.

Let's be original Mr Steve

[EvoG]

Let's just wait for something new, the FO sauce has been streched over a bit too much..

FO fans stretch their sauce all over when they're playing with it.

So I guess that project phonix will not start in a prison.

Let's be original Mr Steve

Hey, I'm not the one starting the game in prison...I'm just saying that its about how its done, not simply the concept that makes it cool or not.

Either way, what does this have to do with FO fans and their man-sauce? Hehe.

Cheers

[Slave_Master]

From an accident involving probably too much sex the player has lost his/her memory and his/her wallet and now he/she cannot pay and he/she runs away naked while customers and guards hunt you down in order to settle the debt .Oh and a great conspiracy in the background.

I had an idea the other day. The game starts with you escaping prison after having been recently raped. You contract an STD, and unless you find the cure you die in x, where x equals the number of game years. I haven't decided yet. But the main quest is nearly impossible, since obviously whoever has a cure has it in some bunker somewhere. So there'll be a big game world and tons of side quests and whatnot.

I'd maybe even have bonuses from the STD of some sort to stats and/or skills that would act as "traits" that are explained as various mutations of the disease. For example, a variation that screws with your adrenal glands and makes you faster and stronger, or one that improves synapses, increasing your strength. Bonuses would also give the "top sekret government" types a reason for developing a cure: they could figure out how to keep the improvements of the virus, without the whole dying in x number of years part.

Shitty, yeah, but I haven't thought it all out yet.

[chrisbeddoes]

For me Fallout 3 is whatever post apoc game Mr Tim Cain makes next.

And it always was.

Fallout is like Da Vinci painting.

Only Da Vinci can make them.

It does not matter who owns the rights or anything else.

And many FO fans think like me.

[S4ur0n27]

Not man-sauce... lol.

Anyway, like Slave said. These guys get paid for creating good games and coming out with great ideas and all they can do is pull some shitty half-assed plot out of their ass. It's exactly the Deus Ex Machina principle, like roman theater.

[EvoG]

For me Fallout 3 is whatever post apoc game Mr Tim Cain makes next.

And it always was.

Fallout is like Da Vinci painting.

Only Da Vinci can make them.

It does not matter who owns the rights or anything else.

And many FO fans think like me.

I've been saying this for a while and you are so right. Its easy to get carried away with the idea of another Fallout, but hell, if the guys who brought us Lionheart did it...well...you know, it would fucking suck, regardless of the FO universe.

Thats why I follow designers/teams rather than licenses.

[Ooe]

Im going to be flamed for this, but THAT sounds like a game I wanna play...