14 DAY TRIAL // Chris Avellone, the leader of the Obsidian development team, has revealed some of the regrets that his team has when it comes to the development of Fallout: New Vegas. He has also talked about the general philosophy the team used when creating the game.
During a presentation at the GDC Online event that focused on narrative expression, the developer stated that, “A big part of the game mechanics in New Vegas was faction politics and faction reputation, and while I thought that was a strong game mechanic, I think internally we realized it's not possible to make those mechanics work if one of those factions isn't as well-developed.”
The team would have appreciated a chance to give Caesar’s Legion, who are portrayed as the enemies in the game, a more nuanced character.
Avellone also revealed that the team had total freedom when it came to creating New Vegas, with Bethesda only asking that they used the Fallout 3 engine and that they kept the action to the West Coast of the United States.
The developer also talked about how Obsidian approached the creation of the four DLC packages for their Fallout game.
He added, “Each one was a very self-contained short experience”.
The team had a 10,000 lines of dialog limit they had to work within and that, combined with their narrative ambitions, resulted in such innovations as characters who spoke in hand gestures.
At the moment, Obsidian and Chris Avellone are trying to get crowdfunding for their Project Eternity, a classic-oriented party-based role-playing game that will be launched during 2014.
The team is creating the entire game world for their new title, complete with complex NPCs and with a number of factions that the player character and his companion will have to deal with.
At the moment, Project Eternity has gone over 2.6 million dollars (2.02 million Euro) in funding.