J.E. Sawyer

The difference from Comic Con is that E3 has never been intended as a consumer show. It's for press, publishers, developers, and retailers -- which is why the E3 folks actively try to restrict attendance. When I have difficulty navigating the floor because a string of obviously not-industry people are waiting to have their picture taken with a Lara Croft model, I want to throw grenades under them. By the way, I actively oppose sexualization of characters unless that's a fundamental part of their design. I fought the valkyrie design for Seven Sorrows every step of the way. During the development of Black Hound, I had to repeatedly call attention to the fact that male versions of armor were absurdly different from the female versions. A suit of hide armor on a male human looked like it came from an eskimo. The same suit put on a female human looked like an Amazonian bikini. If anyone out there didn't know this, I'll let you in on an internet secret: there are many pictures on the internet of women wearing less than a bikini!!! You don't even have to buy a game to look at them!!!

I've never heard of anyone being particularly prudish about it, but I have heard a lot of developers complaining for the same reasons I have. E3 is a press event for video games. Booth babes detract from what should be the focus of the event.

I'm glad this is being done, because fawning over booth babes is pathetic and it takes attention away from the games.

Thanks. It's interesting, because I wrote a short piece of historical fiction in the form of an apocryphal letter about a year ago. It was more expressive than most of my game dialogue, and I think I found a comfortable place from which I could write because I based the writing style in something historically formal and... crisply expressive, I guess. It's still not the sort of dialogue that people seem to like in games, though. Overall, I think I should say that I'd like to write for games, but I'd rather do it on my own time and my own virtual dime, so to speak. I don't really want to express myself in ways that I find revolting, and it makes no sense to force a style upon a group of people that typically likes that which I fight against.

Pretty much never in our own world.

But they were the first, and that's often the source of their descendants' arrogance and nuttiness. E.g.: Yuan-ti.

Have you ever seen Good Morning Vietnam? There's a guy in there who goes on to replace Robin Williams' character for a while. He's totally unfunny, but he insists on continuing his show even though everyone hates him. When he finally gets removed, he defiantly says to everyone around him, "In my heart, I know I am funny!" Who wants to be that guy?

Like I wrote, most people don't like my stories or the way I write dialogue, which is why I try to stay out of that aspect of game design now.

I'm not sure. It's easy to say, "Well, if we had X and Y, and Z hadn't happened, the game would have been great." But there's still the possibility that you can screw a game up all by yourself. A lot of the things we were trying to do in Black Hound were experiemental; I don't know if people would have liked them. Also, a lot of people don't like how I write stories or characters, so they might have hated the CNPCs and other prominent characters in the game. I am pretty confident we could have executed well on F3, but I think it would have taken another round of area reviews to get things more cohesive and focused.

I am not proud of any of the games I've worked on, so it's not that surprising that people conclude I'm incompetent from looking at my work.

Making the game was very difficult because of the circumstances at Black Isle during its development. Icewind Dale II started development the same day that TORN was cancelled and five people were laid off. It was the first time that people had been laid off in Black Isle, so it wasn't exactly a happy beginning. A lot of other people left shortly after development started because IWD2 looked like it would be an embarassment. Seventh-ish IE game, still using 2nd Ed. rules, with a development cycle of about four months. One of those people was the lead designer, so I did double duty on IWD2 while FR6/The Black Hound sort of simmered in the background. The four months eventually turned into ten. It was less of a death march and more of a death race. I felt like I wasn't exactly leading people as much as shooting them out of cannons in a general direction. The levels were very inconsistent in feel because, while there was time to do "course correction", there was no time to do level overhauls -- especially from an art perspective. Also, some of the area designs were just very difficult to do in the IE. Fell Wood was not the sort of puzzle area that Dave Maldonado imagined it would be. Rob Holloway did his own scripting for his extremely ambitious Ice Palace and Dragon's Eye levels, but it was a staggering amount of work. We were also overly concerned with jam-packing every level with stuff because of how short HoW turned out. Areas like the Horde Fortress probably could have been half as long and much more satisfying. If we had 2/3 the number of areas, but they were all the quality of Targos and the Severed Hand, I think the game would have been much more well-received. In terms of technology, I think IWD2 did a great job. Sure, the pathfinding was still Ebola-ridden and the networking code was its usually junky self, but most of the 3E stuff we implemented was solid. I don't think it was mod-unfriendly. I mean, except for the fact that it broke a lot of the existing IE mod tools (lol). I think that people just got tired of modding IE games at that point. Icewind Gate looked neat, but it ran out of steam. As far as the story goes, you weren't "supposed" to feel anything specifically about the twins. They weren't written as bad guys or good guys, but as antagonists. I knew that some people would feel sympathetic for them and some people would think they were buttheads and I thought that was a good goal.

No, you weren't.

That's more than most so-called RPGs can manage these days.

The game's combat seems more suited for use with a console controller, but the role-playing opportunities seem to be pretty great from the videos I've seen.

Ferret worked on The Black Hound and F3.

Pool of Radiance (original) Fallout Darklands Ninja Gaiden (Xbox) Animal Crossing Pikmin 1/2 Tribes Rallisport Challenge 2 Splinter Cell 1/2/3

Of all the demi-human races, halflings have always seemed to be the most likely to have paladins. They tend to be very community-oriented and humble. Urogalan, Yondalla, Cyrrollalee, and Arvoreen all seem to be good deities for paladins to follow. I played a halfling cleric/paladin of Yondalla for a while. He was awesome.

Contrary to what Hades wrote, no one ever said that grenades were melee weapons. Throwing grenades was going to be checked against the melee skill in F3 because the throwing skill in Fallout 1 & 2 was so rarely used that it was practically worthless. The other alternative would have been to put potent throwing weapons everywhere, which made even less sense. If someone went through the effort to do it, I don't think it would be that hard at all. D&D already uses damage reduction. If a game supported more "free form" throwing of objects, or throwing items to other characters, I suppose throwing as a stand-alone skill could be worthwhile. The Hei Gui armor intended for F3 was a light armor (about equivalent to combat armor) that boosted AG, PE, and sneak.

When I was designing a pen-and-paper Fallout game, the rules went through heavy revisions. I started out with something similar to the SPECIAL rules used in F3, but those proved to not be that great in a pen-and-paper environment. In particular, combat felt very clunky and dumb. At the suggestion of Dave Maldonado, I switched the combat system over to a phase-based system like the one used in Necromunda: Move > Charge > Action. AP went away, but sequence was still very important. I reduced the overall damage range of weapons and made character skill more important. This allowed characters with thematic weapons (like revolvers) to be a little more viable. Ranged weapons, guns in particular, had their ranges severely truncated. The ranges weren't realistic, but they actually became meaningful on the hex mat. The results were terrific. Combat went a lot quicker, people understood it more easily, and when people replayed the actual events of a battle, they seemed pretty sensible. I was very skeptical when Dave suggested it, but going phase-based helped a lot.

In the pen-and-paper game I ran when I was at Midway, thrown weapons used the athletics skill. Athletics broadly covered things like swimming, climbing, jumping, and throwing. It seemed to work pretty well. Throwing always seemed like such an overly specialized skill when compared with something like "science".

Somewhat, but the system had the premise that tougher armor = higher AC. And heavier armors had almost no drawbacks (other than weight) when compared to lighter armors. No armor had stealth or AG penalties. Those seem more like systemic problems than data problems. DR is also something that I considered to be a systemic problem. To begin with, the idea behind the math doesn't seem sensible to me. Let's say a piece of armor has 30% DR and 0 DT vs. explosions. A grenade goes off next to someone wearing that armor. The attack does 3 points of damage. 30% of 3 is less than 1, so the target takes full damage. Another grenade goes off, doing 100 damage. The armor protects the target for 30 points of damage. The more damage done to the target, the better the armor protects. Huh? My expectation would be that armor would ablate damage damage up to a certain point with the rest being taken by the person in the armor. E.g. I fire increasingly large bullets into a barrier. The first few are low calibre and they bounce off. The next few are higher calibre and they penetrate deeper as the calibre rises. When the bullet finally penetrates the barrier, the bullet retains whatever energy that remained after breaching the barrier. Ballistics is certainly more complex than this, but that's the general idea. There's a threshold of protection that body armor affords. Once an applied force has overcome that barrier, the body takes the rest. That's effectively what DT is. In Fallout, the better suits of armor have both high DT and DR, and they combine to make even horrible wounds virtually insignificant. The PCs' hit points rise, their DRs rise, and their DTs rise. By the end of the game, they're harder to kill than a lot of D&D characters. A lot of that has to do with the armor. Removing DR and revamping the stats for weapons and armor made a big difference in F3. High-calibre weapons like military-grade sniper and anti-materiel rifles were awesome against heavily armored targets. They weren't so great against groups. Low-calibre, rapid-fire weapons were great against lightly armored groups. The results seemed pretty sensible, but armored characters still gained great benefits.

The demo we developed for Interplay. It was two levels and featured a decent amount of combat on the exterior map. IIRC, the NPC follower that came with your character, Cpl. Armstrong, was wearing T-49d power armor, which was a precursor to the T-51b. He was pretty much impervious to small arms fire, but I think he wound up in the proverbial danger zone when exposed to seriously heavy weapons (like a flamer). Especially since he wasn't wearing a helmet.

It only creates more player choice if the actual instances of armor in the game have meaningful trade-offs. The choice between leather and metal is sort of a trade-off, but by the time you get to combat armor, there's no longer any trade-off. Even between Tesla armor and power armor, there's not much comparison. Telsa armor's protection against energy attacks is only marginally better than power armor's, and power armor's protection against everything else is far better. T-51b Power Armor Type DR DT Normal 40% 12 Laser 80% 18 Fire 60% 12 Plasma 40% 10 Explode 50% 12 (FO1) 18 (FO2) Electrical 40% 12 Tesla Armor Type DR DT Normal 20% 4 Laser 90% 19 Fire 10% 4 Plasma 80% 10 Explode 20% 4 Electrical 80% 10 (stats from The Vault wiki) You could give each suit of armor 10 stats, but if all Suit A's stats are inferior to all of Suit B's stats, the aren't many reasons to choose Suit A over Suit B.

That's pretty much what the F3 system did, but with DT instead of DR and with only two coverage areas: body and head. Also, AC was a weird name for what it represented, so it was just changed to Evasion (I think).

I think your boundary between "working fine" and "broken" is a lot different than mine. Yes, the armor system does actually protect characters from damage, so I guess in that respect, it does function. With regards to supporting player choice, player intuition, and general game balance, I think it fails. Ferret and I put a healthy amount of effort into re-working the armor system for F3. It seemed to hold up pretty well in our lil' demo. That was with no DR and no AC bonuses from armor.