• Posted October 10th, 2007 at 14:34 EDT by
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(continued from previous page) ...include. At the same time, having that many fewer NPCs does allow us to spend a lot more time on each NPC and give them a lot more depth. What they’re doing, their dialog, etc.

PSU: Players who simply want more control in battles can apparently utilize the Vault-Tech Assisted Targeting System (VATS). Now, while the general idea is simple, how will such a system work with groups of enemies if any?

Well, the idea is that VATS gives you the ability to pause time at any point during combat, regardless of whether you have action points to spend or not. Action points determine what actions you can perform in VATS as each attack will use a certain number of points based on the type of weapon you’re using. So you can hit the button when you get attacked just to get a sense of what you’re up against. Is it one enemy or five? Are they easy to handle or really tough? Is there good cover somewhere you should take advantage of? A choke point you want to force them through to get to you? VATS gives you a chance to assess your situation while the game is paused so you can make good decisions.

So if you’re fighting a group you give yourself a chance to figure that out, and then you can start fighting. You can target enemies that are closer to you to try to slow their approach, or blind or cripple one that may have a particularly dangerous weapon, or queue up an attack on several different creatures and pull it off much more quickly than you could in real-time.

PSU: How does the melee system in Fallout 3 exactly work? How will the VATS system focus its efforts with the melee system?

The goal is to balance the game so that you never have to fire a gun if that’s not the kind of character you are role-playing. So you can use different types of melee weapons in close range and use VATS to target body parts just like you can with a gun. How “exactly” it works is one of many things we are working on at the moment and it continues to get changed and refined until we feel like we have it “just right.”


PSU: We just have to ask this….what does the "corpses eaten" statistic on the Pip Boy (a statistics indicator)?

You’ll have to wait to find out. We aren’t talking about that yet. :)

PSU: In terms of development, we have to ask you guys an important question. There have been claims by certain developers stating that the A.I. program in general for the PlayStation 3 platform is weaker than it is compared to the Xbox 360. Now, we all know everyone at Bethesda are the kings of NPC's and A.I. Has the PlayStation 3 helped Bethesda to program for A.I. easier than other consoles at all? In addition, does Bethesda find that the A.I. potential and A.I. in general on the PS3 has far less potential or greater potential than its competitors?

I assume that your question is more about memory allocation for certain systems, rather than an actual AI package. We use our own system for AI and whether or not it works on any platform is really up to us, not up to the console. In general I would say, for us, it’s about the same across platforms. In general, the PS3 and Xbox 360 are equivalent machines in terms of what they can do; they just go about accomplishing it in different ways in terms of threading, memory management, etc. There are certain things that one console may do “better” or “easier” than the other, but I think you only need to look at Oblivion to see that the game is equivalent on all three platforms in terms of what it can do technically. There aren’t any features that are trimmed down for one platform vs. the other. It’s the same game. That’s our goal again on Fallout 3.


PSU: How does Bethesda feel Fallout 3 truly differentiates itself compared ... (continued on next page)