

Fallout 4 director Todd Howard has a great track record when it comes to making blockbuster video games, having previously worked on Oblivion, Skyrim and, of course, Fallout 3.

During this year's E3 gaming expo, we spoke to Howard about the origins of Fallout 4, the lessons he learned from Skyrim, in-game mods and the size of the game world.

It's been a big E3 for Bethesda, how has it been for you?

"It has been a big E3, yes. It's been great. When you have a game like this, it makes things fun."

Have you been pleased with the reaction to the game?

"Yeah, we're pretty blown away. And not just for Fallout 4, but the shelter game [Fallout Shelter], the mobile game, the response to that is not even, like we could never comprehend that kind of response."

Bethesda Softworks



How has that been going?

"It's the number one app in the world. It hasn't left the top of the chart since we put it out. We've never done a mobile game, and here you have a company and that's all they do, and, yeah."

You said during the Bethesda conference that you'd been tinkering with the idea for a while, when did you come up with Fallout Shelter?

"Um, 2008. Actually, tell people to look at the Fallout 3 trailer. If you look at the Fallout 3 trailer, the E3 one, and you watch the cartoon in the beginning, it's Fallout [Shelter]. I mean, when you watch it, it'll be crystal clear."

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Is there a risk in announcing a game [Fallout 4] and releasing it in such a relatively short space of time?

"I'd make it shorter if I could. I think that moment of excitement is really awesome, and the energy here at E3 has been crazy. I think because we're not just saying, 'Yes we're doing it and here's a little teaser', we're saying, 'Here is the whole game, here is what it does', it's exciting for everybody, and they want it now, you know. There are logistics, with retail, so this is about the latest point you could possibly announce it, and still get the retail channel, and everywhere around the world, all sorted. But then with the app store and the mobile app, because it's all digital, you can say, 'We're doing a game and it's out tonight'. So keeping that secret was hard, but that proves that you can do it."

If fans were to pick up on something they didn't like at this stage, would it be too late to act on those things now?

"We have a pretty good idea. So like the fans asking for what they want is pretty constant to us, you know, daily, for years, so I don't think we're missing on that part. So I think their excitement for what we're doing is a better... the positives outweigh any negatives."



Why did you announce it before E3?

"We felt that we were going to be showing so much at the showcase, that we wanted to give everybody a taste beforehand, so they knew, 'I'm going to get to see that'. If we were to go to that showcase and show all of that and that was your first look, I think it's a bit overwhelming, rather than take in a trailer and say this is what the game looks like and this is the tone, and then you're going to get a lot of detail at the showcase, although people didn't know that until we did it, but that was why."

When did you come up with the concept and story for this particular Fallout?

"We started right after Fallout 3. It's an odd thing where whenever we do a game, for some reason, and it's not strategic, but I always think of the beginning, and so I'm sitting there like, 'OK, we want to get you in a vault', because the vaults are really important to Fallout, and I really like the stuff before the bomb, I love all the retro stuff, and this would really be a good way to start the game, so that's usually how we start."



What comes next?

"The world. So then it was, like even then, we didn't know what happened in the vault at that point, just that you're going to go in and then come out later, and like, 'OK, where are we going to put it?' Because the world is the main character, so we had a lot of conversations and a lot of debate about different places, but felt that Boston, we already had some stuff that we'd done on it in Fallout 3, there are some hints about what's going on there, and it just had the right flavour of location, of the history and the high-tech stuff in Boston."

Yes, I was going to ask about Boston and what it was about Boston that really drew you in?

"Yeah, it's got good American history stuff, which is good for Fallout, and Revolutionary War and all that. And then you have all the high-tech stuff that Boston is well known for, and I think those two things together are very Fallout."



What kind of challenges did you have to overcome when creating the new Fallout?

"Mostly for us it's scale, you know, we want to build something huge. And we have so many features, it's just finding the way they all hook together, so the game doesn't feel like it has too many personalities. You have to make all of these ideas sync together well. That is, on every game, the hardest thing."

What about the change in technology and hardware? Did you always know it was coming to these platforms?

"We've known for a while, and that's helped tremendously. Whereas, we're classic PC developers, so even though we've always done console stuff, we're still having to do kind of triple work on the previous generation, so a PC version, a 360 and PS3, but now we can dedicate our time to, you know - they're all similar in architecture to a PC, they have lots of memory, so the amount of extra time we have to spend on each platform is greatly reduced, so we're just much more effective with our time."



What did you learn from your work on Skyrim?

"It's really [what] people... enjoy in an open-world and how you reward their exploration. And how you tell a story that works, given they can do whatever they want."

It was exciting to hear about the mods during the showcase, am I right in thinking that you're hoping to bring that to PS4 at some point?

"We will be. Well, we're going to make every effort to. If Sony says no, we won't, but I don't think they will. But, you know, it will come out on the PC first. So early 2016, the creation mod for the PC, and then we're going to make that work on the Xbox One, and then we're going to do the PS4 version. It's a lot of work to get it all working. And the PC to Xbox One connection is a much better route, and we've worked with those people for a really long time, so we're going to do it there first and then PS4."

What are some of your favourite mods you've seen in your games over the years?

"You know I have lots. I'm really careful about not calling them out, because I don't want to judge and say these are the one Todd likes, but generally the ones that change our art, I lean away from. I like ones that use the tools, scripting and AI, to make the game do something that I didn't know it could do. You know, changing one of our textures, yeah I get it, but if you say, 'Hey we made characters, they now do this, here's a thing you can do that you couldn't do before', those I really, I love them. I'll play a lot of those. We spend more time looking at those."



What about the in-game building, when did you come up with that idea and what exactly can you do with it?

"So that was pretty early. We play a lot of Minecraft, Terraria and other games that let you do it, and this was a perfect fit for Fallout. If you were to put this in Elder Scrolls, you could do it, but it's not an instant, 'Of course, you want this'. Getting it to work mechanically, because we didn't want a separate editor - so you're playing the game, walking around in first person and boom, you can do it - that took a while with just the interface, the rules, how things click together, that was the biggest issue."

You said at the showcase that it was optional, but are there advantages to doing it?

"There are. You get experience points. And I think people will want to make themselves a home and there are some story reasons we do it, so there's certain quests that want you to, so those are the main reasons."

Bethesda



Can you tell us how big the map's going to be?

"I avoid answering that, and I'll tell you why. If you look at our previous stuff, it's kind of like that. We don't actually measure it like that. Because Skyrim is one size, but the mountains take up a lot of space. That's not really a game place, it's in your way, you have to go around it, so we're not really doing that. In the city, it's very dense, but there is no load - like in Fallout 3, there's a load - for areas of the city, we don't do that. So it's very dense, the buildings are tall, and a lot of them are open, so you can just walk in and around, so... it's big. I wouldn't say, you know, if you played Skyrim, I couldn't tell you it's X bigger, so we're just saying it's about the same size."

Can we expect lots of interesting secrets quests to find and characters to meet?

"You have no idea [Laughs], that's what we do."



What about the use of voiced protagonists in Fallout 4, how is that going to change the game?

"It changes it for the better. Having them voiced, you can make emotional moments feel a lot better, and it was important to us that we didn't hold back, so they have recorded, each of them has done over 13,000 lines of dialogue. That's a lot of time, for years, in the studio, and they've done an awesome job."

Did you decide to use voice actors for your protagonists quite early on?

"We knew for this game we wanted to try it. So, we thought we want to try this, what are the problems? Can we solve the problems? Can we record for years, two actors? Can we make it where the game isn't paused and it's just another [cutscene]? We do it differently, and if you watch the video, it seems like a cinematic scene you'd see in a lot of games, but it's not. You can play it in first-person and I could be talking to you and I could look at somebody else and talk to them and then turn back to you and answer your question. We don't do that a lot, but it allows it. It's all just a smooth system, so that part of it was important to us."

A little technical question, but are you aiming for 1080p/60 frames-per-second?

"No one's asked me that, I can't believe it. *It is 1080p on everything, but it's 30, not 60."

*Bethesda has since confirmed that it will be 1080p and 30 frames-per-second on Xbox One and PS4, but the PC version will not be limited in any way when it comes to frame rate and resolution.

Watch a trailer for Fallout 4 below:

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