Shack: Speaking of Fallout, is it being handled by essentially the same team as the Elder Scrolls team?

Pete Hines: The answer to that really has to be yes, because we just have one team.

Shack: Right.

Pete Hines: Yeah, we don't say, "You're the Fallout team and you're the Elder Scrolls team." Even in terms of where people sit, we put programmers together and designers together and artists together. They may move from project to project. Some moved from Oblivion to Fallout, some moved from Oblivion to downloadable content to The Shivering Isles. It just depends what they're good at and what we need. But yeah, it's the same core group of people.

Shack: So you're pretty far into development, I'd think?

Pete Hines: We're a fairly good ways away. Projects reach different stages of development based on how many people are working on them. You can have eight people working on a project for a year and a half and still consider yourself in preproduction just because they spend so much time speccing out what they want to do and how it's going to be implemented. But yeah, we've got a full team working on it now. Of course, as we said with all of our stuff, we don't believe in showing it or even talking about it until we can say, "This is what we're going to do." That time is not that far off.

Shack: This year?

Pete Hines: Oh yeah, yeah. It actually shocked us how long ago it was that we announced that we got the rights to Fallout 3. It surprised all of us! We all said, "Really? That long ago?" [laughs] All we had really done back then was announced we acquired it. Nobody was working on that. We just had to put something out because Interplay is publicly traded.

Shack: Right, it'll show up on the financial records anyway.

Pete Hines: Yeah. But if it was up to us, in the corporate world, I still believe we would have kept that silent. As much fun as it is to hear people buzzing about it, I just think it would have been so much greater if we could have just come out and said, "We're doing it, here it is, here's what it looks like, here's what it plays like." I mean, talk about coming out of left field! [laughs] It's definitely had some advantages in that people know that we're doing it, but my preference would have been to just keep it quiet.

Shack: Well, you guys tend to work pretty quietly in general.

Pete Hines: Exactly, like with Oblivion nobody even really knew we were working on that until we said, "Here it is, here are the screens and the story and the setting and the characters."

Shack: You guys have your own trademark series so you're used to dealing with fan expectation, but is it different or intimidating working on a franchise like Fallout that already has such a built in reputation?

Pete Hines: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. For a couple of reasons. Number one is that we're treating it as if we made the first two, with the same care and attention we give to The Elder Scrolls, but the truth of the matter is that we haven't. As a result there's probably a lot more divergent opinion about what it should be, what we should do, are we the right guys to do it, and so on.

Shack: Is there any of that internally?

Pete Hines: Internally, not really. Internally, we're a bunch of Fallout geeks. There is nobody [here] who hasn't played that game and enjoyed it. I have that game on my laptop, I take it with me and play it. But it's definitely different, because it's not really considered ours, the franchise. We didn't start it. There is a little bit of that sentiment out there that we have to prove that we're worthy to be the guys to make Fallout 3. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, because we have very high expectations for ourselves. The standard that we hold ourselves to, the kind of games we expect to make in terms of quality, we have a very high level of expectation. There's really nothing like the people from the outside expecting more than we expect ourselves.

It's a lot like when we were doing Morrowind. Everybody said, "Well, the last game you did was Daggerfall, and it was really buggy, and everything you're telling me about Morrowind sounds good but you need to prove it." It kind of has that same feel, that people are saying, "Yeah, I liked Oblivion, and you guys are good at roleplaying, but you have to prove that you aren't going to screw up this beloved franchise." We think we can do it. We are the right guys to be doing this franchise, we do take it seriously, and we do want to make it a powerful force in roleplaying in terms of what these games can do and be. We hope that when we show people what we're up to, they'll agree. Some folks will, and some folks will say it's not what they wanted. At the end of the day, we respect that, but we have to do what we think is right. Again, you can't make the game that everybody wants because you'll get ten different answers about what that game is.

Shack: Have you spoken at all to the original creators of the franchise--who from what I know already had less complete involvement with Fallout 2 than with the first game--in any capacity?

Pete Hines: We have, on an individual basis. Some of those folks have contacted us on varying levels, whether it's a "Hey, good luck" or a job inquiry or what have you. Not really formally though, no. Again, it's one of those things where I have a lot of respect for those guys. I was a huge Black Isle fan, and all those RPGs coming out of Interplay at the time. I loved Baldur's Gate, Fallout. It was fantastic. Way back when, when I wrote for the Adrenaline Vault, Interplay was one of my companies. I used to cover all their stuff and play everything they put out. I still have my shrinkwrapped copies of Baldur's Gate and Planescape. They did great stuff for which I will always have tremendous respect. But at the same time, if we're going to move forward, we're really going to have to move forward. We can't just say, "Well, let's ask these guys what they think." As Fallout fans and guys who make roleplaying games and have for over a decade, we have pretty good ideas about what we want to do and how to do it.

Shack: Is there somebody at Bethesda who is really driving the vision of Fallout 3, like Todd Howard, or is it more a situation where it's the company vision?

Pete Hines: It's the vision of a group of folks. Much like The Elder Scrolls, it starts with Todd Howard who drives everything, but then there's definitely the lead designer, lead artist, lead programmer. More than anything, those team leads are the guys who champion for things, saying, "This is what it has to play like, this is what it has to look like, this is how the systems have to work." It's definitely a group of folks but at the end of the day it falls on Todd to set the pace and and how he thinks it should look and play.

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