Fallout 3

There's a lot more handling! We spend a lot of time talking about, "What if the player doesn't go where we want them? What if they stumble on this spot that we wanted for the end-game?" We have to handle that. We don't want to just lock them out and say, "You have to go down this path, that's the only way." We have to handle everything the player's going to do. We're experienced with that because we do it in Oblivion. But it doesn't have quite the same - well, it doesn't affect the game in the same way. A lot of our time has been spent planning for every single contingency that could possibly happen.

You know, that's something else as a developer you also have to come to terms with. What does karma mean? In the real world, it's bad to kill anyone. You could argue to kill even the bad guys. In a videogame setting, it's good to kill the bad guys. So you can still get your jollies so long as you're killing the baddies. But it's tough - that's a place where a lot of the fans disagree - you end up handing out karma inconsistently. It's something we're still trying to balance.

What we can do is provide different avenues for the player. A big thing with the original Fallout is you could talk your way out of certain situations. You could got to the Master and talk him to death. We wanted to provide a lot of different avenues. You have to decide for yourself. Is shooting mutants something my character is going to do? In some ways we'll provide non-lethal combat options, but a big part of this game is the incredible level of violence. It's something people find a lot of fun, so it's not something we're going to back off from. The old Fallout had a slider for violence, you could turn it down if you wanted. We joked that on our options we were going to have one, but it would be taped in place at the max.

It's something I don't really worry about that much. It's probably going to be a Mature game, I don't see how it could possibly not be. It's not something where we're saying, "Let's go through the requirements for Mature and make sure we check all these boxes." It's nothing that we worry about. There is something we worry about regarding kids [The game features children, and it features guns, and it lets you make your choices. Whether they let you kill children is a decision they haven't made], and we could run into all sorts of problems there. It's something we need to think about, and find out, what's a good balance respecting what the game's about, and respecting the reality of the world today.

The fact that we still haven't decided what to do with the kids is, you know... It's the world we live in, and you have to think carefully.

Yeah. There was an old screenshot for Fable when that first came out, where the guy had a sword through a kid's neck! That was a screenshot - I thought, oh my God, that's crazy! It's really something disconcerting, so you have to balance it. How important is it for the game? For Bioshock it's a central part of the game. The big choice is whether you're going to kill these little kids or not. Is that something we need to worry about so much in Fallout? I'm not sure it is.