 The “go anywhere, do whatever” open-ended game offers a unique challenge for videogame writers. Often, the writing in such games is compared to the beloved Choose Your Own Adventure kids’ books.
But that’s not necessarily a fair comparison. Fallout 3, for instance, will be like Choose Your Own Adventure injected with literary growth hormone. With 30,000 lines of dialog played out in an open world, Fallout 3 ain’t kiddie stuff.
Bethesda put the game in the hands of the very capable Emil Pagliarulo, the lead designer on Fallout 3, the brains behind The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s amazing Dark Brotherhood storyline and no. 24 on this year's Hot 100 Developers list.
Thankfully, he’s also a self-professed literature geek—good news for people who have high expectations for Fallout 3’s storyline. A general geekiness and a knack for real-world observation helps bring Pagliarulo’s stories and characters to life.
"If you live an interesting life and you’ve encountered interesting people all the time, the inspiration is easy." “I love a character in Beowulf that might strike a spark in me, but it’s also characters I may have met in my life at one point who are interesting characters in and of themselves,” Pagliarulo says. “You know the whole adage that ‘life is stranger than fiction.’ I think that’s very true, and if you live an interesting life and you’ve encountered interesting people all the time, the inspiration is easy, it just sort of comes to you.
“Life itself is pretty fascinating if you look at it. There’s a lot of inspiration to be drawn out there. I think that people sometimes make a mistake when they limit their inspiration. It’s easy to say, Oh my god, I loved Star Wars and I want to be the next George Lucas,’ and copy what George Lucas did. Why not look at George Lucas’ inspiration? Look at the things that inspired him; look at the Kurosawa films that inspired him and what inspired Kurosawa. There’s a chain there and the farther back you go, generally the better the source I think.”
Rockville, Md.-based Bethesda continues to plug away on the final touches of those 30,000 lines of dialog in Fallout 3, which is on track for a Fall 2008 release on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Those lines of dialog will weave the tale of one character—you—who was raised in one of the numerous underground “vaults” that were created to escape from the nuclear holocaust occurring at ground level. As radiation levels diminished, these vaults opened up, spilling forth human refugees. Vault 101 never opened.
But when your father turns up missing, you venture outside of Vault 101 to find him.
That’s just a slice of what the main quest has in store, and given the Fallout franchise’s foundation and the talent working on this new entry, Fallout 3 has a lot of promise in terms of story.  Not everyone’s happy, though. Particularly the hardcore Fallout fans who lament the “consolization” of a franchise that originated on PC. They expect Bethesda to “dumb down” the game for the masses on multiple levels, whether it be through gameplay or even story.
Writing for a franchise that has such an outspoken core fanbase puts writers in a precarious position: how much do you listen to that core fanbase, and how much do you ignore them?
“…That’s always the toughest question,” says Pagliarulo. “You listen to the fans and respect their ideas, but once you start designing a game that they want to make specifically, then you can get yourself into trouble. One of the things that I love about Bethesda, and that we all love about working here, is we’re all pretty hardcore gamers and we know what we want, we know what’s fun, we know what we like and so we design for each other. We’re our own best audience.
"There just comes a point where you just can’t worry what the hardcore fanbase is going to scream at you about on the forums." “So with Fallout in particular, we’re comfortable that the game is coming out this year—we can finally say that. The game is coming out this year, fall 2008. Knowing where we are in the project and all the work that is finished and all the work we still have to do, I think we’re all so wrapped up in the game that we’re creating, that there just comes a point where you just can’t worry what the hardcore fanbase is going to scream at you about on the forums, you know? You have to make the game that you’re making and know that it’s a good one and continue with that.”
With every new piece of game software that strikes a chord with people who’ve longed for good stories in games (see Mass Effect, BioShock, Half-Life 2, Oblivion and the Halo series), the importance of a good yarn seems to be increasing.
Some developers are realizing that having interesting themes and characters isn’t just about pleasing those snoots who actually want to play a good story. There are also commercial benefits to creating a universe that people want to return to over and over again. Maybe there will eventually come a time where creating a game with solid gameplay is simply not enough.
“[Story] definitely does matter,” Pagliarulo says emphatically. “Look at some of the writing in Mass Effect or BioShock—games that are recognized as being story-heavy and having good stories. Look at Overlord, with that evil comedic wit.
“…It sometimes seems like a good idea to attract a big name writer or an established writer in either the comic book field or some other medium [to work on your game], but the fact is, writing for a videogame is a very specific beast. You have to understand how to compliment the gameplay with your fiction, and the best writer in the world, if he doesn’t understand videogames, can’t make that happen.
“So I think we can have with games like BioShock, we can have really great writing and great gameplay to compliment each other. I think hopefully we’ll be seeing more of that as people understand the medium more and understand how to create for it. I think that’s the only way the writing is really going to get to a level it needs to be at.” | 
