Confessions of A Bethesda Veteran | Nate Purkeypile (Fallout 3, 4, 76, Skyrim, Starfield)

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Yeah, for me it's definitely that freedom that people had and worked really well on like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4. But once you start having multiple companies and adding those layers of bureaucracy and meetings and approvals, it is very, very hard to operate in that same way.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hi there, my name is Steven Lick, and welcome to the Examined Game. Today I am talking with Nate PerkyPyle. He is the founder of Just Perky Games. He worked on Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Skyrim. He was the lead artist on Fallout 76. He played a part in the early days of Starfield and then went on to start his own indie studio where he's released games like The Axis Unseen and the Ucoming Gone Feral. I wanted to talk with Nate about everything to do with his time at Bethesda and what he learned, building some of the most amazing environments that I've ever got to enjoy in a game. And then we get into what it's like to work for a big studio that gets bigger and bigger and how certain things can slow up in terms of the freedom that one might have and his decision to go solo. He also talks about where he would love to see the next Fallout game set, as well as his enthusiasm for a remaster of Fallout 3 because it gives the environments that he worked so hard on, like new fidelity and new audiences as well. So I hope you enjoy. Remember, you can listen to this episode wherever you listen to podcasts, and please do support me on Patreon. You can find more information at the examinedgame.com. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Right now I'm playing a soccer two, finally. I've had it sitting there forever. So I was a big fan of like all the original ones, but I finally got around to playing it. So I'm like, I don't know, like eight hours into that so far.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

So that's your literal present tense game.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Do you have any sort of um kind of go-tos that you're just always returning back to that you're just like totting up hundreds of hours on uh on Steam?

SPEAKER_01 1:49

I mean, I try and avoid doing that, but I do have a lot of hours in like Team Fortress 2 and Hitman. Like Team Fortress 2 is definitely over a thousand hours. Hitman is I've played a lot on Epic, so I'm not exactly sure where it's at, but I'm guessing like three or four hundred hours. There's like so much depth, and they added that like sort of roguelike mode, which is super cool. And I've played that alone quite a bit.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

Um I sort of it's the kind of game I always want to go back to, and then I never for some reason like I feel like I need to spend more than a couple of hours in it to kind of really get back into the the sandbox nature of it. But I always kind of dip in and out. I thought maybe what would be interesting as a way of going through a little bit retrospectively your career is is maybe we could talk about some highlight games for you. And within that, if there's any uh environments or sort of things around design or lighting that is specifically sticks with you as a way for us to kind of work through that that chronology.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

I mean, probably the early, early one that I enjoyed working on the most was Blood Rain 2, way back when I was at Terminal Reality. That was really fun to do like the intro level to that one, which was this mansion, and which at the time seemed like super fancy with like reflections and stuff, but that game shipped on the PS2 also, so it's definitely been a while, and like textures were only 256 by 256 pixels. So definitely a lot of tech constraints, but I had a lot of fun making that, and our team was pretty small, but we were able to do quite a bit. And you know, I look fondly back on that one more than some of the other stuff I did at Terminal Reality, like Aeon Flux. Like, I don't think anybody played that one.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

I I'm guessing there are things that you've made under such tight constraints that you're extremely proud of. And I'm sure you're happy with everything you've done, but there's probably things that you've done like with the best possible technology available to you that you might not remember quite so fondly as those really early restricted um designs. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Yeah, I mean that's why there's apparently it's confirmed now that they're doing like a Fallout 3 remaster, but I'm personally looking forward to that because we were like super tech constrained making Fallout 3, and you could only place so many lights, and again, textures were pretty small, and constantly worrying about the memory budgets or how much stuff you're putting on screen. So it's not like it's exactly how we intended. Like I get why people are more upset over like movie remakes and stuff, but in the case of games and particularly the art side of it, like it's a hundred percent not what we intended, and it was very, very constrained. Like even before I was doing games professionally, I started making games before we had color. So I've seen it change dramatically over time. I think a lot of these remakes have been done, frankly, better lately too, like the Resident Evil ones and stuff, those were fantastic. Whereas for a while I think a lot of those updates were just like, oh, we made the textures a little bit bigger and like through a sharpened filter in Photoshop, and it doesn't really look that much better or actually as good as other games that are coming out.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Well, I think the GTA trilogy was one of the big sort of controversial uh remasters in terms of textures and uh within the game, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Um okay, so yeah, so what would be next on your sort of chronology of the and it doesn't have to be like literally every game that you've worked on, but I'm just thinking about your different eras that you've been through.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

I mean, I guess after Fallout 3 it would be like Skyrim, and that one I had a lot of fun working on and definitely pushed to add more color to it, because I had done like the caves in Fallout 3, but those were like very traditional kind of you know, stalactites and stalagmies, it's kind of boring. And at first it was like, oh, what color should the caves be? And they're like, well, it's rocks, it should be gray. And it's like, no, no, I want it to be really mossy and green and have a lot of like plant life in there, and all those holes that don't exist in the actual map when you go outside, but to get the sunlight coming in and like all that foliage in there. So I really pushed that to have it a lot more colorful and exciting.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

I sort of love this idea that like making caves interesting is like a trailblazing idea because it's you know kind of born out born out of like my sheer boredom with doing caves.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Like, I don't want to do the exact same thing again.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

I just hate every time the quest yeah, exactly. Every time the quest takes me, like it's like, oh, there's the kind of rickety wooden door, so I'm going underground again. Great. But I did, I did, I remember that. I haven't thought about it a long time, but I remember that with Skyrim. Um, the the those environments. Yeah, for you, what is what is the sort of proudest uh or the thing that comes to mind for that game when you think about the environments you you were able to sort of contribute to it.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

Probably little lamp light was the one that stands out the most to me because it was really fun to build. That was actually my first city that I did at Bethesda, and I got to lay out the whole space and do all the lighting and everything, and I really like working on cities to just think about all those different things and how they all work together. Because sometimes in the past they had split up like who's doing the layout and who is doing the art, and I like doing both.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

And I'm just curious, I mean, was that uh a a little bit um intimidating for you when you were given that?

SPEAKER_01 7:31

I actually pushed for it, because at first I think it was gonna be split that way, but I told them that I thought I would be able to do it faster and you know, fewer back and forths and stuff if I just handled it all myself, so I really wanted to do that.

SPEAKER_00 7:47

Was there something about little lamp light that you were drawn to?

SPEAKER_01 7:51

Yeah, it was definitely like the city run by kids, and I've always liked tree houses, and it's essentially designed as like a treehouse village but in a cave. So I've like stayed in a lot of tree houses in real life and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Um okay, and then and so and again, without going too too quickly over it for Skyrim. I'm just interested again what your sort of learning curve was for that particular project. I mean, and maybe it is the main thing is like how do I make Ks interesting?

SPEAKER_01 8:24

But if there's anything else on that, I I would say it's broadly that I did a lot of the kits and we wanted to make kits as a whole more interesting, because in Fallout 3 and all the games I did before that, like Blood Rain and Aeon Flux, all of the kits for level designers, it was purely like 90 degree angles, and it would just snap together. That's it. But then as a player, you definitely feel like the repetitive and grid-like nature of that. Whereas in Skyrim, we kind of broke a lot of those rules, and there's a lot of like freely placed walls and pillars so that things can have like this organic flowing feel to it, and feel much more natural, especially when it comes to something like a cave. But that was even true for like the Imperial forts or the tunnels for the Ratway, other things that I did, because I wanted it all to have that really natural feel, and that was definitely the first step towards that, and made a big difference, I think, in not feeling like you're just you know, again, Oblivion was a cool game, but you go back and play those dungeons and you're like, I've literally seen this room before. It's not a surprise to explore spaces, and I really wanted to push that in Skyrim.

SPEAKER_00 9:31

Is that something that from your position you have to um like you were saying about what you wanted to do with the within the caves, that you have to sort of push for or fight for to say, like, no, I think we can do this better?

SPEAKER_01 9:44

I think a lot of it came from me and Joel Burgess, who was like the head of the level design department, and we both just wanted to like really push what we were doing with levels. So we worked together a lot on exactly how those kits worked, and I would like do some tests and like pass it back to them and go back and forth, and we'd have super in-depth conversations about naming conventions and all these super specific things to make it easy for them. Because it was definitely going to be more of a burden on level design, not just on me, because if you're not just snapping pieces together, you can't just be like boom, boom, boom, boom, done. It has to have all these intersections that then I have to review every single dungeon to make sure it also still looks good. Because if you give people a whole bunch of freedom, you could have things that make no sense or just look bad. So it's definitely more of a burden. But I think everyone was really excited to have more unique dungeons.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

That's what I was going to ask. Do people start to clock on to what what it is you're doing? And I mean, there's nothing better than that moment, at least in my work with say documentary and film, where you sort of you've actually done something quite special and unique, and you get to sit down and show someone what you've had your head down working on for all this time, and they actually start to like buy into it, and then that enthusiasm catches fire, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Yeah, I think that made a big difference, and that's where a lot of the really interesting things in Skyrim and stuff come from, was that everyone was just kind of excited to do what they wanted to do and had a lot more freedom to express themselves and make interesting spaces, and a lot of that was also things that I didn't even expect where they're combining the kits, where you go into like some cave and it's like, oh, there's a whole castle in this cave. Some artists were like, Oh, but you're not supposed to combine the kits that way. But I assuming it got like an art review and could still look cool, provided some really memorable spaces.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

Um, I mean it really did, certainly from a player perspective. Um and again, there's a lot of this I want to sort of come back to, but I'm just enjoying going through your your chronology. So after Skyrim Fallout 4.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

Um Yeah, Fallout 4 was the next one.

SPEAKER_00 11:57

Um and so again, of all the environments in there, if you had to sort of pick one that you feel represented what it was you were trying to push for to, you know, iterate on what you're doing, which would it be?

SPEAKER_01 12:08

I mean, Diamond City was the one that I spent the most time on, because I had moved on to Fallout 4 before most people, so for quite a while it was just me and Isvan, the art director, and Diamond City was sort of the first project. So spent a lot of time like working on the layout of that one to make it really easy for players to go and spend time and like sell all their stuff because I was kind of annoyed by some previous games. Like the cities were great, but with the loads, it was kind of obnoxious to like go to a town, load into a shop, sell your stuff, load back out, go to the other shop, load in. So I pushed pretty hard to have it all just like in this circular area, and only one of those shops is a load. It's like the clothing store, I think, which you're not super likely to go to. But the rest of them you can just like sell your stuff and you load in right there. It's like it was really important for it to like feel like a real city to me, but also convenient to the player and logical.

SPEAKER_00 13:03

Hmm. Were you aware just how much of a uh central point that the city was going to be for the game when you start working on it?

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Yeah, definitely. Because like on Skyrim there was like I think five major cities, and those all had like dedicated artists the whole time. So you obviously end up spending a fair amount of time in each city, but in Fallout 4, it was kind of a conscious decision that that was the only like major city. There were some smaller ones like Good Neighbor and stuff, but they did definitely did not have as much stuff in them, and few requests went through there, so I knew pretty early on that it was like a major quest hub, and that's part of why we were doing it so early, is because it was such a core part of the game.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

Um great, and then 76?

SPEAKER_01 13:55

Yeah. Um 76 was I mean, a very hard project in a lot of ways, because shifting to a multiplayer engine from uh being a single player engine is a ton of work, but I was really happy with how the map turned out because I got to pick like all the locations and the weapons and the creatures and lay all that stuff out and work with the whole art team. So even if the game had like a little bit of a problematic launch, it was nice reading from people like, oh, you know, I might have issues with the game, but that map is super cool and got to really push the lighting a lot. And it's nice to see that they also stuck with it, so now the game is like doing pretty well and makes a lot of money to this day. It's nice that it didn't just, you know, like, oh, it's not doing great, we're gonna give up and move on. It's it finally got to that point, especially once like NPCs were added, and that's how long I was on the project too. It's like up until that expansion called uh Wastelanders when the NPCs came back. That's how long I was on the project.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

It's an interesting point. When I think about I was playing 76 in its early days, and for me I wasn't playing it as intended because it wasn't clicking for me, but it was it was as if um someone had created a fallout game that was was the antithesis of the one core thing that that will always bring me back to to these sorts of video games, which is the the constant pursuit of whatever's next on on the horizon.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Yeah, I think that's a totally valid way to play, and having a lot more space in that map, I think, helped that work well because it's like four times the size of Fallout 4, which obviously was a big discussion with production to make sure that we could do that, but I don't think that game would have felt even remotely the same if it had a map that was the size of Fallout 4.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

No, absolutely. And then I guess I'm curious, I I sort of I I won I I want to come back to your because that that that that then is your last sort of launched game uh as part of Thuster, is that right?

SPEAKER_01 16:01

Uh I worked on Starfield for about a year after that, but I quit before that shipped.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

Were you were you there um are there parts of you know what's what's in the finished game there that you sort of feel like you can you know see see your fingerprints on?

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Yeah, I worked a lot on the City Neon, so that ended up changed in some ways with like a few more loads and stuff, but I did the layout of that city and built a whole bunch of the art for it and stuff like that, and I was the lead lighting artist, but at the time I quit that didn't actually function, so that was mostly just lots of meetings with programmers and stuff. I'm sure that ended up changing too after I left.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

Was there an ambition that you had for that with that that particular city build in the same way that you did with Diamond City?

SPEAKER_01 16:51

Um, it was similar in some ways where it was a lot of accessible shops and stuff, and then the loads were for people's like actual houses and stuff. So it was a bit of a bummer to see more loads than I intended. Because like the it has like a part underneath the main hub area with all the shops, and that was just kind of built all together. But I guess they probably ran into like performance issues or something and had to split it off. Did you feel as if that you were kind of living the train that you'd always had? Yeah, I mean I definitely wanted to make games from a very early age. It was like third grade, I think, when I started programming games and Apple Basics, so I was definitely excited to get into the games industry and went to college for that even. I went to this school called Digipen, which is in Redmond, Washington, and got a degree specifically in like art for computer games. So I had gone to another c college before that, the Academy of Art, but it was like too fine arts focused for me. And I specifically wanted to make games, so that definitely worked out for me, and I was a huge fan of the Fallout games from way back when, so I was not sad that I got to spend like a decade making Fallout games.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

I mean that that just makes you wonder about the um being a part of the team that's taking what is you know this this iconic series that's known as an isometric um POV into a fully 3D realized uh environment. I'm sort of wondering what you know, because I mean Fallout is just that the the essence of of that that series is kind of it it carries over, right? Like whatever we were pulling from, you know, as a reference from those original games, it sort of it it it converted very well into a 3D environment. I'm just curious what kind of forethought had to go into into that.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense and it makes the games a lot more accessible to a lot of people because as much as I like the original games and stuff, there's just not that many people that play like isometric trend-based games. And there's been like Wasteland and stuff, and they they've done fine, but I think bringing it into that perspective was really cool, and I love first-person games personally, and have played tons of like Quake and Half-Life and all that stuff throughout time. And I'd also worked on Metroid Prime 3, so it's not the first franchise I worked on where it was traditionally a different perspective, and then it got shifted into something else, and so to me, I've like seen how that can work really well, because I think the original Metroid Prime is like a fantastic game, definitely up there with like Super Metroid. So I was really excited to be part of that, and it made perfect sense to me to like take the framework of Oblivion and stuff like that and apply that to a Fallout game, and that seemed really interesting to me.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

I mean it this sort of leads into a much bigger question, which is like what is it? What is the magic source that just makes an RPG just like absolutely sing like something like Fallout 3? And that's I mean, if you have an answer for that, then you're welcome to try and tackle that one.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

Um I mean I I think it's just like that desire to explore, and I think it's why games like Fallout and Skyrim work and Elden Ring, I would put in the same category, work really well. It's because you're always going to be surprised and not necessarily know exactly what you're gonna find, and it often like kick off whole quest chains that you didn't expect, or some different kind of dungeon than what you might think initially, could just be like, oh, that's just some random building, and it turns out it's like the Dunwich Borers building in Fallout 3 and has a whole like Lovecraftian angle to it. And I think that's super compelling versus kind of what I call the the checklist open world games, where it's like take down, you know, 20 outposts that are all more or less the same, and you aren't ever really surprised, and those can be fun for a while, but I think it can be easy to get kind of tired playing those games because you're just kind of going through the motions at some point, and it doesn't feel like you're exploring.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

It's a it's a really good point because it's it's almost like the dopamine hit version of like location exploration, right? Like just like banging banging out towers versus a very slow methodical um exploration. I mean, I think that the environments, again, is an example of when I think about say Fallout 3, they really encourage you to lean in. And I'm always surprised. Like, why am I looking at every single shelf in this like abandoned supermarket? It's like, yeah, I'm looking for loop, but you know, when I'm like when I'm 40 hours into a game, I don't need another like snack, you know.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

But but there's there's a but then you might find something really special and you don't know it's there. And some games they're always worried that players are gonna miss stuff, so then everything glows or sparkles, and we very deliberately didn't do that, so then you're paying attention to the actual environment, and then you see all like the random. Environmental storytelling bits that we hit in there with like the teddy bears and all the corpses that died in hilarious ways. And then it becomes like entertaining and informative and telling a story looking around at the world, not just like loop, loop, loop, loop.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

Do you think it's getting harder to justify that in games, even in like big RPGs, that that might be sort of known for that? But I guess there's like either they want to draw in a bigger audience or or they have the idea in their head, well, we could draw in a bigger audience if we s if we sort of over if we simplify that or we take out that, you know, less less hand hand-holdy um approach.

SPEAKER_01 22:46

I think it's a kind of falsely placed thing. I think you can have games be usable without it being so streamlined that it doesn't even feel like you're paying attention to the game anymore and you're just like following the yellow line and picking up the glowing stuff. Because as much as people say that, like Skyrim is one of the top ten selling games of like all time and continues to sell. And it 100% is not that.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

It's 100% not that. Um a company can grow without stifling that creative freedom that makes the games what they are.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

Yeah, I'm of the opinion that that starts to break down past like 100-something people. And I think it worked really well on like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4. But once you start having multiple companies and adding those layers of bureaucracy and meetings and approvals, it is very, very hard to operate in that same way. And I definitely think that's where a lot of the magic comes from, and I would say factored heavily into why I left also, because I do like making games with more freedom and not just talking about making games, but just doing it. And it's as much as I would like for that to be that way when you have like 500 people, it's really hard. And if someone has done that, great, but that's hard.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

And it's sort of, you know, and again, I want to talk about that, about what you've then gone on to do if I'm nothing to actually make something and then release it right in a relatively short period of time, at least relative to those AAA's. But it's and we're sort of getting more into the business end of things, and so but I'm just curious, and this is something I think a lot about as a player. I in some ways am always thinking about that leaving the vault moment in Fallout 3, it's still burning to my readiness, and as a player, I am constantly in the pursuit of and spending a serious amount of money trying to like recapture that moment, right? Um, and I think it can be a really double-edged sword because because companies need to um leverage that that desire, right?

SPEAKER_01 25:17

Yeah, and I kind of think we're seeing how that's played out, though, where a lot of these companies have scaled up a whole bunch, but then it's not actually economically viable to do it, and those games aren't necessarily hitting the way that they want. And as much as like hyper-polished AAA games are cool, I don't think most players care about a lot of that polish that's gone into stuff, and very few companies can actually justify doing it. Like if you're a naughty dog or rock star and can manage to pull that off, great. But in a lot of cases, we've seen people spend all this money and hire all these people, and then it doesn't work, and then they have to immediately fire them. So I think it is more important for companies to try and think of how they can sustainably make games and not constantly fire people. And ultra triple A polish isn't actually what people are looking for, and a lot of the things that have popped off over the past few years are kind of the exact opposite, and they're like, oh, why do we need all these people? If like two people made this game and it completely blew up, it's like, well, you kind of keep forgetting that games should be fun and not just everything is a live service and driving profit for the shareholders. Like that's if that's what your goal is, you're probably not going to make a great game.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

I guess I'm just I'm curious. On I mean, you know, so you you you you moved away from the Fallout um world. Are there things that you would like to see done in that universe? Like with the series moving forward? I'm asking specifically around how you see environments and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 26:50

Yeah, like I've always wanted to see what like the New Orleans area would be like. That's one like if I was gonna pick the location, that would definitely be a big pick. Because some people are like, oh, it should be in New York or something. It's like, man, I don't need to see another bombed out in New York. Like, that's been done plenty of times. I'd rather see something with a bit more character to it.

SPEAKER_00 27:12

Um what what it what is it that intuitively makes you think New Orleans? I'm guessing there's something in your kind of designer artistic brain that understands the geography of that environment and what it is about it that would make it interesting.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

I think it would bring sort of a new feel with like more swampy environments and a lot of the cool architecture that's in that area that isn't just yet another city kind of thing. Because like the DC area and the Boston area, like Boston at least has sort of like the colonial thing going on, but then if you did New York, like New York and DC aren't that different, one just has taller buildings, so it's not that much of a different culture and stuff. So that's why I would definitely pick somewhere else. If it wasn't that, it would be like Colorado or definitely something completely different location, not just another East Coast city.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

And I'm curious on that note, when it came to um Far Harbor, was that was that a DLC that you had a lot of involvement in?

SPEAKER_01 28:20

No, I was mostly on Fault 76 at that point. So all I did on Far Harbor was since I was like the lighting guy, at some point they're like, oh no, we don't have any time to light it. If we give it to someone else, it's gonna take forever or whatever. Can you do the lighting? And I spent like a week or two doing a bunch of the lighting on Far Harbor. I always think of it as sort of point lookout too, because I was also the lead on point lookout, and there's a lot of similarities there with like foggy coastal thing and a lot more horror thing, with also a weird sci-fi undercurrent to it.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

Yes, okay, that that's what I should have thought of was was was um because obviously, you know, because I mean when you said New Orleans, those that that that sort of far came came to mind, but then point lookout is even more so actually. Um there's something is it just something about um sort of water channels kind of breaking up you know one's um path to things, and that's that's my memory of that environment that makes a traversable environment much more interesting, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

Versus like the Boston topography, like Boston as a city, works pretty well, but the area around it like is probably one of the more boring Bethesda maps, I would say, because it's pretty flat. So that was really nice to go from that map to Fall 76, having like the the mountains of West Virginia.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

Hmm.

SPEAKER_01 29:48

Because you don't get the same reveals and stuff when it's so flat.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

It's actually a really good point, and I think if I think about um I I couldn't even tell you where, but it's it's like either looking up at something or looking down into a valley, and and yeah, obviously 76 is so um, you know, the traversal up and down of that environment. I mean, I suppose that that maybe goes on to explain why why Breath of the Wild is such a um a fun environment to um to explore, even though I I always feel like it's a relatively simple one, but it still ticks that.

SPEAKER_01 30:24

Um yeah, because they definitely lay out their mountains and valleys and everything in the same kind of way where you unveil these points of interest and stuff like that, and then you're like, oh, I want to go check out that thing. And like in 76, there's like two whole regions you don't even see at all until you get over the mountains, and then you like look down and you're like, oh wow, there's like this whole other half of the map practically.

SPEAKER_00 30:47

Like, what was your decision making, you know, say with the Axis Unseen, like, what is this gonna Do you do you begin with the environment? Do you begin with the story? Are you beginning with mechanics?

SPEAKER_01 30:59

Uh it kind of started just from the core idea of I'd been playing some hunting games, and I just like the idea of instead of just hunting deer and deer runaway, what if you're hunting monsters from like folklore, and that seemed really compelling to me. But then it just kind of built off of that of well, what kind of different environments would I want within that world? About how much time do I have, like what makes each part of it different? Like they need to have their own identity and color palette and sort of monsters associated with it. So I laid that all out fairly early on and kind of stuck with it.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

I mean, is that something I'm just curious how much time that game spent just like in your head?

SPEAKER_01 31:45

Oh, I mean, it's definitely more terrifying because you're not actually getting a paycheck until you ship something. So that definitely is a a change. But I didn't actually think about it that long, because at first I was gonna be like, I'm gonna just take like three months off or something, but then after about a month, I had started thinking of this idea, like, okay, no, I just need to go build this thing. And I was initially also gonna do like a series of prototypes and pick the one that I like the most, but I just happened to like this idea enough that I just decided to do it. And it all just kind of came together and made sense to me. Cause I I also generally don't try and think too much about whatever my next project is. Like people ask me right now, even like, what's your next game gonna be? And like, I don't know. Like at most I have like a couple well, not not a couple, like a notebook full of one-liners, but I don't try and idly think about oh, my next cool thing will be this. Because I find that really distracting. And instead when I use like my ambient brain space, I guess, to think about what I'm actually working on at that time, because there's are always so many different problems and bugs and all these different things to think about that I should really, if I want to do the best I can on a game, spend as much time as I can thinking about the game I'm actually making.

SPEAKER_00 33:05

And is there a point that you sort of know that okay, like I'm like when that moment comes, is okay, I'm gonna start working on something that you sort of organically just sort of slip into that flow?

SPEAKER_01 33:18

Yeah, and then I'll write out a little bit of a design document and stuff for what I want to build, but um I don't build like design Bibles or anything. Like I think the Access Unseen had like maybe four or five pages of stuff. It was mostly lists of like here's the regions, here's the creatures, here's the the powers and the weapons. But I don't go and really, really detail out systems and stuff because I just don't find it that useful, and it ends up being really wrong in a lot of cases, and I just like to get it in the game and then see what works and doesn't iterate on that as opposed to banging on my keyboard for like three months and then having this stack of papers like a stack of papers is useless. I want a game.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

And as I guess I'm just curious if there's anything that you sort of miss about being back on part of a bigger company. My guess is, well, I don't want to guess for you, but as you said, if the if one of the reasons of leaving is because, you know, too many moving parts, too much oversight, just too many meetings, all of this stuff. I'm assuming that you you've done your time basically. But maybe another way to ask that question is are there things that you find harder just being independent? Or are you like, you know, I just love this every moment of it I can imagine doing it any other way moving forward?

SPEAKER_01 34:36

No, I mean, stuff is definitely harder because I have to solve all the problems. So if something breaks, that's that's on me. I can't just be like, oh, I ran into this bug, I'll just throw it into the bug database. But I also kind of like that, because at the same time, if it breaks, I know who broke it, versus working on big games sometimes. You like pull down the build, and it's like, oh, guess lighting is broken today. And they're like, oh, well, people can still play the game, it's fine. I'm like, well, yeah, but that's like my whole job right now. Like, I can't do my job anymore, and I gotta spend all this time getting an older build, and that stuff is really frustrating. But I did like working with a lot of my friends and stuff who were really talented and good collaborators, because that's not the same as like top-down meetings and approvals and stuff, but like directly collaborating with people, that's fun, and I enjoyed that part of it.

SPEAKER_00 35:31

There's this, I maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but you know, you have the players, you have the the creative endeavor of making a game, and then you have the business side of it. And I think there's there's examples, you know, games have come from you know Bethesda and other studios where that has worked very symbiotically. You make a very very good, like out there game, like trying things and testing players, it satisfies the hell out of players, and they make a bunch of money as well, right? Like that's like that's like a really good outcome for everyone. But it just feels like right now the tension between those three points, if it is a trifecta, are so uh across the industry just feels so taut.

SPEAKER_01 36:18

Mm-hmm. I think it's really easy for businesses to forget that it's like a creative endeavor, too. And a lot of those games, like the Bethesda games, were made by a team that worked together for a long time. Like when I was there, the average tenure was like ten years, and the the new people were like seven years or less. So it's really, really hard to then be like, now we're gonna explode in size because we made all this money, because if we throw more people at it, we're gonna make more money. And I don't think that's true at all. It's really uh not a great way to build a team. It's hard to scale up that way and still maintain all that those like working relationships and have it work out the same way, and to even have the same like hiring standards that you did if you were slowly growing. So I don't think that works well. And most of the big successes that you've seen are these teams that have been around for a long time working on game after game, and eventually one explodes. And you see it with like Larian with Baldur's Gate 3, you see it with The Witcher 3, you see it with smaller indie titles like Peak. That's my opinion, that's what the businesses should be trying to emulate is having these teams grow and giving them a lot of chances to ship stuff instead of hey, we hired this X-Riot dude and hired 300 people in a year. Oh, guess what? It cratered and nobody made any money. And that happened countless times. And like I appreciate that they tried that, but that's not how almost anybody has had a big success. That's not how games work. It's not like a movie, you can't just like throw people at it.

SPEAKER_00 37:52

Do you sort of have a sense of what it was about that particular project and how it was being run, or the ethos behind it, or the ambition that ended up making it what it what it was?

SPEAKER_01 38:03

Yeah, for me it's definitely that freedom that people had and working together for a long time, not too much oversight. Because you definitely need some oversight and guardrails so that people don't do things that just completely don't fit in the game. But I would say that was pretty rare for something to do something where it's like, okay, that's weird, or we need to tell HR, please delete this. So most of the time people were doing something that was really cool, and like, you know, me and Joel and Darl put Blackreach in Skyrim, and that was totally not on the schedule. Wasn't supposed to be there. And I've had a lot of people tell me it's like one of their most memorable parts of Skyrim, and like that didn't come out of some meeting or top-down thing. That was kind of like the Skunk Works project.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Do you um I probably know the answer to this, but do you ever get bored of hearing people's feedback about what those environments mean to them?

SPEAKER_01 38:58

No, I I'm actually really thankful to have worked on some games that, you know, people actually still play or it was like important in their childhood, growing up. I always like really hearing that because I am really thankful that the only game I ever worked on that got cancelled was at Terminal Reality, and it ended up as that game demonic in the movie Grandma's Boy. So even though it was cancelled, it's like still in that weird movie. Whereas other people in games that I've known have worked at like the same company for like ten years or something, and then everything got cancelled, it's all just shuttered away, and they have nothing to show for, and that's like gotta be really tough to deal with.

SPEAKER_00 39:44

And I guess it comes back to the thing you said right at the beginning about this, you know, Fallout 3 remaster, and that people are gonna be revisiting your environments um as you intended them to be, and they're they're like a good few years old now. And and I suppose also new players, right? I don't know how that sort of feels for you to just know that it's it's it's it's getting rejuvenated and and um unveiled and and will be yeah, seen again.

SPEAKER_01 40:13

Yeah, I think it's exciting and see what new fans there are and like the Fallout community is super, super nice. Like I was at the Wasteland Jamboree event in West Virginia not too long ago, and getting to meet all the people doing like amazing cosplay, like full power suit or power armor suits and all sorts of weapons and stuff was super cool. And hearing from people in who live in West West Virginia who thought that we actually did a good job with their state, as opposed to, you know, frankly, most media and how it deals with that state. But that was really nice to hear.

SPEAKER_00 40:46

It's um it's an interesting point, actually. Especially when you're dealing with something that's like, you know, it's not it's not, let's say, as well known or has its own sort of so you know the the the Boston, you know, like movie uh trope isn't it's it's it's it's sort of different from literary Boston, but it still shines a pretty good and interesting light on it. But you're right, you're sort of um dealing with a less like moulded environment in terms of how it's perceived in in the media.

SPEAKER_01 41:12

Yeah, it's more like wrong turn and stuff like that, like backwood snowbillies and which I sort I sort of did with Point Lookout, but Point Lookout I would say is deliberately not representative of that area, even remotely. It's wildly inaccurate.

SPEAKER_00 41:30

Well, I I remember the opening the first trailer for 76, and um if I if I remember it correctly, the first but it just spending some good time, you know, and obviously the song and everything, it was just like um again, very it felt like it it felt as if it really was leaning on the environment.

SPEAKER_01 41:49

I was gonna say it's just definitely a very like exploration-focused trailer with the whole take me home country roads thing, and lots of Vista shots and stuff. So that was a really fun trailer to make.

SPEAKER_00 42:00

And something just came to mind. I'm curious what your feeling is and how you enjoy like when you see people like modding and adapting the environments that you've you've created and worked on.

SPEAKER_01 42:11

I mean, I think it can be interesting, and I used to be a modder myself, so it's always cool seeing what people do. It is kind of funny when they always say, like, oh, we we fixed it or whatever, like, why didn't we do this? And in a lot of cases, there's like obvious tech constraints why we didn't and stuff when people like, oh, we just uprezzed all the textures and made them better. Like, why didn't they do that? It's like, well, we had to ship the game on Xbox, like it would not run.

SPEAKER_00 42:40

You know?

SPEAKER_01 42:41

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of thought for the pacing of all of that stuff. Everything is a pacing in a way in environments for like where the pockets of detail are, where the the locations are. All of that has a lot of thought, so I definitely would agree with that.

SPEAKER_00 42:57

Just and you know, and I want to move on, and if you're still up for it, I'd love to just have a little walk around Diamond City with you if you've got time for that. Sure. Um but but but just to touch on that pacing, it's actually something Josh Surrey talked about as well, saying it took him a long time to learn just how important pacing is. Is there a sort of um not template? Because I know it's just not copy and paste and thing, but is there a sort of a general formula that you're aware of when it comes to like environmental exploration and the way that you're pacing a player and how much time you can get away with like leading them away before you know they are gonna want an interaction or find an environment? I'm just yeah, I'm curious what your again, formula may be too formulaic for that, but I'm I'm interested.

SPEAKER_01 43:46

Yeah, I I definitely think it's more like instinctual at some point, but broadly speaking, it's not too many things at once, but from any particular thing, you're usually gonna see at least one or two things that are interesting and that. applies to the cluttering but also for the locations when you're like up high you don't want to just not be able to see anything you're like oh I I don't even know where to go none of the compass markers are close enough to trigger so a lot of it comes from play testing and going to those places and adjusting those numbers on like how quickly things show up on the compass and that's a small thing in the games but I really like how the Bethesda games use the compass to show that for there's like a nearby location versus most games you would pop open the map and then you have to click on the thing and then it gets added as a marker then you navigate to it because I definitely think it's good to spend as little time as possible in menus, especially when it comes to exploration like that. Like if you're messing with your inventory fine that's like a whole separate conversation. But to need to do it to find stuff definitely has a very very different feel.

SPEAKER_00 44:54

And did you have a sense that maybe that was an issue that Starfield was gonna run into just in the the way that it was sort of the the the planet exploration and the solar system exploration.

SPEAKER_01 45:06

Yeah I I would say it's very accurate that if I was in charge of Starfield I would have not done it that way at all. I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts and because like even playing Starfield after it came out during the main quest I was running into repeated locations like on the main quest. And I was like well yeah because you're only gonna have time to make a certain number of dungeons and if you're gonna have a thousand planets you're going to be repeating content and it's not actually a procedural game. Like those dungeons are built. It's they're not going like the full No Man's sky route or anything so even early on I was like drawing parallels to Mass Effect 1 and how those you know procedural planets with repeated dungeons panned out and I was like I don't think this is a good idea. Because to me if you're gonna do the like thousands of planets thing you really need to go the full No Man's Sky route and have it actually be generating unique content all the time. Not just stitching stuff together in slightly different ways that's that's not procedural that's I call it space quilts where it's just chunks of things getting rearranged you can uh you can copyright that phrase that's pretty that's that's that's that's very that that says that they sort of says says everything about it.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

And again I'm I'm just then interested do you think did you see what the ambition was for that and then it just fell short of what it could have been or was it that it was like actually on conception this is just not gonna work and once the game is on those rails it's quite difficult to I mean I guess they thought that would work and it's not that I think the game is bad, I just don't think it's great.

SPEAKER_01 46:56

And I think that's a big part of that but I don't think the goal ever was to go fully procedural. So that was never the approach and so I guess it's just like a fundamental disagreement that probably like Todd and other people think that that works and could be a work a way to make a game like that and I d strongly disagree and think a lot of what makes the Bethesda game special and the way that those landmarks are laid out and getting surprised is not having repeated content and having a lot of intention on where things are and why. Because you go to like the major city in Starfield and it's huge but then like outside the city there's nothing and it it's like this doesn't even make sense as a world. It is just like oh we didn't have time to do more stuff obviously because it's spent on other planets and can only have so much time so it's just this city so it's kind of like an incoherent from an environmental standpoint to me.

SPEAKER_00 47:56

Well yeah then so on that note I think why don't we go and visit one of the most sort of densely you know interesting uh cities I think I've ever experienced in a in a video game.

SPEAKER_01 48:11

Sure yeah I mean for starters I spent a lot of time on like even just this initial reveal and the exact placement of every power line and the the diamond there and every single roof is a certain height that I played with to get it so it's like lower in the front but then higher in the back so you can kind of see all the important stuff in the city. That initial reveal was really important to me. Everyone that lives in Diamond City has a house and that house reflects their personality versus some games you'll play and it's more like a stage and you can't go into a lot of buildings and a lot of people are fake or maybe even literally never move and that's not how this game operates at all. So most of the buildings are unique because of that where I had to like punch these holes in other meshes so you could just have it open like this and really see in there.

SPEAKER_00 49:03

In terms of the environment you're gonna basically be heading straight towards the uh the noodle shop.

SPEAKER_01 49:08

And that's part of why it has like it's so tall and has like the red tarps to help draw your eye I spent kind of an absurd amount of time trying to cheap and easy way to make those tarps and have them look natural and also move in the wind a little bit and it's technically all comes from like cloth simulations that I did in 3D Studio Max.

SPEAKER_00 49:28

That's incredible. I said it's like in Future Armour when like Vender meets God and says like when you do things right no one will be sure you've done anything at all I think that's a little bit a part of your job a lot of weird little tricks for it to actually work and not be really expensive.

SPEAKER_01 49:44

And then are you thinking a lot about the way that the city changes as you move into different sort of um districts within it wanted to get like that little CD back alley feel to kind of lean into that Noir vibe that Valentine has going. So different feeling to different parts of Diamond City like this versus up in the stands where they're you know quote unquote richer and there's a bit more trash and stuff like that. But then it all has to run too so you can only put so much stuff before it starts to break down you're actually pretty close to a little Easter egg that we put in I don't know if you know about this but if you're there on Christmas like Christmas lights show up I did the art and Will Shen actually did the hookup because I was like oh wouldn't it be funny if we did this like that was definitely one of those things it was not on the schedule and just did for fun. Are you sort of thinking about a lot of signposting to draw them uh into different parts of the city or are you just aware like look they're gonna come to this quest and they're gonna come back here and that's gonna take them yeah it's kind of like a miniature version of what we do on the map as a whole where you can see like oh there's there's a reason all those signs are like sticking up there and have lights on them at night and stuff so you can be like oh that's where the medical supplies are and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 50:54

It's it's it's really um touching looking at this with you actually because it's it's having me look at it in a completely different light but um just slowing down and and and taking it in the rotating sign the the flapping um uh awning canvases a lot of those signs I designed myself and some of the handwriting and stuff that you see throughout the game that's mine as you were building the city could you see that oh this is gonna work or were there moments where it was like an absolute nightmare to pull off what your ambition was here.

SPEAKER_01 51:28

It definitely took a while to get to that point especially when the art style wasn't totally ironed out yet really obvious once you notice it but there's like a couple colors that are well at like three or four actually that are kind of like these template colors that are used a lot throughout the game there's like that blue that you see on the board there, the reddish orange that you see on the tarps and then the rust colors like those are all specifically colors that everybody had in like their Photoshop files so that they're all consistent across all the different things.

SPEAKER_00 51:56

I'm sort of just just a little sidetrack I'm kind of curious about what your take is on on the sort of the the production design for the series and and um I guess I'm thinking mostly in in terms of season one where I feel like they're taking us to like the first you know the the first city which I sort of see some you know that there's for me it feels quite reminiscent of of of Diamond City even though it's a different location setup. But uh yeah just just curious on your your for your thoughts on how that how that you know the Fallout world was kind of rendered into real real life environments in that in that show.

SPEAKER_01 52:29

Yeah it was really really cool to see because a lot of that stuff is like bolt for bolt accurate and a bunch of the signs and pictures in the background are taken directly from the game like some of the signs in Diamond City if you look at these like small signs I think there's some over like to the left near like Moes and stuff there's like these smaller signs but some of those appear on shops in the show and stuff like that. And um maybe not that one but like I think it's to the right maybe yeah like that small one like in caps we trust thing and all those small things like the instead of making up random stuff basically they took these minor textures in the game and like actually used that stuff to make posters and stuff in the show. And that to me showed like the attention to detail they had. It wasn't just like oh the vaults are both revolt accurate which they are they're amazing but it's also all this other random stuff like my cats show up in the show because some of the random paintings you see in Fallout 4 are my cats because my friend was a concept artist and he painted my cats. So it was like you know that Leonardo DiCaprio meme like oh that that's my cats.

SPEAKER_00 53:39

Yeah there's something so you know and I mean who you know I'm sure you weren't thinking at the time that it was like you know I'm I'm I'm conflating it to make the point but the Hollywood's coming to you know like pull from this source material. I mean they they they were smart right because I think they understood that getting getting the vaults perfect is not going to be the thing that people who would do all this series are going to be looking at right it's gonna be the you know the um uh tasty snacks or the um the giddy up buttercup you know um dismounted in the corner or all the signs and and and things like that that that we we sort of have an an eagle eagle eye for and I don't think it's that we're um trying to be kind of snobby fans it's just that I mean it's like if you look at this shot right here like the the thing that makes this feel like a fallout environment is the the cram and it's the new Kakoda and it's the dirty water you know um yeah yeah that attention to detail was really really nice to see for sure because the only other adaptation that I had before that was the Blood Rain movie from you know UA Bowl back in that era of video game adaptations which is that era it's nice to see that that is not how most adaptations are these days and you get a lot of good ones now.

SPEAKER_01 55:09

Well those radio towers are fake the ones you were just looking up there yeah those are just like flat textures.

SPEAKER_00 55:16

It's absolutely incredible I mean Fallout 4 is um it's it's it's it's the game that I've put the most amount of hours into out of any Fallout game. Nice um and that's that's that's I'm sure that's for a variety of reasons but um yeah it's it's it's it's always coming back to the environments for me in Hancock. Obviously looking forward to whatever's um gonna come next when it's ready to sort of jump out of the notebook and um into my hands.

SPEAKER_01 55:45

Yeah sure it's uh called Gone Feral and it's like a if you take a 1980s horror movie and you get a play as the bad guys and it's sort of like Hitman style where you can like steal outfits and use anything you want to get revenge but you can also play it with your friends. And it's kind of like a comedic twist though also because all the characters are animals and since you can use anything to kill people you can like kill people with like a hot dog or whatever and trip people with bananas so yeah it's been a really fun one to make you like you know stock a summer camp and channel your inner Jason if you want and and what was the what was the sort of what was your thesis if that's too highbrow a word you know for for what the the plan is here for this. Initially I wanted to just make a 1980s horror summer camp game but then it kind of clicked for me that like I had mentioned that I played like hundreds of hours of Hitman and I was like oh man but what if you took the Hitman gameplay style but then mixed that with like a 1980 slasher and then I was just like oh this makes perfect sense and then you can go to all these different environments too like go to the suburbs or like a farm or a carnival or a mansion explore all these different spaces and then because I like making things difficult for myself I was like what if it was multiplayer? But it all is up and running now and I've been running private playtests for a while and slowly inviting people from my Discord and it's going really well do you have a sort of a timeline in mind for this? Great with a timeline and make up a bunch of deadlines for myself that said it's also like a scalable design where I can adjust my plans based on how playtests are going and stuff so I don't have to be quite so rigid about it since yeah the deadlines are sort of made up it's just a good way to motivate myself. And I don't want to spend like eight years on the game or something like that. Like I shipped the Axis on scene in like three and a half years and that's exactly how much time I plan to spend on it.

SPEAKER_00 57:44

Um that feels like a really nice lovely lovely turnaround time for a for a f for a video game yeah I think I found out on Fault 4 that like about four years is about my limit.

SPEAKER_01 57:56

Because like I love Fault 4 and how it turned out but by the by four years like that's a lot of years.

SPEAKER_00 58:01

What is the fatigue that sets in at that point? Is it just that is yeah what is the what is the main sort of point of fatigue?

SPEAKER_01 58:09

I guess it's that it feels like you've spent a lot of time on it. What could you be doing something else more interesting and maybe it's particularly open world games too because like you could theoretically spend like forever on a game like that and always keep adding stuff.

SPEAKER_00 58:24

So you kind of just have to put a pin in it at some point I'm seeing here on the screenshots press E to pick up steak and mashed potatoes yeah so you can either heal yourself or you know chuck it at somebody it's a really beautiful um design style.

SPEAKER_01 58:49

Thanks yeah like like immersive sims and hitman and stuff like that so it's it's a lot of fun to do even it's definitely a lot more complicated than the Axis Unseat though with like I mean that was like a complicated hunting simulation where they can hunt and track you and like follow follow your tracks and like smell you and stuff like that. But when you have a whole bunch of NPCs and a whole crime system and stuff where they can witness you and tell people about crimes they've witnessed but then you can like change your outfits there's definitely a lot going on there.

SPEAKER_00 59:18

Yeah I'm looking at the um again just that this the the the the screenshots for that the there's a lot of legions you know the the the data on screen is um it that feels like a a hell a hell of a lot of moving parts um yeah definitely what was the any I'm sorry you just said this but I'm just curious about you know this you are you tip pulling anything from what you came to sort of learn and understood on on 76 around in terms of multiplayer to what you're applying here is this feel like a completely different um approach or or the impetus for the multiplayer uh I mean I wasn't directly involved in the engineering other than the fact that I there's a reason I'm making it like peer-to-peer instead so people can just play with their friends.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:02

I don't have to worry about spinning up Amazon servers and stuff like that. Like I know a lot of people are concerned about game preservation and stuff like that and that is kind of a non-issue when you make a game like this which isn't really possible when you're doing a game of the scale of like 76 with a whole bunch of people all on a server running all these quests and monsters like that's you're not really going to be able to reliably make a peer to peer game like that. But if you have a game like mine where it's like you're playing with a handful of your friends and yeah there's like NPCs but it's not an entire massive world it's just a set of levels that you load through it's a lot more viable