![]() ![]() ![]() “I said, ‘Well remember it’s that they drew straws. “When we made the original Fallout, one of the other designers once told me, it’s like ‘If you pick a character that’s really stupid why would the Vault send that person out as their savior?'” Cain recalls. Arguably the most impressive implementation of that logic involves how the pair justify allowing a created character like a one-armed alcoholic fighter assume the “hero of destiny” role that was common in so many fantasy stories and pre- Fallout video game RPGs. Memorable incidents such as that helped inspire Cain and Boyarsky to assign a different (sometimes slightly twisted) internal logic to their RPG adventures. “It turns out he had, and so he fell, and the rest of them didn’t want to stop and help him, so they all climbed the ladder and ran away while he died…The rungs didn’t mean anything to them, but to a one-armed drunk fighter, it was life or death.” “There were these rungs leading up to a manhole, and so he got to it and I asked ‘Oh, by the way, have you drunk anything today? You need to make a dexterity check,'” Cain says. He was trying to game the system, but his plans were derailed when his group encountered a ladder in a sewer. To illustrate that concept, Cain recalls a time when a friend who played GURPS (an old tabletop RPG) decided to play as a “one-armed alcoholic fighter.” Why? Well, he was trying to take advantage of the fact that the game let you build a character with inherent disadvantages in order to gain bonus points that can be assigned to other aspects. In fact, there are times when those bad decisions end up being more memorable than the good ones. In games like Fallout and The Outer Worlds, though, part of the joy of the experience comes from watching how the world reacts to your sometimes bad decisions. The idea of forcing players to deal with the consequences of their actions in a potentially negative way isn’t something we see in a lot of RPGs and other games which want to send players on a power trip. So a lot of our character building stuff doesn’t just happen during character creation.” “You’d play the game for a while and if you drink a lot of alcohol, we’d say, ‘Hey, you seem to use a lot of alcohol, you want to be a drug addict?’ We offer it to you. “In our game you wouldn’t say you were an alcoholic,” Cain says. More often than not, you define yourself through your actions. ![]() In The Outer Worlds though, playing your character isn’t just about telling the game who you think you are. You should feel like the game is, in its own way, rewarding you for playing your character.” “You have to deal with the consequences of your actions, but it’s your story. ![]() “We don’t want you to feel like you’re doing something wrong by playing the character the way you want to play them,” Boyarsky says. RPGs like Fallout and The Outer Worlds force you to come to terms with who you choose to be in their worlds, but Boyarsky and Cain are careful not to put players in a position where they feel there is a right choice. Read More: How The Outer Worlds Channels Fallout, Classic Sci-fi, and the Real World However, his plans were derailed when he faced an evil choice that he just couldn’t commit to. In a recent playthrough of The Outer Worlds, Boyarsky decided to play an evil character. This emphasis on creation and choice often forces players to confront themselves. “There’s always a fantasy of ‘I’m in this fantastic role, playing a character and doing whatever I want, and seeing how the world reacts.’” “I always thought role-playing meant you, the player, defined who the character was, what his motivations were, as much as possible,” says Cain. So what distinguishes the RPG from its counterparts? After all, you play a role in many games. With Fallout, Cain and Boyarsky helped bring tabletop RPG ideas to PCs, but even at that time, a debate emerged regarding what, exactly, an RPG is. “That was one of our earliest conversations about what a role-playing game on a computer could be.” “I saw Tim running different people through a tabletop scenario and it felt like a totally different experience every time,” Boyarsky says. Fallout was Cain, Boyarsky, and the rest of the team’s attempt to bring tabletop gaming concepts to video games. ![]()
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