Former Fallout and Skyrim developer says RPGs live and die by narrative: “I’ll overlook crappy game mechanics for hours if I enjoy the story”
A former Bethesda developer who worked on both Skyrim and all three of the studio’s Fallout games says role-playing games “live and die” by the strength of their story.
Jeff Gardiner was project manager on Fallout 76 and also worked on SkyrimFallout 3 and Fallout4Before joining Bethesda during Oblivion, he also worked on Activision’s Fantastic Four game from 2005. In an interview with the Boss Rush Network Podcasthe was asked about the differences between developing a game using someone else’s intellectual property and experimenting with a more original franchise.
“It’s a little scary working outside of an established story,” Gardiner replied. “You’re creating things from scratch. It’s a shocking amount of work that I wasn’t even really prepared for. We spent a lot of time working on the backstory and the story and creating the connective tissue.” All of that is extremely important, Gardiner says, because “these RPGs live and die by the story.”
“If I enjoy the story, I’ll overlook crappy game mechanics for hours. Hoursin an RPG. And you have to have really compelling characters, a narrative that pulls you through, and those are all things I remember the most. I don’t remember all the rats I fought in the turn-based Fallout, where it took me 20 minutes to kill a damn rat, but I remember the story,” says the project leader.
From there, Gardiner turns his attention to the Fallout TV seriessuggesting that the project’s success was directly based on an understanding of the game’s “setting and tone”: “It was enough connective tissue and glue for Jonah Nolan and the showrunners to make it a fantastic series.”
That’s an interesting perspective, and I personally think it doesn’t always hold true. When it comes to something character-driven, like The Witcher 3, I think Gardiner hit the nail on the head. But with Bethesda’s RPGs, I was much more interested in design than story, especially Skyrim – you can give me the wildest story you want if you can give me a good stealth archer.
Elsewhere, Gardiner says he clashed with his Bethesda colleagues over the role-playing game’s notoriously difficult item: “You can’t just give the player everything he wants.”
