Интервью с главным дизайнером Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

"I thought it was a great idea," says Chris Pasetto, lead designer on the game. "Interplay had been mainly a PC company up until that point. We were part of a scrappy new division charged with expanding into the console market, with both new IPs as well as old ones."

"We knew a little about what Black Isle was planning for their version of Fallout 3 aka Van Buren, and wanted to make something different for the consoles."

"Don't get me wrong, I liked Dark Alliance a lot," remembers Pasetto. "But it's a pretty barebones rendition of the D&D world, without much depth or open-endeness. The success of it influenced a lot of people, and for better or worse it dictated our course on Brotherhood Of Steel."

"Fallout 1 and 2 are easily in my top 10 games of all time," he declares. "I have fond memories of those first steps out of the vault, firing an SMG at a raider point-blank, and deciding who to side with, Killian or Gizmo."

"We didn't have the engineering bandwidth to do more than a few tweaks," notes Pasetto. "Our main technical focus was improving the ranged combat for the gun-focused gameplay of Fallout."

"So much of what was quintessentially Fallout got dumbed down," sighs Pasetto.

"The stuffy, pseudo-religious techno knights of the Brotherhood weren't sexy enough for the perceived console market," Pasetto sighs again. "They turned into scantily-clad heroes of the wasteland, who occasionally put on power armour to battle evil."

"Because maybe they'd done the intelligent, mature, games that garnered critical acclaim, but were financially unsuccessful," ponders Pasetto. "So new management came in, and swung the pendulum far in the other direction, although of course that's just my opinion. We brought up our concerns up about dumbing down Fallout from the start, but [management] insisted Brotherhood of Steel should be - had to be - an action game, not an RPG."

"I think overall the alternate retro-future aesthetic was missing, deemed too weird. Brotherhood Of Steel's vibe was much more generic post-apocalyptic, which was a real shame."

"The whole team was aware of the criticisms - we shared them," laments the designer. "The problem wasn't bringing Fallout to consoles, and it wasn't removing turn-based combat in favour of real-time. The problem was that we removing the style and depth of a Fallout experience, and any argument to do something like the original Fallout games was met with 'That's not how Dark Alliance did it'."

"It was just one of many projects that underperformed and would have had to sell miraculous numbers to change the fate of Interplay," notes Pasetto sadly. "When it came out and got so much bad press, the development team was pretty demoralised. It was a tough time, to put it mildly."

"If I have one major regret with Brotherhood of Steel, I wish I'd worked harder to convince Interplay to take more risks with the game. I wish we'd quietly peeled off a few people to create a quick prototype of what a more authentic Fallout console game could be. Even if we'd been restricted to the Dark Alliance engine, we could have certainly made something more engaging, and Fallout-ish. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, given the atmosphere at Interplay; but it would have been worth the extra effort up front."

My first playthrough was a ridiculous number of hours, easily over a hundred; I scoured that map like a Zamboni, clearing every inch of the ice rink. I also spent a lot of that time grinding my teeth, thinking about all the nay-sayers who claimed that a Fallout RPG would never sell on consoles."

"Wow. Um, just that this has been incredibly painful..."