John Deiley interview at The Gamer

Both this guy and the interviewer seem full of bad ideas and no clue about why the silly tone is bad and Fallout 1 is better in part because it doesn't have these tone issues
 
Watch talking deathclaws show up in season 2 of the TV show. The show is already an inconsistent mess when it comes to tone.
 
I have no problem with the talking deathclaws concept, but it does seem like it works as a one-off experiment, like many of the strange side quests in Fallout 2. The article doesn't compel me to believe that making them more central to the franchise would've been a net positive. It just sounds like someone who wanted more attention on their armored, hyper-intelligent lizards because they thought they were cool. But the Brotherhood was cool, too, yet killing them off worked.

And replaying F2 right now, Vault 13 feels like unfinished, lazily written content. That could be because it was almost cut, though. I wonder who actually wrote the dialogue. A lot of the player's lines are copy-pasted across multiple NPCs. Or they feel like they were dashed off in a half hour on one spreadsheet. The writing in that entire region feels half-baked. I don't think keeping the deathclaws around as major players was necessary, but they certainly could've used more attention for the time they do show up.
 
I don’t even have a huge problem with the talking deathclaws, but it’s funny how this article tries to portray Avellone as totally unreasonable. My takeaway is that Avellone was right about everything.

Also, the author seems to forget that during the development of Fallout 2, there was only one Fallout game. There were no “little green aliens, men who turn into trees, super mutants addicted to being invisible, and cryptids like the Mothman.” No “sentient toasters” either. I’ll give him “brains in jars”, even though I suspect he’s referring to Point Lookout instead of the Robobrains of the first game.
 
PlanHex said:
Both this guy and the interviewer seem full of bad ideas and no clue about why the silly tone is bad and Fallout 1 is better in part because it doesn't have these tone issues
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Yeah, and this article is another proof that Feargus always seems to force bad ideas on games (I think Avellone hinted or said this in the past):
Luckily, Deiley didn’t have to pitch talking deathclaws to Avellone. Instead, he was asked by Fallout 2 director Fergus Urquhart to come up with something unique, expanding on the deathclaws much as the game had already done with ghouls and super mutants.

Upon reading Deiley’s idea for an evolved subgroup who could communicate, “He said, ‘Wow, this is great. This is exactly what we needed’”. Avellone wasn’t the only one who was unsure, with Fallout creator Tim Cain also having reservations about the idea, but Urquhart insisted that it be included.
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I don't even have any words about this:
If you’ve ventured north in New Vegas to Quarry Junction, you’ll know how terrifying deathclaws are. One is usually enough to send you kicking and screaming back to Goodsprings, let alone a small army. Now, imagine them intelligent and armed with power armour - that was Deiley’s vision.
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:facepalm::facepalm::facepalm:
Iprovidelittlepianos said:
I’ll give him “brains in jars”, even though I suspect he’s referring to Point Lookout instead of the Robobrains of the first game.
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I think he might be mentioning the Courier's brain in the FNV OWB DLC, since it mentions the sentient toaster right after (which is also from the same DLC). Although "sentient" is also wrong, and the DLC even says that they are programmed personalities and not sentient, they are programmed to seem like they are AI but they are not.
Courier: Are you some kind of Artificial Intelligence?
Sink Central Intelligence Unit: Regrettably not, sir. All modules in this habitat are synthetic personalities atop a mundane operating system. There is no intelligence here, sir.
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Risewild said:
I think he might be mentioning the Courier's brain in the FNV OWB DLC
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Oh that’s right, I forgot about that. Could also be referring to the Think Tank scientists, or even cyberdogs like Rex. I don’t know why Point Lookout was my first thought, I probably haven’t played that in almost ten years.
 
Deathclaws in power armor is retarded. It's always retarded, anytime I see that fanart of one in APA I cringe. This is coming from the autistic guy who loves reptiles and owns 3 deathclaw figures for Wasteland Warfare. I felt the talking deathclaws were fine, they needed more work but I enjoy playing the RP and speed running it to get their survival ending. I've always felt deathclaws had human DNA in them anyway, they've always been more intelligent than most other animals in the wastes. That designer seemed like a massive tool though, "Oh no! My OC doughnut steal lizards were killed"... yeah by fucking Frank Horrigan. What a great way for your creation to go.
 
Talking deathclaws are intelligent in the boring "I'm a human mind in the mostrous body" way.
The franchise already has Supermutants covering that base.

It'd be cool to have them act as non-agrresive tribals with basic tools and weapons, attempting to communicate non-verbally as they're unable to talk like humans.

They could use parts of Enclave APA in their own makeshift armor, similar to that one loading screen with the tribal wearing a PA helmet.

They way they're currently in the game never makes you doubt that they're totally harmless and that one guy that wants to escape and kill them all is just a paranoid lunatic.

If you couldn't talk to them directly and just had to make a choice based on your observations and gut feeling would make them way more interesting as a race.
 
Yossarrion said:
That designer seemed like a massive tool though, "Oh no! My OC doughnut steal lizards were killed"... yeah by fucking Frank Horrigan. What a great way for your creation to go.
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I liked that the talking deathclaws were killed off in Fallout 2, they served a purpose there. Not everything has to have serve a higher or longer purpose. It's okay to use something only once.
Alas I know Bethesda will find a way to flanderize them into the next game or season.
 
Risewild said:
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I feel like Avellone's point about needing to keep deathclaws as a major enemy type doesn't fully address the issue. In F2 it seems that there are still normal deathclaws, and these intelligent ones are a very specific breed engineered on purpose. The game doesn't need to stop using them as enemies to have both.

But of course I completely agree with him trying to keep things on track. These rules he mentions for what should be in Fallout are not arbitrary. The real problem to me is that if you put something weirder than everything else in your story, then make it important, your story is now about that thing. Having a crashed alien ship in a special encounter is fine, but if you start having aliens show up everywhere, you're now writing a story about an alien invasion. Everything else becomes less important.

Secluded tribe of intelligent deathclaws, fine. Intelligent deathclaws roaming the wastes in power armor, fighting for justice, you've just shifted the entire story to be about them, stealing thunder from everything else. Either you end up twisting the entire focus of the series, or you end up with an unfocused mishmash when every writer crams their own favorite stuff into the world.
 
I think it's an honorable worry, but it is New Vegas after all, as long as House is in the show, everything will be 2nd. As for the silliness of both talking deathclaws and in power armor, I would like to call my first witness "Frank Horrigan" the super mutant who was more alien than the blaster in F2, the man is now mtg card, so if the fallout show wants to have their next character be unique beyond house or the ghoul, they can either 1) make an interesting and defined character or faction with fascinating enough aspects to make us remember them, or 2) make another Frank Horrigan

Like most Fallout games, both have +/-'s, I think the justice death claws is possible as long as it's a homage to F2 specifically maybe though.
 
ForgiveMeMama said:
I think it's an honorable worry, but it is New Vegas after all, as long as House is in the show, everything will be 2nd. As for the silliness of both talking deathclaws and in power armor, I would like to call my first witness "Frank Horrigan" the super mutant who was more alien than the blaster in F2, the man is now mtg card, so if the fallout show wants to have their next character be unique beyond house or the ghoul, they can either 1) make an interesting and defined character or faction with fascinating enough aspects to make us remember them, or 2) make another Frank Horrigan

Like most Fallout games, both have +/-'s, I think the justice death claws is possible as long as it's a homage to F2 specifically maybe though.
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I have no idea what's happening in the show, and anything they do is irrelevant to me. The modern Fallout franchise is a pile of references to the originals anyway, so they can reference away as much as they want, doesn't really matter. I'm more focused on the direction that Fallout 2 itself took, and what that would've implied for subsequent games, before the IP was fully zombified.

Horrigan combines two things that were already central to Fallout, super mutants and power armor. Putting them together flowed naturally and fit with the major faction of the story. The Enclave itself was a new invention of the second game, afaik, and I'm sure people have argued endlessly about whether the Enclave was a good idea. Also, Horrigan and the Enclave were both killed off in F2. They were introduced and then exterminated, because the game is Fallout, not Enclave starring Frank Horrigan(TM). Weird ideas are fine, but they don't justify every other weird idea, and there's a limited number of things that should be stacked on top of each other at once.

I would be happy to play a (well-made) game about super-mecha lizards, but this writer's reaction to having them killed off smells of someone who should just be making their own thing, rather than piggy-backing on something else. A franchise does not hold infinite ideas without watering itself down.
 
Many good comments in this threads. I thought this was interesting:

The Gamer said:
I ask where the tension between him and Avellone came from, and Deiley recounts a time when working with Josh Sawyer at Interplay. He had designed a final boss that fed on people’s nightmares, a lot like what we’d later see in the Vaermina quest in Skyrim, and Avellone allegedly demanded that it be removed.

“Sawyer stepped in and he said, ‘No, this is the perfect monster. I’m going to back him up 100 percent.’ From that day forward, Avellone was just, ‘I don’t like you. I work with you because I’m forced to work with you.’ He was pretty much the same with Josh,” Deiley says.

Luckily, Deiley didn’t have to pitch talking deathclaws to Avellone. Instead, he was asked by Fallout 2 director Fergus Urquhart to come up with something unique, expanding on the deathclaws much as the game had already done with ghouls and super mutants.

Upon reading Deiley’s idea for an evolved subgroup who could communicate, “He said, ‘Wow, this is great. This is exactly what we needed’”. Avellone wasn’t the only one who was unsure, with Fallout creator Tim Cain also having reservations about the idea, but Urquhart insisted that it be included.
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It must have remained controversial within the development team as they later did this:

The Gamer said:
“One day I was walking down the hallway and I saw Fergus in one of the programmer’s offices and I saw the screen over the programmer’s shoulder and it was [Vault 13],” Deiley says. “I went in there and I said, ‘What’s going on?’ [They said,] ‘Oh, well, we’ve decided to eliminate this area from the game. But we don’t want to just not include it. So, the Enclave is going to kill them all off.’ And that was that. They didn’t come to me and let me know. They didn’t ask me about it. They just [did it] behind my back.”
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Fergus was a key player in both adding and killing the talking deathclaws it seems.
 
The sequence where time runs out and player (must)feels irresponsible to the grief caused on his village is much more interesting anyway. It is also more original in placing (another)geck in final quest.
 
I've been playing deliberately bad character builds in Fallout 1 the last week or two, until they die, no reloads. One of my characters miraculously made it as far as going to see "The Deathclaw", but didn't make it any farther. :) F2's "bag of deathclaws that you can defeat if you're really on game and not afraid to save/reload/kite" is clearly a cheap way to reuse an existing game asset, but still maybe also wanted to keep at least some of the "hoo boy how am I going to survive this" flavor. While giving you a bit of a shooting gallery too I guess...

The idea that "there's this mutated thing in a cave that not everybody thinks is real" which straight up rips you to pieces has a significantly different flavor from, you know, an entire civilization of intelligent giant lizards. Just saying.

[edit] This conversation made me think. The new producers *have* to change things. It's corporate politics: you get a promotion for doing a mass layoff, because you changed something. The next VIP gets a promotion for *hiring* people to fix your over-firing. Neither action was necessary. But there's no promotion for someone who went through the difficult process of removing the two people who actually don't contribute, or attracting and hiring one person with a critical skill that makes the team really come together.

Nobody's going to give you a pat on the back for being faithful to the original. They have to change it. More change is better, as "mass market" safe as possible, layered with "iconic" art as fan service so you can claim it's "true to the franchise." Artistically? Making an interesting statement relative to the source material? Total waste of effort.

Cynical? Maybe.
 
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tekhedd said:
Nobody's going to give you a pat on the back for being faithful to the original. They have to change it. More change is better, as "mass market" safe as possible, layered with "iconic" art as fan service so you can claim it's "true to the franchise." Artistically? Making an interesting statement relative to the source material? Total waste of effort.

Cynical? Maybe.
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IMO, depends whether the writing and management teams are actual writers, or just people with marketing-brain syndrome

 
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