In an old “Design Lesson 101″ post over at the ever-insightful Design Rampage blog, Raven Software Game Designer Manveer Heir contends that
Fallout and Fallout 2 use choice and consequence to deliver a world of enormous opportunities to the player and give the player agency over the type of character they develop.
I never played those first two games, but I’ve just begun Fallout 3, and I can attest that Bethesda’s first entry in the series is no exception to that legacy of choice, consequence, and agency. Options are EVERYWHERE in Fallout 3. Want to play first-person perspective, or third? Ewww, better change that outfit; turns out you look awful goofy in a sheriff’s costume. Now that you’re dressed, what about quests? Feel like wiping Megaton off the map? How about turning the settlers of Arefu against The Family? Or maybe you want to try rescuing some hapless folks from a band of Super Mutants, instead?
The flood of available choices is seemingly endless. And, to manage these, players use the handy-dandy Pip-Boy 3000. Fortunately, this wondrous little device is (more or less) up to the task.
Pip-Boy fills the role of a charmingly clunky personal digital assistant. It’s worn around your avatar’s left wrist and serves a wide variety of functions, from status monitoring to item maintenance to mapping data. But herein lies the problem: your 3000′s myriad uses are so disparate that the damn thing’s interface is often far from intuitive.
See all those dials and switches up there? Doesn’t look much like a PS3 or 360 controller, does it? Bethesda faced one hell of a challenge in mapping those machines’ buttons to a contraption that, were it to actually exist, would have been navigated via a clicky black knob and a notched grey disc.
Your Pip-Boy features three chief modes: stats, items, and data. Each contains five submenus’ worth of related information. Daunting, no? It wouldn’t be so bad if the apparatus were real — just punch the appropriate red mode button, select a horizontally-oriented submenu with that fiddly little knob on your left, and then choose whichever desired tidbit from your vertical list by rolling the notched scroll wheel. The flow of information is suitably elegant…except that we’re dealing with a game pad here, so it’s not a one-to-one comparison.
Which isn’t to say that the 3000 should look like a modern-day video game controller that’s been stapled to every vault-dweller’s wrist; far from it. The Pip-Boy’s interface was thoughtfully crafted around a number of factors, perhaps the most important among these being its previous incarnations. In fact, the tiny console has long been almost a character in itself, which is probably most of why we don’t see a drastic change in design: it’s iconic.
Nevertheless, there are some minor tweaks that I think would make a major difference in player enjoyment when using the Pip-Boy 3000. Presumptuous as this may sound coming from an armchair designer such as myself, I’ll be examining these opportunities for improvement over the next two weeks. I’m taking a critical, detailed look at this stuff not to nitpick, but rather to exercise my own sensibilities a bit. After all, design’s something I’d be thrilled to get more involved with. Here’s hoping you guys enjoy my take, and, as always, please feel free to comment!
Tags: Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Design Rampage, Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout 3, Manveer Heir, Pip-Boy, Pip-Boy 3000, Raven Software
8 June 2009 at 3:30 am |
[...] (mashedmarket) EXCERPTS AND ESSAYS ON THE EXPANDING SPACE OF GAMES « Problems with Pip-Boy 1: Introduction [...]
15 June 2009 at 4:08 am |
[...] on mashedmarket, I’ve been scrutinizing Fallout 3’s sometimes counter-intuitive and quirky Pip-Boy 3000. This will be the final post in that little series. It won’t, however, mark the [...]