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Vault 13 (THE Fallout site) has an interview with Feargus Uruquhart on the Fallout series. This is how the interview starts:
Saint_Proverbius: Fallout 2 was only given around 10 months time to be developed, why such a short time considering Fallout took three and a half years?
Feargus Urquhart: There are two reasons for the ten-month timeline on Fallout 2. First of all it was not ten months at the beginning. We had people working on Fallout 2 in early Summer of 1997, maybe as early as May, definitely in June. By the time Fallout 1 shipped - there was already a great deal of design material and even some art. You can see one of the tilesets and two of the characters in the back of the Fallout 2 manual. However, at the end of Fallout, Tim, Leonard and Jason (Troika) decided they did want to work on
Things went fine for a period of a couple of months and then Tim, Leonard and Jason decided to leave Interplay. So in early February (I think), we had to basically re-start all over again. We did use a lot of what Tim, Leonard and Jason had designed, or rather ideas from them. Unfortunately, most of the work they did directly had to be re-done. Mostly this was because they tried to get a lot of work done in their last two weeks - more than could really be done. So, the product then got re-started for the 2nd time. However, to Interplay, the product had already been in development for at least six or seven months. Interplay was already having financial problems at that time and we were not sure if Baldur's Gate was going to ship in time for the end of the year. So, I agreed to stick to our original time-line. That was a mistake and a decision I would not make as lightly again.
Now the reason a sequel would be given such a short time frame as compared to the first product is because engine development and sequel development are two very different things. In the end we probably spent much more time on level design and implementation in Fallout 2 then was spent on Fallout. There were a whole lot of things that were not resolved in Fallout until the very end. We really didn't have the scripting engine (which runs both dialog and out of combat creature AI in Fallout) nailed down until around the release of the Interactive Demo in March/April of 1997. So that means that most of the levels were not really finished until after that date. It's probably not great to admit, but we were still implementing aspects of the levels a few days before Fallout finalled. The worst culprit was the Boneyard, which didn't really have a design until about two weeks before we were done with the game. Those were some very crazy days. So what does that have to do with a short time frame for production of a sequel you might ask? Basically we went back and looked at how long it actually took to create the areas of Fallout and script them. After putting that all down on paper and then deciding to make a game that was about 25% bigger, it looked like we could do it. Unfortunately we were a little off. I think with another month of bug fixing Fallout 2 would have been a very solid game, but I didn't recognize that at the time and pushed the team too hard to release it. |
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Fallout Interview with Feargus Uruquhart at Vault 13
