Let's start with a quick introduction. Who you are and what your role is in the production of Fallout 3:

I’m Gavin Carter and I’m the lead producer on Fallout 3. It’s my job to take the crazed ramblings of Todd, Emil, and the other leads, and turn them into a workable schedule. Once in a while I even contribute an insane ramble myself. I’m aided by a team of departmental producers who do all my work for me. I couldn’t be nearly as lazy without their constant support.

Most readers are surely familiar with the Fallout concept by this point, but sum up for those that may not be so familiar with it, what kind of game you're designing Fallout 3 to be.

Fallout 3 is post-nuclear role-playing at its next-gen finest. It’s a 1st and 3rd person RPG with themes of survival, sacrifice, player choice, and consequence. The world of Fallout 3 is a destroyed 1950s World of Tomorrow for the player to enjoy, brimming with irony and moral ambiguities. The original Fallout RPGs are among the best pieces of interactive entertainment ever created. We think the series deserves to be back in the RPG limelight and are excited to be the ones tasked with returning it.

Each of the first two Fallouts took place in different geographic regions of the United States. Where does Fallout 3 take place and is there any overlap with locales or events of the first two games?

Fallout 3 changes the location over to the East Coast and takes place in and around the ruins of Washington DC, known as the Capital Wasteland. There’s very little location or event overlap. Mostly it’s a shared history of events as well as some shared factions, like Super Mutants and the Brotherhood of Steel.

To what degree can you talk about the world, beyond just geography, that Fallout inhabits. How much time has elapsed since nuclear Armageddon? To what point has society recovered from it by the time the player character emerges from the Vault?

The nuclear devastation occurred in 2077 according to the Fallout timeline. Our game takes place 200 years after that, putting us about 30 years after the events of Fallout 2. Despite that timeframe, one of our themes is the fact that things aren’t getting better. Humanity is still locked in a struggle for survival, and things are getting worse.

With Fallout 3 using the Oblivion engine, how much of the gameplay mechanics are also carrying over? For example, will enemies and their loot level up with the player character as in Oblivion?

A few gameplay mechanics will feel similar, I’m sure. We’ve been able to iterate a few times now on the whole “big open world” style of game. So there are things that we feel work well in that context. That said, there’s nothing that we won’t look at closely to make sure it fits in with Fallout 3 specifically, and level-scaling is one of them. We’ve created tools that allow us much more control to tie the leveling into individual locations rather than making everything happen globally as with Oblivion. We’re also not letting creatures level up their abilities with you; a Deathclaw will always be a Deathclaw.

Relative to Oblivion, how big is the game world? If it's significantly larger or smaller, what advantages does this change in scope lend to the game?

This question is always a tough one to answer, since so many things go into a game world’s size. The basic answer is that it’s a bit smaller. We recently went through and added some more land area to it to make sure it had that wide-open Wasteland feel. But like Oblivion, Fallout 3 will also have hundreds of interior spaces to explore, as well as some special areas that are cordoned off of the main game world, but still huge in their own right. We do have a smaller number of NPCs in the game world, because we want to concentrate on fleshing out as many characters as deeply as possible.

The SPECIAL character development system from the first two Fallout games is back. How will it be different (if at all)?

We’re using the SPECIAL character system and making few changes to it. The stats all play nicely with our gameplay design. For instance, Perception still feeds into seeing enemies and Agility still affects your action points, which are used for VATS mode. Any of the SPECIAL stats (as well as skills) can be polled in dialog and give you access to different options. Some perks also require a minimum score in a SPECIAL stat for you to use them, as well.

Can you explain the combat system being used for Fallout 3? My understanding is we'll see options for both a real-time and turn-based format. How will that work?

The game is first and foremost an RPG, so your skills factor into everything you do. Even in real-time gameplay, if your character has a low Small Guns skill, you’ll see your arms wobbling around more when you use a gun from that category. You can play combat in real-time like that, but we also have a mode that we’ve termed VATS – the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System. This mode allows you to pause time and target enemies in specific body locations. You’re given information such as a percentage chance to hit each part (again, based on your skills). You queue up moves based on how many action points you have to spend, then unleash them and watch as the resolution is played out cinematically. What this mode provides is a way to put combat completely in the hand of your character’s skills instead of your own.