Ever have one of those dreams where you’re decked out in post-nuclear protective gear trying to escape and then you realize you’re stuck in turn-based combat and you have to play out the whole scene in your head? Yeah, well, those of us who played too much Fallout in the dark did. Fallout’s unique 50’s pulp sci-fi style is coming back with the in-development Fallout 3. We were fortunate enough to be directed to Nate Purkeypile, World Artist at Bethesda Softworks, to get word on his personal experience with the project so far. It sounds like he’s enjoying dreaming up nuclear Wasteland grit in high-def quality.

Q: Fallout 3 comes out of a popular series with a unique setting. What is it like working with an existing IP that already has an art style?

A: Working with the Fallout IP is actually something that fits very well with my own personal style as an artist. For a long time I have had a fascination with ruined and abandoned structures. So being able to create an entire world filled with things like that is the best thing I could ask for. The fact that the style was pre-existing is pretty much irrelevant, because if I was left to my own devices to make art, it would look exactly like Fallout. When I was working at Retro Studios on Metroid Prime 3, my friend Joel Burgess told me over and over how I needed to come to Bethesda to work on Fallout 3 because I was “born to make this game.”

Q: Where does your inspiration come from, other than the past games?

A: My inspiration comes from a variety of places. If we are talking about just visual inspiration, then I have my own personal reference folder of abandoned places that I have been building since before I was in college. It’s full of thousands of images of every kind of place you could imagine, from hospitals and asylums to theme parks and factories, it has pretty much everything. Outside of that, I try to play every single game I consider relevant to the industry as a whole to see exactly how everyone is doing things art-wise. Even something that is seemingly unrelated to Fallout has a lot of content and techniques that are worth looking at.

Sometimes though, my inspiration has absolutely nothing to do with anything in particular and is just a result of me thinking about an area. When I first start working on an area, I like to just imagine the entire space in my head and build it all there. By the time I’m done doing this, I know almost exactly what I need to do from start to finish. This way, I don’t spend a lot of time fiddling around with things as a work in progress; I know what I want it to be from the start.

Q: Fallout 3 is expected to release cross-platform on Xbox 360 and PS3. How has this influenced your pipeline process or the tools you use? What has been different about working with Next Gen consoles?

A: The fact that Fallout 3 is a cross-platform release has basically no impact at all with how I do my art. Whatever I make on the PC will end up looking pretty much the same on the other platforms. I never even have to worry about it. I rarely even touch the 360 version myself.

Working on the Next Gen consoles though is great. At my last job at Retro Studios, I was working on the Wii. Dealing with that hardware was a constant source of frustration for me as an artist. Ultimately, sure, gameplay matters the most. However, if your job is to make art on a console all day, it is an entirely different story. With the amount of power we have on the newer generation of consoles, I am able to create what I want far easier. Instead of constantly checking to see how many polys things are, or how many textures are being used, I just have to worry about making it look great.

Q: How many team members do you have, and how has the teamwork been managed?

I think our development team is around 70 people, though I don’t know the actual number offhand. We also have HR, Sales, Marketing and QA on top of that. Teamwork is mostly managed by compartmentalizing things. For instance, world artists are in two basic groups, interiors and exteriors. Because of this split, people are able to concentrate their efforts more easily on making a particular facet of the game shine. Sometimes we also form miniature teams that are across various disciplines. For instance, while working on a major city for the game, a miniature team might form composed of the lead designer, a level designer, a producer and an artist. These people will meet frequently to just discuss this one aspect of the game. It is much easier to make something that is actually great for the game this way. Otherwise people might tend to focus on their own department’s needs. An area needs to not only look good, but play right and fit within the game as a whole.

Q: What are you most proud of in the art so far?

I can’t really go into specifics on this one. However, I will say that there are a number of areas in the game that I am very proud of. These are areas where I was given a significant amount of time to spend making the area as unique and interesting as possible. All of these areas are full of a lot of custom art and I think these places are the best things I have ever done as an artist. They are all very different from each other, but each area is something I am very proud of. I look forward to seeing what people think of it all when viewed in the context of the game as a whole.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Art Interviews, PEOPLE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.