https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Chris_Avellone

The biggest lesson [learned from Fallout 2] was if you give the player the ability to create a certain type of character, make sure that you honour the player’s character build. What I mean by that is if you give a character to option to dump 500 points into speech, make sure they have an experience thats very cool and is appropriate for a speech based character. The same thing is true if you’re a stupid combat monster, if you’re a sneaky thief who no one ever sees… If you’re allowing the players to build a character like that with the rule set, then make sure your content supports that experience.

I always had a disliking for Bethesda, so just now recalling all the super cool writing from Fallout 1-2, this comment from Avellone hits my nerve a bit:

https://chrisavellone.medium.com/fallout-apocrypha-77c75954641a

If you’re looking for what’s canon and what’s not, then the actual game content from the Bethesda/Bethesda-backed titles (F3, NV, F4, 76) are the sources you should refer to (F1, F2, Tactics are not necessarily canon). […] In talks with Bethesda during development, it was pretty clear that unless a franchise lore point was actually mentioned in Fallout 3+, it wasn’t confirmed to exist. I think this was partially good and partially bad.

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout_Apocrypha (Quoting the comments section I didn’t realize to read in the actual link). Fan asking a question:

Most of the fans of the oldschool Fallout games have a lot of very legitimate reasons to be frustrated over the direction Bethesda has taken the franchise into. Todd and Emil’s writing are, let’s be quite frank, dogshit and the RPG mechanics have been watered down aggressively with every new release and, in my experience, the disdain for this dumbing down of the franchise is very much a consensus among the community of fans of the Fallout games made by Interplay and Obsidian.

(Master is the end boss of Fallout 1). Avellone:
“Still, while the Master’s presence being mostly at the end is a negative, just about everything else about the Master is a plus. The fact you could reveal the flaw in his master plan I thought was genius, and being able to”talk down” a villain in a game was something I hadn’t seen done before, and I loved it.

[zU55HKbMPM0]

A new interview of Chris Avellone. Around 20min mark he talks about doing work as an “actor” for training police and FBI agents in a constructed “town”. It sounded really interesting. The actors are given roles and instructions on how to act, and then the trainees interact with them to solve issues and crimes.

He talks about writing design for a whole game around 27min, and it sounds completely top-down: Start with constraints, eg the game mechanics, budget, franchise, genre. Figure out what kind of story best works with those “parameters”. Write a one sentence summary and a one page description, run it by all the other lead designers to fix any issues. Expand it to four pages, then into separate documents. Basically just iterate until the game is ready.