No Mutants Allowed and Stategy Core teamed up
to siphon as much Fallout 3 information as they could out of Bethesda's Emil Pagiarulo during this year's E3. Finally, some real information:
Q: Can you give us a generalized development timeline over the next year?
A: Sure. You look at our 45-50 minute long demo and it looks like there's a lot there. But on the design side we want to have these important character interactions. We want players to feel like they are real people. In order to do that it simply takes a lot of time. In Oblivion there is what we call essential characters, characters that you cannot kill. A lot of games have them. For Fallout 3, our goal was not to do that. If a NPC gives the player a quest and the player blows his head off, how does that affect the quest? We have to deal with that, and it takes a lot of time to do that. Multiple pathways to fulfill a quest take a lot of time to develop. In Oblivion, the player makes his decisions on a higher level: if I want to be evil I join the Dark Brotherhood, whereas Fallout quests have multiple pathways to complete the quest.
Fallout 3 E3 Interview 
Linear Mode
