Fallout 3 Post-Mortem Interview
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Fallout 3 was not allowed to be '˜beautiful'. (Of course, Fallout 3 is the sequel to the previous Fallout videogames,) acknowledges Pagliarulo. (But being made by Bethesda, it was also very much a sequel to Oblivion. We knew our fans would see it as such, and Oblivion, maybe more than anything, is a '˜beautiful' game you leave that underground prison and are thrust into this amazing forest environment. We knew that in Fallout 3 the player was going to leave Vault 101 and be thrust into a destroyed, postapocalyptic environment. That was the challenge: how do we make the wasteland look beautiful? How do we make the player feel amazed and depressed at the same time?)
The obvious solution would simply be to plump for size if Oblivion was big, Fallout 3 could always be bigger but Bethesda actually decided to head in the opposite direction. After all, the emptiness of the wasteland made it feel vast by default, and the instantly recognisable landmarks of Washington unprecedented anywhere else in America did an excellent job of eliciting the required levels of amazement. Feelings of depression seemed to follow naturally as the full resonance of the White House restyled as a bomb crater began to sink in. Fallout 3's smaller play area makes its exploration a consistently surprising pleasure.
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Washington held lifelong familiarity for many members of the team, and the rest could draw inspiration from the opportunity to unmake their shared national history. Standing before the Washington Monument its form pocked and exploded by years of perpetual warfare is a potent reality check, but the idea manifests itself in more subtle and ingenious ways. In a single day of playing Fallout 3, we sold the Declaration of Independence for less than the price of a decrepit missile launcher, then used it to destroy a robot programmed to act like George Washington. Bethesda's brainstorming sessions must have been a riot.
(It was, actually,) says Howard. (We had to spend a good deal of time figuring out what the government in the world of Fallout would have been like, and how Washington DC would look if the events after WWII were different.) The area around the Mall, which contains almost every famous structure in downtown Washington, was an immediate concern. But strangely enough, when it came to deciding the fate of such symbolic buildings, the conclusion was invariably the same. (We went in with a pretty good plan,) Pagliarulo explains sheepishly, (and, you know, as we kept building the world, we kept destroying other recognisable landmarks.)
