While Bethesda Game Studios makes incredibly immersive RPGs, the studio has never really branched into full-on realism, although modders often do that work for them. In a recent interview, Fallout 3 quest designer and Fallout 4 lead designer Emil Pagliarulo explains that working on the studio’s debut Fallout title made them that “being realistic isn’t fun”.
At the start, Fallout 3 focused much more on realism and survival than the released version of the iconic RPG. This included having a massive underground Metro system that sprawled across the entire map, allowing players to jump in at one Metro station and travel underground to any major point in the map.
“Originally, we had this thought that the Metro would be connected completely underground,” Pagliarulo said in an interview with Game Informer. “And we realised it was just too sprawling, it was too big.”
Some have pointed at the Metro system’s sliced up nature in Fallout 3 as a technical limitation, similar to how Fallout: New Vegas split up its titular city into numerous chunks to save on rendering cost.
In a previous interview with TechRadar, explained Joel Burgess explained that the game was “playable”, but “a lot of the people on the team are giving me negative feedback”. Unfortunately, a lot of that feedback circulated around the sheer scale of the underground Metro system. “
“People are saying: ‘Downtown is really overwhelming, really hard, I can’t trust wayfinding because everything’s disconnected – I can see the Washington monument but I can’t walk to it,’” Burgess recalled.
Pagliarulo explains that this roadblock taught Bethesda that adhering to realism isn’t always fun. Yes, DC should have an underground Metro that connects everything, that’s how a city of that scale works, but does it make sense, and is it actually fun?
“It’s a lesson we’ve learned over the years: that being realistic sometimes isn’t fun,” the designer said. “Because realism can be fun depending on the type of game you’re making, but traversing miles of underground subway stations turns out very realistic, not very fun.”
Of course, Fallout 3 does have some “realistic” gameplay features for its time. Limbs can be crippled which will change how your character uses weapons or how fast they move; radiation poisoning is a threat that players have to deal with. Then again, this is also a game where a random man in a trenchcoat can turn up and cap someone for you. Is realism the point? Not really.
Bethesda made quite a few misteps when releasing Fallout 3 with Todd Howard admitting that the game’s ending was a mistake, one that Bethesda ended up remedying with the release of the game’s Broken Steel DLC. Nevertheless, despite its flaws, Fallout 3 is still a fantastic video game, and one that players are still jumping into today. Too bad we have to wait a lifetime for Fallout 5.
