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The mastermind behind much of Fallout 3's post-apocalyptic world spills the beans on his inspirations for one of the biggest RPGs in 2008.

By Thierry Nguyen


Fallout 3 paints a huge, bleak portrait of our nation's capital, yet despite such an obscenely depressing setting, players pressed on to make sense of postnuclear Washington, D.C. It helps a lot that Bethesda, per its Elder Scrolls titles (most notably Morrowind and Oblivion), populates the world with tons of content, whether it's quests or items or characters making do with a small shack by the irradiated Potomac. Since this game's got so much going on, a whole bunch of questions popped up during our playthroughs, so we decided to hit up Lead Designer Emil Pagliarulo for some answers. Be warned -- this is spoilerific stuff, so don't read this until you've finished the game!


1UP: This could easily be a case of not being quite observant enough, but it seems like there are references to previous Fallouts, but not quite direct connections. For example, the Chosen One in Fallout 2 was supposedly a direct descendent of the Vault Dweller in Fallout. Is there a familial thread in Fallout 3 that I just didn't notice? And if so, was there a particular reason to not tie the Fallout 3 Vault Dweller to the previous games?

Emil Pagliarulo: Looks like your observations were pretty dead-on, actually. It's true there are a few references to the characters, events, and locations of Fallout and Fallout 2, but they're mostly there as cool nods for fans that played those earlier PC games. And, yeah, there's no familial thread -- your character in Fallout 3 is not a descendent of the Vault Dweller in any way, shape, or form. It just didn't seem necessary. We wanted to tell our own story, without too many direct ties to what had come before.

1UP: I'm a bit curious: Why is there only one Behemoth in the main storyline? You guys usually demonstrated the Behemoth fight in front of Galaxy News Radio, but the other encounters are completely optional. Is there a particular reason for that? Not even a Behemoth or two going up against Liberty Prime?

EP: Well, when we put the main storyline together, we paced it out with certain quests and gameplay events, and that Behemoth scene at the Galaxy News Radio plaza was one of our showcases. So we didn't really feel the need to repeat ourselves. Don't get me wrong -- we love the Behemoth, but so much about Fallout 3 is about exploring the world and discovering what's out there, and that includes the other Behemoths. They're there; they're part of the world. You can find them if you want to. But we didn't feel the need to add another one into the main quest line -- it would've felt like we were just reiterating something we'd already done.


1UP: Fallout had the Master and the Supermutant army as the main antagonists, and then Fallout 2 featured the Enclave. Why did you decide to feature the Enclave again, rather than introduce a new faction/antagonist? Was there ever a story draft that featured a different faction?

EP: No, actually, there was never a draft of the story that featured a different faction -- it was always the Enclave. Why? For us, it just made so much sense. I mean, Fallout 2 established the Enclave as the remnant of the U.S. government, yet they'd set up shop on an oil rig off the coast of California. Wouldn't they eventually want to get back to Washington D.C. -- the nation's capital -- and set up shop again? Our game's set in D.C., so they were the perfect antagonists for us.

1UP: The first time you played the game all the way through, what kind of character build did you use?

EP: I've played the game at the office so many times, with so many different characters, at so many different stages of development, that I honestly can't remember the first! But I do remember one of my favorites. I'd made this guy with Tag Skills in Science, Energy Weapons, and Speech. And every time I hit a option in dialogue, I would take it. It actually took me several hours of play before I looked at my character -- and his suave little moustache -- and then it hit me...I'd inadvertently created Tony Stark. I'd been playing the whole game in the role of Tony Stark, and hadn't even realized it.

1UP: Now that the game's out and the companions are known, which one's your favorite, and why?

EP: Fawkes, the sentient Supermutant, is probably my favorite. When you first meet him, you have no idea he can come along for the ride, and then later, he's waiting for you when you get outside of the Enclave base -- and he's got a really cool scene there -- and it's like, "Oh, yeah -- now I'm gonna show the Wasteland who's boss."

Fallout 3 Afterthoughts
The mastermind behind much of Fallout 3's post-apocalyptic world spills the beans on his inspirations for one of the biggest RPGs in 2008.

continued (page 2 of 3)

1UP: Somewhat related to that: Why are companions not an option for inputting the Project Purity code? You already have the option to have Sentinel Lyons input the code in your place. There are three viable options for an alternate to input the code: Fawkes, Sergeant RL-3N, and Charon. The player has already experienced a situation where Fawkes can enter an irradiated room and perform a task, RL-3N should follow his programming to obey you, and Charon would not only become healthier due to the radiation, but he's established as essentially a slave who will do whatever his contract-holder orders him to do. To the player, the inability for either to input the code seems really contradictory.

EP: That's a great question, and one that's obviously come up quite a bit in different forums. Let me try to shed some light on why the game is like that -- it's a pretty interesting look inside the development process.

All of the followers were implemented into the game fairly late in development, after the main story had already been nailed down. So, you know, we had the scene at the end of the game, with deadly radiation, and never really compensated for the fact that you could have a Supermutant, or Ghoul, or robot, who could possibly turn the purifier on for you. We'd only ever planned for you sending Sarah Lyons into the purifier, because we knew, from a story standpoint, that she'd definitely be in there with you.


What we could do -- and what we did ultimately do -- is cover that stuff in dialogue. You can ask those followers to go into the purifier, and they'll tell you why they won't. We felt that fit with their personalities, but really, they didn't "sell" that to the player in a single line of dialogue. So, in the end, the player's left with a, "Huh, why the hell can't they do it?!" sort of feeling.

So the story does kind of break down. But you know what? We knew that, and were OK with it, because the trade-off is, well, you get these cool followers to join you. You meet up with Fawkes near the end of the game, and it's true you can go right with him to the purifier. So we could've not had him there as a follower, and that would've solved the problem of him not going into the purifier -- because, at that point in development, that was the only fix we had time for. But we kept it, and players got him as a follower, and they seem to love adventuring him with. Gameplay trumped story, in that example -- as I believe it should have.

So if we'd planned better, we could've addressed that more satisfactorily. But considering how it all went down, I feel good about the decision we made there.

1UP: I know you just announced it, and I expect you to duck the question, but I have to ask: With the recent announcement of the downloadable-content quests, how will March's Broken Steel quest deal with the fact that a "good" player has likely sacrificed himself by inputting the code?

EP: You're right -- we're going to duck that question! But no worries: We have a sinister master plan....


1UP: Can you say much about your downloadable-content plans? It looks like one piece of content per month -- is that the rough outline? Is a Shivering Isles type of expansion still on the master plan? Would that new region/expansion be the Commonwealth -- is the Commonwealth the Fallout 3 version of Boston?

EP: We announced three new DLCs for Xbox 360 and PC. Operation: Anchorage first, then The Pitt, and then Broken Steel. The plan right now is to release them a month apart. That may change, but we're working hard on them and hope to keep as close to that schedule as possible. Right now, there are no plans to do anything as big as Shivering Isles for Oblivion. All the DLCs we announced for Fallout 3 are around the size of Knights of the Nine for Oblivion. So it's still a substantial amount of content, with new quest, new enemies, new locations, new 360 achievements, and several hours of gameplay -- all that good stuff.

Oh, and no -- no current plan to visit the Commonwealth, which is indeed Massachusetts: Home sweet home for me! Go Southie!

1UP: There's a fair amount of interesting stuff, both in the critical path and on the side quests, that I'm curious where they came from or what inspired their creation and development, so here's a bit of a "word association," where you basically explain where the item in question came from.

EP: In general, it's really tough to try and pinpoint where certain ideas or creative influences come from. It's not usually that specific. When inspiration strikes, it strikes, and creativity follows. But I'll try to narrow these down a bit.

Fallout 3 Afterthoughts
The mastermind behind much of Fallout 3's post-apocalyptic world spills the beans on his inspirations for one of the biggest RPGs in 2008.

continued (page 3 of 3)

1UP: Little Lamplight.

EP: In the game, Little Lamplight was established in the remains of some tourist caves called Lamplight Caverns. This location was loosely based on Luray Caverns in Virginia. As for having a town of little kids? It just seemed like a good addition to the fiction, showing yet another way people in the Wasteland have survived over the years.

1UP: Liberty Prime.

EP: Liberty Prime is kind of an interesting case. We knew we wanted to have this big, pre-war, anticommunist robot. In the original plan, he was going to be massive, and the player was going to ride in his head, anime style. And, well, yeah -- that never happened! And then there's the name.... He was actually named long before the Transformers movie, and long before Optimus Prime sort of reentered the American consciousness. Honestly, he wasn't named after Optimus Prime, as most people suspect. At least, not intentionally -- but the subconscious is powerful thing, and I pull a lot of stuff from there unintentionally.


1UP: Republic of Dave.

EP: Hey, what can I say? It seemed like somewhere out in the Wasteland, there'd be a simple guy, named Dave, who wanted to start his own republic. Hell, if the world ended, and you were still alive, wouldn't you?

1UP: Tenpenny Tower.

EP: Tenpenny Tower was slightly inspired by Fiddler's Green, the skyscraper in George Romero's Land of the Dead. But it was also an opportunity to introduce another character from outside the U.S. Allistair Tenpenny came to the Capital Wasteland from Great Britain to seek his fortune, so that alone tells you that the U.K. was also hit in the war. And if he came to U.S. to succeed, that says a lot about how screwed up Europe must be. So we just allude, a little bit, to the state of the rest of the world. We like to leave a lot to the players' imaginations, and somebody like Tenpenny serves as a catalyst for those thoughts.

1UP: Tranquility Lane.

EP: With Tranquility Lane, the idea was to give players a look into what the Fallout world was like before the bombs fell. It sort of reinforces to the player that the world that got nuked wasn't our world -- it was this sort of 1950s view of the future. As for the gameplay there, Betty was inspired partially by the Billy Mumy character in the Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life," in which this little kid with godlike powers terrorizes the inhabitants of a town, and "wishes" them into the cornfield when they're bad. And the Pint-Sized Slasher? God only knows what dark corner of my psyche that came from. I wanted to be a kid, dressed up as a clown, murdering people. I thought it would be sick fun. Was I wrong?

1UP: On a related point, is there a way to finish Tenpenny Tower where the Ghouls can move in, but not end up killing everyone?

EP: Nope, there's not. For us, it was about reinforcing to the player that, you know, the Capital Wasteland is a brutal place, and sometimes, not everything is black and white -- or has a completely happy ending. If that's not the essence of Fallout, I don't know what is.


1UP: Can you discuss the decision to have the main quest end the game? Why not let the player wander the Capital Wasteland afterward?

EP: When we originally wrote the main story, your character died at the end. There was really only that one ending. We liked the serious tone of it and felt the theme of sacrifice was really important for what we were doing with the game. But then we realized that, well, not having multiple ways to complete the game was pretty contrary to the spirit of Fallout. So we designed and implemented a few ways to end the game: You can sacrifice yourself inside the purifier, you can have Sarah Lyons go in, or you can just stand there and refuse to do anything (and the purifier complex will blow up around you).

But with each of these, even if the player character doesn't die, the game ends. We'd discussed this, and were like, "You know what? Fallout and Fallout 2 ended. We should end our game, too." What we didn't realize is that, largely because of Oblivion, people really expected Fallout 3 not to end! It's something they've come to expect of us, and we underestimated that. You can be sure it's a mistake we won't repeat in the future.

1UP: The Capital Wasteland is full of stuff to discover and places to explore. Is there anything you think most players missed?

EP: If you listen to Galaxy News Radio, there are some radio plays on there that chronicle the adventures of Herbert "Daring" Dashwood and his stalwart Ghoul manservant, Argyle. Turns out, those radio plays were actually based on the life of one of the Capital Wasteland's residents; you can meet the real Herbert Dashwood at Tenpenny Tower, and he asks you to find the real-life Argyle. You can find Argyle -- or, um, what's left of him -- in a hidden location called Rockopolis, which is actually mentioned in a couple of the radio plays. It's really hard to find -- look near Paradise Falls at night. If you see the glow of light from behind some giant boulders, with some banners outside, you're there. Once you find Argyle, you can go back to Tenpenny with the news, and he'll reward you for your efforts.