While making its version of the post-apocalyptic wasteland in Fallout 3, developer Bethesda Game Studios stumbled upon the revelation that maybe sticking to realism isn’t the best route to fun in games.
Long time Bethesda designer and writer Emil Pagliarulo said as much in a retrospective interview with Game Informer, revealing that the studio originally “had this thought that the Metro would be connected completely underground” of Fallout 3’s Washington DC map.
“And we realized it was just too sprawling. It was too big,” he adds. “We had to cut down sections, and it’s a lesson we’ve learned over the years: that being realistic sometimes isn’t fun. 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.”
Unless you’re playing a simulation game where realism is sometimes the point, traversing what aims to be a 1:1 recreation of the real world is pretty damn dull, and thankfully, by the time Fallout 3 rolled around, Bethesda were good at quickly scrapping ideas that it didn’t think were feasible to avoid feature creep.
There’s been a lot of other stuff going on in the wasteland recently, too. Bethesda’s said it’s “looking into” adding cross play for Fallout 76, though it doesn’t sound like the feature will come any time soon. Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters are reportedly still in the pipeline. And we now know that Fallout season 3 is headed to another location that’s actually only been explored via the games once – in Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, of all things.
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