Todd Howard says Bethesda really didn't expect people to hate the way Fallout 3 ended with a full stop, and they scrambled together a solution but 'I'll give us an average grade on that'
Fallout season 2 is wrapped up and, no, we didn't get a surprise remaster dropping at the end. Instead, senior Bethesda types have been giving a bunch of retrospective interviews about the series, the latest of which is a mega-feature from GameInformer that dives into the creation of Fallout 3 and where the series went from there.
One thing I confess I'd forgotten about the game is the fact that, at launch, you could roll credits on it and then… the game would just end. I do remember being conscious of it at the time, and knowing not to start the final mission ("Take it Back", a blowout spectacle with the Liberty Prime robot that ends with the player making certain permanent, life-altering decisions), and then all of a sudden Bethesda announcing that the game's first expansion would 'fix' the issue.
Turns out that Bethesda was caught completely off-guard by the reaction to the game ending properly, rather than allowing you to continue to roam the Wasteland. Which to be fair to them is probably because… well, Fallout and Fallout 2 both ended when you completed the main quest.
"The one thing that we did, we ended up changing in Fallout 3, we were like, 'Well, like the other Fallouts, it has to end,'" recalls Todd Howard. "You know, 'We’re having this type of character system, these other perks are going to work, and then when you finish it, it’s going to end. You’re going to get this video and then the game ends.' And we thought, 'This is Fallout! It’s great!'"
Reader: it was not great.
"People hated it! They expected, like, 'Why would the game end?! The [Elder Scrolls] don’t end!'," says Howard. "And so we were like, 'Well, that was our commitment to that.' And we were sitting around talking about it as we got into DLC, we’re like, 'What if it didn’t end? How would we do that?'"
Bethesda's solution would arrive roughly six months after launch with the game's first expansion, Broken Steel. The studio went for that good old narrative classic whereby, as long as you activate the purifier, the player character will wake up two weeks later rather than dying, having been found unconscious. What can you say: It just works.
"We kind of went back to the drawing board and figured out a way, as gracefully as we could," says Howard, before adding with some commendable honesty: "I’ll give us an average grade on that, to make the story continue."
Narrative fudge it may have been but it was undoubtedly the right decision. Even if ending the game when the credits roll would've been faithful to the Black Isle originals, something about everything just stopping doesn't feel right in a Bethesda open world. You put so much time into these games, and there's so much to find, that it almost feels a tiny bit like punishing the player for completing the main quest. Needless to say Fallout 4 would not repeat the mistake, though New Vegas said screw you guys and did it old-school (though it did have the grace to create a last-ditch save players could return to for DLCs etcetera).
Elsewhere in the interview the game's leads go into VATS, which lead artist Istvan Pely recalls barely working before launch, and its origins in… Burnout 2's Crash mode?