Developers reveal Fallout 3 was so ambitious that even Bethesda could not control the bugs it created
Speaking with Edge Magazine in issue 419, Bethesda’s lead designer Emil Pagliarulo opened up about the many reasons why Fallout 3 launched with so many bugs. He told the magazine’s reporters that Fallout 3, being the first 3D entry in the RPG franchise, was trying to achieve so much that the developers started to struggle to comprehend the complexity of the player freedom they wanted to offer.
In Pagliarulo’s own words, “We were trying to do so much, and we couldn’t really comprehend the complexity of the freedom we were trying to give to the player, and how that can screw things up. There’s a human element, too.”
That’s where the human element kicks in, as Fallout 3’s developers started to get burned out and began making mistakes toward the end of the game’s development cycle. To add further fuel to the fire, he stated that the Gamebryo engine used for Fallout 3 was quite fragile, as trying to iron out even a few bugs required extreme caution. Even changing a few lines of text could have disrupted elements and assets in other parts of the game.
The game’s ambitious open-world scale meant the developers had to draw a fine line between deep gameplay mechanics and the open world itself, which, in turn, led to some timeless bugs and glitches that have become cemented in gaming history.
Like many of us, players during Fallout 3’s heyday saw everything from floating NPCs to characters getting stuck in walls, companions getting stuck in boxes, and exploits for infinite items. These glitches, rather than dulling the immersion in Fallout 3, added character and charm to the wasteland.
Since Fallout 3 was created on the same Gamebryo engine as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which had been released two years earlier, adding new features and effects like rads became quite tricky.
One particularly tricky feature that gave developers headaches was adding VATS (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System), which allows players to quickly gun down enemies in slow motion. Lead artist for Fallout 3, Istvan Pely, shared that adding VATS was painful, with the development team questioning its added fun and viability until the game’s launch.
Pely shared:
Even though we were basically just using the Oblivion engine, there were some significant challenges figuring out VATS. There was a long period where it was like, ‘Is this even fun? Is this worth doing at all? Is anyone even going to use this?
Pely continued:
We spent so much time basically trying to get the game to figure out where to put the camera so you could see the slow-motion playback. There had to be an algorithm to make sure it didn’t get stuck behind an object or in the geometry or something. We only just got that working by the time we shipped.
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