Fallout 3 feeling like "Oblivion with guns" was only natural, Todd Howard says – the RPG was Bethesda's follow-up to, well, Oblivion

The Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion screenshot — (Image credit: Bethesda)

Before Fallout 3's launch in 2008, Bethesda's revival of the post-apocalyptic was criticized both by die-hard Fallout fans and portions of the mainstream gaming audience with one, unified dismissal: "Oh, it's just Oblivion with guns." 18 years later, Todd Howard says Fallout 3's similarities to Oblivion were only natural, since it was Bethesda's follow-up to the fantasy RPG.

"The Oblivion-ish-ness of Fallout 3, I think, has to do with, in many respects, it's our follow up to Oblivion," Howard muses in an interview with Game Informer. "So, it's, you know, we’re rebooting Fallout, which people haven’t seen in a while, in an all-new way. But you’re coming off Oblivion, which was hugely popular, so you’re getting an audience that you know expects both."

That's not to say Fallout 3 was meant to be identical to Oblivion, and that's why Bethesda took caution to make sure it bore little aesthetic resemblance to its predecessor. "We were so conscious of proving that we could do this genre switch and that Fallout would feel very different from what came before, like Oblivion, that I think that informed a lot of how Fallout 3 was a very dark, bleak, very post-apocalyptic type of world," lead artist Istvan Pely explains.

"Oblivion was very saturated and colorful and bright for the most part," Pely continues, "and we sapped out the color, we darkened it, we just added grunge, and everything that’s like… it was almost an overcorrection to say, 'Alright, we need to make a statement that we’re going to take this seriously and do Fallout justice.' I think that gave 3, specifically, a very, very hardcore visual identity. That was, I think, a surprise to a lot of folks that we could pull it off."

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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