Looking back, Fallout 3 seems like a pretty modest RPG in comparison to the Bethesda Game Studios epics that came before and after, but designer and writer Emil Pagliarulo says that's because the developer was really quick to scrap features that it didn't have the bandwidth to execute during production.
"When I look back at developing Fallout 3, it was a very smart project for us," Pagliarulo remembers of the threequel's production in an interview with Game Informer. "It's fairly small compared to our other games. There's a main quest and miscellaneous quests. There are no factions. You can't join the factions, right? You join the Brotherhood of Steel, but that's the main quest."
In hindsight, Fallout 3 was already a majorly ambitious title for the developer. Bethesda had never made an RPG that also had to double up as an FPS, and it couldn't reuse much of anything from The Elder Scrolls games that preceded it, either, perhaps explaining why the studio was so willing to trim the fat around the project.
"I remember at one point, our lead animator at the time, Hugh Riley, he made a comment in a meeting that said, 'We have the opposite of feature creep. We have feature seep,' meaning that we were cutting things," Pagliarulo adds. "We were really smart about cutting things, because we knew that we couldn't do it. We were tackling the scale. And so, during development, we felt really good."
