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Bethesda hadn't dealt with guns in a long time when it came time to develop Fallout 3; thankfully, VATS helped close the distance.
Aside from some Terminator games in the 1990s, Bethesda's bread and butter had been fantasy games and all of the fixings that come with it (swordplay, bows and arrows, magic, etc.). However, Fallout took what the studio had been doing with The Elder Scrolls series and sent it into a sci-fi setting where guns, grenades, and anything you can bash an oversized scorpion with are fair play, leading Bethesda's developers to a problem: how do you make a shooter that also works as an RPG.
"The thing that we love most about games is putting you in a world; I think doing that first-person and then we have third-person, is the best way to do it, where you can kind of reach out and touch the world," Todd Howard explains in an interview with GameInformer. "As it came to Fallout 3, that was the big thing: How do we do this role-playing with guns in a way that feels right, but your character can still improve?"
Fallout 3 designer Emil Pagliarulo explains, "Bethesda, as a studio, hadn’t done gun combat since they did the Terminator games back in the day, so creating gun combat was a real challenge." He adds "Most of the combat in Oblivion is melee, and most of the combat in Fallout is ranged, so we knew we were never going to create gun combat that was on par with Call of Duty or Battlefield."
Thankfully, VATS allowed both issues to be sorted with ease, both making up for the somewhat awkward gunplay (that would later be improved in Fallout 4) and retaining the role-playing aspect of previous games and not turning into a straight FPS, all while paying homage to the original games limb-targeting mechanics.
