Emil Pagliarulo, video game designer at Bethesda Game Studios with credits as a writer on RPG gems like Fallout 4, the ever-long-lived Skyrim, and Starfield, says that the original Deus Ex game from 2000 was a "huge influence" on him.
An influence that he's applied at Bethesda, apparently. "As much immersive sim as was humanly possible, that I could bring in, was really what I wanted to do," Pagliarulo tells Rock Paper Shotgun in a new interview.
"I love the original Deus Ex. It's a huge influence on me." He then recalls one of his core memories of playing. "I remember breaking into a house that I thought was empty to find something, and the maid turned the corner," he says.
"I was like, 'Argh!' I didn't want to kill her, so I took out my shock prod and was in this panic, rushing to do stuff before she gained consciousness." Thankfully, she wouldn't go on to actually wake up – NPCs in the now 26-year-old game don't.
But moments like these, in which Pagliarulo felt he truly had authority as the player and pondered the possibility of what could be, are what the developer wanted to bring to Bethesda's own titles.
"We had done Oblivion, but I knew that we could take it even further in Fallout 3," he recalls. "Trying to get the stealth better, that was only part of it. There were definitely other people who contributed to that as well." He goes on to say the influence was evident elsewhere, too.
"You see this with a lot of people who worked at Looking Glass or Ion Storm Austin. Those are folks who went on to work for Arkane on Dishonored."
As Pagliarulo puts it, "That DNA has definitely spread throughout our organization. But yeah, I really wanted to bring that to Fallout 3 as much as I could." Unsurprisingly, though, doing something like that – bringing the flair of Deus Ex to an open-world RPG – isn't simple.
"It's always difficult, because in a game like Dishonored or Thief, you're playing as a single character and the gameplay focus is really narrow."
That's not the case in a game as massive as Fallout 3. "We let you play as any type of character you want, and there are all these systems. And so, if you want to shoot your way through or sneak your way through, we have to support all of it. Trying to do that… it was not like back in the day of Thief 1, where they put in the fire arrows because they wanted to appeal to Doom and Quake players who wanted a rocket launcher."
It's an amusing comparison, but it makes sense. I can't imagine it would be easy, but I'd say Pagliarulo and the team at Bethesda succeeded in making a solid RPG out of Fallout 3 – one with the Deus Ex-esque qualities he hoped for, and then some.
