Todd Howard says that players reacted very negatively to the ending of Fallout 3, and although the team tried to leave it more open-ended with the DLC, the Bethesda director only gives himself "an average grade" for the effort.
In an interview with Game Informer, Howard explains that "people hated" how Fallout 3 ended, even though other games in the genre were more open-ended at the time. "'You’re going to get this video and then the game ends'," Howard says. "And we thought, 'this is Fallout! It’s great!' People hated it! They expected, like, 'why would the game end?!' You know, 'the other games don’t end!'"
This shift from a closed-ended to an open-ended structure was just one of the changes Bethesda made to Fallout 3 with the release of its numerous DLC packs. "The one thing that we did, we ended up changing in Fallout 3," Howard says. "We were like, 'well, like the other Fallouts, it has to end'. You know, 'we’re having this type of character system, these other perks are going to work, and then when you finish it, it’s going to end.'"
The team went back to the drawing board after players' negative feedback. "And so we were like, 'well, that was our commitment to that,'" Howard says. "And we were sitting around talking about it as we got into DLC, we’re like, 'what if it didn’t end? How would we do that?'"
Despite the time thinking about how to make Fallout more open-ended, Howard only gives the team a passing grade on the result. "And so, we kind of went back to the drawing board and figured out a way, as gracefully as we could. I’ll give us an average grade on that to make the story continue," he explains.
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