Fallout 3 Developer Diary
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Our goal with D.C. was never to rebuild the city street-for-street, but to capture her spirit. The timeline of Fallout diverged from our own many years in the past, and progressed beyond our present day before the apocalypse happened. While much of the cityscape would be recognizable to us, this vision of D.C. is distinctly different from the one we know today. Major and historic landmarks remain. The monuments on the National Mall are present, and a portion of the C&O canal can be visited. Arlington Cemetery reclines west of the Potomac River, beyond the Key Bridge. The city surrounding these major points of interest is generally more dense and oppressive, however. Further, D.C. would have been an obvious priority target in the nuclear exchange of 2077, known only as (The Great War). The catastrophic damage caused by intercontinental barrage devastated the city, making exploration difficult and dangerous. Much of the city would be cut off from exploration, and navigating the ruins often requires passing through seeming unrelated areas, such as clambering from a collapsed train tunnel into the basement of an office building, and emerging in a city park or bomb crater.
So, instead of D.C. being an enormous, open area on the world map, we hatched a plan to focus on the individual areas and neighborhoods of the city. Each of these neighborhoods is its own large outdoor area. This allowed us to clearly define the personality of every neighborhood and specifically tailor gameplay to populate each. Further, the player must navigate treacherous underground areas to move from one neighborhood to another, as many of the surface-level city streets are completely buried under heaped hillocks of debris from shattered structures.
