Fallout 3 Interview
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Strategy Informer: Well during the play-through, I noticed that there wasn't much around. Obviously this is a post apocalyptic setting, but the world was pretty barren. Apart from the main story, you've got no real direction, no incentive to go one way or the other.
Pete Hines: Well, a couple of things. First of all, we sort of take a risk in having you guys go out into the world without having experienced the first thirty to forty-five minutes where you get everything explained to you. If you pay attention to your compass, and where it's trying to direct you to unknown locations out in the world. You actually come across a lot of that stuff, it's just that it's fairly easy to just walk past it without even trying. In Oblivion it's a little easier because it's like, there's a mountain and then there's a cave in the side of the mountain.
Whereas in Fallout it's not always quite as '˜beat-you-over-the-head' obvious, but I do think it is a combination of using your compass to recognise when you're walking past lots of things you can see and do. Also, we're preventing you guys from doing anything in the main quest, which is pretty prohibitive in that we use the main quest to send you out to parts of the world, which intentionally run you past a lot of other things to do. So when we keep you from doing that we keep you from going right past all this stuff that we lead you to in the main quest.
So we might take you out to this part of the map knowing that you're going to come across all this stuff here. And then we know that you're probably going to go over here, and then go to this point of the map. So we're kind of smart about using the map as a setting for different parts of the main quest, and how you're going to get there and what you're going to cover along the way. But take Megaton for example, there's like a good 5,6,7,8 hours worth of quest stuff available too you just like that. One lady's putting together a survival guide, another lady wants you to go to another town. Next thing you know you've been playing the game for a long time.
