Bethesda's Todd Howard reveals one of Fallout 3's biggest DLCs came from how much everyone hated the RPG's ending — "I’ll give us an average grade on that"

After acquiring the complete rights to the Fallout series from Interplay Entertainment and Black Isle Studios in 2007, The Elder Scrolls developer Bethesda took its first crack at the post-nuclear RPG franchise with 2008's Fallout 3. Released across Xbox, Windows PC, and PlayStation, it was a critical and commercial success, with players greatly appreciating how well it translated the isometric series into 3D spaces.

"The sort of vindication for us was, when we did PAX, we had this big live demo of Fallout 3 where everyone could play for, like, a half hour or something. ... We were very nervous. Like, 'Hopefully this goes off without a hitch,'" lead designer Emil Pagliarulo told Game Informer in its excellent An Oral History of Fallout interview.

"The line to play Fallout 3 was around the corner. We were like, 'Oh, we’ve got something here,'" he added. "Then it was the excitement of people playing and then people leaving. That’s when it was, like, it felt great! Like, whoa. People are buying what we’re selling. They like this vision that we have."

Indeed, everything from the game's open-world environments and its huge variety of side quests to its gameplay systems and writing was praised highly. One aspect of the title that was near-universally disliked, though, was its ending, and how players couldn't continue exploring the Capital Wasteland after the credits rolled in particular.

That overwhelmingly negative feedback, Bethesda director and executive producer Todd Howard notes, was the catalyst for the studio's creation of Broken Steel, one of the five DLC expansions that came out in 2009. Broken Steel significantly expands and continues Fallout 3's main story, raises the game's level cap to 30, and enables playing even after the narrative ends.

"The one thing that we did, we ended up changing in Fallout 3, we were like, 'Well, like the other Fallouts, it has to end,'" he explained. "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. You’re going to get this video and then the game ends.' And we thought, 'This is Fallout! It’s great!'"

Unfortunately, the reverence Bethesda treated Fallout and its traditions with for Fallout 3 ironically backfired in this particular instance, as players were expecting to be able to continue playing after the ending like they could in The Elder Scrolls titles Morrowind and Oblivion.

"People hated it! They expected, like, 'Why would the game end?!' You know, 'The other games don’t end!' And so we were like, 'Well, that was our commitment to that.' 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?'" Howard continued. "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."

It's pretty interesting to hear that the decision to give Fallout 3 a hard end point came from Bethesda's aim to stick to Fallout norms, though like most, I'm glad it ended up reversing that call with Broken Steel. Personally, I've always felt that content-rich open-world games should have free play after their endings, even if that just means sending you back into the world the way it was before your final quest.

In the end, Fallout 3 ended up doing something even more interesting by showing you the effects of the big choice you make — one I won't spoil here — in the main story's ending sequence. I appreciated that reactivity to your actions a lot, and I'm glad it was present in the 2015 sequel Fallout 4, too.

Are you a fan of Fallout 3? Did you hate how the ending locked you out of exploring the open world before Broken Steel came out, or did it not really bug you? Let me know in the comments.

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