Fallout 3 lead Emil Pagliarulo tried to stuff it to the gills with Deus Ex DNA: 'As much immersive sim as was humanly possible'

I admit it, when I think of Fallout 3, the immersive sims of yore are not the comparisons I leap to instinctively. But having checked out a recent RPS chat with FO3 lead designer Emil Pagliarulo, you know what? I see it. I see the vision.

"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," said Pagliarulo, who also worked on Thief 2 and 3. "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."

Pagliarulo wanted to go further with FO3. "We had done Oblivion, but I knew that we could take it even further in Fallout 3," he said. That meant things like a better stealth system (though still a profoundly exploitable one, if my memory serves) and mechanics like Fallout's crippled limbs system—almost directly ported over from Deus Ex's. Pagliarulo wanted "As much immersive sim as was humanly possible, that I could bring in, was really what I wanted to do… I love the original Deus Ex. It’s a huge influence on me."

Who among us doesn't remember misusing a LAM mine in DX and having to drag our stumps over to a medkit on the other side of the map? Who among us did not, at some point, also blast our legs off in FO3?

"You see this with a lot of people who worked at Looking Glass, or Ion Storm Austin," said Pagliarulo. "Those are folks who went on to work for Arkane on Dishonored, so that DNA has definitely spread throughout our organisation. But yeah, I really wanted to bring that to Fallout 3 as much as I could."

It's an interesting take and one that—as RPS notes—Pagliarulo has chatted about before. Though I don't think I'd call FO3 an imsim, not quite, I do get where he's coming from, and I've probably not given the game enough credit for what it attempted to do (and what New Vegas went on to do later).