“We felt obligated by the series, not by the fans in particular, as we’re big fans ourselves,” explains Todd Howard, the game’s producer. “We knew, going into it, that we had huge shoes to fill.” Bethesda is an immensely capable studio, but the Fallout series’ unique personality and rare maturity attracted a jealously protective audience. Very few games took you to the places that Black Isle dared, and it’s natural to be wary of even the most skilful and well-meaning alien influence. Howard could have screamed his sincerity from the highest mountain, but suspicion came with the territory.
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“WE MAKE BIG games, but it’s never just space for space’s sake,” insists Pagliarulo. “The downtown DC section was, at one point, twice as big as what we shipped with. We’re talking polished gameplay spaces, with weeks, even months of work having been put into them. But we looked at all that space and had to be honest with ourselves: it was too much, it was hard for the player to navigate, it didn’t really add much to the game, and so we cut it.”
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“The choice to save or destroy Megaton was definitely a deliberate attempt to show the world we were serious about taking on the Fallout franchise,” says Pagliarulo, “because a big part of that is giving the player some really tough choices to make. Megaton is definitely one of the first big decisions you have to make. It’s one of the biggest in the entire game, really. The Fallout world is not pretty, and that’s something we fully embraced. It’s epitomised in the Megaton quest.”​