Bethesda originally thought Fallout 3's metro system should track to the surface world, then realised running through miles of tunnels was dull as hell: 'Being realistic sometimes isn't fun'

We've recently had a bonanza of Bethesda interviews to mark… well, it feels like they were all done to mark the end of Fallout season two, which is a bit odd. But nevertheless, among them is Game Informer's excellent oral history of Fallout, in which the great and good from the studio reminisce about bringing the now-seminal series into 3D.

One of the biggest decisions was where the game would be set, with Bethesda's art team eventually stoked to go with Washington DC: mainly because lots of them lived there. "It's cool to work in an area that you're deeply familiar with, because then you can include things that [other] people may not be familiar with, unless they live here," lead artist Istvan Pely told PCG recently. "Like the DC metro and all the underground tunnels: You don't know they look like that, but those were pretty true to the actual ones in DC."

True, but maybe not that true. The idea of doing the DC metro system was attractive, but the only game lead designer Emil Pagliarulo had seen attempt DC "was an expansion for Duke Nukem." That meant there were plenty of opportunities "to really push on the Americana aspect of Fallout" with the likes of the Capitol or the Lincoln Memorial, but endless tunnels is a different matter.

"Originally, we had this thought that the Metro would be connected completely underground," says Pagliarulo. "And we realized it was just too sprawling. It was too big. We had to cut down sections, and it’s a lesson we’ve learned over the years: that being realistic sometimes isn’t fun. Because realism can be fun depending on the type of game you’re making, but traversing miles of underground subway stations turns out… very realistic, not very fun."

Fans of the Metro series may well disagree, but building a game based entirely around a metro system is an entirely different prospect to that metro system being an annexe to an open world (and it says a lot that, outside of the original game, Metro itself chafes at the limitation).

"Our team was small and a lot of architecture was built out of kits," says Pely. "You know, we had modular buildings and we could flesh out the world with office buildings and suburban buildings and stuff like that. But when it came to the iconic—like the Jefferson Memorial, the Capitol, and all that. Those were unique pieces of art that would take an artist a while to make."

I think we can all imagine what a huge Bethesda metro system underneath Fallout 3's wasteland would have been like and… yeah, they probably made the right call here. Not least because all the trains would have been running on the arms of NPCs.