Bethesda boss Todd Howard has admitted how surprised he was at the controversy surrounding Fallout 3’s ending.
While Bethesda’s games like The Elder Scrolls and Starfield typically allow you to continue playing after hitting an ending, the series never used to be like this.
Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, as well as the first Fallout game by Interplay, originally didn’t allow you to continue exploring the world and completing quests after rolling the credits. Instead, you’d be thrown back to the menu.
Considering the implications set upon by New Vegas’ various endings, this makes complete sense, and fans have made their peace with it.
Fallout 3's Ending Was Controversial Because You Couldn't Continue Playing After The Credits
But for Fallout 3, this feature ended up being a lot more controversial and would later be updated with a post-game scenario to play with in the Broken Steel DLC expansion.
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“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.’,” said Todd Howard in an interview with Game Informer.
“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!’”
Howard then admitted that “people hated it” as a result of not being able to continue playing after hitting an ending.
“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.’
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“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?’ 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.”
Fallout 3 ended up releasing five DLC chapters after launch; with Broken Steel being the third release.
It’s often seen as the most important expansion for the game, as not only did it allow you to continue playing after the game’s ending, but it also gave you a new epilogue to play through, as well as raising the level cap from 20 to 30.