Fallout 3 Point Lookout/Mothership Zeta DLC Interview

The Hachiko brings us an interview with Bethesda Softworks’ Joel Burgess and Jeff Gardiner about the team’s upcoming Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta addons for Fallout 3.

The Point Lookout DLC will have a larger map than past DLC areas. How much larger would you guess and does it serve a greater purpose to the overall narrative and feel of the content? What’s keeping it from being a bunch of empty space meant to say, “Hey, fans said they didn’t like the small maps. Fine, here’s a big one just for the heck of it.”

Joel Burgess: Point Lookout’s main world map is an open region, so in this way it’s more similar to the Wasteland than the areas explored in any prior DLC. The main story arc of Point Lookout only explores a portion of this area, but several freeform quests and points of interest flesh out the remainder of the world. We actually ran into problems with Point Lookout because the density of content is higher than many areas of the base game, which forced us to find new solutions for certain design and technical issues.

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The “Easter Egg” UFO always seemed like a funny gag more than anything. Was content based around this ship always planned? If not, where did the idea come from to use this specific piece of the currently existing Fallout 3 game?

Jeff Gardiner: No, this content was not always planned – it seemed like a fun and natural fit for our 5th DLC. The idea came out of a big brainstorm meeting we had for pitching DLC themes – this one was Istvan Pely’s, our Lead Artist.

We now have a person to blame for adding sci-fi to the post-apocalyptic wasteland.