Aside from all that, it’s a game where you’re supposed to occasionally feel lonely, and we weren’t achieving the tone we wanted. The sightlines in Fallout 3 are much larger, and you don’t have the major visual blockers of Oblivion’s forests and hilly terrain. The trouble was that Oblivion and Fallout 3 are very different games. POI density wasn’t something we really had a name for back then. We simply learn from what we’ve done before. There’s no secret playbook at Bethesda that tells us what to do. This is because we were using the same POI density that had served us well for Oblivion.
We simply had too much stuff, too close together. What we realized was that the world felt pushed together. We realized, however, that wandering the wasteland didn’t feel right. The game is beginning to feel complete as everything comes together.
Up until this point, the game has been a collection of assets, tasks, code and lots of teamwork.
We’re in alpha, and for the first time, we’re meeting Fallout 3. In a talk given at Game Developer’s Conference 2012, Senior Designer Joe Burgess of Bethesda explained why:
In the GECK editor the cells these locations originally occupied are still named and fit the locations given in the 2005 development map. But others, like Raven Rock, Oasis, and Little Lamplight are on the opposite side of the map relative to the where we visited them. Some locations are in the same location as they appear in retail e.g.