Dazu zwei Concept Arts:Our goal with D.C. was never to rebuild the city street-for-street, but to capture her spirit. The timeline of Fallout diverged from our own many years in the past, and progressed beyond our present day before the apocalypse happened. While much of the cityscape would be recognizable to us, this vision of D.C. is distinctly different from the one we know today. Major and historic landmarks remain. The monuments on the National Mall are present, and a portion of the C&O canal can be visited. Arlington Cemetery reclines west of the Potomac River, beyond the Key Bridge. The city surrounding these major points of interest is generally more dense and oppressive, however. Further, D.C. would have been an obvious priority target in the nuclear exchange of 2077, known only as “The Great War”. The catastrophic damage caused by intercontinental barrage devastated the city, making exploration difficult and dangerous. Much of the city would be cut off from exploration, and navigating the ruins often requires passing through seeming unrelated areas, such as clambering from a collapsed train tunnel into the basement of an office building, and emerging in a city park or bomb crater.
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So, instead of D.C. being an enormous, open area on the world map, we hatched a plan to focus on the individual areas and neighborhoods of the city. Each of these neighborhoods is its own large outdoor area. This allowed us to clearly define the personality of every neighborhood and specifically tailor gameplay to populate each. Further, the player must navigate treacherous underground areas to move from one neighborhood to another, as many of the surface-level city streets are completely buried under heaped hillocks of debris from shattered structures.
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The most predominant of these connective areas are the metros. Metro is the colloquial term for the D.C. subway system, operated by the fictional DCTA organization. We envisioned a pre-war system of stations and tracks which mimics D.C.'s real-world public transit system, and used that to guide our development of the DCTA metro. While many tunnels have collapsed and stations have been rendered inaccessible, the player can still make use of in-world cues such as maps and station signs to navigate the innards of D.C. The largest continuous set of tunnels allows the player to reach almost any neighborhood without needing to go above ground, negotiating derelict train tunnels and frequently passing through mingled areas such as collapsed basements and natural caves exposed within the decaying underground.
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The written word is a powerful and direct tool for storytelling. Much of our storytelling as level designers, however, is told with the voice of the world. For every space in the game, however minor, we asked ourselves “why is this here” and “what’s happened here?” Even when this back story isn’t conveyed directly to the player, it informs even minor level design decisions and lends an honest quality to the space. A lonely grave, a heap of human gore, or a long-abandoned outpost convey atmosphere and meaning without a single written word. These small stories all contribute to both the truth of setting and the unique narrative of each player’s experience playing Fallout 3. Their distribution through the world is designed to intersperse the player experience with more punctuation marks to keep time playing the game from blending into a hazy, forgettable miasma.
Notes on Pulling the Sky Down: The Level Design of Fallout 3
