Fallout 3 lead Emil Pagliarulo tried to stuff it to the gills with Deus Ex DNA: 'As much immersive sim as was humanly possible'

Fallout 3 lead Emil Pagliarulo tried to stuff it to the gills with Deus Ex DNA: ‘As much immersive sim as was humanly possible’ | PC Gamer Skip to main content Open menu Close main menu PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES US Edition UK US Canada Australia Subscribe Sign in View Profile Sign out Search Search PC Gamer Games Hardware News Reviews Guides Video Forum More PC Gaming Show PC Gamer Clips Software Codes Coupons Movies & TV Magazine Newsletter Affiliate links Meet the team Community guidelines About PC Gamer PC Gamer Magazine SubscriptionWhy subscribe?Subscribe to the world’s #1 PC gaming magTry a single issue or save on a subscriptionIssues delivered straight to your door or device From$1Subscribe now Don’t miss these RPG Cara Ellison, senior narrative designer on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 before Paradox switched developers, discusses her love of Troika’s original RPG: ‘Everyone on the team helped really make that maximum goth’ RPG You’ve never heard of it, but a Russian studio made a fantasy take on original Fallout way back in 2001, and it honestly kind of rules FPS Occult deckbuilder The Killing Stone is introducing a ‘dynamic’ scare system originally considered for BioShock 2: ‘It’s very fun as a gamedev to be surprised by something in your own game’ RPG ‘We lost things such as physics in games:’ The dev behind my most anticipated RPG thinks players are craving more interactive games, not just ‘moving around in a static 3D environment’ Fallout Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii has played 10,000 hours of Fallout 4 while refusing to do the main quest, build settlements, or travel with anyone but Dogmeat: ‘I’d much rather be beaten to death by Deathclaws’ FPS 10 years in the making, this total conversion based on Half-Life is every bit as ambitious as Black Mesa Fallout Fallout 4 feels like a brand new game now that it’s forcing me to take naps, drink plenty of water, and not save scum Fallout A Steam glitch convinced some Fallout fans a New Vegas remaster was imminent, only to have the rug yanked out from under them: ‘Slowly turning into r/HalfLife’ Fallout Fallout was a ‘B-tier product’ that lost both the licenses it was banking on and had its lead dev joking, ‘In a week, we’re going to be asking whether people want fries with their meal,’ but now he thinks those trials ‘turned out to be positives’ The Elder Scrolls Skyrim’s co-lead designer says Starfield’s main problem is that it never fully cohered as a game: ‘It was a releasable game, but it wasn’t the best’ FPS ‘I consider it a millennial shooter’: The FPS dev making hit shooters by leaning into ‘2007-core’ Fallout Bethesda originally thought Fallout 3’s metro system should go all over the map, then realised running through miles of tunnels was dull as hell: ‘Being realistic sometimes isn’t fun’ RPG Fallout designer Tim Cain reckons his subsequent 3 projects were buggy games ‘or, as people called them, flawed masterpieces’ because ‘we had a lot of feature ideas, we did not edit ourselves at all, and we were a small team’ Fallout ‘It took about 5 years’ for people to start liking Fallout: New Vegas, says Josh Sawyer, and even longer for Obsidian to see that ‘players actually liked the design choices we had made’ RPG I didn’t realize how important headbob was until I played an RPG without it PopularNEW: PC Gamer Clips!Resident EvilArc RaidersBest PC gearGame Quizzes Games RPG Fallout Fallout 3 Fallout 3 lead Emil Pagliarulo tried to stuff it to the gills with Deus Ex DNA: ‘As much immersive sim as was humanly possible’ News By Joshua Wolens published 3 March 2026 Look out, Lone Wanderer, a bomb! When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Bethesda) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter PC Gamer Get the PC Gamer Newsletter Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Want to add more newsletters? Every Friday GamesRadar+ Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you’re going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them. 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From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we’ve got you covered. Signup + Once a month SFX Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month! Signup + An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter I admit it, when I think of Fallout 3, the immersive sims of yore are not the comparisons I leap to instinctively. But having checked out a recent RPS chat with FO3 lead designer Emil Pagliarulo, you know what? I see it. I see the vision.”We let you play as any type of character you want, and there are all these systems. And so, if you want to shoot your way through or sneak your way through, we have to support all of it,” said Pagliarulo, who also worked on Thief 2 and 3. “Trying to do that… it was not like back in the day of Thief 1, where they put in the fire arrows because they wanted to appeal to Doom and Quake players who wanted a rocket launcher.”Pagliarulo wanted to go further with FO3. “We had done Oblivion, but I knew that we could take it even further in Fallout 3,” he said. That meant things like a better stealth system (though still a profoundly exploitable one, if my memory serves) and mechanics like Fallout’s crippled limbs system—almost directly ported over from Deus Ex’s. Pagliarulo wanted “As much immersive sim as was humanly possible, that I could bring in, was really