Today, Bethesda Softworks released some incredible new screenshots of their upcoming DLC for Fallout 3, entitled The Pitt. Maybe it’s just me, but these shots really do the already impressive game justice, showcasing the more robust graphical features of Fallout 3’s modified Gamebryo engine. Despite the litany of crashes due to using VATS with anti-aliasing enabled, I played through the post-apocalyptic hellscape of Fallout 3 with most of the graphical settings at their highest levels with 1650 x 1080 resolution, but even so I don’t recall seeing anything quite as stunning as what’s depicted in these scenes.

In addition to the screenshots, Fallout 3 Senior Producer, Jeff Gardiner, also shed some welcome light on the process of creating downloadable content for the game:

Now back to the Downloadable Content. As Fallout 3 was nearing “true Beta,” most of the content developers, our Artists and Designers, were playing the game around the clock. That process comes to an end once we start locking down the content for Beta, so this is the time we transition the team onto our additional content, now and forevermore entitled “DLC.” To kick the DLC off we held a large team meeting in our theatre, where developers came with ideas, slides and stories. We heard from everyone; ideas included costumes, weapons, sweeping gameplay changes, new settings, alien worlds, even a crazy-clown carnival. What we ended up with were two great quests that were in some ways amalgams many of the ideas pitched in the meeting. Those being Operation: Anchorage, which was an attempt at a more traditional shooter experience and The Pitt, which is Fallout at its best with a new settlement, faction, and morally ambiguous quest line.

The creation of Fallout 3 DLC is about taking a critical look at the game we just made, and deciding where to experiment. What to add. What would we, as fans of the game, like to try? Like to experience? All of us at this point have played Fallout 3 for hundreds of hours. You begin to identify missed opportunities. Stories that need to be told, weapon lists that need filling out, creatures that need allies. Enter the DLC.

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Finally, Gardiner also touches on a number of issues that game up during the development of the game’s first real expansion, Broken Steel, to be released in the upcoming months. Broken Steel features a continuation of Fallout 3’s main story and raises the level cap, enabling further character development.

Now to Broken Steel – which continues the main story and increases the level cap. We had no intention of doing this, or continuing the story, at all. The idea for Broken Steel was not finalized or even talked about in the big team meeting I had mentioned earlier. It came about two months after the game was on the shelves, right before Christmas.

Broken Steel has presented several of its own unique challenges. The first one that gave me pause was the need to reprise the roles of so many voice actors. We’re actually wrapping that up now under the watchful and masterful eye of Mark Lampert. The next thing that was a concern was ‘fiddling’ with so much of our existing content. One of the scariest things about making DLC that drops right into an existing game is the potential to create new bugs. I’ve worked on 13 of these things now, and something always goes wrong in the 11th hour. It’s very rarely easy to fix or benign, so we’re keeping a cautious and watchful eye on Broken Steel. So far, so good.

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