The Fallout VATS system was inspired by Burnout's crash mode of all things or, as Todd Howard puts it, 'imagine the car parts are, like, eyeballs and guts!'

(Image credit: Bethesda)

With Fallout season 2 wrapped up, it feels like we've been deluged with everything except, y'know, a new Fallout game of some kind. Hopes were high that we might get a remaster at the show's end, or even two, but whoa there cowboy: that ain't how Bethesda rolls.

Instead, Bethesda's great and good have been conducting a bunch of retrospective interviews about the series, the latest of which is a mega-feature from GameInformer. In this, the key creatives behind Fallout 3 go a little deeper into the game's VATS system, the delicious slow-mo shooting feature that allowed players to more-or-less pause combat and pick a spot, before restarting and watching the gore fly. Well, when the camera let you.

"Bethesda, as a studio, hadn’t done gun combat since they did the Terminator games back in the day," says lead designer Emil Pagliarulo. "So creating gun combat was a real challenge. And gun combat is a lot different from, you know, there are melee weapons in Fallout, but most of the combat in Oblivion is melee. It’s up-close, and most of the combat in Fallout is ranged.

"We knew we were never going to be able to, with the time and resources we had, create gun combat that was on par with Call of Duty or Battlefield. So, that led us to creating the VATS system—the Vault-Tec Automated Targeting System."

"I remember pitching it and then talking to Emil about it, him coming with, 'This is how it could work,'" says Todd Howard. "It’s sort of like [Star Wars:] Knights of the Old Republic at the time, phase-based combat, you can set things up. And this game, Burnout, which was this racing game where you crash."

Fallout 4 next-gen update screenshot - piggy bank launcher — (Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

Howard here seems to be referring to Burnout 2: Point of Impact specifically, which had a "Crash" mode in which the goal was to accumulate points by causing as much damage as possible in a single crash. Essentially, you drove at a traffic-heavy intersection as fast as possible and, on impact, the game would switch into a slow-mo camera mode that lingered over all the beautiful destruction you'd just caused. And Todd liked that.

"So Crash mode in Burnout with body parts mixed with phase-based [outcomes]", says Howard. "We had this little presentation and, you know, 'but imagine the car parts are, like, eyeballs and guts!' That was part of the 'Okay, this needs to be kind of over the top,' but also, you could stop the game, and your character can make some decisions. And that’s where you felt the stats of your character more than the run-and-gun, which we did a number of things with your character stuff there."

Howard is realistic about where Fallout 3's combat eventually landed, even if VATS was a great saviour. "Frankly, it ended up where people will play it," says Howard. "It doesn’t feel great in your hands because, you know, it’s not the best first-person shooter, even for its time. It’s kind of handicapped as it comes to that, but it still came together really well."

Not everyone is so down on where they ended up with VATS which, for all the jank, is just tremendous fun to let loose in. "It’s my favourite system," says Pely. "I’ve never been great at first-person shooters, and I play exclusively using VATS. And any game now that doesn’t have it, I miss it—I wish I had it."

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Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."

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