VATS almost didn't survive the transition to Bethesda, says Fallout 3 dev: 'We only just got that working by the time we shipped'

Fallout has a lot of iconic hallmarks—ghouls, deathclaws, radioactive cesspools, and some swingin' music. But it's also iconic for the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (VATS), which sees you using your Pip Boy to target and pop-pop body parts of various wasteland uglies.

While it'd be hard to think of a Fallout game without VATS underlying it, linking gunplay to the classic RPG elements of its predecessors, Fallout 3—the first Fallout game after Bethesda acquired the licence—almost threw the gunplay out with the… uh, gunwater. I've lost track of this metaphor.

That's per an interview in the latest issue of Edge (thanks, Gamesradar). Speaking to lead artist Istvan Pely, it was revealed that "there were some significant challenges figuring out VATS. There was a long period where it was like, 'Is this even fun? Is this worth doing at all? Is anyone even going to use this?'"

To hear Pely describe it, it was a right pain in the butt to get it all sorted—even camera positioning was a big challenge: "We spent so much time basically trying to get the game to figure out where to put the camera so you could see the slow-motion playback. There had to be an algorithm to make sure it didn't get stuck behind an object or in the geometry or something."

What really surprises me, however, is to hear that it was a close call—one that barely made it over the finish line with a working camera intact: "We only just got that working by the time we shipped."

RPG balance is a delicate thing, and to hear that Fallout 3 wasn't being fine-tuned around one of its key features—that being, the ability to target limbs with a percentage chance in cinematic slow-mo—from the get-go? It's honestly sort of shocking.

Mind, this is Fallout 3 we're talking about. Speaking with our very own Ted Litchfield earlier this month, studio and production director Angela Browder confessed that the game's entire pathfinding system had to be reworked just to account for the Liberty Prime section at the end of the dang thing. In that context, it's not a huge stretch to imagine Bethesda barely wrangling a digital camera before launch.