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More from Bethesda's Peter Hines, the studio's VP, on Fallout 3: if you were keen on what's to come following the game's release in the form of downloadable content, well, be happy, cause there's gonna be a ton. Talking about what gamers should expect, Hines had this to say:

"The type is really--we want stuff that's going to be several hours. Not just like a one-off thing, but something like where you can download it and play it for X number of hours. It'll be similar to what we did with Knights of the Nine in Oblivion, where it's like whole new quest lines, new stuff, that kind of thing.

We want to do stuff like that, where it's adding hours of tangible stuff to the experience. And it plugs into your existing game, so whether you're starting a new game, or you're playing for 40 hours, you can go off and play this."

Oh, and as for anyone calling the game "Oblivion with guns", they are hurt!

[Lead artist] Istvan Pely: It's two-sided, you know. It's a compliment, and at the same time we set out to make a very different game. We did not start with the design of Oblivion and decide how we were going to change it to make Fallout. We started with, "How is this going to be Fallout?" But we built on experiences we learned with Oblivion. So obviously it's a similar kind of open world--there's experiences with how to make that work, how to keep it exciting, so we applied our lessons learned. It works both ways for us.

Pete Hines: I think the thing that makes it most annoying is that it's said in a tone that's sort of like, that's the best that we could do. For guys like Istvan who have spent literally four years making this game, it really sells short how much time and effort they've put into making this a Fallout game that is true to Fallout. As opposed to just the bare minimum we could do, let's just re-skin all of our creatures to look sort of post-nuclear and just be done with it.

So much more time and effort went into it by the designers and the artists. That's really the only thing that gets me. We love Oblivion, we made it, of course we're proud of it. But just to say that that's all we did, the least amount of effort, really sells short the four years we've put into making this game."

With dedication like this (with the development itself as well as the extensive DLC), I wonder if the series' original creators are not less dissapointed about another studio taking the job due to Interplay's legal ownership of it (last year they expressed how they felt the series was 'theirs').