Bethesda writer Emil Pagliarulo, who worked on the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls series, explained how the approach to writing stories in these franchises differs. In an interview with GamesRadar+, he admitted that creating a story in a fantasy universe like Skyrim is easier than in the science fiction world of Fallout.
According to Pagliarulo, fantasy traditionally relies on understandable archetypes. In games like The Elder Scrolls, there is often a "great evil" against which heroes fight, and the line between good and evil is more obvious. The writer notes that such stories are perceived by the player more naturally — "it's easier to determine who is right and who is wrong in them."
The situation is quite different with Fallout. The world after a nuclear disaster, according to the author, lives according to different moral laws. Here you rarely find absolutely positive or negative characters — it's more like "shades of gray", and each faction has its own arguments in favor of its rightness. Such dilemmas make the work on the script not only more interesting, but also noticeably more difficult.