We’ve put up the latest in a series of Developer Diaries on the Fallout 3 Official Site. Titled “Notes on Pulling the Sky Down: The Level Design of Fallout 3,” it’s an inside look on how our LD’s helped create Fallout 3. Here’s a sample of the diary, which was written by Lead Level Designer, Joel Burgess:

“For all her grandeur, D.C. also presented us with some design quandaries that we had never encountered before. Early prototypes showed us that simply building a city layout in the open world was not only a performance nightmare, but also prevented us from creating the kinds of gameplay scenarios we were eager to attempt. We also looked at other open world games, like GTA and Crackdown, with expansive, open cities, and those games allow the player to move around the world in a much different way than we felt fit Fallout 3. Players don’t have access to fast cars or superhuman jumping abilities. Rather, explorers visiting the Capital Ruins do so in a thorough and deliberate manner, and we wanted to turn our attention to a density of destruction suitable to a devastated city. To this end, we focused on combining the visual focus of level design in other first-person titles like Doom 3 or Call of Duty 2 with the exploration aspect of games like Beyond Good and Evil or any Zelda title. These influences, as well as our own ambitions for the game, helped guide the level design of Fallout 3′s D.C.”

You can read the whole piece here, as well as check out the previous diaries.