Fallout's VATS was inspired by Burnout's crash mode, says Todd Howard

With Fallout season 2 wrapped up, Bethesda’s creatives have been conducting retrospective interviews about the series, and a GameInformer feature looks back at Fallout 3’s VATS system — the slow‑mo shooting feature that let players pause combat, pick a spot, then restart and watch the gore fly.

“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. … 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.” Todd Howard recalls pitching ideas that mixed phase‑based combat with a crash‑mode aesthetic. “I remember pitching it and then talking to Emil about it, him coming with, ‘This is how it could work,’” he says.

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