Dhruin
SasqWatch
Fallout 3 Lead Designer Emil Pagliarulo has answered another bunch of questions at the official forums, this time collected together by Briosafreak's Fallout 3 blog. Here's a sample:
More information.While I enjoyed it [Dark Brotherhood Questline for Oblivion], I found it was not really revolutionary, and as with almost all of the quest lines in Oblivion, it was completely linear.
Emil: True, it was linear, but that was by design. Quests with multiple paths were never planned for Oblivion… with the amount of content we had, we simply didn’t have the time or resources to design them that way. So they had a different, more straightforward structure, and we were totally fine with that.
In Fallout, we have fewer quests, and they tend to have a level of complexity far beyond those in Oblivion. Multiple paths, multiple choices, etc. In the Dark Brotherhood, even if you learned who the traitor was, you couldn’t really affect the outcome. In Fallout 3, a quest like that would certainly have allowed the player more options.