There have been a lot of positives that have come along with the launch for Fallout 4 but the additions to the game that have gotten are the new settlements and workshops that were added into this iteration of the long running series. Lead producer Jeff Gardiner recently talked to Game Informer and told the website the settlements and workshops were actually not supposed to be in the launch version of the game. In fact, those two features were originally going to be brought to the modding community.
It appears Gardiner and the rest of the team went so far as to put a Python compiler into the interactive terminals, but decided to remove it because they thought it was too complicated and would require a keyboard to let people write code. “I remember thinking, ‘If anything has to get cut, the workshop is going to be it,’” Gardiner said. “We had never done something like that before, and it’s big, scary new tech. No one likes big, scary things. As a producer, I was like, ‘In my little jigsaw puzzle of a schedule, if that falls off, that’s the thing that will make me find time to accomplish the other goals we have for this project.’ It was very ambitious, but we stuck to our guns and Todd’s vision.”
Eventually, Gardiner told the magazine that the settlement became so popular with the development team they decided they had to add it to the game. The rest is history and it appears the decision was the right one for Fallout 4.