To meet their tight production schedule, designers would often have to draft huge game areas and then move quickly onto the next, leaving vast portions of Fallout 2 sparse or underpopulated, right up until its release date. It was a harried way of working, but it actually helped to cultivate Fallout's absurdist visual style; with swathes of the map still requiring characters, missions, and other playable material right down to the last minute, Fallout 2's artists and programmers were creatively set loose, and developed appropriately strange ideas.
“I basically sat down and thought up everything and anything I could to fill these spaces,” Spitzley says. “That's where a lot of the crazier stuff, like the treasure-hunting dwarf or the Radscorpion that played chess, ended up coming from.”
Characters’ talking heads, seen up-close during cutscenes and conversations, were animated using 3D clay models and a laser scanner - the resulting dialogue sequences, all big eyebrows and facial tics, helped define Fallout’s amusing, chunky aesthetic. To lighten the long, sometimes intense working days, Black Isle’s designers were encouraged to add-in easter eggs, and nods to their favourite films. As a result, Fallout 2 teemed with references to popular culture, as would Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Fallout 4.
