Fallout 3 - Post-Play Interview @ GamesRadar

Games Radar has a full interview between Emil Pagliarulo, Todd Howard and PC Gamer's Dan Stapleton.  If you haven't read Dan's preview, it's arguably the best of them (and should be, since he was given 5 hours with the game - much more than most) - and the interview also gives some great insights.  The Q&A starts with a conversation about the Family quest from the preview, so do it read to understand the context:

PCG: Are there any ways to get through that quest besides shooting or talking like I did?

Emil: When you go in talking, the main thing is how you get to [the son], and you did it with the Lady Killer perk, but there are a lot of ways to get through there.

PCG: Do you have a rule for a bare-minimum number of ways to solve a quest?

Todd: No, we just do whatever comes naturally. We made a list initially showing the paths, so that we weren’t doing an overabundance of stealth paths versus other skills so that there was a good matrix, but if something fit in one we did it, and if it didn’t fit…

Emil: But as the game grew, just like we ended up making the game bigger, putting more stuff in, I think the quests themselves started to expand. We realized during playthroughs, you know what, there’s no talking path through this quest, or there’s no stealth path, so we went back and added that in. There are fewer quests and fewer NPCs, but probably just as much dialogue as Oblivion, just in all the variations.

Todd: It’s like when you were doing the bomb quest, and you were asking “Can I do this this way?” And so through testing we asked the same things, like “What if I kill Lucas Sims?” And ok, you have to go to the son. That kind of stuff.

Emil: We wanted to cover as many of those bases as we could.