Fallout 3 - The Pitt Screens, Dev Diary

Bethsoft has released their usual trio of new screens for The Pitt, which you can view at the official site, and Senior Producer Jeff Gardiner writes a dev diary about "the process of Game Creation in relation to our Downloadable Content":

Towards the end of the development of a game, there are three pretty well known, but very loosely defined phases, known as Alpha, Beta and finally Gold. Prior to that there are two major phases, Pre-Production and then of course Production itself which is where the bulk of the game goes from documents on paper (or in someone's gray matter) to the screen where we can all enjoy them. It was right before we went Beta that the decision was made to start thinking about our DLC. Now, before you think we just cut existing content from the game in order to milk our fans, let me explain in more detail how we view these various stages.

Pre-Production is a smaller team of core leads, working out the high-level theory from game rendering to character modeling to systems design. It's here where the story is born and concepts are drawn out. On Fallout 3, this phase began while we were still working on Oblivion. For Operation: Anchorage and the other DLC this phase was relatively short as most of the game systems, and obviously our core technology, wouldn't be changing.