Fallout 3's VATS system helped compensate for Bethesda's lack of shooting chops: "We were never going to create gun combat that was on par with Call of Duty or Battlefield"

Fallout 3.

Bethesda hadn't dealt with guns in a long time when it came time to develop Fallout 3; thankfully, VATS helped close the distance.

Aside from some Terminator games in the 1990s, Bethesda's bread and butter had been fantasy games and all of the fixings that come with it (swordplay, bows and arrows, magic, etc.). However, Fallout took what the studio had been doing with The Elder Scrolls series and sent it into a sci-fi setting where guns, grenades, and anything you can bash an oversized scorpion with are fair play, leading Bethesda's developers to a problem: how do you make a shooter that also works as an RPG.