War… War never changes. But game design does.
Fallout has a long and revered history as one of the most open, expansive and influential
computer role-playing game series ever made. Crafted by the geniuses of the now-defunct
Black Isle Studios, the first two games in the franchise sported an unusually open game
world where you are literally able to go anywhere and do anything as soon as you leave the starting
area. They were lauded for breaking the chains so many games shackled their players to, and
constantly begot exploration and exploitation. You could spend a hundred hours scouring the
wasteland conquering, helping or destroying the remnants of civilization, or you could
tactically skip all that and beat the game in about twenty minutes. The games were richly
written and expertly designed sandboxes, and you're not going to find many other role-playing
games that allow for such freedom.
But how could such beloved and innovative game franchise become a rusted husk of itself
over the years, only to be picked up by Bethesda years later? And what did we gain (or lose)
when the new developers refashioned the game in their own style? To understand these questions
and surmise their answers, we're going to need to dive deep into the history of the
series, and what's changed over time.
And hopefully by the end of this video, you will agree with me on the premise that modern-day
Fallout isn't faithful to the theme and mechanics of the original Fallout games, and
would be better off had they been.
In the late 1980's, computer RPGs were blowing up. Far from the text-based adventures of
Rogue or abstract visuals of Wizardry. Graphics were improving (but you know, still had a
way to go) and experiences were moving from the confined spaces of narrow hallways into
immersive, living and breathing worlds where hundreds of characters and creatures roam
and go about their lives. One of the earlier examples of this new type of game was Wasteland,
an innovative game Brian Fargo and his team at Interplay conceived where you roam the
post-nuke American southwest with a team of Army Rangers descendants. It was compelling
and immersive, and offered a bleak atmosphere and unique survival mechanics not found in
many games at the time.
Despite its success, interference by publisher Electronic Arts (yes, THAT Electronic Arts)
helped neuter the release of its sequel, the third planned entry was cancelled and EA wouldn't
let Interplay have the intellectual property.
Nearly ten years later, Interplay designer Tim Cain pitched a new game idea that would
eventually become Fallout. It was originally going to license the Generic Universal Role-Playing
System (also known as GURPS) for the game, which helped inform its deep RPG roots.
After much deliberation over the game's intended setting (one idea included time travel
and dinosaurs), and with the input of artist Leonard Boyarsky, the post-apocalypse was
decided upon and the game was pitched as a spiritual successor to Wasteland. The Fallout
team were media sponges and regularly pulled inspiration from books, movies and shows during
development.
Inspirations include 'The Road Warrior's' bleak wasteland apocalypse strewn with broken
people and rusted wreckage, the brutal morality and the cloistered madness of an underground
vault of 'A Boy and His Dog', the iconic retro-future robotics of Forbidden Planet,
the nuclear and crisis imagery of 'The Day After', the "last normal human versus
a harsh new world" themes of the book 'I Am Legend', the chilling black and white
stills timed to a voiceover of 'La Jetee', and the over-the-top laser guns and one-piece
suits of 'Flash Gordon'. These influences mixed like a fine cocktail and resulted in
a fantastic unique setting, and to top it all off, a heavy dose of carefully crafted
dark humor was added -- it was "Fallout" to a T.
Old Fallout games had a carefully balanced mix of harsh, threatening environments and
enemies and pitch-black humor -- some of it emergent and player-driven like shooting a
guy in the groin and having him shriek in pain about his family jewels, as well as thematic
gags, movie references and the like. The iconic Vault Boy illustrations incorporated into
the game's stat, skill and perk descriptions and throughout the manual were one of its
most brilliant encapsulations of the game's tone. The vintage cartoons depicting violent
or mature acts were charming, instructive and hilarious.
Part of Tim's inspiration for the gray morality the game professed was as a counterpoint to
games like the beloved Ultima series, where you play the unwaveringly heroic Avatar, and
can't stray from the path of good and righteousness.
Fallout was one of the earliest games to explore so many mature themes: prostitution, slavery,
murder, theft, sex, gambling, drinking, drug addiction and even child killing -- much of
which no "reputable" publisher would even consider putting in a game today. Fallout
went all the way, perhaps a little too far as European censorship demanded the game be
toned down or be denied an acceptable rating. This resulted in children being completely
removed for some international releases.
Combat in the game was turn-based, tactical but also smooth and elegant. It takes just
a few minutes to "get" the system and its quirks, but proves to be fun and engaging
many hours on. You could use each weapon in multiple ways, punching and kicking, thrusting
and throwing spears, hip-firing or making an aimed shot with the Vault-Tec Assisted
Targeting System (or V.A.T.S.). Each type of attack had different damage capability,
range, accuracy and action point (A.P.) expenditure. Each movement step cost one AP, opening up
your inventory to use items or equip another item cost a couple AP, and so you would tactically
plan your movement, reloading and attacks to maximize each round.
Glazed with realistically modeled character sprites and marinated in ultra-violence,
Fallout offered visceral deaths, fitting for the harsh world it thrust you into. Shots
from a Gauss rifle can bust open a torso, exposing a rib cage and a minigun will churn
its victim into tiny giblets. Whether getting melted into a pile of goo from a laser gun,
sliced in half, or charred to a crisp, every death feels both satisfying and appropriately
macabre.
As the plot dictated, you were a Vault Dweller sent out into the wasteland to find a replacement
part without which your entire community would perish. The vanilla game demanded you retrieve
this Water Chip within 150 in-game days or you get the Game Over screen. This was a sticking
point for me and many others as it made an already punishing game even more stressful.
Later on, even Tim Cain's team came to this conclusion and released a patch to greatly
expand the limit so players were able to explore and discover more of the world without fear
of getting into a place where the playthrough is incompletable.
Despite this though, the game was near-perfect considering its era and the technology available
at the time. It was a true open world which let you do good, evil or ambiguous actions
with consequences but without artificial limitations. Its Perk system inspired many future games,
including one of Dungeons and Dragons later features. And expertly crafted quests which
always had multiple methods of approach like fighting through it, talking your way out
or sneaking around an obstacle -- which rewarded ingenuity and granted the player a sense of
freedom that no other game does today.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Such was the philosophy for Fallout's anticipated
sequel. Being iterative to a fault and not breaking much ground in many ways, it maintained
a steady hand and restraint. And with the added experience and bug fixes to the original's
engine -- arguably a better experience than the original.
In 1998's Fallout 2, you play a descendant of the original game's protagonist, living
in a village founded by them generations ago. The sequel has a lot more tribal and primitive
cultures in the setting, reflecting the changes and rolling backward society would go through
if all their electric conveniences and governments were vanquished overnight.
There is something truly horrifying when you are traversing the more dangerous parts of
the wasteland and you realize you have a lethal amount of radiation and not enough meds or
resources to cure you. Fallout effectively communicated the horrible reality that is
radiation poisoning: where you're essentially a walking corpse waiting for your timer to
run out. Something old-school Fallout fans will relate.
The "talking heads" of important non-player characters return from the original game,
and again had so much personality, art and thought put into them. These were time-consuming
and expensive to develop in the 90s, starting with hand-sculpted models which were scanned,
rigged and animated to voiced dialogue and expressions in the game. Obviously showing
its age now, the unusual look of their faces, along with the uncanny valley animation still
somehow works today. They were some of the weirdest, malformed and interesting game characters
to date -- perfect denizens of the broken world of Fallout.
The first two game's success led to Interplay ordering another game in the franchise, and
the long, arduous road toward a sequel began. First, a spinoff called Fallout Tactics came
out in 2001 to a lukewarm reception. Removing most exploration, role-playing and NPC interaction
and instead dropping you into enclosed X-COM-style missions with minimal base management, Tactics
was a combat-centric sidestep from the series roots.
Then in 2004, a console-only game called Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel was released for the
PS2 and Xbox -- now scrapping the tactical combat too for a simple twin-stick shooter
with a rock-heavy soundtrack. This was during a trend where PC RPGs were on a decline and
console spinoffs of games like EverQuest and Baldur's Gate were were developed using
popular brand recognition to attract sales.
A true sequel was on the way but delays and major changes to the game's engine, formula
and development staff took its toll on production. This project is now referred to as 'Van
Buren', and though it took heavy strokes from the first two games, it made sweeping
changes to the combat and presentation. Keeping the ¾ perspective, but now sporting a 3D
game engine with particle effects, advanced lighting and the like, Van Buren still *looked*
like a Fallout game. It did however have a realtime combat system which changed things
drastically. No longer based around turns and actions points like the original games,
Van Buren seemed to play more like BioWare's Baldur's Gate series, with fast-paced combat
broken up by occasional pauses for specific actions.
It was ambitious, no doubt taking the massive scale and freedom of 1 & 2 and thrusting it
into a 3D world with a proposed multiplayer mode and a completely revamped combat system,
Van Buren was sadly shelved after Interplay laid off its PC development team. With both
Fallout 3 and Baldur's Gate 3 cancelled, and key staff like Brian Fargo and Tim Cain
having left, a year later they struck a deal with Bethesda (of The Elder Scrolls fame)
to develop a completely new build of Fallout 3.
Being a shell of its former glory, the struggling Interplay eventually sold the rights to Fallout
to Bethesda in the end for just under 6 million dollars, with the caveat that Interplay could
develop a Fallout massively multiplayer online game within a specified time period. A clause
which Interplay did not fulfill and therefore the rights in their entirety fell to Bethesda
after years of legal conflict.
Seeing the post-apocalypse for the first time full 3D with the verticality of multi-story
buildings, hills and cliffs is pretty amazing. A seamless world with no outdoor zones was
a huge step forward, technologically. And you can tell the new creators of the franchise
took significant care into replicating the superficial features of the series like the
archetypal green interface, Vault Boy and the power armor design.
Bethesda Game Studios had been in development of their version of Fallout 3 since 2004,
two years before their next entry to their flagship Elder Scrolls series (Oblivion) launched.
The two games shared an engine, technology and tools between them, and share many of
Bethesda's mainline series features, as well as its quirks, bugs and issues. In fact
many have made the argument that Bethesda played it safe, did what they were comfortable
with and essentially built "Oblivion with guns" in 2008. Though due to inexperience
with first-person shooters, the basic gunplay handled poorly compared to any modern shooter
on the market. You got very little feedback on hits, the zoom level of aiming down sights
was trivial, and you felt like you were missing shots you shouldn't have been.
In an effort to stay loyal to the franchise and to add a difficulty valve for players
less skilled at shooting, Bethesda re-integrated the VATS targeting feature into the game.
Respectable, but it divided the game's combat into two disconnected systems. Some players
didn't like breaking up the flow of combat with incessant pauses so they ignored it.
For others though, the game's crude weapon handling led to "gaming" the system. Hiding
behind cover, waiting for Action Points to recover then peeking around to use VATS to
get a few headshots, rinse and repeat. Insufficient tactical depth of the AI probably contributed
to this problem too, as this wasn't an issue in the original turn-based games.
Item stats, skills and the perk system were redesigned to be more generous, and incidentally,
less realistic. Now even mundane equipment like baseball caps can add an entire point
to your Perception attribute. Different types of armor would "magically" increase certain
profession skills or even unarmed combat. This strayed from the functionality-driven
system of old where items would give you straightforward bonuses rather than unrealistic ones.
Perks are now granted at every level up instead of every three, and many could be taken multiple
times. This seemed rewarding, but also felt diluted from the original perk design, which
made each choice more impactful.
Fallout 3 borrowed Oblivion's universal face system, which was effective at easily
creating hundreds of NPCs and allowed player customization, but often resulted in people
who resembled burn victims, or just looked awkward with badly integrated hair.
Interplay's and Bethesda's creations feature vastly different approaches to the soundtrack
and audial atmosphere. All games would open up to a nostalgic 1950's-esque tune to introduce
you to the world before the Bomb. But the in-game soundtrack of Fallout 1 & 2 were ambient,
industrial, and at times, primal. With metallic sounds like distant screeching metal tubes,
as if hearing the final death throes of a metal-laden world.
Old Fallout had never made any inclination to nationalism, Americana or old-timey pride.
As you looked upon the remnants of the United States, all you saw was a dead nation. If
you listen closely, you might make out the crackling of what sounds like a Geiger counter,
the simmer of the radiated landscape. You can almost hear the cries of the long dead,
woven into the many layers of atmosphere and soundscapes.
Contrasted to New Fallout, you'll notice a greater emphasis on the brassy tunes of
mid-20th century music on the radio (likely influenced by the popular radio stations of
Grand Theft Auto), with ambient music featuring cinematic strings with hints of flutes and
drums, sometimes even sounding like patriotic marching tunes. It relies too heavily on real-world
instruments, and feels too familiar… too comfortable… too orchestral.
Then there's use of "oldies music" in the Fallout games. Old Fallout only played
1950's-style songs during a pre-war video or during the intro. Afterward it wouldn't
be referenced again. Humming to Bob Crosby while firing nukes at supermutants in New
Fallout was pretty funny the first time you did it, but it dilutes the game's atmosphere,
making it charming and quaint -- like a "GTA: Mad Max Edition" of sorts.
Bethesda has a track record of underperforming but underwhelming technical prowess, and Fallout
3 was no exception. The lighting system was way too ambient and lacked almost any trace
of shadow maps or proper obfuscation even at nighttime. Everything just fell into a
gray monotonous tone, only to be detailed by grainy overly-contrasted textures. The
original games weren't exactly known for cutting edge graphic fidelity, but Fallout
3 was in many ways an eyesore from an aesthetic standpoint.
Possibly to compensate for the grey color palette, a green filter was used in nearly
every area of the game. You could make the case that green is commonly associated with
poison, rot or illness -- fitting, but a little over the top.
Bethesda had been moving toward tighter and more linear stories that continually pulled
you toward your next objective. The stricter narrative and forced scenario design proved
antithetical to the very core of Fallout games, peaking in one of the more notorious mainline
quests which leads you through a fort manned by children.
The only options were to convince them through having a high Speech skill, having a particular perk, or performing the quest
they demand you to do. You are mystically stripped of any intimidation or combat capabilities
while in Little Lamplight, breaking immersion and disappointing fans of the original games
where one could threaten, kill or attack anything in the wasteland without limitation, but not
without consequence.
I can't stress enough how scenarios like this and others, where the developers take
your agency away from you and tell you what you need to accomplish -- sometimes outright
barring other areas off with invisible walls or insurmountable odds -- just acts as a rap
on the knuckles of players, rather than giving them challenging opportunities.
2010's Fallout: New Vegas is widely considered a throwback to the Old Fallout game design
philosophy, and with good reason. Many of the original Black Isle Studios developers
had gone on to work at Obsidian Entertainment, who were hired on as the developers of the
Fallout 3 spinoff game, New Vegas. As you might expect, the game has an overarching
gambling and casino theme, especially in the titular city of New Vegas, where the bright
neon lights shine and corruption and addiction could be felt in the darker street corners.
Black Isle veterans like Josh Sawyer (who worked on the Icewind Dale series) and Chris
Avellone (one of the directors of Fallout 2) were more familiar with the old-school
RPG design pillars so pervasive of the original Fallout games. Unlike the design team of Fallout
3, which was composed of later Elder Scrolls and first person action game designers.
In this unusual twist of events where original designers had to follow up a reboot of the
franchise they worked on, New Vegas is a curious beast. Utilizing the game engine and toolset
of Fallout 3 (for better or worse), the game borrowed significant worldbuilding and characters
from the cancelled Van Buren project (of which Avellone wrote much of years prior). In a
second chance to revive the "Fallout 3" that never was, New Vegas was a lot riskier
and innovative than its Bethesda-developed predecessor.
Introducing a more open world, unshackled from the overbearing scenario and mission
design of Fallout 3, and the re-introduction of Tagged skills and the Reputation system
from Fallout 1 & 2 were welcome ones. No longer tied to the omnipresent "Karma" system
where everyone magically knows your moral character before meeting you, you could now
earn brownie points or notoriety with individual factions like towns, gangs or organizations
-- adding a deeper weight of responsibility to your actions as well as blurring the line
between good and evil.
Some skills were overhauled in New Vegas, including Speech. No longer did it roll the
dice with your stats and skills as a bonus and compare it to the difficulty of the task,
Speech became a binary skill gate. If your Speech skill exceeded a predetermined number,
you succeed, else you fail. While I can see why this change was made to deter the "quicksave,
quickload, repeat-type" players. It's a controversial change that many including
myself weren't completely on-board with as it removes guesswork, unpredictability
and immersion knowing that you simple need "X of a given number" to succeed -- no
matter what.
One of the greatest offerings of New Vegas was 'Hardcore Mode', a simulationist difficulty
mode which makes hunger, thirst and sleep real factors that you had to worry about and
regularly maintain. Recovery items would work slowly rather than instantly, radiation was
a bigger threat as you would rid of it slower and you would get much more of an intake from
dirty water, as well as the risk of permanent companion death rather than them simply getting
knocked out. Hardcore Mode was a legitimate step forward for those wanting a gritty post-apocalypse
simulator.
Unfortunately, a combination of Bethesda's infamously buggy engine, toolkit, and a team
less experienced with them, New Vegas had many technical issues, as well as a frankly
glum aesthetic. Replacing Fallout 3's constant green color filter with a brown one, the game
apparently aims to steal the "Brownest Game Ever" crown from the likes of Red Faction:
Guerrilla and Resistance 3 -- perhaps as a rebuttal of the endless green-tinted grays
of Fallout 3. The notorious bugs and quest issues that surround pretty much any game
Bethesda is associated with still plague this game too. Sometimes non-player characters
will do odd or random things, get caught between quest triggers, or badmouth another character
as if they aren't in the room while they are actually two feet from them. Funny, for
sure. Immersion-breaking? Absolutely.
Another bugbear I have with the game is its heavy sense of "Wild West" in every aspect,
which though a unique twist to the franchise, gives each area and encounter a milder and
almost nostalgic Western tone, rather than the harsh reality that is Fallout. It definitely
adds some color to many places, but the continual barrage of southern accents, cowboy hats and
six-shooters got under my skin a bit after a while. Yes, Vegas is in the American Southwest,
but I didn't need that fact pushed down my throat at every opportunity.
Even if the game had a weak introduction and the mainline quest wasn't particularly compelling
either -- All in all, despite some rough edges and arguably weak narrative and setting details,
mechanically speaking, New Vegas is the marriage between Bethesda's 3D reboot and its old-school
roots. Role-playing and player agency was re-emphasized through more intricate scenario
and quest design, your actions were felt much more strongly throughout the wasteland due
to the Reputation system, and the game world threw the doors wide open to you -- a grand
first step toward the glory days of the original games.
A half decade after New Vegas's release we finally got a follow-up, this time from
Bethesda again. Fallout 4 hones in on storyline, shooting mechanics and adds base-building
and expanded crafting to the mix.
Bethesda attempts another personal story, but instead of the "following in your father's
footsteps" plot of Fallout 3, this game puts you in the shoes of a pre-war civilian
who is ushered to a vault right before the bombs hit. You lose your house, spouse and
the world as you know it within the first few minutes of the game, and the narrative
pushes you on to find your stolen baby as the main quest.
But The Last of Us this is not. The plot setup is so sudden and forced, you don't build
a connection to or care about any of it, and you'll easily get distracted by everything
else in the game world and lose sight of what is supposed to be your character's only
connection to their past self and identity. Though an interesting angle to take and I
applaud its creativity during the character creation sequence, this intro is ultimately
weak in my book because (A.) it fails to emotionally invest you in the story and paints your adventure
into a corner, and (B.) the nuclear war is over in an instant through cinematic time
lapsing -- trivializing the catalyst for the entire series' setting.
Tinkering with guns, armor and building settlements are easily the biggest innovations it brought
to the table. This was clearly influenced by the popular trend of survival, exploration
and crafting games like the multi-billion dollar franchise Minecraft. And honestly,
it's probably the most fun to be had in the game, but it can lead to lollygagging
around for in-game months, rather than what should be the pertinent mission or danger
at hand.
All games have this problem of the player's actions being inconsistent with the situation
the game presents, and has been coined "ludo-narrative dissonance" by analysts in the past. But
whereas Fallout 1's imposing time limit was off-putting to casual players, Fallout
4's complete indifference to sidesteps off of your main mission is laughable at times.
Though commendable work went into revamping Fallout 4's out-of-VATS combat in this game,
with slicker shooting mechanics developed with the help of former Bungie staff, character
progression was stripped down even further, revealing a system streamlined like their
previous game, Skyrim. It was busier to look at and basically built your character around
perks entirely, further simplifying the game into a first-person shooter with RPG elements,
rather than the other way around.
A perfect example of this simplistic design philosophy Bethesda is enamored with can be
found in the revamped Radiation system. Compared to the creeping threat of rads in the earlier
games, where you only get text hints of the radioactive nature of each area. Radiation
poisoning was an insidious and creeping death, just as it is in real life, sometimes living
with few symptoms for days without realizing you had a lethal dose.
As well as the big number popups every couple of seconds in radiated areas as introduced
in the last two games, Fallout 4 removes radiation as a meter entirely, instead making rad poisoning
simply a minus to your maximum hitpoints. This not only strips any semblance of realism
of rad poisoning but is immediately applied and metered.
A weak conviction to the setting plagued this game. Buildings stand strong with mostly-intact
paint, museums are barely scathed, food is intact and edible tucked in nooks and crannies,
most NPC's clothes are in good condition with little wear and tear, barbecues aren't
rusted out and lawn furniture are mostly unscathed from lifetimes of oxidization, guns and ammo
in sewers and other nonsensical places, you get the idea. Compare Fallout 4's world
with present-day Detroit and honestly it doesn't look all that bad...
And we're expected to believe in this world two whole centuries after a rain of atom bombs?
I don't think so.
The addition of a fully-voiced protagonist led to simplifying dialogue trees and narrowing
the variety of choices you had during conversation, leading to the game having "Mass Effect"
morality -- where you really only have good-spirited dialogue interactions, with only a couple
edgier or snarky responses as alternates -- a stark contrast to previous games which allowed
controversial or heinous acts and dialogue options.
This led to a tremendous backlash from hardcore enthusiasts interested in the role-playing aspects of the series.
Bethesda also ignored many of the advancements of New Vegas, namely the Reputation and Faction
systems. Instead, you are given fewer main factions, including the Minutemen, an on-the-nose
reference to colonial American militia. The problem with this particular faction and the
new settlement system led to the player building, customizing and maintaining various settlements
and their inhabitants, becoming sort of a post-apocalyptic superintendent who must babysit
the colonies of the wasteland -- a far cry from the "lone wanderer" role you played
in the original games.
I believe the Old Fallout setting succeeded through its equilibrium -- a delicate balance
of post-nuclear horror, retro-futuristic nostalgia and dark humor. The designers at Bethesda
took the inspired source material and translated many of its iconic setting elements to the
new games like Nuka Cola, Vault Boy, and many of the gun and armor designs, but they did
so literally and mechanically, missing the heart and soul of the originals.
In other words, New Fallout's setting contains more or less the same components, but mixed
in different quantities. And if you'd ask a bartender about mixing drinks, they'd
probably tell you that mixing the same ingredients in numerous ways will come out with wildly
different results.
The world of Fallout is broken. The nuclear apocalypse was a reset button for humanity
-- which has regressed back to its primal nature. Civilization has become savage, tribalistic,
and brutal.
The original team at Interplay and Black Isle Studios understood that concept and let it
pervade throughout the Fallout setting. Little of this was communicated through the Bethesda
games. They were cleaner, orderly, and they were too busy trying to tell their story to
allow you the freedom to tell your own.
Old Fallout showcased a world whose ethos was shattered by the nuclear bomb. New Fallout
let you build a gun that fired nuclear bombs.
Old Fallout's world was persistent, and challenged and threatened you but ultimately
bent to your will with enough skill and effort...
New Fallout's world revolved around you -- welcomed, guided and worked to bend you
to its will, like you were just a passenger on a tour they had planned out for you…
None of these entries are bad games, and there are aspects to love about each of them, but
it's clear to me that the series has shifted gears, and in some ways for the worse. The
future of Fallout looks more like a first-person shooter/explorer, rather than a tactical survival
RPG.
We can hope someone picks up the mantle and leads us to the greatness that was Fallout
in its prime once again. I'd rather not let the series wither away as a husk of its
former glory, and instead give us another journey, one which explores the landscape
and ethics of a post-nuclear world once again.
I hope you found this video informational. What are your thoughts on the way Fallout
has changed over the years? Are you an old-school purist who shakes their head at Fallout 4's
missteps, or do you like the changes Bethesda has made over the years? Or perhaps you're
itching for Obsidian to return with a follow-up to New Vegas? Let's discuss in the comments.
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