There are many game franchises that have stuck with me for the majority of my life. Just scratching the surface are things like Zelda, Mario, Metal Gear, Elder Scrolls, and of course the reason for this whole spiel: Fallout. Things have changed dramatically for many of my favorite franchises: Previously mentioned Nintendo titles doing Groundhog’s Day time loops and traveling on the high seas, and going from running on planets to controlling dinosaurs; the Silent Hill franchise shifting from tense horror to intense action; even my man Duke Nukem, the king himself, eventually playing with shit literally and shitting the bed financially. But the Fallout franchise has seeped its way into my very bones, and I’m bathed in the painful phosphorescent glow of its being.
I’m a glutton for punishment when it comes to these games.
Yes, in a shocking revelation for literally no one, I’m one of the old heads who started with the original titles in the series. I actually started with Fallout 2, then went back and tied up my loose ends, years before Bethesda Softworks got their hands on the IP. And of course, I loved those games, and even Tactics when I got around to it, despite my preference as a lone wanderer or part- of-two. Isometric turn-based RPGs, you know your boy loves that shit! On top of a dark and bleak apocalyptic backdrop, featuring an underlying twist of wacky sci-fi humor, a deep alt-history built lore that just won’t quit, over the top brutal violence with a side of an option to avoid it? Come on, that’s a direct quote from my diary under “tightly crafted Zelda: A Link to the Past clone.”
The writing was top notch and the variety of character builds and outcomes was quite impressive at the time. Especially considering how much it drew from things like Mad Max, 50’s Pulp, mid-century Popular Mechanics mockups, and so on, as opposed to the well-trodden territory of “not-quite-Tolkien fantasy” that we find as the backdrop of many games of the same genre. Readers of my First Six Hours column will vouch for how much a unique RPG backdrop draws me in, given the forty-six plus hours I’ve put into Disco Elysium with a glitchy character model best described as “Flesh Ribbons Cop.”
The survival of society and the growth of the New California Republic, set against the machinations of the mutated monstrosity The Master with his Super Mutant experiments, plus some pre-war government remnants and a corporation who manufactured Vaults -bomb shelters to secretly use for experimentation- thrown in for good measure. A city of irradiated humans, living a second life in a wild world. Raiders, scavengers, nuclear energy, even hidden aliens. Fallout hooked me so much, I followed along with the Fallout Bible, a collection of production notes and diaries released by Fallout 2 designer Chris Avellone. I ate that shit up, the history of the world they had built, and the details peppered throughout were captivating, and the uniqueness of it all while still having obvious references and inspirational connections was a fine balance that I needed more of.
Then Bethesda slid into the chat.
Look, back in those days, I was rabid for Bethesda too, thanks to The Elder Scrolls franchise. Morrowind and to a lesser extent Oblivion (a trend began so soon!) were RPGs that really spoke to me about how the genre could expand. Around ‘99 or 2000, I had moved exclusively to playing new titles on consoles, so having missed things like Deus Ex initially, Morrowind was my golden standard for how RPGs could transition to a three-dimensional format like that. It felt like there were consequences to your actions, you had to learn how to better use a map, limited fast travel meant actually exploring and encountering random situations. My favorite things that translate well from traditional tabletop RPGs were there for me. Oblivion toned down some of what felt so good there, made it a bit more railroaded, gave you less guilds, added level scaling. Bethesda had taken some steps backward, and though I didn’t hate it, Oblivion did show them already drifting a touch away from their more role-playing roots.
Then came Fallout 3, and in the beginning, shit was good. It had an interesting story set on the opposite side of the country from what we had seen, in Washington DC, likely the worst-hit place in America when the bombs dropped. For a tutorial, you got to witness the birth of your character and moments throughout their life growing up in a Vault, in first-person. Plus your dad is Liam Neeson! The main narrative of fleeing the vault for the first time in not only your lifetime, but seemingly generations, to find your missing Qui-Gon Dad and help build a water purifier for the Capital Wasteland is pretty good, with interesting characters and places to see. Especially if you’re familiar with the area in real life, Bethesda does do a solid job with world design, I will give them that. The transition from top-down perspective and traversing an overworld map, to actually walking around and experiencing the apocalypse through your own eyes was quite the experience. But for every new-feeling thing there was, there were about a dozen familiar, but not in the right way, kinds of things.
The move to the East Coast was exciting for a few reasons, the biggest for me was the potential to see things that we never could have in California. The first time I ran into a Mirelurk -giant fuck-off Maryland crabs with no rubber bands big enough to hold them down in sight- I was so thrilled to experience a shocking new species. But then came the Deathclaws. Arguably, a truly badass monster beast, a massive lizard creature with knives for claws, I’m not here to say that Deathclaws aren’t neat. But I am here to pedantically point out that they’re created through experiments done on Jackson’s chameleons, an animal indigenous to the California region, and Florida at the closest. We Fallout fans sometimes try to rationalize it by saying that “maybe the experiments were sent from California before the bombs fell,” “they just used labs on opposite sides of the country to do the exact same research, instead of using animals indigenous to the region, because of reasons.” When we all know it’s because there’s a certain point that Bethesda can be incredibly lazy despite being an industry giant.
I could spend an insane letter-count listing off the lore things they decided to just rehash with flimsy at best in-universe reasoning, but I won’t. I could rant about how unnecessary jamming Super Mutants into the game was or having exactly the same factions as the West Coast in the Brotherhood of Steel and Enclave. But I won’t, because there are things outside of the world of Fallout I can bitch about that prove the lack of quality control much better. They’ve used the same engine for nine years now, over the span of two console generations and six title releases, and while that’s not exactly out of the norm for the industry, the quality issues here are a special kind of thing. The Creation Engine is marred with debilitating bugs including issues loading assets, physics shenanigans, and full-on console crashes, and these are things we even faced with the engine they built it from, Gamebryo. Over that much time, not only have they created new and exciting bugs, they’ve not exactly managed to fix the old ones. Hell, even Fallout 76, the game I will be praising momentarily, is the only title in the entire lifetime of my Xbox One to crash it due to an overheat, after less than four hours of continuous play. I know it’s a huge game, but if my XBone can make it through fifteen straight hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it should be able to survive an Event mission.
If you need any more proof, then just google “Elder Scrolls V releases,” and see how they’ve essentially become a company that just re-releases Skyrim. I’d make a joke, but not only is that so cliche at this point that it makes pies to the face look like fucking Space Balls, but also I don’t find it the least bit funny. These guys hold two of the most beloved franchise of their genre, and they spend their time doing what, further breaking their engine and porting Skyrim to T.I. graphing calculators? They take forever to release fixes, focus their attention on their microtransactions stores, and then hold releases of no-information teaser trailers at events like they’re about to send Todd Howard into space. And we let them because they make son of a bitching Fallout and Elder Scrolls. So of course, if they get away with lazy design, then they’ll get lazy with the lore. I understand that Super Mutants, Vaults, Deathclaws, the 1950s retrofuture sensibilities, and the Brotherhood of Steel Power Armor are recognizable touchstones for audiences. That’s smart marketing. But my tin foil hat makes me say it’s slacker than even that when they continue to launch buggy games with increasingly simplified RPG mechanics.
Fallout 4 was infuriating for me at times. The graphics looked wonderful, the gameplay was so much tighter, but important things felt off. While the main protagonist had always been without a voice, they were far from silent, with interesting questions and outlooks the player could use, sometimes depending on skill, to advance plots and learn details. For Fallout 4, the protagonist had recorded dialogue, and the dialogue tree choices were worded vaguely, leading to some bizarre interactions. While at first, this may seem small, for me an important aspect of Role-Playing Games is the “role-playing.” By not knowing exactly what my character was going to say, I was never quite sure of how to completely attach to them in a meaningful way. I was always second-guessing their next move, as opposed to immersing myself in their existence. This went even further with the very railroading main plotline. Not only was I expected to relate to the barely predictable protagonist, but I also had to have feelings for their spouse and baby.
And folks, I’m not shy about how little I enjoy real babies.
While my personal detachment from the parental plotline was something that is partly about my taste, it also impacted the pacing of the game at its core. Oftentimes in Fallout, there is a pressing matter of some kind you must attend to, but either the time limit is something like a month, or it isn’t exactly life or death. It was hard to justify scouring an entire building for duct tape rolls, knowing my kidnapped baby was out there somewhere. Accepting to take a side mission involving boosting the morale of the local depressed radio DJ feels a little superfluous when in the same breath my character is lamenting the loss of their dear Shaun. It made me want to rush the main story, power through the areas, and skip my favorite part of all Bethesda RPGs: Exploring a bizarre world, reading in-game lore to learn the details and little self-contained stories, and breathing in a life that isn’t my own.
And here they come, poking through the forest like some mutated cryptid, Fallout 7-damn-6.
Now don’t get me wrong, I was an inconsolable pile of ass when the news dropped that the next Fallout was going to be an online affair. Not only do I have very few friends, I less jokingly like to play games by myself. Especially these big ol’ explore-a-thons. Anyone who loves me would soon wish my slow demise if they spent an hour having to wait on me to scour every single corner and read every single note left behind. I know for sure it’s a chore to just be near me when it’s going on, judging from my wife’s dead-eyed stares, so it would certainly be a living hell for anyone actually wasting precious game time with me. I was already sour about the mere existence of Elder Scrolls Online in those days too, and while knowing that 76 wasn’t a full-blown MMO made my breathing slow a bit, my heart was still near to bursting anytime I thought of some clown punching me in the head while I tune my power armor, and I turn to find it is a 12-year-old with a god complex.
But I did do a Free Play Weekend test drive for a few hours, found I really enjoyed the map, notes, and audio logs. The base building was fun and more justifiable since I didn’t need to search for my kidnapped child between wall placements. However, the strangers running around were still off-putting and I hated the lack of human NPCs. Yes, that is correct. I want humans in my Fallout, but I would prefer them to be fictional characters, written and voiced by professionals. I also don’t like reality TV when compared to fiction.
I also don’t really like reality.
Anyway, that was that. I had decided to finally let go of what I hoped the franchise would be and just went back and playing a heavily modded version of 4. But then the Wastelanders update came out, which featured apparent fixes and added human NPCs with new storylines. My ears perked up, but I still wasn’t ready to try again, and be disappointed, just wasting fifty bucks. Yet suddenly, everything changed. The Wastelanders edition was put on the Xbox Game Pass one faithful day, and it was finally my time.
I have played it, and it is good.
Is it great? Oh, buddy not by a long shot. There are still plenty of our familiar buggy costars, featuring of course the aforementioned overheating crash. The… other gamers are still there, but there are pretty strict combat rules in place to lower griefing, though newbies might still follow you around and punch you sometimes to initiate conversation, even though neither of you has a mic and waving plus thumbs up doesn’t exactly equal communication. While the things I’m growing tired of are still there in the form of Super Mutants only twenty-five years after the bombs dropped and yet more Deathclaws, there are way more variations of wildlife from the region. Things like multi-headed opossum and giant ticks, and even mutated cryptids famous to the area like the damn Mothman himself. It is the most diverse and unique variety of creatures we’ve seen in a Bethesda Fallout yet, and that combined with the gorgeous West Virginia map and interesting side stories scattered throughout, it really feels like a more role-playable Fallout. This is even despite the toned down perk system which revolves around trading cards as opposed to using and organically growing skills, but the cards are varied enough and the system is flexible enough for plenty of build experimenting at higher levels.
It’s not the best Fallout of the franchise, and it’s a long shot from being the best it could be, but Fallout 76 does not deserve the hate it gets at the moment, especially when compared to most Bethesda-headed titles. Did it deserve it in the beginning? Absolutely. And we also shouldn’t refrain from criticizing Todd Howard and the Bethesda gang, because they need to know what the fans actually do want. If you like the setting of the franchise, if you like violently exploding irradiated monsters, if you really have to listen to “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” by The Ink Spots just one more time, give 76 a go if you haven’t. It’s a hell of a lot more fun that going around, bumming everyone out about your probably dead kid.