by Ravi Sinha
“This ash coloured dawn is something new, yet the wandering souls are few; their bones melt like sand against your feet, the air dry and uneasy yet simply to breathe. How long has it been since you knew you were safe? How long have we known we can go back out again? What is left from this world to satisfy our needs, will not kneel before us know like times past; no longer foes nor adversaries but monsters will rise up to stop us. Challenge, honour, pride, desire — all have lost meaning save the inescapable instinct to survive. Those first steps we took out of the vault…
“…As a gambling doctor with a knack for killing with naught but a flick of his wrist and a concealed scalpel…
“…As a bartering woman thief who’s powerful hands hid a tragic past…
“…As the erstwhile youth, destined to make a difference yet faithful to his containment of birth…
“…As an endearing intellect who had his own plans for reclaiming this nice little nuclear devastated world…
“Those first few steps would change our lives forever.”
The Beginning
In 1988, Brian Fargo, Alan Pavlish, Michael A. Stackpole and Ken St. Andre created Wasteland, a post-apocalyptic role playing game culminating in the aftermath of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this game, heroes were made not by their destinies but by the deeds the accomplished. Cruelly, villains were made when heroes made mistakes. And kept repeating. The Desert Rangers were your typical motley group of soldiers sent in to contain the disturbances of this burning new world. Nonetheless, their tactics were less hard-and-fast team work and more of roasting enemies into “blood sausages”. They were no clique either; as long as one had survival as his modus operandi, he was welcome to the Rangers.
Electronic Arts and Interplay Studios (more specifically, the now defunct Black Isle division) crafted an incredible gameplay experience which they subsequently released on the Commodore 64, the Apple II and IBM systems. Computer Gaming World, at the time, awarded it the RPG of the Year. In 1996, it named Wasteland as #9 on it’s Best PC Games of All Time list. Despite the lackluster “sequel” Fountain of Dreams, Wasteland was universally praised for its complex yet accessible and addictive skill system and rich plot set in a world enduring the nuclear catastrophe.
Wasteland, for all it’s achievements, is now most remembered for it’s spiritual successor that brought not just fame and fortune but a long-standing title of impeccable RPG production to Black Isle before it shut down. This game wanted to be Wasteland 2 but became something entirely different.
This game came to be known as Fallout and to celebrate the ten year anniversary of Fallout 2, we at Split-Screen have composed our own little retrospective detailing the past versions of the series along with some details of what you can expect in Fallout 3.
Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role-Playing Game
It’s just another typical day in your world. The food’s okay, the clothes boring but hey, you’re still alive. Only one problem. No matter how many times you look at a sink, in as many times as you’re free in your doldrum day, you can’t contain that building anxiety in your body that asks and yet confirms at once the horrifying revelation — you only have so many days left before your people, your world, dies of dehydration.
In the first Fallout (released in 1997), you go by the name of the Vault Dweller, a resident of Vault 13 in Southern California during the year 2166. The United States has been crippled and the rest of the world is just one other big bright rainbow in this fairy-tale. You are tasked by the Vault Overseer to procure a Water Chip, responsible in the machine that recycles and provides fresh, clean water to its denizens. You have between 150-250 days to do before the water supplies run out and every one is killed. The task is not easy, given the world being overrun by mutants led by the maniacal, somewhat collectivist super-mutant Richard Grey or “The Master”. Sure enough, you must become a hero once more and defeat “The Master” lest his armies invade the vault in an effort to create the perfect world under his plan, Unity.
The SPECIAL (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck) system was first introduced here, though the main function of the stat alignment was to determine your perks, abilities and ultimately, your persona in the game. Thieves, liars, assassins, mad doctors, gunslingers, mercenaries, psychotics — you were never bereft of potential for good and definitely not so for evil. Fallout offered an immense degree of character customisation and even if you loathed to generate your own protagonist, the game provided you with several others to ease you in that much quicker. The most fun out of Fallout came not from the numbers but from your actions — the Karma system constantly kept track of your evil and good deeds. It was the meter that decided your ability to survive, since nice people seemed to finish first in Fallout while more rebellious folk went heads-up against a funeral coffin more often than not (or heads-down in the sand).
A haunting fact was revealed at the end, though. You are denied entry by the Overseer as he feels your presence would have too much “negative influence” on the citizens of the Vault. In many ways, the first Fallout was representative of the paranoia invoked in the World War II scenario when hate against the Soviets and the Nazis was at its height, which was further accentuated by the game’s retro-futuristic art-style (to be abandoned in later games for a more futuristic feel). The Overseer does not want an “individual” in the system known as the Vault. “The Master” and his plan Unity are both collectivist ideals brought to life via the design of the Forced Evolutionary Virus, a virus that practically transforms victims into his slaves. Even the worlds around you all bear a kind of fixed time warp where the hope and shining upstarts of the old days have decayed into a solemn rot. The Vault Dweller, of course, could kill the Overseer in the end but in a world devoid of moralistic guides and visionaries, when desire has all but died out, what comes next?
Fallout was originally designed by Christoper Taylor (now back with Interplay, working on a secret next-gen MMO) in collaboration with Jason Anderson, Leon Boyarsky and Tim Cain. The latter three went on to form Troika Games and design Arcanum, a game resembling Fallout in spirit and claiming to advance several notches ahead of the initial experience. Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura was released in 2001 but oddly, failed to create much impact on critics and consumers alike.
Perhaps the Fallout experience wasn’t simply something that could be described or replicated; rather, something created as an amalgam of responses and emotions by the gamer in the future that had stood still.
Fallout 2
Fallout 2 was released about a year after the initial game… and made itself apparent as the bumped-up, more definitive version of the two. In just a time span of one year, Black Isle and Interplay renovated the Karma and Reputation systems, increased the side-quests in length and content by several times manifold, improved the graphics, further deepened the SPECIAL system to accommodate skills from Fallout much better than the original game, added more firearms and armour, a deeper storyline replete with dozens of cultural references and above all else, no ticking clock for the main adventure — you could go wherever you want and do whatever you want in this post-nuclear playground.
The mythos of the original game are continued here and are wonderfully expanded further from the original game. The Vault Dweller, it seems, was exiled from Vault 13 and came to what was later known as Arroyo in Northern California with some travelers and formed their own society. 80 years later, the village is in drought and the village elders ask the Chosen One, a direct descendant of the Vault Dweller, to retrieve the Garden Eden Creation Kit (GECK) in order to rescue the irradiated wasteland. Over the course of his journey, Chosen One comes into contact with the technology-obsessed Enclave, an organisation revealed to have a sinister hand in Vault 13′s true function and the origin of “The Master”, the militaristic Brotherhood of Steel (later to star in their own game), the Jet suppliers and addicts of New Reno and of all things, a crashed Star Trek shuttle craft and it’s crew. References to King Arthur, The Wizard of Oz, Scientology, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Monty Python, Final Fantasy, Sharpe, Beowulf and the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the characters of that reference just never seem to get a break, whether in this universe or Arthur Dent’s) are simply the tip of the iceberg.
Fallout 2 even featured a number of easter eggs pertaining to the original, some as ironic as they are startling. For example, a portal similar to the “Guardian of Forever” episode in Star Trek takes you to a very special section Vault 13 and once you access the lone computer there, you are informed that a “water chip” has “malfunctioned”.
Ultimately, many hardcore fans argued that the cultural references took away from the more nuanced retro feel of the original. The vision of a retro society hit by nuclear war was replaced with a more punkish interpretation replete with the aforementioned drug pushers, sadists, even porn studios in this futuristic maelstrom of chaos. Fallout 2 seemed to have taken the concept of an open-ended game well into it’s stride however, as no matter what you did, the difficulty would be scalable while still providing a rich experience unlike the first game that made things tougher if you even killed two kids. Most skills had better usage in Fallout 2 as well, so you could truly play the game however you wanted.
In the “Cafe of Broken Dreams” through a random encounter in the game world, you come across the characters from Fallout gathering together to speak of old times. When you look at all the new references and atmosphere, it’s hard to deny the feeling that the Fallout experience had changed, maybe even matured when it lost its dignified charm. But underneath it all was the same heart and soul that defined it – gently reminiscing in its own way how much things have changed for better, worse or no particular reason at all. Sin was the focal point of Fallout 2‘s ambiance but within the developers showed us that within that horrifyingly beautiful world, amazing things were just waiting to happen.
Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel
You’d look at the upcoming Fallout 3 and think it’s the first Fallout not to have been handled by Black Isle. And you’d be partly wrong, given that Fallout Tactics was handled by Microforte, an Australian developer that closed shortly after the game was released and published by Interplay in 2001. Unlike previous Fallouts that focussed on a central protagonist, this title, a tactical-simulation RPG, featured the ensemble of the Brotherhood of Steel as they finally made their stand in the world. Fallout Tactics was often labeled as having MMO capabilities as well, a fact not fully exploited in it’s under-rated life-span.
Despite not being a true RPG, Fallout Tactics still featured the SPECIAL system for upgrading characters, the Barter system that forces you to scrounge around for items to off-set high market costs, a detailed story, a deeply complex strategic gameplay that emphasizes the effect of team-work and caution, and the ability to pilot various vehicles like a jeep with a machine gun turret (wonder what that helped inspire). You could play the game in three different modes: Continuous Turn Based (CTB) mode where all characters took their turns at once; Individual Turn Based (ITB) mode, where each person took his turn in sequence; and Squad Turn Based (STB), where entire squads fell under and exchanged single turns. This mechanic helped distinguish Fallout Tactics from the main canon as it catered to the strategic crowd. Unfortunately, there were no facilities for co-op play and most reviewers cited the Barter system as being completely unbalanced in its pricing (yes, pricing) of story items. Also, despite critical acclaim, Fallout Tactics never managed near as much success as its predecessors.
Fallout 3
Come October 28, 2008 and we’ll experience it for the first time: The first fully 3D Fallout with a scale to dwarf Oblivion and the target of the most number of gaming controversies bereft of any comments by Jack Thompson ever. Bethesda Softworks has finally finished work on Fallout 3 and will be releasing it in the coming month. Aside from the obvious scenario of you as the protagonist who leaves a Vault and enters the old world turned new world turned bad, several changes have already come into play. According to IGN, the branching of side-quests is more in-depth than before, stating the example of the player joining a cadre of ghouls (whom he was originally hired to kill) who then provide more quests later on. One quest also involved having to retrieve — get this — the Declaration of Independence. Here’s hoping for robotic versions of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln armed with rail-guns as NPCs on this very special mission.
Invisible walls seem to have made their come-back as well, though this is limited to you going off the edge of the map. Most concerns right now seem more concentrated on whether Bethesda can accomplish its vision of a Fallout universe re-imagined on an Elder Scrolls scale. For one, the first-person/third-person combat is said to be rigid and movement, stilted. Granted, this is not a true FPS, with the option to freeze play and ponder your moves over continuously available (think Mass Effect), but you have to wonder when the experience moves from being Fallout to just some faux RPG with nukes. The physics engine is just plain non-existent; if the developers didn’t want to flesh out the small touches over a bigger context, much less aid your suspension of disbelief, why go with the first person view? Budget concerns, perhaps. That being said, the draw distance of this post-apocalyptic world is nothing to laugh about.
Luckily, the Karma system is still in full effect, and you can lie, cheat, steal, kill and maybe do some good in your escapades around the world. We’ll know next month, however, whether this fight is worth the survival and the subsequent mass destruction motivated by selfish excursions or not. Will Fallout succeed in enticing a whole new generation of gamers — enough to create interest in the franchise as a whole for this seventh generation of console gaming? Well, most PC gamers don’t really care (“A new Fallout at last!”) but it would definitely help get more gamers interested in the past golden era of RPG gaming.
Other Fallout Media
Fallout as a franchise exists within more than just the 3D realm. Fallout Warfare is a table-top combat strategy game that shipped along with Fallout Tactics and is as wholly addictive as its counterpart, being essentially a board-game version of Tactics.
And if you’re curious about the alternate scenario of Vault 13, where the resident discover their macabre predicament, check out the Vault 12 comic at No Mutants Allowed. They also have lots of extra information concerning Fallout as a whole, such as comments by RPG veteran Desslock on the series and interview with character artist Dane Olds, that provide interesting reading.
You can also check out Fallout 1 and 2, now available on Gametap; even better, the former will be made available for free play very soon.
Conclusion
In this day and age of console gaming where RPG is a term constantly associated with the latest incarnation from Japan, true experiences that push the limits of our conceptuality and give us true freedom in personalizing our very own adventure. And not once, but again and again, as many times as necessary until all that’s left are sweet memories. Fallout was always about the choices you make and the decisions that come after that, but for all its supposedly “modest” features, this was probably the first ever game to define freedom for an RPG gamer at any and all costs… even if the results were a never-ending genocide of human sufferings. For employing the biggest tool of a gamer — his mind — and using it to make the game larger than life itself (in some cases, more real than reality itself), Fallout still holds a special place in our little nuclear obsessed, legislation-making (I’m looking at you, Mr. Prime Minister) hearts.
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