It might be an unpopular thing to observe—please do not throw tomatoes at me—but whether you like it or not, Bethesda has spun a huge success out of the Fallout franchise, even while shuffling further and further away from its classic RPG roots. Ow, ouch! I asked you nicely to not throw tomatoes at me! I’m on your side!
I genuinely am not a fan of Bethesda’s light-handed approach to RPG mechanics—the pre-voiced player character of Fallout 4, for instance, has me almost entirely disinterested in playing it despite the fact it’s gathering dust in my library. But Bethesda’s made a bajillion dollars and has a hit TV series so, like, what do I know?
That’s a sentiment echoed in Game Informer’s recent mega-interview, wherein the publication speaks with… well, just about everybody involved in Fallout, including its past iterations, the current TV show, and more recent games. This includes Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the two masterminds credited with the creation of the Fallout franchise writ large before it passed into Todd Howard’s chess-piece callused hands.
Cain tells the publication that, overall, “I like what [Bethesda] has done.” However, “it’s not what I would have done. I know Leonard and I especially, we talk about these things a lot. We would have gone in a different direction, but obviously, sales say people love what they did, and I’m looking at my glass cabinet full of Fallout goodies, some of which are from 1 and 2, and some of which are from 3 and 4. So…”
“But I think Fallout 3, for me, was much closer to what we would have done with it in terms of RPG-ness, as opposed to something like Fallout 4, where they moved away from it a bit.” It’s interesting to hear that the third game was a happy medium—which makes sense. As much as I love a crunchy RPG, going full isometric grit probably isn’t that popular anymore.
Read the full article here
