There’s a bit of a generational divide in the Fallout fanbase. Those who hopped on board with Fallout 3 tend to rather like Bethesda’s take: sure, it’s not doing much of enormous narrative ambition, but it’s fun to explore the great rambling wastelands the studio gins up for its game. Decrepit grognards (me), meanwhile, get misty-eyed thinking about how awesome Fallout 1’s pulpy, morally dubious take on the post-apocalypse was. And we will literally never shut the hell up about New Vegas.
So colour me surprised that when The Vile Eye asked OG Fallout co-creator Tim Cain about things he’d love to see in one of the games (via GamesRadar), Cain’s answer was unequivocal: “The one thing I always wished was in a Fallout game was an actual good faction. Like 100% good.”
Cain has a pretty clear idea of what “100% good” means, saying that they’d spend their time “growing food and making shelters and looking for old tech and maybe looking for old medicine, and they’re really trying to help people.” As to why he wants to see this, it’s not (just) because he’s an old softy, but because he thinks it’d be interesting to see how players approached them.
In particular, Cain wants to explore how a good faction deals “with all the suspicion from all the other factions and from the player.” In other words, he kinda wants to see if players end up blasting them just because they think no one can be that nice. “I love the idea of the player suspecting that the faction’s up to something or wiping them out because I’m like, ‘I bet that hospital was used for experimentation’ and it’s not.”
Which is interesting to me on two levels. Level one is that, well, Fallout already has pretty much exactly this faction: the Followers of the Apocalypse, peacenik anarchists who spend most of their time running free hospitals and colleges, and who tend to get shoved around by the bigger and better-armed factions as a result. I’m kind of curious how Cain’s envisioned good guys would differ from them, as “growing food and making shelters and looking for old tech” is pretty much their whole bag.
The other level is that, hmm, Cain’s description isn’t a million miles off the Brotherhood of Steel as it was portrayed in Fallout 3. Bethesda turned the Capital Wasteland faction of the Brotherhood into, well, pretty much just heavily armed good guys, determined to help the folks of the wastes and to obliterate the Enclave as it stood in the way.
Many if not most old-school Fallout fans kind of hate that depiction of the Brotherhood, so it’s amusing and interesting that Cain’s idea isn’t a million miles off from it. Then again, Cain is describing an entirely new crew, not altering a pre-existing one, which is what Bethesda did with the Brotherhood in FO3.
“Fallout trains you that everything’s gray,” says Cain. “That the good side has done some bad stuff and the bad side is not quite as bad… I just thought that would be an interesting thing to try to explore. I’m not even sure if it could be explored since a theme of Fallout is ‘power corrupts.’ So wouldn’t whoever is in charge of this faction be a little corrupt? But it would still be interesting to try to do that.”
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