Bethesda's tenure as the ruler of Fallout's Wasteland has brought with it massive changes: the first-person perspective, FPS combat, base building, its transformation into a survival MMO. Since Fallout 3, the series has gone off in a bunch of different directions, most of them distinct from the original vision of Fallout's creators.
Tim Cain—who initially got the ball rolling and served as the first Fallout's sole designer until he brought in fellow Interplay developers Leonard Boyarsky, Chris Taylor and Jason D. Anderson—wouldn't have taken Fallout down this route. Indeed, back in the late '90s, after he left Interplay, he pushed back on the concept of multiplayer spin-off.
"Fallout wasn't designed to have other players," he said when Interplay picked his brain on the subject. And while Fallout Online would never materialise, instead culminating in a legal battle between Interplay and new owner Bethesda, you can certainly see some of its DNA in Fallout 76.
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Despite the significant changes that have occurred since Cain bid farewell to the series, though, he doesn't think its transformation is a bad thing. "We were going in a different direction," he says. "I'm not saying it's bad. People immediately want to go, ‘Well, that's bad, right?’ No, they're both what they are, and a ton of people like it."
Fallout 1 and 2 were critical and commercial successes, hugely influential, and enduringly popular, but the series has only grown more powerful since Bethesda took the reins. We'll likely have to wait until the next decade until we get another Fallout, but in the meantime, Bethesda continues to expand Fallout 76, and we're getting a second season of Amazon's Fallout TV show.
"I mean, how many people played Fallout 3 and 4? Way more than 1 and 2 put together," says Cain. "You could almost argue it's fundamentally a different game. It's a very different game with the same veneer of the old one, and it obviously appeals to a ton of people. I'm the last person to want to yuck other people's yums. So I'm like, if you like this, play it, love it. Post videos of Let's Plays and have fun with it."
He doesn't understand why some players just want to dunk on the modern direction, either. "The opposite of that is what I don't get," he says. "When people post hour-long videos about why they hate a game. And I'm like, ‘Why aren't you just off playing a game you like? Why are you doing this? The masses are playing it, they don't need to know why you don't like it.’ But game playing is so personal and subjective that I don't even think there's a bad game out there. I just think there's bad games for you, and bad games for me, and maybe even bad games for 80% [of people]. But if you go to Steam, I defy you to find a game for which 100% of the reviews are negative."
The critic in me wants to argue, but I suspect I'd be a lot happier if I spent less time complaining about how far Fallout has deviated from the games I loved so much in the '90s.
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