The lead on one of Fallout's least-loved entries says over-enthusiasm led to its hated hairy deathclaws: 'At the time, I know it was sacrilege'

A deathclaw from Fallout 4 clings to the edges of its cage, ready to do battle.
(Image credit: Bethesda)

The pre-Bethesda Fallouts occupy an odd space, still held up by the die-hards as the Only True Fallouts but largely unplayed beyond gamers of a certain vintage. Me, it's me that's the vintage. Yet even among these titles there is the neglected stepson: Fallout Tactics, a Brotherhood of Steel RPG developed by Micro Forté, released in 2001. It was received pretty well at the time, by critics anyway, but its divergence from the previous games saw many fans then and now dismiss it as unworthy of the heritage.

Sound familiar? Jeremy Peel recently sat down with Fallout Tactics' lead designer, Ed Orman, about the game's development and how heated things subsequently got about this version of the Wasteland. Recalling some of the most common negative complaints they'd hear from fans, Orman lists "This isn't a Fallout game. This is not Fallout 3. You screwed up the lore here, here and here. You put hairy deathclaws in, you’re not using charisma properly and all of those things."

This may have partly contributed to Bethesda's decision to unceremoniously yoink Fallout Tactics out of the official canon ("it sucked"). I mean, hairy deathclaws? And part of the reaction to Micro Forté doing this stuff may have been that Tactics was not a mainline entry, but went all-in on the lore and story anyway. These were the days before lore bibles, after all, when the best you could probably hope for were a few pages of notes from the original team. 

"There might have been some [lore] documentation, but it was a lot of reverse engineering," says Orman. "Which is why we got some things wrong or we went off the beaten path a bit in places, because there was so much. I think your assessment is correct: we didn't need to do what we did [but] I like the setting, and I wanted to write a big story.

"We could have done a series of individual missions. We could have done so much less than we did. But no, I wanted to tie it all together. Fallout 1 and 2 had this story that goes from start to finish, and lots of different side stories. People love exploring those things, and I do too. So that's what I wanted to make."

Which doesn't quite answer the question of how we end up with hairy deathclaws. "Chris [Taylor] was our main point for lore and things like that, and then whatever other documents they could find for us," recalls Orman. "But there was just so much stuff in [Tactics] that I'm not surprised we, you know, made hairy deathclaws. Because it looks like it's there in the sprite, so we're gonna come up with a hairy deathclaw. Now, I actually think there's plenty of justification for doing variations on deathclaws. But at the time, I know it was sacrilege."

A Fallout Tactics sequel was planned at one point, but the game didn't sell well enough to justify the continuation. Nevertheless it remains one of the oddest byroads in a universe that's only going to get bigger, and regardless what Bethesda says about its canonicity or otherwise seems to have had a big influence on subsequent games (most of all, and perhaps this is not surprising, the world of New Vegas: another spinoff Fallout made by another studio). 

There's plenty more to come from our interview with Orman, who is philosophical about Tactics' place in the wider Fallout universe these days. "There have been little bits and pieces of Tactics which you can see kind of are canon now, just through the back door over time. And that's good enough for me. I don't need anything more than that."

TOPICS
Rich Stanton
Senior Editor

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."

With contributions from
Read more
Fallout 76 - a player in a vault suit gives a thumbs up
Fallout's original designer is fine with the direction of the modern games: 'They're both what they are, and a ton of people like it'
Fallout 25th anniversary
'Fallout wasn't designed to have other players': Fallout co-creator Tim Cain was extremely wary of turning it into an MMO
Close up of Fallout Power Armor helmet on orange background
Disco Elysium game director Robert Kurvitz praises the first Fallout: 'It makes other post-apocalyptic worldbuilding seem like an amusement park'
Wyrdsong concept art
Wyrdsong, the RPG from ex-Bethesda talent, isn't dead—but it's no longer an open world: 'We're down to a skeleton crew'
Fallout 76 - a player in a vault suit gives a thumbs up
Fallout 76's former project lead says it's still his favourite game he worked on, but the initial reception was demoralising: 'I got yelled at in an Apple Store, I'll never forget'
Fallout developer Tim Cain seated at computer wearing brown paper bag on head in the '90s
OG Fallout lead Tim Cain dusts off a trove of old development photos dating back to 1994 to show 'what development looked like in the '90s'
Latest in RPG
Baldur's Gate 3 villain Raphael, staring intently at the viewer.
"Eager to get me on my knees, Raphael?" Baldur's Gate 3 mod lets you romance the silk-tongued cambion devil, although maybe you shouldn't, yeah?
A cat gets an affectionate head-scratch in miHoYo's Zenless Zone Zero.
Zenless Zone Zero developer finally embraces its divine domain as the god of jiggle physics, goes mad, adds them to cat balls
Atelier Yumia screenshot
Help, I can't move forward in this chill crafting RPG because I'm too wrapped up in building bases and making sick tools
Avowed Kai holding out his hand toward camera while explaining something to the player.
Avowed's new patch just gave you 6 more talent points to muck around with, along with a heap of fixes and improvements
Olivia, a hunter from Monster Hunter Wilds, looks perplexed in an icy blue environment.
Monster Hunter Wilds players wonder if frenzied monsters are a little undercooked, as one slaps a sickly bird into a fine paste in just 25 seconds
Sans, from the hit 2015 RPG undertale, folds his arms in a dashing suit as stonks rise in the background.
You can grab Undertale for less than $1, as the genre-defining indie RPG beats its all-time player peak for the first time in 10 years
Latest in News
Larian CEO Swen Vincke brandishes a sword at the camera and smiles.
Larian’s Swen Vincke subtweets anyone still fixated on singleplayer games’ commercial viability: 'They just have to be good'
Machinery tools and equipment,Rolls of galvanized steel for production metal pipes and tubes for industrial ventilation systems in factory.
New super-thin '2D' metal sheets could enable ultra-low power chips and can you guess how they're made? Yup, by squishing stuff really hard
Split Fiction trailer still - Zoe and Mio staring into a large pipe
'People like to hate EA, I don't know why': Split Fiction's Josef Fares says he has a good relationship with his publisher, but 'nobody believes' him
A screenshot from the Silent Hill F reveal trailer, showing a Japanese girl in a school uniform next to a truck
The Silent Hill F system requirements look pretty modest at first but that's only for all my 720p gamers out there
The G-Man, The Heavy and Widowmaker hanging out
PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now
A man holding a gun drives a boat as money flies out the back in GTA Online
Rockstar hornswoggles lapsed GTAO players with $3 million welcome-back offer that actually requires you to spend money to get most of it