The Decline of Fallout
Fallout isn’t dead by a long shot, and Bethesda still has plenty of opportunities to turn things around, but the classic franchise isn’t looking too good lately.
The launch of Fallout 76 was a disaster. Most fans were ambivalent about the concept to begin with, but the game itself is so clunky and half-baked that it was worse than predicted. Which is saying a lot. That doesn’t mean people can’t still enjoy it, of course. But it does mean that Bethesda will have squandered its potential, and bad launches are difficult to recover from even if you put in a ton of effort later.
Fallout 4 sold a ton of copies, but it also had a massive hype boost from the five year hiatus that followed the release of Fallout: New Vegas. People had been hungry for Fallout. And its quick announcement-to-launch window got people even more buzzed.
After the hype had settled, however, a lot of fans felt like Fallout 4 was missing something. The gunplay hadn’t aged well. The story wasn’t overly complex. Content was gutted from the main game. Some of the factions weren’t given the attention they needed. And most of the DLCs were disappointing, especially when compared to previous titles.
For me, most importantly, Fallout was no longer giving off the post-apocalyptic vibe that has long defined the franchise. The classic games and New Vegas take place in scorched desert. Fallout 3 was set in an area hit hard by nuclear blasts, and most of Washington D.C. is skeletal remains of once great buildings — not unlike “The Boneyard” of Los Angeles in the original.
The Commonwealth and Appalachia, on the other hand, just look like alternate versions of an otherwise “okay” Earth. Most of the buildings in Boston are still intact, just poorly maintained over time. And Appalachia is pretty much in its current form, but with no people.
Moving away from the bleak apocalypse setting just means that Fallout’s defining traits are now mostly 50’s tunes and retro-style machinery. The “wasteland” is becoming an endangered environment. Coupled with increasingly poor writing, things don’t look great for Fallout. And if the series were diminishing on its own, then that would be one thing.
The real salt in the wound?
Other games are coming out to take advantage of the abandoned wastelands, and they might just do a better job in the genre.
Rage 2
This is a challenger right out of Bethesda — technically. Bethesda’s umbrella company, ZeniMax, has been acquiring developers with a hunger reminiscent of Electronic Arts, and id Softworks is now one of their most competent vassals.
Trailers for Rage 2 show off a world that heavily resembles the original Fallout games — a crapsack desert wasteland populated with neon-and-tattooed raider factions competing for dominance. While it lacks the “retro” stylings of Fallout, this game seems poised to fill the increasingly-neglected raider niche. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and seems full of the same campy humor that once defined the franchise.
Since this is being made by the same developers that created Doom and Wolfenstein, the gunplay is also sure to be smooth and fluid. Rage knows that it is a shooter before anything else.
Metro Exodus
It’s been a long-running joke that Metro and Fallout take place in the same universe, but Metro is what happened on the Russian side of the Great War. That isn’t true, of course, but the two series have a lot in common.
Metro is more of a sleeper franchise, but it’s very polished and has a great atmosphere. The newest game looks fantastic. While not strictly in the same genre, it hits at the same apocalyptic niche that Fallout once did. A hostile tundra wasteland is the opposite extreme of a nuclear-blasted desert, and it works well. In true Russian fashion, it also feels more grim.
Campy humor is less in play here, but it’s going to go after fans of Fallout who want both better combat mechanics and a slightly grimmer setting to play in.
The Outer Worlds
Nobody’s gunning for Bethesda more directly or aggressively than Obsidian. There’s likely some bad blood here. Obsidian was largely formed by employees of Black Isle Studios — the creators of the original Fallout games. They briefly returned to the franchise to create Fallout: New Vegas, and I’ve always suspected that Bethesda was a little salty that New Vegas turned into (arguably) the most beloved game in the franchise since they bought the rights to it.
Now the original creators are back with The Outer Worlds, a brand new series that seems to share a lot of DNA with the older Fallout games. But in SPACE!
There’s humor, snappy writing, an intriguing new world to play in, and the promise of narrative freedom. Obsidian is famous for its top-tier writing, and that is what Bethesda is lacking most of all. It’s also what most of us are playing for in the first place!
The combat mechanics don’t look as impressive as the other titles listed here, but Obsidian is pretty clear about their games being RPGs first — anything else comes second.
Obsidian is also gunning for Bioware, since the former king of western RPGs seems content to move further and further away from their roots in favor of more actions and explosions. Fans of Mass Effect may also find themselves intrigued in Outer Worlds after the lackluster development of Mass Effect: Andromeda.