That last mainline entry in the Fallout series, Fallout 4, was released in 2015. Fallout 5? That’s most likely still half a decade away, if not more: Bethesda first needs to finish and release The Elder Scrolls 6, which is itself mostly likely still a few years away.
Sure, in the meantime we’ve had Fallout 76, and Microsoft has cracked the whip over the backs over what’s left of Obsidian Entertainment to produce a Fallout something, but what’s the earliest we’ll be able to conceivably play Fallout 5? 2032? 2035? Could it really be 20 years between games in the main Fallout series?
Well, just because the best way to play some new Fallout is by watching the Amazon TV series while listlessly pressing controller buttons doesn’t mean we should stop talking about Fallout. We here at PC Gamer impatiently rolled back that big Vault door to air out a few more thoughts about the RPG series.
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If you’re gonna remaster any Fallout games, it should be the first two
Christopher Livingston
I came in a bit late to Fallout. My first Fallout was Fallout 3, after Bethesda had taken the helm, so when I see people waxing nostalgic about the original Interplay Fallout, I can’t really relate. What’s stopping me from playing the original Fallout, or Fallout 2? Well, nothing. They’re both on Steam. I have tried to get into them. But they’re a bit clunky. Not instantly user-friendly. They’re… ancient.
(Which is to say they’re just a bit old and I’ve been very spoiled by modern games. I was late to The Elder Scrolls, too, so my first there was Oblivion, and even though I’ve tried going back to Morrowind to see what the big deal was, I run into the same problems.)
Now we’ve finally got confirmation that Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are getting remastered (thanks to Microsoft desperately trying to distract us from Microsoft’s gutting of Bethesda and Obsidian Entertainment), but I don’t particularly feel like either of those need a remaster as much as the original two Fallout games. Remaster Fallout 1 and 2 instead! They don’t even need to be completely transformed, just update ’em, shine ’em up a bit. Make them run flawless and intuitively on Steam Deck, as a baseline. Then I’ll finally play them, and I bet a lot of other newcomers to Fallout will too.
Hardcore mode is the best way to play New Vegas
Jody Macgregor
Normally I wouldn’t bother with something called “hardcore mode” because I think the way people boast about things they’ve achieved while sitting alone in a darkened room is kind of masturbatory and weird. It took me until last year to replay New Vegas with hardcore mode turned on. I’ve been missing out.
For starters, it’s not going to delete your save if you die or anything daft like that. It’s more of a STALKER-style survival mode you can enable no matter which difficulty you’re playing at. Sure, it means your companions are permanently dead if they drop, though you could just reload a save if that’s a dealbreaker for you.
What it actually does is slow down healing and make eating, drinking, and sleeping mandatory. (Though you still don’t need to sleep that much.) With penalties for eating raw meat there’s a reason to engage with the cooking side of the crafting system, and a whole bunch of perks that you’d otherwise rarely bother with suddenly matter. If ammo has weight, maybe I should take Strong Back or Pack Rat? And if my companions can die, maybe I should give this power armor to Veronica rather than hogging it myself? Turns out, when bullets have weight, so do your decisions.
Fallout 4 is more interesting than Fallout 3
Joshua Wolens
Fallout 4 is a big bag of experiments that don’t quite work out. Settlement building? Largely a source of annoyance. A voiced protagonist? Well, we all know how that worked out. A plot that was more complicated than a fight between obvious good and obvious evil? Not a failure, maybe, but overshadowed by New Vegas, which did exactly that in a defter, less derivative way.
Fallout 3 was more successful in its aims, but those aims were a lot lower—it really was Oblivion with guns. It’s a fun world to explore and it was a great touch to play a selection of ’40s and ’50s hits while you do it, but it’s not an especially remarkable or ambitious game in the Big Bethesda Catalogue. It’s a dang snoozefest, is what it is. Give me the big messy failure any day.
The Fallout show should feel more free to stomp on established lore
Christopher Livingston
George R. R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood (bear with me here, I’ll wheel it back over to Fallout in a second) is an interesting one. It’s a history of the Targaryen family (the HBO show House of the Dragon is based on it), but it’s not a conclusive history. It’s written as an in-universe history book, with information pulled from different sources, all of whom are ultimately unreliable.
Y’know, like real history. It’s spotty. It’s rarely conclusive. There are multiple, contradictory versions of important events. It’s written and rewritten by people with agendas. What’s recorded isn’t always what happened.
So I find it a little tiresome when fans get all up in arms when a TV show, like the Fallout series, takes a few liberties with the history as presented in the Fallout games. Yeah, they changed something you know as a “fact” from the games. Yes, they played a bit fast and loose with the lore. No, the show doesn’t line up 100% with some terminal entry you read in one of the games.
So? Maybe the person who wrote the terminal entry was mistaken. Maybe they were a liar. Maybe they were just as unreliable a narrator as literally anyone else in history. That’s normal. That happens in real life and should happen in fiction too. Which is a roundabout way of saying, if the Fallout show wants to rewrite or change or completely stomp on some established lore, it should go right ahead.
Fallout doesn’t have to be about a Vault Dweller
Jody Macgregor
In Fallout 2 you play a tribal and in New Vegas you’re a courier, yet both games find excuses to squeeze you into a Vault suit and hand you a Pip-Boy by the end of the tutorial. You end up looking and acting the same as the protagonists of all the other games: another twerp in a blue onesie with an overactive smartwatch.
The Elder Scrolls will let me play a khajiit or an argonian, but Fallout seems terrified by the idea I might want to be something different. Fallout 76 does let you become a ghoul, but you have to reach level 50 first and the thought of playing Fallout 76 for that long doesn’t really appeal.
This is the one thing I want from Fallout 5. Let me start out as a ghoul or a super mutant or a synth or something, and don’t make me play through another prologue in a Vault. You’re never going to top the one from Fallout 3, so don’t bother trying.
Fallout doesn’t have to be about Fallout
Andy Chalk
Fallout has become almost a parody of itself. With every new game, you know what you’re going to get: super mutants, ghouls, the Brotherhood of Steel, deathclaws, Vaults, The Ink Spots, a flying saucer, ramshackle settlements scattered amidst a shattered wasteland that never seems to get better. It was brilliant in the original and Fallout 3 brought it to an astonishing new level of immersive life, but man, I’ve seen this show before and I’m not particularly excited about sitting through it again.
Jody says Fallout doesn’t have to be about a Vault Dweller, which I completely agree with. But I’d take it a step further: Fallout doesn’t have to be about anything that currently represents the Fallout canon as we know it. It’s time to let it go. Do something different.
Take the Wasteland games as one source of inspiration: Rip Fallout 5 out of the desert and put it in the Deep South, or maybe Alaska—sorry, I’m not really hip to the finer points of US geography. The important thing is, make it someplace far distant from any Vaults, where people had to survive by other means—and where, freed from the constraints of Vault-Tec corporatocracy, they flourished in ways we haven’t previously encountered.
Or do something else! I’m just firing a thought off the top of my head here. Bethesda pays people good money to come up with better ideas than this. What matters is that it’s time for Fallout to escape its fetters and give us something genuinely different.
Fallout Shelter is great and we need more spinoffs
Lauren Morton
You know what else Fallout doesn’t need to be? An RPG. Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas launched during my formative years so I’ll always feel attached to them but what I have nostalgia for isn’t a Bethesda-shaped RPG. It’s the setting.
Fallout Shelter is a lighter and sillier idle game city-builder but I have enjoyed it for years. Sometimes I replicate an in-lore vault like Fallout 3’s Vault 108 (the Gary vault) or optimize novelty layouts. There are cameos from characters in other games, a fun quest system, and I’ve technically put more hours into it than any other Fallout game. If Fallout is fun in that shape it can be fun in almost any shape.
The Fallout brand has always done plenty of merchandising, but I think the spinoff potential is actually pretty untapped aside from Fallout Shelter, the TV show, and Fallout 76. Someone should try making a bigger traditional city-builder set in the wasteland. Or a Crusader Kings 3-like intrigue management game. Heck, call up a big shot novelist (my picks would be N.K. Jemisin or Seth Dickinson) and get them to write a super fucked-up Fallout spinoff novel the way T. Kingfisher has just published the spinoff story Astarion: Baldur’s Gate 3. There’s so much more Fallout-shaped stuff we could be doing while we wait for Fallout 5.
Fallout 2 is over-rated
Jody Macgregor
In contrast to Chris, I started Fallout with the first one, handed to me on a copied CD. I played as a sneaky type, but there were so many dialogue options clearly intended for characters with a better score in Speech that after I finished it I replayed the whole thing as a smooth talker, avoiding fights I’d struggled through the first time and being blown away by how differently it played out. It changed what I thought games could be.
Years later, I played Fallout 2. It was fine.
Eventually, I found out the internet consensus is that Fallout 2 was better. I’ve been back to replay them with modpacks like Fallout Fixt, Fallout et tu, and Fallout 2 Restoration, and it’s reinforced my opinion: internet consensus is wrong.
The silly jokes and pop culture references that the original slid into random encounters in the depths of the wasteland became a central part of Fallout 2. It’s zanier, and that’s a shame. But what people like most about Fallout 2 is that it has more “content”. There are more quests and activities, and they’re spread across a bigger world that you feel free to explore at your leisure because there’s less sense of time pressure. The oppressive atmosphere of Fallout is replaced by a theme park where you can go to Chinatown Land where it’s all kung fu-themed and New Reno Land where it’s all vice-themed and there’s a questline about becoming a pornstar.
Fallout 2 is the triumph of bigger over better, the school of thought that led to RPGs prioritizing scale over quality. All the way back in 1998 it showed everything that’s wrong with unfocused open world games, a lesson that went unlearned and led to decades of filler after it.
