The lead programmer of Fallout 1 and 2, Tim Cain, has been airing his views on Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas in an in-depth chat with RPG Codex . The co-founder of Troika (Arcanum, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines) is currently working on the upcoming South Park RPG with New Vegas developers, Obsidian, but he reckons it's a close call between the two modern Fallouts.
"If I were to compare the two games, I would say that Fallout New Vegas felt like it captured the humor and style of the Fallout universe better than Fallout 3," he said, "but I have to hand it to the FO3 designers for developing VATS, a cool twist on called shots for a real-time game."
Cain found Fallout 3's wasteland to be a lot more lavish than New Vegas', the incidental details and attention to detail that went into every environment didn't just sell the feel of the post-apocalypse, it hid self-contained stories among the debris.
"I also loved the set decoration FO3. There was so much destruction, yet obviously everything had been meticulously hand-placed. So much story was told entirely through art. I ended up naming these little art vignettes and creating side stories in my head about what had happened.
"There was "The Suicide", a dead guy in a bathtub with a shotgun, and I figured he just couldn't handle life after the bombs. There was "Eternal Love", a couple of skeletons in a bed in a hotel room, forever embracing each other.
"My favorite was "Desperate Gamble", where I found a feral ghoul in an underground shelter filled with lab supplies and lots of drugs... except for Rad-X. I imagined that a scientist found himself irradiated and desperately tried to synthesize some Rad-X to cure himself before he succumbed, but he was too slow. I did notice that whatever was left of his mind sure did seem to enjoy toilet plungers."
Fallout 3's art direction was a big part of Fallout 3's appeal for Cain, but he later said that art should take second seat to design. "I care more about a game being fun than being beautiful, because no matter how good you look, people will move on to the next pretty thing and forget about you. If you make a fun game, people will remember that. And a fun game needs to be accessible, by which I mean that game had to present its rules clearly and then follow them."
Cain certainly isn't alone in his central complaint about Fallout 3, though. "I hated the ending. There, I said it."
It's okay, Tim. I understand. "I didn't like the sudden problem with the purifier, and I especially didn't like the lack of real, meaningful multiple endings beyond what I chose in the final few minutes. But the worst thing about the ending was there was no mention of the fate of places I had visited. In my head I had already imagined slides for Megaton, the Citadel, Rivet City, Underworld, GNR, the Enclave or the mysterious Commonwealth. But I got... pretty much nothing."
Which modern Fallout did you prefer, and what would you like to see from Fallout 4?
OG Fallout lead Tim Cain explains just how much thought went into the timeline, and why canned beans were key: 'Post-apocalypse, but not so far post- that everything's collapsed and everyone's dead'
This mod puts Wordle on all the hacking terminals in Fallout: New Vegas, and even gives you XP for guessing the words right
