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.
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."
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."
