FALLOUT’s FALLOUT’s co-creator dropping bombs about the nascent days of CRPGs
NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT
The co-creator of Fallout (and more recently Outer Worlds) Tim Cain has recently embarked on a one man mission to spill the beans about the early days of cRPGs. Over various YouTube videos Cain has served up treasures about Fallout including that the true purpose of vaults in Fallout, it turns out, were basically testbeds for a starship.
“If you ever read reports from the ’50s about what scientists thought of full-scale, international, superpower nuclear exchange,” said Cain, “there basically is no Earth to come back to”.
So the vaults are testing various limits of humanity, with the longterm goal in mind. “Every vault was in some sense a test,” said Cain. Funnily enough, it’s not too far removed from Mr House’s big scheme – building a rocket and getting out of here – in Fallout: New Vegas. Cain points out that he has no idea what Bethesda’s grand vision for the vaults is, so it may have jettisoned the starship idea entirely. But given Bethesda already sent us to space once for some reason – in the Mothership Zeta DLC for Fallout 3 – it wouldn’t be incongruous.
WITH AN OCTOBER 1998 RELEASE FOR FALLOUT 2, BIG CRUNCH CAME
Fallout built greater momentum and drew more attention in the months leading to its release, and after its critical success, Fallout 2 became a priority for Interplay. Cain describes not wanting to make a sequel at the time and increased interference from management, citing the infamous tutorial as an example. “We were mandated to put that in. We were told there had to be a tutorial. I said, ‘Can people skip it?’ ‘No.’ ‘What about on subsequent playthroughs?’ ‘No.’”
OUR WATCH IS OVER
The co-op, PvE story mode that Overwatch 2 was originally sold on, and that was delayed after not being ready for launch, has now officially been cancelled. It’s one more nail in the coffin for a game that’s struggled since it was first announced to justify being a sequel at all.
STEAM LINK
Jealous of the Nintendo crowd and all the fun they’re having in Tears of the Kingdom? Well dry your eyes, because it was only one day after the game hit Switch that the team behind Yuzu – an emulator – announced the game was “full speed on most [PC] hardware” with “no hacks needed”.
AI GOLD RUSH
Nvidia expects to make some $11 billion in the next few months, largely because ChatGPT needs a lot of its GPUs to keep going. This AI boom is fuelling a huge rise in Nvidia’s revenue and share price, and even briefly made it one of the few companies with a $1 trillion value.
