Revisiting the Wasteland: Fallout 4 and the Post-Post Apocalypse

The Fallout video game series is set in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse, depicting survivors striving to survive in the ruins of the old world and trying to build new societies. Yet Fallout 4 opens with a scene of domestic tranquillity. A loving couple and their baby son live in a beautiful home with all mod-cons in Sanctuary Hills, a picturesque suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. They have the latest gadgets, some good food and even a robot manservant ready to attend their every whim. The only note of disquiet arises when a door-to-door salesman arrives, a representative of Vault-Tec who confirms that your family has a place reserved in nearby Vault 111, should the worst happen. Of course, this being a video game made by a company not known for their narrative subtlety, the worst happens about ninety seconds later as the newscaster alerts you to nuclear bombs dropping on New York and Pennsylvania, and it’s time for you to run up to the vault as mushroom clouds fill the sky. Once in the vault you discover another surprise: this vault isn’t a huge underground facility for multiple people to see out the war but a cryogenic storage facility. With very little warning, you’re put in a freezer and sent on a one-way trip into the future, in which your partner is killed and your son is kidnapped in front of you. 

Fallout 4 was released on 10 November 2015. It was actually the fifth game in the Fallout series, arriving five years after Fallout: New Vegas and seven after Bethesda revamped and rebooted the franchise with Fallout 3 (which I covered in a retrospective here). It was also Bethesda’s first game since their massive, all-conquering fantasy RPG Skyrim, one of the biggest and most meme-generating video games of all time. A lot was riding on Fallout 4 and, broadly speaking, it paid off. With more than 20 million sales, twice that of New Vegas or Fallout 3, it became the biggest-selling game in the Fallout series by far, introduced the series to millions of new fans and won generally positive reviews.

Five years later, the game’s long-term legacy is definitely a bit more mixed. Time has been less kind to it than Skyrim. Retrospectives on the game are few and far between, and most critical reviews these days cite it as a disappointment. Part of this is certainly down to choice: as recently as Skyrim’s release, there was a relative paucity of open-world roleplaying games, but in 2020 that is no longer the case. In the last decade, Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry series have effectively become open-world RPGs, Grand Theft Auto V has become the biggest-selling open world game in history and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has matched Skyrim’s sales and outdone it in terms of critical acclaim. The Witcher 3 was released six months ahead of Fallout 4 and was a point of comparison in many reviews. The Witcher 3’s much more advanced engine and graphics, superior quest design, deeply gripping narrative, side-quests which were frequently more compelling and surprising than most games’ main storylines and rich atmosphere all knocked Fallout 4 into a cocked hat, and couldn’t help but make Bethesda’s design paradigm and creaking engine feel a little tired in comparison. Railing on Fallout 4 has become ubiquitous ever since, and combined with the underwhelming performance of multiplayer spin-off Fallout 76, has made people wonder if Bethesda have lost their mojo, a question that remains resolutely unanswered because their proper follow-up, Starfield, hasn’t been released yet (and virtually nothing is known about it, save it is a far-future space opera and Bethesda’s first new IP in the better part of thirty years). 

But it’s also the case that Fallout 4 may have been knocked a bit too hard. In some respects, it’s the most interesting CRPG that Bethesda has ever created, offering the player unparalleled freedom and power to effect and change the game world. It never quite delivers on that promise, but it hints at a much bolder and more inventive way forwards for open-world games that absolutely no-one else has followed up on, at least so far.

Fallout 4 is a game of several parts. As with every Bethesda RPG since 1994’s The Elder Scrolls: Arena, it is an open-world game where you can go anywhere you want, explore almost every building you see, fight hostile monsters and raiders, join forces with friendly travellers and trade with passing merchants. That freedom and openness has been a hallmark of Bethesda’s design paradigm and Fallout 4 delivers on that with success, with the large map more densely packed with “points of interest” than any of their previous games. 

The second part is a central storyline, a hook that leads you through the main narrative with numerous twists and turns and, for the first time since 1997’s The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, numerous branching endpoints. At several key points you have to make choices about which characters and factions you are supporting, which can lead to radically varying endings. This hadn’t really been done before by Bethesda, and seems to have been very heavily influenced by Fallout: New Vegas, the 2010 game developed by Obsidian Entertainment using Bethesda’s engine. The storyline in Fallout 4 is generally considered to be “okay,” with a central hook (you have to find your kidnapped child) which is slightly in conflict with the traditional “chill out and do what you want in your own time” ethos of a Bethesda RPG. This wasn’t new, as Fallout 3 did the same thing with your supposedly urgent mission to find your missing father which you could put on hold to help defeat an army of giant fire ants or help out a guy who was turning into a tree, but the ludonarrative dissonance of Fallout 4 (the gap between the story and the actual player actions) was far more striking. 

Oh, I bet you will.

The third part is a battery of side-quests. These are missions that have nothing to do with the main story but consist of self-contained narrative subplots, occasionally several, as well as faction side-quests, where one or more of the game’s factions asks you to help them out in some fashion. Side-quests give you something to do with consequences without tying you into advancing the main story towards an ending. For the most part Fallout 4’s side-quests – which include investigating a Chinese submarine in Boston Harbor to helping the robot crew of the ancient ironclad USS Constitution get the vessel, er, seaworthy again – are amusing and entertaining, and a source of much of the game’s muted humour.

Fallout 4’s quests are numerous, which is good for giving you something to do, but they do make for an at-times over-busy game. There are three times as many quests as Fallout 3, not to mention a much greater density of buildings, locations and points of interest on the map. This means that one of the strengths of Fallout 3 and New Vegas, the sometimes uncanny loneliness and sparseness of the landscape, contributing to the eerie atmosphere, is missing, which is a shame. But, as often has been used as a criticism of the series, it's been two centuries since the nuclear war and maybe it's way past time to see more concrete signs of civilisation rebuilding.

The fourth part is companion characters. Previous Bethesda games have had companions who could join you on your mission but, from Oblivion through Fallout 3 and Skyrim, they’ve been mostly pointless. They had some initial dialogue when you first join forces with them, and there might be a single quest associated with them, but otherwise they tagged along and were only really useful for serving as an extra inventory space. New Vegas took them to the next level, giving them unique dialogue for various quests and giving them more to do, including possibly turning on you if you do something that conflicts with their ethos. Fallout 4 builds further on this, with many more unique companion characters who have not just quests associated with them but entire quest lines. Taking a leaf out of BioWare’s book, you can romance several of the companions and they are much more present in the storyline, sometimes interrupting conversations with important NPCs if they have a perspective or knowledge that adds to the story. Eventually this material runs out – the game even tells you when you’ve “maxed out” your relationship with a character as a subtle way of hinting that they are no longer necessary and you can start again with a new character without missing anything important – but it’s fun whilst it lasts. You can also assign your myriad companion characters to a town or settlement of your choosing, where they can help defend the place.

The fifth and final part is the game’s unique feature, something that was sold as something of a killer app and which some players ignored completely and others got heavily into using: settlement building. For the first time in a Fallout or Bethesda game, you could construct new settlements, assembling multi-storey buildings, defences, food-growing gardens, water pumps and even entire underground vaults. As you built up these bases, you could attract people to live there, providing them with somewhere to sleep, eat and work. Settlements generate resources such as food and water. You can then recruit caravans, linking your villages, towns and vaults together through supply lines and trade routes. You can align these settlements with various in-game factions, resulting in their soldiers helping defend them. This can change the make-up of the map as you proceed through the game, with hostile, raider-filled wilderness being tamed by constant patrols of your allies moving between heavily-armed and protected strongpoints. 

Your authority, it is not recognised here.

It is, and it’s hard to undersell this, a brilliant idea. The Fallout franchise has been called post-apocalyptic but that’s not quite accurate. Traditionally, Fallout has been a post-post-apocalyptic series. It’s not really about surviving the war – the war was 210 years ago – but rebuilding in the aftermath, constructing new societies which will hopefully avoid the mistakes of the past. Fallout 3 had lowballed this a bit – using the logic that Washington D.C. had suffered huge damage in the war and fallout levels had taken a lot longer to fall away than in other parts of the country, so it was still early in the stages of rebuilding – but it was at the heart of New Vegas’s storyline, with the ultimate thematic choice being between siding with the well-intentioned but backwards-looking New California Republic, the chaotic and totalitarian Caesar’s Legion or taking control of the Wasteland yourself and forging your own path free from the restrictions of the past.

Fallout 4’s worldbuilding doesn’t quite stack up: Boston took only one nuclear hit during the war, some way to the south-west of the city itself, and most of the buildings and even some of the infrastructure is still intact two centuries later, so why hasn’t anyone got around to rebuilding before this? We do hear about the Commonwealth Minutemen trying to rebuild the region before you but failing due to poor equipment and opposition from Raiders and the isolationist Institute, but it does feel a little convenient that no-one was able to succeed before your character comes along. One possible explanation is that you’re the first person in Boston in decades to have a fully functional suit of power armour, allowing you to wipe out entire enemy encampments single-handed, which would be more convincing if it wasn’t possible to ditch the power armour early on and do everything without it.

As an idea, the settlement building is superb. For the first time in an open-world game, you can add to the landscape and tailor it to your design. You can found and build towns and bases, you can recruit allies and use them to defend people, and you can effectively start building up a new society. But, because Bethesda had cold feet about how popular the mechanic would be (especially the need to find and carry out vast quantities of junk to be recycled into buildings and decorations) and were considering removing it from the game altogether just months before release, they never fully committed to it. Settlement building is optional and, because of that, the game is reluctant to integrate it into the core narrative. Raiders and Super Mutants continue to hurl themselves recklessly against outposts even if you have surrounded them with thick concrete walls with a battery of laser cannons and missile launchers covering every feasible line of approach. No-one really mentions your rebuilding efforts save in the most generic way possible. In some cases, the presence of heavily-armed settlements unexpected by the AI can disrupt the logic flow in quests and break them.

In addition, you end up with beautifully elaborate, cool settlements which you can…not do much with. You can take screenshots and post them on social media to impress people, or stream videos showing how cool they are, but you can’t share them with other people for gameplay purposes. The interaction of the settlement building with a multiplayer element would have been cool, but the multiplayer-only successor game, Fallout 76, doesn’t allow you to build settlements or outposts on anything like the scale of Fallout 4. In addition, by the time you finally accumulate the skills, perks and resources needed to really build elaborate bases, you’ve probably finished the main narrative and side-quests and there isn’t much left to do in the game world. With a slightly smaller map than Skyrim’s and fewer locations to visit, there’s simply nothing to keep you hanging around as in the older game, even with this new feature.

Fallout 4 can’t help but feel disappointing in some respects. The game attempts to give you a personal stake in the story, but this ends up feeling contrived and unrealistic: why am I pretending to be a mock-1930s comic book character when my baby son is being held prisoner by forces unknown? The writing is better than any previous Bethesda game, but still often feels stiff and unconvincing, especially compared to Obsidian’s work on New Vegas. It has a busier, denser map with way more things to do, which is fun but takes away from the post-apocalyptic bleakness that was arguably the best thing Fallout 3 accomplished. Graphically it’s a huge improvement over its predecessors, but definitely is looking older and more dated than any of its contemporaries. It has far more interesting companion characters with more motivations and backstories (although none of them can hold a candle to noir throwback synth detective Nick Valentine), but they very quickly peter out and encourage you to switch to a new companion instead.

But the game does good things as well. Combat is vastly improved from Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Power armour feels chunky, empowering and genuinely impressive for the first time. Inon Zur’s soundtrack is easily the best musical score ever created for a Fallout game. The four-way faction interaction is complex (perhaps a bit too complex at times, but a huge improvement on Fallout 3’s near-lack of faction interaction at all), leading to more interesting divided loyalties and a murkier morality than Fallout 3’s much more obvious story of black and white hats.

For the game’s most interesting feature, the settlement building mechanic is excellent, well-implemented and a lot of fun. But Bethesda’s refusal to fully commit to even having it in the game until way too late for the rest of the game to reflect it means it feels undersold, more of an optional add-on than an integral part of the game. It leaves a huge amount of possibilities on the table. The idea of changing the game map and world to suit your character and chosen faction is a fantastic one, with huge potential for changing the whole approach to open-world gaming, something Bethesda have needed to do for some time. But as a feature it’s left underdeveloped and feeling cosmetic. Hopefully in Starfield, The Elder Scrolls VI and the inevitable Fallout 5, Bethesda find a way of developing the concept further and fulfilling more of that promise.

As it stands Fallout 4 feels a little hard done-by. In many respects it’s a more fun and enjoyable game than Skyrim, and certainly a game that gives even more freedom and power to the player. It’s true that it doesn’t really live up to its potential, but for a few dozen hours it can be fun to wander through the Boston Commonwealth, set the world to rights and build your own vision of the post-post apocalypse. Maybe Fallout 4 would feel stronger if it didn’t have the greater narrative complexity and weirder atmosphere of the Mojave Wasteland looming over its shoulder, but that’s a tale for another time.

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Fallout 4: Nuka-World

A radio broadcast brings the Sole Survivor of Vault 111 to Nuka-World, an old theme park located west of the Boston Commonwealth. The Survivor finds three raider gangs working together under the leadership of a brutal but lazy warlord; eliminating the warlord, they find themselves unexpectedly in charge of three large raider armies who want nothing more than to conquer the Commonwealth. The Survivor must also unlock the secrets of Nuka-World, and choose carefully how to handle their new charges.

Fallout 4 is, by itself, an enormous sprawling CRPG offering more than a hundred hours of content, divided between a complex, multi-sided storyline; exploration; combat; and even settlement-building. To expand the story and world, Bethesda released first Far Harbor and then Nuka-World to add new content to the game.

I must admit that I never got round to Nuka-World the first time around. It was released too long after my initial playthrough of Fallout 4 had left me a bit burned out on Bethesda CRPGs, so it sat on my to-play list until I felt motivated to replay Fallout 4 itself from the start.

Nuka-World, like Far Harbor, adds a large new area to the game which functions as something of a microcosm of the traditional Fallout 4 experience. You can explore this area at your own pace, picking up side-quests, meeting characters, navigating between different factions and following the main storyline. Setting the game in a theme park is a stroke of genius, as each, differently-themed zone of the park gives rise to different stories, puzzles and enemies, and allows the game to riff on Disneyland, Westworld, Jurassic Park and various other influences to entertaining effect.

The expansion is definitely a bit less engrossing than Far Harbor, though. Far Harbor Island was about the same size as the Nuka-World park, but the more interesting and varied terrain and all-enshrouding fog resulted in a much more interesting and atmospheric setting. Nuka-World itself is wide open and sits on a rather dull flat plane; you can see almost the entire park from many points on the map, resulting in less of a surprise as you explore. There's much less of a focus on settlements, as Nuka-World has only one settlement which only unlocks at the end of the story, unlike Far Harbor's four settlements which unlock much earlier on. This means that if you are collecting supplies for settlement building, you need to constantly travel all the way back to the Commonwealth to dump your supplies rather than a local workbench, which gets old quickly.

As an area to explore, the theme park is fun and there's some nice side-quests as you travel through the park. The expansion's biggest weakness is trying to follow the main story. This starts well and there is great comic potential as you end up inadvertently in command of three different raider gangs, each one made up of deranged lunatics, and have to navigate between them cautiously. The problem is that the main story assumes that you're playing an evil or at least amoral character and you're happy to send the raider gangs back into the Commonwealth to take over settlements, including ones you've already taken over on behalf of the Fallout 4 factions, which will pitch you into war with them. If you refuse to do this - because it doesn't make a lick of sense if you're playing a good character - then the story screeches to a halt and the only way to proceed is to trigger the quest that requires you to wipe out all three gangs (which is surprisingly tough; the game matches the raiders to your level and these can provide quite the challenge even for high-level characters). A more inventive approach would have been giving you the option to pitch the gangs against one another or bring in one or several of your Commonwealth-allied factions in to help eliminate them. The Minutemen seem particularly annoyed by the raiders but decidedly unwilling to help you eliminate them, which is odd.

This narrative disconnect is a bit of a shame, because there's a lot of fun to be hand in the expansion. Fighting alligator-deathclaw hybrids in a Jurassic Park-style setting is superb, and a Tarzan-inspired mission where you have to team up with a buff almost-naked guy and his adopted gorilla family to wipe out deathclaws is one of the funniest things in the franchise. A trip through a "world of tomorrow" exhibit promising to create space-borne vaults is entertaining and a solid side-quest carries you over the park looking for secrets to unlock the founder's own personal vault (with some amusing riffs on Walt Disney's life story). 

Fallout 4: Nuka-World (***½) gives you more Fallout 4, which for a lot of people will be enough. There's some fun to be had here and some fun quests and side-stories, but the main story doesn't seem to have been well-thought-through, resulting in a less compelling experience than it could have been. The expansion is available for Fallout 4 on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Fallout 4: Far Harbor

A routine case turns up at Valentine's Detective Agency: a young girl has run away from her family, and they want to track her down. The Sole Survivor and Nick Valentine soon discover that the girl has fled to Far Habor, an island located to the north-east of the Commonwealth. Following in her tracks, they find a community fiercely distrustful of outsiders and divided into three camps: the town of Far Harbour itself, the nuke-worshipping cult known as the Children of the Atom and a band of runaway synths dwelling in the scientific outpost of Arcadia. Tensions are rising between the three groups, which is dangerous when one controls a band of powerful robots that can look human and another has access to nuclear weapons. You have to choose which faction to support, or if there is a way to continue the peace and allow the three sides to exist in harmony.

Bethesda RPGs are such gargantuam, time-destroying games (each easily allowing for over 100 hours of gameplay) that the notion of making them even bigger has always seemed a bit redundant. This is especially the case if you've already completed the base game and are entering the expansions as an all-powerful, high-level demigod of destruction. Bethesda's response in the past has been to go completely nuts in originality and experimentation, with their expansions usually being wilder, better-written and more thoughtful than their base games. The Shivering Isles was a huge improvement over the blander Oblivion, Fallout 3's five mini-expansions were much better than the original game (and fixed its truly appalling original ending) and Dragonborn was an excellent mash-up of Skyrim's arctic stylings with the weirdness of Morrowind (arguably, still Bethesda's finest hour). But the highlight of the Bethesda expansion track record (maybe somewhat embarrassingly, as Obsidian actually made them) is easily New Vegas: not only was the base game the most thoughtful, interesting and well-judged of their big RPGs, but its four expansions together made for a fascinating thematic exploration of the philosophy of RPGs whilst also being extremely funny and wildly varying in tone and atmosphere.

Far Harbor isn't competing remotely on the same level as Obsidian's material, but it's more surprising that it also fails to live up to Bethesda's own past achievements. Bethesda have boasted that it's their biggest expansion to date, and that the world map (based on the real island of Bar Harbor, Maine) is the largest they've created for an expansion (if so, it's not by much). However, in terms of locations to visit on that map and the amount of stuff to do it feels slight compared to Dragonborn or Shivering Isles. In terms of the time I spent playing it, it evened out at around 15 hours, which is less than even Old World Blues or Point Lookout, supposed mini-expansions for Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3 respectively. 15 hours of gameplay is nothing to be sneezed at, but considering that some people have put literally hundreds of hours into Fallout 4 itself it's also not going to be presenting players with a huge challenge.

The game is designed around its three factions and their bases: the human settlement of Far Harbor, the synth base of Arcadia (built in an old observatory) and the Children of the Atom's stronghold of Nucleus, an old nuclear submarine base. In each location you have multiple characters to meet and befriend and a lot of quests to do to build up your reputation with each faction. Ultimately you have to decide on the fate of each faction and the entire island: it is possible to wipe out the entire population of the island if you really want and it's also possible to forge a new peace between the three sides. You can also, laudably, create a messier halfway-house stopgap solution which leaves one or more factions destroyed and the rest angry with you for messing everything up.

That's all fine, but surprisingly short and unchallenging. A lot of the quests for each faction fall back on Fallout 4's biggest weakness, its frustrating and dull overreliance on combat. The Fallout series was, once upon a time, the most roleplaying-intensive of all game series, giving you amazing freedom to complete quests through dialogue, wits, cunning, stealth or combat. Fallout 4 has very little truck with allowing you to solve problems through anything other than bloodletting. Far Harbor does allow you some leeway in how to solve the over-arcing storyling peacefully, but most of the individual quests you do along the way involve having to blast your way to a solution. It's an annoying tendency which is often at odds with the expansion's thematic musings on diplomacy, consequences and regrets for past actions (hint: make sure you take Nick Valentine as your companion, as the game expands a lot on his backstory). If you're coming into this expansion having completed the main game and in the Level 40s or 50s, you'll also find it a complete and total cakewalk (a couple of the tougher robots below Arcadia possibly excepted).

On the plus side, the shorter game length and smaller geographic size of the game allows for a tighter focus on the characters, and there seemed to be more memorable characters with better dialogue than the base game. This comes to life in the game's highlight, a dramatic showdown between the leaders of Arcadia and Far Harbor where your past actions in helping or hindering both sides come dramatically into play (slightly frustratingly, this scene only plays if you've already given up on the "best possible" ending, but then there is a consequence for such things).


Another initial highlight is a side-quest called "Brain Dead", which takes you into a vault populated entirely by robots. A murder has taken place, which quickly turns into a Agatha Christie-style mystery. With robots. This was actually original, zany, well-written and funny, the sort of thing Bethesda used to be really good at. Unfortunately, this quest was quite blatantly "borrowed" from a New Vegas fan mod called Autumn Leaves, which Bethesda apparently have not credited to the original creator, which is definitely not a cool thing.

Overall, Far Harbor (***½) isn't terrible. It's fun, it passes away a few hours and it has some strengths in character and moral decision making that are better than the original game. But it's also lacking in original content and is much slighter than Bethesda made out it as going to be. As possibly the only major, story-focused expansion for Fallout 4 we'll get (the rest have all been cosmetic twinges to the settlement system and allowing you to build new robots), it's severely underwhelming. I would only recommend this at full price to hardcore Fallout 4 fans, and would advise that everyone else wait for the complete Ultimate Edition or for the expansion to be heavily discounted.

Bethesda confirm that ELDER SCROLLS VI is in development

Bethesda have confirmed that a sixth game in their Elder Scrolls fantasy roleplaying saga is in development, surprising absolutely no-one. However, they have stressed that this is not a formal announcement of the game, merely the fact that they are working on it. The setting, title and what kind of game it will be all remain to be seen.

The previous Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim, was released in 2011 and was enormously successful, selling tens of millions of copies. A new version of the game, with upgraded graphics, will launch this October on PS4 and XB1. Bethesda's last game, Fallout 4, was released at the end of 2015 and has also been a huge success. Partner company Zenimax Studios released The Elder Scrolls Online two years ago which has been more of a moderate success, and panicked some fans into thinking we weren't going to get a new single-player Elder Scrolls game. This announcement fortunately confirms that this isn't the case and a new CRPG in Tamriel will - eventually - arrive.

According to Bethesda, their plans for the new game are extremely ambitious and rely on technology that is still in development. This suggests that Bethesda may - finally! - be working on a new engine to power the game. They have also said that the game is a long, long way off. I suspect we'll be lucky to see it this side of 2020.

Bethesda have also confirmed that they are working on two other "large projects", and we may hear more about these before The Elder Scrolls VI is officially announced.

Fallout 4

2287. The sole survivor of a cryogenic suspension experiment stumbles out of Vault 111 to find their home city of Boston a blasted ruin, devastated in a nuclear war that took place two centuries earlier. The Commonwealth, as the region is now called, is divided between warring factions of raiders and mutants, all living in fear of the Institute and its enigmatic human-like robots, the synths. The sole survivor has to make their way in the world, survive...and find their missing son.

Fallout 4 is the fifth main game (and ninth overall) in the Fallout franchise of post-apocalyptic roleplaying games. As with the previous two games in the series (Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas), the game is played from a first-person perspective. You create a character and set out to explore the wasteland. Although there is a main storyline to follow, you are free to ignore it and pursue side-quests, do jobs for various factions or simply explore and scavenge for loot and money. Fallout 4 also introduces the idea of settlement building, allowing you to construct entire new towns and outposts in the wilderness and establish shops, trading links and supply lines between them.

This type of gameplay, sometimes called "sandbox" or "open world", has become enormously popular. It gives the player the freedom to decide how to play the game and allows for huge amounts of content. It also personalises the experience: every player may encounter the same enemies and missions, but the order in which they encounter them and the degree to which they vary the story and their own activities will be unique to them. It's also something that Bethesda, who developed both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 as well as the Elder Scrolls series of fantasy RPGs (their latest of which was the phenomenally popular Skyrim), have struggled to do in a really satisfying manner, especially compared to the team at Black Isle. Black Isle created Fallout, Fallout 2 and, in their current guise as Obsidian, New Vegas.

Fallout 4 is the first Bethesda RPG since 2006's Oblivion to create real, jaw-dropping vistas.

For a very easy review, if you enjoyed Fallout 3, it's very likely you'll enjoy Fallout 4. The game is similar, but the graphics are vastly improved, the settlement-building adds a new dimension to the game, there are a lot more quests, there are more factions with more complex interrelationships and the writing is stronger. The characters in Fallout 4, companions, mission-givers, vendors and random passers-by, are vastly superior to those in the earlier game. Companion characters are also vastly more present. They offer opinions about what's going on, will sometimes join in conversations with important NPCs if they have pertinent information and will interact with you more. Some of them can even be romanced, and all of their have their own personal storyline and missions to fulfil once you've earned their trust. Combat is much more satisfying, with chunkier, more viscerally satisfying first-person shooting and an improved VATs system (which slows time down and allows you to target individual body parts) for more strategically-inclined players. There is a new system for modding armour and weapons, resulting in a truly vast array of weapons and armour to compare and contrast.

The art design is also much better, with Boston being a more vibrant location than the burned-out remains of Washington, DC in Fallout 3. The sky is a glorious blue, the water effects are hugely improved (up close, anyway, from a distance or in the air the water looks distinctly odd) and character animation, long Bethesda's sore spot, is much better. For the first time in a Bethesda RPG, all your dialogue is voiced (as both a male and female player). Whilst some may hate this due to how it limits the writing (the need to record dialogue months in advance prevents late changes), others may feel it's more immersive, especially as Bethesda programmed several thousand names into your robot butler so it's possible you may actually get called by your real name (which is a bit weird the first few times it happens).

Fallout 4 acknowledges hot-button contemporary issues like, er, craft beer in the game.

In terms of being a game in which there is absolutely tons to do, Fallout 4 ticks a lot of boxes. It will suck up enormous quantities of time regardless of if you focus on the main quest, the faction missions, random side-quests, combat or on settlement-building. An enormous amount of work went into the game and the attention to detail is sometimes breathtaking, such as the subtly anti-Communist posters dotting the ruins or the stories about ordinary people's lives which were suddenly ended on the day the Great War took place. Interrupted computer logs, skeletons of entire families slumped in front of televisions and hand-written notes subtly tell the story about a nation of individuals who tragically had their lives snatched away from them by politicians and generals in far-off cities.

Unfortunately, such subtlety does not extend to the primary game design or the writing of the quests. Bethesda's main achilles heel has always been the fact that, after crafting an amazing open world playground packed with stuff, they then completely fail to craft a reactive narrative that interfaces properly with it. The last time they did do this reasonably well was in Morrowind, released in 2002 (astonishingly, Fallout 4 actually uses the same engine - albeit upgraded - as Morrowind, and the occasionally stodgy movement and awkward area transitions are problems it inherits from it). Since then, their main stories have always been a bit on the tepid side and failed to acknowledge the open world design of the game.

The game occasionally manages moments of real, atmospheric and haunting beauty.

This was most notable in Fallout 3, where the final mission of the game required you to enter a radiation-soaked chamber and sacrifice yourself, even if you had a radiation-immune companion with you. Later on they fixed this problem in expansions, but it was a good example of Bethesda's attitude to open world game design, which offers apparently limitless possibilities but boils down to "Save the world as a good guy or save the world as a psychopath."

Particularly problematic for Bethesda is that Obsidian showed with New Vegas that, even with the same clunky engine, they could deliver a game rooted in more mature themes which reacted ridiculously well to almost any decision the player could make, down to killing the main bad guy halfway through the plot just because they got a good enough weapon to get through the enemy camp, or rejecting all the options offered by all the factions and conquering the wasteland themselves. Fallout 4, on the other hand, offers only mildly differing finales despite there being four major factions you can align with, in varying degrees of opposition to one another. In fact, there's a rather nasty bug in the endgame which can prevent you from taking one particular faction to victory which is enraging if you've been working with that faction for dozens of hours.

You don't even want to know.

This also interacts with the game's second major problem. The Fallout franchise has always been one about choice, about offering the player the option to solve problems through violence, wits, stealth or diplomacy, and facing the full consequences of how such decisions are made. Fallout 3 rolled this back but didn't dispense with it. The fate of the town of Megaton, for example, was well-handled and there were a few quests that could be completed without violence. New Vegas took this to the extreme of allowing you to kill every single person in the game (including vitally important quest-givers) or by allowing you to use your skills and charisma to virtually avoid combat altogether, apart from some forms of wildlife.

Fallout 4 has absolutely zero truck with this. Once in a blue moon you may be able to convince an enemy to flee or surrender with a dialogue choice, but it's insanely rare you are even given the option. Otherwise almost every single quest in the game involves slaughtering everything in sight with high-powered weaponry. This leads to repetition: you get given a quest to go somewhere and kill everyone there. Then the next quest tells you to go somewhere else and kill everyone there. And so on and on. When combined with the "streamlined" character levelling system (which now only gives you a single perk point per level, with virtually all of the perks being combat-related), the result is a game that is effectively a first-person shooter with looting, crafting and occasional dialogue choices. It's fun, for a while, but it's not really Fallout.

For a game set in a post-nuclear apocalyptic wasteland, Fallout 4 is strangely reluctant to condemn radiation as a bad thing. It makes some people immortal and is very easily cured or avoided.

Then there's the third problem, which is a perennial issue with RPGs but Fallout 4 somehow takes it to new extremes. The game's levelling system (which, unlike previous games in the series, is uncapped) is slanted almost preposterously in favour of the player. By the time you hit Level 20, you're capable of taking on anything in the game with no issue. By the time you are Level 40 you're an effectively bullet-proof, radiation-proof demigod, able to walk through storms of bullets almost without harm and capable of one-shotting virtually everything in the game. The game is extremely generous with stimpacks (which replenish health), bobby pins (which act as lockpicks), currency and ammo, especially when you choose feats which make them even easier to find. A well-designed game will usually build to a climax where it presents its greatest challenge to the player in the finale, where they have to use all the skills and tools they have amassed to overcome the enemy. In Fallout 4 the final story missions are an absolute cakewalk with zero threat to the player's life.

This leads to an awkward game that, from moment to moment, is often great fun to play. Fallout 4 has a sense of humour to it largely missing from Fallout 3, although not to the riotous extent of the Old World Blues expansion for New Vegas. The game certainly has more personality and flair to it than any previous Bethesda RPG since Morrowind. The combat is great, the settlement-building and equipment modding gives creative players lots to do. The factions are all well-thought-out, and it's a tremendous relief to see the Brotherhood of Steel back to being techno-hoarding fascists rather than the inexplicable white knights they were in the previous game. The new additions to the game, such as the Institute, Minutemen and Railroad, "feel" like Fallout factions. Some of the locations are brilliantly-designed and hauntingly atmospheric. Some of the setpieces, whether designed by the story or encountered randomly, are epic. Some of the questlines, such as ascending a Super Mutant-infested skyscraper in a homage to Die Hard or helping out a crew of robotic pirates trying to convert a 17th Century galleon into a skyship, are original, amusing and memorable.

Fallout 4's companion characters are far better-written, characterised and are much deeper individuals than in any previous Bethesda game. But sometimes they're handy with a minigun as well.

But the feeling remains that Fallout 4 has fallen far short of its potential. The decision to roll back the real roleplaying elements in favour of violence and combat is disappointing, taking away some of the much-vaunted freedom and flexibility of the game. Dialogue is often clunky and filled with infodumps. The game's "big twist" can be guessed within minutes of the start. And, after what can be a tough opening couple of hours, it becomes far, far too easy. Even as recently as Skyrim these problems could perhaps be overlooked due to a lack of real, credible alternatives. But now if you want an open-world game focused on combat, there are the likes of Far Cry 3 (and 4) and Just Cause 3 to consider. If you want an open-world RPG with much, much more emphasis on roleplaying, The Witcher 3 has Fallout 4 pretty handily beaten. More awkwardly, Fallout 4 falls short of the standards set by its immediate predecessor. It looks a heck of a lot uglier and is much less approachable due to a badly-designed opening area, but Fallout: New Vegas has a much more challenging, interesting and original storyline and narrative, offers far more reactivity and adapts to player choices in a more meaningful way than Fallout 4 does.

Fallout 4 (****) is definitely a good game. It's fun, it drains away the hours and it proves that Bethesda's game design paradigm, despite its age, is still effective. But it's definitely moving further away from the Fallout notions of freedom and consequence that made the franchise one of the most popular and critically-praised video game series of all time. For a lot of people, this won't matter one jot. For others, it will be a shame to see what could have been the greatest CRPG ever made merely settle for being "pretty good". The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 (UK, USA) and X-Box One (UK, USA).

Fallout Franchise Familiariser

On Tuesday, Bethesda Softworks will release the computer roleplaying game Fallout 4. The previous games in the series have sold tens of millions of copies, and Fallout 4 will likely be battling with Star Wars: Battlefront and Call of Duty: Black Ops III for the title of biggest-selling game of the year. A lot of people are going to be talking about it, but what if you have no idea what the hell the thing is about? Time for a Franchise Familiariser course.

Vault Boy is the emblem of Vault-Tec, the corporation that built the vaults designed to protect humanity from nuclear war.

Fallout is a video game series set in the aftermath of the Great War, a nuclear exchange between the United States and China which utterly destroyed civilisation as we know it. In the backstory to the games this apocalypse took place on 23 October 2077. The original Fallout takes place almost a century later in 2161. The series then jumped forwards another hundred years, with Fallouts 2 to 4 taking place between 2241 and 2287.

Fallout also takes place in an alternate timeline, one where transistor and microchip technology developed a lot later than it did in our world and nuclear power was embraced much more enthusiastically. Thus, whilst Fallout is set in a post-apocalyptic future it also channels the visual design and spirit of a lot of 1950s and 1960s pulp sci-fi novels and films, a design theme known as retrofuturism (sadly, my term "Americanapunk" failed to catch on).

Apart from Fallout 2 and New Vegas, each of the core Fallout games starts with your character in a Vault, one of 122 different, massive underground facilities designed to protect people from the radiation outside. For different reasons, your character has to leave the Vault and explore the outside world for some purpose. This usually leads into conflicts with the various factions that have emerged in the wake of the nuclear war, with the player's character having a decisive role to play in events. All five main games take place in the same continuity and some characters appear in more than one game, but each title is designed to stand alone with only light references to the events of the other games.

The Fallout franchise consists solely of a series of video games. The first two were developed by the internal development studio at Interplay (this studio was named Black Isle whilst working on Fallout 2). Fallout 3, 4 and Fallout 76 were made by Bethesda Game Studios. Fallout: New Vegas was outsourced by Bethesda to Obsidian Entertainment, the successor studio to Black Isle after Interplay went bust. The two development teams have adopted different focuses for the games, with Black Isle/Obsidian focusing on the American West and Bethesda so far focusing on the east coast of the former United States.

There are no novels, comics or other material set in the Fallout universe, slightly unusually, although there are some art books and other "behind the scenes" materials that have been released.

The world as it stands in the latter part of the 23rd Century, two centuries after the Great War.

The Fallout canon consists of eight video games, five of which are considered part of the "core canon" and another three are spin-offs of debatable status.

The core canon consists of:

• Fallout (1997)
• Fallout 2 (1998)
• Fallout 3 (2008)
• Five expansions to Fallout 3: Operation Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel, Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta (all 2009)
• Fallout: New Vegas (2010)
• Four expansions to New Vegas: Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues and Lonesome Road (all 2011)
• Fallout 4 (2015)
• Three expansions to Fallout 4: Automatron, Far Harbor and Nuka World (all 2016).
• Fallout 76 (2018)

The series also has three side or spin-off games, the official and canon status of which have been disputed:

• Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (2001)
• Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (2004)
• Fallout Shelter (2015)

Although unrelated in terms of setting, canon, characters or fiction, the Fallout franchise developed out of an earlier game series known as Wasteland. Wasteland (1988) and especially Wasteland 2 (2014) and Wasteland 3 (2019) may therefore be of interest to players who are fond of the post-apocalyptic setting.

One of the primary inspirations for the Fallout series is the movie A Boy and His Dog, reflected in the iconography of the games.

Fallout's timeline diverges from our own after 1945 and the end of World War II. The transistor was not developed as it was in our history and human technology continued to favour big, bulky designs. The Soviet Union did not collapse as it did not in our world and China did not adopt free market reforms after the 1970s, continuing to be an oppressive Communist state.

By the mid-21st Century the world had become gripped in a desperate energy crisis. The United States adjusted to this by creating small nuclear power generators and even fusion generators to power everything from cars to homes to aircraft. However, this process was slow and the country's reliance on oil remained high. In 2052 these strains resulted in the Resource Wars, with countries in Europe and Asia invading the Middle-East to claim the last remaining oil resources on the Eurasian continent. The result was a bloodbath which resulted in the first use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield in a century. The United Nations was powerless to intervene and the body was disbanded on 26 July 2052. In 2056, Tel Aviv was destroyed in a nuclear exchange between regional powers.

The United States stayed out of this conflict, choosing instead to develop the final oilfields in North America, located under Alaska. Immense pipelines were built and fortified, with the United States deploying enormous military resources to defend Alaska. This led to tensions with Canada, with both the pipeline and transport links running through Canadian territory to the fury of several Canadian nationalist movements. The nuking of Tel Aviv also sparked fears in the United States of a full-scale war.

The Battle of Anchorage in late 2076/early 2077 broke the back of the Chinese invasion of Alaska.

The Vault-Tec Corporation was founded to address this issue, and over the next twenty years they constructed 122 huge Vaults in various parts of the country. The aim was to provide shelter and food for anyone who could reach them in time. However, with an American population of approximately 400 million the Vaults were woefully inadequate to help everyone. In reality the United States government did not believe that a nuclear war was likely, so with Vault-Tec's cooperation developed the shelters also as social conditioning experiments.

In 2066 China launched a full-scale invasion of Alaska in an attempt to seize the pipeline. The Americans resisted the initial attack but soon fell into a deadly war of attrition. The Chinese numbers were overwhelming, but American technology and resources proved superior. In 2074 the United States outflanked the invading armies and landed troops on the Chinese mainland, opening a second front in the war. At the same time, more confident in securing the oil pipeline and in its transfer to fusion power, the United States walked away from peace talks designed to end the crisis. In 2075 the USA formally annexed Canada and the following year deployed the formidable and iconic T-51b Power Armour, giving its troops a formidable advantage on the battlefield. The Chinese forces in both Alaska and at home began to collapse, drained of fuel and unable to combat the new technology.

The United States appeared to be on the verge of victory, but only at a terrible cost: the country had become more militarised, with the deployment of military robots, biological weapons and devastating laser and plasma-based weaponry. Civil rights riots had broken out in several cities, only to be put down with terrifying, lethal force. Some American military units had rebelled when ordered to fire on civilians. Civil war appeared possible, even as the Chinese faced total defeat.

The Great War on 23 October 2077 ended human civilisation over the course of approximately two hours.

On 23 October 2077 the Great War took place. It lasted only two hours. It remains unknown who launched the first ICBM: the increasingly desperate Chinese, facing defeat at home and overseas; the American government, forced into desperation by the imminent collapse of social order at home; or other, unknown forces. What is known is that by the end of the day the entire world had been wracked by multiple, mass-megaton nuclear explosions, human civilisation had effectively ended and a terrible nuclear winter had begun. 95%+ of the human race was wiped out, with the majority of the survivors being those in government shelters, or the lucky few tens of thousands who managed to get into the vaults before (or as, in some cases) the bombs fell. The only American city to survive largely intact was Las Vegas, as a wealthy (and fortuitously paranoid) industrialist living in the city, Robert House, had equipped the city with point-defence lasers and satellite-based countermeasures which scrambled the Chinese warheads on their way to the city.

In the aftermath of the atomic holocaust, most of the world suffered a devastating nuclear winter. Poisoned, radioactive rain wiped out a large number of animals and humans who survived the initial detonations. The radiation either killed people outright or mutated them in bizarre ways. One of the most unexpected consequences was the transformation of some people into "ghouls". Some ghouls were feral and zombie-like, but others were intelligent and reasoning. Ghouls took on a hideous appearance but also appeared to be functionally immortal, with their ageing halting altogether. The radiation also mutated creatures like scorpions into much larger and deadlier versions of their former selves.

Adding to the chaos was the fact that during the war the United States had been experimenting with genetic engineering to help replace troops on the battlefield and greatly increase their strength and stamina. One result of this was the extremely lethal, huge and ferocious creature known as the deathclaw. The initial deathclaw specimens escaped the labs in the wake of the war, made their way into the wilderness and began to breed. Another experiment led to the creation of the Forced Evolutionary Virus (FEV) which would force the evolution of the subjects into a superior form. This led to the creation of the Super Mutants, tall and lumbering humanoids possessing tremendous physical strength. The FEV labs were located in two separate locations, one in Mariposa, California and the other in Washington, D.C. The FEV escaped from both, but due to differing strains they had slightly different effects: in the west the resulting Super Mutants were mostly still reasoning and intelligent, able to cooperate alongside other people, but in the east they became mostly savage and violent creatures, with the smart ones being very rare in comparison.

However, despite the near-total destruction of the world, humanity prevailed. Tiny pockets of survivors avoided starvation, radiation poisoning, gangs of raiders, mutated monsters and despair. They formed communities and survived. They eked out a living in the ruins of the old world, but as more and more time passed they began to build new settlements, form new alliances...and make the same old mistakes.

Released in 1997, Fallout was a roleplaying game viewed from an overhead, isometric viewpoint. The game allowed you to create a character via the SPECIAL (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck) system and walk around in real time to talk to people and solve puzzles. When danger threatened, the game switched to a turn-based combat mode which allowed you to target specific body parts on enemies to incapacitate or kill them.

The game was initially developed as a sequel to Wasteland, an RPG created by Interplay and released by Electronic Arts in 1988. It was hugely successful, but Electronic Arts didn't really do anything more with it. Interplay went solo, became a publisher in its own right and tried to buy the Wasteland IP, but EA refused to sell. Fallout was developed instead as a spiritual successor. The alternate timeline setting, single character focus and retrofuturistic art style were deliberately created to differentiate the game from Wasteland. The primary designer on the original Fallout was Tim Cain.

Fallout is set in 2161, eighty-four years after the Great War. The player's character - referred to as the Vault Dweller (their actual name is up to each individual player) - is an inhabitant of Vault 13, located under Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of eastern California. The vault has ridden out the nuclear war and its aftermath in isolation from the outside world, with several generations growing up inside. The vault's water chip, which is responsible for recycling all water in the facility, fails and the player is tasked by the Vault Overseer with venturing outside to find a replacement. To help him (or her), the Vault Dweller is given some basic equipment and the Pip-Boy 2000, a wrist-mounted computer which contains mapping information, a Geiger counter and a system for keeping track of mission objectives. The Vault Dweller has approximately 150 days to find the water chip or Vault 13 will run out of water and have to be abandoned.

Venturing into the exterior world, the Vault Dweller discovers, to her (or his) surprise that many settlements exist and are thriving, and several factions have formed to control them. These include several raider gangs (the Khans, Jackals and Vipers), the Brotherhood of Steel (a high-tech group obsessed with acquiring technology) and several groups of traders. One of these groups, the Water Merchants, can temporarily supply Vault 13 with water, extending its operating period by 100 days for each caravan that is sent. However, this increased trade exposes the existence of the vault to outsiders, resulting it the vault being attacked 400 days into the game (this happens 500 days into the game if the Water Merchants are not hired to supply the vault).

In order to complete the game, the Vault Dweller has to win the trust of the locals in various towns by solving problems for them. This gives the Dweller experience, allowing them to level up, gain additional funds and equipment and also recruit allies to help them in combat. The most loyal ally is a canine named Dogmeat, who soon becomes an iconic part of the game series (descendants of Dogmeat, or simply namesakes, show up in most games in the series). Eventually the Vault Dweller successfully locates a replacement Water Chip and saves Vault 13. However, in doing so they discover that a mysterious leader known as "the Master" is gathering (and, with the help of a supply of the FEV from Mariposa, expanding) an army of Super Mutants to the west, in Los Angeles, and plans to use them to conquer all of California. The Dweller has to use their newly-acquired skills, gear and allies to mount an assault on Los Angeles and kill the Master.

The game ends on an unusually sombre note. In most endings, the Dweller returns to Vault 13 only to be told that their experiences have changed them and their stories about the outside world would likely lead many to abandon the vault and seek out a new life. As a result, the Dweller is banished. If the Dweller has undertaken a "low karma" play style, by killing innocents or resorting to violence rather than diplomacy, the Dweller can also kill the Overseer. He or she can also join forces with the Master and help them conquer the California wasteland, but both of these endings are non-canon. In a possible homage to The Searchers, the Vault Dweller has to leave their home and head off in search of a new life.

Fallout was extremely well-received when it was released in 1997. The retrofuturistic setting, characters and both the SPECIAL and turn-based combat system were all praised, although the game also got some criticism for being quite tough and unforgiving, as well as some bugs related to how companion characters acted (most notably, if you accidentally gave them a key item the only way to get it back was to pickpocket it from them!).

Fallout 2 entered development almost as soon as work finished on the original game. At this point Interplay were very excited about their new roleplaying games. At the same time they were making Fallout and its sequel they had also partnered with a newly-formed Canadian studio, BioWare, to release some new games based on the Dungeons and Dragons licence. In fact, the licence and BioWare's exceptionally impressive Infinity Engine nearly killed the Fallout games as Interplay wanted to use the engine for a run of in-house games as well. Fortunately, the work done on the original Fallout and the first game's warm reception convinced them to continue development of the sequel. During development the internal studio was renamed Black Isle, and Fallout 2 was the first game released under that soon-to-be-famous logo.

Fallout 2 is very similar to Fallout in appearance and gameplay, although there are slight improvements in graphics and the user interface. The biggest difference is in tone, with Fallout 2 engaging with more adult topics such as prostitution and drug use. The game also poses some harder moral questions. The biggest difference is that whilst Fallout is located a bit more firmly in the post-apocalyptic genre, Fallout 2 examines what happens when societies start emerging from the ashes and begin operating properly. This has been dubbed the post-post apocalyptic subgenre.

Fallout 2 takes place in 2241, eighty years after the events of Fallout. As the game opens, it is explained that the Vault Dweller of the original game established a new settlement called Arroyo north of Vault 13. The settlement prospered for many years, until it was threatened by a drought. The village elder asks one of the villagers, a descendant of the Vault Dweller, to embark on a perilous mission to find a Garden of Eden Construction Kit (GECK), a fabled device capable of terraforming the local landscape into something more habitable. The villager, the "Chosen One" (as with Fallout, their actual name and capabilities are determined by the player), sets out equipped only with a Pip-Boy 2000 and some basic equipment (possibly inherited from the Dweller).

As with the first game, Fallout 2 sees the player visit several distinct locations and become embroiled in local politics, factional squabbles and desperate battles for survival. The greater passage of time from the first game and the war means that society has continued to recover from the Great War and new nation-states have begun to emerge. The first of these to be encountered is the New California Republic, based in Shady Sands. The Chosen One discovers that his ancestor, the Vault Dweller, inspired the founding of the NCR through his heroic ways. The NCR is dedicated to democracy, peace and security. A rival power is also established in the form of the Enclave, which claims continuity from the old pre-war United States government. Unfortunately, that government had become dictatorial, controlling and militaristic towards the end of the Resource Wars and the Enclave has continued to operate in that style.

The player's mission to find the GECK means negotiating missions with several factions before he is able to locate Vault 13, the home of the Vault Dweller. However, he finds the vault abandoned and the GECK missing. Returning him, he discovers that the Enclave have invaded Arroyo and taken everyone prisoner back to their base of operations, an oil rig in the Pacific Ocean. This is also where the survivors from Vault 13 have been taken. Eventually, it is revealed that the Enclave plan to use the FEV to create their own Super Mutant army to assist them in re-conquering North America. The Chosen One stops them by blowing up the oil rig and killing the corrupt President. After the end of the crisis, the survivors from Vault 13 are allowed to settle in Arroyo, which in turn is saved by the use of the GECK to create a lush garden from the surrounding wilderness.

Fallout 2 was well-received on release and was praised for its stronger writing than the first game (it was the first game worked on by the soon-to-be-famous Chris Avellone, who went on to work on Planescape: Torment straight from this game) but criticised for more bugs and a use of humour and darker topics which were felt not to be completely consistent with the tone of the first game. The game was also criticised for some by being too similar to the original. The game was well-received and sold initially well, but it also had the misfortune of coming out just weeks before Baldur's Gate. Baldur's Gate received massive praise and sold enormously well, somewhat overshadowing its label-mate.

With Black Isle working on other games for the foreseeable future, Interplay outsourced development of the next game in the series to an external studio, Micro Forte. It was decided that this game would not be a "proper" Fallout 3, but instead a spin-off that de-emphasised roleplaying and story in favour of a more focused, linear and combat-heavy game. Its full title was Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, but the game is almost exclusively referred to now as Fallout Tactics to avoid confusion with the 2004 game Brotherhood of Steel.

The plot has the player take on the role of the Warrior (as usual etc), a new recruit in the Midwest Brotherhood of Steel, based in the ruins of Chicago. The Brotherhood plays a small role in the first two games, but is iconically linked to the franchise due to its use heavy of the T-series of Power Armour, the most iconic armour in the series which appears on the covers of most of the games. The Brotherhood encountered in the first two games is apparently good-intentioned but is also arrogant, believing that only it has has the moral right to use and control advanced pre-war technology to avert a future second apocalypse. The Midwest Brotherhood is different in that it believes in recruiting from outsiders and also forming government and police forces is a good idea.

The game proceeds with the Midwest Brotherhood defeating a local group of "beastlords" (who control deathclaws for use in battle) before commencing a long-running, desperate battle with Super Mutants operating from St. Louis. Eventually they achieve victory, but only because the mutants were suddenly attacked by robots invading from the west. The Brotherhood learns that the robots are under the direction of the Calculator, a computer intelligence located in Vault 0 under Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. Using a still-operational nuclear warhead, the Brotherhood blast their way into the vault and are able to confront the Calculator. They can destroy it (apparently the canon ending), reprogramme it to operate more beneficially, or help it conquer North America.

Although reasonably well-received as a combat/tactics game, Fallout Tactics was met with some disappointment for not being a full RPG, for some inconsistencies with the pre-existing lore and for its use of modern weapons over the retrofuturistic weapons of the other games, as well as its lack of period music. The game was rushed and under-budget, with Interplay starting to experience financial issues which meant there was limited time for testing and polish. Sales were poor, leading to the cancellation of the planned Fallout Tactics 2. Tactics 2 would have taken place in Florida, which would have been ravaged by an irradiated GECK and turned into a nightmarish landscape of monstrous creatures, opposed by a Brotherhood of Steel chapter that had given up on morality to become as harsh and oppressive as the landscape it was challenging.

Fallout: Tactics is generally regarded as non-canon, although the Midwestern Brotherhood of Steel is mentioned and dismissed as a "rogue unit" in Fallout 3. There are some superficial similarities between Tactics and inXile Entertainment's Wasteland 2, made by some ex-Interplay veterans of the Fallout series.

Following the development of Fallout 2, Black Isle Studios became sidetracked with the Dungeons and Dragons licence. They developed Planescape: Torment (1999), Icewind Dale (2000) and Icewind Dale II (2002), but had always planned to return to the Fallout universe for a main series CRPG. Work on Van Buren, as the game was called in internal development documents (although it was planned to be finally called Fallout 3, the game is now referred to as Van Buren to avoid confusion with the actually-released sequel), began in 2001 or 2002. It was planned that the game would use an all-new engine featuring 3D character models. The same engine would also power the planned Baldur's Gate III, which Black Isle planned to develop internally after BioWare split off to make Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic.

In 2003 Interplay collapsed due to financial problems. Technically, it continued to operate but it no longer had any capital to actually make games and Black Isle Studios was disbanded. Work on Van Buren was halted, despite the fact that the engine was complete, and roughly 50% of the game was complete, at least in an early alpha build. Staff from Black Isle would reform as two other studios, Obsidian Entertainment and Troika Studios, but as Interplay retained the Fallout licence they had to move onto other projects (Knights of the Old Republic II for the former and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines for the latter). Van Buren, and indeed Fallout overall, would appear to be dead.

The storyline for Van Buren would have been set in 2253, twelve years after the events of Fallout 2, and would have sprawled across Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Nevada. It would have seen the player, known as the Prisoner because he or she starts in jail (possibly an echo - conscious or not - of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls games), fall into a conflict between the New California Republic established in Fallout 2 and a new threat spreading from the east, Caesar's Legion, an army of Roman-inspired fascists who believed in racial supremacy and absolute law enforcement. The real threat would have turned out to have been a lunatic scientist called Victor Presper who was trying to both spread a virus and gain control of a still-functioning weapons platform to conquer the world.

Van Buren is very much non-canon, although a playable tech demo exists. Some elements of the game were repurposed in 2010 for Fallout: New Vegas.

Through four games Fallout had resolutely been a PC-only experience, but in its dying days Interplay hit on the idea of trying to get the franchise onto the PlayStation 2 and X-Box consoles. The result was an action-heavy game set in 2208 and featuring the player as one of three possible Initiates of the Texas branch of the Brotherhood of Steel (Cyrus, Nadia or Cain). Later in the game other characters become available, including the Vault Dweller, the protagonist of he original Fallout.

The game doesn't have much of a plot, instead pitting the player against waves of Fallout enemies in several locations. The enemy is a mutant leader who must be eliminated.

Unlike Tactics, which is considered at least partially canonical, Brotherhood of Steel is not only regarded as non-canon but some of the franchise's other creators have indicated they would be happy removing it from existence. It is arguably the total nadir of the Fallout franchise to date and can be safely ignored.


In mid-2004 it was unexpectedly announced that Bethesda Softworks had bought the Fallout intellectual property rights from Interplay for a large sum of money. Bethesda were best-known for their fantasy roleplaying series, The Elder Scrolls, and it was assumed that they would continue focusing on that series. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind had been released in 2002 to a very positive reception, so the news that Bethesda had bought the Fallout IP was cautiously greeted with optimism by the fanbase. In early 2006 The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was released to a generally positive response, but it was felt that the game had dumbed down somewhat from Morrowind. But Bethesda then announced that their next game would be Fallout 3, restoring life to a franchise that had appeared dead.

Released in 2008, Fallout 3 marked the biggest shift in the franchise's history. The game was now viewed from a first-person 3D viewpoint (an optional third-person mode is included), with combat taking place in real time. An optional VATS (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) mode allows the player to pause the game and target enemy body parts in a nod to the turn-based gameplay of the original. However, the SPECIAL character development system remains in place.

The game takes place in 2277, on the 200th anniversary of the Great War. There is a dramatic shift in location for the game, which now takes place on the Eastern Seaboard of the former United States, in and around the ruins of Washington, DC, in what is called the Capital Wasteland. Bethesda wanted a total break from the original game and the freedom to develop new locations and characters without getting bogged down in too much continuity from the earlier games. Indeed, it has been rumoured that originally the game was planned to take place much earlier in the timeline, between the war and the original Fallout, thus explaining the still-ruined state of the post-apocalyptic world. However, a desire to include such Fallout stalwarts as Super Mutants, the Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel eventually compelled them to move it to after Fallout 2, explaining the game's inconsistent worldbuilding. This rumour has never been confirmed.

The game has the player create a new character, the Lone Wanderer, who grows up in Vault 101, located just outside the capital. A prologue sequence shows the character growing up and their father, James, becoming more and more concerned about the world outside. In 2277 James leaves the Vault and goes outside, throwing the carefully-constructed society inside into paranoia. The Overseer charges the Wanderer with finding James and returning him home. However (and traditionally), the Wanderer soon becomes involved with local politics between bickering factions. These include the DC chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel, who have relaxed their technology-seizing ways and now serve as an army of techno-knights, and the (relatively) civilised settlements of Megaton (built around an inactive warhead) and Rivet City (built on a derelict aircraft carrier). Opposition comes in the form of various bands of Super Mutants, who are more aggressive and openly hostile than their western counterparts, and the Enclave.

It is eventually revealed that James has created Project Purity, a machine based in the Jefferson Memorial that can purify all of the water in the Potomac and surrounding hydration systems. This will restore life to the Capital Wasteland and allow civilisation to flourish again. However, the Enclave wants to combine the project with the FEV in order to poison and kill all mutated animals and life in the Wasteland, including Super Mutants, Ghouls and humans. Only the Enclave, whose citizens have lived in total isolation from the radiation outside their bases, will survive. The Wanderer has to choose which side to support. The canon ending assumes that the Wanderer will complete James's work and use the Water Purifier to save the Wasteland. In this ending the player joins forces with the Brotherhood of Steel, destroys the Enclave army with the help of a colossal war machine called Liberty Prime and uses the Purifier for its originally-intended purpose.

Rivet City, a repurposed aircraft carrier located in the ruins of Washington, DC.

The original ending to Fallout 3 required the player to sacrifice themselves (by passing through a radiation-filled chamber) to carry out the mission. However, this attracted tremendous criticism because the player would likely have allies (including Super Mutants and Ghouls) at this point who were immune to radiation. Bethesda retconned this ending with the Broken Steel expansion, allowing the player to survive the ending and then take part in a final assault on the Enclave.

Fallout 3 was massively well-received on release, attracting high review scores. Bethesda spent a substantial amount on marketing the game, emphasising that it was not necessary to play the previous games in the series, and trading on their reputation from the highly acclaimed Morrowind and Oblivion. The result was that Fallout 3 sold three million copies in its first month on sale, exceeding the combined lifetime sales of the previous games in the series. The game would go on to sell many millions of copies more on PC, X-Box 360 and PlayStation 3.

The general critical reception was very high, but the game had a cooler reception amongst hardcore, long-term Fallout fans. The primary criticisms related to an incompatibility between the game and the "post-post apocalyptic" setting of the previous games, in which the bombs had fallen 200 years ago and humanity had actually made some headway in rebuilding. Fallout 3 ignores this by having the city look like the bombs fell a few weeks earlier at best, using the Super Mutants (apart from one) as mindless monsters rather than the more nuanced characters in the original games and by recasting the Brotherhood of Steel as noble-intentioned knights of justice and honour rather than the arrogant technological conquerors of the previous games. However, the latter criticism was itself deemed unfair due to the previous games establishing that there are many chapters of the Brotherhood of Steel, each with its own variation on the organisation's core ideology.

More problematic for Fallout 3 are issues with much weaker writing compared to the previous games (especially of dialogue), a plethora of bugs (mostly unmentioned by the reviewers) and a very linear main storyline which does not react well to different player choices. However, the game is certainly very good and succeeded in its primary goal of bringing the franchise back to life and introducing all of the previous games to legions of new fans.

Liberty Prime assists the Lone Wanderer and the Brotherhood of Steel in assaulting the Enclave base at Adams Air Force Base.

Following Fallout 3's release, Bethesda released five expansions for the game in the form of downloadable content (DLC). Each expansion has its own new areas to explore, its own storyline and own themes. Thanks to the third DLC rewriting the end of the core game, the expansions can be played either before or after completing Fallout 3.

In Operation Anchorage the Wanderer discovers a hidden technological facility including a VR simulation of the Battle of Anchorage, an epic final assault by the Chinese forces in Alaska on the US positions. The player can gain experience for taking part in the VR simulation and also gets some pretty hefty equipment after completing it, including Power Armour. As the DLC can be played almost immediately after leaving Vault 101, it can somewhat unbalance the rest of the core game by making your character very tough. This DLC is noteworthy for being set mostly before the Great War in a completely new type of environment, but it is extremely linear and focused almost entirely on combat.

The Pitt sees the Wanderer accept a commission to travel to the ruins of Pittsburgh, where the vast steel mills now serve as a refuge for survivors. The Wanderer becomes embroiled in a battle between the slave-owning elite who run the Pitt, their servants and raiders. The Pitt has a renewed focus on melee combat over guns, giving the player some formidable weapons to use in close-quarters battle.

Broken Steel expands on the end of Fallout 3, allowing the Wanderer's adventure to continue after the end of the main game. It introduces some new side-quests in the Capital Wasteland, reflecting on the aftermath of the main game, but it also features a new area in the form of Adams Air Force Base, which is being used as a forward operating base by the Enclave. The Wanderer once again teams up with the Brotherhood of Steel and the massive warbot Liberty Prime to drive the Enclave from the DC area once and for all.

Point Lookout sees the Wanderer called away to Point Lookout National Park, located at the confluence of the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay to the south-east of the city. The area is infested with powerful enemies called "Tribals" and the Wanderer is commissioned by various locals to help defeat them. There is less emphasis on a core storyline in Point Lookout and more on exploration and salvaging.

Mothership Zeta is the final DLC for Fallout 3. It sees the Wanderer investigating a radio signal only to be abducted by an alien spacecraft. The existence of aliens in the Fallout universe has been strongly hinted at prior to this expansion, with the crashed remnants of what appear to by flying saucers locatable in both Fallout 2 and 3, and an "Alien Blaster" is one of the most powerful weapons in the franchise (although ammo for it is scarce). Mothership Zeta goes all-out on this idea, with the Wanderer waking up on the alien mothership discovering he or she is about to be probed. Escaping captivity, the Wanderer frees several other captives, some of whom have been in suspended animation for centuries, and forms a combat team consisting of themselves, a samurai, a Great War-era American soldier and a cowboy. They fight their way through the ship and eventually take control of it, shooting down a second alien ship when it intervenes. Subsequent to these events, the Wanderer can use the alien vessel as a base of operations and teleport at will between it and the Capital Wasteland.

Fallout 3 and its DLC were extremely successful, leading to Bethesda Softworks wanting to release a relatively rapid follow-up. However, the core development team at Bethesda had already started work on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, meaning a new Fallout game was likely going to be at least five or six years away. A solution was found when the Fallout 3 developers suggested outsourcing development to Obsidian Entertainment. Obsidian consisted of many of the creators and programmers of Fallout, Fallout 2 and the cancelled Van Buren, so were already very familiar with the franchise. Bethesda also believed this would be a goodwill gesture towards fans who felt that Bethesda had "muscled in" on the franchise without involving the original creators.

Fallout: New Vegas plays in an almost identical fashion to Fallout 3, as it uses the same engine. The biggest difference is the introduction of iron sights, to allow for more authentic shooting, and a hardcore "Survival Mode" which makes carrying vast amounts of ammo more difficult and requires the player to eat and drink on a regular basis. More significant are the differences in tone, narrative and design philosophy, which all hew back much more closely to the original two Fallout games.

The game opens with the player controlling the Courier, a simple worker tasked with taking a message to the city of New Vegas in Nevada. Along the way the Courier is captured, forced to dig her (or his) own grave and is then shot in the head. Thanks to a passing robot, the Courier survives and is able to continue his (or her) mission. However, New Vegas and the surrounding Mojave Wasteland are in the grip of a terrible conflict between the New California Republic and Caesar's Legion, with Mr. House, the enigmatic ruler of New Vegas, caught in the middle. Other factions, such as the Brotherhood of Steel and a community of Super Mutants trying to live peacefully, are also involved in the crisis. Unlike the more straightforward factions of Fallout 3, New Vegas's sides are more conflicted, with each faction riven by internal divisions. There are also complicated backstories, with the Brotherhood and the NCR both opposing the Legion but refusing to work with one another due to a bloody military conflict between them in the recent past.

New Vegas is unprecedented in the series in how much freedom it gives to the player. The player has the freedom to kill everyone in the game apart from one robot vendor, regardless of how many quests this makes it impossible to complete. The game's storyline is divided into two parallel paths, one involving Mr. House's plans for New Vegas and the other involving the NCR/Legion conflict. The combination of these two paths, with the player able to choose between multiple states, gives the game dozens of different endings (compared to Fallout 3's two, both very similar). The game is also unusual in that it allows you to adopt a selfish route in which you solve the problems to your personal gain, seize control of an army of laser death robots and take over the Mojave Wasteland yourself as a dictator (benevolent or otherwise).

New Vegas had a mixed reception on release, not helped by launching with a large number of bugs not picked up on by Bethesda's Quality Assurance team. Players enjoyed the greater freedom and more flexible narrative of the game, as well as the much-improved combat, vastly stronger writing and dialogue and the much deeper companion characters (who had their own storylines and allegiances) but were put off by a much less welcoming opening area and set of quests, and perceived linearity. There were also criticisms that the game forced the player to pick sides at different times, closing off other storylines and quests (although this was also praised for encouraging replayability). Since its original release, and with the bugs fixed and the DLC added, the game has been critically reappraised and is now often cited as the single finest Fallout game to date.

The game sold extremely well on release, shifting almost twice as many copies as Fallout 3 did in its first month on sale. However, the game also attracted controversy when it was revealed that Bethesda witheld a bonus payment to Obsidian (worth approximately a million dollars) after the game failed to hit its metacritic review target by a single percentage point. This was especially deemed unfair since the review mark-downs were mostly down to the early bugs, the identification and fixing of which were Bethesda's responsibility rather than Obsidian's.

Despite this controversy, Obsidian and Bethesda have both said they enjoyed the collaboration and would be open to future joint endeavours.

Like Fallout 3, New Vegas had a number of expansions released for it. Unlike Fallout 3, these expansions are linked by a common (if subtle) storyline and each one is bigger than its Fallout 3 equivalents, with each one introducing a new area to explore, new PCs and in some cases new game mechanics.

Dead Money sees the Courier receive an odd radio signal leading to Sierra Madre, a casino and supporting town located out in the desert. Upon arrival, the Courier is captured by unknown forces, has their equipment seized and a bomb placed around their neck which will detonate if they do not cooperate with the instructions of the mysterious Elijah. Joining forces with other captives lured to the area, the Courier must outwit and defeat Elijah. Dead Money is very linear but is also remarkable for its tremendous sense of atmosphere, with eerie lighting and music not quite like anything else in the franchise.

Honest Hearts sees the Courier recruited to help guide a caravan to New Canaan, near the Great Salt Lake. However, the caravan is ambushed at Zion Canyon, Utah, and is destroyed. Escaping, the Courier meets the mysterious Burned Man who reveals that New Canaan has been laid waste by the White Legs, a primitive tribe of raiders allied to Caesar's Legion. The Courier has to choose to join forces with the Burned Man to help defend Zion and defeat the White Legs, or to allow the White Legs to destroy the survivors of New Canaan. Like FO3's Point Lookout, the storyline in Honest Hearts is fairly straightforward and light, with more of an emphasis on exploring the large canyon.

Old World Blues is set at the Big MT, a huge scientific research station in California. The Courier is abducted and brought to the MT by the Think Tank, a group of scientists who have transplanted their brains into robots and, in the process, have gone a bit crazy. The Think Tank initially take a hostile stance towards the Courier, but eventually agree to let him go. Unfortunately, one of their number, Dr. Mobius, has stolen the Courier's brain (their body is currently on remote control) and gone rogue. The Think Tank and the Courier join forces to defeat Mobius and retrieve the Courier's brain. This expansion is notable for massively raising the tech level of the game, giving the Courier access to a personal teleportation device as well as providing a high-tech base of operations he can teleport to at will from anywhere in the Mojave. The expansion also has a crazy sense of humour and is filled with references to things like Doctor Who, Star Trek and Red Dwarf.

Lonesome Road has the Courier receive a message from the Divide, a formerly prosperous community that was drawn into the conflict between the New California Republic and Caesar's Legion. Arriving at the Divide, the Courier discovers the place has been completely obliterated by multiple nuclear explosions, far more recently than the Great War. The Courier is drawn into the Divide, still inhabited by raiders as well as a dangerous new type of deathclaw, by messages from a man called Ulysses who seems to have unusual amounts of knowledge about the Courier. Eventually, in the final confrontation with Ulysses, it is revealed that the Courier themselves was inadvertently responsible for destroying the Divide when he (or she) delivered a package to the community some years before the job to New Vegas. In turn, Ulysses manipulated events to send the Courier to New Vegas and the fate they suffered there. Lonesome Road is very linear, but the game attempts to make a philosophical point about volition and the "chosen one" of video game heroes by casting the Courier as an unwitting, duped NPC in another character's personal story. How successful (or pretentiously wankish) that is varies by player, but it's an interesting viewpoint.

Fallout Shelter is a mobile-only game released for iOS and Android. The game casts the player as the Overseer of a Vault which has survived the Great War and is now expanding, attracting outsiders to the vault as well as growing the population internally and building new facilities whilst fending off attacks by raiders.

Fallout Shelter is a fun, free game which whiles away a couple of hours quite nicely. It's a highly repetitive game, however, and I would strongly recommend against spending any actual money on it. As a brief stopgap before Fallout 4 comes out, it's fine.

Fallout 4 was released in November 2015, having only been announced a few months earlier. The game runs on the same engine as Fallout 3 and New Vegas (as well as Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim), but it has been upgraded to allow for more impressive graphical effects and improved real-time combat, including the limited use of jetpacks. VATS has also been adjusted so that it slows time down rather and freezing it altogether. The biggest change to the gameplay is that the player can now construct buildings and even entire settlements at will, adding defences and attracting other people to stay in them.

Fallout 4 starts in October 2077, with the player choosing to create a male or female character. Unlike previous games in the series, this protagonist - the Sole Survivor - is fully voiced. The opening prologue has the character living in his or her house on the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts, dealing with their partner and baby. A representative from Vault-Tec reminds the family that they can take shelter in the nearby Vault 111 if the worst should happen and war should erupt. Air raid warnings start sounding, so the family flee to the vault.

Unlike other vaults, which were generational affairs with people growing up and never seeing the sun before dying of old age, Vault 111 is equipped with cryogenic stasis pods, allowing the populace to ride out the period of radioactive contamination before emerging. When the Sole Survivor wakes up, however, they find the vault empty and the other people missing or dead. It is now 2287, 210 years after the Great War (ten years after the events of Fallout 3 and six after New Vegas). The Survivor makes her (or his) way into the ruins of Boston to find other people, survive and find out what's going on in the world.

As with previous games, Fallout 4 sees the player torn between several different factions. In this case, the Institute plays a major role. Located under the ruins of MIT, the Institute has been creating human-like robots known as synths for purposes unknown (this follows up on a side-quest in Fallout 3, in which such a synth flees to Rivet City). This has attracted the enmity of several factions who are suspicious of their motives and wish to destroy them. The player has the ability to choose which factions to support whilst trying to discover what's really going on. Factions include Ghouls, Super Mutants, the Railroad, the Minutemen and a settlement called Diamond City.

Following Fallout 4's release, Bethesda once again released a series of expansions. These consisted of small, minor expansions which expanded the game's settlement building options, and three somewhat larger ones.

Automata gives the player the ability to create their own custom robot companions and adds several quests which explore the robot culture of the Fallout universe in slightly more detail.

Far Harbor is a story-based expansion which takes the player to Far Harbor - actually Bar Harbor, Maine - where they've picked up an SOS. Their mission delves into the backstory of Fallout 4 fan favourite character Nick Valentine and uncovers a threat to the Commonwealth which the player has various options in how to defeat.

In Nuka-World, the Sole Survivor discovers a Nuka Cola theme park which has been taken over by a Raider faction. For the first time, the player can join the Raiders and try to curtail their attacks on civilians, or increase them further.

Unlike previous Fallout expansions, none of Fallout 4's expansions really excited fans or critics.

In May 2018, Bethesda announced that the next Fallout game would be a spin-off with more of a survival horror vibe and, for the first time since the disappointing Brotherhood of Steel, a multiplayer focus.

Brotherhood of Steel starts in October 2102, just twenty-five years after the bombs fell. The inhabitants of Vault 76, located in West Virginia, had been led to believe that when they emerged, the world would be pristine and ready for resettlement. They were wrong. The hope of Reclamation Day quickly turned to horror, the discovery that the world had been reduced to a charred, radioactive ruin. Raiders and mutants are everywhere, supplies are scarce and none of the nation-building from the other games has been completed yet. The Brotherhood of Steel, New California Republic and the Legion are all decades away from being created, and, aside from the Enclave cowering in a bunker somewhere, none of the familiar factions exist.

It falls to the inhabitants of Vault 76 to begin the task of taming the wasteland, with a focus on survival, scavenging and settlement building. Fallout 76 is due to be released in late 2018.

The main Fallout fan community on the web can be found at No Mutants Allowed. Nukapedia, the Fallout Wiki is an essential source of information on the setting.