Fallout: Season 1

2296. Two hundred and nineteen years have passed since the world was devastated in the Great War. Tens of thousands of people in the United States survived in vaults, vast underground complexes dedicated to human survival. When Vault 33, under Santa Monica, Los Angeles, is raided by surface dwellers and its Overseer captured, it falls to his daughter Lucy to set out in search of him. She finds her search complicated by an overlapping quest to find a technological gizmo that could save the wasteland, with multiple other factions searching for the same device, including the Brotherhood of Steel and a ghoul bounty-hunter. Lucy has to overcome her initial naivete about the world to accomplish her mission.

Fallout is a video game franchise which has worn a lot of hats over its twenty-seven years in existence. It's been a dark comedy, a horror fable, a tale of political intrigue, a survival story and an action piece. Each one of the nine games to bear the Fallout banner has been notably different from the others, with different emphases on things like comedy, character or worldbuilding. This has made Fallout almost uniquely contentious as a franchise: every game in the series is somebody's favourite (okay, maybe not 2004's terrible action game Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel) or somebody's most reviled. Each game has a different tone and style, and as each game is somebody's first Fallout experience, they go away thinking of that as being "real Fallout" and anything that deviates from that is a mistake.

When you're making a Fallout TV show, that gives the production team a headache. How can you thread the needle between sometimes wildly different source material, with an infamously contentious fanbase, which also appeals to the general audience? It turns out, pretty well.

Fallout: The Show on Television takes advantage of its format to have an ensemble cast. We mostly focus on Lucy (Ella Purnell) as she leaves Vault 33 and steps onto the surface world for the first time and has to contend with its whacky and weird inhabitants, but we also follow the misadventures of Squire Maximus (Aaron Moten) of the Brotherhood of Steel as he tries to rise through the ranks. No less than two storylines follow the character of Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), the first as he experiences the events leading up to the Great War first-hand, and the second in the present, where Howard, now transformed into an immortal ghoul by radiation, is a bounty hunter searching for the tech-macguffin. Amusingly, these characters map to three distinct playstyles for the game: Lucy as the optimistic do-gooder, Maximus as the bumbling anything-goes character, and Cooper as the murderhobo whose first response to even the merest hint of a challenge is comically over-the-tope ultraviolence.

These characters are surrounded by an utter galaxy of great supporting turns, from the small to the substantial. Johnny Pemberton as Squire Thaddeus steels every scene he's in (and demonstrates what over-encumbrance would look like in real life). Moises Arias has the meatiest dramatic subplot as Lucy's brother, who stays behind in Vault 33 to investigate some weird goings-on at home (ably supported by Dave Register as Cousin Chet). Leslie Uggams (Deadpool's Blind Al) is outstanding as Betty, a senior member of Vault 33's ruling council. Kyle MacLachlan as Lucy's father Hank is obviously brilliant. Lost and Person of Interest's (strangely ageless) Michael Emerson is terrific as a troubled scientist on the run. Matt Berry, Michael Rapaport and Chris Parnell all have small, but memorable moments of scene-stealing excellence. Also a word of approval to the latest incarnation of  Dogmeat (sorry, CX404), who is present and correct and portrayed as they would appear in-game (and you start realising that such a canine might not be altogether right in the head).

As excellent as the cast is the production design. Many production designs on adaptations like to change all the designs (presumably so they can put the new designs in their portfolios), but the guys on Fallout clearly just took designs from the games and whack them on screen. The vaults all look like they've been snapped together from the prefab pieces in Fallout 4's Vault-Tec DLC. Even the door buttons look exactly the same. Characters improbably heal quickly from ludicrous injuries by just injecting lore-accurate stimpaks. The creatures are pretty much high-res versions from the game, although they do throw in a couple of new entries. The Brotherhood power armour is all fantastic. Nothing's been changed here for the sake of change, and, to paraphrase someone involved in the franchise, it just works.

The TV show certainly is not perfect, though. At eight hours there's a couple of moments of wheel-spinning. The shifts in tone mostly work, but there's a few jarring shifts that aren't as well-signposted. The Vault 33 storyline is a bit thin and is strung out across the entire season through relatively brief sequences, maybe that could have been punched up a little bit. There's one continuity error regarding a date on a chalkboard which caused some fans to freak the hell out, but the debate over that was later shut down (and also by the cliffhanger ending of the season). This isn't a very weighty series, it doesn't have the emotional depth of, say, The Last of Us, but then it's not really aiming for that so that's not much of a complaint.

Fallout: The Gogglebox Version - Season 1 (****) is relentlessly entertaining, well-acted with just the right degree of dark humour, tragedy and horror. It's good pulp entertainment which is both true to the source material but also brings some more interesting ideas to the franchise (like the ensemble cast and the greater focus on the pre-war era). It's not the highest of art, and some will bounce right off it, but it does what it's trying to do with aplomb. The show is available now worldwide on Amazon Prime Television. A second season has already been commissioned.

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FALLOUT TV show gets its first trailer

After the first teaser images earlier this week, the Fallout TV show now has its first trailer.

The trailer shows our new protagonist, Lucy (Ella Purnell), leaving Vault 33 to strike out into the post-apocalyptic wasteland outside, the ruins of Los Angeles known as the Boneyard. Lucy is on the trail of technological artifact alongside two other people: The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a 250-year-old gunslinger made immortal (and noseless) by radiation, and Squire Maximus (Aaron Goten), an initiate of the Brotherhood of Steel. The trailer also confirms the presence of Dogmeat, or at least a variation of the canine companion who appears in most of the video games, and Lost and Person of Interest's Michael Emerson as a mentor character for our protagonist.

The TV show is set in 2296, nine years after the events of the video game Fallout 4.

The show launches on 12 April 2024 on Amazon Prime Video.

Plot details and pictures from the FALLOUT TV series

Via Vanity Fair, Amazon have shared a first look at their upcoming Fallout TV show, based on the popular video game series from Black Isle, Obsidian and Bethesda Studios.

Lucy (Ella Purnell), a Vault-dweller from Vault 33 who has to embark on a dangerous journey into post-apocalyptic California.

The Fallout TV series is set in the year 2296, 219 years after the Great War almost obliterated humanity overnight. Some people survived on the surface, but were dramatically impacted by radiation and a desperate fight for survival. Others survived below, in Vaults created before the war by the Vault-Tec corporation.

Lucy (Ella Purnell) and her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), the Overseer of Vault 33.

The TV show starts in Vault 33, where twenty-something Lucy (Ella Purnell of Yellowjackets and Arcane) is living a sheltered but comfortable existence. There is no problem with food or water, the vault is apparently safe and secure, and she is being schooled and trained by her father, the Vault Overseer Hank (Kyle MacLachlan, of Twin Peaks and Dune fame). Needless to say - players of the games are probably way ahead of the curve here - something goes wrong and Lucy has to leave her secure home behind to go in search of a technological artifact that holds the key to her vault's survival. She knows absolutely nothing about the world outside the doors, and has to learn. Fast.

The Caswennan, a Brotherhood of Steel airship. This is a sister-ship to the Prydwen, which plays a major role in the video game Fallout 4.

Another faction on the trail of the artifact is the Brotherhood of Steel. Famed in the Fallout universe for trying to seize control of all high technology that might pose a risk to humanity, a Brotherhood chapter based on the airship Caswennan despatch some of their best troops to hunt for it. Amongst them is Maximus (Aaron Moten, from The Night Of), a squire for a knight of the Brotherhood. Although believing in the Brotherhood's mission and in the leadership of his knight, Maximus has more cynicism and grit than Lucy.

Walton Goggins as The Ghoul (aka Cooper Howard), a gunslinger rendered immortal (but noseless) from radiation.

The third lead is The Ghoul (Walton Goggins, Justified), a ~250-year-old gunslinger. The Ghoul was originally an ordinary human named Cooper Howard, who lost his family in the Great War. But Howard himself survived, transformed by radiation into a type of human who thrives on radiation rather than being harmed by it. The Ghoul is clever, cunning and ruthless, but he has a rough code of honour.

Squire Maximus (Aaron Moten) and his knight, members of the Brotherhood of Steel.

How the three characters interact with one another remains to be seen. Other castmembers include Xelia Mendes-Jones, Mike Doyle, Moises Arias, Johnny Pemberton, Cherien Dabis, Dale Dickey, Matty Caradrople, Sarita Chodhury, Michael Emerson, Leslie Uggams, Frances Turner, Dave Register, Zach Cherry, Rodrigo Luzzi and Annabel O'Hagan.

Lucy (Ella Purnell) arrives at Philly, a small town on the outskirts of the ruins of Los Angeles, a vast area known as the "Boneyard" in the games. The New California Republic is also based in this region.

The Fallout franchise was created by Tim Cain for Interplay in 1996, as a spiritual successor to an earlier game called Wasteland (1988). The first game in the series, released in 1997, was developed by Interplay's internal development studio. This studio was renamed Black Isle Studios and created Fallout 2 (1998) and Fallout Tactics (2001). Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (2004) was a much-maligned, console-only release rushed out ahead of the company going bust. A third mainline Fallout game was in development at the time under the codename Van Buren. Black Isle Studios personnel were split between several new studios, including inXile, Troika and Obsidian Entertainment.

Brotherhood of Steel knights clad in power armour.

The IP was bought by Bethesda Game Studios, who subsequently developed Fallout 3 (2008). They licenced the rights to Obsidian to make Fallout: New Vegas (2010), partially based on the old Van Buren prototype. Bethesda subsequently released Fallout 4 (2015) and the multiplayer-focused prequel, Fallout 76 (2018). Modiphius Entertainment have recently released an official Fallout wargame/miniatures line, called Wasteland Warfare, and a tabletop roleplaying game. Bethesda has confirmed that Fallout 5 is very early in the planning stages.

The Ghoul (Walton Goggins).

The Fallout TV series launches on 12 April 2024 on Amazon Prime.

The Outer Worlds

The future. Vast mega-corporations control Earth and its colony worlds. One such colony is in the Halcyon system, where the colony ship Hope is taking thousands of colonists to help start a new life. One colonist - yourself - is awoken early by a scientist named Phineas Welles, who has dire news. The Hope came out of its skip drive far too early, and has spent decades in sublight flight to Halcyon. The colonists have been frozen so long it's too dangerous to wake them up without an exacting and difficult procedure. He calls on you to help save your fellow colonists and save Halcyon from its current troubles.

The Outer Worlds has some serious pedigree behind it. It's a collaboration between veteran CRPG designers Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the creative geniuses behind the original Fallout, Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, among many others (Boyarsky also worked on Diablo III and Cain on Pillars of Eternity). It's also the first 3D RPG game from Obsidian aimed at a commercial audience since Fallout: New Vegas in 2010. Their intervening games have mostly been crowdfunded, 2D retro-RPGs such as the Pillars of Eternity duology and the excellent Tyranny: great games, but not likely to win over vast audiences.

The Outer Worlds resembles - very closely in places - the Bethesda-published Fallout games. You create a character whom you can customise to your heart's content, through skills, perks, weapons and armour choices, and can also choose your character's name, gender and appearance. There's a main storyline you can follow but also a vast number of side-quests you can complete for extra rewards, and you are also joined on your adventure by several companion characters, who also have their own loyalty missions for you to complete. Everything unfolds in 3D with an emphasis on first-person combat, although you can also use stealth, engineering skills or negotiations to overcome obstacles. Expect to do an enormous amount of exploring, shooting and talking.

A key difference is that The Outer Worlds not exactly an open-world game. The game's universe is split between several planets and each planet has several large wilderness/outdoor areas, some of them very generously sized but not on a par with the open worlds of say New Vegas, the province of Skyrim or the Boston Commonwealth. There are usually one or two large towns in these areas, surrounded by more hostile areas plagued by bandits and dangerous wildlife. A plethora of different storylines and missions take you through these areas.

As an Obsidian RPG, The Outer Worlds hits the right notes of being a morally murky, twisty game where the "right decision" is not always immediately obvious, and where each problem has multiple solutions. A stressed boss has fired one of her pit gangs for asking for a pay raise: you can use persuasion and logic to get her to give in to their demands, or you can hack her terminal to find out she's been skimming off the back end and blackmail her into agreeing to their demands. Or you can break into the pit gang boss's house and find his stash of stolen goods, and then blackmail him into giving up without a fight. Or just say sod it and shoot both of them. The Outer Worlds gives you a tremendous amount of freedom in how you play it, leading to several wildly different endings.

Mechanically, the game is very solid. The Unreal 4 engine is a vast improvement over Bethesda's Creation Engine and makes the game look great (helped by a slightly retro art style) and feel much more modern. You can customise weapons through mods and different ammo types, and also modify armour to give you strong bonuses (further improved by your skills and perks). Your choice of companions - you can bring two with you at any time - also gives you bonuses to different skills and perks. Shooting is chunky and solid. There is a weapon and armour degradation mechanic which I found a little bit tedious, especially because the risk of your weapon actually breaking is pretty much non-existent due to the vast amount of repair parts available. Ammo and cash are also extremely readily available, and apart from the very start of the game hoarding ammo and supplies is not really necessary.

The writing is pretty good, as you'd expect from this team, and the central story about the saving of Halcyon is reasonably engaging, especially the clever way it ties together many of the quests and companion missions as you go along. Open-world CRPGs can feel a bit diffuse at times, their main storylines lacking urgency because they have to be able to explain you wandering off to do completely unrelated activities for 200 hours instead. The Outer Worlds' tighter focus is to its benefit in that area. This is still not a short game - I finished it off in a bit under 30 hours - but it's more in the vein of Knights of the Old Republic or Mass Effect than say The Witcher 3 (which takes more like 80-90 hours to complete).

The companion characters are also brilliant fun, witty and engaging (well, maybe not so much Felix), providing valuable support in combat and engaging in banter with one another, sometimes in ways that opens up new storylines and quests. Earning the respect of each team member is a lot of fun and gives the game greater depth.

On the negative side of things, The Outer Worlds is perhaps a little too easy. On the second-highest difficulty level, the game is still very forgiving and does not pose too much of a challenge. The game is also not that great at supporting a jack-of-all trades kind of player. It really encourages you to play as a soldier (with a strong focus in weapons), engineer (with a focusing in hacking and lockpicking) or stealth operative. If you try to spread your points out over a variety of skills, you may find yourself unable to deal with several late-game challenges. Fortunately you can re-spec at any time using a console on your ship, the Unreliable, but this did feel a little bit like cheating. Some areas of the game also feel like they had more time spent on them than others: Monarch and the areas on Terra 2 all feel huge and packed with quests, whilst it took less than half an hour to do everything I could find to do on Scylla.

The Outer Worlds (****) is an excellent CRPG with a strong focus on writing, character and player choice. It can't quite compete with the likes of say Fallout 4 for budget (The Outer Worlds' budget seems to have been around one-sixth that of a Bethesda title), but it certainly outstrips it hugely in terms of dialogue, a genuinely reactive storyline and moral murkiness. The game is available now on PC, X-Box One (UK, USA) and PlayStation 4 (UK, USA).

THE OUTER WORLDS gets release date

Obsidian Entertainment's science fiction roleplaying game The Outer Worlds has been given a release date: 25 October 2019.

The game, an original title in a brand new universe, sees the character (who can be fully customised by the player) waking up from cryo-sleep in the remote Halcyon system, which is dominated by powerful corporations. The player finds themselves embroiled in a struggle between the different factions and can choose which side to support and which characters to align with.

Created by the team behind the original Fallout and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, the game will be available on PlayStation 4, X-Box One and PC via the Windows and Epic Game Stores (with a Steam release to follow in 2020).

Obsidian announce their new RPG, THE OUTER WORLDS, from the creators of FALLOUT

Obsidian Entertainment have formally announced their next game, The Outer Worlds. As anticipated from teasers earlier this week, this is a retrofuturistic SF roleplaying game. The setting is the planet Halcyon, one of numerous colony worlds overrun by corporations. The player creates a character who wakes up from a long period in cryosleep and is asked to help recover missing colonists from across the planet. The trailer hints that you may also travel to other planets and engage in space combat.

The game is the brainchild of acclaimed RPG designers Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky. The two developers are best-known for creating the Fallout franchise for Black Isle Studios and Interplay, jointly creating the first game in the series in 1997 and working on the sequel of a year later. They later left the floundering Interplay to found the highly-esteemed development studio Troika, where they worked on Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001) and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (2004), two of the most highly-acclaimed CRPGs of all time. After Troika was disbanded, Cain joined Obsidian Entertainment (the successor to Black Isle) where he worked on games such as Pillars of Eternity (2015). In the meantime Boyarsky joined Blizzard and worked as a writer and “loremaster” on Diablo III (2012) and its expansion Reaper of Souls (2014).

In 2015 Boyarsky joined Cain at Obsidian and the two were given the freedom to work on a new game, one they’d been discussing informally for over a decade by that point. Obsidian had created a new niche making retro-2D isometric RPGs like Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny (2016) and Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire (2018) but they didn’t want to get locked into that permanently and wanted to make a colourful 3D RPG with high production values that could go head to head with the likes of BioWare and Bethesda.

The Outer Worlds is the result of that collaboration. As with Cain and Boyarsky’s previous games, it is set in an unusual, colourful and characterful world which reacts and changes to the player’s actions. Players have freedom to solve problems with violence, wits, stealth or negotiation, and have a lot of freedom over their builds. Skills play a much larger role in dialogue choices than in many RPGs (which sometimes have oddities where characters with very high science or medicine skills are unable to use those skills to solve problems, instead having to go on lengthy quests to recover information). They can also amass a crew of various characters who can provide assistance and support.

The game is played from a first-person perspective and looks on first glimpse like a cross between New Vegas, Borderlands and Mass Effect. The trailer demonstrates combat, dialogue and roleplaying possibilities. It is unclear at the moment if the game is a huge open world (like a Bethesda title) or more of a focused game set in large but linear environments (like BioWare's Mass Effect series).

The Outer Worlds will be published by Private Division, the new indie publishing division of Take Two Interactive. Obsidian were recently purchased by Microsoft, but this will not impact on The Outer Worlds which will be released on PC, X-Box One and PlayStation 4 in 2019.

PROJECT ETERNITY smashes funding goals

As covered previously, Obsidian Entertainment have been working on a brand-new, 'old-school' RPG with the working title Project Eternity. The game is heavily influenced and inspired by their own classic games (when they were working as Black Isle), such as Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale and the early Fallout games, as well as those of their associated companies, such as BioWare's Baldur's Gate titles. To help fund the title, Obsidian requested fans to pledge $1.1 million via the Kickstarter crowdfunding website.

Click for massive version.

A month later, the Kickstarter has come to an end with Obsidian having raised $3,986,929 via the website, plus an additional $140,099 in PayPal contributions. The result being that the game achieved all of its planned stretch goals and will now be radically enhanced as a result. This includes the game now shipping on PC, Mac and Linux platforms, in multiple languages and with several added areas (including a whole new city and a major, 14-level dungeon complex).

The game is tentatively set for release in April 2014.

Creators of the greatest RPGs of all time collaborate on new game

Obsidian Entertainment have announced their next big RPG: a fantasy game called Project Eternity (working title). This game will be an isometric, old-school RPG that draws heavily on their old D&D games using the Infinity Engine (the Icewind Dale series and the legendary Planescape: Torment).

However, tired of working for publishers who either don't do proper Q&A on their games (resulting in the bug-filled mess of Alpha Protocol), rush them out in an incomplete state (Knights of the Old Republic II) or refuse to pay them a bonus by failing to hit a ludicrously arbitrary Metacritic score by one point despite selling millions of copies (Fallout: New Vegas), Obsidian have decided to take this one to the fans. Via Kickstarter, Obsidian are asking for $1.1 million to help fund the game. They're already at $300,000 less than a day after starting the project.

The creative forces behind the game include Chris Avellone, the writer of Planescape: Torment; Tim Cain, the creator of the Fallout franchise; and Josh Sawyer, the project lead on the excellent New Vegas (who infamously disapproved of the game being somewhat 'softened' for console players and released his own, more hardcore mod for the PC version of the game). They hope to release the game in early 2014.

Kotaku interview Avellone here about the project, whilst GameBanshee talk to Obsidian studio head Feargus Urquhart here.

UPDATE: As of 24 hours later, the amount raised stands at $1,083,000, and should hit the target within a few hours (with 31 days still to go). Obsidian have already said that any money they make over the $1.1 million will go to making the game even more impressive, and some projections are now suggesting they could make upwards of four times the amount they asked for.