I love Fallout and I'm excited about Disco Elysium, but this also strikes me as historically wrong. Fallout is just a somewhat more serious incarnation of a setting that was well trodden in cRPGs by the time Fallout came out, with Wasteland an easy example but certainly not the only one (Roadwar 2000, Fountain of Dreams, perhaps 2400 AD to some degree, etc.). The quest design and dialogue trees are at least somewhat reminiscent of Dark Sun, and the skill system is somewhat reminiscent of Wasteland and others. I think it is rightly regarded as one of the greatest games of all time for weaving together systems, setting, art, writing, etc. into something special, but I'm not sure that's "revolutionary" so much as an instance of carefully building upon existing elements.
Marat Sar can speak for himself here, and the question of whether Fallout was truly revolutionary probably deserves its own thread, but...
Before I concede that Fallout wasn’t paricularly innovative, they did one thing that I believe was new: providing massive build based reactivity in the dialogue trees. Basically combining Dark Sun style dialogue with extensive skill/attribute checks (IIRC Wasteland had a couple of social skills but they weren’t very useful). My pre-‘97 knowledge is kind of a hodgepodge, but did anyone else, for example, create a low Intelligence playthrough where the dialogue is very, very different—both what you say and what NPCs say to you? Maybe you’d call this a difference of degree rather than kind. And I don’t want to give short shrift to Dark Sun’s reactivity (more games should really do equipment based reactivity). However, I think Fallout’s blend of dialogue trees with tons of attribute and skill checks was indeed revolutionary. If this is what you mean by blending together systems, I’d say at some point these refinements become more than the sum of their parts.
In addition, Fallout took all of these disparate earlier innovations and synthesized them—sure—and then turned what they had into a philosophy of game design. You don’t need to be an innovator to be revolutionary, you just need to advance the revolution. Wasteland and Dark Sun are to Fallout as Rousseau and Montesquieu are to Robespierre, or Marx is to Lenin; the guys who have the ideas are not always the guys who make those ideas truly work (for a given definition of work). Granted, it’s not the best analogy.
That said, there’s a difference between Dark Sun, where many quests have multiple solutions, and Fallout where they decided going in that
every quest must have at least two solutions and
should have at least three. That’s not an innovation, but it’s more than just a refinement.
Maybe a better example is rock & roll, a totally derivative form of music that merely synthesized and refined some pre-existing genre conventions, often going so far as to rip off blues songs without crediting or paying the original writers. And yet there’s a point where rock music became revolutionary, and I’d argue that point came before it started getting really experimental.
And, of course, Fallout had a revolutionary impact on the genre, which is why so many people think it’s full of innovations that it didn’t really invent.
I’ll stop here. Hopefully Robert will have some time to explain his view—he’s much better at articulating RPG ideology than anyone else I agree with.
