Fallout PC Gamer interview with Fallout Tactics lead designer Ed Orman

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fallo...-declared-non-canon-by-todd-howard-it-sucked/

What it feels like to have your Fallout game declared non-canon by Todd Howard: 'It sucked'​

The actual third game in the series didn't get much love from Bethesda.

Fallout 3 is not, in fact, the third Fallout game. That would be Fallout Tactics, a squad-based Brotherhood of Steel tactical RPG developed by Micro Forté, which appeared a few years after Fallout 2, in 2001. Despite being pretty well-liked by critics at the time, the way it deviated from its predecessor meant that it caught a lot of flak from the fans.

Lead designer Ed Orman, who we recently chatted to about his time in the Wasteland, remembers things getting pretty heated. "There was a minority I remember seeing on there who were like, 'Hey, it's a pretty good game. I like what they've done to improve these things about Fallout.' But the vast majority were like, 'This isn't a Fallout game. This is not Fallout 3. You screwed up the lore here, here and here. You put hairy deathclaws in, you’re not using charisma properly and all of those things.' And so there was a huge amount of negativity within the fanbase."

Bethesda faced a similar backlash from the diehards when it took on the challenge of creating Fallout 3. So you might have imagined that the studio would see Micro Forté as a kindred spirit, another developer who went through a similar trial. That was unfortunately not evident when, in 2007, Todd Howard essentially gave Tactics, along with the 2004 ARPG Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, the boot.

"For our purposes," he said, "neither Fallout Tactics nor Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel happened."

"It sucked," says Orman. "You don't want to be told that what you've done is non-canon. By the time he said that I had a lot of distance from this, so it wasn't heartbreaking or gut-wrenching—it was just like, 'Oh man. You didn't have to officially say it, we could have existed in this weird quantum state where it was kind of part of things.' But the way things go now, with the reinterpretation of IPs and the retelling of stories—and especially with the creation of the TV show, where it's existing in the universe, but they're taking liberties and they may have to make adjustments to make that world work for TV—lots of ideas are going to get shuffled around. There have been little bits and pieces of Tactics which you can see kind of are canon now, just through the back door over time. And that's good enough for me. I don't need anything more than that."

One of those things that slipped through the back door was the Prydwen, the Brotherhood of Steel's airship as seen in Fallout 4 and the Fallout TV series. While the Prydwen is a Bethesda creation, it's hard not to look at its zeppelin-like design and see it as directly inspired by the Brotherhood zeppelin of Fallout Tactics.

"They are a logical thing to introduce in the universe, especially for the Brotherhood," says Orman. "If they're not just flying vertibirds, it makes sense they have a kind of aircraft carrier thing, and you can't really travel on the roads. So I think an airship makes a lot of logical sense for the universe. So maybe that's why they came up with it. But I'll just sit here quietly and think, ‘Yes, it's because we had them in Fallout Tactics', and I'll be happy."

A Fallout Tactics sequel was initially planned, but poor sales scuppered its future. Orman would love to see the original gain a new lease on life, though. "I'd love to see a retelling of it. If somebody did a remake of Tactics in Fallout 4's engine, you could just adjust a few things and fix some of the lore problems, I would be fine with that. It's not sacrosanct to me, if that brought it in line." But he's content knowing that some of Fallout Tactics is still living on, in a way. "Every time these things make that leap, it's nice to know that they are at least still drawing on that background. And that Tactics is just holding on, being interpreted usefully in some way."

Keep an eye out for our full interview with Orman, where we dig into the making of Fallout Tactics.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fallo...-be-a-multinational-with-more-than-18-months/

Fallout Tactics' lead designer tips his hat to Bethesda for succeeding where they failed: 'It can be done. You just need to be a multinational with more than 18 months'​

"Our approach was just terrible."

Fallout's had an interesting journey as a series—starting out as one of those crunchy computer CRPGs under the stewardship of Interplay Entertainment, it was then brought under the Bethesda umbrella in 2007, turning into the FPS RPG you either love or loathe depending on which games you've played, and how traditionalist your tastes are.

Turns out, though, there's a dark horse sandwiched in between those two halves of the series' history. Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel was released in 2001, between Fallout 2 (1998) and Fallout 3 (2008). It was developed by Micro Forté under publishers 14 Degrees East and Bethesda Softworks, and it was, at the time, kinda controversial for die-hards.

It wasn't really an RPG, and more of an RTS-style XCOM thing. Turning away from the previous games' turn-based combat, Fallout Tactics instead saw you hopping between missions and Brotherhood Bunkers—there was a turn-based option, but after doing some digging, I can't really find a single person who says that it really worked out.

While Fallout Tactics was a little before my time, the feeling I get just listening to people talk about it, in essence, a mechanically messy game that didn't quite thread the needles it needed to thread. But don't just take my word for it: Recently, Jeremy Peel reached out to team lead Ed Orman on behalf of PC Gamer to talk about the game's development, and he painted a picture of a game that was saddled with hefty time constraints and a confused vision.

"Obviously Speech was the biggest problem for us … you can't dump any stat because it can't be ‘PECIAL’, you know? You can't just drop a letter out of their stat system. That was a huge challenge all the way through. And I think ultimately, we probably didn't really come up with a good solution for Speech.

"I pushed constantly to make sure that we were using it, and I think it was Tony Oakden who finally was like, ‘Dude, this is not gonna work. We don't have a solution, and we don't have any time.' So I think Speech pretty much withered on the vine."

It wasn't just Speech he and his fellow devs struggled to make fit, though. When Peel asks him if the team struggled to work variety into the game, Orman responds bluntly that, yes, they did, and while they didn't exactly fail at that job, things would've been a lot easier if they hadn't bitten off more than they could chew:

"I think we were worried about that from the beginning. And our approach was just terrible. One way to do that would be to have a smaller campaign, so that it never gets tired and never gets same-y. We didn't do that. We had a huge campaign.

"It's all hindsight now, but doing something smaller and more focused would have been so much easier to actually solve that problem of repetition. But instead, we just filled it with stuff. There are so many features. We added vehicles. We added so many things to the game to fill it out instead. It’s a bloody long campaign, and there's a lot of variety in it."

In a moment of reflection, Orman considers Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel—not the game his team made, but an ill-fated console release with an unhelpfully similar title made by Interplay Entertainment in 2004, which was more universally-panned: A weird, top-down action RPG that's far more sacreligious to the spirit of the universe than anything Bethesda made afterwards.

"I feel for the other Brotherhood of Steel game, the console one, because they got panned and I don’t know if that was right or not. But that separation would have probably been a great start. It’s a Fallout game, but you don't try and say, 'This is the same kind of game, just the combat part.'"

Orman even tips his hat to what Bethesda managed, and—look, while the move to a first-person shooter was controversial at the time, and I do think the world could always use more CRPGs, I don't think you can say that Bethesda's spin was unsuccessful with a straight face, even if it made you want to take up arms and become an old man yelling at a nuclear cloud.

"To Bethesda's credit, I think they actually did a pretty good job of going, 'This is a real-time game, but we're going to put in the time to figure out how to make this work—this core thing of SPECIAL and all of the stats, how to make that actually applicable," he then adds that gee, it would've been nice to have the actual time to do something similar: "It can be done. You just need to be a multinational with more than 18 months. It was ridiculous."

 

[Roguey]

He should be happy to be excluded from Bethout.

If somebody did a remake of Tactics in Fallout 4's engine, you could just adjust a few things and fix some of the lore problems, I would be fine with that.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fallo...lly-enjoyed-killing-off-the-nobility-of-them/

Fallout Tactics lead on exploring the 'bigotry' of the Brotherhood of Steel long before Bethesda got there: 'I really enjoyed killing off the nobility of them'​

Fallout Tactics had some big ideas even if it didn't make good on all of them.

Almost every Fallout game has its stalwart defenders: People who will swear til they're blue in the face that New Vegas, or 3, or 2, or 1 is the best game in the series and, just maybe, the best game of all time. There's something about the Wasteland that inspires fanatical devotion. Usually.

Fallout Tactics is one of the few games you'd struggle to find a ride-or-die fan for. A combat-focused follow-up to Fallout 2, the game's blend of tactics and RPG elements didn't quite find purchase with fans of either genre. And who knows—maybe Fallout fans bristled at its depiction of the Brotherhood of Steel.

"I really enjoyed killing off the nobility of them," Fallout Tactics lead designer Ed Orman told PCG in a recent interview. In Tactics, players took on the role of a squad of Brotherhood soldiers, giving what was—at that point—one of the deepest looks yet at the faction in the series (though they had featured heavily in both the first and second games, naturally).

"Anybody who gets that level of power through all of their technology and stuff, post-apocalyptically, I don't believe they're going to remain a noble enterprise," says Orman. And besides, he doesn't think the Brotherhood was "really, deep down, all that noble anyway." A key part of Tactics' backstory is a split in the Brotherhood over whether to accept "unpure" recruits: Mutants, ghouls and the like who now inhabit the Wasteland. Some want to expand the membership, others of a slightly more, shall we say, fascist tinge want to keep the ranks as they are.

"[What] we were exploring was basically racism," says Orman. "The bigotry is built into their ethos. In [tabletop RPG] Gamma World there’s this concept of pure strain humans, and I know that concept is in Fallout as well from the Brotherhood's perspective.

"I really liked playing with that. It's the reason I liked the ending where they basically get over it—they get over all of their prejudices and bigotry and accept that survival requires everybody's help."

The Brotherhood weren't straightforward white knights in FO1 or 2, mind, but Tactics asked questions about the ethics of their underlying philosophy long before the split in Fallout 3 or their waning, xenophobic depiction in New Vegas. It was genuinely ahead of its time in that sense, which is easy to forget of a game so under-loved.

"I liked breaking that mould for them," says Orman, "and forcing them to take on new people. I don't know if we stuck the landing, but I really liked that over the course of the campaign, and by the end, one of the good endings is that they become barely the Brotherhood anymore. They are open to everybody at that point, because they realise that's the actual way to survive. It's not just the technology, it's the people. I always liked that note." Friends, I think I might want to give Fallout Tactics another go.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

What a moron. I was wondering if I should give it another go and he just kicked it down a hundred places in the priority list.

 

[The Nameless One]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fallo...lly-enjoyed-killing-off-the-nobility-of-them/

Fallout Tactics lead on exploring the 'bigotry' of the Brotherhood of Steel long before Bethesda got there: 'I really enjoyed killing off the nobility of them'​

Fallout Tactics had some big ideas even if it didn't make good on all of them.

Almost every Fallout game has its stalwart defenders: People who will swear til they're blue in the face that New Vegas, or 3, or 2, or 1 is the best game in the series and, just maybe, the best game of all time. There's something about the Wasteland that inspires fanatical devotion. Usually.

Fallout Tactics is one of the few games you'd struggle to find a ride-or-die fan for. A combat-focused follow-up to Fallout 2, the game's blend of tactics and RPG elements didn't quite find purchase with fans of either genre. And who knows—maybe Fallout fans bristled at its depiction of the Brotherhood of Steel.

"I really enjoyed killing off the nobility of them," Fallout Tactics lead designer Ed Orman told PCG in a recent interview. In Tactics, players took on the role of a squad of Brotherhood soldiers, giving what was—at that point—one of the deepest looks yet at the faction in the series (though they had featured heavily in both the first and second games, naturally).

"Anybody who gets that level of power through all of their technology and stuff, post-apocalyptically, I don't believe they're going to remain a noble enterprise," says Orman. And besides, he doesn't think the Brotherhood was "really, deep down, all that noble anyway." A key part of Tactics' backstory is a split in the Brotherhood over whether to accept "unpure" recruits: Mutants, ghouls and the like who now inhabit the Wasteland. Some want to expand the membership, others of a slightly more, shall we say, fascist tinge want to keep the ranks as they are.

"[What] we were exploring was basically racism," says Orman. "The bigotry is built into their ethos. In [tabletop RPG] Gamma World there’s this concept of pure strain humans, and I know that concept is in Fallout as well from the Brotherhood's perspective.

"I really liked playing with that. It's the reason I liked the ending where they basically get over it—they get over all of their prejudices and bigotry and accept that survival requires everybody's help."

The Brotherhood weren't straightforward white knights in FO1 or 2, mind, but Tactics asked questions about the ethics of their underlying philosophy long before the split in Fallout 3 or their waning, xenophobic depiction in New Vegas. It was genuinely ahead of its time in that sense, which is easy to forget of a game so under-loved.

"I liked breaking that mould for them," says Orman, "and forcing them to take on new people. I don't know if we stuck the landing, but I really liked that over the course of the campaign, and by the end, one of the good endings is that they become barely the Brotherhood anymore. They are open to everybody at that point, because they realise that's the actual way to survive. It's not just the technology, it's the people. I always liked that note." Friends, I think I might want to give Fallout Tactics another go.

And here's yet another rabid case of "poor man's virtue-signalling".

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/t...athclaws-at-the-time-i-know-it-was-sacrilege/

The lead on one of Fallout's least-loved entries says over-enthusiasm led to its hated hairy deathclaws: 'At the time, I know it was sacrilege'​

But there are good reasons too!

The pre-Bethesda Fallouts occupy an odd space, still held up by the die-hards as the Only True Fallouts but largely unplayed beyond gamers of a certain vintage. Me, it's me that's the vintage. Yet even among these titles there is the neglected stepson: Fallout Tactics, a Brotherhood of Steel RPG developed by Micro Forté, released in 2001. It was received pretty well at the time, by critics anyway, but its divergence from the previous games saw many fans then and now dismiss it as unworthy of the heritage.

Sound familiar? Jeremy Peel recently sat down with Fallout Tactics' lead designer, Ed Orman, about the game's development and how heated things subsequently got about this version of the Wasteland. Recalling some of the most common negative complaints they'd hear from fans, Orman lists "This isn't a Fallout game. This is not Fallout 3. You screwed up the lore here, here and here. You put hairy deathclaws in, you’re not using charisma properly and all of those things."

This may have partly contributed to Bethesda's decision to unceremoniously yoink Fallout Tactics out of the official canon ("it sucked"). I mean, hairy deathclaws? And part of the reaction to Micro Forté doing this stuff may have been that Tactics was not a mainline entry, but went all-in on the lore and story anyway. These were the days before lore bibles, after all, when the best you could probably hope for were a few pages of notes from the original team.

"There might have been some [lore] documentation, but it was a lot of reverse engineering," says Orman. "Which is why we got some things wrong or we went off the beaten path a bit in places, because there was so much. I think your assessment is correct: we didn't need to do what we did [but] I like the setting, and I wanted to write a big story.

"We could have done a series of individual missions. We could have done so much less than we did. But no, I wanted to tie it all together. Fallout 1 and 2 had this story that goes from start to finish, and lots of different side stories. People love exploring those things, and I do too. So that's what I wanted to make."

Which doesn't quite answer the question of how we end up with hairy deathclaws. "Chris [Taylor] was our main point for lore and things like that, and then whatever other documents they could find for us," recalls Orman. "But there was just so much stuff in [Tactics] that I'm not surprised we, you know, made hairy deathclaws. Because it looks like it's there in the sprite, so we're gonna come up with a hairy deathclaw. Now, I actually think there's plenty of justification for doing variations on deathclaws. But at the time, I know it was sacrilege."

A Fallout Tactics sequel was planned at one point, but the game didn't sell well enough to justify the continuation. Nevertheless it remains one of the oddest byroads in a universe that's only going to get bigger, and regardless what Bethesda says about its canonicity or otherwise seems to have had a big influence on subsequent games (most of all, and perhaps this is not surprising, the world of New Vegas: another spinoff Fallout made by another studio).

There's plenty more to come from our interview with Orman, who is philosophical about Tactics' place in the wider Fallout universe these days. "There have been little bits and pieces of Tactics which you can see kind of are canon now, just through the back door over time. And that's good enough for me. I don't need anything more than that."

 

[Fargus]

Oh no, not the hairy deathclaws. Don't forget that they also talk.

 

[-M-]

I love how one guy did what probably amounted to a 10 minute interview with the Tactics dev, and now we have four (and counting) talentless pcgamer writers milking it dry and probably will continue to do so for the rest of the month.

There was a time you would just publish the damn interview.

 

[Konjad]

Yeah, I'm not reading this shit. Interview or bust.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Yeah, I'm not reading this shit. Interview or bust.

General Barnaky bad.

I was really afraid for my ghoul friends when he got elected.

 

[SexExitium]

I love how one guy did what probably amounted to a 10 minute interview with the Tactics dev, and now we have four (and counting) talentless pcgamer writers milking it dry and probably will continue to do so for the rest of the month.

There was a time you would just publish the damn interview.

like watching a six hour reaction video to a tiktok meme. reading between the lines it's all just pure existential dread: nothing but a way to squander the final moments of their meaningless game journo existences by weaving words into superfluous tapestries of mindless drivel; waiting for the moment chatgpt inevitably takes over their jobs so that they can finally crack open those bottles of fentanyl they've been saving for this very occasion, desperate for release from the hollow cycle of "content creation". good riddance

anyway, the extent to which this franchise's barren teat is being milked is kinda baffling; who's actually sipping on this putrid sludge and going "ahhh" is beyond me

 

[The Nameless One]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/t...athclaws-at-the-time-i-know-it-was-sacrilege/

The lead on one of Fallout's least-loved entries says over-enthusiasm led to its hated hairy deathclaws: 'At the time, I know it was sacrilege'​

But there are good reasons too!

The pre-Bethesda Fallouts occupy an odd space, still held up by the die-hards as the Only True Fallouts but largely unplayed beyond gamers of a certain vintage. Me, it's me that's the vintage. Yet even among these titles there is the neglected stepson: Fallout Tactics, a Brotherhood of Steel RPG developed by Micro Forté, released in 2001. It was received pretty well at the time, by critics anyway, but its divergence from the previous games saw many fans then and now dismiss it as unworthy of the heritage.

Sound familiar? Jeremy Peel recently sat down with Fallout Tactics' lead designer, Ed Orman, about the game's development and how heated things subsequently got about this version of the Wasteland. Recalling some of the most common negative complaints they'd hear from fans, Orman lists "This isn't a Fallout game. This is not Fallout 3. You screwed up the lore here, here and here. You put hairy deathclaws in, you’re not using charisma properly and all of those things."

This may have partly contributed to Bethesda's decision to unceremoniously yoink Fallout Tactics out of the official canon ("it sucked"). I mean, hairy deathclaws? And part of the reaction to Micro Forté doing this stuff may have been that Tactics was not a mainline entry, but went all-in on the lore and story anyway. These were the days before lore bibles, after all, when the best you could probably hope for were a few pages of notes from the original team.

"There might have been some [lore] documentation, but it was a lot of reverse engineering," says Orman. "Which is why we got some things wrong or we went off the beaten path a bit in places, because there was so much. I think your assessment is correct: we didn't need to do what we did [but] I like the setting, and I wanted to write a big story.

"We could have done a series of individual missions. We could have done so much less than we did. But no, I wanted to tie it all together. Fallout 1 and 2 had this story that goes from start to finish, and lots of different side stories. People love exploring those things, and I do too. So that's what I wanted to make."

Which doesn't quite answer the question of how we end up with hairy deathclaws. "Chris [Taylor] was our main point for lore and things like that, and then whatever other documents they could find for us," recalls Orman. "But there was just so much stuff in [Tactics] that I'm not surprised we, you know, made hairy deathclaws. Because it looks like it's there in the sprite, so we're gonna come up with a hairy deathclaw. Now, I actually think there's plenty of justification for doing variations on deathclaws. But at the time, I know it was sacrilege."

A Fallout Tactics sequel was planned at one point, but the game didn't sell well enough to justify the continuation. Nevertheless it remains one of the oddest byroads in a universe that's only going to get bigger, and regardless what Bethesda says about its canonicity or otherwise seems to have had a big influence on subsequent games (most of all, and perhaps this is not surprising, the world of New Vegas: another spinoff Fallout made by another studio).

There's plenty more to come from our interview with Orman, who is philosophical about Tactics' place in the wider Fallout universe these days. "There have been little bits and pieces of Tactics which you can see kind of are canon now, just through the back door over time. And that's good enough for me. I don't need anything more than that."

Why, of course it's about the sacrilege of hairy deathclaws & evil BoS, and clearly it's nothing like game-breaking bugs, shitty endings and no replayability.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/strat...-was-planned-but-then-interplay-bit-the-dust/

A deep South Fallout sequel with a 'guerilla warfare' vibe was planned, but then Interplay bit the dust​

Rasslin' them radscorpions.

The Fallout lineage roughly splits into pre-Bethesda and post-Bethesda, but there are byroads. One of the most notable is 2001's Fallout Tactics, a Brotherhood of Steel RPG developed by Micro Forté. The game's critical reception was good, though sales weren't, and it occupies a strange non-canonical space: disregarded by Bethesda and Todd Howard (which "sucked"), yet bleeding into things like Amazon's Fallout show in small ways.

Jeremy Peel recently sat down with Fallout Tactics' lead designer, Ed Orman, about the game's breakneck and somewhat troubled development, including the hairy deathclaws. Towards the end of this chat they get onto Fallout Tactics 2: a sequel that was discussed and even planned-out, before publisher Interplay imploded and it became an irradiated Dodo.

"Somewhere in the ether there is a document," says Orman. "I don't know if it exists anywhere, I certainly don't have it, but there is a spec for the Tactics 2 game. And broadly speaking, it was a spec that attempted to address most of the problems that we've talked about: It was a smaller campaign, still the same structure. But having established it, we would simplify the economy, simplify the number of objects and weapons in the game."

Orman reckons one of the issues with Fallout Tactics was feature-creep and a tight deadline, which made balancing a nightmare. But streamlining the sequel allowed it to double-down on the real-time elements. "It really embraced the real-time aspect," says Orman. "I don't think we were ever going to be able to let go of turn-based. But definitely, front-and-centre, it was supposed to be a real-time version."

Orman was blissfully unaware of how bad things were at Interplay, and instead focused on what the team could fix in the game just shipped. "We got to reuse all of the assets, in theory, except for the new content needed for the new campaign," says Orman. "And it was heading into the deep South, which gave us lots of opportunities for new mutations and creatures and things that you hadn't seen before in Fallout, and new factions and all that sort of stuff. There were lots of ideas and I think it would have probably addressed a lot of the different problems that we had discovered, which if we'd had more time we would have fixed. So instead, we were just going to fix them in the sequel."

As for the story, it's a doozy. "We were talking about having an Eve Kit that was basically taking on the role of the robots in Fallout Tactics 1," says Orman. "The idea was that there was an Eve Kit that was creating intelligent plant hybrid things. So the plants were going to be the big problem. And by intelligent plants, going to the South and having really lush environments, that was going to make that more interesting. Because now you can't tell the environment from the enemies, and there’s more of a guerrilla warfare sort of feeling to the missions. I don't know how far we got with that, I just thought it was a cool idea."

Funnily enough, the Atlantic City based expansion of Fallout 76 explores similar ideas, another example of Tactics' quiet influence across contemporary Fallout. "It's a bit of parallel evolution," laughs Orman. "Some of these ideas just naturally come out of the setting."

Unfortunately, Interplay was about to go bust in spectacular fashion. Micro Forté may have just shipped a reasonably well-received game in a major series but, like many studios, it was brutally affected.

"Yes, that [time] was awful," says Orman. "I didn't like it, but it was worse for everybody who lost their jobs. I was still pretty young, but it was probably the first time that being in a lead position I realised what the real responsibility of that meant: trying to make it OK for the people who lost their jobs, and make it OK for the people that stayed. We found out two or three days before we had to tell everybody else, and I wasn't allowed to tell anybody. So to sit on that knowledge… that's just the responsibility that you have.

"So that sucked. The way it was handled sucked as well. It was not done well. I understand the economic realities of it. I know why it had to happen now. Being naive back then, I didn't, I was raging against this injustice. If there's no money, then you’ve got to let people go, I get it. You can do it good, or you can do it bad. But it is always a shame. You really do form a lot of bonds with the people you work with, and then to just kill that is awful [...] This cycle of hiring people up and killing them off and hiring them up, it's so wasteful. It doesn't even make economic sense, let alone the human toll of the damn thing."

Fallout Tactics 2 went by the wayside, and Orman eventually moved on. The original remains the series' greatest oddity, and whatever Bethesda says officially has had a big influence on the contemporary wasteland. There's plenty more to come from our interview with Orman, who is philosophical about Tactics' place in the wider Fallout universe: "little bits and pieces of Tactics you can see kind of are canon now, just through the back door over time," says Orman. "And that's good enough for me."

Full interview: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fallo...down-on-it-now-but-i-still-love-what-we-made/

The making of Fallout Tactics: 'I sound like I'm down on it now, but I still love what we made'​

A green team with huge ambitions—what could possibly go wrong?

We didn't call them memes in 2001. But insofar as viral internet jokes existed, hairy deathclaws became a meme. More specifically, they became a stick to beat Fallout Tactics developer Micro Forté with. The studio had invented a take on the iconic monster that was covered in thick fur—a natural coat which provided top-notch protection from the weather. "Because it looks like it's there in the sprite," lead designer Ed Orman says. "Now I actually think there's plenty of justification for doing variations on deathclaws. But at the time, it was sacrilege."

The hairy deathclaw is, in many ways, emblematic of Fallout Tactics—a bold and slightly strange genetic offshoot of the beloved RPG series, reverse-engineered by an enthusiastic team. It's a wistful reminder of a time before the Bethesda reboot in which the future of Fallout had yet to be written—and for all we knew, might feature a Brotherhood of Steel who sped around the ruined city of Chicago in Humvees, desperate for new recruits.

Rewind to May 1999, when Micro Forté put out a forgotten squad tactics game named Enemy Infestation. A real-time take on XCOM, it was praised by PC Gamer for its "good storyline", lampooned for its "hambone voice acting", and judged as "worth playing if someone gave it to you as a gift—maybe."

Against the odds, it put the inexperienced developer in prime position to contribute to one of the most beloved series in gaming. "We finished that game, and then we moved onto another one, which was called Chimera Project I think," Orman says. "It had a bunch of different names. We made a full playable demo to pitch."

At some stage, that demo reached Interplay, who came back with a counter-pitch: how about you make a Fallout game? It's not quite the wild punt it seems when you consider what the publisher was looking at. Micro Forté had built an isometric, tile-based engine which, if you squinted a little, already resembled a shiny version of the quintessential post-apocalyptic RPG.

"It had some bells and whistles that the Fallout engines didn't have," Orman says. "Graphically, it was just more advanced. Even the color palettes that we had available were better than what was in the original Fallout games, and we were rendering sprites at higher res."

Future shock

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Even so, this serendipitous deal came as a fantastic shock—particularly to Orman, who had grown up with the '50s music and Americana that distinguished Fallout, and regularly played in the radiation-soaked tabletop setting of Gamma World. "I thought Fallout was this amazing melding of these things," he says. "I was blown away by the idea that they would put us in charge of anything with any pre-existing value, because we were a totally new team."

That thought would come back to haunt him. But Interplay did take steps to try and limit the responsibility it was loading on Micro Forté. Namely, it decided that the game would be Fallout Tactics—a spinoff rather than a numbered entry in the series.

"Making a full-fledged RPG with a brand new team, with the complexity Fallout has, it's a big ask," Orman says. "We still made something ludicrously complex anyway. But I think the idea was to do this offshoot, and not have to adhere to all of the conventions of the mechanics that are usually in a Fallout game."

Fallout Tactics would focus on the turn-based combat system that had powered the two previous games in the series. But Micro Forté simultaneously developed a real-time version that would give players the option of steering their squad and setting up ambushes without pausing the action—the brainchild of lead programmer Karl Burdack.

"Probably the turn-based stuff had been identified as not having as large an appeal. You can reach more people if you're real-time," Orman says. "But I also think, when we first got an implementation of it, we all enjoyed it greatly, too. It was still using all the same artwork and all the same game systems and everything, but having it run in real-time was just so much faster, and it was cool to see everything kicking off."

Given the size of the levels in Fallout Tactics and the length of its protracted engagements with raiders, the real-time option became less a novelty and more a necessity. "That was something that came out of playing the original Fallouts," Orman says. "The horrible situation where you ended up with one enemy and couldn't figure out where they were on the map, and you were just turn-based walking around - that was always a painful end game. So at least we solved that."

The militarised premise of Fallout Tactics pushed the team towards the Brotherhood of Steel—the Fallout faction with a predisposition towards tactical training and squad-based operations. In a curious pre-echo of Bethesda's Fallout 3, Micro Forté severed the cord that connected its Brotherhood soldiers to the faction's founders in California. The studio imagined an ideological schism that left a bunch of power-armored, power-hungry survivors stranded out east in Chicago.

"Separating them from the main Brotherhood was really important so that we could do something different with this group," Orman says. "They're survivalists at this point, they're not the holy Brotherhood." Like the later Brotherhood of New Vegas, the faction of Fallout Tactics is grappling with the problem of recruitment—whether to compromise its insular way of life by taking on newcomers from the wastes, or risk dying off in its bunkers.

(Image credit: Bethesda)

"I really enjoyed killing off the nobility of them," Orman says. "Anybody who gets that level of power through all of their technology, post-apocalyptically, I don't believe they're going to remain a noble enterprise. I don't think the Brotherhood was really, deep down, all that noble anyway."

If you don't throw narrative curveballs the Brotherhood's way, Orman says, they're basically a steamroller. "They are the perfect superpower that exists post-apocalyptically, and they're just going to spread. I think there is a legit game where the Brotherhood are the main bad guys, 100 years in the future. Because they're just unstoppable."

The bigotry of the Brotherhood became a core theme of Fallout Tactics' story. "It's built into their ethos," Orman says. "In Gamma World there's this concept of pure strain humans, and I know that concept is in Fallout as well from the Brotherhood's perspective. So I really liked playing with that."

One of the endings Micro Forté designed for Fallout Tactics saw the player's gaggle of veterans become almost unrecognisable as the Brotherhood of Steel. "They are open to everybody at that point," Orman says. "It's not just the technology, it's the people. They basically get over all of their prejudices and accept that survival requires everybody's help. I always liked that note."

Hard road​

(Image credit: Bethesda)

As you might have gathered by this point, Micro Forté didn't take the easy route when it came to scoping its spinoff. It volunteered to make a sprawling story campaign, as well as a multiplayer component. Like Icewind Dale in the wake of Baldur's Gate, this was an action-focused RPG spinoff that sacrificed nothing in terms of worldbuilding, crunchy stat management and looted equipment.

"Standalone missions would have been so much better, instead of the contiguous world that we were trying to create," Orman says. "Because you can just pace out the equipment that the player has and the enemies that you're encountering, and take the player through the variation that's in the game. Instead, we were the opposite. We were incentivizing you to keep your squad alive."

By the midgame, players were in command of powerful squaddies bristling with every gun they'd picked off a corpse during previous missions. Balancing the difficulty quickly became Orman's biggest problem, and dogged him throughout development. "It was possible to overwhelm all of the mechanics by equipping the right amount of weaponry with an almost unlimited ammo source, because we didn't balance the economy correctly," he says. "So there were parts where you could just select everybody and rush through."

It's no wonder that Micro Forté made mistakes, given that it was greener than the mutants. The most experienced team member by far was Tony Oakden, a producer who had worked on Driver in the UK. "I was always naively pushing back against him, saying, 'No, we can't cut this thing, this has to be in here,'' Orman says. "He almost certainly could see the writing on the wall."

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Orman himself was made lead designer and associate producer based on very little game design experience. "I was not qualified, other than I'd played a lot of role-playing games in my life, so I understood rules, and had played a lot of Fallout, so I understood Fallout," he says. "I pretty much stumbled straight into it."

There's a sense, too, that Interplay had set Micro Forté an impossible problem. There was no obvious way to split the difference between the sprawl of Fallout—a universe that always said yes to the player and gave them choices wherever possible—and a tight, combat-first tactics game.

"It sits uncomfortably in the middle, and that was always the problem, and one of the joys of it," Orman says. "If we'd had another year from the start, we'd have had the time to plan and balance these things out properly. I think it would have been a much better Fallout game. But it needed more time or less features. It needed to choose one direction or the other."

That said, it's the big, inadvisable swings of Fallout Tactics that stick fondly in the memory—like the bunker hub where characters from previous missions gradually show up for chats. "I love that you go back to the base, and you have the quartermaster that you can talk to and sell your crap to," Orman says. "It just makes everything feel so much more cohesive."

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Let's not forget, too, that Fallout Tactics remains the only game in the series to officially support driveable vehicles. "That was an insane thing to try and take on, but we did," Orman says. "Because it was a squad-based game, you want a way to move all your guys together—stick them in a vehicle and off you go. They took up huge amounts of memory and had navigation problems, because the world was built for humanoid, upright characters. But they were a lot of fun to put in."

All this ambition made Fallout Tactics a tricky game to pull together. Micro Forté wasn't helped by the fact that art assets they'd been promised by Interplay from the first two Fallout games never materialised. "We lost months," Orman says. "That was a huge leg sweep. Every single thing that came over from a Fallout game, we had to recreate from scratch. That was just a huge slog."

It's a feat akin to recreating the sound of the Beatles' albums without access to Abbey Road. And it's testament to the team's skill in reverse-engineering that, for the most part, Fallout Tactics is steeped in the same crackling atmosphere and post-societal murk as the original games. Not that their efforts were appreciated by a punishing fanbase at launch. Despite the input of original Fallout co-creator Chris Taylor, who acted as a living lore bible, the team "got some things wrong".

"The art team in particular were super gutted, because a lot of the visuals of the robots which they had slaved away on, those were the things that were getting dinged for not fitting the aesthetic," Orman says. "Visually, it was really easy to point at things and go, 'This doesn't fit the universe.' So they copped it hard. You want to make the fan base happy. You want to make another one too. So it was a gut punch.

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Micro Forté had plans for a sequel. Fallout Tactics 2 was intended to address the issues of its predecessor, with a smaller campaign, simplified economy, and new setting in the form of the deep South. "Which gave us lots of opportunities for new mutations and creatures that you hadn't seen before in Fallout," Orman says. "The idea was that there was an Eden Kit that was creating intelligent plant hybrids. Now you can't tell the environment from the enemies, and there's more of a guerrilla warfare sort of feeling to the missions."

Instead, once Fallout Tactics was finished, the team was subjected to "awful" layoffs. "Emotionally, it sucks," Orman says. "From a business sense, it's really bad business. If there is any way you can maintain those teams, they will generate more for you, because they have this bond already and this experience together."

Nonetheless, members of the Fallout Tactics team went on to great things—working at Irrational Australia on the likes of BioShock, and contributing to the country's vibrant indie scene. And over time, despite being declared non-canon by Todd Howard, elements of Fallout Tactics have crept into sequels and into the hearts of series fans. Like the Brotherhood, the Fallout hardcore has slowly seen the value in embracing the mutants on the periphery of the world they so jealously guard.

"The team was a great bunch of people who pulled off a ridiculous feat in creating a game with nowhere near as much money as it needed to have, with not enough time, all of these things against it. And the fact that we all made that game is still really, really awesome to me," Orman says. "I sound like I'm down on it now. With years of hindsight you can see your own mistakes much more clearly. But I still love what we made."

 

[cioran]

To think that at some point I had a subscription with Pc Gamer

 

[Curious_Tongue]

The game has many almost great elements. I understand why it's still discussed after all this time.

 

[Harthwain]

"I really enjoyed killing off the nobility of them," Orman says. "Anybody who gets that level of power through all of their technology, post-apocalyptically, I don't believe they're going to remain a noble enterprise. I don't think the Brotherhood was really, deep down, all that noble anyway."

If you don't throw narrative curveballs the Brotherhood's way, Orman says, they're basically a steamroller. "They are the perfect superpower that exists post-apocalyptically, and they're just going to spread. I think there is a legit game where the Brotherhood are the main bad guys, 100 years in the future. Because they're just unstoppable."

The bigotry of the Brotherhood became a core theme of Fallout Tactics' story. "It's built into their ethos," Orman says. "In Gamma World there's this concept of pure strain humans, and I know that concept is in Fallout as well from the Brotherhood's perspective. So I really liked playing with that."

One of the endings Micro Forté designed for Fallout Tactics saw the player's gaggle of veterans become almost unrecognisable as the Brotherhood of Steel. "They are open to everybody at that point," Orman says. "It's not just the technology, it's the people. They basically get over all of their prejudices and accept that survival requires everybody's help. I always liked that note."

That guy has a really shitty way with the words.

From where I am standing the Brotherhood wasn't supposed to be noble, but superior by the way of monopolizing access to old-world technology via hoarding everything. There is nothing noble in that. And they pretty much do the same thing in Tactics. It's what they do. However, it is not that difficult to contest the notion of the Brotherhood of Steel being unstoppable. Logistics is one obvious way of pointing that out.

They accept recruits from various sources, because they have to do that. However, this isn't them "getting over their prejudices". They are adapting in order to survive, which fits Fallout "do or die" vibe. This is plainly visible in the intro (which I liked immensely). The drill sergeant treated new recruits like the bunch of savages, because that's pretty much what they are. He also points out they are the resource the Brotherhood needs (one of the few). Just because you can have Ghouls and Supermutants in the Brotherhood at some point doesn't mean they are suddenly seen as equals. You can compare that to having black people serving in WW2 and Vietnam.

I guess this is yet another proof that it is possible to create something good by accident, rather than having a stroke of genius.

 

[ArchAngel]

I liked and finished F:T twice. I've finished F3, FNV and F4 ZERO times

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/strat...vent-and-passionate-and-often-horribly-toxic/

'God it was gutting' to see the Fallout fanbase response, says Fallout Tactics lead: 'fervent and passionate and often horribly toxic'​

"We should have just never looked."

Before the Bethesda Fallouts, and after the Black Isle originals, came a singular series offshoot—Fallout: Tactics. A slightly offbeat spinoff made by an inexperienced team, who had to reverse-engineer from the source material, Tactics would release in 2001 to a fairly decent critical reception, but got the cold shoulder from many fans.

Jeremy Peel recently spoke to Tactics' lead designer Ed Orman, in a wide-ranging PCG interview revealing more about the game than ever before. One of the oddities of working on it was that dual reaction, with all the praise soon undercut by fans livid about things like the hairy deathclaws.

"We had two windows into how it was being received," says Orman. "There was one that we should have just never looked through, and the one that we always look through. Commercially and in terms of how [Fallout: Tactics] was rated and how it was reviewed, it was received really well. For what it was, the journalists who played it just generally seemed to get what we were trying to do, what the limitations of what we had were, and they thought we punched above our weight. I think we did too. I think we made a really great game that a bunch of people enjoyed."

But a lot of people didn't: or at least said they didn't. Fallout: Tactics didn't just diverge from what the previous games had done, but above all else suffered from the unfortunate fact it wasn't (the Black Isle) Fallout 3.

"The other window was the existing Fallout fan base and the incredibly fervent and passionate and often horribly toxic people in that fan base," says Orman. "There was a minority I remember seeing on there who were like 'Hey, it's pretty good game. I like what they've done to improve these things about Fallout.' But the vast majority were like, 'This isn't a Fallout game. This is not Fallout 3. You screwed up the lore here, here and here. You put hairy deathclaws in, you’re not using charisma properly and all of those things.' And so there was a huge amount of negativity within the fan base."

The unfortunate thing was that, even before the team began work on Fallout: Tactics, they were part of that fanbase, and as the game was developed became even bigger fans. Perhaps the wounds cut deep because, on some level, these were the fellow travellers that the developers had hoped to please.

"That was disheartening," says Orman. "God, it was gutting. The art team in particular were super gutted, because a lot of the visuals of the robots and things like that which they had slaved away on, those were the things that were getting dinged for not fitting the aesthetic. Visually, it was really easy to point at things and go, 'This doesn't fit the universe.' So they copped it hard.

"It was a rough time. And I think we put more weight on the fan base, because we were trying to make people happy. You want to make the fan base happy. You want to make another one too. You want people to like it. So, yeah, it was a gut punch.

"It doesn't help that there was already a schism in that fan base, between Fallout 1 and 2, because they were totally different games. So there was already that going on. And then let's add a third game."

Unbeknownst to Orman at the time, publisher Interplay was in serious financial trouble: and so while a Tactics sequel was planned, it would never happen. Interplay was soon in such hot water that it would sell the Fallout IP to Bethesda in 2004, which began work on the game we now know as Fallout 3. Which in itself, oddly enough, lent Tactics something more of a shine.

"Over time that [negativity] did seem to change," says Orman. "Fallout 1 and 2 was packaged with Tactics, and people came to appreciate Tactics for what it was.

"I also wonder, once Fallout 3 came out, how much that solidified the group to go, 'Well, that's not my Fallout.' So it might have legitimised us a bit there too."

Bethesda would soon enough decide, however, that it was going to make Tactics a non-canon entry in the series (which "sucked," Orman told PC Gamer). It remains one of the oddest entries in a now-massive series and, in ways big and small, keeps bleeding out into the contemporary stuff: "little bits and pieces of Tactics you can see kind of are canon now, just through the back door over time," says Orman. "And that's good enough for me."

You can read Jeremy Peel's full interview here: The Making of Fallout Tactics.

 

[Yosharian]

I'm honestly kinda tired of developers who take a franchise and completely change its core mechanics, story, etc in order to sell it to a 'modern audience' and then when they release the new game it's poorly received and then they start crying that the fan base is 'toxic' and 'entitled'

How about you go fuck yourself

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Agree in general, but in this particular case I think not altering classic Fallout combat mechanics enough is one of FT's biggest issues.

 

[Hellion]

Heh, this interview brings back memories. That early 2000s "Glittering Gems of Hatred" era was a glorious and at the same time utterly soul-crushing time to be a Fallout fan. Tactics, FO:BOS, Van Buren being cancelled, Black Isle/Interplay shutting down... Posting on NMA was like 24/7 depression.

 

[Snufkin]

Fun fact: Fallout Tactics multiplayer was still played in 2013 year in polish scene.

 

[Turn_BASED]

If Todd Howard burned my game I would just claim that HIS series isn't canon and it stopped being canon when the credits rolled on MY game, Fallout Tactics.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fallo...anything-about-interplays-financial-problems/

The developers of the final 2D Fallout game had no idea their publisher was gasping for air: 'We weren't told anything about Interplay's financial problems'​

Fallout Tactics was made at a make-or-break moment for Interplay, a publisher with its fair share of make-or-break moments.

Similar to beloved classic PC developer Looking Glass Studios, '90s RPG powerhouse Interplay's legacy seems defined almost as much by its persistent financial difficulties as its great games. In an interview with PC Gamer contributor Jeremy Peel for a wider retrospective on Fallout Tactics, the game's lead designer, Ed Orman, recalled how that instability trickled down to the studio he worked at, Micro Forté.

"At the time, I had no idea what was going on inside Interplay," Orman said. "I do remember thinking that it was weird that we didn’t get to speak to more people that had worked on the original Fallouts. But I think they were busy working on something else." Given the timetable of Fallout Tactics' development (~1999-2001), I'd guess this something else was one or both of the Icewind Dale games.

"We got to speak to Chris Avellone a bit," Orman added. "It was nearer the end where it became more apparent that there were a whole bunch of other pressures going on from the Interplay side."

For most of Tactics' development, Micro Forté interfaced with 14 Degrees East, a strategy-focused subsidiary of Interplay founded in 1999. "I think that insulated us a bunch from whatever was going on at Interplay," said Orman.

While Micro Forté only experienced Interplay's troubles indirectly, Orman thinks the publisher's desperation definitely ratcheted up the tension during development, especially as Micro Forté approached the finish line: "I'm positive we weren't told anything about Interplay’s financial problems, or anything along the lines of them needing to get this game out to get some money in. We just knew that we could not slip.

"So that was the real pressure. That was the crunch time. That was the sleepless nights and the stupid overworking that the game industry tolerated at that time, and I tolerated that at the time."

For more on Tactics' development and legacy, you can check out Jeremy Peel's full Fallout Tactics interview-retrospective, a look back at a game with heart and hairy Deathclaws that was misunderstood in its own time. If all this Tactics talk has you jonesin' for some Fallout firefights with a minimum of roleplaying, you can grab Fallout Tactics for yourself over on Steam, GOG, or Epic.