Fallout Tactics lead designer congratulates Bethesda on their success: 'It's possible.' You only need to be a multi-national with at least 18 months of experience.

Fallout has had a fascinating journey as a franchise. It began as a computer CRPG under Interplay Entertainment and was brought under Bethesda in 2007. Since then, it's evolved into a FPS RPG that you either love or hate depending on what games you've already played and how traditionalist you are.

It turns out that there's another dark horse between these two halves. Fallout Tactics Brotherhood of Steel, released in 2001 between Fallout 2 (1998) and Fallout 3 (2008), was a dark horse. It was created by Micro Forte and published by 14 Degrees East & Bethesda Softworks. At the time it was a bit controversial.

It was more like an RTS-style XCOM game than an RPG. Fallout Tactics, instead of the turn-based combat of previous games, saw you hopping from missions and Brotherhood Bunkers. There was a turn-based but after doing some research, I couldn't find anyone who said that it worked.

Fallout Tactics may have been a game I didn't play, but the impression I get from people talking about it is that it was a mechanically messed up game that didn’t quite thread the needles. Don't take my word for this: Jeremy Peel, on behalf of PC Gamer, recently contacted team leader Ed Orman to discuss the game's progress. He painted a picture of a confusing vision and a game with a lot of time constraints.

"Obviously Speech was our biggest problem... you can’t dump any stat, because it can’t be 'PECIAL", you know? You can't just remove a letter from their stat system. This was a major challenge throughout. I think we didn't come up with the best solution for Speech.

"I was always pushing to use it and I think Tony Oakden was the one who finally said, 'Dude this isn't going to work. We don't know a solution and we're running out of time. Speech has pretty much died on the vine."

Orman and his colleagues struggled with more than just Speech. Orman says that while the team did struggle to bring variety into the game, they were not failures. However, it would have been easier if they had not taken on more than they could handle.

"I think that we were concerned about it from the beginning. Our approach was terrible. A smaller campaign would help to avoid this. It will also keep it fresh and not repetitive. We didn't. We had a massive campaign.

"It was all hindsight, but doing something smaller and focused would have made it so much easier to solve the problem of repetition. Instead, we just stuffed it full of stuff. There are so many features. We added vehicles. We added so much to the game instead. It's an extremely long campaign with a lot to do.

Orman reflects on Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, not the game his team created, but a console release in 2004 with a similar title, which was universally panned. It's a weird, top-down, action RPG, that's more sacreligious than anything Bethesda has made since.

"I feel bad for the other Brotherhood of Steel console game because it was panned. I don't even know if this was fair or not. This separation would have been a good start. It's a Fallout, but you wouldn't say, "This is the same type of game, only the combat part."

Orman even gives Bethesda a nod. And, although the move to first-person shooting was controversial, and the world could use more CRPGs in general, I don't believe you can say with a straight faced that Bethesda’s spin was unsatisfactory, even if you felt like taking up arms and becoming an old man screaming at a nuclear cloud.

"To Bethesda’s credit, I actually think they did a pretty decent job of saying, 'This game is real-time, but we're gonna put in the work to figure out how this works--this core of SPECIAL, and all of those stats, how can we make that actually apply?" He then adds that it would have been nice to actually have the time to do something like that: "It could be done. You only need to be a multi-national with at least 18 months. It was ridiculous."