Pre-Bethesda Fallouts occupy a strange space, still recognized by die-hards as the only true Fallout, but largely unplayable outside of players of a certain vintage. Me, it’s me, it’s that year. However, even among these titles there is a neglected stepchild: Fallout Tactics, the Brotherhood of Steel RPG developed by Micro Forté, released in 2001. It was quite well received at the time, at least by critics, but its difference from previous games got noticed by many fans and now they dismiss it as unworthy of the legacy.
Sound familiar? Jeremy Peel recently spoke with Fallout Tactics lead designer Ed Orman about the game’s development and how heated things later became for this version of Wasteland. Recalling some of the most common negative complaints they hear from fans, Orman lists: “It’s not a Fallout game. This is not Fallout 3. You screwed up the plot here, here and here. You put up hairy deathclaws, we don’t use charisma properly, and so on.”
This may have partially contributed to Bethesda’s decision to unceremoniously remove Fallout Tactics from the official canon (“it sucked“). I mean, hairy deathclaws? Part of the reaction to Micro Forté doing this may have been that Tactics wasn’t the main entry, but it focused on lore and story anyway. These were the days before Lore Bibles were finally the best , what you could count on was a few pages of notes from the original band.
“We could have done a series of individual missions. We could have done 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 tons of different side stories. People love discovering these things and I do too.
At one point, a sequel to Fallout Tactics was planned, but the game did not sell well enough to justify a sequel. Nevertheless, it remains one of the weirdest byways in a universe that’s only going to get bigger, and regardless of what Bethesda says about its canonicity or otherwise, it seems like it’s had a major impact on subsequent games (primarily, which may not surprisingly, the world of New Vegas: another Fallout spinoff created by another studio).
There is much more to be gleaned from our interview with Orman, who is now philosophical about Tactics’ place in the broader Fallout universe. “There were little bits of tactics that now seem to have become canon, just by the back door over time. And that’s enough for me. I don’t need anything else.”
