TechStuff Enters the Wasteland

they don't have to be science fiction. I just I like that kind of exploration mode RPG kind of style. And my love of these games dates back to when I was a kid and I would play old paper and pencil role playing games with friends, you know, actual staying around the table, you got dice and all that

kind of stuff. I was also a big fan of various computer role playing games, but keep in mind those games in the early computer days definitely leaned much harder on game mechanics rather than on actual role playing because the limitations of the medium. You didn't typically have super deep role playing mechanics in there. You just had a lot of statistical mechanics to uh to negotiate stuff like combat,

for example, But I still love those games anyway. One of my favorite series and these open world RPG genres is uh the Fallout franchise, which is currently the property of the video game developer Bethesda Softworks, but that was not always the case. Now, first, I want to give a quick word about the subject matter of this game series. The game series is a game series for mature audiences according to the E s r B because of the subject matter. There's a lot of violence in the games.

The Fallout series of games take place in a post apocalyptic setting, so it's Earth, but it's not really our Earth. It's an Earth that has a similar history to our own, leading up to just after World War Two, and then at that point after World War two sometime between then in present day, the Fallout universe's history goes in a

different direction than our real world history does. Within the Fallout Universe, the United States becomes increasingly embroiled in a conflict with countries that have communist governments, largely China, and then technology continues to become more sophisticated in the Fallout Universe, but it maintains a sort of nineteen fifties era esthetic.

Some people call it ray Gun Gothic, so you get the sort of retro futurism thing going on, where everything looks like the way people in the nineteen fifties imagine the future would look like. One of the key elements of Fallout is that there was a company within the mythology of the game world called Vault Tech that started building out nuclear bunkers across the United States UH in

the years before the nuclear war. Some of those bunkers were purely intended as survival bunkers for a relatively small number of citizens, but other vaults appeared to be standard bomb shelters, so externally you just think, oh, this is just a normal shelter, but in actuality, they were masking a range of different experimental facilities meant to run tests

on unknowing human subjects. Those tests could involve anything from using chemicals to try and manipulate people's emotions, or to find out what happens if you put no established hierarchy in place before you seal the vault shut. So, in other words, it's all this dark science fiction, unethical type dystopian kind of stuff now in the world of Fallout.

On October twenty three, two thousand seventy seven, the global nuclear powers engaged in a nuclear war, and one's really sure who fired first or but it was a full retaliation and entire sections of the globe were UH irreversibly changed or apparently irreversibly changed. People in the vaults survived

the initial blast for the most part. Some of the experimental vaults would devolve into chaos before any of the games would begin UH, and some people on the surface of the world would manage to survive, though not necessarily unscathed. There are mutated people called ghouls who can live to be incredibly old, but they also tend to lose their humanity as they get older. And then there are also super mutants. Those are the result of various experiments with

a substance called the forced evolution virus. But you get the idea, and the games try to balance a lighthearted and sometimes absurd tone in some of the games with some of the more serious dark themes that you find and post apocalyptic fiction. Sometimes it works, some times it doesn't. Anyway, that's the quick lowdown on the mythology of the game world. Now let's talk about the history of the actual development of the games, so the original Fallout game did not

come out of Bethesda Softworks. There was another company called Interplay Productions, later known as Interplay Entertainment. It was founded by Brian Fargo and j Patel, Rebecca Hineman, and Troy Worl in nineteen eighty three. The studio produced some illustrated text based adventures. Early on, in they released the first

game in the Bard's Tale series of computer RPGs. That series also happens to be one that I'm really fond of, though I would say that the gameplay of those earlier games is much more limited than what you would find in current generation games. I don't know that someone brand new to the genre of computer role playing games would find those old games compelling, although you can't find remastered versions of them out there. Interplay began development on Fallout

back in nineteen four. A guy named Timothy Caine was the lead on development. In fact, at first he was the whole team for Fallout. Now. This was after the days when video game development was handled by very very small groups, like sometimes just one or two people. This was past that point, uh so this was particularly small for even for now. According to Kane, the whole game development came about because he wanted to design his own

game engine. I did an episode recently on tech Stuff about what game engines are, and he wanted to build one of his own. And at that time, Interplay had been using game engines that other companies had developed, and so he said, give me a chance to make my own, and I'll make a game around the game engine that I create. So when he first got started, there was

no actual game planned. They would have to make stuff to demonstrate the game engine, but they had no idea of what the game would be, what its purpose would be, what its theme would be. So Kine was just creating this asset, this game engine. One of the early ideas for the game would have involved the player controlling a character who would travel through time, encountering science fiction and magical elements in the past and and alternate futures, before

eventually returning to present day to rescue his girlfriend. But that game was never meant to be, so they abandoned that idea. Probably would have been interesting, but I doubt that we would have found the franchise uh like Fallout anyway. From there, they thought about doing a game in which aliens had taken over the planet except for one city, and that city would be the player's home base, and the player would venture out to fight aliens using that

city as their base of operations. Now that eventually would morph into the idea of Fallout, except instead of a city, it was a vault that was your base of operations, and instead of aliens, it was mutants, schools, and survivors out in the waste land. The team tried to negotiate with Electronic Arts to get the license for an older post apocalyptic video game called Wasteland that e A had published in order to make an official sequel to it, but they weren't able to do it at that point,

so they started making Fallout instead. Although they really tried to make it a sequel to Wasteland for a long time. Fallout was unusual and that it was not a licensed game, and it eventually was just its own new intellectual property, and it all started as sort of a personal project.

Kane says that other people Interplay would stop by and help him out early on, but this was all stuff that had to happen outside of normal business hours because everyone else, said the company was already assigned to other projects, so For the first six months of developing Fallout, Timothy Kane was the only person officially working on the game. He had other people stopping in and helping him out occasionally, but never in an official capacity. After six months, he

finally got two other people on his project. One of them was an artist, one of them was a script or. Both of them had the name Jason, so they became known as Timothy and the Jason's for a while. Kane also cited that several other examples of media h were very influential for both the mechanics of Fallout and the content the theme of the game. So one of the big ones that he took a lot of inspiration from was x coom that's a turn based small group tactics

and strategy game. Thematically, the electronic arts video game waste Land was a huge influence, obviously because for a while they were hoping to make a sequel, so it's kind of a spiritual sequel to waste Land, but not and actual thematic or or I guess thematically it's a sequel but not not by actual content. Other influences would include a role playing game called the Generic Universal role Playing System, also known as Girps. Girps is a game out of

Steve Jackson Games. It's a paper and pencil style role playing game, and the reason why it's called generic universal role playing system is that, at least in theory, you can apply those rules for all sorts of different settings. You could do Girps and have a fantasy role playing game, or a Western or horror based or science fiction. The idea is that the basic rules can handle all the mechanics, and then the details are up to whoever's running the

game and the players. Interplay was working on getting a license for Girups and actually had one for a while, and that would become the center of a really big legal problem later on. I'll get to that in a bit. The development process was arduous, and part of the issue

was that tech was changing rapidly. In the mid nineties, games were starting to move from sprite based games to polygonal based games, so while Fallout would stick with sprites, one thing the game included were some talking head segments. Characters that were voiced, often by recognizable actors, and had fully animated heads that were delivering this this dialogue or monologue to you. So you have this animation there. In order to make that work, there was an incredibly involved process.

There was an artist assigned who would sculpt physical models out of clay and build out a full three dimensional model of the head of the character, and then use a tool to scan the face of that clay model to create a computer model. Then they would have to do textures, and then ifter they got all the textures put in place, they also have to do animation. This process would take a really long time just to make the head before you even got to the part where

you were lips sinking. The animation would take eight weeks per head. So it's a very long and involved process. One funny story that Timothy Kane tells about the development is that he was told to make sure the game

would be certified for Windows. The team had made Fallout to run on multiple platforms, including Windows and Windows in T, but Microsoft denied the certification initially because it required the program to run on Windows but to quote fail gracefully end quote on Windows in t Kane tried to convince Microsoft that the game working on in timant that it was failing as gracefully as it gets, but that explanation didn't fly, and so one of his other programmers actually

built into the code that Fallout would fail if it detected it was running on a Windows in team machine, so it failed on purpose. That was how they were able to get the Windows nine certification. Interplay nearly canceled the game twice. The first time was within its first year of development, after the game had been you know

several months along. Interplay had acquired the rights to create games set in the D and D Forgotten Realms universe, and company executives were worried that Fallout was going to drain resources that could be used elsewhere. Timothy Kane was able to convince leadership, especially Brian Fargo, to allow his team to keep working on the Fallout game. The second time it was nearly canceled was due to a dispute with Steve Jackson Games and the Groups role playing system

I talked about earlier. So Fallout was at one point intended to be a game based on the GIRPS system, but well into the element of the game, the team got pushed back from Steve Jackson Games. They objected to several things and fall Out. One was the level of violence, because the game was incredibly violent. Another was the art style.

The folks over at Steve Jackson Games didn't really like it, but it was the game was so far along in the development process even though they were still years from launch, they couldn't really make any changes. If they did, it would have delayed the game even more, and interplay just wasn't in a place financially where they could, you know,

continuously put off the release of a game. Kane was told by Fargo that if his team could rewrite and code in a new combat system that was not based off the Groups system, if the mechanics of the game could be completely unique and not dependent upon that RPG within two weeks, then they would not cancel Fallout. That's a huge amount of work to do in just two weeks, but somehow they managed to do it and fall outstayed alive.

The original name for this game was Vault, but Brian Fargo played it and then said we should come up with a better game name and said, why don't we call it Fallout, And Timothy Kane said, no, that's perfect. It's a great name. Let's go with it. By the time the game shipped, the number of people who had worked on it was around thirty and there was never an official budget that Timothy Kane ever encountered, but he said it was somewhere in the neighborhood of three million dollars.

That's when Fallout would publish. It was called Fallout, a post nuclear role playing game. It featured a camera angle that's technically called trimetric projection. That's essentially a way to represent a three dimensional object in two dimensional space, and it's a slightly overhead angled view similar to isometric, but

technically it's trimetric. The game introduced a lot of stuff that has become in trends to fall Out lore, including the character traits that your character possesses, which is called special. That's an acronym that stands for strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck. This was the replacement of that Girp's system they had been using, So your character has ranks in each of those that determines his or her abilities and

chance of success for certain types of actions. I've got more to say about the Fallout games, but before I get into it, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So in that first Fallout game, the player controls a character known as the Vault dweller obviously, is someone who has lived all their life in a vault. They've been in the protective confines of the bunker since they were born. The year in Fallout one is twenty

one six d one. And remember the nuclear war in the Fallout world happened in twenty seven, so it's almost been a century since the nuclear war, so several generations have been born and have died in the vault since that time. Your vault that you live in needs a new water purification chip because obviously the water in the area has radiation. It's toxic, so it needs this purifier and so that is why you are sent out of

the vault. You're told to go out find a water purification chip and bring it back or else everyone's going to die. So the action and Fallout one was turn based, which meant that all combat would take place in rounds

rather than in real time. The game would keep track of how much time has passed in game, and initially players had just one hundred in game days to retrieve the water purification chip before everyone back at the vault would die, though there were ways to extend that deadline a bit if you encountered certain water caravans and hired them to bring water to your home. Now, this was

just the first part of the game. Getting the water purification chip and coming back to your vault did not end the game, but it wasn't necessary step in order to progress through the story, and Timothy Kane would later say that he wished they had left out the time dependent component because he said it didn't work the way we had intended. They wanted to create a way of of building a sense of urgency to make the player feel like they need to get certain things done and

not just wander around. But then Timothy Kane said that he came around to feel that this was a bad choice because it would discourage players from just exploring and experiencing the game. So and later versions this got patched out, but in the original one, that first major part of your mission you had to complete within a certain time or the game was over. The game introduced ghouls, super mutants,

introduced a faction called the Brotherhood of Steel. They're known for wearing these big exoskeleton armor suits and they tend to hoard technology, and the purpose for that is that they want to protect humanity from another catastrophe like nuclear war. Essentially, they're saying mankind is irresponsible and they cannot handle the power of these massive weapons, so we're gonna take them so that no one else can. It's a little hypocritical, but that's part of the element of the story that

plays out in the Fallout universe. It's meant to be that way. In fact, one of the important things that Timothy Caine and his group wanted to do was create a game that did not have a strict morality to it. The various factions have their good points and they're bad points, apart from some of the ones that are just kind of almost mindless destruction machines, but almost everyone has their they're good aspects and their bad aspects, and even the player can choose to behave in a way that's ethical

or unethical. The Timothy Kane did not want to put restrictions on what players could do. He did want there to be consequences to your actions. So if you choose to do terrible, terrible things, let's say in the context of a town, then the people of that town are going to recognize that you're terrible, terrible person and they will treat you as such. But you can still choose to do it that way, you're not prevented from behaving

any particular way. So these are all basic elements of Fallout that would become core components of the mythology and the world building that would move forward and would be carried forward in future titles, and it became the foundation for all future games. It also creates some gameplay elements that would last from iteration to iteration. So one of

those was the perk system. So again in fall Out, you have your basic abilities, those special abilities, but then you also have skills, like you might have lock picking or energy weapons as a skill, so you can build up your skills that you're better at those things than other things. But the parks system was added super late in the game to give a little more umph to

the leveling in within it. So the perks might involve kind of interesting features, like a mutation that gives you benefits, or that you do more damage during night hours than you do in day hours, or you might be able to find more resources when you scavenge that kind of stuff. According to Kane, it was actually really easy to insert this into the game, which is good because it was introduced very late in the game's development, and it was effectively invented by a guy named Chris Taylor in just

a day. The benefit was that the parks really gave players more opportunities to customize their character and to customize their play style. It also set a precedent for the way these games end. In Fallout, you typically have your main quest and a bunch of side quests that you can elect to pursue or ignore, and as you make choices, the game takes note of the choices you have made.

At the conclusion of the game, when you have completed the main storyline, you get a slide show like presentation that tells you how things unfold in the world because of the decisions you made, both the good ones and the bad ones, and this would become a hallmark of the series, even as other elements of Fallout would change dramatically. One other thing that became a hallmark was the presence of Ron Perlman as one of the voice actors in many of the Fallout games. He acts as the narrator

for the game. He opens the games with the emblematic phrase, the iconic phrase war war never changes. He hasn't narrated every single game, but most of them, and he has been a voice actor in almost every single game as well. The first game sold well and was praised by critics, and it led to the decision to develop a sequel.

No big surprise there. Interplay, which by now was called Interplay Entertainment, created a division within the company, so as a studio within Interplay Entertainment, and it was called Black Isle Studios. That internal department would take on responsibility a

developing Fallout two. Several of the people who worked on that had also worked on Fallout, but technically speaking, Black Asle Studios came into being towards the end of Fallouts development, and fall Out one was not officially part of Black Asle Studios work, although some of the people who would be in Black Asle Studios did work on Fallout one.

Fallout two takes place years after the first game, and the player controls the descendant of the character from Fallout one, and the goal and Fallout two, which features similar mechanics and graphics from the first game, is to recover a machine called the Get G E c K, and the Get is supposed to be able to restore irradiated environments to their pre apocalypse status. It would become a big

part of Fallout three as well. The game was a bit more absurd in tone than Fallout one and made some fans a little uneasy that the the humor got a little more zany in the second game. That's a trend that's continued as well. The Focused team was able to publish Fallout two just a year after the release of the first Fallout, although again a lot of the work, the game engine and a lot of the assets had already been developed, so that was a big part of it.

But still was a huge effort to turn a game around in one year, and it was bigger in scope and included some new features as well. It wasn't like it was just a new story built on the bones of Fallout one. It was more than that. In Interplay filed its initial public offering and also financing from a French game company called Titus Software. In two thousand, Interplay founder Brian Fargo would resign from the company he had co founded after having some disagreements with Titus about the

direction of Interplay. Fargo would leave and go on to found a new company in two thousand two called in Exile Entertainment, and years later this company would produce waste Land To the sequel that Timothy Kane had wanted to make years earlier, and it would become its own thing, eventually evolving it to fall Out, the the one that Timothy Kane worked on Now you had in exile creating the actual sequel waste Land To. Also, they created a

sequel to Or. They created the remaster to the Bard's Tale series, which was nice back to fall Out, though. The next game in the franchise came from a totally different developer and publisher. It was a game called Fallout Tactics. Brotherhood of Steel, a company micro Forte, developed it, and another company called fourteen Degrees East published it back in two thousand one. This was different from Fallout one and Fallout two. Those were those sort of open world isometric

view more or less isometric really trimetric view RPGs. Fallout Tactics was a tactical combat game, a little bit closer to Xcom than Fallout, so it wasn't as much of a role playing game. Some of the elements would become canon and later Fallout entries, but a lot of what happened in that game is considered non canon. In other words, is not part of the official history of the Fallout mythology. The Fallout games are not perfectly consistent. That's a nice

way of putting it. There are a lot of inconsistencies from game to game, things that seem to contradict previously established lore, but a lot of Fallout Tactics was just thrown out. The game did get really good reviews, however. It was a well does signed tactical game, but there were some Fallout fans who were disappointed because it wasn't a role playing game the way the first two in

the series were. In two thousand four, Interplay produced Fallout Brotherhood of Steel, which, despite the similar title, is a different game than Fallout Tactics Brotherhood of Steel, which is confusing. I know. This game wasn't an open world style game either. It had a much more linear storyline, and you would progress from the beginning all the way through to the end, and you couldn't really backtrack. You couldn't go back and revisit stuff that you had already seen. It was always

moving forward. This was the first Fallout game developed specifically for game consoles. Both the two thousand one and two thousand four games allowed players to control Brotherhood of Steel characters. You could also play the Vault Dweller from the original Fallout game as a character in the two thousand four game. And I've never played the two thousand four game, but

in general it got pretty mixed to negative reviews. A lot of people consider it the weakest game that's related to the Fallout series, and a lot of folks just don't pay attention to it. Now. I have a little bit more to say about the Fallout franchise, but before I get to that, let's take another quick break to

thank our sponsor. While Interplay Entertainment was at work on Fallout Brotherhood of Steel for the game consoles, the black Isle Studio division within Interplay was working on several titles, among them what was supposed to be Fallout three. This also gets confusing because it's the same company. You have a division within the company working on one game, and then you have the overall company working on another game,

both of them in the same franchise. Uh. I don't pretend to understand the business side of all this, but it is interesting to me. The code name for the black Isle Studios Fallout three game was called Van Buren. The player was to control a character who started off the game in prison. Then the character would be thrust in the middle of a conflict between the Brotherhood of Steel faction and a relatively young New California Republic group.

But Interplay went bankrupt in two thousand three and black Isle Studios shut down. Everyone on the black Isle Studios staff was laid off. Some of the elements of Van Buren would eventually find their way into a future Fallout game. More on that in just a bit, But this version of Fallout three died because the studio that was developing it was no more. Interplay continued to exist, by the way, even though it was bankrupt um, but black Isle Studios

was folded. So then we get to Bethesda Softworks. Bethesda Softworks started back in six and it was known for making lots of different games, including the Elder Scroll series. In two thousand four, beth As announced it had secured the licensed rights to create a single player Fallout game, and they had secured these rights from Interplay, so they

were paying Interplay so that they could create a Fallout game. Interplay, meanwhile, was in the middle of overseeing a Fallout based massively multiplayer online game MMO and this was being developed by another company at the time called Masthead Studios. In two thousand and seven, Bethesda negotiated to purchase the intellectual property of Fallout outright from Interplay for five point seven five

million dollars. Interplay was still going to be allowed to work on this MMO, which was known as Fallout Online, so the idea was Bethesda would work on the single player game and Interplay would oversee the development of this

online multiplayer game. This remained the case until two thousand nine, and then Bethesda Softworks announced it was going to send the license it had granted to Interplay for the Fallout MMO, and the reasoning for Bethesda's decision was that the Bethesda claimed Interplay had failed to meet its obligations to get proper funding together and to enter into full scale development on time, and so according to Bethesda Softworks, Interplay was

in breach of contract. Interplay disputed these claims, and it all eventually headed toward court. Eventually the two companies would arrive at a settlement agreement, but part of that agreement was that Interplay would officially cancel the Fallout Online project, and so I got the AX. While all that was unfolding in courts. Bethesda was developing its own Fallout single player game in house, and it started in July two

four UH. Much of the early work was limited because the studio was also in full production mode for the fourth game in the Elder Scrolls franchise. The new game that they were working on would become Fallout three, which had a dramatically different gameplay approach than Fallout one or two.

Rather than that third person tri metric view of Fallout one and Fallout to, Fallout three could be played first person style, so from the perspective of the player, you were in a three D world and you saw through your character's eyes, or you could play as kind of a sort of over the shoulder third person view if

you wanted to. The game was largely true to the thematic and stylistic elements of its predecessors, despite this new approach to presenting the world to the players, so while while on a gameplay level it was dramatically different, it was true to the tone and themes of the pre existing Fallout games. It's also the first Fallout game I ever played, so I have a really soft spot in my heart for Fallout three in that game. You play

as a character who was born in a vault. Your father has mysteriously disappeared, so you're searching for him out in the waste Land, and it leads you on an adventure through the post apocalyptic Washington, d C. Area. That game came out in October two eight. It was another big success, despite having some pretty weird bugs. A lot of Bethesda Softworks games launch with some odd bugs in them.

There are numerous videos on YouTube of Bethesda Softworks games in which things are not behaving the way they should, and that's true for Fallout, it's true for Skyrim. That doesn't mean they're bad games. It just means weird stuff sometimes happens in them for no apparent reason. But then Bethesda had seen that the success of Fallout three met

there really should be a sequel. However, the in house developed first were already working on the next Elder Scrolls game, which would be Skyrim, so they didn't have the resources to dedicate to another Fallout game. But they wanted to strike while the iron was hot, so but Thesda partnered with another game developer company called Obsidian Entertainment. Obsidian was founded in two thousand three by several former Black Isle Studio employees, in other words, people who had come from Interplay.

Some of them had worked on the previous Fallout games like Fallout one and Fallout two, and now they were going to work on the next Fallout game, skipping over Fallout three. So I thought that was really interesting that some of those people had gone on to found their own company and they started working on an i P that they had been involved with years and years before. So I'm sitting and got to work on the next Fallout game, and it would rely on the same game

engine as Fallout three. It had numerous tweaks to the Fallout three source code, so it wasn't exactly the same thing, but kind of like how Fallout two was able to take advantage of assets that were built for fall Out one, Fallout New Vegas, which was the next game in the series, took advantage of the stuff that was built for Fallout three. This game would incorporate some of the elements that have

been intended for Van Buren. So you remember when I said some of those ideas that the original Interplay team had in mind for Fallout three, they found their way in to fall Out New Vegas, including this concept of the new California Republic and its conflicts with the Brotherhood of Steel. New Vegas came out in t and like Fallout three, it was met with with pretty good praise, also had some silly bugs in it. I actually really

like New Vegas a lot. Has a very different tone in many ways than Fallout three and later fall Out games do, but I still found it a lot of fun, and I didn't think it was different enough to be a problem, so I personally enjoy it. At E three, Bethesda Softworks had a couple of really big announcements, and one was that the studio had developed a Fallout themed mobile game called Fallout Shelter, in which you play is

the overseer of a vault. You manage what goes on inside it, you build out rooms, and you scavenge and essentially it's a kind of a management SIMS style game. A light one because it was meant for mobile platforms and eventually came out for other platforms as well. That was a fun E three event because they announced the

game and then they announced it's available right now. You can go ahead and download it right now, which was a power move to announce a game that had been kept completely secret and then reveal that it was available that day. But the bigger announcement from that E three was for Fallout four, which was set in New England, specifically in the Boston area, and it featured the largest

Fallout map up to that point. Now, in that game, you would play as a character who was actually alive on the day that there was global nuclear war, but you and your spouse and your child make it into a vault and then you get cryogenically frozen upon entering

the vault. That was the experiment of this vault was to do experiments on cryogenic freezing, so you are effectively asleep and miss out on all the fun waste land stuff until you get thawed out, and then you go on a quest to try and rescue your character's son who was kidnapped while you were on ice. The most recent title in the Fallout series aims to do what Interplay wanted to do back in the mid two thousand's, sort of. The most recent one is Fallout seventy six,

and it's an online multiplayer game. In that game, you play as someone from a vault that opens up in twenty one oh two, so it's just twenty five years after the nuclear war happened, and that makes about seventy six the earliest game in the chronology of the Fallout series if you look at the years that the individual games are set in. Bethesda made several choices that fans found, let's say, controversial, and one of them is it's an

online game. You're always playing with other people, and other people can be jerks, so there's a lot of concern about griefing. Another concern is that Bethesda wanted players to control the only humans in the game. So if you see a human as you play Fallow seventy, you know that's being controlled by another human being. But that limits your interactions within the game itself. You can only interact really with other players and then the occasional robot, maybe

a couple of other NBC like characters. But most of the time you're if you're hearing anything, it's from a prerecorded message that's on a hollow tape that you can play, and that seems to be less compelling than having interactions with computer controlled characters. Um, you're just you know, listening to recording after recording after recording, you'll find bodies of

other people as you wander around. Some of those bodies appear to be fairly fresh, but you won't actually find any human characters unless they're played by other players, and the drop and interaction is a sore spot for some people. The game also features a camp building mechanic that lets the player establish a base of operations, which is similar to a base building mechanic that Bethesda introduced for Fall Up four. Some players really love that aspect of the game.

Other players really hate it. They find it tedious and frustrating, and to be fair, the tools for building out these are not necessarily the most intuitive or user friendly. Follow Up seventy six is set in the Virginia region, and it includes several nods to local folklore, such as the Mothman legend. That game has received mixed reviews, lots of

people complaining about the lack of a cohesive story. There's some complaints about feeling like there's a huge space with not a lot to do there, that that there doesn't seem to be enough of a sense of purpose in the game, and that ultimately it can be a very frustrating or unfulfilling experience for people. I've only played a little bit of it, but I can definitely see where

the criticisms are coming from. It is a very different game than say, Fallout four, and uh, I don't hate it, but I certainly don't find it as compelling an experience as the single player games were, where you had a much more focused storyline and world building effort there that made it easier to inhabit the world and follow Out seventy six. Everything is instanced, which means you can run into the same things over and over and over again.

Um and a lot off your experience depends upon other people who are in the game, so it is a very different experience. That's the Fallout history up until today.

To get into the lore would take you could do a whole podcast, like you could dedicate a podcast to fall Out lore, because there's so much that's been left in all those different games, and it gets incredibly detailed, and then you know, you don't have to dedicate entire episodes too inconsistencies and contradictions that have happened within the course of these games coming out. I am not going to do that. That is too much work for me.

But I wanted to dedicate an episode to a franchise that I really enjoy, even though it is not always met with the same critical reception throughout every entry in the series, but it is one worth checking out if you're a gamer to to see if maybe that kind of genre appeals to you. It definitely has a very you hate to say, very unique. It definitely has a unique aesthetic and perspective. I don't think that it always handles the balance between comedy and drama really well, but

it's still really compelling. And that's it for this episode. If you have any suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, whether it's a technology, a company, person in tech, maybe it's just a general tech topic you think it would be interesting to hear more about, send me an email let me know what you're thinking. Our address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or head on over to our website that's tech Stuff Podcast dot com.

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that's it for me. I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com