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(Image credit: WIRED on YouTube)
The Fallout franchise is beloved for a lot of good reasons—it’s got a timeless aesthetic, nukes are cool to look at when they aren’t melting your flesh off, and the blend of post-apocalyptic Americana with radiation that’s borderline indistinguishable from magic is pretty appealing.
It’s also never really moved outside of its country of origin, with its games located almost entirely in the United States. And while some fan projects likeFallout: Londonare attempting to broaden the scope beyond lore mentions of other world superpowers, Todd Howard says he’s keen to keep things red, white and blue for the foreseeable future.
That’s as per an interview withKinda Funny Gamesuploaded to YouTube yesterday. In it, Howard was asked whether Bethesda had ever looked into doing Fallouts in places other than America in the past.
While I can definitely see the argument—I can’t help feeling like there’s some untrod ground Bethesda’s just plain reluctant to explore. New Vegas is great, in part, because it’s a game of contrasts. You think you’re in the wild west, but then a bunch of neo-Roman Empire worshippers show up and start nailing people to crosses. Peopledugthat—it was a nice injection of grim, feudal fantasy into an otherwise familiar landscape.
Regardless, Howard says that another motivating factor is the want to preserve mysteries: “In any world, I don’t feel the need to answer. It’s okay to leave mysteries or questions … I think those are good things.”
Howard recalls the Elder Scrolls games (which haven’t seen a mainline Bethesda entry in over a decade, bar stuff likeThe Elder Scrolls: Onlineor, uh,Blades) and fans' desire to see more of that world’s landscape. “Everybody kind of wants to go to these other specific lands. I’m known for saying [that] the worst thing you can do to mysterious lands is to remove the mystery. Keep the mysterious lands mysterious.”
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There’s a grain of truth to that, for sure. Similar to how any full-body reveal of a monster in a horror game tends to makes them less scary, going too whole-hog on your worldbuilding can rob a setting of its mystique. On the other hand, maybe Fallout could stand to shake things up a little—if the hullabaloo around Fallout: London is any indication, there’s definitely a thirst for something completely different.
Personally I’d like to see a Fallout: South England spinoff where grim-looking raiders ride Mad Max-style tractors and fling irradiated hay bombs at each other, but Bethesda hasn’t returned any of my pitch emails.
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OG Fallout lead Tim Cain dusts off a trove of old development photos dating back to 1994 to show ‘what development looked like in the ’90s’Fallout’s original designer is fine with the direction of the modern games: ‘They’re both what they are, and a ton of people like it’
OG Fallout lead Tim Cain dusts off a trove of old development photos dating back to 1994 to show ‘what development looked like in the ’90s’
OG Fallout lead Tim Cain dusts off a trove of old development photos dating back to 1994 to show ‘what development looked like in the ’90s’
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Today’s Wordle answer for Friday, January 10
Today’s Wordle answer for Friday, January 10
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