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(Image credit: Bethesda)
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.”
(Image credit: Bethesda)
“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.”
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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.
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