Fallout’s 21st century features an increasingly desperate international community besieged by crisis after crisis: civil unrest, mysterious diseases, political and military shifts, and countries world-wide going to war over oil, water, and nuclear fuel deposits.

Who to have a nuclear war with, then? The USSR’s protÃ©gÃ©, the People’s Republic of China. In Fallout’s history, the US is the unchallenged 20th century superpower after WWII. Instead of restoring the USSR as a superpower and nuclear threat, the Fallout timeline discounts Soviet Russia’s influence after World War II: the USSR exists, but conflict is minimal or nonexistent. Thankfully, they got a lot more creative. The writers could have taken the easy way out by leaving the USSR as the boogeyman and chalking it all up to the alternate timeline that Fallout is set in. We had spent decades being just a missed phone call away from Mutually Assured Destruction, yet that had all evaporated overnight as Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank in Moscow. The fall of Soviet Russia in 1991 had left no Cold War to go hot – there was no more beet-eating boogeyman waiting over the horizon with a sack of ICBMs. A brief history of Fallout It didn’t want to set the world on fire.įallout was written at a challenging time for nuclear apocalypses. Note that when I refer to â€œthe Fallout seriesâ€, I am referring to the canonical major releases of Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas.

This article is full of spoilers for the Fallout series. Why, then, did it feel incomplete? There was something missing from New Vegas that, as players and critics have remarked, makes it feel more like a really big Fallout 3 expansion rather than a Fallout game in its own right. Yet, New Vegas seemed to have all the ingredients of a stellar Fallout game: an expansive world, factions to meet, choices to make, and excellent casting, all centered around a sweeping and nuanced regional conflict. Never before has a canonical, major release Fallout game received such hedged reviews from fans and critics. Fallout has managed to transcend the traditional combat- and leveling-focused RPGs to satisfy players on a much deeper level.Īt least, the Fallout games transcended the typical genre offering until Fallout: New Vegas. The Fallout series of role-playing video games have been well-received and popular since Fallout was released in 1997 as â€œAmerica’s first choice in post-nuclear simulation.â€ Post-apocalyptic video games have been numerous, yet the Fallout games stand out for their immersion and complexity.

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