Fallout Tactics
Brotherhood of Steel
What is it?
Gone are the days of the lone gunman and gone are the nights of roaming the wasteland. Now, it's all about annihilating extremely large groups of bad guys and taking all of their stuff.—G-Wok
The time when I was playing Fallout and Fallout 2 for the first time, I visited No Mutants Allowed a lot, which back then was still hosted on gamestats, was still run by Miroslav, and still had a legitimate claim to be the center of Fallout fandom. Those were the days.
That was back in 1999/2000, and that was the time that Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel was developed. Naturally, any news about this new game were quickly commented on NMA. And there was a great disappointment when the pictures of the vehicles were released: none of them was a 50s craft, had the designers given up the concept of retro future?
I was disappointed too, but for another reason: they were all without a doubt military vehicles, very unlike the Fallout 2 Highwayman. Was this going to be purely a combat game?
More or less, it was. As far as I remember there was even an interview where one of the designers said that there had been too many "ways around combat" in the first two games, and they were going to fix that. A game without combat, without compulsory combat that is, is obviously a taboo.
Be that as it may, Fallout Tactics got a rather lukewarm reception from the community, though it was never as universally hated as Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel for the Xbox. The 1.27 patch added an editor, and it enjoyed a modest popularity with modders for a while.
One detail I really liked: Fallout Tactics has multiple desktop icons. Besides the winking vault boy that had always been the default icon of the executable, but was now for the first time used for the shortcuts, you get three more, all of them variations of the BoS logo:
Making small, Fallout-themed games was a popular pastime among programming-savvy Fallout fans while waiting for the release of Tactics.
There is a long, somewhat involved plot that holds it all together. You start off as an Initiate of the Brotherhood of Steel, and are sent on missions to various towns and villages to achieve the Brotherhood's goals. The writing is quite excellent, not shying at all from painting the Brotherhood as an organization with a decidedly tough, dictatorial streak concerned first and foremost with its own survival. You are never allowed to view the world through rosy glasses, to say the least.
While the game is only around 50% complete (engine 80%) I guess I shouldn't be lavishing too much praise just yet, but hey, what can I say? Fallout is awesome and Fallout Tactics, while perhaps not providing the purist fan with the kind of single player experienced that they had in the first two games, looks like it will be a lot of fun.
The Fallout Tactics demo managed to stick to the original atmosphere of Fallout though. I swore I was walking around in Fallout again at a higher resolution. It was very pretty, plus the dynamic lighting also adds a lot to the combat when you’re fighting at night. Sound is dismal though, I was expecting the guns to make a little more noise. They sounded like paintball guns on fully automatic. Ears should bleed at the firing of rifles, or, at the very least make me smile when the character squeezes the trigger and feel satisfied. They just didn’t have the kick I was expecting.
