Soapbox #7: Hooray! The Fallout MMO Is Dead!

Thursday, February 2, 2012

A fun family moment in Fallout 3.

Hey, you, stop being upset at the death of the Interplay Fallout MMO. Yes, you, the one being sad about not getting the chance to run around online as a vault dweller. I bet you hadn’t considered the fact that Fallout as an MMO would suck.

Well, it would. What people love about the Fallout mythos stands directly at odds with the formula for a compelling MMO. To transform the series into an MMO would quickly destroy those precious moments everyone loved, melting the game into something bland and uninteresting.

For example, can we all stop and picture the locations for every Fallout game for a minute? Picture those dilapidated inner city buildings, irradiated wastelands crawling with giant insects and mutant bears, and underground vaults long ago abandoned by the people who sought refuge from nuclear a holocaust. Remember the bleak greys covering a torn Earth while you scavenged ammo and food from humanity’s decayed fingers?

Nothing about that scenario really screams millions of people /dancing in a town center. The basic aesthetic meshes poorly with a massive online community. Despite the hundreds of human raiders and super mutants running around the wasteland looking to borrow your blood, not many people survived the nukes falling. That’s kind of the point.

A burned house in Fallout 3. Lovely.

Just imagine all the people that could dance and look for groups in that house.

That lonely, cold existence serves as the backdrop for a grueling tale of survival. The story always takes a personal perspective – leaving the vault for the first time, finding your missing father, avenging the bullet some butthole put in your face, etc. Even when things eventually swing towards the bigger picture, you only help a few hundred people at most. You made sure one city had clean water in Fallout 3, not the whole world.

Getting a group of forty together and hunting a giant deathclaw isn’t the story of a few handfuls of survivors scraping their way through the dust. And it certainly isn’t the compelling drama of one person being tossed into a hostile world to battle the government, super mutants, and their personal demons that the series rests firmly upon.

Yes, the premise and story could change to fit a more rebuilt age in the series or simply be ignored in a flash of smoke and hand waiving, but without those key elements, all that remains would be the same generic, crappy post-apocalyptic shooter every developer pushes these days.

“But what about the VATS aiming system? That could make the combat so much fun!” Ah yes, the Vault-Tech Assisted Targeting System, which allows players to stop combat and blast off particular body parts. When running in parallel to every other player, the process of slowing events down, choosing tactics, and then recharging a meter before these special attacks can be used again sounds oddly familiar…

A Fallout 3 ghoul. Beautiful.

This man probably hates giant ants and probably wants you to kill 20 of them.

Suddenly, the combat becomes the same recycled system people have complained about since the days of EverQuest. As a single player experience, few games can rival Fallout’s ambition, but as something bigger than that, nothing about this particular series stands out from typical MMO fair.

Worst of all, the fan base needed for the game to be successful online have proven themselves to be fickle, entrenched in their idea for what the franchise should be. Shake things up on the scale needed to transform an established RPG into an MMO, and the people most needed to keep the game afloat could quickly flee.

I get it, the MMO genre lacks a major post-apocalyptic game to fill that archetype, and falling WoW subscriptions have every scrambling to find the next big time sink. Something similar could easily swoop in for the crown. But not Fallout. There’s too much baggage and established history. Developers need to go out and find something new for this one.

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About the Author

Growing up in the dusty corn fields of Pennsylvania, Mike Barrett's options for entertainment consisted of video games and sticks. Though he obviously chose sticks whenever possible, video games were always a comfortable second. As an adult, his passion for pretending to be a swordsman has been put on the back burner for his second passion -- being as loud and sarcastic as possible with his gaming opinions, hopefully while drinking. He can also be found writing at www.gaygamer.net and on twitter as @DrydenGG.

  • http://mediocritycodex.blogspot.com/ Timothy Hsu

    With all do respect Mike, I’m tired of people getting Fallout all wrong.

    And I’m almost inclined to write something on it.

    But the short of it is that no, Fallout is less about the crap that happens right after apocalypse and more about what happens because of apocalypse. It’s more about what apocalypse means than what apocalypse is. It’s more about people than it is about bombed-out buildings, broken and beat up monuments, and useless wrecks of ruins of an old a tossed-up world.

    Most of all, Fallout is more about the stuff that doesn’t change when the entire world gets flipped upside down. Fallout is about the people who inhabit a world that only exists in history books with morals that only exist in the minds of the dead. Fallout is about making laws, breaking laws, fake identities, half-finished dreams, new beginnings, and false hope in a hopeless future paving the way to real hope in a world devoid of rules.

    It’s easy to fixated on the obvious: the fire, the radioactivity, the fallow fields. But these things aren’t Fallout. Fallout isn’t about the building built after the bombs, but the relationships that motivate them. Fallout isn’t about the technology frozen in time, but about the ideals that either preserve or pervert them. Fallout isn’t about the irreparable damage caused by atomic bombs, but about the unstoppable force of humanity and all of its virtues and vices barreling forth in the face of apocaplyptic calamity.

    Well, I guess that pretty much sums up what I wanted to say.

    • http://twitter.com/DrydenGG Mike Barrett

      “A ship isn’t just rigging and sails and a deck. That’s what a ship needs, but what a ship is…is freedom.” Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean.

      I completely agree, Tim, and that’s what I was trying to say in the article. I took a more practical, less philosophical approach to saying it, but apparently didn’t get the message across.

      For all the reasons you stated, I don’t think a Fallout MMO would work. People really only think it would be a cool idea because of the setting, but like you said, Fallout is about the people and their ambitions. And that’s what makes it great, not the junk lying everywhere. Trying to bring that to a grand scale poops right in its eye.

      • http://mediocritycodex.blogspot.com/ Timothy Hsu

        I realized that I left this rant without any piece-relevant points.

        I understand that making Fallout into the current generation of MMOs would likely do it a disservice, but as an MMO concept it’s likely the best one I can imagine.

        The power of MMOs is interaction, which is the core of the Fallout franchise. It’s also about change, which is also something that MMOs can do, and have been shown to be compelling (a la phasing in WoW) and substantial.

        I guess since we don’t really know what the design intentions of the game were, I think that if the assumption you had about its being focused on grand scale were true, it would likely end up as a bland, useless mimic of all the other MMOs out there. But I think it could be successful with a different perspective.

        What if the game focused instead on giving players the ability to create guilds, towns, and marketplaces that persisted in the game world, ones that they could infuse with some of their own personality or ideals?

        I realize this is essentially games like Second Life or EVE online, but maybe that’s where Fallout should have gone. Its amoralist philosophy is perfect for a world like ours, and a game that allowed for that would have been really, really good.

        I realize it may not be fun, but it would be really good.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mathew-Chilton/1539690519 Mathew Chilton

    What a lame article. I sure am glad you’re not the person in any position of power to decide what does and does not become an MMO. I was damn glad a fallout MMO was coming out, and now I am sad to see that Bethesda’s money grubbing has killed it. You had no way to tell how they would work in what, Did you even ever PLAY any of the fallouts? There were plenty of people alive, all over the world. You cant tell the scope of the game, or the factions you could play as, How about you leave that to the original creators of the IP? Its funny, because while Bethesda’s game was prettier, it wasnt the same, it lacked all those touches that Interplay gave it. RIP, fallout mmo. You will be missed.