A deep South Fallout sequel with a 'guerilla warfare' vibe was planned, but then Interplay bit the dust

The Fallout lineage roughly splits into pre-Bethesda and post-Bethesda, but there are byroads. One of the most notable is 2001's Fallout Tactics, a Brotherhood of Steel RPG developed by Micro Forté. The game's critical reception was good, though sales weren't, and it occupies a strange non-canonical space: disregarded by Bethesda and Todd Howard (which "sucked"), yet bleeding into things like Amazon's Fallout show in small ways.

Jeremy Peel recently sat down with Fallout Tactics' lead designer, Ed Orman, about the game's breakneck and somewhat troubled development, including the hairy deathclaws. Towards the end of this chat they get onto Fallout Tactics 2: a sequel that was discussed and even planned-out, before publisher Interplay imploded and it became an irradiated Dodo.

«Somewhere in the ether there is a document,» says Orman. «I don't know if it exists anywhere, I certainly don't have it, but there is a spec for the Tactics 2 game. And broadly speaking, it was a spec that attempted to address most of the problems that we've talked about: It was a smaller campaign, still the same structure. But having established it, we would simplify the economy, simplify the number of objects and weapons in the game.»

Orman reckons one of the issues with Fallout Tactics was feature-creep and a tight deadline, which made balancing a nightmare. But streamlining the sequel allowed it to double-down on the real-time elements. «It really embraced the real-time aspect,» says Orman. «I don't think we were ever going to be able to let go of turn-based. But definitely, front-and-centre, it was supposed to be a real-time version.»

Orman was blissfully unaware of how bad things were at Interplay, and instead focused on what the team could fix in the game just shipped. «We got to reuse all of the assets, in theory, except for the new content needed for the new campaign,» says Orman. «And it was heading into the deep South, which gave us lots of opportunities for new mutations and