Fallout Tactics' lead designer tips his hat to Bethesda for succeeding where they failed: 'It can be done. You just need to be a multinational with more than 18 months'

Fallout's had an interesting journey as a series—starting out as one of those crunchy computer CRPGs under the stewardship of Interplay Entertainment, it was then brought under the Bethesda umbrella in 2007, turning into the FPS RPG you either love or loathe depending on which games you've played, and how traditionalist your tastes are.

Turns out, though, there's a dark horse sandwiched in between those two halves of the series' history. Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel was released in 2001, between Fallout 2 (1998) and Fallout 3 (2008). It was developed by Micro Forté under publishers 14 Degrees East and Bethesda Softworks, and it was, at the time, kinda controversial for die-hards.

It wasn't really an RPG, and more of an RTS-style XCOM thing. Turning away from the previous games' turn-based combat, Fallout Tactics instead saw you hopping between missions and Brotherhood Bunkers—there was a turn-based option, but after doing some digging, I can't really find a single person who says that it really worked out.

While Fallout Tactics was a little before my time, the feeling I get just listening to people talk about it, in essence, a mechanically messy game that didn't quite thread the needles it needed to thread. But don't just take my word for it: Recently, Jeremy Peel reached out to team lead Ed Orman on behalf of PC Gamer to talk about the game's development, and he painted a picture of a game that was saddled with hefty time constraints and a confused vision.

«Obviously Speech was the biggest problem for us … you can't dump any stat because it can't be ‘PECIAL’, you know? You can't just drop a letter out of their stat system. That was a huge challenge all the way through. And I think ultimately, we probably didn't really come up with a good solution for Speech.

»I pushed constantly to make sure that we were using it, and I think it was Tony Oakden who finally was like, ‘Dude, this is not gonna work. We don't have a solution, and we don't have any time.' So I