'God it was gutting' to see the Fallout fanbase response, says Fallout Tactics lead: 'fervent and passionate and often horribly toxic'

Before the Bethesda Fallouts, and after the Black Isle originals, came a singular series offshoot—Fallout: Tactics. A slightly offbeat spinoff made by an inexperienced team, who had to reverse-engineer from the source material, Tactics would release in 2001 to a fairly decent critical reception, but got the cold shoulder from many fans. 

Jeremy Peel recently spoke to Tactics' lead designer Ed Orman, in a wide-ranging PCG interview revealing more about the game than ever before. One of the oddities of working on it was that dual reaction, with all the praise soon undercut by fans livid about things like the hairy deathclaws.

«We had two windows into how it was being received,» says Orman. «There was one that we should have just never looked through, and the one that we always look through. Commercially and in terms of how [Fallout: Tactics] was rated and how it was reviewed, it was received really well. For what it was, the journalists who played it just generally seemed to get what we were trying to do, what the limitations of what we had were, and they thought we punched above our weight. I think we did too. I think we made a really great game that a bunch of people enjoyed.»

But a lot of people didn't: or at least said they didn't. Fallout: Tactics didn't just diverge from what the previous games had done, but above all else suffered from the unfortunate fact it wasn't (the Black Isle) Fallout 3.

«The other window was the existing Fallout fan base and the incredibly fervent and passionate and often horribly toxic people in that fan base,» says Orman. «There was a minority I remember seeing on there who were like 'Hey, it's pretty good game. I like what they've done to improve these things about Fallout.' But the vast majority were like, 'This isn't a Fallout game. This is not Fallout 3. You screwed up the lore here, here and here. You put hairy deathclaws in, you’re not using charisma properly and all of those things.' And so there was a huge amount of negativity