Fallout - The History of the Series

Hardcore Gaming 101 with an introduction into the Fallout series:

Among Fallout fans, there are two conflicting ideas about what Fallout actually is. To many players, Fallout is about exploring the post-apocalyptic wasteland, shooting raiders and participating in conflicts which will shape the future of the world (or rather what remains of it). Others will say it's not enough - for them, Fallout is a game about difficult choices, complex mechanics and extreme non-linearity.

Such divide among the fans stems from the fact that Fallout can be thought of as two loosely connected series developed by different teams with different approaches to both gameplay and narrative. The first two mainline games are a product - or maybe a catalyst - of the 1990s computer RPG revival and carry all the common traits of this movement. They're played from isometric perspective, they put a lot of focus on player agency and their difficulty is less in choices made during the combat and more in preparation and character building. Fallout 3 and 4, created by Bethesda, are more similar to that studio's flagship The Elder Scrolls series (especially later titles like Oblivion and Skyrim): they're exploration-heavy first person action-RPGs set in a large, freely explorable (due to both lack of explicit 'invisible walls' and the controversial level scaling mechanics meant to provide steady difficulty during the whole playthrough) open world.

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Thanks Dark Savant!