The creator of Fallout is still wondering if he put too much effort into fixing a graphics issue in the original RPG - especially since Diablo completely got away with it at the time.
In a recent video, Tim Cain discussed the struggles that developers sometimes go through when their personal preferences don't necessarily line up with the audience's. To explain that, he touches on the concept of 'foot-sliding' - something he wrestled to remove from the original Fallout, but watched other devs get away with.
Foot-sliding is an issue where characters' feet slide around on the floor, even when they're completely still, as if they're standing on a patch of ice. According to Cain, that wasn't something he was prepared to accept in Fallout. "We kept our feet firmly planted, and we spent a lot of time to make sure that worked right."
In some ways, Cain says, he was vindicated by people in the community. "There were some people out there who said 'Hey Tim, I love that'. But it seems even that praise wasn't enough to satisfy the part of Cain's brain that has always wondered 'what if?'.
"To this day, I wonder what was lost in Fallout because we spent so much time to avoid foot-sliding," he admits. Even to the people who enjoyed that attention to detail, he says "think of all the things that didn't go in, think of all the programming time that was lost, and look at all the bugs that Fallout shipped with, or features we didn't have that were immediately put into Fallout 2."
To add insult to injury, Cain points out all the sacrifices that he and his team made on their game to fix foot-sliding, only to see another RPG get away with it. 10 months before Fallout, the original Diablo had launched, and Cain says that it had foot-sliding "in droves," but "no-one cared."
In the end, I don't know how much of a difference it made. For all of its issues, Fallout still spawned an undeniably successful franchise, from its immediate sequel all the way up to the Fallout TV show and the eventual release of Fallout 5. Sure, he might have put too much time into having rigid feet, but at least it paid off in the long run.
