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Original Fallout lead Tim Cain hasn't had his hands in the series for years, but he still wants it to someday get an "actual good faction." That's not him dissing the factions that have appeared in modern iterations of the series – no, he simply wants to see a morally pure group in the post apocalypse. Partly because players would probably still try to wipe them out on instinct.
In an interview on YouTube channel The Vile Eye, Cain – who is often credited as Fallout's creator, having led development of the original and also supported the first sequel – was asked if there's any fresh type of antagonist he'd like to see in a future series entry. He does have a clear idea here, though it's locked in the secret pages of the Fallout design doc he hasn't yet shared with anyone.
"But without going into details," Cain says, "the one thing I always wished in a Fallout game was an actual good faction. Like 100% good. They're just growing food and making shelters and looking for old tech and maybe looking for old medicine, and they're really trying to help people. What I wanted them written as is how they have to deal with all the suspicion from all the other factions and from the player."
Cain suspects that there might be some challenge in building that suspicion these days when "everyone will just look everything up, but I love the idea of the player suspecting that the faction's up to something or wiping them out because I'm like, 'I bet that hospital was used for experimentation' and it's not. They're actually a good faction because almost every other faction we've seen in Fallout has either been a mix – which I like, I like gray factions – or just pure evil."
As Cain sees it, "Fallout trains you that everything's gray. That the good side has done some bad stuff and the bad side is not quite as bad, or they think of themselves as good. I just thought that would be an interesting thing to try to explore. I'm not even sure if it could be explored since a theme of Fallout is 'power corrupts.' So, wouldn't whoever is in charge of this faction be a little corrupt? But it would still be interesting to try to do that."
He also sees it as a challenge to narrative designers – the same sort of challenge he laid out when he proposed doing exclusive "dumb dialogue" for player characters with low intelligence stats in the original Fallout.
"I had never seen anything like that in a video game, and I had done that in a tabletop game. I said, 'Can you guys pull that off? Can you write dialogue lines from a player who is severely stupid?' And they rose to that challenge. So, I think they could rise to this one, too."
