Fallout creator Tim Cain says the biggest thing he'd explore in a hypothetical sequel is an increase on the RPG series' "morality stuff," which he thinks not all players really understood the first time around.
Asked in his latest video what he'd like to do with a sequel, Cain said that there are "three things I'd explore in a Fallout sequel – some new factions, some new locations, and more morality stuff, because that's what it's about."
The morality, he says, is "the biggest" aspect he'd want to pursue in a sequel. "I love gray morality," he says. "I also like tough black and white decisions." But that's where he thinks some players go astray – "people consider this to be gray," but often "there's nothing gray about the decision, there's an obvious right choice, there's an obvious good choice, but the evil choice is way more rewarding."
Cain says that making a player choose between, say, saving an NPC or acquiring a new weapon that they'll never get the chance to see again, is something that "really makes people stop, because there's an effect in the game for your player [...] Those are the kind of things I want to explore."
He points towards the popular thought experiment of the trolley problem, which he says is interesting because "there's people who think there's a solution. There isn't. I love the trolley problem, because if you put it into a game, those gamers are going to talk online, and they're going to talk about 'the right solution' – and there is no right solution, there's just a variety of solutions."
That's the lens through which Cain says he would like to explore a new Fallout game: "I would love to dive into Fallout's main theme: power corrupts; people have always done bad things; war never changes. That was always Fallout's main theme. I would love to explore that in detail in a sequel. And really make some of the players who are coming to have fun in this wasteland of cool weapons and weird monsters – give them something to think about while they're playing this game. It's what we always intended, it's why Fallout was so dark and had some of the quests it had."
Cain's days making Fallout are almost guaranteed to have passed – he's said many times that he couldn't be involved in a potential Fallout remaster because he was ordered to destroy all his source code when he left the game's developer. Elsewhere, he's said that no amount of money would get him to make another Fallout game, but he does have one condition that might get him to return to the series instead – the kind of creative control he seems to be speaking about in this latest video. Either way, with Bethesda and Microsoft firmly in control of the game's IP rights, the whole thing is certainly out of Cain's hands for now.
