Since he's the guy who created the original concept for Fallout and led the first RPG's development, it's reasonable to put some weight on what Tim Cain thinks is most interesting about the series. In a new video, he revisits an old sentiment of his that Fallout is about exploring "the ethics of a post-nuclear world."
"There's a famous quote of mine – I even looked it up because I said it once, like 25 years ago. 'My idea is to explore more of the ethics of a post-nuclear world, not to make a better plasma gun,'" Cain says in a new YouTube video. That quote, in fact, dates back to a 2002 chat with Fallout fansite Duck and Cover, published when the original Fallout 3 – which is better known as Van Buren, and which Cain was not directly involved with – was still in development.
The older, crankier portions of the Fallout fanbase have regularly revisited that quote as a way to dunk on the Bethesda era of the series, but Cain himself is more interested in using it to explain why he likes post-apocalyptic settings so much.
"People have trotted that out for all kinds of things they want to support," he explains, "but what I was saying there is the ultimate reason I liked [the post-apocalypse] and why I liked making Fallout was this absence of authority, allowing you to explore morality. It wasn't so we could make cool plasma weapons and power armor and all that – although that's cool. But that wasn't the reason. If Fallout's a cake, that stuff is the icing."
The gooey cake at the heart of Fallout is, instead, "that gray morality stuff," Cain argues. "You will run around the world and you see some people trying to do good and rebuild civilization. You will find other people being really bad and killing people and raiding settlements and saying, 'We're just trying to survive.' Sometimes they're not even pretending to do that. They're bad. They know it. They don't care. They don't want to work."
That's the world as it exists in the game, "but to the player," Cain says, "I've always wanted the game to ask, 'What will you do? Okay, here you are, blank slate player. What are you going to do? How are you going to behave when no one tells you what to do? Are you going to be a good person or are you going to be a bad person?'"
While Cain says "I love the Ultima series," one of the cornerstones of RPG design, those games "expect you to be good. Fallout has no such expectation. It's an entirely different kind of game." The post-apocalyptic setting offers a world without any kind of moral authority – whether legal, cultural, or religious – and lets you make your choices as you will.
That impetus to let players do what they want is why Fallout has a series of slides at the end showing the consequences of your actions over the course of the game. "We created them and put them in because, when the game ended, we wanted the player to know we watched you," Cain says. "The designers anticipated some of the horrific stuff you did, and here are some slides explaining all the horrible stuff that resulted from your actions. And good stuff, but also bad stuff."
For Cain, that lack of moral judgment is essential. "I love gray morality," he concludes. "I love it. It makes people self-reflect. Something a lot of people don't do. I mean, just look at politics or online. I love that about the game. It also makes people want to replay, which is a big part of Fallout. Replay, make a new character, act differently."
Certainly, our list of the best Fallout games can generate no controversy.
