Before Bethesda Game Studios worked on Fallout, another studio and company owned the IP, and Fallout Tactics, which came out after the first two installments, was initially divisive.
It was a spin-off created by a somewhat inexperienced team, and they had to reverse engineer the source material before it was released in 2001. Though critics recognized the success of Fallout Tactics, the public was initially reluctant. Ed Orman, lead designer on Fallout Tactics, spoke with PCGamer. He talked about the mixed reception, the fact that it wasn’t Fallout 3 (although it wouldn’t have failed on Black Isle), and the fact that while there were plans for a sequel to Tactics, publisher Interplay was in a very bad financial situation. So they sold the Fallout IP to Bethesda in 2004…
“We had two windows into how it was being received. There was one that we should never have looked through, and the one that we always look through. Commercially and in terms of how [Fallout: Tactics] was received and how it was reviewed, it was really well received. For what it was, the journalists that played it just generally seemed to understand what we were trying to do, what the limitations of what we had were, and they thought we punched above our weight. I think we did. I think we made a really great game that a lot of people enjoyed.
The other window was the existing Fallout fanbase and the incredibly fervent and passionate and often horribly toxic people in that fanbase. There was a minority that I remember seeing there that said, “Hey, it’s a pretty good game. I like what you’ve done to improve these things about Fallout. But the vast majority were like, “This isn’t a Fallout game. This is not Fallout 3. You screwed up the lore here, here, and here. You put in hairy death claws, you don’t use charisma right, and all that stuff. And so there was a huge amount of negativity within the fanbase.
It was disheartening. God, it was disheartening. The art team in particular was super gutted, because a lot of the visuals of the robots and things like that that they had slaved over, those were the things that got panned for not fitting the aesthetic. Visually, it was really easy to point at things and say, “This doesn’t fit the universe. So they took it hard. It was a hard time. And I think we put more weight on the fan base because we were trying to make people happy. You want to make the fan base happy. You want to make another one. You want people to like it. So yeah, it was a gut punch. It doesn’t help that there was already a split in that fan base between Fallout 1 and 2, because they were completely different games. So there was already that going on. And then you add in a third game.
Over time, that [negativity] seemed to change. Fallout 1 and 2 came with Tactics, and people came to appreciate Tactics for what it was. I also wonder how much that solidified the group when Fallout 3 came out to say, “Well, this isn’t my Fallout. So it may have legitimized us a little bit there as well. Little bits and pieces of tactics that you can see are kind of canon now, just through the back door over time, and that’s good enough for me,” Orman said.
It’s a sad story, really…
Source: PCGamer
