Chris Taylor talks about Fallout:Tactics

Brother None

Brother None

This ghoul has seen it all
Orderite
In a thread on RPGCodex about our Tony Oakden dev profile, Chris Taylor opens a book on Fallout:Tactics. He has some interesting things to say:<blockquote>Additional testing time would have allowed: more bug fixes, better balancing (especially in Turn-Based, since the limited amount of testing time, most of QA was testing in real-time) and more tweaks to the game system. It would not have allowed for any major changes to the story, characters, plot and game system.

In hindsight, we should have not implemented both TB and RT. It did end up costing us a substantial amount of QA time and resources. Or, we should have kept RT only for multiplayer. That would have given us a little more time for balancing the single-player campaign.

MicroForte wasn't responsible for nearly as many problems on FOT as Interplay was

(...)

Something else that I remembered: when we (IP and MF) sat down for that original week of pre-production design, the game was strictly turn-based. We had discussed how we wanted to implement TB/RT or some sort of hybrid, and the decision was made to do TB combat only (RT until combat, just like FO1/2).

(...)

If Interplay had allowed more time (and money), MicroForte would have been in a position to deliver a better game. That's fairly typical of the publisher/developer relationship. It just hurts more in this particular case, because there was a higher expectation of quality due to the Fallout name. The project wasn't completely on schedule in reality, but that was due to a couple of changes in direction during development and wasn't due to any major problems with the developer. Interplay should have taken a step back, slipped the game 3-4 months and released a higher quality game. That doesn't mean I take any less responsibility for my duties on FOT and my failure to keep the FO lore as close to canon as possible. </blockquote>Really good stuff

Link: Thread on RPGCodex

Thanks Briosafreak
 
Lord and Taylor said:
It would not have allowed for any major changes to the story, characters, plot and game system.
Click to expand...

How about major changes to the shitty, shitty ending? I wanted an end boss goddamit! Not some lame ass computer.
 
FOT did give me the feeling it was half finished and rushed to hell...anyone still shuddering at the fluffy final fantasy death claws? i am! :E
 
I enjoyed Tactics. i knew from the start it was not meant to be true to the fallout name as much as the first two games and i didd't expect it to, so i enjoyed the game for what it was and not expecting it to be the next great entry into the series.

true we all would have been better off with Fallout 3 instead, but we all know who we have to blame for that don't we..
 
I would say that it was self-serving and blame-shifting if I didn't know that such things really happen. Unfortunately, they do.
 
Stevie D said:
Interplay, pariah though it may be, gets to be everbody's whipping boy? How convienient.
Click to expand...

That Interplay rushed FOT out was common knowledge at the time, so it's not a revisionist view that Taylor is presenting here.

It's stuff like this that constantly causes me to remind everyone that Interplay was seriously messed up way before Caen and his kids took over. We can't allow Fargo to be remembered as a "good guy" just because he green-lighted FO1 and FO2.
 
I cant belive that they made the changes to power armour, and other stuff, that they did.

If you ask me, tactics was screwed up from the word go, simply because it doesnt look like fallout.
 
Sarkus said:
Stevie D said:
Interplay, pariah though it may be, gets to be everbody's whipping boy? How convienient.
Click to expand...

That Interplay rushed FOT out was common knowledge at the time, so it's not a revisionist view that Taylor is presenting here.

It's stuff like this that constantly causes me to remind everyone that Interplay was seriously messed up way before Caen and his kids took over. We can't allow Fargo to be remembered as a "good guy" just because he green-lighted FO1 and FO2.
Click to expand...

I have to agree on this, but add that the idea of making the game in the mad circunstances it was made, with the time difference and network problems making it difficult for a real control on what was being done, hindered the project a lot. At the time i had a bad feeling on the entire ordeal, since Interplay seemed to be on the loose, there was a feeling of lack of professionalism and a "run for your lives" methodology everywhere.

What a mess of a company...
 
Briosafreak said:
I have to agree on this, but add that the idea of making the game in the mad circunstances it was made, with the time difference and network problems making it difficult for a real control on what was being done, hindered the project a lot.
Click to expand...

/agree

You just reminded me about the network problems. We would ftp builds of the game, and it would take forever. The pipe out of Australia is rather small, and we would constantly get transfer rates in the low single digits (2-3k/sec).

Towards the end, we even resorted to shipping builds of the game via Fedex, since that was turning out to be faster. We had to get a complete build of the game, including all source code and raw assets. That had to be shipped via hard disk, since it was too big for a CDR. The hard disk arrived damaged, of course.

The time difference was a pain, too. It often ended up taking several days to resolve a simple question. I did appreciate being able to visit Canberra and spend some time at the MF studio there.

pax,
-Chris
 
Who's idea was it to make tactics not a RPG ?

As is, the only good stuff in tactics is the new animations for some weapons fireing effects (laser, plasma, gauss) and if those get modded into FO2, tactics will loose all appeal for me.
 
[3PD said:
PsychoSniper]Who's idea was it to make tactics not a RPG ?
Click to expand...
The guy who thought of the name. Fallout : Tactics would be a terrible name for an RPG.
 
[3PD said:
PsychoSniper]Who's idea was it to make tactics not a RPG ?

As is, the only good stuff in tactics is the new animations for some weapons fireing effects (laser, plasma, gauss) and if those get modded into FO2, tactics will loose all appeal for me.
Click to expand...

At the time, Interplay was broken into divisions. 14° East was the strategy division and Black Isle was the RPG division.

The people in 14° East wanted to do a Fallout title, but it couldn't be a RPG because that was what Black Isle did. Black Isle was going to be working on a FO title (FO3), but not for quite some time. Interplay thought it would be a good idea to continue to keep the Fallout name alive (and further increase the size of the franchise) by making a strategy/tactical game. FOT was never meant to replace the RPG that Black Isle would be doing. It was meant to supplement it.

pax,
-Chris
 
I personaly liked the game, I didnt expect an RPG game when I got it and enjoyed it for what it was. It did a good job for what it was - A tactical combat game.

Though my tactic was to get real big guns and fire them as fast as possible at the bad guys... :)
 
I liked some of the improvements on the game (larger inventory screen, better barter screens, some better weapons effects) but was largley disapointed.


It could have actualy been much better if it used the talking screen that FO1-2 had, and had other towns that you could visit without having a mission there, so you could explore the area better, possibly even get secondary missions.

I dont see why 14Deg east couldnt implemend some RPGlike features, since they obviously have at least some gam making experince. (judging by the multiple 14east tittles I have.)
 
Honestly I have been replaying it using the real-time mode. In real-time it's a vasty different game.

But the thing is, and which pisses me off about Tactics, is how much crap was left out. I am up to Springfield, which seems to be one of the better maps so far, and even that has large stretches of map where nothing happens. So much was undone or incomplete (like the celler and tunnel under the Springfield whorehouse).

It's just half-assed and was shipped that way to make a quick buck.
 
welsh said:
It's just half-assed and was shipped that way to make a quick buck.
Click to expand...


Yup.


They should have implemented some RPG stuff, and had non-mission towns on the map, were you could trade and interactm learning more of the storyline.

Wait, maybe its good they didnt try, considering some of the continuity issues in tactscs even.
 
I have to say I disagree, it was intentionly made as a non-RPG, so dialog was never going to be a two way thing it only needed to be one way telling you what to do. Much ther same as warcraft or command and conquer, the purpose of the dialog was to tell you what to do.

The problem is that is you look at FOT expecting a RPG you would be disapointed, as an RPG it was a total piece of junk, buts that because it was not an RPG.

It had Fallout: Tactics written on the box which kind of implied it was a 'tactics' game. Sure I bught it because it was fallout but if you take it on the level it was meant for it was a good game. Besides as Chris implied above there were policital pressures from with the company to make it distinctly un-rpg ish
 
That's been argued before and it doesn't fly.

For one thing, just playing Fallout Tactics, it retained the same character screens and options as in the roleplay. Most of that stuff you never really need to use. Then there is the entire linear basis of the story, and it's so damn not-interactive.

But my point was more about the shit they didn't include.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top