Why do think there aren't any Fallout novels?

"There is an audience for it" could be said for so many things when it comes to both Fallout and TES. I've long said Bethesda management is incompetent and it doesn't just go for their game design. There are so many things they could milk the ever living shit out of but don't. For Fallout alone they could get smaller studios and produce cRPG's, X-COM style games for Tactics, RTS', simulation games for vaults, comics as All Roads proved, novels as any narratively heavy universe with tons of lore allow. There is like zero reason not to do this. They have long since had the funding for it. They have the studios for it. And it's not like they're worried about the lore becoming a mess by allowing too many cooks in the kitchen considering they themselves fuck it up every time they even lay their sights on it.

Fallout has the potential of becoming something like Star Wars where it can spread its tendrils across the entertainment industry and make itself a proper household name. It has the universe, it has the lore, it has the iconography.

But as I said, Bethesda's management is fucking incompetent. Bunch of buffoons that don't see what they got. All they've managed to do is try to milk it in the safest fucking ways they possibly could with an MMO for ES, a phone game with microtransactions for Fallout, a game that sells out to the chinese because those genocide coins are all the rave these days and finally a sloppily put together multiplayer Fallout 4 with Battle Royale.

They have an amazing IP on their hands and they do fuck all with it.
Cause they're dumb fucks.

They could throw so many darts at the dartboard that us who despise their work could actually get a proper Fallout game by accident. Instead it's so overly cautiously curated with the sole intent being on what can make the safest amount of money. Milking machine.
 
Poor IP Management and the view of Fallout as a "dumb" brand that wouldn't really be suited to books in the same way that RAGE isn't.
 
I feel like The Elder Scrolls is an ideal case for books, because it's always been a fleshed out fantasy world, with an entire continent already shown in one context or another.

Fallout not so much. It's attitude has always been to treat each part of the world on a case-by-case basis. Techo-Knights being what lies over that hill over there is relevant because it's what's in the game. In writing an entire area for the purpose of a novel, you are inherently enclosing off spaces for future exploration in-game. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but if it was a choice between having the space explored in a game, or having it explored in a novel, I think most players would choose a game.

Now this still leaves room for stuff like All Roads, which fill in the gaps in the ambigious spaces before the game, and actually enhance the stories of the game(You can visit all of the locations shown in All Roads, except of course the vegas skyline locations but y'know Vegas has always been smaller than intended in-game).

Beyond that, I feel the comic format really fits Fallout's mood perfectly: second to maybe a intentionally retro styled sci fi serial with crappy special effects. I mean, it's heavily inspired by old pulp Sci Fi stories, and given that by definition those were cheap crappy stories you could buy I think it would be painful to read in novel format, but would make pretty cool comics.
 
I agree with the others in that if there were to be fallout novels, a graphic novel would work best. A big part of fallout is it’s aesthetic/art style, and just text describing the art style doesn’t really do it justice. You need an artist to depict what the world looks like, otherwise it would be too similar to any other post-apocalyptic novel. Also we should remember that fallout first and foremost is a game. The turn based combat system came first, with the lore getting figured out later in development. In a sense, any fallout product that lacks this element kind of misses the point. Not that I’m against spin-off games or other media.
 
Iprovidelittlepianos said:
I agree with the others in that if there were to be fallout novels, a graphic novel would work best. A big part of fallout is it’s aesthetic/art style, and just text describing the art style doesn’t really do it justice. You need an artist to depict what the world looks like, otherwise it would be too similar to any other post-apocalyptic novel. Also we should remember that fallout first and foremost is a game. The turn based combat system came first, with the lore getting figured out later in development. In a sense, any fallout product that lacks this element kind of misses the point. Not that I’m against spin-off games or other media.
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Honestly I don't trust Bethesda to handle a graphic novel very well, there was a pretty decent attempt at keeping the art style from the old games and replicating it in Fallout 3 but then Fallout 4 comes out and the look is almost COMPLETELY gone. It'd have to be done by an outside party that at least paid attention to the 90s games, because holy shit do they look so damn good and detailed.
 
The GoBernment said:
Honestly I don't trust Bethesda to handle a graphic novel very well, there was a pretty decent attempt at keeping the art style from the old games and replicating it in Fallout 3 but then Fallout 4 comes out and the look is almost COMPLETELY gone. It'd have to be done by an outside party that at least paid attention to the 90s games, because holy shit do they look so damn good and detailed.
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I remember when I heard that Adam Adamowicz (or whatever his name was) died and I thought “oh shit, he’s the guy who did the concept art for fallout 3, I hope fallout 4 doesn’t suffer from his absence.” Of course this was back when I actually still liked fallout 3.
 
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Mr Fish said:
"There is an audience for it" could be said for so many things when it comes to both Fallout and TES. I've long said Bethesda management is incompetent and it doesn't just go for their game design. There are so many things they could milk the ever living shit out of but don't. For Fallout alone they could get smaller studios and produce cRPG's, X-COM style games for Tactics, RTS', simulation games for vaults, comics as All Roads proved, novels as any narratively heavy universe with tons of lore allow. There is like zero reason not to do this. They have long since had the funding for it. They have the studios for it. And it's not like they're worried about the lore becoming a mess by allowing too many cooks in the kitchen considering they themselves fuck it up every time they even lay their sights on it.

Fallout has the potential of becoming something like Star Wars where it can spread its tendrils across the entertainment industry and make itself a proper household name. It has the universe, it has the lore, it has the iconography.

But as I said, Bethesda's management is fucking incompetent. Bunch of buffoons that don't see what they got. All they've managed to do is try to milk it in the safest fucking ways they possibly could with an MMO for ES, a phone game with microtransactions for Fallout, a game that sells out to the chinese because those genocide coins are all the rave these days and finally a sloppily put together multiplayer Fallout 4 with Battle Royale.

They have an amazing IP on their hands and they do fuck all with it.
Cause they're dumb fucks.

They could throw so many darts at the dartboard that us who despise their work could actually get a proper Fallout game by accident. Instead it's so overly cautiously curated with the sole intent being on what can make the safest amount of money. Milking machine.
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God, Bethesda's incompetence is actually remarkable. I genuinely wonder how they even got off the ground as a game company.
 
A Fallout comic is something that I've always wanted, And was part of the reason why I picked up the special editon of New Vegas back in the day.

But honestly, yeah, put a good team on that book. The dream would be someone like jonathan Hickman, someone who can go into all the secret society stuff And is just a general crazyan when it comes to writing.

But Bethesda just don't know what they got. There were a couple of Elder Scrolls books, but that's it.
Fallout is one of the few ips that can be milked a bit And get a good audience response. But i don't think Bethesda like the idea of a comic outdoing their games.
 
Why aren't there any Fallout novels?
From Bethesda? The same Bethesda that says reading is boring and new players don't want to read and just skip the dialogue? And with Mr. Hines that says: "And now I’m playing other stuff, where there’s dialogue and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I wish I could just walk away’. Because I don’t have the attention span for long dialogue!"?

I wonder why indeed.
 
Risewild said:
Why aren't there any Fallout novels?
From Bethesda? The same Bethesda that says reading is boring, new players don't want to read and just skip the dialogue and with Mr. Hines that says: "And now I’m playing other stuff, where there’s dialogue and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I wish I could just walk away’. Because I don’t have the attention span for long dialogue!"?

I wonder why indeed.
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Pete Hines is truly an enigma.
 
Risewild said:
Why aren't there any Fallout novels?
From Bethesda? The same Bethesda that says reading is boring and new players don't want to read and just skip the dialogue? And with Mr. Hines that says: "And now I’m playing other stuff, where there’s dialogue and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I wish I could just walk away’. Because I don’t have the attention span for long dialogue!"?

I wonder why indeed.
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I forgot about that.
I wonder why Todd is so keen on designing the games for daddy Pete's enjoyment.
 
Mr Fish said:
I wonder why Todd is so keen on designing the games for daddy Pete's enjoyment.
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I think Todd just likes action games more than RPGs.
If you look at his history in Bethesda, all games he worked on before Morrowind were action games with the exception of Daggerfall.
Let's look at all those games:
1995 - Producer and Designer of "The Terminator: Future Shock" (FPS)
1996 - Producer and Designer of "Skynet" (FPS)
1996 - Producer and Designer of "TES Daggerfall" (1st person Action RPG) Daggerfall was the sequel to "TES Arena", so I doubt Todd was allowed to change the game's formula much
1998 - Project Leader of "TES Adventures Redguard" (3rd person Action Adventure)

Seems obvious that the games he had more freedom of choice, he ended up making action shoot/fighting games, instead of RPGs.
 
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Risewild said:
I think Todd just likes action games more than RPGs.
If you look at his history in Bethesda, all games he worked on before Morrowind were action games with the exception of Daggerfall.
Let's look at all those games:
1995 - Producer and Designer of "The Terminator: Future Shock" (FPS)
1996 - Producer and Designer of "Skynet" (FPS)
1996 - Producer and Designer of "TES Daggerfall" (1st person Action RPG) Daggerfall was the sequel to "TES Arena", so I doubt Todd was allowed to change the game's formula much
1998 - Project Leader of "TES Adventures Redguard" (3rd person Action Adventure)

Seems obvious that the games he had more freedom of choice, he ended up making action shoot/fighting games, instead of RPGs.
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Well my post is in referral to how Pete literally said that he loved that in Skyrim or Fallout 4 you could just walk away from conversations. Basically slamming Bethesda's writing casually.
 
was the the Greg Keyes books written with bethesda's permission i wonder at first anyway? I'm sure if there's an author out there who wants to write their own sort of novel on Fallout i'm sure bethesda would allow it to be published/made but they probably have to be well - established.

i guess there just hasn't been an author too write a Fallout novel as of yet. i mean there's a lot of fan fiction out there on fallout. on fanfiction(dot)net. i used to read a lot of work on there when i was between the ages 13-15. i don't remember how i found the site, as i never even heard the term fanfiction until then, but i think i just typed in fallout something related to fiction and it popped up something in the search results on google.

Maybe there could be a fallout novel set around the events the brotherhood of steel during the years of the Scourge (The Pitt) i think it was called. or a fallout novel set around the time of Arthur Maxson's rise to power in the brotherhood of steel and the uniting of the outcasts and the brotherhood of steel.

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someone could also make a novel inspired by Fallout / Wasteland set in its own post apocalypse setting.
 
I think the Fallout universe would lend itself well to short stories and comics rather than full-length novels. All Roads should be seen as a blueprint for how to write a fallout story in a “literary” format.

Not to beat a dead horse, but there are a number of historical events in the Fallout universe that could make a good short story/graphic novella. Some events I’d like to see a comic about include:

-the events leading up to the formation of the brotherhood of steel. Discovery of the FEV experiments at Mariposa, the mutiny, and the exodus to what would become Lost Hills bunker.
-a sequel of sorts to the previous story could be about the unsanctioned, ill-fated brotherhood expedition to the Glow.

-a story detailing Edward Swallows early life, joining the followers, clashing with colleagues and foreshadowing his rise as one of the most brutal dictators in the post-war world. The story could end on a “cliffhanger”, his capture by the Blackfoot tribe. We all know what happens next.
-and a sequel to that story could go into the early formation and conquests of the legion.

-a graphic novella adaption of Randall Clark’s story would be cool, although the story told in the game is well-written and detailed enough that this might be unnecessary.

-a story about the transformation of the Vault 12 residents into ghouls (which already exists on this very site!). Particularly I’d like to see what Set was like before and after ghoulification, and what led him to killing the overseer and usurping the throne of Necropolis.

-a story about Harold and Richard Grey’s journey to Mariposa military base. Maybe could also have a prequel showing Richard’s exile from Vault City.

Anyway, I’ve got more thoughts on this but I don’t want to bog this thread down.
 
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