Tim Cain recently released a video titled “Real-Time Fallout” on his YouTube channel. He states how real-time Fallout 1 was a possibility and why that never came to be. In addition, he discusses a lot of changes that would’ve needed to be made to systems in Fallout 1 for real-time gameplay. Some systems he mentions specifically revolved around action points, skills, and weapons.
Cain explains the reason why a real-time Fallout 1 was never pursued:
“Interplay Marketing… pushed several times [for real-time Fallout 1] and the way I finally got it to stop was pointing out how much money I would need, and time, and then they finally stopped.”
He also describes some of the changes that Fallout 1 would’ve needed to receive to be real-time, some of which are listed below:
“First of all, action points are gone… So you have to ask yourself questions like: what does the attribute agility do now? Because… one of it’s big traits was it gave you action points. By the way, there’s a lot of things that reference action points: attributes, perks, weapons, weapon modes. What are you gonna do with all that? You’re gonna throw it all away is what your gonna do with all that.”
“You can still have those [weapon] modes… and then they can have different rates of use… That rate of use can be controlled, to give you more of a balancing in real-time.”
“There are so many skills that you will have to decide on an individual basis whether they should stop, slow, or be done in real-time.”
Overall, Cain detests the idea of remaking Fallout 1 in real-time. Although Bethesda owns the rights to it and would ultimately get the final say, fans should take comfort in knowing that the co-creator of Fallout 1 believes the game’s turn-based style should be maintained.
