Fallout 4: What Can it Learn from Wasteland 2?

Any gamer worth their salt, be they old or young, tends to appreciate the origins of the hobby. Everyone with an avid interest in video games knows about the NES and the failure that was the Virtual Boy. They know about the faithful 9/9/99 launch of the Dreamcast, a system ahead of its time.

Those with this kind of interest also know the history of their favourite titles and franchise. Lets take Fallout, for example. The original, hard as nails, old-school, hardcore RPG, Fallout. Did you know it was originally heavily influenced by a 1988 RPG by the name of Wasteland? Well if you did, I have a question for you.

With Wasteland 2 having just dropped, is there anything that the Fallout developers could learn from it? I ask this not only because Wasteland 2 was in part developed by Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment, but because Fallout 4 – as a topic – is beginning to stagnate. There has been no official news about it, the fan community is begging for it and those dedicated enough to still mod Fallout 3 are moving on after all their years of dedication.

The next Fallout would do marvellously well on a crowd funding platform for just this reason. The demand is there, people would be willing to pay and Kickstarter’s new rules and regulations all but guarantee the project would go ahead once funded. But at the same time, that’s an awfully big commitment to make, and putting the success of your product in something so fickle as the marketplace is a risky business.

Assuming you’re a fan of the Fallout series, how would you feel if history were to repeat itself? The original Fallout was heavily influenced by Wasteland; it’s world, characters , locations, enemies and story all share striking similarities. But with Wasteland 2 having been released, how would you feel if Fallout once again aped its predecessor?

What if they eschewed the manipulatable 3rd person camera  and first person camera angles and everything was once again isometric? It could happen you know, I’m not saying it will, but it could. Thanks to crowd funding platforms, there has been a marked increase in market demand for old school styled games as new titles become more flashy and increasingly shallow.

So what do you think? Will we see a throwback to an older time? Would you still play it? Or would it be the death of a much loved series?