No Game New Year Week 9: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel and the history of the PS2

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

This Playstation 2 game is to the Fallout franchise kind of like the embarrassing relative that nobody talks about. It took a rich intellectual property like Fallout and did not do it justice with the version that came out on Console. Now, while not awful, this game is going to take me a LONG time to play all the way through, so this week’s entry will be more about the context of the game than the actual game.

So, when people talk about the Fallout franchise, they’ll think of one of two things:

• If they’ve been playing games for a while they might talk about the brilliant isometric role-playing game from Black Isle Studios, first released on PC in 1997 and a sequel released in 1998. Games like this weren’t exactly unknown but this game pushed a lot of boundaries in terms of its setting, combat and morally ambiguous content.
• Younger fans, or people who have been following the franchise for a while and have recognised its developments, would be more likely to talk about Fallout 3 and its sequel Fallout New Vegas. Bethesda created a game that was a massive departure from its predecessors in terms of its game play, but did a lot to bring sci-fi role-playing games into what is at the moment the current generation of gaming. It was also a fantastic game, and incidentally one of the few Xbox360 games I own that I’ve actually completed.

What they wouldn’t talk about is a top-down dungeon-crawling action game with the Fallout setting released on the PS2 and the Xbox in 2004, which is basically all Brotherhood of Steel was. At best, it was one of two spinoffs from the main series (the other being Fallout: Tactics, which I never played.) At worst, it was a cheap cash-in of a successful franchise to make a game that was shallow, flawed and if I’m honest, actually quite dull.

Which begs the question: Why wasn’t this game a role-playing game? Why such a drastic move away from the style of the previous games?

We may never know, but here’s my theory: I think it had a lot to do with the hardware limitations of the Playstation 2. And this is going to take a while to explain, so bear with me. And also bear in mind that I’m talking about what happened in the UK; the position might be a little different in America and the rest of the world:

Believe it or not, not everything about the PS2 went to plan. If you spool time back to 2001, you might remember that the old PS2s were massive and had an expansion bay in the back. It was supposed to be used for a Hard Disk Drive and an Online Adapter, and was a well-intentioned attempt to take console gaming online. Unfortunately for Sony, this was one of the few times they launched a product before the world was ready for it, and both the Hard Disk Drive and the Online Adapter fell flat on their faces in the UK when they were first released.

Let’s start with the Network Adapter. Why did that fail? Well, a lot of it was to do with the availability of Broadband in the UK at that time. The European version of the Online Adapter came with an Ethernet adapter to connect it to a broadband connection. It didn’t come with an option to connect it with a dial-up connection, (I understand the US model did,) and rightly so because the kind of data that would have to have been processed in order to make a PS2 game work on line would almost certainly have needed a broadband connection.

Unfortunately for a great many PS2 gamers in the UK, very few people actually had broadband at this point, and most internet users used a dial-up connection. This worked by using modems to convert the message from the computer into a telephone signal, sending it across to its destination modem. This would convert the telephone signal back into a computer message, the effect of which would then be displayed on the computer. No wonder connections were slow!

Broadband was no more clever than this. It basically cut out the ‘middle-man’ and connecting computers directly to each other using dedicated internet cables. This allowed the internet to work without all that tedious mucking about with phone lines,[1] but it also meant that a lot of work had to be done to create the infrastructure to allow it to do so. The technology existed and was available, but digging up every street in the UK in order to connect every home to broadband was no small task. We’re still in 2001 here, don’t forget. I don’t think Broadband was used domestically to any major extent until 2002, and I didn’t get it until 2003.

So when the online adapter was first built, it flopped in the UK simply because we didn’t have the infrastructure to make it work. Up until the Slimline PS2 was released in 2004 (which had an Ethernet adapter built in to it,) the only game I can think of that supported online games was Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3, also released in 2001 – and the online functionality didn’t work for obvious reasons. But what about the Hard Disk Drive?

Every console from the original Xbox now has a hard disk drive (HDD) built in to it. This was not the case with the PS2. The HDD was an optional extra that could, in theory, be bought separately and used with the PS2’s expansion bay. I don’t actually know whether this was ever released in the UK or not. It was talked about at the gaming shows, E3 being one of them. But I never heard anything about it being used in any games I read about in magazines, not least because one of its flaws was that no one seemed particularly sure what it was supposed to do.

We know what it does now, of course. Turn on your Xbox One or 360 and the interface you see, and everything you’re getting from Xbox Live, is all part of the infrastructure of the hard disk built in to the console. All your online content goes on to the HDD, and if you’re in to downloading games, they can go on the HDD as well. And there’s all sorts going on with the Next-Gen consoles that I haven’t got the faintest idea about yet.

However, it wasn’t all that clear to console gamers early last decade. Things like additional content and streaming were talked about, but all that made it sound like was a giant memory card. The HDD worked by streaming data from the game disk onto the hard drive. The idea behind it was that the PS2 could access data more quickly from a disk built into its infrastructure than from the disk. It could also be used in online play to download new content, and also have a substantial amount of memory to cope with the data coming in for online games.

It all sounded good in a ‘We’ll see what all that means when we get one’ kind of way, but at that time there were only two games that supported the HDD: Final Fantasy 10 and Final Fantasy 11.

FF11 was probably the first in what we now recognise as MMORPGs, and the first game that I was aware of that was exclusively online. So, if you didn’t have an internet connection, you couldn’t play it – and at that time, nobody did, because nobody in the UK had a broadband connection that would support online play with the PS2.

Final Fantasy 10 was not an online game, it was a large but somewhat linear RPG. It had a lot of data to access, and took advantage of streaming data from the game disk on to the HDD, where it could be read more quickly. What was the effect of this? Well, loading times decreased by about a second… and that was it.

So all in all, the situation with the HDD didn’t paint a picture of a piece of hardware you’d want to drop a couple of hundred pounds on.[2] Nobody bought it, and I think by the time the PS2 reached the end of its iteration, there were only 35 games that supported it. It was difficult, if not impossible, to attach it to the Slimline PS2, and its usefulness was overshadowed by the Xbox and the following generation of consoles.

What’s this got to do with Fallout? Stay with me, I’m going somewhere with this…

Given the vast complexities of the requirements needed to create a sandbox/non-linear role-playing game, which is what people would have expected from Fallout, a hard disk drive would definitely be preferable, if not a requirement of a game like that. Any game with a morality-based system has to take into account all actions of the character in order to implement the effect of the world at large. It would also require a metric tonne of voice acting to account for all the possible conversations, and a whole host of other things I have not the technical savvy to describe right now. This kind of thing was possible on the 6^th-gen consoles; Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire and Morrowind were all released on the Xbox, which had a HDD built in to it.

Put simply, it would have been impossible to put a role-playing game as complex as Fallout would have to have been on the PS2; the machine just didn’t have the hardware to deal with it. So Interplay had to come up with a different game entirely, and what they came up with was a dungeon-crawler: A functional action game with role-playing elements, but none of the depth or exploration that might have been expected for a game from the Fallout franchise.

So why did Interplay make a PS2 game at all? Why not put a proper role-playing game on the Xbox, which had the system capabilities to do it? I would imagine the decision came somewhere between the following two reasons:

• They had done more or less the same thing for Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance in 2001, which pre-dates the Xbox. They’d taken a well-loved and deep intellectual property, and made it into a dungeon-crawler game. Few fans of the series thanked them for it, but the PS2 gamers now had a version of Baldur’s Gate they could play – and Interplay now had a workable engine they could use for games that followed, including Dark Alliance 2 and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. This could be cynically viewed as a lazy re-use of assets, when a new game would have been preferable, but it also meant they could produce the game reasonably quickly.
• Part of the reason for the PS2’s success is that it had a lot of developers and publishers contracted to make games for them. This was partly due to the Playstation being the first console to get CD-based gaming right, which is a different story altogether but a lot of those deals would have been made around that time, and partly because for about 6 months developers and publishers had little choice in the matter. Between Sega calling it a day with the Dreamcast, and Microsoft releasing the Xbox, there was no choice but to make console games on the PS2. Unless Microsoft bought those contracts out when the Xbox was released, (and in some cases they did,) it was very unlikely that a development contract would extend to being able to make a game for the Xbox but not the PS2.

Or to put it simply, Interplay had to make the game for both the PS2 and the Xbox, and with an engine already in place, there was no reason to put any more effort into designing a completely new game.

So that, I think, is how we ended up with Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. I hope you’ve enjoyed my musings into the history of video games circa early 00’s. Next week I might actually start talking about the game; that would be good, wouldn’t it?

See you next time.

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[1] Anyone remember having an extendable phone line that you had to reel around the house to wherever your computer was in order to plug the internet cables in? We laugh about it now, but I wonder how many people actually tripped up over those wires and broke their necks, as my Mom was convinced she would do. She never did…

[2] Or however much it was. I never saw one for sale so I don’t know.