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,
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.
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 6th-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?
