Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
We’re now two weeks gone from the release of Prime Video’s Fallout, a shockingly good TV adaptation of one of the greatest video game series of all time—enough time for plenty of viewers to have taken their first steps into exploring the Wasteland with Lucy, Maximus, and The Ghoul. It might be natural, then, for people, even non-gamers, to be curious about the video game series that spawned this hyper-bloody, deeply cynical satire of life post-nuke. But where to start, when you’re contemplating the apocalyptic end?
It’s not an easy question to answer, if only because Fallout stretches across a pretty huge swathe of gaming history—and with it, various trends, genres, and occasional evolutionary cul-de-sacs, to say nothing of the fact that the 10 or so games in the series have been created by a pretty vast array of creators and developers over the decades. It’s the kind of series, for instance, where you probably shouldn’t start with the franchise’s first installment—or its best, or its latest, all of which have some fairly serious barriers to entry. So, in the interest of getting people primed to crawl out through the Fallout, we thought we’d devote Game Theory this week to answering the question: Which order should you play the Fallout games in, now that you’ve finished the show?
Best starting points
Fallout 3 (2008)
We’ll be honest: If this was a ranking of the best Fallout games, 2008 series reset button Fallout 3 would be a lot further down the list. The first Fallout game created by current owners Bethesda, Fallout 3 contains many of the flaws endemic to the company’s games: Simplistic plotting and relatively weak writing; occasionally grind-y gameplay; a willingness to ignore player choice in favor of easy resolutions and big spectacle.
All that being said, there’s a reason this thing sold more than 10 million copies, out-selling the previous mainline entry in the series (1998's Fallout 2) literally 100 times over. As the first game in the series to function as a first-person shooter/RPG, Fallout 3 also does all the things Bethesda does better than anybody in the business, creating a huge, ugly-gorgeous world for players to explore, inviting them to get lost out in the Wastes. (It doesn’t hurt that Bethesda had a pre-created sandbox to play in, rather than having to drop players into their typical generic fantasy worlds.) Fallout 3 is, by design, a near-perfect “first” Fallout game, gently inviting players out into the apocalypse, teaching them about the series’ all-important tone, and even contributing a few fantastic additions to the universe’s lore. (This, for instance, is where Fallout goes hard on the idea of the Vaults being experimental testing labs, allowing the 3D Fallout games to use those “emergency shelters” as engines for short, strange stories and dungeons.) 16 years later, the game is as good as ever, for better or worse—and about as good a wading pool for Fallout as you’re going to get.
Fallout 4 (2015)
Fallout 4 is a strange beast. An attempt to put some of the “survival” elements back into a series ostensibly about post-apocalyptic survival, the game’s story of a parent hunting for their kidnapped child commits at least one unforgivable Fallout sin: Reducing the franchise’s gorgeously convoluted conversation trees down to a series of simplistic button prompts. The result is to cut Fallout 4 off from some of the biggest strengths of the series it’s building on—the writing, and the reactivity to player choice—forcing it to instead stand as a thing apart.
Which is, thankfully, still a pretty interesting game, with a heavy emphasis on literal world-building, as your survivor spends a lot of their time rebuilding Wasteland communities, establishing bases, and generally digging into something akin to a very light sim game about bringing the blasted planet back to life. You’re still shooting thousands of irradiated cockroaches, of course, and gunning down robots and mutants in abundance. But Fallout 4 is a fascinatingly robust game when taken on its own merits, an enjoyable crunchy action-simulator of post-apocalyptic life. (Also, Bethesda blessedly walked back the Brotherhood Of Steel’s role as goody-goodies from Fallout 3, which will make them a lot more recognizable if you’re coming to the games from the show.) If you simply want to play the newest Fallout game (that doesn’t carry some extremely serious baggage), you could do worse than dipping your toe into this particular puddle of radioactive sludge.
Where to go next?
Fallout: New Vegas (2010)
The gaming equivalent of “I told you that story so I could tell you this one,” 2010's Fallout: New Vegas is—we’re just going to say it— the best Fallout game ever made. Sure, it was a buggy mess when it launched. Sure, it’s deliberately hostile to players, literally setting a death trap for anyone foolish enough to follow their map straight north out of the starting town. Sure, it’s a bad starting place for newcomers to the series. But as a Fallout video game? It’s completely sublime.
Created by outside studio Obsidian Games (with a large number of the people who worked on the original Fallouts on staff), New Vegas returned Fallout 3 players to the West Coast environs of those original titles, telling a far more complex story about warring civilizations each scrabbling for purchase on the new (nuclear) frontier. Dropping players into the shoes of a Courier who gets bushwhacked during a seemingly routine delivery, the game displays, at pretty much every turn, the imagination, wit, and complexity that makes Fallout so vital. Building on (which is to say, pretty much using outright, with a few tiny tweaks) the infrastructure Bethesda built for Fallout 3, it injects the Wasteland with life and intelligence, telling a funny, frequently brutal story where the players’ choices actually matter.
All that, and it’ll be a good lead-in for the second season of the show, which hints in its final moments that it’ll be heading down to irradiated Nevada for that next installment.
Fallout 2 (1998)
Yes, before we start: The beginning of Fallout 2 is rough. Infamously rough. Huge pain in the ass, forced-tutorial-in-an-awkward-combat-system, constantly-trying-to-punch-an-ant-and-failing rough. It was rough back in 1998, and it’s rougher now, as modern players try to acclimate to the isometric perspective and turn-based fighting of the original few games in the series.
Get through that rough beginning, though, and the rewards are myriad. Even more than the original game, Fallout 2 is a text nerd’s paradise, filled with incredible stories lurking in its nuked-to-cinders heart. This is, in many ways, the game that all “modern” Fallouts are pulling from, blending a satirical silliness with a deep cynicism about human nature, with a healthy dose of institutional paranoia lurking under the whole thing. It also features some of the coolest cities ever built in a video game, including the sprawling vice den of New Reno, still dauntingly huge more than 20 years later. Prepare yourself for an early struggle, and there’s still an absolutely amazing game to be found here.
Save for later
Fallout 76 (2018)
Much has already been written, here and elsewhere, about the faults (and occasional successes) of the most recent Fallout title, an effort to take the franchise kind-of, sort-of into the world of online multiplayer. Using Fallout 4 as a technical blueprint, Fallout 76 has decent bones, but has been marred by a huge number of odd choices that Bethesda, and its players, are still wrestling with to this day.
The biggest weirdness has, thankfully, now been patched over: The decision, at launch, to have no non-player human characters in the game. Since characters are, typically, the parts of a story people actually care about, that left Fallout 76 as a sort of combat-heavy “walking through abandoned buildings” simulator. (This has now been addressed by recent updates that completely walked back the whole awful concept.) And, genuinely, there’s fun to be had here, because there’s fun baked into the basic DNA of the games it cribs from: Wandering a gorgeous West Virginia landscape, shooting Super Mutants, reading dead people’s diaries. If you finished Fallout 4 and were desperate for more of its particular take on this franchise—or if you’re legendary horror director John Carpenter, weirdly—you’ll probably be happy as a pig in glowing green shit; otherwise, you can probably save 76 for later.
Fallout (1997)
The original Fallout is, in some ways, a victim of the success of Fallout 2. Bleaker, and less narratively complex, than its successor, the story of a lone Vault Dweller searching the Wastes for a water chip to replace the broken one in his home is simultaneously fundamental to the series’ identity, and kind of a drag to play. It’s still a fascinating game—and a more focused one than the sprawling 2—but it’s the kind of game that probably functions better as a Let’s Play these days, rather than as a personal gaming experience. If you fall wholeheartedly in love with the series, though, go back and experience it once you’ve got some of the other games under your belt, because there’s some genuinely great stuff lurking in its vision of the Wasteland as a new take on the lawless American West. But for the love of god, don’t start with it.
Fallout Tactics (2001)
Did you finish Fallout 2 and the original Fallout, and found yourself still hankering for more of its turn-based combat? Then boy, are you in luck: 2001's Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood Of Steel cuts back on the series’ storytelling elements in favor of giving you a whole squad of post-apocalyptic scavengers to control. Telling a story of ambiguously canon status, taking place in the otherwise never-visited Midwest, the game has its vocal defenders, who speak highly of its attempt to more fully blend Fallout with games like Microprose’s X-Com series. (Also, it’s the first game in the series to feature music from Inon Zur, whose work would later become synonymous with the franchise.) As story dorks, Tactics never clicked for us, if we’re being honest, but you could certainly do worse.
Speaking of…
Fallout: Brotherhood Of Steel (2004)
Fun fact: This PlayStation 2/Xbox-era attempt to turn Fallout into a mindless, soulless top-down action game in the vein of the (much better) Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance is the only Fallout game you can’t buy directly from any online storefront these days.
This is for the best.