Disclaimer: I'm not starting this as a topic for debating whether or not a Fallout spin-off is or is not a good idea, or whether or not it will "drag down" the franchise in some way. My view is that if spin-off games didn't ruin Halo, Warcraft, Metal Gear, Mario, or Tom Clancy; but instead could, if done properly, expand upon and reinforce the franchise - then the same could hold true with Fallout.

This is idea came to me out this thinking that at this point, any sort of a return to the original type of gameplay from Fallout 1 or 2, is going to effectively be a spin-off. This got me to thinking what other avenues might be open to expanding upon the Fallout Universe with various gameplay formats and genres.

If you think the entire concept of a spin-off is just the worst thing that could be done to the series at this point, that's fine. But I'm not terribly interested in debating that issue with anyone - there's no middle ground to be found in what is certainly a subjective opinion - so there's really nothing I could add to the statement that "a spin-off is a horrible idea" beyond "I feel otherwise." Feel free, obviously, to post opinions about any of these ideas or what others may come up with. I just don't want this topic to devolve into a cyclical debate about whose opinion is "right."

That said, here's a few of my ideas:

Fallout: Back to Basics Basically, a return to the original Fallout format. With or without 2D sprites and an isometric view. Basically an RPG with more traditional RPG mechanics in mind. Personally, I think the DS could handle something like this pretty aptly (I'd imagine you could easily fit all of Fallout 2 on one DS cartridge at this point) but it would on a PC interface just as well, of course. If we went the PC route, I'd like to see some current-gen 3D graphics involved - and I think a turn-based game with lots of pretty graphics could make for some very cinematic combat, as well. Anyway, this one's sort of a no-brainer, as well.

Fallout: Tactics Another no-brainer, pretty much. Not that much different from the original RPG, really - only with more of an emphasis on squad-based combat and leaner on the role-playing front. I think there's likely a pretty interesting story to tell in how Lyons got his troop of Brotherhood all the way out to DC. And this sort of game would be a good fit for telling that story, I think.

Fallout: Wasteland Chef This is along the lines of me trying to think of something that'd be a big departure for the series, but at the same time incorporating key themes and using those to add some new twists to a different genre. Basically a cooking/ restaurant management sim - creating and following recipes to serve to people, while dealing with limited food stocks and trying to use your profits to expand your enterprise for the good of mankind.

You start out training as a Cafeteria Worker in a Vault, where you learn the basics of the game and some basic recipes. Eventually you are expelled from the Vault for being too experimentive, failing to stick to Vault-Tec Approved recipes, and creating un-Vault-like dishes that inspire rebellion and unclean thoughts among the populace. Stranded and alone in the Wastes, you are discovered by a group of travelling nomads and nursed back to health by their unorthodox and inspiring food. They impart in you the concepts of minimizing food waste and creating recipes that are efficient and use every bit of food available - as well as acting as a tutorial and giving you hints at making up your own concoctions.

You make some life-long friends, and together you decide to set up your own business at the bub of a major trade network. There's already some competition within what are the beginnings of a permanent settlement, so it's up to you to draw business to your place from the merchants that pass by, bartering your services in exchange for more food and supplies to build up your place and upgrade it with things like better stoves, more seats, a working icebox, etc.

As you expand your business, you have to keep track of your food stock through intermittent shortages and learn to improvise with what you have. Elements could potentially get very detailed, down to choosing what you do with each part of that Brahmin you managed to get your hands on - do you throw out the hooves and other unsavory bits, or work that into a recipe as well? Also, managing your business and hiring more help and enlisting the aid of helpers to scavenge more food for you. Build up a reputation and curry favor with the locals by learning their favorite recipes or comping their meals on occasion to unlock more upgrades and earn a bigger share of market in town.

As your business increases, so too does the town grow in size to give you a constant challenge. Deal with various events like raids and Supermutant attacks, and respond to the shortages these cause. Your final challenge comes when the area experiences a great drought and you have to manage to keep the entire town fed and their spirits up by making use of your constantly dwindling supply of food. (You've run out of brahmin meat - do you decide to serve cannibal dishes as a last option, or make due with what little you have left?) Win through to the end of the bad season and you're the hero of the town (with various endings depending on what sacrifices you've made with your morality during the crises.)

Fallout: Around the Wasteland in 80 Days A racing sim. Learn the basics of the game practice your skills doing missions in a hub-type city (starting possibly with riding horses or brahmin around, working your way up to cobbled-together motorcycles, etc.) Then participate in an endurance race to uncover a fabled pre-War artifact. Customize your ride, and struggle to keep it well-maintained for as long as possible - always on the lookout to scavenge more fuel and spare parts. Combat others trying to get there before you, and steal their transportation.

Fallout: Doomsday A classic point-and-click adventure game telling the story in a more cinematic manner of life immediately before, during, and after the War.

Fallout: Vault Overseer This is another one I think is fairly obvious. A sim-style management game where you construct Vaults for various experiments and then do your best to keep things running smoothly. Weed out unsavory elements by making them dissapear or fall prone to "accidents," keep everyone happy, and hope you remembered to stock up on Water Chips.

Fallout: Wasteland Minstrel Surely something that is in high demand in the Wasteland is good entertainment to keep people's minds off the harsh realities of existence. A music rhythm game (compatible, of course, with Guitar Hero and Rock Band controllers) where you travel from town to town plying your trade in exchange for food and shelter. Fend off attacking raiders with your awesome drum solo, tame the savage Deathclaw with the sleepy tunes of your guitar. With the ultimate goal of garnering the favor of a powerful radio station and using your skills for the betterment of the human race. (And with new controller add-ons like the Jazz Piano and Pre-War Violin, of course.)

Fallout: Tactics

Although not sure what Warcraft spinoffs there are (WoW and ?) or Tom Clancy ones (there's a game series that has gone totally to hell.).

Fallout Tactics. About the only one on that list that isn't wretched. You don't necessarily have to be a BoS soldier though (not that fun to play as the Holy Ordos they are now), it could be a sort of JA type game, where you command a group of mercenaries that level with you, have some interesting characters, that kind of thing. I guess it'd be an RPG-lite, heh - heavy combat and emphasis on squad tactics, but a light sprinkling of story and character development.

Nah, none of those ideas seem relivant. Building a vault? Go get The Sims in that case!

Agreed. I wish the series would move away from toting the BOS as its poster boys. They aren't the only faction in the wasteland.

Maybe a Tactics style game where you control a Raider or Mercenary group. Pick up new recruits along the way with different stats and interesting back stories. Then instead of making it linear they re-implement dialogue trees and moral choices.

A Back to Basics spinoff would be sweet of course (as ironic as those words sound. ) I wonder if Beth would be willing to hire a small production house to create a game like this in the far future.

Well, surprisingly I think I'd play all of those Except maybe the last one, I'm a fan of guitar hero type games of course, that one just sounds like it would be a little short-lived is all.

Man if Interplay had developed and sold masses of ported ideas like this, they probably would have kept the franchise in the first place

Fallout: CIV

Your settlement is growing, but where are you going to get the water, resources and land you need?

Why, take if from those other poeple, of course!

Build your settlement. Find and manage your resources. Find stashes of prewar tech and reverse engineer it. Use that knowledge to build bigger and better stuff.

Win via conquest, political power..unite the wasteland under your flag, economically, by resource ...you build the water purifier, etc.

(Alpha Centuri with a fallout theme. Even the more modern...and probably mopre appealing for most Civ IV would work well)

True, there's really no inherent need to go with the Brotherhood in any of these games. I would like to see something telling the story of how Lyons got all the way to the East Coast, though. I just think there's an interesting story to be told there, and seeing the events that led to his change of heart and eventual mutiny from the Brotherhood proper. I think a Tactics-style game would be a good fit for that.

But of course, if we went with Tactics, there's no reason for that to be the only story told in that sort of game. There's certainly room to have you commanding a group of mercenaries (actually, I was thinking that a squad-based shooter like Rainbow Six could be interesting for a mercenary campaign,) or even controlling and building up a group of raiders staging attacks against nearby settlements and caravans.

Absolutely.

Obviously a more contained timeline than Civilization (like you said, closer to Alpha Centauri) but I think that style of gameplay would be a good fit for a post-nuclear setting. Building up your fledgling settlement from a small band of refugees, competing with nearby settlements for limited resources, upgrading your town to better deal with the rigors of the wastes and defend your territory from encroaching raiders, Supermutants, and mutant animals.

And by all means, guys - feel free to continue coming up with your own ideas - I put out a few examples to get things started but by no means did I intend that to be the definitive list. I'd love to hear any ideas about games that would work well on different platforms/ genres.

Eh, I dunno about a Back to Basics spinoff (not really sure how it'd be a spinoff though). Too late for that, and it'd end up looking like an admission of a failing to ever get made anyway, heh. Another spinoff idea occurred to me, It would be fun to see would be an adventure game set in the Fallout universe, not a MI type though, but no reason adventure games can't be gritty. The downside to these ideas is that they'd end up being large scale mods of another game (Say..Raven Shield for a Tactical game, Civ for a Empire building one, etc).

Yeah, I'd like to see an adventure game for this setting - no reason I can't see why you couldn't tell a very advlt story within that genre.

Yeah, that would be the incorrect way to go about this, I think. Say we did something that played a bit like Civ in a Fallout setting - the wrong way to go about that would be to just mod the existing Civ with more post-nuclear textures. Better to take that 4x gameplay concept and build it from the ground up to take advantages of the gameplay twists that a post-nuclear setting would be well-suited for; than adapting an existing game and just adding a layer of flavoring on top of it.

Well I didn't mean literally a mod, just that it seems as if the line of thought gave birth to it went like "Hm I like Civilization IV, I like Fallout...hmm...What if I take those two together!". Not really an immense pitfall though, if you're drawing on two solid games for inspiration, the hybrid isn't necessarily garbage. The problem comes in when you stretch Fallout to fit over the other game's body, so to speak (research is key in 4X..but how'd that work in Fallout ?), but that's another topic.

Fallout could really be ported well into an adventure game though. Shame the genre died out about 10 years ago, hah.

Heh. It seems like some poeple don't realize that Fallout: Tactics actually exists...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_Tactics

You're joking..o_O

There are no words for this facepalm

Major lolocaust and all that.

Oh I do, I liked the game as well (Ah Farsight, how I love thee...ugly though). Just thought it was a suggestion for another Fallout tactical game.

Well I thought that was pretty much common knowledge. As far as re-introducing Tactics into the series - well, that's already a spin-off game. If I'm talking about spin-offs I'd like to see, then a Fallout Tactics 2 seems like a given. edit: if you're talking about my mention of it in my original post, I was just offering up a description of how the game works for anyone who hadn't heard of it. I do get the feeling most of us posting here have at least heard of it, if not played it.

Yeah, if we ever saw a 4X Fallout game I'd like something that was more than just Civilization with a post-nuclear face-lift. Obviously if you're going to make any sort of game you're going to look at other games in that category as inspiration; but you can also go further than just trying to copy wholesale the gameplay. With a lot of these examples I'm pointing to other games for examples, but I'd also want something built from the ground up with gameplay elements that incorporated what was fitting to the setting.

Research, for example, could be very useful in a 4X Fallout game. Certainly an emphasis on forming scavenging parties that look for pre-War tech and other salvageable items, and researching how to reverse engineer them into something useful for your purposes. This is one example where it wouldn't work exactly like Civ's tech tree - actually a more detailed research element that focused on how best to utilize the materials at your disposal. (ie, taking Civ's tech tree and changing all the names to fit the Fallout universe is the wrong way to go about it. Coming up with an all-new research method that was designed from the start to incorporate and work alongside with the salvage operations would be a much better idea. You're never going to play a 4X game that doesn't remind you of Civ, but it also doesn't mean you have to copy to any real degree, either.)

It would be more along the lines of coming up with a game that would simulate trying to build a viable settlement and increasing your power in the area. The research aspect would be more about implementing a game mechanic that would simulate finding scrap and pre-War relic and coming up with useful things to do with it. As opposed to "Civ had a research tech tree, so we need to have one, too."

Anyways, yeah - with any of these I'd rather see a spin-off game that's made because there's actually some game potential to explore with the setting, not simply as "this type of game would look cool if replaced all the textures.") For myself, I was just thinking of what basic gameplay styles might be interesting to pursue for a Fallout game, and using those to explore some of the concepts behind the franchise. (Like in the cooking game - exploring the Fallout-centric concept that food is hard to come by and giving you a glimpse into what concerns you have to encounter in trying to set up the logistics of keeping people fed and happy. Or a Vault Overseer simulator being a fitting way to explore what it may be like to fill the role of Overseer.)

There's likely room to come up with a spin-off that doesn't fit so easily into pre-concieved definitions, to create a wholely new gameplay style. If anyone comes up with something that doesn't so easily correspond or compare to an existing game, then I'd love to hear those, too.

Heh. It seems like some people don't realize that they should read a thread before they respond to it.

Fallout Spin-offs aren't bad...
http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/3446/farmai3.jpg

Well, I did used to have a severe addiction to Harvest Moon a few years back...

Dude, don't get me started

I got surprisngly addicted to Harvest Moon DS >_< And now I want to play that new one with the weird name, rune monster something..>_<

But that's for another topic perhaps

Nice parody anyway, made me lol ^_^

The corner text box is hilarious.

Fallout: The Drakmor Explorer.

It's in Norway and you have to battle dragon goose in order to find water chips in the bag of pens.

Got another one: obviously FEV plays an important role in the Fallout universe. It's origins and purpose are described in detail if you dig deep enough into the computer terminals and holotapes during Fallout 1, but a lot of new Fallout fans aren't going have to access to all of that backstory (sure, there are many ways to get a copy of Fallout 1, and I'd recommend that game to anyone who liked Fallout 3 - but they're also aimed at a very different sort of demographic and not everyone is going to have the patience to follow through on that game.)

Rather than retread old territory in Fallout 3 or any future Bethesda games through tried-and-true holotapes and computer terminal entries (which again, not every player is going to want to spend that much time reading text - even I get text-weary at times and skim over what might be important backstory in many of these games) it might be interesting to explore and illustrate the beginnings of FEV - it's original purpose, research, and development - with a spin-off type game.

What I was thinking would be an apt gameplay style for that would be a puzzle game. I'm not terribly sure how exactly it would play, but it would be best not to borrow from any particular game currently out there, but instead come up with something totally new. The game's story would revolve around a group of West Tek scientists working on the Pan-Immunity Virion Project, with the puzzle game representing their experiments with the gene manipulation - new wrinkles being added into the gameplay as levels progress until the eventual breakthroughs that lead to the Forced Evolutionary Virus project.

I almost see something where your results in the puzzle game would correspond to mutations and deformations of the test subjects (starting with animals and working up to humans.) Maybe some sort of 3D models that can be manipulated in response to the results of the puzzle game, so you could end up with some very interesting (and grotesque) results.

Further levels could even go on past the War and the desertion of Mariposa, until the intervention of Dr. Richard Grey, his precipitous accident and then continued experimentation with the virus, leading up to the creation of the SuperMutants.

Successive levels in the game could become increasingly complex and represent more complicated and far-reaching experiments in trying to create the ultimate super-soldier, while revealing more of the story along the way.

Anyway, just a thought. Again, the idea is less "how can Fallout be stretched to fit different game genres" so much as "what is the potential for telling different stories about the Fallout universe, and what game genre would best apply to telling that story?"

I would think that a Fallout strategy game, similar in design to IMPERIALISM, would make an excellent spin-off. The thing that most people enjoyed about IMPERIALISM was that there was an element of: War, Production, Internal Transportation, Foreign Trade, Diplomacy, Resource Harvesting, Naval Combat etc.

If you have never played Imperialism before, I suggest you pick it up and try it!!

As for another option, for those who have played either Full Spectrum Warrior or Operation Flashpoint...then you would probably agree that either style of game would do well for a Fallout War/Combat simulation. As I see it, the player could live through the whole Sino-American War. The player in question, would then be given the chance to play as either a member of the PLA, PLAN, PLAAF or on the other side and play as the US.A, USMC, USN,USAF(Obviously the air and naval element options would be a bit limited in certain aspects). Also with this idea, it would be very easy to add new mods and campaigns in the future....(Sino-Soviet Conflict)....etc.

"Heh. It seems like some people don't realize that they should read a thread before they respond to it."

That's ironic.

Yep. I think a strategy game would work pretty well for Fallout.

Yeah, I think something else that would work well for the franchise is a full-blown tactical shooter. Wasn't there a game a few years' back that focused solely on commanding your squad (you couldn't directly fire, so much as set targets for them to focus on, gave orders on where they found cover, but the interface was very close to an FPS... can't remember the name.) Something akin to that would be fun - or just a nice squad-based shooter in general, with gameplay mechanics build from the ground up to take advantage of the wrinkles that a post-nuclear setting could add.

Personally, I'd rather see something that places you in control of maybe something akin to Reilly's Rangers - some sort of mercenary group (though again, playing as raiders could be interesting, too.) Having a game like you suggested, focusing on the War and lead-up to Nuclear Oblivion - my worry is that it would come off as not so terribly different than a lot of games already out on the market. It would have Fallout's Pre-War art aesthetic, but otherwise I don't see a shooter game focusing on an epic war being different enough to really sell all that well.

Plus, placing it in the Wasteland could make the gameplay a little more interesting. Scavenging equipment and armor (maybe an interesting mechanic to reforge weapons, cobble together makeshift weapons and even procedurally combining weapons - like strapping a big knife on an Assault Rifle, etc.) for example. Having to handle a bit of logistics while progressing through the game and making sure your squad is well-equipped with armor and weapons in good repair could be an interesting twist for a game like that, possibly.