Fallout Tactics

Fallout Tactics or Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel is a tactical computer role-playing game that was originally developed by Micro Forté and 14° East and published by Interplay Entertainment. Released on March 15, 2001, it is the third installment, following Fallout 2.

Background
The story revolves around a group known as the Brotherhood of Steel, established in the post-War United States, spreading from the former state of California eastward. The isolationist, technology-focused group found itself at odds with its ideals once the need to recruit outsiders became a reality.

The Brotherhood forces found they had much to offer native populations in the Midwest who had never seen advanced equipment. They developed a working relationship with the locals, offering protection and medicine for food and labor. The Brotherhood drafts recruits from this population. The player character is a new recruit to the Brotherhood called the Warrior, tasked to lead a squad of soldiers made up of their peers against several threats in the surrounding area starting in the year 2197.

Gameplay
Fallout Tactics is the first non-standard CRPG and the first to feature a multiplayer mode in the series. The gameplay is similar to real-time strategy games, focusing on squad-based combat and introducing a continuous turn-based play style.

The game centers around Brotherhood bunkers and missions that serve as a central point for the Brotherhood. Players can obtain the services of quartermasters, mechanics, personnel yeomen, and medics. Characters from completed missions occasionally visit the bunkers.

After receiving a mission briefing from the general in charge of the bunker, the player's squad can then move to the area where the mission will take place. Among these locations are towns, factories, military encampments, or vaults. There, the player is given a map of the area marked with objectives and notes.

Combat
Combat in Fallout Tactics features three modes of combat: Continuous Turn-Based (CTB), Individual Turn-Based (ITB), and Squad Turn-Based (STB). In CTB, everyone can act at the same time, and action points are regenerated at a rate based on the Agility stat. ITB is the system used in the original games. STB is a variation of that wherein each turn is given to a squad. Other changes include the ability to change stance, modifiers for height, and setting sentry modes, which let characters shoot automatically in CTB upon encountering an enemy.

Multiplayer
Fallout Tactics has a multiplayer option of creating a squad and or person based on a value of how many points you can put into your person or squad. The game can be played on Gamespy Arcade. It can also be played online via Steam with its multiplayer option, using Steam's very own servers.

Recruits
Although the main character in the single-player campaign has to be human, recruits from the Brotherhood and characters in multiplayer matches can be of any of the six races featured in the game. Non-player characters have different natures and demeanors assigned to them, determining their behavior in any given situation. Each race also possess unique taunts.

Character creation
Fallout Tactics uses the SPECIAL character system. The game difficulty setting does not affect how much experience characters will receive. When creating a character, there is a Tough Guy setting which awards 30% more experience at the cost of being unable to save while on a mission. This is increased to a 100% increase in experience points with Patch 1.27. The game may still be saved inside Brotherhood bunkers.

Skills
Fallout Tactics largely uses the same skills as Fallout and Fallout 2. The only exception is the removal of Speech and the addition of Pilot.

Traits and perks
Fallout Tactics features the same traits as the original Fallout with a few race-specific additions. The arsenal of available perks is expanded.

Endings
After defeating or pacifying the threats to the region, the squad is given the choice to either destroy the endgame boss the Calculator, sacrifice a character to merge with it or allow General Barnaky to merge with it, if the general is still alive.

Music
The game soundtrack for Fallout Tactics was composed by Inon Zur, which contains only Fallout style background music and is the only Fallout game that has no ambient music from the 1940s and 1950s.

Marketing
Promotional items were given away prior to the release of Fallout Tactics or were available by pre-ordering the game. A small camouflage bag was given as a part of the pre-order bonus to those who pre-ordered Fallout Tactics at the Interplay online store. A t-shirt with the Fallout Tactics logo on it was given as a prize in promotional contests and as a pre-order bonus. It was included in the pre-order bundle on Amazon.com.

Fallout: Warfare
An additional fourth CD was given out as a standard pre-order bonus. The CD included a tabletop battle game based on Fallout Tactics was added to the game's bonus disk. It uses a simplified version of the SPECIAL character system and was written by Chris Taylor. It was available in the 2006 UK White Label DVD Release of the Fallout Collection.
 * Fallout: Warfare, a table-top miniatures game based on the Fallout universe
 * A Bonus mission and a vehicle for the main game
 * Additional game artwork

Games
Additional marketing in the forms of games were created for Fallout Tactics.
 * Fallout Concentration
 * Fallout Tactics Simon Says

Reception
Fallout Tactics received a Metacritic metascore of 82/100.

Behind the scenes
(RPG Codex forum - archived) that the game had high expectations due to being a Fallout title, and that it could have been better if more time and money had been invested during development.
 * Emil Pagliarulo stated that lore and elements of Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics have been included in subsequent works.
 * According to Chris Taylor, the game's combat was intended to be strictly turn-based during pre-production. He also noted that the game testing before shipping was insufficient,Chris Taylor: "Keep in mind that the amount of testing on Fallout Tactics was tragically short. IIRC, Interplay received the first full beta/fully playable to the end on a Saturday. The following Wednesday, after one - maybe two - revs, it was sent off for mastering. That's an amazingly short amount of time (most projects have at least a month between fully playable and gold mastering, RPGs usually have longer). Myself and a few others asked for more time to do more testing and we were denied. There was a strong desire to get the game out as fast as possible by someone at Interplay. I don't think it helped that I had walked out of a marketing meeting a month or so earlier, so my opinion towards the end wasn't well received. Additional testing time would have allowed: more bug fixes, better balancing (especially in Turn-Based, since the limited amount of testing time, most of QA was testing in real-time) and more tweaks to the game system. It would not have allowed for any major changes to the story, characters, plot and game system. In hindsight, we should have not implemented both TB and RT. It did end up costing us a substantial amount of QA time and resources. Or, we should have kept RT only for multiplayer. That would have given us a little more time for balancing the single-player campaign. MicroForte wasn't responsible for nearly as many problems on FOT as Interplay was. And I would be surprised at the amount of problems Interplay's QA department was able to find, except I know how hard they worked and the problems they were working against. They did as good as job as anyone could have done under the circumstances. Of all things, I'm still bummed we never got a song in for the intro movie. I had wanted "Jesus Just Left Chicago" by ZZ Top."
 * Regarding the development of Fallout 3, Todd Howard stated that "As far as the existence of Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel, we pretty much ignore their existence in the same way that I ignore Aliens 3 and 4."

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