Mod:Fallout: The Frontier/Fallout: The Frontier



Fallout New Vegas: The Frontier, also known simply as Fallout: The Frontier, is a free fan-made modification for the 2010 action role-playing video game Fallout: New Vegas. It was initially developed by Maybenexttime and JoshBadWriter, later led by Tgspy, along with many members of the Fallout modding community and Frontier development team.

It is important to note that The Frontier is a highly expansive and ambitious mod for New Vegas; it is not simply akin to being like one of the four DLCs of New Vegas which could be completed in 5 hours. The Frontier features a large map that rivals the Mojave, over 100 quests, three main campaigns, hundreds of characters and thousands of lines of voice acting. Players can easily sink dozens of hours into The Frontier and its scale could be considered its own game, albeit within another game.

The mod was released in January 2021. This version was called the "legacy" version because a rework that would feature an overhaul was in progress. However, the rework project was cancelled in February 2023 due to technical difficulties and being too much of a time commitment, making the legacy version the only available downloadable version.

Setting and story


As the Courier, you start a new adventure centered around a conflict, an ongoing war, between the NCR Exiles and the Northern Legion in the snow blasted remains of Portland, Oregon. The NCR Exiles is led by Elias Blackthorne and the Legion is led by Marcus Valerius. Additionally, a group of Mormons known as the Crusaders led by a woman named Tasha Weaver have been caught in the conflict.

Another "group" of people are known as Scavengers ("Scavs") which essentially refers to everyone who has not taken a side with these three factions. Scavs include both hostile raider enemies, as well as the generally friendly populace.

The mod also currently contains violent content (i.e. gore) in order to show the story's dark themes.

Gameplay


To begin the mod, a character will approach the Mojave Desert after waiting a couple days. After some discussion, the Courier will go on a truck to the Frontier. The mod also checks to see if the Courier has been involved with the base game's DLCs (Dead Money, Lonesome Road, etc) which will unlock some new dialogue options.

The mod features a map around the size of the base Mojave Desert map. It also features hundreds of interior locations.

Features



 * Climbable ladders
 * Vehicles
 * In order to humanize the NPCs, they animate using a lot more body language, such as crying, gesturing (waving goodbye), etc
 * Multiple companions who can follow the Courier at the same time (there does not appear to be a limit so the Courier could have 10 people following them at once)
 * New items, weapons, armors and enemies, including giant spiders

Development

 * See also: Development and development team

The mod has been in development since around May 2014 when "maybenexttime" started development and gathered various modders. It has had over 30 developers. Tgspy become lead developer after 2017. Voice actors were recruited on the site Casting Call Club.

It has been stated that there was infighting and steamrolling among the developers before the launch, resulting in controversy, with accusations of uncompromising attitudes that had hurt the creative vision of the mod. It has been said that a developer by the username "Devilswish182" had high creative control of the NCR questline, and that he was very protective of others wanting to change or adjust it. Developer Nazenthedark said, "Every time an issue was brought up he would threaten to leave. If he left, that would mean that all of the content the former project lead showed off in the trailers would be unfinished, and then there's be a whole different controversy." A developer also said, "The NCR Questline was basically his little fiefdom and he refused to share or change anything for anyone. He also went out of his way to not interact with the team." and "Devil was always way more interested in the coding and visual side of development than the writing, he was also dead set on making something he liked regardless of whether or not it would appeal to anyone else (which of course, it didn't)."

Tgspy mentioned, "A lot of the problems with the NCR Main quest in particular stem from a combination of the chapters being made completely out of order and as such having different levels of writing competency, poor game design and overwhelming difficulty and tedium stemming from said poor game design. The first chapter of the NCR, the tank escort and Hardcase rescue, was written back in late 2015-2016, when there was very different plans on what the Frontier would be. What came after that, was the third chapter, the space station. This was written in a weird position where there was no actual story to back it up yet, and it was only made because of a desire at the time to have a space station segment, and as such it borrowed/plagiarized some scenes from other games. Yikes."

Apart from steamrolling, it has also been said that one of the core issues was, simply put, a lack of planning and communication between many of the team members. For example, one developer may have added, modified or deleted something without letting anyone else know about it. This can be partially attributed to the fact that the mod is an online project where the members live all around the world, as opposed to a studio where everyone works in the same office and can easily bounce their opinions back and forth with the whole team so that these types of situations can be prevented.

Launch reception
The Frontier released on Nexus Mods on January 15, 2021. An easy-to-install Steam version was once planned.

Negative aspects


The Frontier was soon met with some negative reception and controversy in early 2021. Although there were some people had more positive-lukewarm feelings, many players found that some of the game's attempts at humor (especially the adult jokes and sexual humor) felt awkward, saying the tone struggled with being able to balance its lighthearted and serious moments. Even attempts at trying to be serious still came off as goofy to some.

Players were unsure what to make of some lines; for example, America complained briefly about how her feet were smelly after wandering around the wasteland; players were unsure if this was simply an innocuous line meant to be humorous and nothing more, or a dogwhistle to appeal for foot fetishists; one of the developers claimed it was the former, and joked that only foot fetishists would seriously interpret it as such. One representative claimed about some of the lines: "We recognize that these topics were not handled tactfully, however, there was never any malicious intent behind the writing of the lines."



One of the major issues players had was the game's NCR questline, which drew criticism due to many players feeling it was linear, overly fantastical (e.g. a trip into outer space), poorly written and too much like Call of Duty and Dead Space. The Archimedes II quest in space proved controversial, although it still had some enjoyers who found it technically and graphically impressive, even if the horror tone was unusual.

Positive aspects
Despite the negative reception, the mod has received some defenders who have genuinely enjoyed playing the mod, and feel if the player can tolerate some questionable writing here and there, occasional crashes and bugginess, and recognize that The Frontier is a free fan project at the end of the day, then there is still enjoyment to be had.

Many have praised the large and expansive environment of Portland, with some preferring Portland over the Mojave Desert. The world map and its interiors show a lot of effort put into it. Some players also feel some of the criticism has been overblown, especially by those who act like every single quest and character is poorly written. The music has been well-received as well.

Defenders encourage others to not just listen to vocal critics, but to give the mod a chance, download it and try it for themselves. In addition to this wiki which has grown to over 1,000 articles, a subreddit for the mod has also grown to over 2,500 members.

Criticism and response
Some content creators made long video essays on why the mod is "garbage" and warned other Fallout fans to stay away. This was a very dark period for many of the developers and it took a high toll on their emotional being and mental health, especially when some players felt that they "wasted" years of their lives working on it. Some developers were also subjected to online harassment and trolling. The reaction left many disheartened developers to leave the project, either by choice or due to a community consensus that they should no longer be involved, so much so that the development team of the now-cancelled rework was almost a completely different team.

During these trying times, instead of leaving angered and insulting responses, some players and developers of other Fallout mods had a sympathetic response and decided to reach out and offered their condolences to The Frontier team; while not necessarily condoning the controversial content, they told the team to be strong and they also expressed the sentiment that the actions of a few developers should not speak for everyone who has ever contributed to the project.

A few patches were released to delete some of the content players found cringey and iffy. Some of the mod's contributors and voice actors requested their submissions to be removed, which is why there are some characters in the game who have no voices. While most voice actors are still in the game, a notable exception is the companion Wrench. A statement was released from the team in which they apologized and mentioned that some of the content in the initial release mod was poorly thought out or unacceptable.

Rework project (cancelled)
In May 2021, the Frontier Team addressed criticisms. They announced their intention to rework the mod "from the ground up", namely the NCR campaign. The development team shifted to such a degree that the new developers are almost a completely different team. The rework was an attempt to meet the standards of the Fallout community and give the mod a chance for a better send-off, hoping it could be redeemed to some degree like how many players have warmed up to Fallout 76. With this announcement, they began recruiting new writers, artists and developers for the project. Project lead Tgspy stated in a blogpost "we hope that this new story will do better justice to the characters, and to the Frontier as a whole".

Some things that were planned:
 * The NCR wouldn't be the "NCR Exiles", but rather, proper NCR.
 * The NCR campaign would have more branching paths and freedom of choice, instead of being linear in many ways and full of combat sections.
 * The character of Elias Blackthorne would be rewritten in an attempt to make him a more complex and compelling character, with some of his decisions being changed.
 * The character of Tiberius Rancor would be reinvented into a new character called Conrad.
 * The player would no longer be automatically enlisted into the NCR before arriving in the Frontier. Instead they would be a "nobody" with no set affiliation to the factions there.
 * A common complaint was that the "legendary" Courier had a lot of worship by other characters, to the degree that dialogue seemed to ego-stroke the player. The "Courier worship" by others would have been toned down.
 * There would be more realistic interactions between the factions and the player would see the NCR fighting a war outside the main quest.
 * There would be five or six Scav tribes who have "territory" around the Frontier.
 * Legion and Crusaders would see see some level of adjustment to prevent lore conflicts or quality concerns.
 * Sandlot would have been a new settlement similar to Diamond City from Fallout 4.
 * Salt Town would be reworked because some people feel the quests had an anti-union message.
 * Irvington would be reworked because some people feel the quests lack quality and are just are not very interesting and engaging.
 * The skyline of Portland would be modified to have less buildings in the downtown area, in an attempt to make it so that the player can more easily tell what buildings they can enter.
 * Portland was going to be adjusted so it would resemble reality more, but also have more cultural locations. These include the Shanghai tunnels, a more accurate interior of the Lloyd Center, Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, an interior for the U.S. Bancorp Tower, Pioneer Courthouse Square, and Powell's Books.
 * The map would have clearer roads to better fit moving around in vehicles.
 * There would be more content around the downtown area.
 * In the legacy version, it is not really explained why Portland is so snowy, but the canonical reason is that the nuclear fallout of the Great War threw radiation and ash into the air which blocked out sunlight, making the region more vulnerable to the cold. Admittedly, this is not a very good explanation 200 years later. In the rework, there would be a better explanation: a weather machine using similar technology to Big MT and Fort ATLAS in Fallout 76 would have been located in the upper floors of the Portland National Bank.
 * The Frontier has been criticized for being "edgy" at times, with sexual humor and random references (e.g. receiving 666 caps as part of a quest, finding a condom, etc). This was an attempt to appeal to the New Vegas fanbase who are often been viewed as being on the more "edgy" side by some Fallout and Bethesda fans. For example, in New Vegas, the title screen shows a masked man in a trench-coat with a gun in a "cool" pose, blood splatters on the camera in the opening, there is a hooker in the strip with only tape covering her nipples, Fisto can be seen as an anal sex joke, the Think Tank joke about toes looking like penises, etc. The developers of the rework intended to tone this aspect down in order for the story to come across as more serious to a more general audience.
 * Tgspy once said the space station Archimedes II would remain, since removing it was too much due to how ingrained it was in the engine, but noted the NCR questline would be gutted out from it, and it would be re-named and made lore-friendly. However, later comments suggested the space station would be gone entirely in the rework.

In 2022, the team announced that because some developers were in Ukraine's conflict zone, this would halt some progress on the mod.

On February 10, 2023, it was announced the team made the difficult choice of ending the rework due to technical issues and burnout due to the amount of energy required to fix them, as it would likely result in four years of development with the coders they have. Additionally, the team is aware that many Fallout fans don't want to touch any form of the mod "with a ten foot pole", and they felt the pay-off is too little.

Despite the main cancellation for the most part, it was said, "Where we go from here is still up in the air. Some wish to continue doing Frontier-related things, such as weapons, armor, and even story elements. We are currently evaluating the state of the Legacy build's assets, as well as sorting out the logistics of what we do next. We'll have more to announce on that front later." This raises the possibilities of small patches for the legacy version.

Trivia

 * There used to be a species of talking lizard people called the Trochili in the mod, similar to the talking deathclaws and Brain the talking mole rat from Fallout 2. They were patched out (with the exception of Tarna) due to players finding them too silly. Some called them lore-breaking, although there is an explanation for their creation: they were created by the mad scientist Frederick Voss who was experimenting with creating biological creatures, and he had an obsession with sci-fi movies.
 * According to Nazenthedark, one other core developer threatened to remove all their substantial contributions to the mod if the Trochili weren't cut out completely so the team gave into the removal.
 * There was once the ability to have sex with a deathclaw; this was only meant for players with Wild Wasteland enabled, although it appears that the developers forgot to flag it as WW. This was only meant to be a goofy and silly joke due to the absurd ridiculousness of the situation, instead of a serious attempt at promoting bestiality; no actual sex is seen and silly lines like "I'm a sick fuck, I like a quick fuck" and "any hole is a goal" were options. This was patched out because some players found it too iffy as a joke anyway.
 * There were plans of a body temperature system where players would lose health if they stayed in the cold too long, but this was scrapped.
 * The Frontier features dozens of ghouls, much more than New Vegas.
 * One member of the Legion mentions "Tandi K. Aradesh" from the first Fallout has become a ghoul and is still alive.
 * Ray Chase, the voice actor of Noctis Caelum of Final Fantasy XV, voices Tiberius Rancor (warning: major story spoilers on this character article). According to the team, it was Ray Chase who asked to be a voice actor in the project first instead of the other way around, due to him being a Fallout fan. Ray Chase was not confirmed to return in the rework.
 * The following locations have a basis in reality:
 * Arlington Heights
 * Goose Hollow
 * Hillside
 * Hosford-Abernathy street
 * Irvington
 * Kings Heights
 * Lincoln Park Elementary School
 * Lloyd Center
 * Oregon convention centre
 * Pearl district
 * Providence park
 * Slab Town
 * Sunnyside street
 * Burnside and Marquam Bridges