I replayed Fallout 1 recently – I don’t have a record of when I completed it, which means I had no date to enter into my How Long To Beat backlog of finished games, which I decided was as good an excuse as any to play it again – and as with every time I play this game, I am pained by how close to perfect it is, how relatively easy it would be to get that last inch. Fallout 1 isn’t maimed by the places where it’s slightly rushed, but just another three months of polish and it would be completely flawless. Here’s what’s missing:
First, there’s a broken end slide for the Hub because the quest to turn Iguana Bob over to the police is broken. All that’s missing is the dialogue for turning him over to the police. The only reason this would even take an afternoon to fix is because no one’s familiar with the source code anymore (even the original devs will have lost their intuitive grasp of the structure nearly thirty years later), so you’d need a while to familiarize/refamiliarize yourself with how to set flags and add dialogue at all. If Fallout had even one extra week of polish before shipping, this part could’ve been finished. Instead, it’s impossible to get the good ending for the Hub. It will disperse to the wastelands no matter what you do.
Second, finish the Boneyard. There’s a lot of wholly unimplemented quests in the game, but I don’t think the game particularly needs most of them, especially since all the major ideas the game missed out on got picked up and reintroduced into the setting in Fallout: New Vegas. We don’t need a second raider camp for the Vipers, because to whatever extent that content is missing from our lives, we have it now in New Vegas.
But the Boneyard is genuinely unfinished. Like the Hub, there’s a good ending that’s impossible to get in the current game because the side quest for it was never implemented (you can even get it in your quest log, but the spy you need to find is not in the game world). It’s also impossible to end up with a version of the Boneyard where either the Blades take over or the Regulators remain in power. An ending slide where the Followers of the Apocalypse take over is in the game files, unreachable due to the unimplemented side quest, but if you help the Blades defeat the Regulators or vice-versa while not helping the Followers, there’s just no ending slide at all.
Third and finally, fix all the timers. There’s some dangling bugs where certain activities that only cost you a few days on the pip-boy countdown for the water chip advance the calendar date by several weeks, which matters because the mutant army countdown is based on the calendar date, so the same action can bring you three days closer to Vault 13 dying of dehydration but twenty days closer to Vault 13 dying of super mutant invasion, not because it actually affects the timetables of those two things in different ways, but because of a bug.
Also, there’s claims on the wiki that the super mutants are supposed to take over every settlement in the game on specific dates, but despite blowing past the earlier deadlines even on my fastest playthroughs, the end slides are never affected the way they’re supposed to be. I’ve heard if you actually return to Necropolis after the deadline it will be taken over and the end slide will reflect this, but the Hub and the Brotherhood definitely don’t work this way and if you just don’t go back to the Necropolis it will never be overrun by mutants no matter how long it takes you to finish the game.
The game having a timer for its endgame to pick up when the water chip timer that dominated the early-to-mid game leaves off is a good idea. I understand why people didn’t like the half-finished version that the game shipped with and why the easy fix in the post-release patch was to add a 0 to the number of days on the timer rather than overhaul what happens when the timer counts down, but I think the game would be much better with a properly functioning timer.
What do I mean by “properly functioning?” First, let the player know there is a timer. The staggered nature of the timer is perfect for allowing a player to feel like they’re always at risk of running out of time to save everyone and yet have no chance of running out of time to save anyone. 500 or even 400 days is a ludicrously long time to complete this game in. But because the timer is unannounced and there’s no indication of settlements being overrun (except maybe Necropolis?), players get tricked into thinking they’re off the clock once they’ve got the water chip and may end up wandering over the time limit by accident if they spend a lot of time criss-crossing the map. There should be a radio network linking different settlements together. Shady Sands should have a little radio hut where you can tune in to hear the latest wasteland news, using the radio item (the same one you use to turn forcefields on and off with computer hacking in the military base) should let you tune in as well, and when you finish up in Junktown, whoever you helped should give you a radio so they can keep in touch in case the town ever ends up in trouble again. NPCs in the Hub should also point you to the radio in the general store, saying it’s a good idea to have one.
Now, on day 90, you get a radio message from a survivor from the Gun Runners in Boneyard who’s fled to the Hub, letting you know that the Boneyard has fallen to a mutant army and it’s only a matter of time before they expand outwards (“it’s only a matter of months, maybe even weeks, before the mutants strike at the Hub!” or similar to help emphasize that this is a countdown, not a battle map). This causes a new sticky note to show up on your pip-boy in place of the water chip countdown. It’s got a spot on it for the water chip countdown if that’s still relevant, and it’s got a list of all the settlements in the wasteland in order of when they’re conquered, with the Boneyard on top, crossed out. The player doesn’t know exactly when the others will fall, but they get the idea that they are on the clock to stop this mutant army before it’s too late.
Second, sort out the timers on all the settlements between the Necropolis and Vault 13. According to the wiki, the timers for the end slides are (or are supposed to be) 90 days for the Boneyard on the Master’s doorstep, 110 days for the Necropolis, 140 days for the Hub, 170 days for the Brotherhood of Steel, 210 days for Junktown, 230 days for Shady Sands, 400 days for Vault 13 if you told the Water Guild about its location to extend the water chip timer, or 500 days if you did not. The only ones of these that are well-balanced are the Boneyard and the Vault 13 default. The Vault 13 default is so long that, provided the player actually knows they’re on the clock, running out of time is nearly impossible. The Boneyard is on a tight enough timetable that you have to have a good idea of what you’re doing to meet it, making it a good challenge objective for a second playthrough.
The problem is that all of the others are way too soon after the Boneyard, except the 400 day timer on Vault 13 if you did give its location away, which is still so easy that it’s not much of a tradeoff at all for extending the initial water chip countdown. Making the Vault 13 timer more aggressive would be bad because you get an instant game over if Vault 13 falls, but if that just isn’t true, if you can keep playing so long as there’s one settlement left no matter what it is, then extending your initial timer can cut Vault 13’s endgame timer by a lot.
Necropolis being packed pretty tight after the Boneyard might not be a terrible idea, since it serves as a backup objective for someone who was going for the save-everyone deadline but missed it by a hair. You probably missed both the Boneyard and Necropolis on your first playthrough, so getting one but not the other serves as a decent consolation prize.
But saving the Hub is way too hard. As the primary city of the wasteland, any victory that comes after the fall of the Hub is going to feel like a Pyrrhic victory, and you can get there just by making one extra trip back up to Vault 13 to check on things, going on a few caravan runs, and spending a bit too much time in recovery from the Brotherhood of Steel’s stat-boosting surgeries – a sloppy playthrough to be sure, but not excessively so. The Brotherhood of Steel is supposed to get overrun after 170 days, but it definitely isn’t and shouldn’t be, because they are the source of power armor and the stat boosting surgeries, which means it shouldn’t be possible to lose access to them unless you’ve seriously messed up.
Instead, I’d suggest that at 140 days, the Hub reports that scouts from the Crimson Caravan have spotted a mutant army massing and announce that all caravans are suspended as all guards and Hub police are massed into an army to fight them off, at 170 days they announce that just as Hub forces were at their breaking point, the Brotherhood of Steel pushed the mutant army back, leaving without a word and leaving everyone as baffled as ever as to their motives and whether this is a good thing in the long term, and at 200 days, reports come that the Brotherhood is under siege. At 230 days, the Brotherhood falls, and the Hub falls at 240 days.
You can still get power armor (and some of the other loot normally available from there) by getting past the super mutant garrison and retrieving it (the mutants don’t need any special dialogue or anything, they’re just a bunch of bruisers left behind to camp on mostly the first level), but you permanently lose access to the surgeries and no one will show up to help you fight at the military base (for all the help those three losers are when they don’t even follow you inside). Likewise, while you can pick up some amount of leftover loot from the Hub (and get piles of XP from fighting the mutant army occupying its five maps), it’s eradicated as an interactable location.
Once they’ve captured the Hub, the mutants also capture the location of Vault 13, if the Hub traders had access to it. Without the Hub or the Brotherhood to fight them in the field, the super mutants can go wherever they want – Junktown will hold their walls against the army, but they won’t meet them in the field if they go around. Since nearly everyone in Vault 13 is sufficiently unaffected by radiation as to be a prime candidate for mutation, it’s a priority target, and it falls after just 255 days as the mutants make a beeline for it. Junktown goes at 270 days, and Shady Sands at 320 (it’s remote). If Vault 13’s location wasn’t given to the Water Guild, they hold out until day 500 because the super mutants don’t know about it. They think they’ve won and put no particular effort into doublechecking.
The drama around the fall of the Hub and the Brotherhood should make clear to the player that they’re still very much on the clock, and even 245 days is a very generous time limit to finish the game up within, so the player would have to have been completely ignoring the time limit to lose Junktown, Shady Sands, or Vault 13 (even with the Water Guild knowing where they are – the water chip deadline isn’t super harsh, so the price for extending it doesn’t have to be that severe, just not so lenient that it’s virtually guaranteed not to come up unless you go looking for it).
A player who didn’t take the fall of the Boneyard or Necropolis seriously might struggle to save the Brotherhood and the Hub, but even then, not by much. The battle for the Hub, from the first time the Crimson Caravan reports they’re in danger to the point when the Hub falls, lasts 100 days. The entire game is expected to be completed within 90 days if you know exactly what you’re doing, so while saving the Hub adds enough time pressure to make you think twice about making a second trip to the Glow to clean out extra loot, it shouldn’t be hard to do.
So now the game has Junktown, Shady Sands, and Vault 13 as settlements that are nearly impossible to lose, the Hub and the Brotherhood as settlements that are on a tight enough deadline to stop you from thoughtlessly wasting time but which you will almost certainly save in your first playthrough, and Necropolis and the Boneyard as settlements that require fairly efficient gameplay to save, with no room for a stray caravan trip or any unnecessary visits to remote locations like Vault 13 or the Glow (and pretty limited tolerance even for extra trips within the core region of the Hub, Junktown, Necropolis, Brotherhood of Steel, and Boneyard).
This is, by far, the most drastic overhaul to the game, but it’s part of the game’s original plan. The only thing I’ve tweaked is the exact number of days it takes to get there, everything else is reimplementing a super mutant march that was always supposed to be in the game.
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