Tim Cain is a creative guy. I would rather he spend his time developing new things rather than revisiting old.
I personally want a Fallout 1 remaster/remake, but I don’t see what value is added by Tim Cain being part of it. He already gave his input, somebody else can riff on it. (You know, hypothetically, since God Howard has declared his holy rays will never illuminate a remaster).
He’s already said he generally doesn’t like sequels for that reason. His YouTube channel is a treasure trove btw.
Its pretty rare for a creative to want to go back to their previous works. Most want to keep making new stuff, even if that comes at an expense to everyone else. Its understandable, but it also becomes disappointing to people that like a certain work and then a creative revisits it only to make it something completely different.
Art used to be considered not very worthy unless it had a moral message. The modern art movement helped us break free of those limitations. The new way society has found to limit the arts is the notion that art should be made for profit, and valued mostly in terms of price.
Sequels and reboots are an aspect of this, I’m beginning to feel. The code of old games should absolutely be maintained so that access to them is preserved, but what’s the real value of a remake, if the point is not to contribute to the conversations the original was influencing?
Creatives who aren’t driven by a hunger for new ideas and fresh concepts don’t usually leave us works that deserve to be revisited and maintained, but even works of homage should bring something new to the table.
Take Skywind; they’re remaking Morrowind, but they’re adding their own content, expanding on what was there, and flattering the source material to the extent that the original looks somewhat shabby in comparison.
If there is something worthwhile to be done with Fallout at this point, people can do it whether Todd Howard likes it or not. Tim Cain is totally on point here, and I wrote too much bye
I was listening to some pretentious film critic yesterday complain that modern films have stopped being artistic or intellectually challenging, because there’s a huge audience of people who are exhausted all the time. They don’t want media that makes them think, that challenges their assumptions, or even requires their full, sustained attention. Comfort media, like mac & cheese for the brain.
Fallout has become exactly that - some vague, nefarious organization as antagonist; raiders & feral ghouls as unambiguously bad cannon fodder. Just move it to a new city, put in some iconic landmarks, and let the money roll in. I can’t honestly think of a franchise that gets past 2 without falling into that trap, but I just started another run through FO4.
Comfort media, yeah. But also: “A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity”.
So it’s not just a problem with media having no artistic ambitions, or being entirely valued in terms of box office or binge metrics - it’s that even the media which seems to share and extoll our values are simply part of maintaining our compliance with the status quo.
Art is always being constrained in these ways because good art is subversive. Fallout 1 was good art.
I would love a true post-post apocalypse 3D Fallout. Like set in Shady Sands in it’s heyday.
Relatively normal modern day problems in the city, wasteland problems outside. Feel like there’s some space to explore some new things there, but Todd seems to be intent on keeping the Fallout setting in “post and a half-pocalypse”.
Least it’s not “nuke it all again” Avellone.
Well if I was going to hire Tim Cain to do a Fallout… I’d let him figure that out. Do whatever you want, buddy! Just set it inside the Fallout universe.
On his youtube channel he says for him to be onboard with fallout 5, they would have to bring him something different, something new… what would you bring to fallout 5 that already hasn’t been done in so many games already?
War… War never changes.
He has a point.
Counterpoint: “War has changed.”
