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Years before Fallout 3 made its debut on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, a third Fallout game already existed in the form of Fallout Tactics. However, after Bethesda acquired the beloved IP from Interplay, the game was officially removed from canon, despite numerous elements returning in Fallout 4 and the new Amazon show.
Now, 16 years after being removed from canon, Tactics’ lead designer Ed Orman has spoken out about their game being removed from Fallout’s universe.
Fallout Tactics being removed from canon “sucked”
Speaking to PC Gamer, Orman explained that the spin-off Fallout game was never truly considered the third game in the series by fans. While the game was fantastic, fans met the title with a lot of negativity for being too different compared to the original two entries.
“The vast majority were like, ‘This isn’t a Fallout game. This is not Fallout 3. You screwed up the lore here, here and here. You put hairy Deathclaws in, you’re not using charisma properly and all of those things.’ And so there was a huge amount of negativity within the fanbase,” Orman recalled.
Years later, Bethesda’s Todd Howard removed Fallout Tactics and the PS2 game Brotherhood of Steel from canon. The move hurt, with Orman recalling the news “sucked” to hear after years of negative responses to the game.
“You don’t want to be told that what you’ve done is non-canon,” Orman explained. “By the time he said that I had a lot of distance from this, so it wasn’t heartbreaking or gut-wrenching—it was just like, ‘Oh man. You didn’t have to officially say it, we could have existed in this weird quantum state where it was kind of part of things.’”
Tactics’ weird place in canon
While the events of Fallout Tactics have been axed from the timeline, multiple pieces of the game have made their way back into the universe.
“The way things go now, with the reinterpretation of IPs and the retelling of stories—and especially with the creation of the TV show, where it’s existing in the universe, but they’re taking liberties and they may have to make adjustments to make that world work for TV—lots of ideas are going to get shuffled around,” Orman said. “There have been little bits and pieces of Tactics which you can see kind of are canon now, just through the back door over time. And that’s good enough for me. I don’t need anything more than that.”
One of the biggest additions to canon from Tactics was the introduction of massive airships for the Brotherhood of Steel, which would eventually return in the form of the Prydwen. While the game may never become truly canon, it’s at least better received than it was way back in 2001.
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