The next Fallout game and its setting have yet to be announced, but Fallout 5 will need to make some big changes to draw fans back to the franchise. Fallout 76 took fans to a multiplayer version of the series set in post-apocalyptic West Virginia, but the game was not received as well as Bethesda had likely hoped.
Starting with Fallout 5, the Fallout series will need to give players some brand new roleplaying opportunities, a new degree of roleplaying freedom, and some interesting new mechanics to spice up combat if it’s going to get the franchise back on top of the RPG heap. Fortunately for Fallout, there’s one major part of the game’s setting that has rarely been explored as a mechanic or customization feature.
The Fallout games are full of mutations and mutants. Types of sentient mutated humans already seen in the Fallout games includes Ghouls, Super Mutants, Nightkin, Mole Miners, and Swampfolk. Each of these has its own place in the Fallout universe, though some are more established than others. Mole Miners and Swampfolk were only introduced in Fallout 76, but Ghouls and Super Mutants have had a long history with other non-mutated humas in the Fallout lore.
Fallout‘s Ghouls, for example, have often lived in human settlements, but suffer from significant prejudice and oppression, while the Super Mutants and their creator were central to the plot of earlier Fallout games. One possible path Bethesda could go down would be giving players the option to play as different mutant races in a similar way to The Elder Scrolls’ race options. This might help provide some diversity of roleplaying experiences in a setting that most players are already very familiar with.
Just as The Elder Scrolls series has stuck close to its opening formula, with players starting as a prisoner, so too has Fallout stuck relatively closely to its formula under Bethesda. All Bethesda-made Fallout games begin with the player as a survivor living in a vault, which they then leave to explore the world. The most notable exception in the series is The Courier from Fallout: New Vegas, created by Obsidian Entertainment.
Players need only imagine the diversity of roleplaying opportunities which could have been afforded to a game like Fallout 4 if players had the option of sacrificing themselves to save their family by getting them to Vault 111 at the beginning, only to end up outliving them as a Ghoul wandering the apocalyptic wasteland, perhaps one who only regains their full consciousness 200 years later. Although this option would be exciting to many fans, it would also be quite a radical change. However, there are other ways mutations could be integrated into Fallout 5.
Fallout 5 could also include mutations as something closer to Skyrim mechanics like spells, shouts, and diseases than it is to Skyrim’s race options. In other words, Fallout 5 could allow the player to play with mutations as a way of gaining special combat powers and other abilities, perhaps even having to make a trade-off between these new traits and other detrimental effects.
Perhaps the most similar mechanic would be Skyrim’s vampirism, which gives players increasingly higher rewards as the disease progresses and even has its own skill tree as part of the Dawnguard DLC. However, the change comes at great cost, drastically reducing stats during the day and requiring the player to feed for their vampiric qualities not to be painfully obvious to any NPC with a keen-eye and a wooden stake.
Mutations could work in this way both in terms of abilities and stat increases as well as changes to physical appearance. If the player were to come into possession of a watered-down version of a Super Mutant serum, for example, they might be able to make themself stronger and stronger in-game at the cost of their intelligence. This could slowly make them larger, greener, and might even lead to fun dialog changes, like those seen in a low INT playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas.
Becoming a Super Mutant who specializes as a Nightkin using an ability tree, for example, may allow the player to massively increase their stealth bonus at the cost of their sanity – maybe their aim or ability to identify friend from foe – just like the Nightkin from Fallout: New Vegas.
Games like Fallout 4 already establish that it is possible for someone to turn into a Super Mutant and then back into a human in the Fallout universe. This makes finding an in-game and story friendly cure for mutation easy to integrate into the world just as players can go through a short questline to cure late-stage vampirism in Skyrim, or can use Cure Disease or other spells on it at earlier stages. In this way, mutations need not become burdensome for players who don’t want to go down that path.
For a game series that has integrated mechanics from addiction to radiation, it seems strange that mutations have not played a big role in the Fallout games so far, especially considered the stylized retro-futurist way that mutations spontaneously manifest in the series. Mutations were explored in earlier installments before Bethesda took over. The “Mutate!” perk in Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 allowed players to change one trait once, but hardly scratched the surface of the potential of mutations both mechanically and in the story.
Mutations also haven’t been featured heavily in the story since the defeat of the Master, who wanted to usher in an age of mutant domination led by him. After the Master’s defeat, however, mutants including the Super Mutants he created are still very much alive in the Fallout universe. Fallout 5 could include access to societies and areas which are only accessible by players with certain mutations, just like Castle Volkihar for pureblooded vampires in Skyrim.
Mutations could allow Fallout 5 players to finally play as a Ghoul or Super Mutant and experience the reaction of NPCs as they go about their adventures. Not only that, but mechanical mutations in which players pay high prices for certain stat increases and abilities could diversify combat and help increase the number of playstyles which the game allows. Fallout needs to get back on its feet and reinvigorate the creativity that led to the series’ success to begin with: mutations could be the mechanic to do just that.
Fallout 5 has not been announced.
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