The Fallout TV show effect continues. This time, it’s popular mod site Nexus Mods on the receiving end of the double-edged Shishkebab, as its servers struggle under the weight of people rushing to play through the series again - and mod its latter entries into games worth playing, presumably.
I sort of reject that the Fallout TV show has Easter eggs hidden in it because it, as a whole, is the equivalent of one of those fancy Hotel Chocolat ostrich-sized patisserie collection bastards that cost 40 quid. However. Eagle-eyed viewers of the Fallout show noted that episode 6 gives you a number for Valt-Tec that you can actually get in touch with - 213-25-VAULT (or, 213-258-2858). Charges apply, as well as international codes if you're outside the US, which makes it 001-213-258-2858.
If you text the number you get a reply from Vault-Tec saying "The next available appointment is 33 weeks from now, please stand by!" (handily captured by X user FanaticalGuy cos my response hasn't come through yet). And then the significantly less immersive "Reply Y to get recurring marketing and other texts from FallOut", which is quite funny. There is speculation that this is just a reference to Vault 33, the vault where main character Lucy was born and raised. On the other hand, 33 weeks from now is November, the month when both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 came out.
Crawl out through the fallout, baby! I've watched two episodes of Amazon's recently released Fallout TV show, a series for and about Walton Goggins' rizz (a thing the kids say). I've been on the Goggins hype train for over a decade at this point, and it's great that - oh sorry, I'm being told that the Fallout TV show is in fact about Bethesda's post-nukepocalypse RPG series of video games, and as such has given a massive player bump to said video games on Steam.
Posted on Xitter by SteamDB yesterday (HT to our pals at Eurogamer), it appears Fallout has more than doubled its concurrent players on Steam since the show dumped all its episodes last week.
Tim Cain, one of the developers behind the original Fallout and a consultant on The Outer Worlds 2, has outlined how he feels about mods in a recent YouTube video, and one of the big positives he alludes to is their potential to serve as an alternative or solution to annoying back-and-forths about features and mechanics in video games.
If you’re modding a game, odds are some of the first works you’ll grab - assuming they’re on offer - will be ones that revamp certain systems within it to better match what you want from the experience. For some people, it’s turning Fallout 4 into a survival game, for me it’s turning everything into Fallout New Vegas, complete with perk and skill systems that mirror that game.
As it turns out, Fallout co-creator Tim Cain’s a big fan of these kinds of mods, because they can actually help developers think about things people might want them to do with or add to their games without just being someone declaring ‘do this’ on the internet.
The Fallout TV series that’s set to drop on Amazon Prime Video in April this year is about “what happens when you outsource the survival of the human race”, according to director and executive producer Jonathan Nolan.
This is just the latest little teaser Fallout fans have gotten regarding what they’re in for when the show arrives in a few months’ time, and it’s an interesting one given that plenty of the sneak peeks we’ve had so far have focused on what it’ll involve story and costume wise. For those more interested in how the show will aim for atmospherically in terms of its portrayal of the Fallout universe, it seems like you’ll need to prepare for plenty of satire based around our own reality.
Speaking to Empire, Nolan, who’s developed the show alongside fellow Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy - as well as showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner - has revealed that it’s about: “what happens when you outsource the survival of the human race.” What does that mean? Well, plenty of commentary on how soul-destroying living in the real world is nowadays.