[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to the Fallout lorecast.
[SPEAKER_02]: The podcast that explores the boundaries of our knowledge about the world of Fallout.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd be working on the brain, fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: All that is gone.
[SPEAKER_02]: Buddy, Bob, is that you?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, hey, Bob.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's been like years.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's been a really long time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Where have you, did you say working on the brain, Farm?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll wait, wait, where can I be?
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I've been going over lots of data.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been pulling together information stats about each of the main fallout games and how they're similar and different from each other.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, things like total number of quests and how long it takes people approximately to finish the game and how long it took to make each game and kind of comparing some of that, wait a minute, why are you interested?
[SPEAKER_02]: First of all, where have you been?
[SPEAKER_02]: Emily.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, well, keep your secrets.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I?
[SPEAKER_02]: Can I?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I?
[UNKNOWN]: Can
[SPEAKER_02]: That's something to do with your voice, or maybe the fact that you collect brains, which you seem to still be doing?
[SPEAKER_02]: No!
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, yeah, yeah, all right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, you just be quiet, and you can hang out.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm about to tell everybody about all the stats that I pulled together, but no more talking, okay?
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, even his talking, so just be quiet.
[SPEAKER_02]: Alright, hey everybody.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back to the Fallout lorecast.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sorry for that interruption.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have been pouring over all sorts of information.
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything from developer logs to the Guinness Book of World Records to websites like How Long to Beat and IMDB and Wikipedia and the Fallout Wikies and the Guinness Book of World Records are a bunch of different stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: In order to pull together
[SPEAKER_02]: All of the info that I thought would be really cool to discuss on today's episodes.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we're changing it up.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're not talking about old businesses in the pre-war world or anything like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're talking about statistics about each of the follow games.
[SPEAKER_02]: So how does this work?
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I have statistics from Fallout 1 to Fallout 76.
[SPEAKER_02]: So 1, 2, 3, new Vegas 4 and 76.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're not doing tactics or brotherhood of steel.
[SPEAKER_02]: any of the offshoots because they're not similar games in the RPG kind of formula.
[SPEAKER_02]: When we're listing things like lines of dialogue or number of quest lines and things like that, they function differently enough that it's not really a good comparison.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the main games are more popular anyway.
[SPEAKER_02]: So here, let's dig right in.
[SPEAKER_02]: What did I find?
[SPEAKER_02]: And what are you about to
[SPEAKER_02]: I have a whole list.
[SPEAKER_02]: We have a total number of quests, the date that they were released, lines of dialogue, map size, which we've talked about before.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have a whole episode about that by itself.
[SPEAKER_02]: The number of different types of weapons, unique NPCs, different types of enemy groups.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm talking like main groups, not like permutations.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, oh, well, this
[SPEAKER_02]: and it functions like a specific type of Raider, so that would be one enemy type.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's how that works.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll get into main story playtime, unique ending slides in each game, based on all your decisions and all of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Number of skill checks in dialogue as best as I could find there aren't definitive
[SPEAKER_02]: final counts.
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, nobody's actually gone through and counted all of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that was a bigger test than I really had time to work on this week.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I mean, it's the sort of things where you would have to actually do a playthrough, do every single class, every single conversation, and then note down which ones are dialogue checks.
[SPEAKER_02]: Nobody's done that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that would be really cool to know.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I've got some estimates on that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then even stuff about production.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, have you ever thought about how long it took for each game to be made and then compared that to the size of the game world or the number of quests, the amount of dialogue or the script of the game, and we're going to talk about that as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: The game scripts, and also how many voice actors were in each game?
[SPEAKER_02]: So here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's get started.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to start with what I'll call the core statistics right at the beginning.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's talk about the release years because these are things that most people generally have in mind.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I was to say about what year was followed one released, most people would say,
[SPEAKER_02]: And then 10 years later Bethesda gets the rights, well, they get the rights before 10 years later, but then they release Fallout 3 in 2008.
[SPEAKER_02]: So a 10-year gap between two and three change of developers.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now during that 10-year gap, there was also development for the original Fallout 3 codename Van Buren, which we've talked about on the show before.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's not like no work was being done by the original developers, it just never made it to the finish line because of a whole bunch of other stuff, but we're not going into that today.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then, Fallout New Vegas comes out 2011, it was developed by Obsidian, so change of developers, not that Obsidian got the rights to own fallout, but they got the rights to make a game as approved by Bethesda.
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, people have debated about, well, Bethesda,
[SPEAKER_02]: harbors ill will towards them and all of that, which I think is a bunch of made up internet nonsense in order to get clicks if you ask me.
[SPEAKER_02]: But there are some, there's some friction there, but there's also a lot of friendship there and of course the story is more nuanced.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's neither here nor there for this episode.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 4 comes out 2015 which is 5 years after New Vegas and 7 years after Fallout 3.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now you have to remember Bethesda in those intervening years released the Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it wasn't just 7 years between games the same way that like Starfield took 7 years of development.
[SPEAKER_02]: Remember, 2011 was Skyrim, so it was 3 years between Fallout 3 and Skyrim, and then 4 years between Skyrim and Fallout 4.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then, Fallout 76 is only 3 years after Fallout 4, which is crazy to think about.
[SPEAKER_02]: We went three years between Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, 2018, and it is now eight years later, and we, as far as we know, based on official reveals, don't have another Fallout game on the horizon anytime soon.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, there is speculation about this.
[SPEAKER_02]: The first thing I'll say is that follow up five as far as we know from Todd Howard's interviews and things like that is something that Bethesda is keeping in house and will be working on and releasing after Elder Scrolls 6.
[SPEAKER_02]: the speculation for Elder Scrolls 6 is that most likely from what I've seen and this is where I would put my money will be getting that in 2027 probably in the fall and so that means that there's now development time that will be shifted over to fall out 5 if they go the same way that they've been developing these things in the past and we're probably at another
[SPEAKER_02]: three, but more likely five years until we get another fall out after 2027.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we're looking at 2032.
[SPEAKER_02]: If my estimates are correct, which is unfortunate, but there is speculation that
[SPEAKER_02]: they are working on a fallout and when I say they it's not the in-house Bethesda team it's going to be outsourced and somebody else will be working on some sort of fallout side project we don't know what that is but it seems likely and there's a lot of reason to believe that we will be getting at least a fallout three remasters similar to the oblivion remaster if not a fallout new Vegas remaster along with it or following it which both of those would sell like hotcakes so it makes sense that they would
[SPEAKER_02]: Spend some development time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, supporting an external studio on turning those out, getting them out into the world.
[SPEAKER_02]: So here, let's move on.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is the stuff that most of you guys all know.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's talk about the approximate number of quests.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I say a proximate number of quests, there's a reason for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of the games have unmarked quests.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then Fallout 76 has daily events.
[SPEAKER_02]: which technically are quest as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: But here, let's start with Fallout 1, 68 quests.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now I went through in hand counted every single quest on the Fallout Wiki.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a whole list of them, and I counted all the way down the page, and then counted all the way back up the page to just double check and make sure that it wasn't 69, it's 68, unfortunately.
[SPEAKER_02]: 68 Fallout 1 quests, two read they just didn't add another one.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 2 has 101 quests according to that Wiki page.
[SPEAKER_02]: three actually has slightly less with 94.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then when we get to follow new Vegas, there's what seems to be a unconfirmed or unagreed upon number of unmarked quests.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a lot of uns and a row.
[SPEAKER_02]: But what we do know is 85 main quests, 33 DLC quests, and then some number of unmarked quests.
[SPEAKER_02]: The kinds of things that you run into in the environment that
[SPEAKER_02]: The show up is something that you can go do, somebody you can interact with, something that you get a reward for, something like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it isn't defined as an actual quest.
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't show up say in your quest log the same way the other things do.
[SPEAKER_02]: So with 94 total quests in Fallout 3, New Vegas has more total quests.
[SPEAKER_02]: 85 plus 33 is 108.
[SPEAKER_02]: But what about Fallout 4?
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, Fallout 4 is a larger game in size area than both of those.
[SPEAKER_02]: and has 129 main quests, 64 DLC quests, more than almost double.
[SPEAKER_02]: New Vegas's DLC list, and at least 60 unmarked quests, which is very similar.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, the thing about Fallout 4 is it does have the radiant system where you have to go fix another settlement or whatever, and those add into the main quests.
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, the side quests are still main quests.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're talking main
[SPEAKER_02]: quests.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, so what about Fallout 76?
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, the main quest line, not the main game.
[SPEAKER_02]: The main quest line is 53 quests, with 55 side quests that you can do, which means 108 original quests in the game plus,
[SPEAKER_02]: There are a total of 67 daily quests and 97 events.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I haven't broken that all down to which daily's in which events were in the original game when it first came out.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a smaller number for each of those as they've added more zones and more expansions and all of that kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that comes to a total of 272 different kinds of quests you can do currently in Fallout 76.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now with a bunch of quests, you're going to have actual lines of dialogue.
[SPEAKER_02]: voiced dialogue, at least in most of the games.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, if we go back to Fallout 1, I've found estimates of 3,000 lines of total dialogue with about 1,200 lines of spoken dialogue, and you have to remember that limitations back then were very different.
[SPEAKER_02]: First of all,
[SPEAKER_02]: There was 1997, games shipped on CD ROMs, not even DVDs, CD ROMs, there was only so much space, plus, all it was was unproven, they only invested so much in it at the time, and it wasn't common for every line in an RPG to be actually voiced by human voices back then.
[SPEAKER_02]: So 3,000 total lines of dialogue and then 1 to 200 lines of spoken dialogue across about what 21 different talking heads.
[SPEAKER_02]: When we get to Fallout 2 though, the number jumps 20,000 lines of dialogue, including a percentage that are voiced as well, a smaller percentage still.
[SPEAKER_02]: When we get to Fallout 3, we're at 40,000 lines of dialogue.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout New Vegas has 65,000 lines of dialogue, which is crazy, and it keeps these new Vegas numbers in your mind as we go through them, and once we get to the actual development time on the games, it is kind of crazy how much they were able to produce in such a short time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 4 has 11,000 lines of dialogue and Fallout 76 started at around 100,000 but with all the updates is closer to something like 160,000 lines of dialogue.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a lot of words.
[SPEAKER_02]: That is a lot of voice acting.
[SPEAKER_02]: So let's compare this to another stat.
[SPEAKER_02]: Number of unique NPCs.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 1 has 200, Fallout 2 has 500, Fallout 3 1500, New Vegas 2200, and these are rough estimates, these are rounded.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 4 around 1000 named, because not all of them are named, and we don't actually have a list, I couldn't find a total list of number of NPCs in Fallout 76, either at launch or currently in the game.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now remember, some of these numbers in my mind, I'm not 100% sure about the rough estimates and they're pulled from different sources that some give more like rough estimates than actual numbers.
[SPEAKER_02]: But here, we're just going to keep rolling with the best info I can find here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now I want to compare the total number of dialogue lines between the number of unique NPCs.
[SPEAKER_02]: So 3,000 lines in Fallout 1, 200 NPCs means that there are 15 lines of dialogue per named in like unique NPC, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: For Fallout 2, that jumps to 40.
[SPEAKER_02]: 40 lines of dialogue on average per NPC.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, remember, some characters are companions, some characters are major plot characters, and they're going to have hundreds of lines of dialogue, and some of them are only going to have like five, but it averages out to 40.
[SPEAKER_02]: For Fallout 3, 40,000 lines of dialogue across 1500 NPCs is 27 lines per NPC.
[SPEAKER_02]: For Fallout New Vegas, it's 65,000 lines of dialogue.
[SPEAKER_02]: At 2200 NPCs is 30 lines per NPC, so just slightly higher than Fallout 3.
[SPEAKER_02]: But fall out four, 111 lines of dialogue across at least 1,000 NPCs is on average 111 lines of dialogue per NPC.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I'm 100% sure that this is skewed by the main character.
[SPEAKER_02]: Most of the NPCs in the game do not have 100 lines of dialogue, but the main characters probably have thousands.
[SPEAKER_02]: Plus companions, plus main characters on different quests and different factions, so it averages out though, to 111.
[SPEAKER_02]: So these match up to some other stats as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: For example, how many unique voice actors does each game have?
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, Fallout 1's actually about 20.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 2, 30, Fallout 3, 90, New Vegas, 110, Fallout 4, 180, and we know if it
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, the way these numbers grow, also match the way the scripts seem to work.
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, remember that Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 didn't necessarily have voice characters for most of the game, so this script count is going to be a little bit different for those.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, according to no mutants allowed, this is a site, this is the one site I could find that actually listed out word count for the Fallout 1 script.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's close to 20 to 30,000 words, but when we jump to Fallout 2, we get
[SPEAKER_02]: over a million words in the script and oftentimes these script numbers also include things like halotapes and they're not just spoken dialogue or screen dialogue that you read on the screen, but anywhere that you would see any words.
[SPEAKER_02]: So conversations, halotapes, notes on tables, the little things left, one place or another, and the numbers get real big because over a million
[SPEAKER_02]: in the about half of that size, Fallout 3 is estimated somewhere between 400 and 500,000 lines in the script.
[SPEAKER_02]: New Vegas is a little bit bigger, it's at least 500,000 if not slightly larger than that, and then Fallout 4 jumps back up to over a million.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 76, don't really have numbers for that one, unfortunately, but it continues to grow.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now a lot of this really hits home for me, the total size of these games, not just the world size we've talked about, but the creative size of the games.
[SPEAKER_02]: Think about writing all of these lines, think about hiring all of these voice actors, the time it takes to sit down in a room and direct them and get the takes that you want.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then there's a
[SPEAKER_02]: dev time in doing things not just designing the world, but the number of different types of weapons, the number of different types of unique NPCs, the number of different types of enemies.
[SPEAKER_02]: So let's take a look at some of those.
[SPEAKER_02]: The total number of base weapon types in the games.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 1 has roughly 40.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 2 has roughly 70.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 3 has 53.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout New Vegas has 106, now as we get further into the series, you start being able to come across all these different kinds of permutations, not just base weapons and legendary weapons, but ways that you can upgrade the weapons or add attachments and things like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we're only talking base weapons here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now when we get to Fallout 4, they become extremely modular, but there's still only 50 base weapons.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Fallout 76 has over 60 base weapon types.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, what do you use the weapons for?
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, killing the enemies.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the number of base types of enemies also increases.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm not talking, again, little changes on the same basic model or something like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: These are just base enemy types.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 1 started with about 20.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 2 35, Fallout 3 backed up a little bit, and remember, the scale of Fallout 3 was smaller than Fallout 2 to 30.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout New Vegas jumped to 45, and if you think about it, think about going back and playing Fallout 3 and then playing New Vegas.
[SPEAKER_02]: New Vegas has a wider variety of different types of enemies.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a bunch of weird stuff that shows up in New Vegas that wasn't in Fallout 3.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then we get to Fallout 4 and it turns out that there's 40, but remember that there are more of these variations.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are more of these different types of armors or different types of weapons that each of the enemies can hold.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the total variety is larger even if the base number is smaller.
[SPEAKER_02]: Vault 76 has over 60 different species, and that makes sense as well when we think about all of the cryptids and all of the weird things they added to 76 that again weren't in the other games or things like the floaters that come back from the earlier games that weren't in games for a while.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, weapons aren't the only thing you're using to tackle your enemies.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not going to go into all the different armor types, but I will talk about the number of traits or perks that are in each of the games.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 1 and 2 start with 118 traits.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 3 has around 50 different perks.
[SPEAKER_02]: New Vegas increases that to 80.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then Fallout 4 is very different.
[SPEAKER_02]: The level up screen has what strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, luck, so seven different columns, and then 10 different tiers below that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you're at 70 to start with not including increasing the base stat, but then each of those has different levels.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you add all of that up,
[SPEAKER_02]: you end up at 270.
[SPEAKER_02]: These are different perk levels across 70 different perks.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, Fallout 76 changes things up again because there are cards and there are over 200 different perk cards in Fallout 76 and they continue to edit that.
[SPEAKER_02]: They've added a bunch, they've removed some and that has evolved again over time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now one of my favorite things in the follow games are the skill checks and most of the skill checks I think that's a fair to say are dialog skill checks there.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I guess it depends on how you play and what you're doing There are definitely strength checks and intelligence checks and things like that and some of the dialog checks are Strength their intelligence checks depending on the game and the way things are set up, but
[SPEAKER_02]: Overall, the total number of dialogue skill checks to me was interesting, and this I had a very difficult time figuring out.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was able to determine that there's about 15 in Fallout 1 that are actually based on dialogue.
[SPEAKER_02]: But Fallout 2 doesn't really show you the mechanics underneath the check.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you don't always know when a skill check is playing out in a dialogue.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I can't get an actual number of that because we don't have the data.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, for Fallout 3, New Vegas, Fallout 4, 76, I also can't find a total number of dialogue checks.
[SPEAKER_02]: Nobody has actually played through the game and counted every single one of them, and I can't find a wiki page that lists them out where I can just kind of pull out the entire dialogue and that would take a really long time.
[SPEAKER_02]: But what we do know is that Fallout 3 and New Vegas both seem to have a moderate number of checks based on the way the community talks about these things, and questions people have posted online on places like Reddit discussing these before.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 4, the number actually goes down, or at least it feels like it goes down.
[SPEAKER_02]: It seems like the checks are less often, but then the general consensus for Fallout 76 is that the number of checks go back up again.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I haven't done a whole lot of conversational stuff in Fallout 76, at least along the main questline aside from some of the newer content in recent years, even it's been a while since I've gone back and played through the main questline, so I'm not 100% sure about that either.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, if you have some thoughts about this, and if you have actually done some time, some playthroughs, and taken the time to count all of the dialogue checks, that would be amazing, because this is information that as much as I scour the internet, I have not been able to find.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I've just got a few more details here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, one of the most interesting things about the way the Fallout games play out, or at least the majority of them, is the endings.
[SPEAKER_02]: How do the games end?
[SPEAKER_02]: When you side with different factions, when you make different decisions, when you have a different morality for the games that have the morality systems in a really a big part of deciding how things play out in the end, how many ending slides do you get?
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, this is a little tricky as well, because defining an ending slide is a little bit hard to do on some of them, so for example, Fallout 1 has 11 ending slides.
[SPEAKER_02]: You play the game, you make different decisions, and you get 11 different slides at the end that can vary.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you have combinations of those.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, slide number one could be a good ending or a bad ending for this faction, that sort of thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 2 has 27, so more than double, one which makes sense, it's a much bigger game.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 3, you might think.
[SPEAKER_02]: goes down.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that would be a fair assumption.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is a smaller game on landmass, and it was developed by Bethesda, and a lot of people are like, well, the Bethesda developed games don't have as many options.
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't have many as many endings of any of that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: It turns out, depending on how you play Fallout 3, you have between 26 and 29 ending slides.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now.
[SPEAKER_02]: We have to consider that not every ending slide is equivalent to every other ending slide, but there is a lot of variety there, which plays into the quote that Todd Howard said about over 200 different endings and what he was meaning by that is permutations.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have 26 to 29 different slides and each of those slides can go good or bad or maybe neutral.
[SPEAKER_02]: and the permutations, the ways that that can play out, adds up very quickly.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout New Vegas, you might also think, then probably has more ending slides than Fallout 3, because there's more quests and there's more stuff going on, and it was Obsidian.
[SPEAKER_02]: Turns out, there's 27 right there between 26 and 29, just like Fallout 3.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Fallout 4 is probably the odd one in the group other than 76, which doesn't really have an ending, because it's basically always existing, constantly added to MMO, sort of kind of game-as-service thing, but Fallout 4 has four main faction endings with some variety.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're not going to get into all the details there, but they changed it up.
[SPEAKER_02]: They didn't do all of the different ending slides, the same way that the other
[SPEAKER_02]: Which I think is kind of a miss.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that those ending slides and the different varieties of endings are cool.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think there's something that a lot of people associate with fallout.
[SPEAKER_02]: So hey, bring it back on the next game, Bethesda, thanks.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so we've gotten to ending slides and all of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But here's the piece that I want you to think about.
[SPEAKER_02]: As we wrap up this episode, how long was the dev cycle for each of these games compared to the total amount of stuff we just talked about?
[SPEAKER_02]: Along with the total number of devs,
[SPEAKER_02]: who worked on those games or at least the roughly the team size.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is another one of those things that's a little bit tricky, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like the team size is probably more important than the total number of devs because some devs get hired, some devs get fired maybe or they leave.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, let's go over those details.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's talk about time first.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 1 took three and a half years.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now you have to remember, Tim Kane started development on his own and started pulling in his friends from the office to work on this game after hours before it was greenlit by the studio and then eventually became an official project.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that took three and a half years in a very slow process with roughly 30 people in the end who had contributed to it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, because Fallout 1 was considered a success, Fallout 2 got more support.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that means...
[SPEAKER_02]: that there are more people working on it but a much smaller development cycle because they wanted to get a sequel out while the series was hot.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is back in the late 90s when you could
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, the development cycle for Fallout 2 is estimated at somewhere between 9 and 12 months, because they shifted from Fallout 1 into Fallout 2 very quickly with a team of 40 to 50 core developers.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is staggering.
[SPEAKER_02]: They increased the team by 10 to 20 people and developed a game that was much bigger as we've seen in the stats.
[SPEAKER_02]: in just a year.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fallout 3 took 4 years with a team of about 70 to 80 people and remember that by the time development started for Fallout 3, we're talking the mid 2000s, the game industry had changed.
[SPEAKER_02]: We had 3D polygonal environments.
[SPEAKER_02]: This was a first person game.
[SPEAKER_02]: This wasn't a flat isometric game with a resolution of 640p or something like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: This game was in the HD era.
[SPEAKER_02]: This required 3D polygons and textures that could at least work on 720 or 1080p monitors.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the game industry had changed here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Teams were doubling in size and most of those new employees were art and design.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you have a game that takes four years, 70 to 80 people on New Vegas was turned around in 18 months.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is phenomenal.
[SPEAKER_02]: An Obsidian busted their butts to get this game out with a similar size team of 70 to 80 people.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, there is a main difference between Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, that being that the Fallout 3 team had to develop the engine and a lot of the assets that were then reused by the New Vegas team, so they didn't have to do the same total amount of development, but they did a lot for a team that size.
[SPEAKER_02]: For sure, Fallout 4 then takes 7 years and a team of 120 people.
[SPEAKER_02]: These teams are getting really big and development times are just getting larger.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, seven years on this project doesn't mean full development during all seven of those years.
[SPEAKER_02]: Bethesda has spoken about this and how they do a lot of pre-production with a much smaller group for a year or two while wrapping up a previous project.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's probably what happened in those earliest years until the game got full development for roughly five or five years of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, Fallout 76 technically took three years to develop, but we all know that went before launch.
[SPEAKER_02]: Those three years were not enough time.
[SPEAKER_02]: The game launched in a very rough state and has continued to be worked on now for eight years with the team that numbers three to four hundred people.
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, the current state of the game is very different.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure, there's still bugs, sometimes things break, but the game is way more playable, a lot more fun than it was on launch, and the total amount of content has just continued to expand with expeditions, and two new areas on the map, the map was already four times the size of Fallout 4, and it is now at least five times the size of Fallout 4.
[SPEAKER_02]: So there you go.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's all my details.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's all the info that I pulled for this episode.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me know your thoughts on these.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I probably got some of it wrong.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of the information was the best information I could find.
[SPEAKER_02]: But some of it hits me a little bit odd.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, I don't know 100% sure about that number.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I couldn't find better information.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I had to share what I was able to discover.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for your advice, that's really helpful.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: You said helpful, are you working on something, buddy, bud?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah, well then, you need to make it my far ready.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we're out right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not sure what he's up to.
[SPEAKER_02]: We gotta keep an eye on that guy.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you have any questions about Nucleworld, I'd be delighted to answer them!
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I hope you enjoyed a very different kind of episode and the return of Buddybot.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of the patrons had been asking you about him, so I thought we'd bring them back, or at least have him show up as a surprise.
[SPEAKER_02]: But thank you to all of our patrons, everyone who keeps this show going.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're welcome to join us on the Patreon.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Go check it out.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Also shout outs to our Sentry Bot who get shout outs every week, germinator, main monkey,
[SPEAKER_02]: in era moody, thank you so much for your support as well.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Have a wonderful week.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you see buddy butt out there farming brains, let me know.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll see you next time.
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