Back to the Wasteland – The Post-apocalyptic, Isometric RPG Returns

Even though it wasn’t the first post-apocalyptic RPG, the original Fallout without a doubt ended up becoming one of the most influential RPGs of all time. With that in mind, the editors over at the Wireframe magazine interviewed a number of developers behind some notable Fallout-inspired isometric RPGs. These include Underrail’s Dejan Radišić, Atom RPG’s Anton Krasilnikov, and even Brian Fargo – the game director on Wasteland, the game that inspired Fallout in the first place and has a new sequel on the way.

Here are a few sample paragraphs:

GOING UNDERGROUND

In the words of its lead developer Dejan Radišić, better known as Styg, Underrail is a game about a “post-post-apocalypse.” Hundreds of years have passed since a mysterious cataclysm drove the remnants of society underground where they now live in protected station-states. As a member of the independent South Gate Station, players must explore these vast networks of tunnels, battling psi beetles, mole crickets, and hostile humans.

For Radišić, the decision to make an isometric CRPG in the style of Fallout was a risky one – companies had already moved away from making them when production began on Underrail in late 2008; Radišić, however, had grown up appreciating the look and the mood of games like Fallout and Baldur’s Gate, and wanted to make something in a similar vein.

“I always wanted to make a single-character game, where that character would go through this hostile world and have a persistent feeling of isolation and danger,” he explains. “So the game wouldn’t have expansive urban areas – you mostly just crawl through tunnels like ventilation shafts, blow up holes to make passages, and encounter all sorts of monstrous creatures and races of people.”

Though the game borrows a lot of its aspects from classic RPGs, there were many areas that Radišić wanted to improve on from those games. For instance, he criticises the combat in the original Fallout, and wanted to expand on it in Underrail to give the player more options on how fights can play out.