For those who haven’t played Fallout 2, the classic isometric RPG is a wildly different game from the first-person real-time titles of Bethesda’s reign. Despite this, fans are trying to remake the classic turn-based game within the real-time engine of Fallout 4.
Dubbed Project Arroyo, named after the location the Vault Dweller creates after the end of Fallout 2, a team of talented fans are working on bringing the brilliant story, quests and locations of the classic title into the new engine, and it’s a difficult task.
Speaking to YouTuber AVV Gaming in a recent interview, project lead Damion Daponte explained that the team can’t just remake everything 1:1 in Fallout 4’s engine because they simply do not fit together. Instead, the team will be talking heavy liberties which will probably end up annoying other fans.
When asked what the “hardest part” of working on the project is, Daponte explained that it’s “walking the thin line of not making a completely different game than Fallout 2, but also not keeping it exactly [the same]” which is needed when turning the game from a top-down title into a fully 3D real-time game.
“We could easily just keep it exactly the same, but I will say, especially in this engine, it will be a worse game if we keep it exactly the same,” he continued. “Even if people don’t realise that. I’m sure some people will get angry that we’ve changed anything. There’s really no winning when it comes out. I think most of the changes will be for the better.”
Every location in Project Arroyo will have, at least, “minor changes” that will make them fit better with the freedom of Fallout 4’s 3D movement.
“For example, the church in the den area in Fallout 2,” he continued. “I wanted more options to enter. If you have a stealth build, I wanted the player to be able to lockpick the door in the back and come in through the back. And then on the inside there’s crates and stuff. So, we laid out the crates in a way that the player could sneak in and hide behind the crates and loot them while there’s people inside.”
One of the biggest decisions the team has made for the Fallout 2 Remake is the fact that the mod won’t be one big open-world like Fallout 4 is. Instead, the team is making the game closer to the original with big hub locations that you’ll travel between.
Of course, this will limit exploration in one sense, but it also allows the team to focus on the locations that matter. The original Fallout games’ wasteland felt vast and barren simply because you weren’t exploring the in-between areas as much, and this could do a great job at replicating that.
As usual with mod projects, Project Arroyo doesn’t have a release date, but development is certainly proceeding nicely. The team have revealed a number of models, locations and music tracks over the past few years, but there’s no concrete date when fans can sink their teeth into it.
