The original Fallout is one of the earliest games I've ever played. I was about six when it came out and it made up a pretty important part of my childhood. If I was asked to name my all-time favourite game, Fallout would instantly enter the conversation. What makes Fallout so special for me is its S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stat system.
Fallout adopted GURPS – Generic Universal Role Playing System – by Steve Jackson Games and moulded it to its own needs. At its very core, S.P.E.C.I.A.L is made up of stats: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. These stats are set at the very beginning of the game and are permanent. The player is given 40 points to distribute among these stats with values between one and ten. It all seems pretty straight forward until you realise just how much of an impact your decision here makes. Low Luck will make guns blow up in your face. Low Agility will make you drop your weapons through clumsiness. Low Perception will make you borderline blind. Low Intelligence will make you not sentence good. If you thought picking your starter Pokémon was tough, try building a Fallout character you're happy with.
Of course, experienced players have found optimal builds and there are secret ways of improving certain stats during the course of the game, but 'dumb' playthroughs are still incredibly popular. S.P.E.C.I.A.L not only lets you build a character, it lets you role-play. With low Endurance your character will be more susceptible to addiction but the points you free up can go into Intelligence and Perception and you can role play a post-apocalyptic Gregory House or Rick Sanchez. On your first go you're likely to try building an all-rounder who ends up being really mediocre or unknowingly force yourself into a specialisation with practically your first choice of the game. And that's great - it offers a different challenge. But then Bethesda got their hands on the franchise.
I was actually a big proponent of Fallout 3 becoming a First Person Action RPG, it was the most logical place for the franchise to go, especially with Bethesda involved. I remember a lot of people worrying about Fallout 3 being "Oblivion with guns" at the time and my rebuttal of that worry always involved S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Little was I to know that what has always been a massive and much loved feature would be revamped the way Bethesda has been revamping its Elder Scrolls series - by trimming.
Where in the first two Fallouts your stats built a foundation for who your character is in a meaningful, often obscure way, Bethesda's Fallouts have a much more mundane attitude towards them. You occasionally might get a strength or intelligence check in the game but those are telegraphed along with the needed stat points. Mostly, Intelligence gives more skill points at level up, Strength lets you carry more, Agility gives you more action points for V.A.T.S. It's all predictable and unimaginative. It's boring. The joy of Fallout no longer comes from playing a character, only from meeting characters and 'doing stuff', removing much of the role-playing the game was so good at.
This begs the question: with the likes of Divinity: Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity enjoying success, could we have a smaller developer (not indie perhaps, but AA) attempt to recreate the style of role-play from the original Fallout games? Wouldn't it be great if you could doom a character to being a klutz or make them so lucky they run into hidden stashes of weapons on accident? Wouldn't it be great if you could mould a different path for your experience with a game every time you start it over to that degree? Make RPGs great again, make them S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
Bethesda's Fallouts are: your best friend after a lobotomy/10
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