Fallout 1 meets Doom in incredible looking re-revealed fan game
It has been a long time since the last wholly original Fallout game was released. Multiplayer entry Fallout 76 has continued to receive updates and Fallout 4 saw a re-release for modern consoles last year, but that's all in the last decade.
The success of the Fallout TV show has no doubt incentivised Microsoft and Bethesda to fast-track new projects, but while multiple new games are reportedly in the works, including Fallout 5, nothing has been officially announced.
Aside from simply replaying the older games, fans have to rely on community-made projects, such as the impressive Fallout: London mod for Fallout 4, that launched last year. And now there's a reimagining of Fallout 1, that's been made as a mod of Doom.
Dubbed Fallout: Bakersfield, the project was initially teased all the way back in 2022 but seemed to drop off the map, as many of these fan projects do. It turns out the team have been chipping away at it ever since and sharing regular updates on its progress since September 2023, though only through a website called Boosty, that we've never heard of before.
Regardless, a new trailer has dropped this week and it manages to look like both Doom and Fallout. Unlike the modern Fallout games that blend role-playing mechanics with real-time gunplay, the original Fallout was a traditional role-playing game with turn-based combat.
It's often forgotten, but Bethesda did not invent Fallout, they bought the franchise from defunct publisher Interplay and by the time they released Fallout 3 in 2008 there were already four other games preceding it.
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Judging by the name and trailer, Fallout: Bakersfield isn't adapting the entirety of the first game and is instead focusing on one area: the Necropolis. This is a city built in the ruins of Bakersfield, California and is now home to mutated ghouls.
The mod is being built with the GZDoom engine, which is based on the engine for the original Doom and a popular choice for Doom mods. So, it's probably more accurate to say Fallout: Bakersfield is reworking Doom to be more like Fallout rather than the other way around.
Not only does it use the same style of 2D pixel artwork from Doom for the player character and enemies, even the heads-up display at the bottom of the screen is similar to Doom's, complete with a render of the player character's head that reacts to taking damage.
The pixel art and HUD's design have been updated to resemble Fallout's post-apocalyptic aesthetic and while the mod doesn't appear to retain any of Fallout 1's role-playing mechanics (at least from what we can tell), the HUD does have a text log that's constantly narrating your actions, just like the original. More Trending
To be honest, it's very impressive and we really like the way they've used the Doom engine to make something that's reminiscent of the era the first game came out in (the first Fallout was released in 1997, just a year after Quake, when there were still plenty of Doom clones around).
Although the trailer focuses on exploring and shooting, there won't be a complete absence of spoken dialogue, as it ends with the player confronting Harry, leader of the super mutants, complete with different dialogue options for the player to make.
As for when it'll be available to play, the tail end of the trailer only promises to have it out before the 2020s are up (so 2029 at the latest).
Apparently it's currently 60% complete and though the team appears to consist of only two people – Alexander 'Red888guns' Berezin and Denis Berezin – the popularity of the trailer may well act as a recruitment tool to get more people helping out.
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MORE: Fallout London has finally been released – this is what you need to play it
MORE: Fallout 3 remaster is still a 'while' away says source as Oblivion is confirmed
MORE: Atomfall review – Fallout in the Lake District is a fun nuclear disaster
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We want to go at 60fps on PS5. Now the reception, when we were in Orlando and we were doing the rehearsal, I had shivers. I had complete shivers the first time I saw it from the beginning to end, and I was like, 'this is just fantastic'. Of course, we saw it on the little screen and were iterating on it, but when we saw on the big screen we were like, 'okay, this is going to be great'. And I think when we did the first official rehearsal everybody from Epic and our side were very impressed about the result. Speaking of Epic, how are you finding the process of developing Witcher 4 in Unreal Engine 5 as opposed to the Red Engine from before? We are a very ambitious company and now, since we work together [with Epic] on what it means to make the next generation of open-world, we need to align differently. That's why we did this. The two technologies are completely different, the way they handle a few things. Definitely some things would have been way easier on RED Engine and somethings are way easier on Unreal. Now we just try to take all the good things we have on Unreal and all the things we add with Unreal Engine, and try to now have some kind of a beautiful baby, just to be sure that we can scale up to the hardware. We don't want to go back and to have a less quality product. For us, it's not very acceptable to step back, right? The ambition is still there. We want to push forward always. This was very important for us, and I think this is why with Epic, we managed to have very good collaboration. I think the fact that they managed to work with us to make this open world and deliver the technology that is required to make it at performance [where] everybody will benefit, not just us. Finally, with it being The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary, do you have a favourite quest? I think the most interesting one is probably when you reunite with the witchers in Kaer Morhen. 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