Van Buren Tech Demo

The Fallout franchise is by far one of the most well-known RPG series out there, especially since it survived from back in the 90s, all the way to Fallout New Vegas, which was released only a few years ago. However, as many of you might be aware, Bethesda did not always have the rights to the franchise, because it originally belonged to Interplay and the legendary Black Isle studios.

The Van Buren Tech demo is nothing more than exactly that: a tech demo. In fact, it can barely be categorized as a tech demo, given the multitude of problems it has and how unpolished everything else is. However, this is to be expected, because Black Isle only wanted to show this to Interplay and demonstrate their ideas for the third Fallout episode, so it didn’t really have to work very well or anything, just prove a point.

The first thing you get to notice is the top-down camera, which is in tune with the rest of the franchise, unlike the first-person version developed by Bethesda. However, it does use a three-dimensional engine, on the other hand, so the environments and the characters are much more detailed and vivid this time around.

In case you are not familiar with the acronym, S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stands for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck, which are the attributes you can increase or decrease in the character creation wizard. The rest of your skills and abilities depend on these, so you really need to be choose wisely and keep an eye on the big picture. However, there are also perks and tag skills you can choose in order to personalize the character, depending on how you like to play.

The first two episodes are legendary for their brilliant dark humor present in the story and the dialogue, which kind of lacked from Bethesda’s version. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of it in this tech demo either, mostly because dialogue was not a big concern at this stage and neither was the story. In fact, you can’t do much else, other than walk around and fumble through the inventory.

All things considered, the Van Buren Tech Demo is not really playable, given all the bugs and the problems you will run into. As an idea, it is nice to see Fallout from a top-down perspective again, but that probably won’t happen any time soon. On the other hand, you can at least enjoy the other game inspired by this demo and developed by some of the same Black Isle employers, which is called Wasteland 2.