Abstract
Problem: What aspects of the Fallout universe remain underexplored and deserve expansion in a potential sequel?
Approach: Tim Cain, the original creator of Fallout, responds to a fan question by outlining three major areas of lore he would personally explore if he were making a new Fallout game.
Findings: Cain identifies three pillars for exploration: new factions beyond Vault-Tec and RobCo, international locations beyond the US, and deeper morality systems rooted in trolley-problem-style dilemmas — all in service of Fallout's core theme that "war never changes."
Key insight: Fallout's true intent was always moral exploration — power corrupts, people do bad things — and a sequel should force players into genuinely uncomfortable choices where there is no right answer, only a variety of solutions.
Context and Caveats
Tim Cain opens by noting that he has "a lot of me in Fallout" — along with Arcanum, these are his two most personal games. He clarifies several important points upfront:
- He has a design for a Fallout sequel but will not share it, specifically so that if elements appear in someone else's Fallout game, he knows it's coincidence
- He has already seen a couple of his ideas show up coincidentally in other games
- This video is not him asking to work on Fallout again — it's purely a thought exercise prompted by a fan question
- The video is a companion piece to his earlier "Arcanum Lore Exploration" video
New Factions
Beyond Vault-Tec and RobCo
Cain wants to explore the wider corporate landscape of pre-war America. The Fallout universe had many companies beyond the usual suspects — car manufacturers (like the Chryslus fusion-powered vehicles), consumer goods companies, and more. Exploring their products, slogans, and roles would paint a richer picture of what society was actually like before the bombs fell — which he emphasizes was not people eating squirrel bits.
Mutation-Based Factions
He's interested in whether FEV created factions beyond the standard super mutants we've seen across multiple games. What if people mutated first from radiation, and then FEV affected them differently? These could be secretive factions — perhaps ones that fight super mutants in conflicts humans have never even discovered. Maybe the super mutants are winning.
Isolated Communities
Cain envisions whole populations of people and ghouls living in deep hiding — not just holed up somewhere obvious, but genuinely concealed. He draws a Futurama comparison: an entire city under the city, populations living deep beneath the sewers that you'd have to work hard to discover. Once found, they'd likely be hostile to outsiders.
Prepper Factions
A particularly interesting idea: what happened to the real-world equivalent of preppers — people who built underground bunkers stocked with supplies in remote locations? Finding their descendants 40, 50, or 100 years later would offer a unique perspective on the pre-war world from people who are neither vault dwellers nor ghouls. What would their grandchildren and great-grandchildren think of the world?
International Locations
Cain's second major area of exploration moves beyond US borders entirely. Very little has been established about what happened in the rest of the world, despite evidence that things did happen.
Cultural Retrofuturism
If Fallout represents advanced American 1950s jingoism, what would the equivalent be for the Soviet Union? China? Canada (which the US annexed)? Mexico? Brazil? Australia? India? Countries across Europe and Africa? Cain admits he's "not really prepared" to design all of these himself but would love to see them explored.
Foreign Technology
Fallout 2 established that the Stealth Boy was Chinese technology. What other countries had unique tech that either didn't exist in the US, or only existed there because it was stolen through espionage? Did other nations develop their own biological weapons programs comparable to FEV? Perhaps Argentina had its own FEV-like virus producing entirely different mutations.
Smaller Nations
Beyond the superpowers, Cain is fascinated by what smaller or more isolated countries might look like. Iceland stands out as a particularly compelling example — geographically isolated with geothermal power, potentially self-sufficient and hostile to outsiders. Vietnam, smaller European nations — all offer rich possibilities.
Morality Exploration
Cain saves what he calls "the biggest one" for last. Any sequel he worked on would need deep morality exploration.
Gray Morality vs. Tough Choices
Cain distinguishes between two types of moral design he loves:
- True gray morality — situations where there genuinely is no clear right or wrong
- Tough black-and-white decisions — where the good choice is obvious, but the evil choice is far more rewarding for the player mechanically
He gives concrete examples: save a person or grab a powerful weapon (but not both); rescue a child or gain access to new technology (but not both). The key is that the evil choice requires active, overt action — not just passive neglect.
The Trolley Problem in Games
Cain explicitly connects his design philosophy to the classic trolley problem from philosophy (and The Good Place). He loves these dilemmas because they generate endless discussion with no definitive answer. When placed in a game with real mechanical consequences — you will never get that weapon if you make the good choice — they force genuine reflection.
The point isn't that there's a right solution. There's "just a variety of solutions." And players will argue about them endlessly online, which is exactly the intent.
Fallout's Core Theme
Everything circles back to Fallout's fundamental message: power corrupts, people have always done bad things, war never changes. Cain wants players who come to the wasteland for cool weapons and weird monsters to leave with something to think about. "It's what we always intended. It's why Fallout was so dark and had some of the quests it had."