For anyone interested in Van Buren there’s a huge rabbit hole you can go down. The demo is available, there’s several fan projects made to recreate elements of it (more than the one the article mentions), and Retcon Raider has some pretty good videos covering the design documents.
“Would that engine have been acceptable five years later [after Fallout 2]?”
I would have been totally fine with it if that meant we had a decent Fallout 3
Hear hear. Bethesda’s Fallout 3 and above are nice Bethesda games, but the art style never quite captured the whimsical grittiness of Fallout2.
Fallout 3 kinda overdid the grays and greens in its art style. It works for a post-apocalyptic wasteland of course, but everything starts to look same-y after a while. Especially in DC itself with its nightmarish metro system full of identical gray metal infrastructure.
Once you get to Megaton and start talking to the girl that gives you all the starter quests it’s apparent the game isn’t anywhere close to Fallout 1 & 2.
It’s fun. But… Yeah.
I actually liked the downtown metro maze though. It’s pretty unique. I feel like it was the proto vast underground dwemer ruins areas of Skyrim.
