If you ask me, Fallout 4 is already a pretty bloody big game. The wasteland certainly isn’t lacking in things to do or areas to explore.
But for some people, that’s not enough. Enter Fallout 2161, a mod to recreate the original Fallout in Fallout 4 — by using geographical data to map the states of California and Nevada.
The project has actually been an ongoing idea for years; its creator, Dakcenturi, originally began work on Fallout 2161 when Fallout 3 was released. “However, there was a lot of other things going on at the time. A year before the project started I was married and shortly after my first son was born,” they wrote on the ModDB listing.
With Fallout 4 out and the impending release of Bethesda’s construction kit, however, progress has resumed. Things can’t resume fully mind you, at least not until the kit is actually published, but some planning can begin on the in-game world.
“Rather than simply having small areas to match the original locations we are creating game regions to allow a degree of the open world feel that is common place in Bethesda games and one of the things that make them great,” the creator wrote. “To that end let’s look at some of the progress on the height maps.”
The height maps are being built off Fallout 1 and 2. Here are those maps, for comparison.
From there, the Fallout 2161 team set about to “just make California and part of Nevada as a whole”. You won’t be able to traverse the entirety of this though — they simply don’t have the manpower to fill out the inevitable amount of nothingness that would be generated.
“With a small team this would leave a LOT of open space with nothing of interest,” Dakcenturi explained. “Add to that limitations of the game engine and we changed our plans to subsections of the global map. However, this overall world is still going to be important for our Fast Travel system.”
This is where they’re at.
Once things are ironed out, the team will create a tutorial for other modders “interested in creating their own mods based off of real world locations”. Existing tutorials are supposedly outdated, lacking images and other bits of information, so this group of Fallout modders are going to help fill the void.
You can follow progress on Fallout 2161 through their ModDB listing. There’s no release date or even a ballpark time on when an alpha may become available, although it’ll be an interesting project to follow nevertheless.
Comments
3 responses to “A Fallout 4 Mod Is Using Geographical Data To Recreate The Original Fallout”
I would have loved to get involved in something like this back in the day, when time was free. I’m no good with modelling, but could have scripted the hell out of the dialogue and choices to match the original games.
This is the reason why I still keep playing Skyrim – and why I will keep playing Fallout 4.
would be nice, but I’m uncertain on that max map size for the creation engine (think thats what its called). I mean skyrim had large areas outside of its main map so it could handle quite a bit but is it not stuck on 32bit precision still?