By The originator of Fallout is still pondering whether he invested excessive energy into remedying a visual glitch in the original RPG – particularly since Diablo completely bypassed it during that period.
In a recent video, Tim Cain talked about the challenges that developers occasionally face when their personal inclinations don’t always align with the preferences of players. To illustrate this, he refers to the idea of ‘foot-sliding’ – an issue he battled to eliminate from the original Fallout, yet observed other developers manage it without repercussions.
Foot-sliding refers to a problem where characters’ feet glide along the ground, even when they’re entirely stationary, as if they were positioned on a slick surface. According to Cain, that was not something he was willing to tolerate in Fallout. “We kept our feet firmly anchored, and we dedicated a significant amount of time to ensure that it functioned correctly.”
In some respects, Cain states, he found validation from individuals in the community. “There were some people who remarked ‘Hey Tim, I adore that’. But it appears even that acclaim wasn’t adequate to satisfy the part of Cain’s mind that has perpetually questioned ‘what if?’.
“To this day, I contemplate what might have been sacrificed in Fallout due to our extensive time spent avoiding foot-sliding,” he confesses. Even for those who appreciated that meticulousness, he posits “consider all the elements that didn’t make it in, reflect on all the programming hours that were squandered, and observe all the bugs that Fallout launched with, or features we lacked that were promptly incorporated into Fallout 2.”
To exacerbate the situation, Cain highlights the numerous sacrifices he and his team made to rectify foot-sliding, only to witness another RPG evade it. Ten months prior to Fallout, the initial Diablo had debuted, and Cain asserts that it displayed foot-sliding “in abundance,” yet “no one was concerned.”
Ultimately, I’m uncertain how much of an impact it had. For all its flaws, Fallout nevertheless initiated an undeniably thriving franchise, from its immediate sequel up to the Fallout TV series and the eventual launch of Fallout 5. Sure, he may have expended excessive time ensuring feet were rigid, but at least it yielded benefits in the long term.