FOnline 2238: The Bootleg Fallout MMO You Never Played

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Roughly 16 years ago, I sunk a year of my life onto an unsanctioned MMORPG in the universe of Fallout.

Around 2010, I was finishing engineering school. It was the best moment (no) to start an online guild on a bootleg mmo in the universe of Fallout, my favourite RPG. This game taught me a lot about modding and harsh game design. I look back at this time fondly.

History of the License

theden

Fallout 1 & 2 are games coming out of the legendary studio Interplay and created by Timothy Cain (his youtube channel is excellent for gamedev advices and more). They were released respectively in 1997 and 1998. Fallout 3, arguably getting the license to the mainstream audience is the first 3d and fps version of the game, only got released 10 years later, in 2008 and by Bethesda! The same Bethesda released a MMO based on their Fallout universe in 2018 named Fallout 76.

Rumour has it that when Interplay on the verge of dying sold the Fallout IP to Bethesda, they kept the right of doing a multiplayer version of it. It was nicknamed Fallout Online. But Interplay had no money at the time and to keep the rights of the license, they needed to show something. If you search the internet you will find some screenshots and some backstories. But ultimately, Bethesda sued and won, Interplay was finished. It may explain why we got an official Fallout MMO so late.

fallout online

I am not going to speak about those games. FOnline is a wordplay of Fallout and Online, but this is not the Interplay version. A russian developer nicknamed Cvet created from scratch a multiplayer engine able to read the assets of Fallout 1 & 2. It is not a mod. A mod is when you modify in some capacity the game engine of a game and you add new assets, new scripts. Here the guy rewrote from scratch a new engine. But this engine was capable of loading the animations, the sprites of the original games. Technically you can get the same game but running on another engine. You saw a lot of those efforts for example with remakes of games by Nightdive studios (their System Shock, Quake II versions are both excellent).

This solo dev created the technology. From what I understand it was a C++ engine with a layer of modding through Angel Script. Because of this, he associated himself with 2 teams of modders. One mainly in germany and another one in Russia. Those 2 teams, created 2 different games, one was the russian version of FOnline, the other and the one I played was called FOnline 2238. They both had different content and rules. No-one had ever access to the source code of the game. Modders would script and add content, but the solo dev remained the only one to be able to provide engine updates. And on top, he only shared the SDK with those 2 modder teams (at least at first).

The MMO

russian roulette Player based Russian Roulette event

You take the isometric view of the originals, you remove the turn-based gameplay by the real-time design of Fallout Tactics (amazing game particularly in multiplayer but this is a contentious opinion), you keep all the rest and you get yourself a MMORPG system.

One key differentiator of fallout compared to other rpgs:

It is particularly important in a MMO, because of the need for specialization. There are no class per say as in Priest, Paladin and other archetypes but you effectively can be a medic, sniper or tank based on the stats you boost. It also includes the soft skills like barter, speech, gambling.

So it naturally works on a MMO player, who understands the need to group and associate with others to cover all stats.

fonline stats SPECIAL

Timothy Cain nicknamed this game system S.P.E.C.I.A.L. I also played a bit of the pen & paper role playing game of Fallout (because my cousin is a big nerd) and you get the same feel. It is very unique and natural. Like in real world, of course I can shoot any-gun I can put my hands on. There are no magical level limits. Am I a bad shooter? Of course I am, but with some luck, maybe anything can happen. In the game it translates to running to close range to someone and unloading an ungodly amount of bullet until you get a critic hit with some sheer luck and if you have stats for it (luck is a stat). This is Fallout for you.

critical Gibs, gibs everywhere

The Hardcore

So what? You can play Fallout with friends? Go kill some molerats to earn xp in the desert and get some caps as reward? It is certainly what the creators envisioned but the game became something else entirely.

This is my spicy take and the sole reason I wasted a year of my life playing this game: FOnline is closer to Escape from Tarkov (Tarkov is a mmorpg btw) than to World of Warcraft.

So what are the similarities between an extraction shooter fps and a 2d isometric rpg.

The little detail that changes everything: in FOnline when you die, anyone can loot your body and everything you were carrying. Some cities, mostly in the south are protected by guards, which does not mean you cannot die or get robbed, but otherwise the whole world is open to savage PvP without much consequences.

caps The famous Nuka Cola Caps currency

The only way to accumulate wealth and loot, was to get a tent or a guild base. It is the only place in the world that is instanced only for you. Everywhere else is shared.

Having stake creates tension, and tension creates memorable moments. It also creates frustration, why shouldn’t I equip my best gear and show it off? Sometimes it is better to look poor than rich particularly when bands of goons are roaming the land.

Naturally this kind of gameplay also implies an enormous amount of crafting and planning. Like in Tarkov you will spend more than half your time prepping your gear and crafting stuff. In this case, a lot of bullets. As the next man, I enjoy a lot shooting miniguns (iconic), but this badboy requires so much ammo than to be able to shoot it, you will spend a lot of time gathering rocks to make ammo.

minigun

Politics & Player Motivations

This game attracted two categories of people (it overlaps of course):

Those two populations are not reconcilable. Fallout being a single player RPG originally, people trying to revive this experience with their friends could not get along with savage people killing everything on sight. When the game design is good everyone wants to experience the content. The PK will slowly but surely drain out the first population. And when there is no-one else to kill anymore, they will also leave the game. It is a classic design problem. Tarkov revealed that 50% of their player population only engage with their PvE content which is an insane number. But it really shows those differences of player profile and motivation. You can always say it is a skill issue, sure, but it is not a design solve. Getting chain kill by random people when you try to do some questing is not fun to anyone, particularly when the power curve gives you no chance to fight back. So at the risk of splitting the player base you can offer 2 separates experiences or try to offer content with safe zone to try to accommodate. Tarkov went with the population split. You can barely find new player anymore in the PvP, which leads to even more frustration for the mid or bottom tier players. Only high level players are having fun which in time will kill the game.

base Am organized guild base with all the loot on the floor

It is the difference between a min-maxer headshot only optimized build against a specialized barter with a gambling addiction (stats all over the place because it was fun to try stuff). As a game dev, I love the latter because they have more chances to make the game their own and discover things. The former will churn through content and find the one broken things. It is very interesting too but appealing to both population in the same world is clearly an unsolved problem.

The way this PvE population copes is to associate in guilds and punish violence. You can see this behaviour in Arc Raiders for example. In FOnline the Francophone community gathered around a single guild, The Cajuns if I recall. It is exactly what you would expect: a military style structure with echelon of bosses organized around crafting and pooling loots. And they love to roleplay, making up their own rules. There is power to those para-social organizations. They will onboard new members into the game, showing them the ropes and basic loot. It is an essential function for the game to survive. It is so unforgiving and without any handrail, you need sherpas or guide to show you the basic stuffs and unwritten rules.

On the other hand, I do not like joining an already established organization, with mandatory community service and pity bosses. It is why I founded a rival French guild nicknamed The Amboy Dukes. Mind you, I had no idea about the band, it just sounded cool (my last name is Duc which translates to Duke). Those names are pre-recorded from a list, you cannot freeform.

We would kill people, fight others in cities, rackets in mining area crafters for their production .. Suicid bomb attack in protected cities (instead of robbing, use the skill to plant dynamites in people). Our best action was bombing a comedy stand-up rp event where we managed to smuggle explosive in the venue and exploded everywhere in the audience. Remember, it is a video-game. Our motto was For Lulz and Glory.

The schism between player population led to a full blown-out war between two coalitions: The Dark Alliance and the North Alliance or PvP people versus PvE people. The admin organized at the time some giant Arenas to fight fair between the two coalitions. The scripting of this engine was really powerful. Of course we won (PvP).

Anatomy of a Fight

Some PvP

Let’s try to explain the design around combat. You should watch the first 30s of this video.

minimap In Fallout, you walk the world in a mini-map. While in this state, you cannot be attacked. The cities or interest points are marked with this big green circle.

Upon arrival, you can decide where to spawn. spawn

You can spawn and leave the map through the same zones.

  1. Guilds would gather on top of a city
  2. Spawn and camp on one of the edge

There are not many incentives to push. If you push mid-map, you cannot escape. And if you push too-hard, people can break engagement and go back to the live map. So there is a bit of a lengthy cat and mouse game before someone take the initiative. The design fix in Tarkov for example is to make you exit to the opposite side of your spawn point. In Fallout, they spawn you slightly off the zone so you still have to run a bit to reach it but it is not much. They introduced later-on city capture (hold the midtown for an amount of time) to force people to push. It was ok.

line of sight Red/Green is the line of sight. Bottom right, is the zone to enter/exit the map

You cannot see any characters outside your line of sight, they would pop-out of existence. A lot of the fighting is about scouting and seeing your enemy to be able to target it.

There are multiple side effects of having this safe above map situation.

This is roughly how it goes. It was interesting to see that many different groups were able to keep-up the arms race. You could think that at some point one group would overly dominate because of their gear, but numbers and crafting ended-up compensating. The lack of ultimate gotcha items (way above the power curve) also helps. At the end of the day, your numbers will be the deciding factor.

One last video to illustrate those points following my point of view of a battle we lost.

The Hacking and Dramas

We did multiple things at the time that went overboard.

I asked my little cousin to infiltrate the other French guild for over a month until one day, he infiltrated us into their base and we stole everything at 2am (when no-one is connected). We got slapped by one French admin of the server (now a video-game journalist funny enough) in retaliation. In insight, the admin fud was more funny than emptying the base in itself. We also knew for a long time everywhere they would attack having our embedded agents in their rank. It would lead to a famous standoff situation, where we got cornered in a building with only one door, we would insult each others through the windows and walls. The line in such game between in-game and real-life is very thin.

The consequences of doing this is that everyone started doing it. The game was not equipped for it and it led to multiple guild collapsing because of betrayal by one or two members. Thinking about it, even with a shared space, players certainly still need a private stash and an explicit zone for sharing. Here, in FOnline, everything was on the floor which leads to constant policing of the stockpile.

We also created an overlay program (from my lab-mate and friend Caled) which was macro on steroids. It allowed you to bypass the UI and directly aim for body part with shortcuts. We added on top audio clue when someone died or was injured. It was our first foray into dll injections and drawing overlays. Mind you, the game UI was still the same as Fallout 2, so designed for a single player, turn based RPG. The modders would eventually integrate those UI changes.

I also reversed partially the network protocol of the game and was able to code a simple lightweight client. I mostly used it to XP alternate characters. In Fallout you get XP whenever you use a skill. I would connect two bots from my own special lightweight client, make them punch each other, then heal each other. Repeat for a week, 24/7 and you get a maxxed level character. Nothing extremely fancy compared to farming bots in other mmos, but being able to run a little Python program (big Python guy at the time) on my EEEPC all day was cool.

There is something we never managed to crack really. The game tried to prevent you to connect different characters from the same computer (to prevents bots and mules) by generating a hardware id, uniquely identifying your computer. Then upon trying to log-in with another account, it would apply a cool-down. I never understood how this number was generated. But we knew where it was in the connection packet. I created a “proxy” that would inject this hardware id upon connection. Instead of connecting directly to the game, the FOnline client would connect to my proxy, then this proxy would relay game traffic to the official servers. We got a pool of hardware id by installing the game on any computer we could find and just saving this id in a text file (libraries, university computer rooms, etc). It was truly a lot of work.

The code is available here. You can see it can connect through SOCKS proxy and Tor.

The Amboy Dukes

I let you read here the description of our Guild that I posted 14 years ago on a forum to recruit people. I censored it because I know better now (language). It is a tribute to people that spent time with us and shared a unique bond.

= Overview=
The Amboy Dukes was first a gather of french players on FOnline : The Life After. After a lot of updates, the 2238 mod became more playable and the team do the move to this new server (Open Beta 3 : before and after wipe 1 and 2).
We are a democratic organisation. We try to find a consensus on everything we make.
Our Website is www.deckard.fr .
= Members =
'''The first 4'''
LapinMalin also known as FooFighter, deckard.
Caled also known as Ulricht, gretchen.
Cryo also known as Brick.
Buchay also known asBuchayy (inactive).
'''The first spy'''
Alfa also known as Hempov, Crotesecher.
'''Former of Union Of a New Tomorrow'''
We mixed with the former faction called Union of a New Tomorrow. We are now one.
Bastib also known as Atomic Blast, Blastib, luciano.
Drunxtr also known as DuffCraft.
Marcellino also known as himself (inactive).
'''Our crew'''
Xan, Eolith, LeBagnard, Fate, Maximus.
= Rules =
A FOnline 2238 PvP Faction Fighting everywhere for glory and lulz !
Here are the rules :
1. PvP First.
2. Work at school.
3. Praise Rat God.
4. Speak French (or not).
5. Don't be afraid to *** the cajun's base after 3 a.m.
6. Say "Hi Izual !" each time you enter our base. (because he's watching you, always)
7. If someone is claiming his/her stuff back after being killed, kill him/her back.
8. Wasteland is harsh.
9. Don't care about diplomatic stuff. Speakers are loosers.
10. ***
= Recruitment =
French Speaker. We don't care about how old you are. You just need to be our kind. Just one way to know if it works between us, send a MP to LapinMalin on the forum.
== Politics ==
Our official spy also known as Alfa after infiltrated Cajuns (largest french faction) for one month. We *** their base. After that, we were excluded from French Community.
 
== Dark Side (Alliance against North Alliance) ==
+ Bang Bang Smash
+ The Repo Men
+ Soldiers of Thunderstorm
+ The Wasteland Carnivores
+ Grey Guardians
+ Murder Death Kill
+ Tim Bob and his men
== Kill On Sight ==
+ Cajun
+ Wilks (a big one)
= Contact =
Use IRC - #2238, look for people with the BBS tag.

We were definitely way too into it. What’s interesting with MMOs is that it is more of a social construct than anything else with its own dynamic that exists outside the game. All this bravado and talk talk did not really exists in-game because there was no space for it (we shoot first), but existed on forums, IRC, TeamSpeak …

As you can read, I could barely speak English (Lost came later), our allies were mostly Polish so it did not mattered (they mostly spoke to us in bad words and swearing). We were using Fraps to record our gameplay footage, another time, another world.

And finally, find a glorious 2010 low resolution tribute to our clan.

Don’t mind our allies saying bad words.

If you read until now, thank you. This game shaped a lot of my taste for design and what I like in player-versus-player. It also shaped my technical taste, I would pivot my professional ambition from Electronics (embedded systems) to Computer Security, then to Video-Games and Networking in particular: a pivotal time in my formative years.

Erratum

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