Fallout’s Creator Wants One Thing From the Future—and It’s Not What You’d Expect

Tim Cain, the mind behind Fallout, reveals why he’s hoping for a truly good faction in the series at last—because after decades of moral gray zones, even wasteland heroes deserve a win.

Here is a pitch you do not hear every day: Fallout co-creator Tim Cain wants a future Fallout with a truly good faction. Not morally gray. Not secretly sinister. Just straight-up helpful people in the wasteland… and then see how long it takes players to assume they are evil and blow them up anyway.

Where this came from

Cain, who led the original Fallout and helped on Fallout 2 but has not been hands-on with the series for years, talked about the idea on YouTube channel The Vile Eye. He was asked about new kinds of antagonists he would like to see, and his answer was basically the opposite: an unambiguously good group. He says the specifics live in some still-private pages of his old Fallout design docs.

"The one thing I always wished in a Fallout game was an actual good faction. Like 100% good. They are just growing food and making shelters and looking for old tech and maybe looking for old medicine, and they are really trying to help people."

Why a good faction could still cause chaos

Cain is not dunking on the factions that exist now. He likes Fallout’s trademark moral grayness and the sinister extremes. But he thinks a purely benevolent group could be a great test of player instincts. In his head, the drama is less about the faction doing anything wrong and more about everyone else projecting suspicion onto them.

He even imagines players wiping the group out because of a hunch like, I bet that hospital was used for experimentation, when it was not. In other words, Fallout has trained us to assume rot under every floorboard. He also notes that in 2024, it is harder to build that slow-burn doubt when someone can just Google Are these people evil? five minutes in.

The thematic speed bump

Cain is realistic about the franchise’s core theme: power corrupts. If someone is in charge, are they ever truly clean? Maybe not. He still wants to try it precisely because it pokes at what Fallout usually teaches — that the good guys have skeletons and the bad guys think they are heroes.

Writers, start sweating (in a good way)

For him, this is a narrative-design challenge on the level of the original Fallout’s low-Intelligence dialogue, which he pushed for back in the day after trying it at the tabletop.

He asked the team then: can you write actual playable lines for a severely stupid character? They did. He thinks writers could rise to this new challenge too.

• His pitch in brief: a 100% good faction that grows food, builds shelters, and scours old tech and medicine to help people; the story tension comes from how other factions — and the player — treat them with suspicion anyway, not from a secret heel turn.

On Bethesda steering the ship

Cain also tips his cap to where the series went under Bethesda. He says the franchise is bigger now, though his version of expansion would have looked different.

"Did they expand it the way I would have? No, not at all, that is OK."

Personally, I kind of want someone to try this just to see how many of us instinctively nuke the only decent people left in the apocalypse.