Every now and then, I come across a game that eats up all my time. When I am in that session, the minutes fly by. Like so many other people, I have been absorbed in the Fallout world again following the recent Amazon series. While revisiting the franchise, I downloaded Fallout Shelter, and for the first time in years, it has its hooks in me. I loved it back in the day, but even now I find myself constantly thinking of my vault. For as simple as it is, it might be one of my favorites in the series. That said, I think it can be improved with a sequel.
Nuclear addiction, even after all this time
When Fallout Shelter was originally released, a lot of people quickly fell in love with it. The game is addicting, as you expect any good mobile game to be. You are the overseer of a vault. You control the room layout and assign dwellers to various tasks inside or send them on quests out in the wasteland. Now and then, your dwellers need to defend themselves from an invasion, but typically, you’re just maintaining everyday life in the vault.
As your vault continues to expand, more dwellers will join or be born. Like other base management games, this makes balancing your resources very important. Of course, you need to keep your electricity, food, and water levels going to get the full benefits out of everything, but there’s more to it than that. Assigning dwellers to the right job keeps them happy, and maintaining storage has been one of the more important aspects that I keep overlooking.
All this time later, the formula is the same. I’ve gotten thousands of caps, completed plenty of quests, and have been crafting legendary weapons and clothes while training my dwellers. It’s all great, but you can still see where things can be improved. I was shocked to see that there has never been a massive game-changing update in years. It forces Fallout Shelter to be not as great as it could be.
Where can Fallout Shelter improve with a sequel?
I think there is room for Fallout Shelter to be better with a sequel. For starters, quests can definitely be improved. Right now, every quest feels the same. You load up a building and select rooms for your chosen dwellers to explore. There’s little gameplay aspects like healing them and hitting critical shots, but I can’t help but be very bored during these missions. There could be more variety injected, or maybe take out the need to overlook your dwellers when they’re on their quest. Just sending them out with a percentage chance of completing the mission would be good enough for what this game is. I like to focus on my vault anyway, and when I have to load a new area to direct them through a building to be in the same fights, it gets old fast.
I also think there is the capability to get some small multiplayer aspects incorporated. Being able to join your friend’s vault and look things over or trade resources would be a really cool experience. You already see tons of vaults on quests, so visiting a friend’s vault would definitely be doable. Sending a team of dwellers out to raid a vault would also be a really cool twist that could give the game some low-stakes PvP fun.
As for maintaining your own vault, there is so much potential for new rooms to add to the mix. Currently, there are only rooms for resource management, crafting, training, and one oddball room that calls strangers to join your vault. A sequel would require more. A war room for the raids I mentioned earlier would be good, but where else can we expand? I think we can expand on the living conditions. As it is now, your Barracks decide how many dwellers you can have in your vault. If those dwellers actually aged and had their SPECIAL abilities fluctuate with their age, you could find some interesting jobs for them to do. A strong man could start his adult life as a hunter in the wasteland, but as he ages and his strength falls, he could tend to a farm within the vault. There could be rooms for raising and training pets or building robots.
Since we are so far away from Fallout Shelter’s release, I doubt there is any chance of a sequel. That’s a bit of a missed opportunity. Bethesda has a perfect time to strike with all kinds of Fallout stuff following the show’s success. With King now under the Xbox umbrella, maybe they could pick it up, but all we have heard so far is Bethesda and Activision work independently of each other. Of course, a Fallout Shelter in today’s world is probably bursting at the seams with microtransactions, which is gross, but if they did it right, it could still be a fun time. It’s not likely that we will ever see a Fallout Shelter 2, but it’s something I’m going to keep holding out hope for.
