Fallout: Project Brazil

Development

Project lead Brandan Lee of Radian-Helix Media, LLC was inspired by the games Fallout and Fallout 2 from Black Isle Studios. With the help of friends in the film, TV, radio, and live theatre industries, Lee set out to create a modification of Fallout 3 for people who appreciated the style of the original Black Isle games. Eventually, with the release of Fallout: New Vegas in 2010, development of the mod was converted and moved into the updated New Vegas engine with help from Lead Programmer Rick Hukkanen. Lee states that he headed up a team of three people, with occasional community donations, who would spend four years creating the modification; eventually ending up with 5,000 lines of dialogue from twenty different actors and three hours of gameplay for the first installment alone. Lee christened the mod "Project Brazil" partly due to inspiration by the Terry Gilliam film Brazil, and as a nod to Black Isle Entertainment through the Irish myth of the mythological island of Brasil.

90% of Project Brazil's assets were created between December 2011 and May 2013, when the story was refined after a year-long break away from the project. Lee created a worldspace the size of that found in Bethesda's Fallout 3, and wrote the dialog in tandem with level and character design. Freddie Farnsworth joined in January 2013 as lead project technician; applying a global NavMesh, and re-rendering the level of detail mesh on a computer custom built for the task.

Development on the final installment is underway with promises to expand upon the mod with new quests and factions.

Gameplay

Project Brazil follows a style similar to that of an episodic video game, being split into two installments released at unspecified dates. Like with Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, Project Brazil has a radio station that will comment on the actions of the player as the story progresses further, but includes music from the 60s and 70s in addition to 50s and 40s style music associated with the franchise. The player's S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats also have a greater impact on dialog choices with NPCs and player skills.

Story

Project Brazil was planned to be broken into three segments, but as of December 13, 2013, the third installment was scrapped. The first installment was released on May 31, 2013, the second installment has an unknown release date.

First installment

The first installment begins in Vault 18, a nuclear fallout shelter in San Bernardino, California, high in the mountains of the fictional Black Bear National Forest, near Big Bear Lake. The player is the adopted son of the Overseer, one of many who were brought into the Vault after their tribe was slaughtered. The player "awakens" from a daze as Johnny Matheson, a Vault-Ball player, barrels towards their face to a cheering crowd in the Vault Stadium. They make the instantaneous decision to tackle or dodge, leading them down two separate paths through the story.

Choosing to dodge allows Johnny to crush the player's leg and knock them unconscious, where they wake up in the infirmary to the voice of Dr. Kevin Rossman, the Vault's Robotics & Computer Analytics Teacher. Through dialog, Dr. Rossman reveals that the player is a Nerd, and had no place on the field in that game. He gives them a quest to fix the old servers in Vault 18's computer lab to give them something to do in their down time. The player limps through the entire prequel chapter, often being degraded and mocked by other teenage Vault Dwellers, except those companions with an open mind and intelligent disposition, like fellow tribal orphans Ben Kurtz and Kira Mann. Several side quests send the Nerd player around the Vault to restore Robots with corrupted hard drives, overwritten with text-based RPGs from their brother Shawn, and hunting for terminals rich with history and Wasteland Scout reports.

Choosing tackle causes the player to smash into Johnny, breaking his kneecap instead, and setting up the player to make the final touchdown of the season. The lights explode and white out, and they awaken again in Coach Bragg's office as the Star Athlete. In his post game congratulations, Bragg reveals that the player has always been an Athlete, even if they have been seen as a loner until tonight. He offers them a position with Vault Security, and a place among his "Patriots," an after school group dedicated to military training to "protect the vault and restore America some day." The player leaves to pick their choices with Lieutenant Chevy Bragg in Vault Security, or to join Vault Maintenance. Discovering that nearly all the Vault's residents praise them except a select few, the player is easily able to persuade people to have long talks with them, like Dr. Rossman, Overseer Christianson, Jamie and Eric Campbell, Ben Kurtz, and Kira Mann. A side quest with Jenifer Hale reveals that Bragg has a special "list" of people in the Vault, and wants to know what it's for, launching the player on one of several side quests to discover its meaning.

After going to bed in the prequel, they have a strange nightmare in which an ancient tribal elder inform them that they are "dead," and must fight the shadows of death to rise again. They defeat the dream challenges and awaken to a burning vault. The scene is revealed to be a coup launched by Coach Bragg, an Enclave Colonel sent to capture data from the Overseer's computer. The player will then either wipe out Vault Security (Athlete) or the Enclave Patriots (Athlete or Nerd), personally killing Bragg, Chevy, and several of their own former teammates after discovering they had been brainwashed by the Enclave through Bragg's "club". The player is then forced to escape along with the survivors before the Vault self-destructs as part of the Vault Experiment, rushing past the piled high cars left in the road from the day of the Great War, dodging bullets and plasma bolts as they go. The 1st Installment leaves off there, the player free to explore the wasteland with no further quests until the 2nd Installment is released.

The second installment, which has yet to be released, will focus on the player dealing with three factions: the New California Republic, a band of raiders called the Survivalists, and the remnants of the Master's army from the original Fallout.

Reception

Reviews for the mod have been very positive. Obsidian Entertainment (developer of "New Vegas"), and the official "Fallout" Facebook both praised the mod and recommended it to "New Vegas" players. It was praised mostly for its "Out of the box" compatibility, strong storyline, professional voice overs, and content. It was 9th on Mod DB's Top Mods of 2013 list.