Wikipedia:Peer review/Fallout (video game)/archive1

Fallout (video game)

Fallout is one of the most influential role-playing video games of all time, launching a successful franchise and rejuvenating the genre of role-playing video games on the computer systems. I brought the article to the status of WP:Good article in 2021. This year on October will be the 25th anniversary of Fallout, so I would like to bring this article up to the status of WP:Featured article. Any improvements that need to be made, list down here.

Thanks, Lazman321 (talk) 05:38, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

@Lazman321: Hi Lazman, I'm not really experienced with giving peer reviews of other articles, but there are maybe a couple things that I see compared to a featured article like Bioshock that can be improved.

• The lead says the game was critically acclaimed, but Metacritic says "generally favorable reviews". Now, it probably was critically acclaimed, but you'll need some sources that explicitly state it is critically acclaimed.
• Lead also says it was a "financial success", expounding on this by adding to that sentence, saying like "... a financial success according to XYZ Magazine's "Best Selling" list" or something like that. Furthermore, the actual commercial success section says that it failed to meet expectations in sales. This could be potentially misleading. The lead could also maybe be more connected and have less seperated sentences.
• Plot and Development both have sections named "Characters". Additionally, "Plot" can be renamed as "Synopsis" with "Story" being renamed to "Plot" as they are the same thing.

This is only from a quick glance at the article- I haven't actually read the text or looked at the citations. If you want my advice, I suggest comparing it to a featured article like Bioshock or Half Life 2: Episode One and adapting this article to be more like those if you want it to be FA status. Thanks! shanghai.^{talk to me} 11:03, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

I have dealt with your concerns, including the section name concern and the separated sentence concern. However, I am not attributing the commercially successful statement in the lead because it is not attributed in-text in the sales subsection. Lazman321 (talk) 14:05, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

@David Fuchs: It has been two weeks since you have promised to provide feedback to this peer review. Are you going to, or not? Lazman321 (talk) 23:27, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

@David Fuchs: Three weeks now. Please respond. Lazman321 (talk) 03:29, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

Review by Shooterwalker

Comments coming. Stay tuned. Shooterwalker (talk) 18:23, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

• A lot of this is already pretty well written. It's not featured status yet, but within striking distance, and worthy of nomination.
• There are some areas where maybe the sequence of words could introduce concepts more carefully, for people who might less familiar with this style of game.
• I think karma and experience points both need to be explained. Especially karma, just after you introduce these as concepts.
• Be sure to link post-apocalyptic the first time it appears in the body. Since it factors so heavily into the fiction, maybe clarify the importance of nuclear war. "Fallout takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, in the aftermath of a global nuclear war." I realize you go into more detail a few sentences later, but this will help introduce the overall concept.
• There are a few run-on sentences in the plot section. Sometimes it's better to have a sentence focus on a singular idea than to join multiple separate ideas with lots of commas.
• Consider separating the setting and characters subsections, just for organization purposes.
• Explain who Tim Cain is when you introduce him.
• "Amazing" doesn't explain very much. Does Tim Cain explain what he thought his team brought to the table?
• What does it mean to treat Fallout as a B-project, and who treated it that way?
• When you say that Tim Cain decided on the game's freedom, before its setting and style... Does this mean he started with the goal of making a free form game, before deciding it would be a post-apocalyptic role-playing game? I'd try to make it clearer. If yes, explain that he wanted to make a free form game first, and then explain how this led him to a post-apocalyptic RPG. If not, explain how he started with the post-apocalyptic RPG, and how that led him towards a more freeform experience.
• Further to my previous point, make sure you explain how the project started. Did it start as a successor to Wasteland, or did that come along later? When did they decide that Wasteland would be a good source of inspiration, and what did they have at that point?
• Is there more on what The Simpsons has to do with writing the prolog? Otherwise this seems more like a concidence.
• Is there more on what the original prolog was, and why it was rejected and rewritten? Maybe re-arrange these two thoughts to be in chronological order.
• There's some indication that maybe the engine was the first step in the game's development, and not the concept. If that's true, the article would need to be re-sequenced in order to communicate this.
• Note that GURPS is a tabletop system, and not a video game system. (This becomes important once you recognize that they couldn't acquire the license.)
• "for free" means "without pay".
• "expensive" is sort of vague in this meaning. Any context as to how expensive?
• Perhaps the Characters section should be "characters and writing"
• Do we know more about the promotion and advertising? You launch right into demos without elaborating on this point.
• Was the release only reported, or did the release in fact happen?
• Why was the release date determined retroactively?
• In the reception section, you include some distant retrospectives (like the RPG book) in with reviews of the time. I would separate these, to distinguish between how it was received at the time, versus its legacy. The RPG book was written in the 2010s and is clearly in the place of evaluating its legacy, instead of giving the game an immediate review.
• You should greatly expand on the awards and accolades section. Arguably this is more important than the critical reviews, as this goes beyond WP:NEWS coverage into the game's lasting impression. It
• I don't think the "see also" for "history of role-playing games" makes much sense, as it's really a separate topic. It's enough to say "there was an increase in consumer interest in role-playing video games ... attributed to a few role-playing video games, including Fallout."
• The legacy section also needs to be greatly expanded. I think you could divide this into multiple paragraphs: first the influence on the video game genre in the late 1990s, then its lasting influence on game design including specific titles and developers who cite it as an influence, and finally its influence on alumni such as Tim Cain.
• The series section should be separated from legacy. I do see the relationship, but these are different things.
• I've tried not to nitpick the prose too much as I'm sure there will be more time for that when you nominate this for featured status. I'll be happy to give a more thorough review when that moment comes.

Those are my comments for now. I'd emphasize the re-structuring of the development section, as well as the reception and legacy sections. IMO, the article needs to fully explain the game's influence on other games and developers. The game casts a very large shadow that the article doesn't really touch on, and that would be essential for this article to meet its comprehensiveness requirement. Shooterwalker (talk) 19:38, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Thank you so much for your feedback. This was incredibly helpful to the improvement of the article. I rewrote areas of the article to introduce concepts more carefully, separated the characters and setting sections, restructured the development section to make more sense chronologically, expanded the release sub-section to be more in-depth in its promotion, restructured the reception section to separate contemporaneous and retrospective reception, and expanded the legacy section. Those aren't the only things I did after your feedback, but those were the major actions I took on the article based on the peer review. However, I didn't separate the series sub-section away from the legacy section because most Wikipedia articles on influential video games that spawned a series actually put information on the series in the legacy section itself (e.g. System Shock). Maybe it will be separated during featured article candidacy, but I doubt it. Anyway, the article is currently listed for copyediting by the Guild of Copyeditors. I will probably close the peer review and start the candidacy once the copyedit is performed. Lazman321 (talk) 03:34, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

• You've done a great job and there's room for other editors to chime in about where else to go. Getting another copy edit is a good idea, and you should be within striking distance of a FA. I really think the legacy section could be expanded, because Fallout is really a groundbreaking game with a lot of "firsts" and a lot of influence on other games. There are probably tons of articles about how Fallout has influenced later games, even into the 2010s and 2020s. But if nothing else, see what kinds of notes they mention in the List of video games considered the best, with the multiple sources around Fallout. The game's legacy is more than just the immediate reaction to it, or even the direct sequels and spinoffs. It is a game that transformed the artform. Shooterwalker (talk) 19:30, 8 May 2022 (UTC)