The History of Fallout’s Most Controversial Feature: Childkiller
I wouldn’t go as far to call it cowardice, but Bethesda has always played it safe with the Fallout series. Fallout 3, the studio’s first Fallout release, is one example, with the studio eschewing the isometric perspective that the first two Fallout games were distinct for in favour of a more popular first-person shooter format.
In subsequent releases, Bethesda only leaned harder into the zeitgeist of gaming at that time, particularly with a penchant for game mechanics, violence, and busyness: more adrenaline-pumped shooting, exaggerated wounds, realistic faces and gestures, settlement building, crafting and looting, ultra-condensed dialogue, skill trees, side quests, and in Fallout 76, rampaging in multiplayer mode and setting off nukes for fun. And then there are the kids in Bethesda’s Fallout games: across all the Bethesda Fallout’s games, they’re virtually invincible.
Related: Fallout: New Vegas Is Still The Most Popular Game Among Fallout Fans
Kid-killing, of course, can be controversial, and its inclusion in any games wouldn’t automatically make them more thoughtful or astute—just edgy, like a teen who first discovered that yelling cuss words and slurs would make people around them deeply uncomfortable. But the original Fallout games are also notable for allowing players to kill children, attributing this feature to the relentlessness and harshness of its world. This is a universe where slavery is commonplace, and where you can easily hand a loaded gun to kids playing at combat so that they will accidentally shoot one another during their games.
When the player kills enough children in Fallout and Fallout 2, they will gain a reputation as a ‘childkiller’, which would imbue several effects on the player: random
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