LogInIt's not Fallout 3 but it kind of is.
Micro Forté
When the Fallout show was released, many fans were not happy with it, saying the creators botched New Vegas's lore, removing it from canon events. However, this is not the first time something like this happened in the franchise.
While Bethesda pushed back, claiming New Vegas was part of the canon, not everyone was as lucky. The third installment of the series is not Fallout 3 but Fallout Tactics, a game about the Brotherhood of Steel, developed by Micro Forté. While it was generally well received, some players criticized it for elements differing from the first two games.
"This isn't a Fallout game. This is not Fallout 3. You screwed up the lore here, here and here. You put hairy deathclaws in, you’re not using charisma properly and all of those things," they would say, in the game's lead designer Ed Orman's words (via PC Gamer).
Micro Forté
But perhaps worse than fans' rage was Bethesda's Todd Howard officially removing Tactics from canon.
"For our purposes," he said back in 2007, "neither Fallout Tactics nor Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel happened."
"It sucked," Orman shared. "You don't want to be told that what you've done is non-canon. By the time he said that I had a lot of distance from this, so it wasn't heartbreaking or gut-wrenching – it was just like, 'Oh man. You didn't have to officially say it, we could have existed in this weird quantum state where it was kind of part of things.'"
It might be more painful (or rewarding) now to see the TV show using some ideas from Tactics and calling them canon, like the Brotherhood of Steel's airship Prydwen, appearing in Fallout 4 and the TV series, which looks inspired by Tactics' zeppelin.
"They are a logical thing to introduce in the universe, especially for the Brotherhood," said Orman. "If they're not just flying vertibirds, it makes sense they have a kind of aircraft carrier thing, and you can't really travel on the roads. So I think an airship makes a lot of logical sense for the universe. So maybe that's why they came up with it. But I'll just sit here quietly and think, ‘Yes, it's because we had them in Fallout Tactics', and I'll be happy."
Micro Forté
It's not clear why Howard decided to stand back from Tactics. Perhaps he didn't want to deal with spin-offs, or maybe it was easier for Bethesda to build its own lore without dragging Tactics' issues into its production. Or possibly, it's because of Howard's personal attitude toward non-mainline games (TES Adventures: Redguard, look it up.)
Whatever the case, Orman would love to see his games remade: "If somebody did a remake of Tactics in Fallout 4's engine, you could just adjust a few things and fix some of the lore problems, I would be fine with that. It's not sacrosanct to me, if that brought it in line."
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