Highlights
- The Chosen One from Fallout 2 strikes the perfect balance between being a predetermined character with a set path and a malleable protagonist for an RPG, making them both relatable and highly impressive.
- The Courier from Fallout: New Vegas allows players to project their own stories onto them, with minimal predetermined backstory, making them loved for their role-playing potential in the game's setting.
- The Sole Survivor from Fallout 4 is the least suited to the RPG format, with a strictly defined backstory, clear and specific goals, and fully voice-acted, leaving little room for player role-playing and making them the least compelling protagonist in the franchise.
Fallout is one of the most iconic open-world RPG franchises of all time and much of its quality lies in how well the world and its characters are written. The series is packed with colorful personalities, but players will naturally spend most of their time thinking about the main character. As a role-playing game, Fallout offers freedom and creativity when it comes to defining a protagonist, but each game's player-character has unique qualities and pre-determined features that make them stand out.
Three different developers have tackled the Fallout franchise, and that has led to a great deal of diversity between titles, specifically when it comes to how each main character is defined. Some entries in the series have been more dedicated to the role-playing experience than others, offering a main character that is essentially a blank slate for the player to shape to their liking. Others have been more rigid, sacrificing some player freedom in exchange for a more engaging, human story. When comparing Fallout protagonists, it's important to consider not just the individual personalities or stories of each character, but also how much fun each character is to inhabit in the context of an RPG.
S-Tier
The Chosen One (Fallout 2) - While every Fallout protagonist has their strengths and weaknesses, Fallout 2's Chosen One strikes the best balance between being an interesting pre-determined character on a set path and being just vague enough to be a viable protagonist for an RPG. A descendant of the player-character from the first Fallout, The Chosen One was raised in Arroyo rather than a vault.
From a young age, The Chosen One was trained to be a powerful and versatile warrior, which prepared them for their adventures through some of Fallout's most dangerous regions in search of a Garden of Eden Creation Kit (GECK). While away from Arroyo, the Enclave abducts the tribe, with plans to use them to build a humanity-ending virus. To save their people, The Chosen One wipes out the Enclave, including ultra-powerful super mutant Frank Horrigan.
The stakes of Fallout games are generally more personal, with a character seeking solutions to their own problems or the problems of their loved ones. Fallout 2 has some of this, as the Arroyo tribe is in danger for much of the game, but it also kicks things up a notch by threatening the demise of what remains of the human race. As such, The Chosen One is at once relatable and highly impressive. The Enclave is one of the most powerful groups in Fallout, and defeating them makes The Chosen One arguably the most powerful protagonist in the series. At the same time, the character is malleable enough to work well in the RPG genre.
A-Tier
The Courier (Fallout: New Vegas) - Many fans consider Fallout: New Vegas to be the pinnacle of the franchise and one of the most praised aspects of the game is its protagonist. Specifically, audiences approved of how well they meet the demands of an RPG. The Courier is the most minimal Fallout protagonist in terms of pre-determined backstory, which allows players to project their own stories onto them.
Players are first introduced to The Courier just before they are shot by Benny, a central villain in Fallout: New Vegas. Other than this intro and the fact that this character makes their living as a courier, they are undefined, and players can construct their backstory through a combination of imagination, class-building, and specific dialog choices.
While there are a few things players can do to make The Courier feel weaker or less impressive, their background as a messenger necessitates that they be at least relatively competent and strong, as they would have had to spend a lot of time traversing the wasteland. Plus, surviving a point-blank gunshot to the head is quite impressive. That said, this protagonist is loved for their role-playing potential in the Fallout: New Vegas setting more than their raw power.
B-Tier
The Vault Dweller (Fallout) - The protagonist that kicked the series off is nothing to scoff at, but they are not nearly as powerful as The Chosen One or as versatile as The Courier. The main mission of The Vault Dweller is to retrieve a purification chip to repair their vault's water-filtration system, which they need to survive. Thus, the premise of Fallout, and by extension the premise of The Vault Dweller's character, is quite straightforward. This isn't inherently bad, as it does offer better role-playing potential in some ways.
The Vault Dweller is a born survivor in Fallout's twisted, post-apocalyptic world, but they aren't too powerful or intriguing right off the bat. Rather, the story of The Vault Dweller is interesting because of how bittersweet it is. In the canon ending of the game, The Vault Dweller is exiled from their vault despite their heroic actions, and forced to build a life in the wasteland. Eventually, they establish what would grow to become Arroyo, making them something of a legend in the universe of Fallout, and the only protagonist directly connected to the story of another game in the series.
C-Tier
The Lone Wanderer (Fallout 3) - The first Bethesda-developed Fallout game deviated from the franchise formula in a number of ways; it moved to real-time, first-person gameplay and introduced unique Fallout mechanics and systems, but it also streamlined many of the franchise's RPG fundamentals, opting for a more bespoke, narrative-led experience.
One of the ways that this shifted focus manifested was in the main character. The protagonist of Fallout 3 is set on a quest to save their father after he disappears from the vault they inhabit. Eventually, it's discovered that the father is part of Project Purity, an initiative to bring clean water to the masses. This is a decent enough premise, but the game takes many liberties with the character, forcing the player into a predetermined backstory, which is an issue that is even worse in the next mainline entry.
D-Tier
The Sole Survivor (Fallout 4) - The sole survivor is easily the Fallout character least suited to the RPG format. Fallout 4 is something of a black sheep in the franchise, as it marked a major turn away from classic RPGs. The player-character is a key part of this turn, as they have a strictly defined backstory, a clear and morally specific goal (saving their son), and, most significantly, they are fully voice-acted. This doesn't leave much room for role-playing, as the main character is essentially characterized by their familial devotion.
The voice acting exacerbates the issue, as intonation and attitude can drastically change how a player experiences an in-game conversation. The story of Fallout 4 has its merits, but it takes away what makes RPGs so appealing, and makes the game's protagonist the least compelling of the bunch. None of these protagonists are strictly terrible—even Fallout 4's hero has aged well in some respects. Moreover, every player will want something different out of an RPG protagonist, and the wide range of main characters in the series means that Fallout can offer something different with each release.