Fallout 76: Community Spotlight Article – Fallout Génération

For this month’s Community Spotlight, we reached out to HawK-EyE, who contributed to the founding of the French Fallout community group “Fallout Génération”.

”. When asked about the origins of the community group, he explained even though the group was “born in 2007, we actually started out as Fallout-3.com. This was long before Bethesda open the EU and French offices. Since there were some rumors about a new Fallout game being developed by Bethesda, I thought it would be interesting to cover the flow of news in English and decided to translate it for the French community. We eventually became the major source of information in French for Fallout fans and other post-apocalyptic video games. Throughout the years I've participated to countless projects with many translations for unofficial patches, extensions, games and mods, subtitles for fan made movies, content creation, videos, podcasts with the community, interviews, talk-shows with members and guests, news and articles, organization of many events and community management.”

Inspiration for the group’s creation stemmed from a desire to find other fans of the genre. HawK-EyE says that he “always thought that the best way to play a game was to play it with friends. I always enjoyed the community-like creativeness and open-source inspirations of the early days of the internet. From me this website was simply a place to find other fans of the universe, share experience and knowledge with them, discuss and play similar games. Our model is 100% self-funded and only based on volunteering, there are zero ads in any of our content. When I decided to create this website, I thought it was only going to last for a few months and that after the release of the game, it was going to collapse in a few years. But I wasn't the only fan of the Fallout universe and many people really enjoyed what we created.”

Now that Fallout Génération had become a giant hub for information on all things Fallout, the team took some impressive steps to turn it into a non-profit. HawK-EyE highlights that it was really “thanks to Kims our beloved administrator and president (you are the best!). We are now officially a non-profit in France. We have many volunteers that come and go each year and it has always been a combined effort of many people. They tackle everything from contributions to the forums, writing articles for the wiki, contribution to community maps, helping people in discord, providing feedbacks, creating content and fanzines, organizing roleplay events, funding support with donations, and most importantly, playing games and having fun together.” The community has really blossomed into a one-stop-shop for all things videogame post-apocalyptic.

We asked HawK-EyE about his experience with Fallout and what drew him to the series to begin with, he detailed that his first experience was actually “back in autumn 1997, when a demo of the first Fallout game was freely available in the additional CD-Rom of a French magazine called "Joystick". A friend of mine was a subscriber and lend me the CD. He told me the demo was short but that there were many paths to take. We spent the next 2 or 3 weeks trying to find every possible way to finish the demo. We tried every single interaction or line of dialog and tried killing every character. It was indeed very short, but it was so intense. I think I never fully recovered from it.” Another important moment, HawK-EyE explains was “when I eventually became the holder of the World Record of the "single-segment" speed run of Fallout 1 for almost 2 years (between 2013 and 2015). I made a detailed explanation video in French (and included bloopers video with many failures and the frustration that comes with during live sessions). The run is not very difficult, but the game doesn't always react as intended because of its age and the amount of RNG, so that makes it very frustrating at the end. You typically need something like 200 attempts to reach a correct time (ex: sub-8 minutes) and many more for the world record of course.”

When it comes to game genres in general HawK-EyE explains he has “always enjoyed sci-fi universes and post-apocalyptic was one of my favorite settings. I was playing this popular tabletop RPG "Bitume" from "Croc", one of the most famous TTRPGs in France. I played it way too much to have a normal social life in middle school and it was around that time that Fallout also caught my attention. While I was still young (13 years old), I completely fell in love with its sarcastic tone, adult themes and morally grey situations. I was a rebel at the time, and it was incredible to find a game that depicted what would happen to an ultra-belligerent US of the 50's. Piling up atomic weapons and fostering anti-communism to the point that everything blew up in their face in a self-fulfilling prophecy. But beyond the political claims and social critique, the game itself was really a blast because of its total freedom of action. The deep choice and consequences created a ton of branching possibilities. The freedom of the roles that are accessible for players is what makes it a true computer-RPG. The humor, the tone, and the deep humanity that emerges from the characters (complete with their inner contradictions and moral dilemmas) makes it one of the greatest video games I ever played and a true masterpiece of art.”

Now that he’s started playing Fallout 76, HawK-EyE primarily plays “a Sniper/Sneak with most single-shot and critical hits perks cards and another Bloody/Explosive Big Gun/Power Armor build that is not really finished yet.” Fallout Génération has taken a more active role now in Fallout 76 with their community as well. “We like doing PvP tournaments, daily quizzes, races in the Appalachia, helping people in their daily activities etc... The clan Gecko Operation is the most active clan in our community and their leader Goupil (who is the most committed man I ever met) has become the head administrator of our Discord. They organize many different types of activities. Some of which are unique bi-weekly group activities such as exploring nuked zones to find new wildlife, plants or creatures, helping people in building projects, finding materials or specific items, and helping people soloing their first nuclear silo with the as few spoilers as possible. Last year's quarantine during the pandemic pushed us to launch new IRL projects but nothing has been announced yet, so I prefer not to spoil anything.”

One of the Fallout 76 clans in Fallout Génération has started their own monthly newspaper for the community. He explains that “Clan Operation Gecko was created from members of the Fallout Generation community and has been present in Fallout 76 since the beginning. With a focus on PvE, its members play together. Sharing the experience of walking through the Fallout universe with other players, experiencing these journeys together is what binds them together. Fallout 76 is a multiplayer game that evolves, time passes, and Appalachia changes, it lives. That's why we've decided to publish a monthly Gazette that let you discover Appalachia and its surprises. It mainly gives you survival tips and tricks, talks about in-game news, and most importantly it does so with Fallout style humor.”

For the amount of time that Fallout Génération has been around, the online world has seen quite a few platforms for communication come and go. When it came to evolving with the emerging programs and web portals like Discord, HawK-EyE explains that “The website is used as a portal for the rest of our platforms. Our community is on most social networks, but it's quite hard to keep being active everywhere so it depends if some of our members are experienced with a specific network.”

“We are a forum-based community, but we always had some sort of chatbox or voice-based server (mumble/IRC/etc...) for all our events and our multiplayers games. It’s always been clear for us that the quality (not quantity) of the interactions is much lower on a chatbox than on a permanent text-based version. We found the forums much more effective in terms of organization, centralization, navigation, and dispersion of information in general (also because it's indexed from external search engines and publicly accessible). But we think all platforms are useful and complementary. For example, we have a dedicated channel on our discord to gather all feedback for bugs and suggestions for Fallout 76 on which people can vote for the "most important/most annoying feature/bug" and then we organize them in our bugtracker in the website and report back to Bethsoft for what was the most voted ones. We have a big project for a new design, nothing announced yet but if it works it's going to be really nice.”

“We tend to get the best of everything rather than focusing on one only and we try our best to delegate tasks but this can be quite exhausting to maintain, especially for a small number of volunteers. Even though many ask us to spend time with them on Discord, we try to not foster it and we prefer to spend as much time as we can on our forums or our wiki, because we know that this time will be much more rewarding and useful for the community than on a semi-private chat room At the end of the day, we find that our Wiki may be the most effective place to spend time on, which is why some of our admins are almost 100% dedicated to it (e.g. Kharmitch who has done an incredible job over the years and who is always adding new features and content - love you bro).”

If you’re considering joining Fallout 76 for the first time, HawK-EyE has this advice to give: “Just come and play, and do not worry about anything else. The game itself is not the most complex but the amount of information you can get if you really dive into it can be overwhelming. If you want to explore this universe in good company, with experienced people who will help you discover everything at your own pace and help you find new friends to play with, this is the place for you.”

We thank HawK-EyE for taking the time to talk to us about the amazing community at Fallout Génération. We look forward to all the creative projects they dive into! You can find Fallout Génération on their website, Youtube, Twitch, and on Facebook.

We’ll see you in the Wasteland!