Fallout Series Got Its Best Heroes Wrong
Even before the Fallout series of games spawned a hit new TV show, there was a very popular spinoff game about Vault management called Fallout Shelter. Recently, Bethesda released official Fallout Shelter character stats for some of our favorite characters from the show, including Lucy, Maximus, and the Ghoul.
It’s the kind of corporate synergy that would make Vault-Tec proud, but there’s just one problem: after you watch the show, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that some of these stats are completely wrong compared to what we see onscreen.
Lucy Is A Bit Off
For example, the Fallout Shelter stats for Lucy give the character a 5 in both Charisma and Agility.
While she obviously has plot armor (no fusion core required), it seems that she should have a higher Agility score to represent her uncanny ability to stay alive after leaving the cocoon of her Vault and wandering an unforgiving wasteland.
Arguably, her Charisma should be higher as well considering how she manages to win people over who should realistically just kill her and loot the body (sorry, Lucy, but that jerky has to come from somewhere).
The Ghoul Is Different As Well
One of the characters she wins over (albeit after a strange and tense journey together) is The Ghoul. And the biggest problem with his Fallout Shelter stats is that he has a Charisma of 7.
That high level of Charisma would have made sense back in the pre-nuke days when he was the world-famous movie star, Cooper Howard.
But in the wasteland, he has a brutally unforgiving attitude and a face that looks like that mutated punk from RoboCop…not the kind of guy that would normally be labeled as “highly charismatic.”
Maximus’s Luck
The final major character (sorry, Ma June, but you’re just a minor character in this television adaptation) who has Fallout Shelter stats is Maximus.
And like Lucy and The Ghoul, this Brotherhood of Steel character has some stats that don’t really line up with what we see onscreen.
Specifically, Maximus is a character that has a modest Luck stat of 5, but the character keeps surviving encounters that should kill him. Those range from the Yaoi Guai that killed Titus to a fight with The Ghoul himself. He’s quite literally the luckiest character in the show, basically blundering himself into a major leadership role by the end.
Also Some Intelligence Issues
Speaking of poor Maximus, many fans think that his Intelligence score, which is at a relatively low 4, really should have been more like a 1.
Thanks to his Brotherhood of Steel upbringing, this character is very ignorant about everything from sex to the date when the nukes dropped.
If he had been just smart enough to be honest with the Brotherhood about how Titus died and that he used the knight’s armor to continue this time-sensitive mission, he could have avoided multiple narrow scrapes with death.
Just Some Fallout Nitpicking
With all that said, the nitpicking about these Fallout Shelter stats is just that: nitpicking.
The fact that the Fallout show was so unexpectedly and inexplicably good means that all of the time the fandom would normally spend tearing a new genre show into rad roach meat is instead going to minor quibbles about Bethesda character stats.
Simply put, when stuff like this is all we have to complain about, you know the television adaptation of Fallout has been completely “okie-dokie” in the parlance of Vault 33.
Fallout Season 2
Now that a second season of the show has been greenlit, it will be interesting to see if Bethesda releases new Fallout Shelter stats to represent how Lucy and the other characters have grown over the course of their brutal trials and travels.
Honestly, though, I’d settle for the company to release more info about what kind of stats these characters would have in mainline games like Fallout 3 and Fallout 4.
Then we could have an answer to everyone’s burning question…Maximus just has to have the idiot savant perk, right?
