Fallout 4 fan used a couple of mods to turn the game into a gritty trench shooter with Warhammer 40k vibes

Every Fallout game opens with a reminder that war never changes, yet the series barely shows players the war itself. The nuclear apocalypse happens offscreen, and the hero emerges into the ruins decades or even centuries later. It's a funny paradox: a franchise built entirely on the aftermath of war has kept players away from the front line for nearly three decades.

One player decided to fix that and posted a two-minute clip from Fallout 4 on Reddit. It shows a full-scale battle: Brotherhood of Steel paladins in power armor hold the line, Vertibirds circle overhead and crash down after being hit, and heavy vehicles cover the infantry. Just two mods are behind it. Fallout Commander (FCOM) lets players command an entire platoon of NPCs, while a set of APC and tank turrets adds armor that, admittedly, can't drive.

The clip immediately reminded players of Operation Anchorage, the Fallout 3 add-on released in 2009. In it, the hero relived the liberation of Anchorage from the Chinese army on the eve of the Great War through a military simulation. The idea was ambitious but ran into engine limits, and instead of frontline hell it turned out to be a tidy stroll with a handful of soldiers. One commenter summed it up as "The operation Anchorage DLC we deserved vs what we got."

From there, the dream of a pre-war prologue for future games grew naturally. Fallout 4 technically starts before the bombs fall, but it's limited to a morning in the suburbs, even though protagonist Nate went through the Alaskan front himself. The Amazon series, with its look at Cooper Howard's military past, only added fuel to the fire, and a neat structure was floated online:

Prologue section set in the pre apocalypse war, then a "200 years later" transition to an almost identical looking war happening in the post apocalypse. War, war never changes.

Someone went further and suggested starting the game as an ordinary human and continuing as a ghoul after the nuclear strike, with pre-war decisions shaping the story. Comparisons to Warhammer 40K came up too: armor-clad zealots with slogans about steel do look like relatives of the Space Marines. Skeptics with a military eye showed up as well, noting that these "knights" stand at full height in front of anyone with a rocket launcher. The series has no cover system, and the closest thing to digging in is plain crouching.

Bethesda has been promising a big Fallout war in its opening line for more than twenty years, yet a couple of fan mods and a player willing to put up with FPS drops were the ones to show it.