New Fallout Fan's First Playthrough Of Fallout 1/2

Uber Morpth

Uber Morpth

First time out of the vault
Recently I completed my first Fallout 1 playthrough and currently on Fallout 2, I must say as both these games are from the late 90s they surprisingly hold up in the graphical and gameplay department along with the role-play elements. I'll just be listing a few noteworthy things about each game for what I liked/disliked.

Gameplay: I'll be honest at first I was thinking I'm gonna heavily dislike the turn based combat system but It grew on me overtime and I eventually liked it, one good thing is got going is the fact it requires some amount of thought to how you engage the enemy or don't with the conversation system, in some parts it can get quiet a bit dull with having to wait for the animations to play out (I even played on the games max combat speed and it still felt slow to me).

Another is the V.A.T.S's targeting system which I see much better then in the newer games, not only able to target their eyes/groin and afflicting blindness or knocking them unconscious respectively made me realize how much better the system could of been in the newer games.

Last would be that most semi auto weapon has a normal and or burst fire mode, I liked this as it allows for the different classes of weapons to be unique in their role and whenever to use the single or burst fire in some cases.

Graphics: I genuinely love the art style of both games, any particular character having a talking head made em truly unique compared to the other npc's and they still look great to this day. The sprites also look quiet nice my favorites being the super mutants, when I first saw the mutants were able to one hand a minigun due to their mass strength was an amazing attention to detail (really made me wish the new mutants were more like this.)

I even enjoyed the overworld look of the map, and the towns/settlements themselves highlights were Lost Hill's, Arroyo, NCR, Vault City and Navarro, even in the random encounters areas they would mostly match with the corresponding environment which again is a nice attention to detail.

Role-Playing: I was surprised with a multitude of the choices and options I had even on my first character run (and what other ones might be there I didn't discover yet), getting directions to places in a smart way instead of a map marker, dedicated low int or high int dialogue that would be actually hidden unless you had previous knowledge on the subject by discussing it to others about it instead of a speech skill check, my favorite example has to be with The Master where you can bring up the fact his mutant's were sterile but only if you talked to one of the head paladin scribes about this.

Overall I enjoyed my time with both of these games and as I continue Fallout 2 I imagine I'll love it as much as Fallout 1 or even more as I am so far, even coming from someone who's only played the new fallout games (I love new vegas still but 1 and 2 are up there now in my favorites.)
 
Turn based combat is an odd beast from my experience. I don't think i have played one where i didn't find it boring in early game, but then it starts to ramp up in the late early game to mid game and it gets a lot of fun.

A recent example of one i played was Underrail which is honestly pretty boring in the beginning, but like around 8 levels into the game it gets a lot of fun and around the mid game it gets ridiculous to the point that i actively want to fight things.

It also applies to Fallout 1 and 2 to me, the early game can be pretty boring combat wise, but when you start getting good weapons and getting to the perks you want to use, it gets pretty fun.
 
Norzan said:
Turn based combat is an odd beast from my experience. I don't think i have played one where i didn't find it boring in early game, but then it starts to ramp up in the late early game to mid game and it gets a lot of fun.

A recent example of one i played was Underrail which is honestly pretty boring in the beginning, but like around 8 levels into the game it gets a lot of fun and around the mid game it gets ridiculous to the point that i actively want to fight things.

It also applies to Fallout 1 and 2 to me, the early game can be pretty boring combat wise, but when you start getting good weapons and getting to the perks you want to use, it gets pretty fun.
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At first with the Rat's and Scorpion's I fought missing 50/50 of the time I had my worries as you said it can be quiet dull in the beginning, but I think around the time I got to The Hub and had decent stat's/equipment at this point I started liking the combat a hell of a lot more. More so in Fallout 2 with the god awful tutorial level but afterwords I enjoyed it again.
 
Atomic Postman said:
For isometric turn based is a necessity IMO. I cannot stand Real Time With Pause combat at all.
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I wouldn't mind it as real time as much if you couldn't spam healing items out the ass ( like in 3 and new vegas), I actually liked it when they made it so stimpacks wouldn't insta heal on use in 4 but I get why is turned based in 1 and 2.
 
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I like all the primary and secondary stats that are involved in Fallout and Fallout 2 because they're very directly applicable to tabletop rules, and real-time just renders all of that to be completely thoughtless spam clicking. In my experience of isometric RPGs anyway.
 
Atomic Postman said:
I like all the primary and secondary stats that are involved in Fallout and Fallout 2 because they're very directly applicable to tabletop rules, and real-time just renders all of that to be completely thoughtless spam clicking. In my experience of isometric RPGs anyway.
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I do wish the Medicine skill wasn't just the end all be all of healing skills, I liked First Aid and Doctor existing (although from a gameplay perspective I found Doctor more useful then First Aid.)
 
When designing my Fallout PnP rulebook I did some major rework on Doctor and First Aid and yeah I think they need to be independent skills.
 
Atomic Postman said:
For isometric turn based is a necessity IMO. I cannot stand Real Time With Pause combat at all.
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I can tolerate it, but yeah, I'd rather just have turn based. Though I consider Witcher 1 and KOTOR 1 and 2 to be RTwP, I consider that to be decent for some reason. Their combat doesn't make me want to die.
 
Genres suck. You can't define things other than their impact. If they make an impact, then it becomes "A new genre."

"I like this or I like that." What you really mean is, "I like things that don't suck." One could say this is conjecture, but I would look at how certain genres of media encapsulate the attention of young people and also have mainstream appeal even after their paradigm has ended.
 
Mr. Grandma said:
Genres suck. You can't define things other than their impact. If they make an impact, then it becomes "A new genre."

"I like this or I like that." What you really mean is, "I like things that don't suck." One could say this is conjecture, but I would look at how certain genres of media encapsulate the attention of young people and also have mainstream appeal even after their paradigm has ended.
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I suppose back then when I was a younger Bethesda fanboy I wouldn't of found Fallout 1 or 2 to be not fun because back then turn based games were "boring" to me compared to the fun rump fps fallout has become, makes me wonder if my generation would ever play games like fallout 1 or even heard about em.
 
Mr. Grandma said:
Genres suck. You can't define things other than their impact. If they make an impact, then it becomes "A new genre."

"I like this or I like that." What you really mean is, "I like things that don't suck." One could say this is conjecture, but I would look at how certain genres of media encapsulate the attention of young people and also have mainstream appeal even after their paradigm has ended.
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Real time with pause isn't a genre though, it is a specific gameplay feature. That is much easier and more fair to write-off when you consistently don't enjoy it than a genre.
 
That's why people call them "Genre defining features." Some do some do not.
 
As a general rule I prefer turn based combat; especially for party based games. But I do not like major mechanics reversal/swaps for series games. I would not like turn based in a Dawn of War 4, or Spacemarine 2; nor having realtime combat in Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus.
 
Never played it; never owned a game console.
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Sequels that stray from series is what I described. I would say no of a GoldenEye 2 having turn based combat; but not of GoldenEye 1—since it would obviously have been their intent.

EDIT:
* I would have been more okay with FO3, if they had designed the combat to play a bit more like Superhot; still with APs though.




But even that is not truly right for the Fallout games.
 
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I'd say spinoffs that go turn based when the main series is not are fine. Age of Mythology DS is actually a pretty solid tactics turn based game and the main series is real time.
 
Norzan said:
It also applies to Fallout 1 and 2 to me, the early game can be pretty boring combat wise, but when you start getting good weapons and getting to the perks you want to use, it gets pretty fun.
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The combat is one thing that I will always say Bethesda did a better job at in terms of re-activeness and general fun. But that came at the cost of everything else that made those games flawed masterpieces. (This is not including New Vegas, that game was incredible)
 
Fallout was envisioned (before development) as a G.U.R.P.S. simulator. They lost the IP license, so they made their own, but the game was essentially the one they had in mind after three years of working on it.

FO_GURPS.jpg


So, Bethesda did not improve on anything, they simply replaced it with the combat from Oblivion; about as far from appropriate as can be imagined.
(This is a common thread with them.)

As to which is better job, or more fun—that's up to the player preference of course.

For myself, I find the Fallout combat reactions better than any reaction found in FO3, and as to what's more general fun... well... FO3 has a strike against it merely because it is not based on the series combat system—all merit aside, it starts off in the negative. In an RPG, I prefer to calculate my PC's options, and see them play out. In an RPG, strike & damage rolls are reflective of accuracy—not so when the player sees the barrel centered on the forehead. In FO3 those rolls can be low even with the barrel pressed to the skin. Headshots in VATS can miss if the hips are obscured by cover.

I have played Quake for 24 hours straight, before, and loved it (not only that... I didn't realize it had been more than 1 hour. I started at 7:00, and quit when the clock said 8:00 (and wondered why the Sun wasn't setting), but Quake is a shooter.

FO3 devs made the mistake of humoring the RPG combat heritage in a player directed interaction; meaning that the player aims & fires the weapon instead of the character—that's strike two against them, because it actively damages the FPS feel and reactivity of the shooter combat; ostensibly for the RPG aspect—which it doesn't really have. This is the principle reason you see players able to shoot NPC's 32 times in the head, and they shrug it off until the very last hit. That's not an improvement for a game of any style. (But who is to say what is fun?)

 
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An FPS is an inherently weaker format for RPG combat because in an isometric a pacifist non-combatant character literally couldn't fight even if they wanted to. Whereas in an FPS RPG every character is one decision away from being a player controlled John Wick.

You could offset this by doing things like making reloading speed, recoil control, bullet spread et cetera heavily dependant on weapon skill but it's still not quite the same.
 
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