Fallout 1's and 2'd character creation screen is the best.

[Average Manatee]

That weird feeling when you're reading a thread, see a good post, try to agree and you realize it's yourself.

They especially fucked up with outdoorsman, which should be a seriously powerful skill. Just think about it. Just getting from town to town takes up about a week. It should provide a plenty opportunities to use that skill - like hunting, scavenging, searching for water, etc.

Outdoorsman made perfect sense in Fallout 1, a game where both main quests are on a timeline and even if you can accomplish them there's actual effects in how fast or slow you get things done. Same goes for stuff like Doctor/First aid, where healing yourself fairly quickly on the spot is much preferable to being forced to rest for weeks. Similarly skill books weren't quite as OP since they took a bit of time to read a bunch of them.

Obviously this was lost in the translation to Fallout 2. Or rather I'm guessing they axed it after players got annoyed in FO1, since FO2 has the dream sequences yet nothing ever comes of them.

 

[laclongquan]

How the fuck do you even find a 5 year old thread to reply to without intentionally looking for one?

Nothing gets lost in the Internet. Nothing. Your words are in black and white for eternity, waiting for someone to brag them out of the sewers of Hell *spooky music plays*

I said spooky music, not X-Files theme! Someone shoot the music director!

That was, sadly, the illusion. Wayback machine can only store certain information at certain layer. Once it goes deeper, it can be not archived and therefore lost.

As the loss of community data of Prince of Qin cockslap me during my replays way back when. There's a huge source of experimental data regarding item creation that will not be replicable unless you got a big number of fans with hard-on for experimental minigame like in PoQ's.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

That weird feeling when you're reading a thread, see a good post, try to agree and you realize it's yourself.

They especially fucked up with outdoorsman, which should be a seriously powerful skill. Just think about it. Just getting from town to town takes up about a week. It should provide a plenty opportunities to use that skill - like hunting, scavenging, searching for water, etc.

Outdoorsman made perfect sense in Fallout 1, a game where both main quests are on a timeline and even if you can accomplish them there's actual effects in how fast or slow you get things done. Same goes for stuff like Doctor/First aid, where healing yourself fairly quickly on the spot is much preferable to being forced to rest for weeks. Similarly skill books weren't quite as OP since they took a bit of time to read a bunch of them.

Obviously this was lost in the translation to Fallout 2. Or rather I'm guessing they axed it after players got annoyed in FO1, since FO2 has the dream sequences yet nothing ever comes of them.

I always modded out the time limit.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

C&C, bitch

It's a freaking wasteland, obviously you won't find energy weapons easily.

Is it so obvious? You can find energy weapons right at the start of Fallout 3 and New Vegas. There's nothing indicating "this skill is only used in the endgame if you're not metagaming" because you have no idea how powerful energy weapons are in comparison to the others because they don't actually exist (unlike the small guns/big guns comparison).

Half the fun of Fallout was discovering which build was effective and what skills could be used where.

Making uninformed choices is never fun.

The game was from the manual era. When buying Fallout as it was published, you'd get an awesome manual that should be read before playing.

The manual has an equipment list that lists various types of weapons and armour (possibly standard Vault equipment before depletion?) including:

10mm Pistol
10mm SMG
Hunting Rifle
Assault Rifle
Grenades
Throwing Knives
Knives
Club
Sledgehammer


This is basically the list of stuff you can count on finding in the beginning of the game. There's literally zero Big Guns and Energy Weapons on the list. When the game gives you an "Equipment List" which has zero weapons from some category, it communicates that these are late game weapons.
Of course writing that stuff like this isn't in Vault inventory in-ingame skill description wouldn't hurt, but these were times when printed manuals were a standard element of game re-releases, so nobody would expect that years later people would buy the game in DVD box without manual.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

That weird feeling when you're reading a thread, see a good post, try to agree and you realize it's yourself.

They especially fucked up with outdoorsman, which should be a seriously powerful skill. Just think about it. Just getting from town to town takes up about a week. It should provide a plenty opportunities to use that skill - like hunting, scavenging, searching for water, etc.

Outdoorsman made perfect sense in Fallout 1, a game where both main quests are on a timeline and even if you can accomplish them there's actual effects in how fast or slow you get things done.

Wait, Outdoorsman drastically cuts travel time? Didn't know it. It doesn't matter because time isn't a real problem in the first place. I never had the time limit run out in game. Never.

It has next-to-no-effect on game because they made survival a non-problem.
You need about a gallon of water per day when travelling through a desert region. For example getting from Shady Sands to Junk Town takes 10 days without Outdoorsman skill. So, it should consume 10 gallons of water - which would require carrying about 90lbs of water bottles.
That drastically cuts character's carrying capacity.

Basically without good survival skills you need to carry massive amounts of supplies when travelling on foot. This would make Outdoorsman as important as combat skills.