Fallout Underwhelmed by Fallout :(

[Vault Dweller]

I agree with you that some leeway in consistency is admissable. I mean, evne in our own world there're things which might defy explanation: ufos, ghosts, bermuda triangle, bigfoot, science results being misinterpreted, inertia, etc. Certainly, science has a good hold on local things in our universe, but if a game was modelled almost 100% on this world, it'd have to have some room for leniency just because not everyone can be on the same page. In fact, I'd argue some freedom would be MORE realistic!

First, the issue isn't the unexplained paranormal but the indefensible retardedness like the yakuza, the gansters from the 30s, the kung-fu town, the straight out of fantasy ghost, the scientologists with celebrities, etc.

As for ghost in the modern world, it's one thing to portray them in a pseudo-realistic fashion (i.e. an unexplained phenomenon, assuming it is a phenomenon in the first place). It's quite another to use a typical fantasy design - ghost need itam, get item, ghost happy, ghost friend with human, xp++.

 

[Zombra]

The only problem is on what grounds would a player think that's a good choice? Taken prisoner?

One important note is I don't "save scum" to learn about the game or gain benefits. I only reload a savegame if I died.

If you only reload on Game Over, then you should know that there's some awesome stuff to see sometimes if you are "defeated" but not taken to Game Over.

I never go into a situation with the intent of dying or gaining any benefits from it whatsoever.

Seeing cool content is a benefit. If you only "role-play" characters who never fail at anything and who only perform actions based on your metaknowledge of profit, you are really missing out.

I don't remember the ghoul prisoner thing at all, but it sounds like a fantastic plotline and well worth playing through.

 

[Infinitron]

OK so now I find myself "exploring" yet another two quest town mostly filled with feral ghouls, then diving into sewers killing rats looking for a piece of junk... This game feels so "lite" and half baked in every way that it makes BG1 look like a work of genius in comparison. The Hub was a brief respite from all the issues I've had, but dunno how much more of this I can take, at this point I am just hateplaying the game.

That's not really a town, it's more like a dungeon with some NPCs in it. Enjoy the atmosphere as best you can. Also, if you haven't done so yet, there's the matter of returning to Vault 13...

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

The reason I never played Fallout 2 was that I was underwhelmed by Fallout 1. It is a game I'm determined to play properly at some point in my life though, or will I? Who knows.

 

[Nevill]

The only problem is on what grounds would a player think that's a good choice? Taken prisoner? That's like being offered to be handcuffed and executed when the sun goes down? I know I wouldn't take it unless I wanted to work with the mutants. If that's the intent, fine, but if not then it's not really an option unless you have a means to escape at anytime beforehand.

I think a lot of times in FO1 I felt vulnerable and was very cautious about my choices regarding potential conversation paths. This is why I comment now. One important note is I don't "save scum" to learn about the game or gain benefits. I only reload a savegame if I died, and I never go into a situation with the intent of dying or gaining any benefits from it whatsoever.

You surrender on the grounds that a level 5 melee character can't really kill 6 supermutants with heavy weapons in Necropolis (or at least, he is not supposed to), and there is a choice between being captured and being shot while the game does not usually bother with it in most situations. I did it just out of curiosity.

Another reason to do it in the endgame where you can take the muties out is to bypass the security and go straight to the main boss. You have the same option available at the Cathedral, where the Nightkin guards can take you to the Master past the tunnel of psychic horrors if you agree to come quietly. If you didn't grab a protective helmet, you get to be blind and half-crazy after the final battle, not prior to it, which is not that small of a benefit.

There is also the fact that leaving the Military Base is easier than breaking in. It is a high risk, high reward approach.

It's the same with Jagged Alliance 2. You can get ambushed, surrender, and kill Deidranna when she comes to mock the captives in prison, ending the game in a matter of hours. It is awesome when the game allows you to do that.

Oh, and about save scumming. The game opened to me only when I started playing Ironman. When I felt that in 80% of cases I am going to die anyway to some stupid mistake on my part, I stopped caring about optimal paths and best rewards and started doing things for fun.

I remember how my first Ironman playthrough of Fallout 2 (after about 30 failed attempts) ended with killing Frank Horrigan with an explosion from a Phaser Rifle that blew up in my hands because I have built a melee character with a Jinxed Trait. Those were fun times.

 

[Lhynn]

First, a "more of the same" sequel hardly counts. Second, it doesn't do anything better. It simply piles up more shit (moar guns! kung-fu! a kung-fu city! gangsters in suits and fedoras! aliens! scientologists! ghosts! giant robots! Yakuza with katanas! talking deathclaws!).

This sounds p. fucking awesome tbh.

But yeah, fallout 1 is simply better in every way that matters. Not because its "less silly", but because it handles those "silly" elements in a much better way, integrating them to the world in a way that feels natural.

 

[MasPingon]

roshan, you are too obvious, no one even bother.

 

[DalekFlay]

I'm all for subjective viewpoints and honesty but not liking Fallout should really result in a ban.

 

[laclongquan]

What the hell. Why?

It's a little too personal, too close to home. Vietnam in the 80s is pretty much like the period immediately after Dark Time but not before rebuilding. If it's any worse than that I just dont want to contemplate the visions. It's a bit too desperate struggles for my taste.

Dark Time. It sounds like adventures. Anyone got a little brain in their head know adventures is deep shit cover somebody we dont know in a faraway land. If it's somebody we know, in a land nearby, it would be tragedy. Dont like much tragedy, either.

Aaaaanyway, if you (not you, Surf) feel Fallout is too bland, Fallout 2 would be more to your liking.

 

[roshan]

I'm all for subjective viewpoints and honesty but not liking Fallout should really result in a ban.

What's so good about this game? So far it's turned out to be a failure in almost every respect.....

 

[roshan]

The reason I never played Fallout 2 was that I was underwhelmed by Fallout 1. It is a game I'm determined to play properly at some point in my life though, or will I? Who knows.

Play it, it's really good, one of the best RPGs ever made.

 

[Jaesun]

 

[MRY]

Good thoughts.

It sounds like we experienced the game in much the same way, but I've always attributed that to my own character failings -- having been raised on jRPGs, with my only PC RPGs prior to Fallout being Daggerfall (which I never completed), Might and Magic 2 (which I never completed), various Unlimited Adventures modules, and Dark Sun: Shattered Lands. One thing Fallout failed to do was educate a useless person like me as to how to better play the game; that's consistent with the Infinitron theory of it feeling like an unpolished indie title. (The weakness of that theory is that the production values of the game are through the roof.) But when you read about the variety of ways you could play the game, it's hard not to be impressed. The game works best if you aren't save-scumming / outcome-maximizing and are experimenting with skills and the environment, but very few players these days have those traits today (if they ever did); we need condor puppets to teach us to eat.

Truth be told, I can't even begin to tell you how half the stuff in Fallout worked -- like the aimed shot system, all I ever did was shoot at the eyes like some BG2 familiar; never tried the stat-boosting drugs (since I assumed they were the classic "short term upside, longterm downside" trap that you want to avoid, even though I suspect they could make the game quite interesting); and I believe that I may have been unaware of the existence of followers my first time through the game, as impossible as that seems in hindsight. For all that incompetence on my part, the game is an unshakable experience.

By FO2, I "got it," but the game left very little impression on me, other than that I recall a sequence where you can steal a Mafioso's drugs, ingest them out of his wife's mouth while sleeping with her, sleep with his daughter, then kill him, which probably is the best mustache-twirling villainy this side of force-compelling Zalbaar to kill Mission. I mean, I remember the endless series of zany jokes and I remember thinknig they they squandered great graphics, engine, quest design, and preexisting setting. But it's not like I have any "feeling" from the game the way I do from Fallout, or PS:T, or Dark Sun or the other games I played in the same era.

random criticals

I suspect that you, like me, used "luck" as a dump stat. If you don't do that, the random criticals are apparently quite rare.

Anyway, I'm bowing out!

 

[J_C]

Requesting Infinitron to change the title of the thread to: Underwhelmed by Fallout (also Fallout 2 is shit). Then the Codex should be burned to the ground.

 

[Jaesun]

It should just be merged (with the Vastly Superior Original) LOL Fallout sucks thread. This thread is shit and is not delivering.

 

[groke]

"Fallout" should be wordfiltered to "Fallout 2" (and vice-versa).

 

[Sykar]

What's so good about this game? So far it's turned out to be a failure in almost every respect.....

Sigh...
Ok look it this way, there are plenty of people who buy really old cars for ridiculous amounts of money. Now is such a car from over let's say 50 or 70 years ago better than a car made more recently, especially in terms of safety and fuel consumption, not to mention emissions and noise generation or even comfort? Most likely not. Yet they still enjoy driving them despite their shortcomings.
Same with old trains. Plenty of people enjoy the annual joyride on a vintage well preserved steam train, despite modern trains being outright superior in ever god damn aspect.

 

[roshan]

It should just be merged (with the Vastly Superior Original) LOL Fallout sucks thread. This thread is shit and is not delivering.

Can anyone even refute anything that has been said about Fallout 1? All it's fans are able to do is reflexively lash out at Fallout 2. For reference here are my impressions of the game, from an earlier post:

OK, so here are my overall impressions of Fallout so far (I'm at Necropolis now, got bored so I'm taking a break):

1. Setting - Good

I appreciate the "purity" of the setting in Fallout. So far aside from Loxley with his British accent, most things have felt totally in place. However it also suffers from a lack of being fleshed out. You don't see communities struggling with starvation, or lack of water, and rarely do you even see individuals struggling against each other or against environmental forces. Everything feels too settled and stable, and very often the gameworld actually feels boring.

2. Intrigue - Very Poor

Unfortunately, there is no discovery factor so far. There is nothing to unravel, almost everything is at face value. Unlike in Fallout 2 where you could unwrap the tangled relationships between different towns and factions (for example, the families in Reno were allied with various external forces such as the Salvatores and the Enclave, the power struggle over Broken Hills, etc). There just seems to be very little to nothing going on "behind the scenes" in Fallout.

3. Content - Utterly Pathetic

Most areas are completely empty and have nothing to do. Shady Sands west has only the two central quests and no one to interact with except 4 NPCs all related to those quests. Shady Sands east is empty and useless. Junktown has 3 areas with 3 quests distributed across these areas. Necropolis area one has nothing to do except kill feral ghouls, and underground you waste time on 3 molerats. Vault 15 has nothing to do as well except kill rats, etc. The most content rich town is so far the Hub but that is only comparable to the Den, and quests are mostly localized. Perhaps 95% of all NPCs in the game are civilians and guards with only floating text, and out of the rest 2 out of 3 NPCs are useless to talk to and ignorable during a replay.

4. Reactivity - Poor

This is in relation to content. If a game has as few quests as Fallout, the gameworld could at least react to those quests. It's a shame for example that in Junktown no one even recognizes that Gizmo has been disposed off given that was the main quest in the town. Even after siding with Killian, he resets to his default dialogue as if you were a stranger that just wandered into the shop. Basic options such as being able to report Doc Morbid, or reporting the iguana guy are not even available. I can forgive lack of reactivity in a content rich game, but in a content poor game, these become much more glaring flaws.

5. Connectivity - Very Poor

It's funny how fans claim that the towns in Fallout 2 exist in isolation, whereas in fact most towns in Fallout 1 really don't interconnect at all. The only "glue" actually turning this whole thing into a setting instead of a random pastiche of small and uninteresting settlements is the Hub with the caravans going out to other towns.

6. Dialogue - Very Poor to Functional, with a few high points.

There's rarely any flow to dialogue, it often ends randomly like the designers couldn't be bothered to link various dialogue nodes, much of it is amateurish, some of it terribad (like in the Khans). Usually the best it approaches is functional, with the high points basically being some of the Vault Dweller's smartass comments and a few key characters (the jokes about Gizmo, for example and most of the Hub's major characters are generally well written).

7. "More than the sum of it's parts" factor - Good

All that being said, this game does have it's charm, it's fucking Fallout afterall. And for some reason despite being severely flawed is still overall a good game - weirdly enough, and I can't explain it myself.

ADDENDUM:

I can see how this game could be a lot better during a replay, simply because it is very possible to basically blind yourself to all it's flaws, which is probably why it has so many fans. If you already know that no one will react to Gizmo being killed, you won't bother talking to them anymore. If you know that 3/4 characters will have shitty dialogue and are of no consequence, you can simply ignore them, if you know an area is actually empty you won't bother exploring anything, you won't waste time looking into containers most of which turn up empty, or looking for quests where there are none to be found. But as a first timer, particularly one already used to Fallout 2, Arcanum and other games, it's a really disappointing and overall crappy experience finding mostly empty towns, characters, containers, etc. Basically, I now understand what it's like to play Baldur's Gate 2 and PST first and then move on to BG1 afterwards.

I would also add now that in general, world building in Fallout 1 is quite poor. Even Icewind Dale did a massively better job at this, with memorable dungeons like the Severed Hand with centuries of history behind them. You have areas like Junktown and Hub which basically have more guards than civilians, there is just no effort put into making the various "towns" feel like real locations. And most places are so poorly fleshed out, you don't even see, for example, where the Hub's water comes from, or how settlements like Junktown came to be. Whereas settlements like Broken Hills in Fallout have histories behind them that tie in to current politics of those locations.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Fallout 2 has been regarded by many on these boards as some kind of rushed hackjob by Black Isle's incompetent "B-team", while the real masterpiece from the real masters was Fallout 1. But the truth is that other than being rushed, Fallout 2 was clearly the more professional project, made by the more experienced RPG designers.

If Fallout 2 hadn't been rushed, I don't believe there would have been any question at all about which was the higher quality game. Fallout 1 was the real "B-game", a low budget project that succeeded beyond everybody's expectations.

I played FO2 first and remember how surprised I was at how much more big-budget FO1 felt when I did end up playing it. More and better looking talking heads, with great voice actors and (seemingly) more dialogue, more and better cutscenes (dat mutant assault fail state). Amazingly, given that FO2 rehashed most of them, even the sprites looked better in FO1 (with the Overseer and the helmet-less PA's for example). The decline in quality of the inventory item art from FO1 to 2 is also huge (even FO:T has better inventory item art).

It was also far more focussed on a (far better) overarching plot. Despite it's higher degree of quest connectivity, FO1 still felt more as a whole than FO2 because most of the areas fit into the main plot quite beautifully (I don't think the "theme-park" stuff has much to do with this lack of cohesiveness tbh). Also, compare the holodisks of FO1 and FO2, the former almost all provide a background to the main plot, the latter are mostly either sidequest/location related or give general background of the setting.

I still love FO2 about as much because of the better quest design, (slight) mechanical improvements and hugeness, but I can't see how you can get the lower budget/less professional vibe from FO1.

 

[Infinitron]

I played FO2 first and remember how surprised I was at how much more big-budget FO1 felt when I did end up playing it. More and better looking talking heads, with great voice actors and (seemingly) more dialogue, more and better cutscenes (dat mutant assault fail state). Even with FO2 rehashing most of them, the sprites still looked better in FO1 (with the Overseer and the helmet-less PA's for example). The decline in quality of the inventory item art from FO1 to 2 is also huge (even FO:T has better inventory item art).

Yes, the frilly stuff in FO2 suffered somewhat from it being rushed. MRY mentioned high production quality. A more accurate description of Fallout 1 would be "indie game that had all sorts of big budget frills like talking heads and 3D cutscenes pasted into it when the Interplay execs realized it was looking promising".

Actual game content, on the other hand...

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Yes, the frilly stuff in FO2 suffered somewhat from it being rushed. MRY mentioned high production quality. A more accurate description of Fallout 1 would be "indie game that had all sorts of big budget frills like talking heads and 3D cutscenes pasted into it when the Interplay execs realized it was looking promising".

Actual game content, on the other hand...

I doubt most people would agree with you that art, dialogue and plot are frills in rpg's and that only sidequests counts as game content.

 

[Infinitron]

I doubt most people would agree with you that art, dialogue and plot are frills in rpg's and that only quests counts as game content.

Uh, I don't see why I should be particularly impressed by Fallout's plot or dialogue.

"Stop an army of mutants from taking over the Wasteland!" Wow, such plot. Heck, it's an obvious rehash of Wasteland's plot, but with mutants instead of robots. FO2 may have tone issues but it's definitely more interesting.

As for dialogue, roshan has said all that needs to be said about that. And as for art, I never really noticed much of a difference?

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Uh, I don't see why I should be particularly impressed by Fallout's plot or dialogue.

"Stop an army of mutants from taking over the Wasteland!" Wow, such plot. Heck, it's an obvious rehash of Wasteland's plot, but with mutants instead of robots. When did this become great writing? FO2 may have tone issues but it's definitely more interesting.

I absolutely loved the plot, especially how compelling the Master was as a villain compared to the President in FO2. Instead of adapting post-apocalyptic circumstances to humanity, adapt humanity to fit these circumstances; the President's plan to murder 95% of humanity for being impure is far less interesting.

Most importantly for an rpg-plot is how well the gameworld supports it; from the holodisks I mentioned to how the different factions related to the main quest (even in far flung places like the Hub and Necropolis there's interactions between locals and the Mutants and the Children, and quests involving you in them; in FO2 almost everyone was entirely apathetic/oblivious) FO1 creates a far more interesting plot than FO2 (or any other CRPG with the possible exception of Torment).

 

[Infinitron]

(even in far flung places like the Hub and Necropolis there's interactions between locals and the Mutants and the Children

See, this is a good example of what I said about Fallout 1 fans reacting more to their sense of what the game was trying to do than to what it actually does.

Yes, there was a CotC representation in those two locations, but what did they actually do? Not much. The only thing I remember about the Children in the Hub is that their leader chick was an assassination target for the criminal underworld for some reason (I don't think that was ever really explained?) and I'm pretty sure the Necropolis one didn't do anything at all.

Fallout 1 is sparse. Fallout 1 is raw. It is super-indie. I can understand the charm of that, and how the small size of it really lets you understand the game to its very depths which is a satisfying feeling, but it is what it is.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

See, this is a good example of what I said about Fallout 1 fans reacting more to their sense of what the game was trying to do than to what it actually does.

Yes, there was a CotC representation in those two locations, but what did they actually do? Not much. The only thing I remember about the Children in the hub is that their leader chick was an assassination target for the criminal underworld for some reason (I don't think that was ever really explained?) and I'm pretty sure the Necropolis one didn't do anything at all.

Fallout 1 is sparse. Fallout 1 is raw. It is super-indie. I can understand the charm of that, and how the small size of it really lets you understand the game to its very depths which is a satisfying feeling, but it is what it is.

Okay, then explain how FO2 fit locations into the mainplot better, and less "indie"-like. You wouldn't have been making this fake argument all along just to criticize both Fallout 1 and 2, and their entire fan-base now would you Infinitron, that wouldn't at all be like you.

Also, I was talking about the Mutants and their relation to Seth in Necropolis, not the Children.

edit: eh, it doesn't matter, I don't even know what I'm arguing anymore, I always try to read your ulterior motives for some reason and that just removes the point of every discussion, sorry about that.