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Comment by mstade | Hacker News Reader

You really should try. They're clunky and old, but they are great stories with engaging narratives, interesting characters, and ambiance aplenty. Which is really what Fallout used to be about – great story telling – before Bethesda started ruining the franchise with cookie cutter narratives, simpleton characters, and being distinctly non-canon. (I appreciate artistic freedom as much as the next guy, but at some point you've created a different world and just slapped Fallout stickers onto it.)

What's odd to me is that the Fallout 4 Nuka-World DLC is much more engaging than the main story. Is this typical of games these days? Do a crappy "main" game but "fix it" with DLCs? Or is it just Bethesda and possibly even just Fallout?

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Another thing the old games has that Bethesda forgot about: replay value. I still play FO1 and FO2 every now and then, and still find things and side quests I never knew existed. And they are interesting – not just randomly generated "there are ghouls that are bothering me over there, plx 2 go and kill them kthnxbye" grinding crap. I've just finished Fallout 4 and can't for the life of me be bothered to play it again. I had fun, it's not a bad game, and I don't mind the price of admission, but just like Fallout 3 it'll end up in a box somewhere and I'll never care for it again.

Not so with FO1 and FO2 (my favorite being FO2) – I dread the day I can't play them anymore because they are too old.

Also, pro-tip: http://user.tninet.se/~jyg699a/fallout2.html

That guide has everything, it's awesome.

Are there any modern games that fall into the same category, do you think?

You could try Pillars of Eternity. Also, Fallout 3: New Vegas was done by Obsidian, not Bethesda, and Obsidian has many of the same staff that worked on the original Fallouts 1 and 2.

Pillars of Eternity is really fantastic. I dropped more hours than I'm willing to admit on that game and I might pick it up again when I have some more free time. I'm also really looking forward to playing Tyranny.

Fallout is itself a spiritual successor to a game called Wasteland, which is old enough to have been released on the Commodore 64. The people who made Fallout couldn't get the rights to Wasteland so they made Fallout. Well, now they have the rights, and you can pick up Wasteland 2 now: http://store.steampowered.com/app/240760/ Currently on sale 60% off, though I'll say I've seen it on sale quite a bit. I'm sure it'll be on sale Christmas again.

I cut my teeth on the original Wasteland (on an Apple 2) and am working my way through WL2 (haven't yet got to CA).

Wasteland 2 is good but buggy. There were some balance issues with the original and even though they went back and made a director's cut it's still not great. I'm most annoyed by the way that certain factions are hostile depending on where you are on the map (e.g. not based on actions).

You're just missing the Red Boots DLC. Makes everything perfect.

Warts and all I really enjoyed wasteland 2

I was disappointed my initial "balanced" party was very difficult to fight with, and I had to go back and remake a party where everyone uses assault rifles (and one sniper) and a backup melee weapon. I don't mind realism (in which that is the only sensible build for what our characters are doing, there is a reason real militaries carry around so many assault rifles), and I don't mind artificially balancing things out so that all weapons are equally valid or situationally useful, but don't tell me you did one on the hint screen, then do the other.

A funding campaign for Wasteland 3 recently completed successfully! https://www.fig.co/campaigns/wasteland-3

That's awesome, I didn't know this was happening! Would have backed it otherwise.

Hopefully they have the budget to have it nice and polished before release.

Age of Decadence and UnderRail are two modern games that were pretty heavily influenced by Fallout. AoD in particular has a lot of content that you won't see in a single playthrough.

UnderRail seems like it should be so, so cool, but the interface is rough and nothing quite feels right. I was pretty disappointed.

Underrail.

Shadowrun Dragonfall is reasonably close.

From one angle, Fallout New Vegas.

It's exactly what I'm trying to say to people that like fallout3/4 but don't know nothing about the FO1 and FO2.

Thumb up! I still play both of them too! and I will give a try to this 1.5 :) this made my day.

FO3 + NV have massive replayability, especially when combined with mods. People played those games over and over again, role playing totally different characters.

Your gut-feeling about Bethesda games lacking replay value is at odds with objective stats. Skyrim is even still in the top 10 played games today on Steam 5 years after release (and was a stubborn fixture in the top 10 even before the remaster)[1]. Fallout 3 + NV stayed there for years. Admittedly, FO4 dropped out quicker than usual, but a lot of people blame the constricting nature of a voiced protagonist. FO4 is nevertheless still in the top 20 for most players today a year after release.

So their games have definitely got replay value, they really get replay value. Their worlds are full of unique locations. I do admit they got something a bit wrong with FO4, but I think even they must realise that at this point given the player feedback.

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

To be fair, I'm positive that Skyrim's top 10 spot is due to mods. The modding community has done some crazy impressive stuff, up to and including complete gameplay overhauls.

Doesn't invalidate the point that Bethesda know how to make a game replayable, even if the answer is make it moddable.

Fair point. Far too few developers understand the value of an engaged, active community extending their game.

I wonder if the next Bethesda games will ever see such success after The Witcher 3. That game is so high above Fallout 4, in terms of quests, characters, and anything you could think about, that I seriously doubt Bethesda is capable of producing something that could even be compared.

Bethesda sure fucked something up with Fallout 4, but let's not go there.

Instead I thank you for encouraging to get back to the 1 & 2. I've bought the games off of GoG -- in several occasions mind you -- but never really got into them. Each generation of games is made easier and now it shows when you're supposed to get into the good ones. :( But I think I'll surrender myself to the spoilers and get Fo2 going.

I agree with the point about the grindy nature of Fallout 4. They seemed to think I would get excited to run through randomly generated side quests from unnamed NPCs that they couldn't even be bothered to create unique dialogue for.

Then they put in a little sting of failing some of these side quests if you don't play by their rules and jump on them before an undisclosed amount of time elapses. At that point, if you want go back to avoid the quest failure you need to revert to earlier save and lose some of your progress.

  > You really should try.

I know, I know! I really have tried, but apparently I have to adult more than I used to these days :( I'm fully expecting it to be worth it when I get there - I missed Planescape at the time for much the same reasons, and ever since I finally played it about 10 years back (was unemployed for a while! :) ) I've been happily calling it the greatest game ever.

Good to know that Nuka-World delivers though - I've been saving it for the christmas break.

As far as "mediocre base - great DLC" goes, I'd guess it's a result of the modern DLC culture - where it used to be that if a game sold well enough there'd be a mission disk later down the line, most studios are already hard at work on the DLCs before the base game is even released, so the DLC teams (in as much as they're separate from the main team) get all the lessons, bug reports and player reaction from the trunk development, and longer deadlines to boot. Oblivion and Skyrim's expansions definitely reaped some benefit that way, imho - Shivering Isles in particular was an absolute masterpiece, for my money.

I definitely agree with you. Planescape: Torment is the best game I ever played. A superb, engaging work of art.

I am very glad I found a reference to Planescape here. I'm relatively "young" to have played P:T, I played it when it was already an old game, but the story really stuck with me. The best story I've ever seen in a video game.

The nice thing about the original Fallouts, they are turn based and low requirements. Slap them in a VM and you can just pause the whole machine instead of worrying about save points and such nonsense. I beat Prince of Persia way, years ago. I did start to sweat when I realized the whole game had a time that doesn't show up until the end. Save state and pause state made me less worried about doing things quickly...

> Is this typical of games these days? Do a crappy "main" game but "fix it" with DLCs?

A lot of AAA devs have started using games as a platform for DLC. Valve, for example, just launched glove skins [0] - 300 USD for a texture. DLC is far more profitable than games, nowadays.

As for Bethesda, long-time fans have a general understanding that Bethesda games get worse with each iteration. Their DLCs are usually better than the main games, but not by much.

[0]: https://steamcommunity.com/market/search?q=&category_730_Ite...

Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but I clicked on that link. What exactly is going on there? It looks like people are paying hundreds of dollars for a different skins for the gloves for their characters? Is that USD or some sort of in-universe currency?

You have fully understood the absurdity. People are paying hundreds of real life USD for a new texture for their gloves.

How is that really any more absurd than say... buying a boat? Or cigarettes? Or the game itself?

It's a free market for special item "drops" that you get in game, that have specific drop rates (rare items end up being worth something to collectors). It's no different than people paying for Diablo inventory back in the day, except that a) Valve controls it all so they get a cut of the market, and b) they are purely cosmetic, so people can't pay to be better, breaking the game mechanics.

It actually has very little to do with the question at hand because the wow factor in this case, the price, is user defined, and also doesn't really affect gameplay at all (AFAIK).

As far as I understand this is about gambling/moneylaundering. The stakes are high enough that there has been match fixing and everything.

http://www.polygon.com/2016/10/5/13176244/washington-gamblin...

That's insane - why not just gamble with Bitcoin or something that has tangible value? I guess the gambling/money laundering crowd will just move to any digital goods that aren't being regulated by anti-money laundering laws.

They're not really clunky, though. The two are pretty different as well. I enjoyed the first one a lot, but couldn't finish the second (weak writing, too many pop culture references, some poorly designed areas, etc.).

The original Fallout is the best, but second one is pretty good too, even though it indeed suffers from too many pop culture references. Also, too many glitches and broken quests. But when it worked, it worked -- I still prefer its opening intro to the original Fallout's. It was grim and sad.

For me -- who to my eternal shame wasn't aware of Wasteland, its spiritual parent -- Fallout was the first truly great RPG, a wonderful post-apocalyptic game in a world of Tolkien-wannabe copycats. No Elves, Orcs or magic -- mutants, ghouls and radiation instead!

> Also, too many glitches and broken quests.

I have been playing Fallout 2 Restoration project, and it is amazing. Tons of cut content restored, bugs fixed, and the random encounters often include little huts and farms to pick through.

Just don't add the extra talking head during installation. The modders had to do their own voice acting and it is sadly not good.

I think for some people, "clunky" means "Temple of Trials".

It's still infamous as a horrible failure of game design, and puts a significant number of people off the game without ever seeing the part where diverse builds are actually viable. It's a bit liking firing up the original XCOM - it might be perfectly good, but the very beginning is so bizarrely hostile and underexplained that a modern player would never know.

Yeah the best advice there is to run away from everything.

It seems to me that the developers wanted to push players towards role playing a tribal who molds themselves to the wasteland. They wanted to discourage people from rolling a charming doctorate student with a Gatling laser.

I still think it's bad game design. It does make it less fun.

This is a good observation, and it's remained a pain point for the series. You can fire up New Vegas and make an energy weapons sniper, but it's going to make the first few missions very painful. (And, of course, you'll replay the same problem when you hit Dead Money.)

There's probably no clean fix while the weapons skills are divided, because the game needs item progression and investing in intermediate skills is so pricy. Really the only big improvement I can think of is offering a handful of quality, low-skill-requirement weapons like NV's Weathered 10mm to tide players over.

Still, the series has definitely advanced from the Temple of Trials approach, where it had been overdone to make the gameplay unpleasant.

I'm comfortable with "energy weapons" being a special skill you only want to pump up later in the game. If I remember correctly, in the original Wasteland, when you first create a character, Energy Weapons isn't even an available skill. You have to find it first out in the world. The first two Fallouts work that way in practice even if you can technically spec yourself up as a primitive tribal with a bizarre understanding of Energy Weapons.

This would make a lot of sense, they're theoretically special and uncommon weapons. My sense was that it came with two problems in FO3/NV.

First, perks (and to a degree points) felt scarce, especially with level caps. Dumping value into any combat other than Energy Weapons felt like you were backtracking when you switched over - though points were cheap if you took any of the meta-experience perks.

Second, that redundancy felt crappy because the energy weapons didn't really feel impactful enough. Some were fine, like the pistols, but the high-end stuff couldn't outpace guns. They were really heavy, and things like the Tribeam just weren't very good. The Gauss Rifle was solid, but you got it so late and it was so tiresome to maintain and keep loaded that it was hard to justify.

Really the biggest perks of Energy Weapons in NV were the low Strength requirements and the Hyperbreeder Alpha, which was a hilariously cheap and easy way to fight petty enemies. On some level the balance decision just felt wrong - I understand spending more to use Energy Weapons, but why would I if they don't beat Paciencia and Ratslayer?

Perhaps it's just a continuation of the Fallout tradition to promote bullets? In Fallout 2, it was also generally more worthwhile to invest into firearms, and by the end of the game switch to Gauss Rifle/Pistol (and go for aimed shots / critical hits as much as possible). I always felt like energy weapons were there mostly to satisfy people who didn't care that much about stats, and just wanted to see enemies melting down etc.

Well, in Fallout 1 the most powerful weapon was the Turbo Plasma Rifle, iirc. In Fallout 2 it was the Bozar, which took a Big Guns skill to use effectively.

IIRC, weapon base damage translated differently depending on the armor type. In particular, in Fallout 2, the advanced power armor had slightly lower damage resistance to normal damage than it did to plasma and electrical (the latter mattered for pulse rifle). On top of that, gauss ammo had a very high AC modifier (making critical hits easier), and also a high DR modifier (reducing effect of enemy armor). So it was much more efficient against e.g. Enclave soldiers in power suits than its base damage would suggest.

In practice, with a build that maximized small arms from the get go (which also made the early-to-mid game easy), and invested stat points into Perception for those crits, by the end of the game you would be killing Enclave patrolmen with one-shot eye criticals more often than not, making any extra damage kinda moot.

(As I recall, gauss vs pulse is a long standing holy war in Fallout 2 community.)

Like I said, I don't think Fallout 2 had great design in general. Even still, the Temple of Trials only takes about 7-8 minutes and isn't that difficult. It was hardly the worst part of the game (for me at least).

Fallout 1 only had the rat cave in the beginning, though, and that only took a minute.

It actually is pretty common (look how much better Mass Effect 3 is with The Citadel & Leviathan DLC, or Dragon Age Inquisition with the Trespasser DLC, or Deus Ex: Human Revolution with The Missing Link, for example) but it isn't a for any nefarious reason.

For the most part, it's just the plain fact that DLC is made at the end of the cycle, after all the creative people working on it have had the most time to get the feel for the worlds they create. And this experience translates in to better worldbuilding.

> Is this typical of games these days? Do a crappy "main" game but "fix it" with DLCs? Or is it just Bethesda and possibly even just Fallout?

That reminds me of Neverwinter Nights. The main game's quest was straightforward and unimaginative, but a lot of the community-built quests and the expansions were great. Of course, this was BioWare and close to 15 years ago, so it certainly isn't just Bethesda, and it's also not just "games these days".

I for one thought the main quest, and the base game in general to be great. Didn't enjoy nuka-world very much, but really liked far harbor.

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