World on Fire: The Oral History of Fallout and Fallout 2
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Perhaps I'd have been a more productive member of society had I started businesses, graduated earlier, or done more R&D with these hours, but these were real parts of my life then and now, like stories or movies or beloved books. Part of the measure of my life's accomplishments is having time to indulge in these interactive art pieces.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/12/20959758/the-outer-world...
I’m finding it pretty enjoyable. My main complaints are that even though it is touted as being not a wide game (like FO4), but deep game, I still don’t get the feeling that there is much consequence to dialog options. Additionally, it is too easy out of the gate. You can alter the difficulty of combat and survival aspects, but I don’t think I’ve found an instance where I couldn’t pass a skill check by some means—they will often give you multiple ways to do so. Given all that, it is pretty enjoyable because we don’t get games with those basic mechanics too often, and I do really like stuff like Fallout, Mass Effect, Dragon Age. I truly hope they are starting to focus more on the depth of these games vs. how large the world is.
Fallout 4 has tons of options that are flavorful and make you feel like you live in a dynamic world, right up until you realize there's not much actual dynamic content.
New Vegas was a special beast, with its myraid choices and great writing. I will have to replay that. But FO4 on survival mode is a great experience, with plenty of danger and tradeoffs, and so much that I literally cannot do everything (I fail quests just due to lack of fast travel sometimes). And for that, I can thank Bethesda for a new kind of "more real" fallout experience.
This is true, but the reason why Fallout 2 is considered great (and why so is New Vegas), was in number possible paths that player can take during gameplay. Writing in those games was all about presenting gray and grayer dilemmas to the player and leaving it up to them to follow quest lines for either of those.
It was rarely things like "take the lost kitten from a tree or set the tree on fire" types of "good and evil" pseudo-dilemmas that end with player being a paragon of justice or chaotic evil, something that keeps plaguing role-playing games to this day.
In Fallout 1, the entire Necropolis arc is time dependent, and what you can do in there depends of the time you arrive: the Vault Dweller can save Necropolis from the slaughter by killing the Master before the Lieutenant and before 25 March 2162 but after 110 days have passed.
I think Oblivion's success despite its shortcomings on the RPG side gave them the message that this works and Skyrim's success reinforced it even further.
Though personally i find Morrowind the best of their games by far, especially on the writing side (not a surprise considering the writers they had - and lost right after Morrowind). Not as chaotic and repetitive as Daggerfall and Arena's random generator-based worlds, yet still with solid RPG mechanics, writing and exploration.
I remember getting to the 2nd map (Los Angles?) and the first mission was this huge map which was hardly used. Massive waste of my time baby sitting and watching people walk.
And that was when I had enough of the game designers wasting my time so much and stopped.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Hong Kong are also really good. I hear "Returns" was OK but not nearly as good as those, haven't bothered with it.
Divinity: Original Sin seemed really promising but I got sick of it crashing like 1/hr and dropped it.
Perspective: aging former gamer whose access to long gaming sessions for deep single-player stuff is now tightly restricted by adult responsibilities—i.e., kids.
Favorite older games of that sort, for reference, are Baldur's Gate, FO1 and (especially) 2, Arcanum, and (stretching "that sort" a bit) Darklands. Still haven't beaten Planescape: Torment after my game started repeatably crashing ~2/3 of the way through years ago, but that was really good.
The story lines are linear, but the stories are rather good. There's a lot of user generated content, and some are OK, but none of them are as good as the original. (I _think_ someone remade the original game's campaign in the Hong Kong engine, but don't recall for sure.)
DoS 1/2: Never had any crash in either game and played both from release on.
No need to play the first.
I hurried through and went back to Witcher 3.
I decided that until Bethesda starts writing games properly (story- and code-wise), I'm going to pass. Fallout 76 didn't interest me, and stayed away from that soon to be dumpster fire. I found it hilarious that most Fallout 4 criticisms applied to Fallout 76.
It's important to understand what Fallout went through before Bethesda even got their hands on it:
By the time there were plans for a Fallout 3, Western CRPGs had become a niche as the "RPG" label had become widely associated with "Action RPGs" like Diablo and RPG mechanics (skill progression systems really) had started popping up in many genres.
So rather than funding another RPG, Interplay decided to test the waters in a more promising genre: tactical action games. Because they lacked any experience with the genre, they outsourced the production of Fallout Tactics to a company unfamiliar with the franchise with very little input. The game was aesthetically and thematically very alien to the established canon. Some fans encouraged others to buy the game to demonstrate an interest in the franchise while others saw it as evidence that the series was dead. In the end it was a mixed bag but had very little to do with Fallout other than some flavor text.
With FoT not being nearly as successful as they must have hoped, Interplay made another last ditch attempt: Fallout Brotherhood of Steel, an action adventure based on the engine of an AD&D game that only had a moderate level of success. Instead of sticking with any of the core themes, the game heavily relied on language and dialogs written in a desperate attempt to appeal to teenage boys with an over-reliance on sexual themes. The press kits included glow-in-the-dark condoms. The game bombed, as expected.
Eventually Interplay did leak information about an in-progress sequel developed in-house with the code name "Van Buren" but Interplay had long been struggling financially and the game was eventually scrapped, though many elements would later re-appear in New Vegas (developed not by Bethesda but a company employing several people who worked on this and earlier Fallout games).
Interplay initially sold the licenses for Fallout 3, 4 and 5 to Bethesda. Still trying to produce their own take on the franchise they now spent their last resources on a Fallout MMORPG, temporarily titled "Fallout Online". "Fallout Online" (or "FOOL" as it had been titled by the community) had been an idea in the fan community for a long time but always been dismissed because the idea of an MMO game ran counter to the thematic constant of Fallout 1 and 2: the lone wanderer in a hostile wasteland.
If I recall correctly, part of the deal with Bethesda was that they would get the full rights to the franchise if Interplay did not produce another Fallout game within a given timeframe. The failure of Fallout Online sealed that deal. Ironically Bethesda's latest Fallout game is basically Fallout Online but based on their renewed franchise rather than the originals, but still an utter failure though for slightly different reasons.
Fallout's fan community, small but strangely persistent, at the time had been adequately described by game journalists as "glittering gems of hatred". I think that is justified to some extent: many of us would have rather seen the franchise die after Fallout 2 than move on and change. Some even argued that Fallout 2 was already overloaded with pop culture references (which to some degree had already been part of Fallout 1's DNA) and strayed from Fallout 1's leitmotif. But with the release of Fallout 3 it had become quite clear that this leitmotif had been completely abandoned.
For those unaware: While Fallout had always juxtaposed the optimistic 1950s Americana aesthetic and futurist outlook of technology and the "Atom Age" with the post-nuclear hellscape, the message was clearly a cynical dismissal of that optimism: nuclear power hadn't created a utopia, it created hell on Earth; instead of picket fences you had dirt farmers and scrap merchants trying to survive in an irradiated desert. Fallout 2 further emphasised this bleak outlook by showing that even the vaults that were supposed to protect American citizens from the aftermath of WW3 were actually cynical experiments, each being flawed in their own cruel ways, while the government elites get to live in safety (intentionally taking a page or two from Doctor Strangelove).
Fallout 3 eliminated any of the remaining bleakness and subtlety and replaced it with mini-nuke launchers and more Americana. Where Fallout 1 and 2 were satire, Fallout 3 had already lost the intent of that satire and just ended up playing it straight. But these themes were already mostly absent in Fallout Tactics and completely abandoned in Fallout Brotherhood of Steel: Fallout already died before Bethesda added to the franchise.
As a design goal and due to the better graphics, the environment design also does a better job at conveying stories. You’ll enter a storm drain and find a skeleton with bullets and a radio or whatever. There’s almost nothing that seems out of place or bland.
For some reason the main quest doesn’t follow the same philosophy and is too linear. But I always find it strange how Fallout 3 critics focus on the main quest when it comprises maybe 10% of the total playtime altogether. The main quest set pieces are all incredibly brief.
Republic of Dave, finding Quantum Colas, Tenpenny tower, the humor on texts, all those Vaults with mysteries... it's amazing. I totally bought the dark Americana design. It's one of my favorite games of all time.
Huh? I thought it was almost unremittingly bleak, albeit leavened by moments of dark humour. Using a sniper rifle with VATS and the Bloody Mess perk to splatter ghouls into their composing body parts in super slo-mo isn't bleak?
I'm not faulting anyone for enjoying any of the newer games (or even Fallout Brotherhood of Steel) but the tone is extremely different. You can call Fallout 3 bleak, but it's not bleak in the same way as Fallout 1 was.
<SPOILER> The entire story arc of Fallout 1 is that you are cast out into the lethal wasteland to save your vault (one of the first things you find is the corpse of some other unlucky guy from your vault), struggle against all odds, bring down an army of super soldier mutants and a fanatic cult that wants to turn all humans into mutants while what's left of the US military sits in its own little bunker full of high tech equipment but refusing to help you, then once you make it back to your vault your Overseer refuses you entry because you would no longer fit in with the community. The entire journey is basically the premise of Rambo First Blood. </SPOILER>
That's a lot bleaker than the gory ultraviolence in Fallout 3. BTW, Fallout 1 and 2 already had the Bloody Mess perk and ultraviolent death animations, it just wasn't slo-mo and first person. Those weren't what made the game bleak, though. If anything, that was intended as dark humor (cf. splatter "horror" movies like Braindead, ultraviolent "splatstick" comedies) and a nod to pulp fiction (cheap novels, not the movie of the same name).
Was my favorite game, but somehow nobody knew it until the second part came out.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/552620/ATOM_RPG_Postapoca...
I'm enjoying it more than I did F4, honestly, but that's partly because I really really hated the "build and support villages" aspect of F4.
Outer Worlds is well written and funny space romp with rather little roleplaying (you have seemingly tons of options, but often the results only affect the next dialog line and the game is so easy that the player quite often can pass any skill test) while Atom RPG is dark, hard and bleak post-apocalyptic role playing game where almost any situation can play out in so many different ways depending on your skills and luck. Atom RPG is Fallout 1&2 worship to its core, with all of the flaws of the original 2 included.
I am not saying that Outer Worlds is objectively a worse or better game, it's just different.