The CRPG Renaissance, Part 5: Fallout 2 and Baldur's Gate
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In original Fallout you enter a city which spans across four screens, repetetively uses the same set of limited sprites and is inhabited by some random moving pixels acting as citizens of which several have some interesting dialog lines.
The Fallout 3 seems similar at first, only employing a major leap in technological advancement - the city spans in every direction, there are animated and voice acted characters, and everyone is presented in cutting edge 3D technology.
But it all falls flat upon closer inspection. Every building is exactly the same. Dialogs are mundane and everyone has some sort of hiking accident where they took an arrow to the knee and even though the city has only 8 buildings its easy to get lost.
The reason is simple - in the original the story takes place mainly in your head, it's a mind's eye theatre, the game only gives you a broad outlines of the world and you are forced to fill out the blanks yourself. The game doesn't try to be realistic and leaves you a lot of space.
Once you start animating and voice acting your characters you quickly realize it's an endless money pit. The more lines you add, the cost grows exponentially, because you have to account for all localisation scenarios.
This is summed up very well (forgive me for not looking up reference and quoting from memory) by Bioshock lead who said in interview:
"At work if I have an idea we need to assemble a team - including programmers, modellers, scripters - and just to get a basic prototype that would give us the gist of what we were thinking it takes a month or more. Meanwhile, at home, I can relax after work, and in one evening session create a whole Doom campaign."
And then came Minecraft made by 1 guy rendering blocky graphics with basic animations. It was a real wake up call for a lot of developers, that success isn't driven by how realistic you can make a world, but something more fundamental. Most games with ultra-realistic graphics feel more like theme-park rides, where you have little or no affect on the game - as doing so would break the immersion.
After minecraft came out I quit the industry, and am far happier for it.
On interactivity and emergent gameplay, it predated MC for decades.
Elite, Nethack, Ultima IV-VII, Deus Ex, Arx Libertatis...
Assuming you mean Infiniminer?
> On interactivity and emergent gameplay, it predated MC for decades.
Infiniminer was released in early 2009 and pretty much immediately inspired Minecraft (first public alpha mid 2009.)
Not denying it was an emotional reaction by people working in the games industry at the time, but it doesn't feel grounded in reality. It's like the makers of The Matrix feeling like they should give up because of The Blair Witch Project.
Minecraft and Blair Witch caught gold dust. You could make a thousand similar low budget movies or games - of equal quality - without ever replicating their success.
By contrast, if you make a movie or a game that's any way good with a 100 million budget and another 100 million to market it, you can be fairly sure of making profit. It's a different market. A Marvel movie, a Matrix movie, or a Fallout game, has to be actively terrible to fail to turn a profit.
In the Fallout remakes, that happy go lucky style basically is the world. I mean it's still supposed to be a sort of post apocalyptic dystopia and you can do 'evil' things like blow up a town but even then it all still feels like an episode of Leave it to Beaver (further emphasized by the style that's no longer especially ironic), probably in equal parts in order to ensure mass [commercial] appeal and to abide modern ideals of political correctness in a scenario where that would be the last thing in play.
So the originals just completely drag you into their world, whereas Fallout 3 never really makes any effort at suspending your disbelief. The world is designed to be pretty silly and unbelievable, but has fun enough gameplay that it ultimately doesn't matter that much. I'm extremely curious how a more 'narratively faithful' remake, but with otherwise identical modern gameplay/graphics/etc, would feel.
All the isometric RPGs are very linear. You do act 1, then act 2, then act 3, etc.. What varies is how you complete them.
In the Bathesda style RPGs you can never touch the main quest and STILL play for 100 hours before you get bored. You can go in any direction. Some directions are 'level' checked by enemies, but you can sneak past them (e.g. death claws at the beginning in Fallout NV).
Games like BG2/BG3/Fallout 2/wasteland are much more constrained in what you can actually do. You have to clear the gob line camp to get to baldurs gate, etc.
The games are 'free' in very different ways.
I personally believe that the Bathesda 'freedom' of WHAT to do, with less choices in HOW to do it is much more RPG friendly than the on rails isometric 'freedom' which has very little choice in WHAT to do, just HOW you do it.
You can finish Fallout 1 in less than 5 minutes, skipping essentially all of the act [1], so not necessarily that linear. But even if we discount this specific case, isometric RPGs are not that different from Bethesda style RPGs in structure, it is that the latter have very different budget and have a huge amount of side quests.
That said, OP was speaking specifically of Fallout 3, and compared to the following titles, I find it was quite more constrained... lot of time spent in tunnels, areas that were off limits until you could cross a certain metro... Fallout NV and Fallout 4 feel more in line with the original games.
I'm a huge fan of the series but could never bring myself to play Fallout 4 because of this reason. It just 'feels' wrong, even if it actually is a perfectly enjoyable game. Kind of like I wouldn't want to play a Call of Duty RPG. Actually that might be kind of neat lol. I guess it's just because I'm more into RPGs than shooters!
You get that right?
Can you acknowledge that both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 would BOTH be chosen as some of the greatest video games of the last 2 decades? Unlike, say FO76 or Starfield?
I just don't understand the tiny, yet extremely vocal, set of Bathesda haters who constantly whine on about Gamebryo or 'real' fallout.
If it's so bloody good, why was Wasteland 3 fairly meh. There's your 'old' fallout. It was a mid-level hit. Entertaining, but not an all time great. If Bathesda is so bad at writing RPGs and Obsidian are so much better, why is Outer Worlds so utterly underwhelming and boring.
Like the actual evidence and reality is in front of your face. Making a great game is hard. Bathesda have done it multiple times. And Fallout 3 + 4 are somevof those great games.
If you don't like what they did with the fallout IP, just remember, you could have got another fallout brotherhood of steel.
Fallout 2... Well you can just do anything the open world before final thing. Skyrim for example is infinitely more constrained, you have lot of pretty boring content to get to end...
Also, the only RPG I know of where a character sufficiently skilled in diplomacy can win the final boss fight by convincing them to abandon their evil plans.
Fallout 3 was magnificent, a wild commercial success and one of the greatest CRPGs of all times.
I'm sure Fallout 2 was good, I don't know because the control system is so bloody awful I couldn't get more than 2 hours into it.
It is acclaimed, but it's hard to replay it.
In today's world it is a bad game. Fallout 3 is still a good game.
Bethesda games are constantly replayed. Skyrim, fallout 4, etc. are all still on Steam charts top played lists.
Right NOW. 10 years after release
Fallout 2 is not.
You are on the wrong side of fact Vs fantasy.
I checked your claim about the steam charts. Currently the 30-Day Avg for Fallout 2 is 159 and for Fallout 3 - 376 players. I wouldn't call this a huge win. F2 is much older and the graphics are not aging well.
20,000 players.
By other metrics it may fall a bit lower down the ranks. For example, the writing is quite bad (the water is thoroughly irradiated from a war that happened 200 years ago).
This is what I always found grating about the writing in Bethesda Fallout games. Their writers think that the war happened last Tuesday and there are parts of the old world behind every other door. In universe, the war happened more than two centuries ago and humanity has moved on, in several strange ways.
When I (re-)played Fallout again a few years back I found it hard to get over the jankiness of it all. I didn't finish it. Porting Fallout 1 and 2 to the Infinity Engine used by the Black Isle games is one of my "dream projects" I'll probably never get around to.
I really miss the variety of CRPGs we used to have. I don't like real-time games. I like being able to chill playing turn-based games (including strategy games like Civ). I don't think I'm alone in that and it's one of those fundamental misunderstanding game publishers have: thinking players want "hard" games, which for a CRPG (or, rather, an ARPG) really means how fast you can react.
But I really dislike the Bethesda CRPG model, which is really the only model left. I hate scaling content. It's lazy. I really dislike that in games like Skyrim you have to level efficiently or you get weaker (because of content scaling) and that forces you to do some non-fun things to optimize your levelling.
I know a lot of people enjoyed the Fallout serivce. For me, the aesthetics killed it for me. A brown wasteland just isn't aesthetically pleasing as a fantasy environment.
To contradict myself, I have to give special mention to Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I wish I could erase my memory to play that game for the first time again. It's not without its issues but the feeling you have of being in the world is virtually unmatched by any other game.
Alas, budget and time limited I guess.
In Morrowind, a big part of gameplay was figuring out where you needed to go to progress in a quest. A NPC might say to go to a town, take the East road out, turn left at the lake, and proceed until you see a certain kind of tree. You actually needed to do all that just to find the next step of the quest. It felt incredibly immersive. In Skyrim and a lot of post-Skyrim games, you just take a direct path to the quest marker without even thinking about it.
Quests in Skyrim often feel shallow because you put in almost no effort. It's a little skippable dialogue, a run across the mountains to a quest marker, kill something, loot something, and run to another quest marker for more optional dialogue. The dialogue in these quests often didn't even explain how you know where to go. Maybe the NPC puts a mark on your map, or maybe you're just psychic! Writers no longer had to care about giving directions, so they often didn't.
Bethesda probably did this because players were complaining about getting lost in Morrowind. If a quest isn't carefully written and the world carefully designed, it is often easy for players to miss the mark. After Skyrim, quest makers became the norm in all sorts of RPG's. It reduced effort for developers and ensured players don't get lost. However, it may be the case that the frustration of getting lost and the triumph of finding your way are parts of a compelling role-playing experience.
BG1 and Fallout 1/2 were both games where you could get badly lost and wander into areas that were way too tough for your character at the stage of the game you were currently in. Getting a little bit lost, a little bit in over your head, and stumbling upon something hidden was actually a lot of fun.
But it's also weird because all of these mods sound like you're just beating yourself in the head, and perhaps we are. I remember a game development class I took, and one of the first things we did was define what game was. I thought it was quite stupid at the time, but in hindsight maybe the guy was onto something: "A series of unnecessary obstacles."
And so it always sounds great to remove obstacles, but the more obstacles you remove, the less of a game you have left at the end of it all. For those of us who grew up in the Nintendo era I think none of us will ever forget Battle Toads, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Punch Out, and other such games where the entire games are basically about beating yourself in the head repeatedly, yet at the end of it all - it felt great!
I would love to play an RPG where I need to take notes. Where I fear to get lost in the wilderness if I take the wrong turn because I could get eaten by a horrible beast then.
I mean, that's what real adventures are about, or not? The mystery of exploration. The need to navigate by markers in nature or even the sun.
In a perfect world for me, game devs would add more dynamic and intelligent NPCs with their own agenda. I am bored by the feeling of Potemkin villages, where everything feels like it is designed to give you a smooth game experience and every NPC is standing there forever, just waiting for you.
I'm probably nitpicking here, but I really hope they put a lot more thoughts into each quest. For example I remember one of the brotherhood tasks is to assassinate the Emperor, but it was a very disappointing task as far as I remember. Admittedly, removing the markers and such definitely helps a bit, but I can't help feeling that the game designers just wanted to pump as many quests into the games as possible, and call it a day. I'd rather have just half of the quests, but with each of them having more depth and require more thoughts.
[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1069160/SKALD_Against_the...
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1063540/Space_Wreck/
All the plebs on the ship are being too noisy, just cut out all their tongues.
Beamdog remastering Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights was a good excuse to replay them, though the new scenarios (Siege of Dragonspear, Pirates of the Sword Coast,...) didn't really do much for me. I believe they're working on Neverwinter Nights 2, which is I game I'm quite fond of (Mask of the Betrayer is such an interesting story), so I'm looking forward to seeing it.
The indie scene is also doing interesting things, Fell Seal: Arbiters Mark is a neat take on the Tactical RPG style based on Final Fantasy Tactics.
For anyone looking for an alternative, Bethesda’s Morrowind has it all, an open world and no scaling enemies.