Fallout Retrospective
How the original games caused a quiet revolution.
When Fallout 3 was announced, the widespread joy at the resurrection of a beloved and largely forgotten series by a developer of as much established talent as Bethesda was huge. But it was matched by an equally fierce backlash from one of the most notoriously fanatical, difficult-to-please fanbases in the gaming world. Most Fallout fans were adamant that the series ought to be left alone, that the limited technology that the games were built upon was an integral part of what Fallout was, and that any attempt to modernise the series could only result in the bastardisation of one of the most fondly-remembered game universes in the history of the medium.
Practically nobody bought the Fallout games. Lifetime sales in the UK, for instance, barely topped 50,000 units for the pair of them. Commercially, they were utterly disastrous. But if you can find one person who did play them and talks about them with anything other than near-rabid devotion, it'd be quite a feat. Few games inspire such passion, but embarking upon a search for its source, it's difficult to find anything that's not worth loving about Fallout. From the unrelentingly bleak, darkly ironic tone to the novelty of the open-world, post-apocalyptic setting, from the inspired, cerebral turn-based combat system to the immense degree of variety and personality in the character-customisation, the superbly-written quests and characters and the gallows humour that underpins the games without lessening their emotional impact, even the well-placed, gritty violence; there's very little about the games that doesn't command as much respect now as they did a decade ago.
The genesis of the series lies in Wasteland, a beloved post-apocalyptic adventure by Interplay, a developer already famous for Brian Fargo's The Bard's Tale trilogy, and released in 1988. Elements of Fallout's humour are evident in its colourful text descriptions ("Thug explodes like a blood sausage", "Rabbit is reduced to a thin red paste"), and the experimental open-world setting paved the way for Fargo and Black Isle Studios to develop a much more expansive, developed post-apocalyptic dystopia for Fallout, Wasteland's 'spiritual sequel', which was released almost a decade later in 1997. (Interestingly, Fargo has subsequently bought the Wasteland IP back from Electronic Arts and is working on a long-overdue sequel at his current developer, inXile. But that's another story.)

The weapon variety was really excellent, and all the better if you managed to steal your gun from some wasteland meglomaniac rather than pay for it.
Fallout started life as a computer-game implementation of GURPS, a pen-and-paper role-playing system invented by Steve Jackson Games. Contract squabbles caused Interplay and SJG to part ways, but there is still much of the pen-and-paper RPG about Fallout. The open-world freedom and the extent of Fallout's character customisation both owe a lot to the game's original aim of emulating a tabletop RPG as closely as possible.
The SPECIAL character-creation system - Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck - in combination with a hugely varied selection of possible skills and character-defining Perks, ensured that it was possible to play Fallout in pretty much any way you could imagine. It was genuinely possible to create any character - a silver-tongued ladykiller, a meat-headed, giant-gun-toting thug, a sharpshooting scientist - and take them out of the safety of Vault 13, sealed from the inside since the onset of devastating nuclear war, and into the surrounding wilderness, and attempt to make it your own.
And once you got out into that wilderness, you found yourself surrounded by unrelenting devastation. There's no helpful town situated nearby, just raiders and scavengers and a motley assortment of unsavoury characters struggling to survive in a world that no longer has room for things like compassion. The closest thing to a settlement, Junktown, is a ramshackle assortment of buildings inhabited by grasping despots, killing each other for guns or drugs or money. Fallout throws you into a genuinely destroyed world, and there's nothing about it that's heartening. It's all the more disquieting for how realistic it is. One of the most striking things about Fallout's imagining of post-apocalyptic America is how accurate it could well be; all the positive aspects of human nature fall away in a grimy and pointless struggle for survival.
Scott Bennie, a designer who helped to write and design Fallout along with Chris Avellone (who later wrote Planescape: Torment and is now the creative director at Obsidian) and Fallout 2 hero Chris Taylor, felt that Fallout's bleak setting struck a particular chord with audiences of the time. "After years of generic fantasy RPGs, Fallout was a shock to the system, both for the designers (who got to cut loose after working on fantasy projects like Stonekeep and Descent to Undermountain) and for the audience... There weren't that many post-apocalypse games out at the time we did Fallout," says Bennie. "Wasteland was excellent, but it was severely hamstrung by the limitations of the textual display. Origins' Bad Blood was designed to be an action game. The less said about EA's Fountain of Dreams, the better. As a result of the genre's scarcity - and the appropriateness of graphic violence, harsh language, and a gritty theme - it was easy for Fallout to stand out. Being christened the 'spiritual successor' to Wasteland, one of the most beloved RPGs up to that time, made it even easier to get noticed."

Bob's Iguana Bits - the best in the business.
Gameplay innovations went hand-in-hand with the game's unique and dark setting. Fallout was a genuine role-player in that it was impossible to succeed in the wasteland without taking full advantage of every ability that your created character had. If you came across a heavily-guarded compound and just didn't have the firepower to get inside, you had to start hacking computers and looking for pass-codes, or talking to people around in an effort to find someone who could get you inside, or scavenging or thieving better equipment from wherever you could. There were always so many ways to approach a given situation, so many different directions to go in and so many random events, characters and quests to stumble upon, that almost everyone who played Fallout got something different out of it.
There is perhaps no greater illustration of that than Fallout's final showdown with the Master, a sprawling mess of computer, mutant and human led down a twisted path on his search for humanity. By the time you reach him, you've experienced the darkest that Fallout's wastelands have to offer, met its most hopelessly forsaken characters and become embroiled in the struggle for power over what little the world has left to offer. You'll almost certainly have the necessary firepower to storm in and take him down. But instead, you can embark upon a philosophical conversation with him, challenge him on what makes humanity worth preserving. You can persuade him to see the darkness in what he is doing, and if you succeed, he commits suicide, taking his entire mutant enclave with him.
"I think that the one thing that Fallout did better than almost any game that I can remember was that ineffable quality called 'heart'," says Bennie. "How many games out there gave you a scraggly, scrappy, and quietly loyal sidekick named Dogmeat? When you met Richard Dean Anderson's Killian and began to unlock the secrets of the world, how many people ached for the people in that world? How did you feel in the first moment when you realised the Master wasn't some generic ranting villain like Ultima's Guardian, but had thoroughly good intentions that sent him down one of the darkest imaginable roads to a personal hell, and didn't deserve his fate?"
And that is the truly, enduringly great thing about Fallout - it does with text and dialogue and sheer atmosphere what it could not do with pretty pixels. Like many RPGs of the time, technical limitations fed a necessity for good writing. "Chris Taylor's writing for the original Fallout, while not the most polished in the industry, did something remarkable," Bennie says. "It made you care, deeply, about people who were only a few moving pixels and sentences of expository text. And if that's not good writing, I don't know what is."
The more you put into Fallout, the more you get out of it. Originally the game constrained you with a time limit, but this was soon fixed with a patch when Interplay realised that players were desperate to get everything they could out the game, see everything that the wasteland had hidden away. Fallout 2, released just a year later in 1998, offered an even bigger and more populated wasteland, and painted a picture of a new power struggle going on in the wilderness 80 years after the events of the first game. Though its tone and practically everything about the game engine stayed exactly the same, the themes were more adult; drug addiction and the sex industry were much more obvious here than in the original game, and perhaps less subtly disturbing as a result.

Almost everything in the Fallout games can be scavenged. At the start of the game, it's the only way to survive.
Fallout 2's open-world was as punishing as it was rewarding. Though it was never easy to survive in Fallout 1's wastes, it took even more hours of scavenging and scrounging in Fallout 2 before the plot really kicked in and the player was able to take command of the wastes. But Fallout's chilling realism would suffer if the games were easy. Their portrayal of a forsaken post-apocalyptic world makes no compromises for the player's comfort, in terms of gameplay or emotionally.
Fallout 1 and 2 are bastions of the Western RPG, for sure - the combat and SPECIAL systems were inspired, and far from its only innovations - but what they really brought to the medium was an illustration of how atmosphere and writing and soul can change how games move us. Fallout and Fallout 2's world, often heart-rending in its desolation, well-written and ironic, is still one of the most believable and moving in videogames. They are games of fundamental importance to anybody who cares about how good writing can transform interactive experiences, and that's one of the reasons that they've proven so enduring; because Fallout's impact wasn't dependent on its technology, you can play them now and experience the exact same emotional impact that they had when they were first written. And you should.
Alternatively, you could play Fallout 3, which is due out for PS3, 360 and PC on 31st October. Our review of the game goes live tonight at midnight EST, which is 4am GMT on Tuesday morning.
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Comments (73) Latest comment 3 years ago
Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!
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Bought the Fallout collection but still haven't played them.
Well I played the first Fallout for about 10 minutes then I quit when I realised that this was going to take me ages to get into it.
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It's not as good as fallout 2 i'm afraid.
ahh o yeah tomorrow embargoes eh
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I would add my name to the Fierce Fan Club, they truly are outstanding master pieces that i do still dabble in to this day. (though I much prefer 1).
Its good that your given an education on the back story, as most people seem to think that Fallout 3 is "ripping" a lot of things off, without realising of course that it was the first to include many many things. (ish)....
Me personally, I'm withholding all judgement on fallout 3 until I have played it. I was recently informed that nearly all of the dark humour and irony is completely missing. That along is enough to put me off. It would be like buying a cat, only its dog called cat.
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Shady Sands was rather closer to Vault 13 than Junktown was and as it was between the only two locations that you know of as the Vault Dweller something you bump into fairly quickly.
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It is certainly well done, I am enjoying it now that I have got past the 'time limit' bit, and am scrambling around trying to figure how to take out super mutants and deathclaws with the gaming equivalent of peashooters.
Hoping the 3rd will also be good.
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[link url=http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php?a ction=category&cat_id=16
]http://ww w.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.p...[/link]
Works fine on my Vista.
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Anyone?
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10 years is just too long to wait for anything
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It's Pipboy, he is Fallout, sort of.
EDIT: Of course he's Vault Boy, i'm just old.
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And He is certainly one of the classifying factors of Fallout.
Edit : here is the web address to clarify
http://fallou t.wikia.com/wiki/Vault_Boy
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Made me buy a cheap cd of inkspots classics at the time.... Mayyyybeee....
I do hope they have something similar with the new one.
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But it is a risky project for bethesda to take on.. i really do hope they manage to capture the soul of the first 2 games and evolve it and bring it to the next generation.. because if they dont then they are going to get so much sh*t.
And if they have raped the game.. well they deserve all the sh*t they'll get. I wont have any sympathy for them if they bollox this up.
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"You could put the review up at 4am GMT you know - daylight saving time is still in effect in the US. "
Yeah, Kristan just sent me an email pointing that out. My dismal record translating time around the world continues
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why? thought this is "Euro" Gamer? or is that the time at which the embargo ends? can't be asked to get up at 4? why not 8 or something
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A brilliant maker of pen and paper games. Would love to see a Car Wars or Ogre squad-based universe remade into decent videogames.
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HELLO!
I brought them both about 5 years ago, abut never really liked them all that much. Same with Planescape. I always felt like I was being given the illusion of choice, when actually there were only extremely limited outcomes - themselves always determined by a single choice at or near the endgame.
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/swoon.
Might even get up 'early' for the Fallout 3 review - I am already crawling out of bed at 5am to reach the expo...
Might just stay awake all night and wait for it I guess.
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I hope they've got it right, I deeply wish it so... watching the TGS trailer however gives me a sinking feeling.
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Not everyone will like it, you have to approach it with a certain attitude.
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I'd also like to mention simple fact that bethesda chose to change *everything* in fallout 3, including appearance of characters and items present in previous fallouts (Mr. Handy is one such example). Although, I have to admit: while it annoyed me at first, after some thought I came to conclusion that it will be much easier to treat fallout 3 as a game that has nothing to do with fallout 1 or 2, other than the name.
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Morrowind has superb writing, especially in terms of depth and lore, and some of the characters are very memorable too. It was nothing like the generic mess of Oblivion's dialogue, if that is what you're basing Bethesda's writing credentials on. The thing about Bethesda is that they tend to create worlds with a certain degree of harshness - just like Fallout's - and filling that world with characters that are constantly 'well-written' can actually hinder the world's immersive qualities.
Because a character that is brought to life brilliantly by writing is then expected to ACT intelligently too, something that most games - with their stationary 'quest point' characters - simply can't create.
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As for Bethesda, it is obvious that they're going to milk this for all its worth. I expect FO3 to be the Hollywood version of a foreign film (think "The Departed" vs "Infernal Affairs"
On a more positive note if this game sells well Brian Fargo might get the funding he needs to create a sequel to Wasteland, and that would be something worth getting excited about.
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@ swede: Have you not seen the trailer? I've been singing "I don't want to set the world on fiiiire" for months! lol
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If you say so. Are you a Bethesda's employee? The one Silvervein mentioned?
I'm pretty used to rough, unrewarding beginnings of cRPGs, but Morrowind utterly failed to give me an impression of a living world inhabitated by living creatures. I haven't got an impression of "me" being "there" as well. You know, walking person and stuff. The most unconvincing FPP I ever played. TPP view on the other hand was just ugly.
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It was nothing like the generic mess of Oblivion's dialogue
That was also in my post, but don't tell Bethesda. I might get fired.
First of all, since when are CRPGs supposed to create a 'living world full of living creatures'? That's rubbish. They are all about strict gameplay rules and the context in which those rules are presented, not story and fleshed out personalities. They aren't storybook sims, or adventure games, they are pen-and-paper simulators where the creatures are driven primarily by maths and dice not emotion. While that doesn't mean they can't have good writing or decent characters, it does mean that the emphasis should be on player-challenge and not 'believable NPCs' etc.
I fully understand how Morrowind doesn't appeal to everyone ... it's highly flawed and incredibly unrewarding if you don't take to the premise. However, its plot and inhabitants DID perfectly suit the CRPG context, I feel.
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That's not rubbish at all, and I don't know how you can separate that from a great player-challenge. Betehsda's games always feeling so sterile and lifeless is pretty much the biggest criticism of their games. Believable NPCs can improve an RPG ten-fold, whether it's your party in Baldur's Gate 2 or NPCs in general in Gothic 1/2. Bethesda have a lot to learn in that area, and it didn't help that Oblivion's much-touted "radiant AI" was marketing gag more than anything else.
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]http://www.dark-wind.com.
[/link]
Not a perfect match but well worth checking out.
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Firstly, without going into the many details why, I'm not a big fan of Oblivion as a CRPG, though it's a fine adventure/RPG. The story and characters were appalling, for the most part.
But here is a better explanation of what I'm trying to say: CRPGs are about levelling and loot. A CRPG world should, first and foremost, accommodate levelling and looting. In a world where characters are drawn 'believably', they are also expected to act and react accordingly. But a CRPG that allows for proper player freedom - like NPC killing, theft, god-killing, rule-bending, etc - could never really co-exist with properly, emotionally 'fleshed out' NPCs.
Morrowind's writing excelled at drawing a lore-rich, choose-your-own-adventure-style world that immersed you because it created a brilliant atmosphere for looting, levelling and exploration, without ever pretending to create 'real' inhabitants that would be expected to react to your actions accordingly.
Also, Baldur's Gate and Gothic, for all the love I bear them, are far more linear by comparison, allowing for much better character writing.
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I don't think single player cRPG will ever manage to emulate pen and paper RPG. All I know is that feeling of smoehow existing me acting on my own in somehow existing world is what I want from cRPG. Fallout, Arcanum, Gothic, Deus Ex, Planescape: Torment, KotOR - all of them gave me that feeling. Morrowind just didn't.
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Can you imagine how great this would be if Obsidian had the rights to their own franchise, and as much money and staff as Bethesda? And The support of a half decent publisher?
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I agree 100%. The fact that it was so utterly vast didn't hurt either.
"Also, Baldur's Gate and Gothic, for all the love I bear them, are far more linear by comparison, allowing for much better character writing."
That's the second mention of Gothic in this thread, and I just have to say: Gothic 3 was totally under-rated.
Obiwanshinobi: "One more thing. Role Playing Games are about playing roles."
This argument has gone back and forth on these forums so many times and its really a moot point by now. At first blush it would seem like a truism that RPGs are about role-playing, but at the same time we all know very well what COMPUTER RPGs have come to represent, and because of limitations in the technology, they very seldom focus on user role playing. Even the examples that are considered most role-playing-centric are laughably weak in that department if you step back and look at it objectively. There are other measures of good CRPGs.
That said, I think you have EXCELLENT taste in CRPGs anyway.
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The Gothic games are actually a lot less linear than Oblivion's main quest is. Oblivion allows you to travel anywhere, anytime, and do the sidequests in any order you want, but pays a high price for it (like levelling mobs), but the main quest is as linear as railway tracks.
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Oh, absolutely. Like I said, not a fan of Oblivion for many reasons, especially the levelled mobs.
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http://ww w.gametrailers.com/player/42026...
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It may sound like a barrel of laugh, but I've even found some kind of cRPG pleasure in Chrono Trigger. Some of this freedom, this kind of weight behind my decisions and actions. In ABBA's words: it's magic. Something impossible to dissect or measure.
It's hard to ignore the fact of Morrowind being considered as good cRPG by many gamers. I'm just not among them.
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'But here is a better explanation of what I'm trying to say: CRPGs are about levelling and loot. A CRPG world should, first and foremost, accommodate levelling and looting. In a world where characters are drawn 'believably', they are also expected to act and react accordingly. But a CRPG that allows for proper player freedom - like NPC killing, theft, god-killing, rule-bending, etc - could never really co-exist with properly, emotionally 'fleshed out' NPCs.'
I have the feeling we are using the same term to describe two very different categories of games.
One is based around loot and levelling. Examples include diablo 1 and 2, as well as world of warcraft and any of korean online games (they are not called grinders for nothing, you know). Although proper name for this kind of game is Action RPG, or perhaps action adventure, since Space Siege falls into this category but is not set in fantasy setting typically associated with roleplaying games.
Then there is second type of computer games. They are computer roleplaying games that are descendants of pen and paper roleplaying games, and those games thrive on story, with all its elements such as memorable characters, dialogues, choices and consequences and interesting narrative. Character advancement and looting are present in those games also, but they are two of many elements making such games. Examples include planescape: torment, fallout 1/ 2 and to lesser degree baldur's gate and kotor.
Saying that believable character can't exist in computer roleplaying game without detracting from experience is true if you think of games like diablo or morrowind, where game world serves only as thinly veiled justification for player to hack and slash his way through everything on his or her quest to gather mountain of loot. Of course, such games never really deal with important thing: consequences of player actions. Bethesda is especially guilty there, with their notorious babysitting of player (and feeding him regurigated pulp of: chose A: you are good, chose B, you are bad...You chose B, are you really sure? Really? Maybe you reconsider? Oh well, you chose B, but don't worry, it won't stop you from experiencing everything the game has to offer).
That's why I don't consider oblivion, and to certain extent morrowind as roleplaying games, understood as games driven by story and creating believable world where players actions are treated seriously, and not as a cosmetic detail.
PS.
And to show what I mean about bethesda games being poorly concevied messes in terms of creating any kind of immersive and believable world (where consequences of player actions needs to be considered and included, like in planescape: torment or fallouts, here's link to youtube clip showing a bit of oblivion: http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=6KN7cKO8-P0
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Does this mean I win?
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I love Jelly, and I love Rollercoasters, but I don't want to go on a jelly rollercoaster!
But hopefully you will love it. I'm hoping a big side effect of this is that more people venture out and pick up the originals....
P.s, are random encounters still part of the game?
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Heh, well you know me and Morrowind Kris! I can't help myself. :-D
@Silvervein
I think we've kind gone off track, unusual for an online discussion. ;-p I was originally reacting to a point made about Bethesda's poor writing and said Morrowind's plot and characters were perfect for the kind of world Beth were trying to create. I've already said that Oblivion was very poor on that level.
You're right, we are talking about two different types of game at heart. The Elder Scrolls are a genre unto themselves in a way, while the likes of Torment (a true classic) and Fallout are really interactive storybooks with the illusion of choice, though that illusion is more comprehensive in Fallout. You claim that player choice and the consequences of actions make for a true CRPG ... but where then do Fable II and GTA IV come into the equation? The former has far more action-consequences than Torment, which basically only let you go down the 'cerebral' or 'muscle-man' route if I recall.
I'm not a fan of Diablo or WoW whatsoever, or any other game that deals solely in the loot/levelling premise I mentioned without the right atmosphere and plot to back it up. However, that doesn't mean I want to sacrifice freeform gameplay, of which Morrowind is truly king, for the sake of a smaller world, a streamlined plot and player choice 'outcomes'.
If I spend 15 minutes 'real time' walking across the island of Morrowind, only to find a door that's too high to reach, and locked at 75 out of 100, I can still (at level 1) find a way to levitate there and open it, accessing an area supposedly beyond my reach. I can become a character that sweet-talks people into information; I can fly; I can kill every NPC in the world; I can become a werewolf with the expected consequences; I can play the good guy, the bad guy, or the fickle guy (my personal favourite - save a guy's life, then axe him ;-p). In a world where all that and more is possible - and based on stats and choice of character type - the NPCs need to be somewhat simpler.
EDIT: Bloody Morrowind, making me crazy again. :-D
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Wasteland, though, I played obsessively when it first came out in 1988. Brilliant game.
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a) I haven't played it.
b) I haven't played the originals
c) I don't like Bethesda, which makes me an outstandingly neutral observer
d) I struggle to find two neurons to rub together
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He is not the 'Vault boy'... page 4-19 identifies him as the 'trademarked Vault-Man'. Well done the wiki lot for getting it wrong.
I am avoiding (and have avoided) all the trailers and previews since the Vault-Tec advert trailer as these things have a horrible habit of spoiling the game with their fast-cut clips and hint dropping.
As an extremely old school Fallout fan (I discovered it via the beta/demo that I got off Happypuppy.com back in 1997) I'm extremely interested to see how they interpret Black Isle's universe. Silvervein's comment regarding the changing of the appearance of so many objects really worries me - after all, stuff like the 10mm pistol, MP9 SMG and Plasma Rifle (which is so large you carry it slung at your hip, as opposed to held to your shoulder) are iconic. It would be rather like making a new Star Wars film set during or after the original trilogy, and changing the look of the Stormtroopers' rifles.
I'm also eager to see if the marvellous conversation system of Mass Effect has had any impact - playing Oblivion and talking to people after Mass Effect justly feels like a huge step backwards. Will improvements have been made (after all, the original Fallouts had a conversation a lot more akin to Mass Effect than Oblivion's 'Hey, you are the hero of Vault 13!' 'I heard that Dr Atomic knows how to move in Power Armour' 'That's what I heard') or not?
Oh well. Three days to go...
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Aaargh, I can't help myself!! How can someone miss the level scaling (the real game killer, in my opinion), the grating NPC's, the broken AI, the sameness of all the dungeons, the incredibly repetitive hell gates, the horrible character development system (yes, you need to put all your most used skills in the MINOR categories), the lack of hand-placed objects in the world, the linearity of the quests (always ONE solution), the idiotic conversation mini-game, etc, etc, etc.
[link url=http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=6KN7cKO8-P0
]http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=6KN7cKO8-P0
[/link]
10/10..
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I'd be further tempted to say that the original game was far more combat oriented than the sequel - while it was possible to do many of the puzzles without fighting, you needed very high stats to do so and even then success was not as guaranteed as it was with gunplay. The diplomacy route, for example, was extremely limited compared to the other suggestions (sneaky and fighty) while a jack of all trades character would struggle while in the sequel they had a much easier time of it.
Oh, and huzzah - the two giant flash banners that surround the page make my browser run so slowly I'm reminded of the C64 word processor we had in school - type a sentence and then sit back for a few seconds while it catches up with you.
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Do you realize Fallout still sells today, and can be even found in stores and from several online distributors?
Goddamnit, the stupidity of some people.
Nobody bought it... jeez...
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No need to worry! Actually I can't imagine 'better' graphics for Fallouts. It ages well. It's timeless. The only problem nowadays is that 640x480 resolution doesn't look good on LCD. If you can hook up your PC to CRT, do it. When you pick up more powerful weapons and start delivering critical hits, any complaints about graphics disappear.
Hell, don't 'think', just go play them. You know, these words:
They are games of fundamental importance to anybody who cares about how good writing can transform interactive experiences, and that's one of the reasons that they've proven so enduring; because Fallout's impact wasn't dependent on its technology, you can play them now and experience the exact same emotional impact that they had when they were first written. And you should.
are by no means exaggeration. The best of what PC gaming has to offer awaits you. It's called Fallout and Fallout 2.
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Fallout: [link url=http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php?ac tion=file&file_id=1169
]http://ww w.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.p...[/link]
Fallout 2: [link url=http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php?ac tion=file&file_id=1173
]http://ww w.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.p...[/link]
They work wonderfully, with only a few weird glitches (nothing gamebreaking).
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That said, I would say that few of your complaints about Oblivion count for Fallout. The character development system is SPECIAL and skills, like the original Fallout, which is much better. The enemies aren't scaled, there are no repetitive hell gates, and I'm sure that much of Fallout 3's word has been hand-placed and designed with real care. I can't speak for the later dungeons or the AI or the believability of the NPCs (although I suspect they might still be the game's chief weakness), but I know the quest design is very different. It gives you real options, and the decisions that you take close off other avenues of opportunity, unlike in Oblivion. What Fallout 3 definitely does get right, in my experience, is the wasteland atmosphere, the desolation, the sense of worthlessness and grimy isolation. I'm hugely looking forward to spending sixty-odd hours in that game's company.
metalangel: Given that this is a retrospective, it's rather expected that we should be reflecting upon the series' best moments. I don't think that knowing about the Master would in any way spoil the Fallout experience for a new player, not when there is just so much to enjoy. Knowing the plot of a famous book doesn't affect the enjoyment you get from reading it.
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Fallout never was all about graphics, yet visuals are part of its charm. You may find them ugly, but this ugliness suits the world perfectly. To quote Kino no Tabi:
The world is not beautiful... And that, in a way, lends it a sort of beauty.
That's how philosophiliac I am.
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Edit: Oh, and for the record: I didn't hate Oblivion, I was just really disappointed in it after reading the glowing reviews it got everywhere. I also think it's one of the first few games where Eurogamer has been dead wrong in its score (compared to my taste). Bioshock is another example.. where you even got me to pre-order the Collector's Edition! It was NOTHING like System Shock 2.
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Played FO2 and FO Tactics, just hoping they install the 'feel'of the PC games which was uterly absorbing.
+ with loads on Miniguns, sniper rifles , shotguns etc with 6 different types of Ammuniiton for each