The first two games came out at the worst time for me - A-levels precluded me from spending any time at all with them (that's probably for the best, though - a few years later, Morrowind and the absence of parental oversight killed my degree stone dead :) ).
Fallout 3, NV and 4 have all in turn nudged me to try the originals again, but they're just old-fashioned enough that I struggle to get into them, every time. These days I think I've resigned myself to only getting to play them properly in the event of a long stay in hospital.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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).
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.).
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.
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!
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.
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".
Yes, it's a game where you even had to get into back in the day. And back then what was driving the hype was what we would call "open world" feel nowadays. And in comparison to today's sizes it's quite small. So without nostalgia I wouldn't suggest starting FO1/2. Watch a Let's Play for some story, or read some dialogues online. More is not reasonable at this point.
I don't know whether having a massive 'open world' really matters, because you can't scale storytelling. The trick of all of these games is having a feel that a larger world exists, but at the same time leading you along a relatively narrow path, along a meaningful story.
Also true. But still, coming from that point of view, the illusion is easier to see through in FO1/2. E.g. the idea of walking through the wasteland vs just seeing a dot move over a map with some random encounters. Back then there weren't many games were you could really explore the world, so this illusion was quite good at giving you the feel of having a huge map with real events happening. It won't do that to a person who played Skyrim and GTAV.
On the one hand, seeing a dot travel across a map may make it feel like they aren't "really" moving.
On the other hand, taking several thousand squares miles of real-world space and stuffing it into about ten square miles can make it feel like the world is awfully claustrophobic. In the real world, it would be perfectly sensible for a slightly out-of-the-way vault or something to be entirely undiscovered for decades at a time, even with our current pre-catastrophe civilization. In the Fallout gamespace it seems faintly silly... "seriously dude, nobody ever took a five minute break from work to talk a walk and noticed this big, hulking thing?"
One game that actually did tackle this all the way was Arcanum.
For those who don't remember, what these guys did was make a seeded map generator that filled all those thousand square miles of real-world space between pre-designed locations with something appropriate. And you could literally leave a location, but just keep going without switching to the fast-travel "world map" - and if you went for long enough in the right direction, you'd get somewhere else. But, world size being to scale, you'd literally have to walk hours or days.
Consequently, when in fast travel, if you ran into some randomly generated monsters, the battle map would actually be that exact part of the generated world map. If you happened to run into something else again in the same spot (or close enough), you'd see the same map.
Of course, this made game design somewhat awkward, because if you knew the precise locations of things (they even used latitude/longtitude for map coordinates!), you could just go there right away - unless there was some choke point on the map that you couldn't avoid and that would require direct interaction (like, say, a lone bridge over a river with a bandit collecting toll from any passers-by). And the game was actually designed around that possibility!
The problem with all this is that it's a gargantuan effort to maintain a giant sandbox that most players will just ignore, or possibly never even discover.
I can still get into a book even though I've seen movies. I think it takes a certain type of individual to get into the Fallout 1/2 style of interface, but the overall game still holds up. Older games require more imagination though.
I've gone back in and played the original wasteland recently, and it's cluunky - but I was still able to get into it and enjoy myself.
I think back in the day gamers had more imagination. It's possible that's because gaming required it, and that it took better graphics and interaction to get it so that the mass-market could adopt them. It's possible there's a branch of gamers who just won't be able to get into games like Fallout 1/2, but I hope it's fewer than you are describing.
Fallout 2 is still plenty big even by modern standards. Here's a quick question: how many city locations did it have? If you played a lot, but still can't answer right off the bat, it's probably "big enough".
I played them when they came out, and consider them among the best games ever to come out, but they haven't aged well. I tried to play 1 for nostalgia, but quickly gave up.
interesting, i replayed both 1 & 2 a few years ago and had no issues with either (i installed some fan-patches but I think they changed little aside from bug fixes and enabling higher resolutions).
I built an old P2-era PC (Win98, CRT, ball mouse) a few years ago to play similar vintage games they way they were meant to, both favorite and unplayed games. About the same time, GoG had some Fallout games for free for 2 days[0], so I grabbed the hell out of those. I finished the first one a year later, and I found the UI had many rough edges. Like the first (at first), I've "started" the second a few times by now, but not making it more than 2 hours or so each time.
The thing is, I restart games because I want to remember and be cognizant of the story I'm playing through. I often don't play for months at a time, and when I get back I wonder what I'm doing.
I've had the same problem with recent titles too, such as GTA IV and V. I'd like to get into the Mass Effect series as well, but my gaming tends to come in fits and starts.
What would be awesome would be recognition of this by developers of AAA titles with long narratives - with the option to watch a dynamically generated cut scene comprised of both cut scene footage and significant in-game footage from the player's own gameplay.
The problem with this is that it's hard to have a reel or prior important moments to refer to without making it a spoiler. Is that seemingly inconsequential merchant you snubbed going to come back to haunt you 5 hours of game play from now? Well, it it immediately makes it to the recap reel, you know it was important before you maybe should.
It's sort of like watching Game of Thrones, and instead of seeing a prior episodes recap before the episode where it matters, you were able to check immediately after a scene to see if it would be worthy of a recap later. Sort of ruins some of the fun.
Other than that, this would be awesome. Maybe if there was some way to offer a recap immediately prior to it being relevant, so someone who was consistently playing could ignore and someone that might have forgotten portions could take advantage of. That does make it quite a bit more complicated though.
Alan Wake did something like that, but with static ones. It got old the second or third time it recapped the "episode" I had finished 15 seconds ago while I was bingeing on it.
Yeah... to be fair I tend to do that more with relatively linear JRPGs where not quite remembering what happened yesterday isn't necessarily a fatal problem.
I feel the same way about Baldur's Gate 2. While I have a lot of friends who love that game, I tried playing it and just could not get into it. It was just so clunky.
Having played both, it's "clunkier" than Fallout, sure. And it expects a fair amount of AD&D knowledge. If you got that pre-requisite, it is not difficult to get into. And, while I prefer Fallout's ambiance, the characters in Baldur's gate are awesome.
Fallout 3, NV and 4 have all in turn nudged me to try the originals again, but they're just old-fashioned enough that I struggle to get into them, every time. These days I think I've resigned myself to only getting to play them properly in the event of a long stay in hospital.