I liked Fallout, and I liked Fallout 3. I even like Fallout:Tactics compared to Fallout 2.

Fallout 2 seems: dumb, amateurish and out-of-genre.

I mean: a wild west town, Reno with gangsters with Tommy guns shooting pormo flicks, San Francisco is simply over-the-top weird, way too many tongue in cheek popular culture references (including Mike Tyson etc.).....

The game is beyond immersion breaking and only about 1/3rd feels like Fallout and a deep, immersive game.

I don't know HOW people consider FO2 to be a decent game overall. Many, many parts simply feel off - a stew pot of creative ideas with no attempt to create a cool, immersive fictional universe... just a "hey, let's do this" mish-mash scattered across a map.

I hope Fallout: New Vegas keeps to the feel of Fallout and Fallout 3 and leaves Fallout 2 far, far behind.

J

Bethesda's Fallout 3 was really out of genre....

So.... is it international backwards day? I've seen a lot of out-of-norm posts lately

I agree. Fallout 2 is the weakest of the trilogy, although it is still a very enjoyable game. I understand that a lot of people have a huge nostalgic boner for Fallout 2 but it just seems like a less inspired version of Fallout 1. I like to think of it as Fallout 1.5

Stuff like San Francisco, New Reno, Arroyo and Redding were pretty bad in terms of fitting the setting it's true. However were they actually any worse in terms of being totally out of place than locations like Little Lamplight, Oasis, Canterbury Commons with its battling superheroes, Girdershade and Andale?

Throw in a vampire clan (yeah I know they're not really vampires but for all practical purposes), the Fiddler's Green reference that is Tenpenny Tower and the Dunwich Building which is just an homage to Lovecraft and I think it's a bit unfair to claim Fallout 2 is somehow the worst in the series in terms of providing a cohesive setting.

Remember that Fallout 2 also had absolutely superb locations like Klamath, the Den, Modoc, and Vault City and even the ones that didn't fit were usually great in terms of RPG elements (San Francisco being a very woeful exception). New Reno remains one of the best designed areas in any RPG and incredibly fun to play through.

Definitely not the weakest of the series in game terms and while I understand the argument I don't even think it was especially bad at providing a consistent Fallout setting now that it has Fallout 3 to compare to.

I agree that there is too much pop-culture referencing and too much "out-of-genre" going on in the game. But to call it amateurish is more than a little overboard. The game expanded on Fallout 1 in so many brilliant ways. Not only were the basic mechanics moved but the towns, quests, npcs, dialogue--all were deeper and more complex this time around. For example, you might hate New Reno because it kicks the established Fallout 1 canon and feeling of "mostly-serious, sometimes goofy, always witty" in the shin, but on the other hand it is one of the most complex towns in any RPG I've ever played. The amount of depth in quests, characters and choices in that town is pretty incredible.

And hell, I actually really like it. It was Fallout 2 which dragged me into the series first. I actually bought it off the shelf, played it obsessively, then played Fallout 1. I love them both for what they are, and while I consider Fallout 1 to be the ultimate game on which all should be judged--I still play 2 more often (which has a lot to do with Kilap and his projects).



This is also true. Bethesda arbitrarily broke canon and what I feel is completely essential to the series (good writing, for one) constantly in order to adapt the game to their style. In fact, they just broke it in a way in which more Bethesda fans are fine with. I could probably come up with a list just as long as somebody else could with Fallout 2.



Well would you look at this. Somebody already started making a little list for me.

Pretty much my sentiments exactly. How convenient!

:foodndrink:

Just noticed I said "Not only were the basic mechanics moved" when I meant "Not only were the basic mechanics improved". Oops.

Back in the day, when F2 first came out, I can't honestly say I much noticed any of the excesses that game took. Fallout's always been a little tongue-in-cheek, after all. F2 probably took things a bit far in some places, but I think in other areas they did a very good job with what they had to work with (let's not forget that game came out only a year after the first one, give or take...) At the time I was playing it, I was just glad to playing another Fallout game so soon after the first one. And there were enough upgrades, revisions, and overall polish that in general I was easily able to overlook some of their other questionable liberties that they'd taken.

Still, everyone's entitled to their opinion; and it's not like the inherent "worth" (or lack thereof) of Fallout 2 is something that anyone's going to be able to empirically argue. Some people aren't going to be fans of it. I imagine there's likely a fair amount of people who only enjoyed playing Fallout 3, after all; and didn't really care very much for either of the first two games. There's probably even some people out there somewhere who think the only game that ever got it "right" was Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel.

I do have a couple of things I disagree with in the OP, however. First off: "a wild west town," isn't something that I can see as being a negative point considering this game. There's actually always been quite a lot of parallels between Spaghetti Westerns, and the Post-Apocalyptic genre overall. Take the first Mad Max movie, for instance. Take away his Interceptor, and put everyone on horses; and it wouldn't have seemed terribly out of place as a Western revenge movie.

Also: "a stew pot of creative ideas with no attempt to create a cool, immersive fictional universe... just a "hey, let's do this" mish-mash scattered across a map." I'll easily concede that point. It's a common criticism of Fallout 2 that it contains (probably too many) winking nods to the fans, fourth-wall breaking, and out-of-character comments. On the other hand, I don't think they set out to create an "immersive" world; in the same way that Fallout 3 attempted to do that. I have to find it hard to fault a game company for failing to accomplish something that I don't really think was high on their list of priorities in the first place.

Fallout 1 and 2 (to me, at least) were about giving weight to your character's actions and decisions - to give the illusion that literally anything you did in the game was going to have some larger consequence at some point (even if it wasn't realized until the end credits.) The idea wasn't necessarily to create a living, breathing, open world for the player to inhabit in the manner that Fallout 3 (and Bethesda games in general,) was.

totally agree, if anything Fallout 2's places was better in that regard.

I have to agree with you. To this day, Fallout 1 remains my favorite in the series. If it had as much replayabilty (or modding going for it) as Fallout 2, it'd be the undisputed king of the trilogy. The main thing I dislike about Fallout 2 is just that civilization has advanced to the point where it doesn't even feel like a Post-Nuclear Roleplaying Game. Hell, if it weren't for the Supermutants and Radscorpions, anyone giving the game a passing glance would probably think it was a Western or something.

There's just too much emphasis on combat compared to FO1, the dialog choices are severely lacking (most NPCs basically just give you "okay, go on", "can I ask you something else", and "[censored] you, please attack me" options), there's far too much emphasis on scavenging whereas items were more easily attainable in FO1. There's a glaringly obvious pop culture reference or other self-referential humor around every corner. Most NPCs place too much emphasis on drugs, six, et cetera. Prior to Shaun of the Dead, I think this game set the world record for entertainment media with the highest usage of the word "f* ck" per sentence. Fallout 2 just doesn't feel "Fallout-y". /rant

Someone on No Mutants Allowed once said that FO1's design mantra is "survive in the Wasteland", whereas FO2's is "prosper in the Wasteland". I hold this to be true. Still, I enjoy its lighthearted nature sometimes, and the political/diplomatic intrigue is enough reason to play it at least once. I will actually acknowledge Fallout 3 and say, however, that it probably nailed the true post-apocalyptic feeling better than FO2 did.

I've not been shy in voicing my negative opinions of the out of character aspects of FO2. I believe that the game would have been far superior without the many out of character random encounters and dialogue.

Its a game. Stop complaining and have a nice day

If you played fallout 2 when it first came out I bet you would think different. Fallout 2 is a great game alot better then fallout 3 when it comes to story and characters. some place were out of place and cut from the game. Wiki fallout 2 and you will see alot was taken out of the game. If they kept it in I would agree with you about locations being out of place. so many locations in fallout 3 were just cookie cutter locations with no real point being there. I would go to many of them and kill some radroachs and then maybe get some bottle caps, some ammo. Big woop. Then the predictable, getting attacked by talon company when I walk out the door. Fallout 2's location may have been a little out of place but they all had something worth exploring and quests.

Fallout 2 is superior to any other fallouts. Actually its the best rpg i ever played. About everything is perfect in that game.

In fallout 1 when you have visited one town, then you have visited all towns as they look almost same and are quite boring places. Feels like all npc`s would have been made from the same wood. And not enough quests. Too easy. Also it is quite childish game.

In fallout 2 you never know what you see next and that makes it very interesting to explore the world as it feels very alive. And enemy encounters are much harder and power armor isnt so overpowered as in fallout 1. Fallout 2 is very funny but still very immersive game. I have finished fo2 alredy about 15-30 times. And last time even felt better than first time in fallout 1.

I think you uderplay FO3 and overplay FO2. Although I enjoyed the locations of FO2, except, perhaps for New Reno, which i considered unfallout like, there certainly wasn't much exploring to do. You apparantly didn't enjoy the exploration aspect of FO3, but after several hundreds of hours of wandering around FO3, Iw qs still finding interesting places with little stories to them. They certainly weren't cpokie cutter locations.

A lot of the exploration and depth of the original Fallout games didnt consist of just more and more and more new locations. It consisted of levels in the existing settlements. The fact that what skills you had opened more options and that Stats actually did something allowed for there to be a lot that would take multiple playthroughs to find. In Fallout 3 you can find and do everything with two playthroughs.

You can specialize in enough things that one guy generally geared toward Small Weapons and Science/Repair etc who is good and one guy who is generally geared toward Big/Energy and whatever you missed from the first who is evil...those two guys cover everything. Point allocation wasnt so willy nilly in the originals and stats mattered. A guy with 1 intelligence was basically mentally handicapped in the originals, in Fallout 3 he's just Skill Point handicapped...and still capable of maxing out a few skills especially with books and bobbleheads

Hey! I don't believe in God so I've got to be obsessed with something!

Also, to defend Fallout 3--it really did a stupendous job of cramming in a mind-blowing amount of locations and --uh-- stuff, I guess. It's just that too many of those locations were useless in regards to actual quests, etc. I would imagine this is one area Fallout 4 could and would improve on.

This sums up my thoughts on it as well. :thumbsup:

Fallout 1 is my favorite, Fallout 2 was bigger and had all the fixes FO1 needed ~Since I never took either as an "immersive" experience, the 4th wall breaking was a non-issue in both games (for me)...
and I liked most of it (except for the chessmaster :grad: ) .


I liked all of the locations.

(cool logo/avatar :goodjob: )

Although I will gladly defend fallout 2 to the death, there are large parts of it which are a rush job and the devs iirc expressed disatisfaction with the end result of reno.

But Immersion breaking? No. Not at all.

I'll bite the bait. Funny, you can apply all of those comments to Fallout 3 perfectly.

Yeah, but Fallout 3 is still from this century so people just think you're being an opinionated FO1/2 veteran when you tell them that. :shrug:

Well i have to say that fallout 1 and 2 had much more aura than the fallout 3. The dialogues were much dumber in fallout 3, the music was much more deeper in fallout 1 and 2 than 3. I can say that i had more fear playing fallout 1 and 2 than 3. Well fallout 3 had less weapons, the citys were only littles camps that you can found 2 people 1 sleeping and the other drunk or crazy. Fallout 3 is like a prequel of the other 2 because everyone is dumber, everything is more destroyed and the cityes are littler. The combat svcks in 3 fallouts but in a fps you expect something better like in stalker. Then repair weapons was very stressing because you always have your weapons broken. The mission were stupid. The dialogues you have the (100%) in the right one so you didnt have to think to much. Was much easier get to the end because the end isn't to hard like fallout 1 and so hard to find like in fallout 2. The charcters aren't so original. The graphics werent so amazing like i expected and the game is really bad optimized. Crysis worked better and with less bug and it had better graphics. Stalker was much more deeper and with more aura. I dont know why the fallout doesnt look like a fallout because it lost the aura, it has less important places, it has worse music, is a laberynth go to dc and you get bored of killing 13131 ghoulds only. Well the combats are really confusing until you use bats and you kill 1313131 of 1 shot . Is boring, i really dislike it in comparation with the other 2.

That bothered me a bit at first as well - I also wanted to see the 'expected' post-apocalyptic dystopia of most of the first game (Like the one that Bethesda eventually made - a presentation of a world that although theoretically "nightmarish" it was familiar since we've been 'expecting' it after having experienced similar worlds (like the ones in Mad Max 2&3 for instance) and we could feel 'secure' in it - note that by "we" I refer to the players as observers not our in-game alter-egos).

But Fallout 2 really pulled the carpet from under our feet didn't it? It forced us into a world that was made out of very familiar elements yet it was so different from what we knew and felt comfortable in. It took a familiar environment- a place of safety - and broke it into pieces, kind of like wandering in a ruin that used to be your house: you can recognize it, you can see your favorite armchair that you know too well (like recognizing a 4th-wall-breaking pop reference) but it's now in a state that it doesn't convey any feelings of coziness anymore, it is instead confusing and scary.

So isn't that really what post-apocalypse is about? Isn't it about experiencing a world made out of familiar bits and pieces but violently redefined with the result of the observer feeling threatened in what he can still recognize as his own neighborhood? I say that if FO2 made you feel uneasy, confused and out-of-place or at least annoyed then it's easily the most 'immersive' game of the three.



Plus: the apparent difference of the locations can easily be explained and it makes perfect sense if you consider that you are exploring a world that tries to rebuild itself long after its destruction but under harsh conditions, and with each settlement being effectively cut out from the rest (In fact that's played pretty well since much of the game is explores the early attempts of these separate settlements to establish some sort of relation with each other) Each of these locations being cut-off from the rest naturally evolves in its own different way: In Clammath for example you see a resigned community that has given up any attempt of progress and makes no effort of improvement, Vault City shows a closed community that tries to rebuild itself by refusing to accept any external elements into it's closed system - an effective approach if that closed system is self-sufficient, but Vault City is not and therefore it slowly degrades. In New Reno you see a community where opportunists have found the chance to amass power for themselves by adapting in the new situation and taking advantage of people's despair.

Effectively it is a "mish-mash scattered across a map"... but that seems very logical to me as the game (unexpectedly and inconveniently perhaps) doesn't show a world trying to simply stay alive the next day after the destruction, but instead a world of groups that have been taken apart but managed to ensure their survival - each on it's own way- and now try to find a way to re-connect with each other. Maybe people are 'turned off' by that because the notion of having to survive yourself is more 'comfortable' than the notion that those who won't abide by your values have to survive as well - especially when doing so requires them drawing some of your comforts away from you.

I know I've already added my own two bottlecaps to this, and I don't want to see yet another thread devolve into yet another "I like Fallout 3/ I hate Fallout 3" strawman contest; but there are a couple of points I wanted to throw in before that happens:

I'm not going to argue that Fallout 2 didn't break the fourth wall too many times, or that it's attempts at humor didn't more often than not come off as something dreamt up by a coalition of horny 13-year-old nerds. I won't defend F2 to someone who found there were too many obstacles in the way of them getting into it. But if we're going to hope that Bethesda, in their further iterations of the franchise, learn from Black Isle's past mistakes; then I'd also hope that they learn from what that game did right (and in which I feel that Bethesda's future iterations could benefit from.)

For one, I didn't feel that Fallout 2 was a mish-mash of different ideas strewn across a worldmap. A closer look often reveals a strong interconnection (if not directly, then at least thematically,) between most of the settlements found in the game. Jet is produced and distributed from New Reno, which is variably leveraged by different factions to control Redding; New Reno itself being contested by any number of forces both internal and external. You have Vault City at one end of the map - an isolationist dystopia, and NCR on the other - an imperialistic union looking to spread it's moralistic agenda across the entire Wasteland. And of course mixed in with all of this is the Brotherhood of Steel, and the Enclave - each with their own agenda, the Ghouls who just want to be left alone, and a number of other settlements who have so far been able to remain peripheral to this entire powerplay.

Each settlement you explore in Fallout 2 is very different - with varying themes and events, but they're all of them illuminated by their relation to one or more factions or settlements. In contrast, I have to admit that I found each settlement in Fallout 3 to be comparably isolated not only from the events taking place elsewhere in DC, but separated in terms of any real connection to somewhere outside of their own locale. Considering the much narrower scale of the game, I found this a bit questionable. I found all of the places to visit in Fallout 3 to be well-constructed and thematically viable; but I missed that sense of interconnection between the various towns and villages.

I also found the item progression in Fallout 2 to be particularly commendable for an ostensibly open-world game. Considering that you can go anywhere and do anything, I felt it did a very good job with keeping you from the higher-powered weapons, items, and armor early on in the game; and providing you with equipment and tasks relative to your level and progress through the game without keeping things too linear. Sure, now that I know the game inside and out I can run through and get some awesome gear right off the bat - but a newcomer is very likely to find themselves funneled into areas with challenges more apropos to their level; with gear and rewards relative to that. In Fallout 3, the Combat Armor (which I used through the rest of the game, as RP-wise I didn't find the Power Armor to be a very good fit,) wasn't terribly more expensive than any other type of armor - barring quest-specific and unique iterations of these things, the gear I would find myself with at the end of the game were things I picked up in Megaton - the very first town I encountered in the game.

Anyway, I'm just saying that there's a number of things that I don't think worked so terribly well in Fallout 2; but that there's also some (I think very important) lessons that apply to most modern RPGs, to this day. There's even some things that I think Fallout 2 did a better job with than Fallout 3 did (and I didn't even get into the whole customizable armor and weapon thing.) None of that's meant to be taken as "well, you might not have liked Fallout 2, but at least it didn't svck like Fallout 3 did." I'm just saying that there's also some things that Fallout 2 did right, that any future Bethesda RPGs (heck, even Elder Scrolls, for all of it's awesomeness,) could benefit from.