This question is directed at people who played the old games when they came out the first time. It's not important how much you liked these games. What is important is you completed most part of the games. If you played Fallout1 and Fallout2 after you played Fallout3, please state this.

But please do not leave sorry played out excuses like "but Fallout 1 and 2 were old!". Or Fallout 1+2 fights being turn based and Fallout 3 being realtime. Or Fallout 1+2 being third person and Fallout 3 being both 1st and 3rd person.

As these things depend on taste rather than facts. I may like games that are good and you may like games that are worse.

Write about things that are better (even if the difference is marginal) in Fallout 1 and 2. Compare the role playing aspects, game mechanics, the matureness level. Give examples and compare them. Hide the spoilers about Fallout 1and 2 if necessary. And write about things that doesn't not can't don't come to my mind write now.

Eye and Groin Shots!

Speech options

You could try to pick any lock and still have a chance to unlock it. On the same note you could blow up doors

It was harder to survive (when supply's cost real money as in 20000 caps for combat armor)

No stupid mini hacking or lock picking games

So many more, but Fallout 3 is still a great game just missing some of the old good stuff.

- Dialogue
- Unique NPCs
- Towns (while not unique by appearance, they had more things to do and had more history and factions in them)

... That's pretty much it. Otherwise there is a bunch of small details though, such as better looking armor and so on..


EDIT: The OP's request for players "who played the old games when they came out the first time" is silly. I bought the games some one and a half years ago... So what? I've still played them through so many times I've done everything possible in the two. Just because you had the game collecting dust in your locker for years doesn't make you any more better in answering to questions like these... A better one would be "those who played the originals before Fallout 3".

This.

Also:

- Depth
- Overall writing
- Music
- Atmosphere
- Combat
- Rule system
- Immersion (yeah, that buzzword )
- Difficulty balance (imo)

To mention few on to of my hat.

- The old games were much more advlt oriented. They made the games so that children who tried playing them would not like them. Only advlts would want to continue playing the games.
- The old games scripts and dialogues were very deep. There were tons of things you could say, and there could be many results.
- The inner mechanics of the game were better. More sophisticated use of SPECIAL, more balanced damage.
- The game was immerse.
- You could have character traits.
- SPECIAL skills, perks you gained or traits could have effects on the interactions.
- You could buy and upgrade a car.
- There were very big places with many things to do.
- There were very small beautiful details.
- There were no immortal characters.
- There was humor in the game.
- Music was mostly more atmospheric.
- There were funny random encounters and easter eggs and similar things that reminded you that you were playing a game. (the game was that immerse)
- The game world was more realistic.
- The game tried to show you many different aspects of the Fallout world.

Good stuff. A few I agree with personally from the posts so far are:

1) Dialogue (was more usually funnier too!)
2) Speech options (and they were risky).
3) Eye and Groin shots (Heck yes!)
4) Music (I loved that music so much)
5) Prices of supplies (I liked having to save money to buy some big gun or boxes of ammo, sadly never had to do that in F3).

I hereby deem these features OP approved. :tops:

Some people claimed the games humor was really juvenile, and I do know people who played them really young. But overall I do think they went over the heads of most kids.

Immersive or immense?

I wonder why they removed those. Probably just to be able to create more perks?

Meh, that thing would have been useless in Fallout 3 even if they could have one since FT was instant.

Definitely something I liked. With just a few tweaks for quests they could/should have done the same in Fallout 3.

Highly arguable. Most of it was randomly generated preset themes like "ruined building square","blank desert square", etc.
Even the towns like New Reno which was so close to the other cities which were ruined by the war was a bright well lit city full of casino's with full functioning gambling machines. I liked the barren towns in F3 better, despite the humorous characters.

- Game mechanics and way those are implemented. Your character has limitations, if you character cannot shoot energy weapons... fact that player has steady aim and fast reflexes won't win battles.
- Atmosphere.
- World/setting design details. In Fallout 3 it's pretty hard to find locations that have logical economy behind those. On original games that is usually told on first description of settlements you have just arrived into and map design of those locations also reflect that, description might tell that you have arrived into a small mining community, main street is empty and dusty.
- Freedom of action and causality. You can do stuff, but you also have to pay for consequences of those choices.
- Writing of individual quests.
- Dialogue.
- Players intelligence isn't undermined every time when skill/perk/attribute threshold triggered dialogue option appears. Example, you talk with scientist,
- Writing of main plot.
- Humor on originals was quite multilayered.
- Possibility to play character who is too stupid to have actually sensible discussions.

The dialouge options were by far the best part of the old games.There was some depth and reason to them unlike:

(Intelligence) I think their a genus of crabs.
(Agility)It takes fast hands and faster reflexes.

While maybe not end game changing,for the most part,dialouge often could and would affect a quest or multiple quests depending on your speech,or charisma.

I actually like the turn based combat and the modifiers that went into it.Though it could be arbitrary.One drawback was that you could miss an enemy right in front of you several times in a row even with a high perception and gun skill..Low level characters can find even simple enemies a chore and very time consuming.Also what is the AC modifying?A rat is just as likely to hit and cause damage wether my AC is 8 or 38 or if i'm wearing a vault suit or one of the leather armors.Your AC modifier only really seems to come into play once you get combat or power armor.Also a high number of critical hits that cause 0 damage.

Exploration was okay in towns and other preset areas,but you could get really boned if you couldn't get enough random encounters between these.You might finish all the quests in Arryo,Klamath,the Den,and Modoc,then maybe only get one or two encounters where youcould build your character outside of them.Leading to the player roaming around the map for weeks or even months in hopes of getting enough encounters to build them up enough to be able to survive the next area.

Well, considering that this thread has 8 replies, and the original counterpart has 11x as many I am forced to conclude that: FALLOUT 3 IS BETTER!! My plan worked perfectly. :woot:

"Realistic" can often mean "internally plausible or consistent within the context" ~and Fallout for the most part was just that. Also, none of it was randomly generated as far as I know; and those parts that were "blank desert square" (?) or outside of town I guess you mean, were archetypal and indicative of the general terrain of the aftermath.

Kind of like concluding that all socks are white and reach up to the knee...

In the topic I created, I wasn't trying to show people that Fallout1 and Fallout2 were better. I just thought if people who didn't bother playing the old games became aware of the fact that old games were better "role playing" games, then they would want the next Fallout to be more role playing oriented, as there is shortage in Post Apocalyptic "Role Playing" games at the moment and an abundance of Post Apocalyptic shooters (and Fallout3 falls short when compared to those shooters). Maybe if the developers read and saw that we wanted a better Fallout, they would pay more attention to the detail that we really wanted.

I started out on fallout 3, then was curious as to what the previous games were like... Now i can safely say that the ONLY thing fallout 3 did better was make it prettier (exploring ruins in 3D, explosions, a sky)
Dont get me wrong i love FO3, it introduced me to the series, But i cant help but feel like it turned an amazing RPG series into an FPS with minor role playing elements.

FO1/FO2 had a better overall feel, better dialog, better character development, better voice acters, better storyline, more/better weapons, more varied enemies, better towns, more towns, more quests and was alot harder.

Your argument that more people liked fallout 3 therefore it is better is a poor one. Its all a matter of preference.
I tried playing FO3 again today and got bored very quickly. IMO fallout 3 is too easy and feels like it was made to cater for mainsteam gamers who dont like to die in games or give any thought to proper character development.

Fallout 1/2 don't hold the same replay value to me, where as F3 does. And if I stop playing one game and keep playing another, that game I'm still playing is therefore better to me.

And people liking Fallout 3 more is not a argument, it is a scientifically proven fact. :nerd:

The combat... In my opinion VATS should just be old school fallout combat slightly refined. And then of course you'd have your first person also.

We all have our own opinions, (as it should be)

Fallout 3 would have to be selling in 2020 for this to be a proven fact (If Fallout 1 is proven not to be selling along side it).

Fallout 1 & 2 still sell to this day and its a fair bet that many folks here played it last week. This is an industry where titles are forgotten in months or sometimes weeks, and only the best of the best past the test
(of time)
Also, popularity does not equal quality. (to paraphrase a borrowed quote) McDonalds has arguably served more burgers than any other company in history, but no one will agree that they serve the best burgers, and they are certainly not the best quality burger. Just because a 'Mom & Pop' hole in the wall burger joint is unknown globally and can't claim a billion served, does not mean their product must be inferior to Mcdonald's, "cuz more people eat there instead". Just because a large number of people pay to play a game for 8 to 12 hours a day all year long does not of itself indicate the game's quality ~it just doesn't. :shrug:

I'm not even going to comment. :yawn:

Totally the opposite for me. I've played F2 many times and each playthrough is enjoyable.

I tried replaying F3 and couldn't do it, it just wasn't fun, so I created a character that some of you have seen (Robot Chicken dike Cheney) and cheated like mad.
I've not actually played Point Lookout or Mothership Zeta - I got bored before I got that far. Hell, I didn't even finish Broken Steel as by that point I'd put so many hours in that the game was just starting to feel old.

Robot Chicken dike Cheney???

I think it's pretty much been said here already. I'm also one that replays the originals atleast once everyyear. FO3 only lasted 200 hours with a ton of mods and screenshooting proping it up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuexfFEL048 was the inspiration for my character.
He ended up looking like http://i47.tinypic.com/28takk2.jpg.

Oh yeah I remember that character, back in that other thread. I thought that guy was awesome.

Hahaha, quote:"look on the bright side, you can play simon on it"


Wow! Did you have a build in flamethrower in your power armor? Now I see the point of your nickname. :laugh:

Anyway, nice work! Looks great! :ahhh:

I don't think there's any issue with that. People have all manner various dislikes and preferences - that's what makes the world such an interesting place to live in.

1) I don't think that's something that you can simply "call" without at the same time backingt up with some supporting facts - at the very, very least some form of extensive poll performed by a trustworthy and disinterested third party. I mean, I can say that "it's scientifically proven that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," but without supplying anything to back that up I'm essentially asking people to take my statement at face value. And unless I've already been unanimously proven to be someone 100% trustworthy and an expert in that specific field, I somehow doubt that anyone's going to be believe me solely on the strength of my convictions...

When you make a statement of opinion, and then wish it be accepted as fact, then the burden of proof falls upon you.

2) Who cares? Like I said - I have my preferences, and you have yours. This is probably not the only thing we'd find we disagree on. If it were somehow proven that "9 out of 10 dentists recommend Fallout 3," then that's not going to somehow sway my own opinion on the matter - I'm not going to feel bad for myself simply because I'm in the minority. And likewise, sharing a popular opinion with others is hardly going to make me feel more "valid" in my views.

(ie, I recently went out and bought some new shoes. After looking at what was available in my price range, I settled on a pair of brown ones. I bought that pair because they were the ones I liked, after trying out a number of other options. I didn't go through the store and poll everyone to see whether they preferred the black or brown shoes before seeing what my opinion should be... )

Back to topic, I have to say I much preferred the spread of equipment and items in Fallout 2 over Fallout 3 (and Fallout 1, as well.) In #2, I rather liked how you started out at the very bottom "rung" of the equipment ladder, and (considering a standard play-through - ie, not "exploiting" knowledge of the map to run out and grab some Power Armor right off the bat, etc,) how you generally spent a decent amount of time each step "step" along the way. (Like: you finally save up enough money for some Leather Armor, and by the time you get the Customized Leather Armor, it's still a valuable upgrade that you spend a noticeable amount of time cherishing.)

I seem to remember a pre-release interview with Todd Howard, where he mentioned that he wanted to make use of the item condition mechanic to make some of the higher-level weapons and equipment more available early on in the game - to give the players a taste of what would be out there without making them wait for the most of the game to be able to find it. Ostensibly, I think the idea was that the player would find a high-level item with near-zero condition and be able to play around with it a bit before it broke. Which I think was actually an honorable motive. But the downside was that if you happened to come across something like that, all you really had to do was take it back to a merchant and get it repaired - basically you were getting a high-level item before you were really "supposed" to have access to it. (And ammo was something I rarely found to be all that much of a limitation, for the most part.)

I think that's something that could have worked out - but perhaps needed to have been thought through a little bit more.

Still, what I enjoyed about Fallout 2 was how you'd get to Klamath as a near-penniless tribal with little of any real value to barter with, and even the most basic of necessities was well outside of your price range. I still remember saving up every penny and trading in almost all my disposable good just to be able to buy a couple of actual stimpaks, so that I wouldn't have to rely on those Healing Powders quite as much - and how buying just two of those completely cleaned me out.

The relative scarcity of certain items in Fallout 2 (and of course, towards mid-game this was much less of a consideration - an aspect that's been present throughout all of the Fallout series,) was something I felt really added to the setting and atmosphere. Buying those stimpaks wasn't like going to the drug store to pick up medicine - it felt like I was buying a rare Pre-War artifact that had miraculously managed to stay intact through all of those years. An item that was valuable not just for it's usefulness, but as a rare artifact of the nearly "magical" Pre-War civilization.