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  • I'm a huge fan of the OG Fallouts, played them many times. I replayed Fallout 1 just a week ago and it's great but... I would be hasitant to recommend it to someone who never played it. It is really archaic and I'm not talking about the graphics as that's fine. It can simply be a bit hard to operate to people used to modern games.

    You don't have any tutorials telling you how to play it. If you actually find a quest log in Pip Boy, it turns out it only lists some quests and doesn't have any details on them, only a vague one-liner title.

    Figuring out that a randomly found item called Junk with an absolutely general description is actually an item needed to fix some machinery and that you need to hold right button on said machinery, from the drop-down select backpack, scroll to said junk and click it to use... isn't really straight forward. Same goes for using some skills (repair, science etc.)

    The game is also incredibly unforgiving and even when using all 10 save slots you can get locked out. Saying the wrong thing often causes an NPC to attack you, and when you kill them, everyone around turn hostile. Sometimes you don't even need to talk and get attacked on sight.

    You go to the Glow without a stock of Rad-X and you can go through it thinking everything's fine and you'll heal that radiation later. Your character seems to be fine, until you try to leave the location and you just keep dying in the Wasteland, seemingly for no reason. This happened to me last playthorugh and after 20 attempts I finally managed to survive by eating every drug I had with me xD. Only some (real) hours later I noticed that my SPECIAL stats were permanently lowered. The game makes it really hard and rare to permanently increase those stats and easy to lower it (drug addiction will do the same, or I think attacks from the Master and/or his Nightkin).

    There are also bugs. It's super frustrating when a BoS companion blocks you elevator exit in Mariposa Base. Had to force them to run through force fields multiple times so they die...

    These are just some examples and even though some of these issues get fixed or improved in Fallout 2, they illustrate what I mean - a modern gamer can simply bounce back from OG Fallouts and I wouldn't blame them.

    Also - since when anyone cares what "tik tok says"?

  • I will also say, the original Fallouts are games of its time. It sold itself off its narrative and as I am playing Fallout 2, it is still enjoyable but I do concede there are moments of frustration that one learns to work around.

    It is not a perfect game, but it is a game that was written in a plausible manner that could be considered too real look at human nature at times and in the same breath going off the rails crazy with something out of pocket that can catch one off guard.

    It does a great job of allowing one to make it their story, although some of the writing might not gel with everyone it at least framed it well in setting.

    It think it gels well with people that can roleplay in a setting as even the combat logs have humour to it. It requires a lot of reading and the people in the videos look like clay dolls but it is bound to envoke something in someone if they are enjoying themselves playing these types of games.

    The turn-based nature of the combat can turn people off, but I cannot deny the charm of running up to someone and giving them a concussion by wolloping their head and then going in to gouge their eyes to make them useless in combat and finishing them off with a shot to the groin.

  • Imagine if they made a deal with Larian to make another installment in the franchise (not Fallout 5, just something like New Vegas by Obsidian). How cool would that be? They specialize in turn-based, top-down RPGs and would fit perfectly.

    • Although Larian and Black Isle have both excelled at novelistic (as opposed to Bethesda's simulationist) games, what a lot of people loved about Fallout 1+2 was how the storytelling was regional, factional, and political. The payoff was how the denouement responded to your in game choices, and how your story could be contextualized in a larger living world.

      The Larian house style is great, but more focused on characters, interpersonal storytelling, dialogue and forensically detailed narrative exception handling. There are voiced lines and detailed writing intended for even the most abstrusely sequenced playthroughs that few players will ever see. Black Isle did something similar, but with less graphical acumen and in more factional terms.

      It would be interesting and likely profitable to see how Larian's style came across in a Fallout game, but I'm not sure it's a perfect fit for a story that's at its best when it's critiquing society and human nature at large.

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