RAKtheUndead said:
I've not only played them, but played them multiple times, most of the time on the hardest difficulty, reviewed them both and have read most of the Fallout Bibles. I love the first two Fallout games. They're a gold standard in the Western RPG genre.
^this^ and agree.
I mean lets look at it this way games have gotten far easier to the world at large than the good old days of gaming where we had no compass with big blinky beacons to say "GO THIS WAY" can add "STUPID" onto that if you want. Games also had a harder difficulty curve in general again because games have gotten easier.
Fallout 1 and 2 also had old school solid rpg mechanics, movement, iniative, etc hence you only had X movement points per turn so you could only move so much and use so many actions in your movement turn cycle. Old school RPG players know this concept very well, since ad&d and many games had the exact same systems in play, tho to be honest most of my groups scrapped the whole movement stuff and ballparked it cause it was faster and of course more fun when you could cut down a few dice rolls per encounter and move stuff along better.
But many of these old school pnp rpg elements carried over in the fallout games seem to baffle younger players and people people that try to get into the games now days. How many times have people complained omg i can only move a few blocks and cant do anything!
But look at the majority of rpgs you play now days there is no limitation to your movement you can fight or flee at will as long as your attacker is not faster than you, many rpgs also dumb down the content to your level, so you can encounter anything in game and have a reasonable chance of defeating it, but most old rpgs you had high level monsters that would obliterate you if you tried to fight them, so early on in rpgs like fo1 and 2 you are going to spend a good bit of your early levels just running away from fights you cannot win period.
Now days most games do not even have healing items, heck we are to the point in gaming where majority of games have the magic healing when you glue yourself to a wall for a bit and let your health recover, now having items that fill you up is not real, but what the old health kit systems did is made you play smarter. I could not rambo my way thru a level and hope to have enough healing to take on the boss at the end. So i had to use my skills, stealth, cover, different weapons to make my way through levels.
No clearer how spoiled i was by todays games than going back and playing deus ex recently, cause the game was HARD, it was real hard until i started thinking more and being smarter how i played the game and still some parts of the game were brutal to the point i had a lot of reloads to pass certain encounters.
Or the fact i am playing baldurs gate, well sort of got distracted by gran turismo 5

, but bg is hard, many fights are very hard espeically since you can get some rather difficult missions early on in the game, when you are not geared properly for them. Not made any easier when i told my best healer she whined too much and she left the party never to be seen again....
But yea for me fo1 and 2 were the best of the old school rpg games that probably captured the
feel of pnp rpg games better than any rpg i had played. I do not think i have ever ironmanned them tho, tho its been a long time since i played either, but have played fo2 probably 4 times over the years, then i lent my cd to a buddy and he lent that to a friend of his and it vanished into thin air....