Gethsemani said:
I've played all three games and completed them all several times, yet I have to disagree with you. Fallout 1 and 2 requires that you really, really love RPGs and numbercrunching if you want to get the most out of the experience. To not consider it "fun" to be brutally molested by a pack of geckos before reaching level 4 and getting a gun in Fallout 2 is not a sign of being an ADHD-diagnosed 12-year old looking for quick gratification (As the DAC/NMA crowd would like to paint all Fallout 3 fans out to be). It is not a good UI or good design to have the Inventory and the Character Sheet apart or not showing your hit chance with your choosen weapon without entering combat ("Stand still Marcus, I am just checking if I can use this rifle well.").
Both Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 were punishing to new players, especially new players who weren't used to RPGs. The journal and mission log updated poorly so either you kept notes on paper or hoped you could keep it all in your head, otherwise you might end up forgetting that you could pursue an alternate solution (this is especially notable in the Vault City/Gecko storyline). The late game combat was also brutally slow, when you had to sit through turns that took upwards of 20 minutes because 30 or so Super Mutants (Abandoned Military Base and Wannamingo Mine especially) were shuffling towards you or because everyone in Navarro was acting in every turn. Geckos in the lower levels? If you had built anything but a combat monster with high AP, you could get shredded over and over even by the "easy" silver geckos. Have fun getting that moonshine in Klamath with your non-combat character.
i disagree. i was never a hardcore RPG fan, and i still dislike some features in RPGs and open worlds in general. i never used DAC or NMA or any other forum or site related to a specific game, simply because i don't care that much about one single game.
i'm not saying that i got the full experience out of fallout 1/2 either, there are numerous ways i never tried out in the game; not because it was too boring, but because i felt by completing the game the way i did, i got as much gratification as i needed from it.
the thing i disagree with though, is that you seem to think an example of a non-combat character (which perhaps is the least used way of doing things - i played the role as a suave, charismatic person, but even i had some combat skills at a certain level just to be able to survive) is a way of playing the game. stop for a second and think about it; you're in a wasteland, a harsh environment where animals or other beings are looking to take your head at every corner; where you realistically had to think about how to survive from day to day and whether or not you had the resources to do so. can you really afford to not be a combative character in a world like this, at least in some way?
also: the games were never without flaws, and i'm not saying that they are perfect in any way (i don't think any game can reach such a level of achievement). the turn based combat required players to exploit the system to skip combat just so you could move faster towards your next combat area, for instance. what i was saying was that fallout 1/2 was never about needless mechanics (there aren't any), and that the game was only as dull as the player made it for himself.
Fallout 3 is a whole other beast entirely. It is no longer aimed at the hardcore RPG-crowd, Bethesda admits as much. Is it a worse game? Yes, in some ways. Is it a better game? Yes, in some ways. The problem with this entire discussion is that the Fallout die-hards will never admit that Fallout 3 did something well and the Fallout 3 fanboys have learnt that the easiest way to deal with the die-hards is to tell them to take their rose-tinted glasses off and go back to NMA/DAC to brood some more. The Escapist is one of those few forums where both groups still meet on somewhat even ground.
i deliberately didn't want to talk about fallout 3 as i thought it was missing so much. don't get me wrong; i was excited on beforehand for fallout 3, but i was disappointed to how it was presented in the end. the environment was boring, and tinted with a green (because, as we know, radiation in any form is green and not colorless), rather than letting a more artistic way of rendering the wasteland. the story ended abruptly, and in general it didn't feel like a fallout game, but more like a game forced into the fallout universe by no other means than the right to the franchise.
i don't think that fallout 3 did anything that hadn't been done before, or improved anything that had been done in the genre, which is another reason for my disappointment. fallout 1/2, at the time of release, were at a frontier of game development; both in the sense of the environment, but also in the brutal "realism" of the game (realism is used here to pertain to the environment, NOT to the reality of present day) as well as the game mechanics and depth of the game. what exactly did fallout 3 bring to the table at release?
