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dorchadas
The year was 1997, and I (as I've written about many times on my reviews) did not have a Super Nintendo or a Playstation, so I was playing PC games. Games like Diablo and Age of Empires, or Star Wars: Jedi Knight and Heroes of Might and Magic, or Civilization II and Myth: the Fallen Lords. I read PC Gamer ravenously every month because most of my friends did have Playstations or Supers Nintendo and so they weren't reliable sources for new PC games coming out. Every month, PC Gamer came with a demo disc, and I got to play a bit of Diablo (the demo went through the Butcher and included a "repair items" skill that reduced max durability that didn't make it to the main game) and games I never went on to play, like Interstate '76--I still remember the radio line that plays after the first combat where the cops say "Use of deadly force...is encouraged."
One of the games I still remember to this day was Fallout. It takes place in "Scrapheap" (which was reused for Junktown), a town split by rival warring gangs, where you can side with either of the gangs (or kill them both, or sabotage the generator and doom the town). There's only a couple screens, no character creation, and two quests (deal with the gang, and meet Dogmeat), and I played that demo maybe a dozen times, scouring the entire town for everything I could find it in. Playing other RPGs had already taught me to talk to everyone, and at that point, the lack of total knowledge due to the rudimentary state of the internet meant that every single game was imbued with infinite potential because if I didn't discover something myself, it was possible I'd never learn about it. For example, I only learned you could sabotage the generator when writing this post!
When the full game came out later that year, I bought it immediately.
Well, that last guy they sent sure didn't get very far.
The demo throws you into the deep end and the full game isn't much better. The introductory movie is cool and moody set to "Maybe" by the Ink Spots (famously they wanted to use "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" but couldn't get the rights) but is all world background about the Vaults and the resource conflicts that led to the Great War, and after character creation you briefly talk with the Vault 13 Overseer who lays out the quest--the water chip is broken and cannot be repaired, the vault has only a few months of water, and everyone will die or have to abandon the vault unless a replacement chip is found. Then the giant vault door closes and you're in a cave filled with rats, standing next to a dead body wearing a Vault 13 jumpsuit. And when you fight or run past the rats and make it to the cave exit, it takes you to the world map shrouded in darkness.
I have problems with Fallout 3 that I'll mention later but one thing it does really well is the moment you leave the vault and your character sees sunlight for the first time in their entire life. The whole screen going white and suddenly fading into austere ruins while mournful music plays perfectly sells the sheltered Vault 101 inhabitant seeing the outside and realizing that they're totally out of their element. The beginning of Fallout had the same effect on me when I was young, a world map full of darkness with "Vault 13" and "Vault 15" as the only points of light. Most of the map is empty wasteland and traveling between towns takes days, with random encounters being mostly hostile mutants, checks to avoid dehydration, or the occasional corpse of a fellow-traveler. Since you're on a time limit before the vault runs out of water, talking to people and trying to find out where you should be going so you don't waste weeks wandering through trackless desert is an important strategy, but it's not necessary at the beginning. Heading to Vault 15 as the only other destination, several days away from Vault 13 you'll see another green circle on your map, indicating a point of interest.
Before I really get into that, though, I should talk about character creation.
Well, aren't you S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
Fallout semi-famously was originally going to be the first GURPS-based computer game but the GURPS license was dropped for still-unclear reasons and replaced with the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system, which stands for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck, those being your primary stats.
Now, one problem with this system is that it's extremely unbalanced. I went 4, 7, 5, 7, 9, 9, 8 for my stats--you start with 5 in each and get 10 points to put wherever you want, and the Gifted trait gives you +1 to each stat. I dumpstered Strength and Endurance because the power armor you find later increases your Strength by 3, and I didn't set anything to 10 because you can get cyberware installed later that increases every stat except Charisma and Luck by 1, and those can also be increased through other means. And of course, I did this because I've played this game a dozen times already and I know how it works, but it does work like that. Also, Agility directly sets the number of action points you have in combat, at the rate of (5 + [Agility / 2]), and since the single-greatest power in any turn-based game is the power to take more turns, high Agility is one of the best stats you can take. Similary, high Intelligence directly raises the number of skill points you can get--the default is 5 * (Intelligence * 2)--so while low Intelligence does have hilarious dialogue options as the people you're talking to all realize how stupid you are, high Intelligence will give you multiple times more skill points than low Intelligence. Perception increases how quickly you act in combat and reduces range penalties, and so on.
You can pick two traits, including Gifted, which has the above effects and slightly reduces your skill points per level; Bloody Mess, which makes the extravagant death animations play more often; Small Frame, which gives you more Agility but a lower max carry weight; or Jinxed, which means you get more critical failures in combat but so do all your enemies. You can also pick three skills as "tag" skills, which means that points you put into them count double. I tagged, as I usually do, Energy Weapons, Speech, and Science, to make some kind of 50s egghead with a blaster. This also kind of breaks the game and just now I learned why--the original GURPS-based skill list, visible in the above article, contains the skills Bard, Carousing, Detect Lies, Influence Skills: Diplomacy, Influence Skills: Fast-Talk, Influence Skills: Intimidation, Influence Skills: Savoir-Faire, Influence Skills: Sex Appeal. Those eight skills were all collapsed into the Speech skill, letting you take a single skill and dominate everyone in dialogue, just like in Dragon Age: Origins where I'd use Coercion to shut down quests near-instantly. In the same way that the stealthy sniper is the uberbuild that dominates every Bethesda game, the smooth-talking brainiac is the build that dominates Fallout 1.
Fallout didn't invent the concept of perks but it did call them perks (as opposed to Merits or Feats or Advantages or various other TTRPG terms), and I was so used to getting so many of them after hundreds of hours of Fallout 3 / Fallout New Vegas that I forgot in Fallout 1 they work more like feats in D&D. The maximum level is 21, and barring wandering the wasteland and murdering mutants for a dozen of hours you're not going to get anywhere close to that--I beat the game at level 13--and since you get a perk every three levels, in practice you only get a handful. Some of them are nearly useless, like the Healer perk (you will heal far more with stimpaks or over time while traveling than by using either First Aid or Doctor), or the Mental Block perk, which prevents one single attack type by one enemy that is easily defended against using an item. It's much the same problem as D&D, actually, where some perks like Bonus Rate of Fire are incredible and some like Friendly Foe (which just became part of the UI in Fallout 2) are a waste of time. It's definitely a first pass on a system that would be refined in the sequel.
It's fine and works, and it's very memorable, but it's very easy to win the game in character creation. On the other hand, that means it's easier to make challenge builds--just don't take Gifted and you're already playing on hard mode.
They may call it Junktown but the buildings are still clean.
Okay, that out of the way, let's get back to the story. The Vault Dweller (as the protagonist will be called in every later reference to them) arrives at the city they see on the horizon to find a new place.
Let me emphasize that--a new place. The people of Shady Sands aren't living in bombed out ruins that they inexplicably haven't even cleared the trash and skeletons out of. Their buildings are gleaming white adobe, clean and well-maintained, with walls around the town to protect from raiders and mutant wildlife. They're attempting to farm and build a life for themselves, and with a high enough Science skill, you can introduce the idea of crop rotation to help their yields. There are no references to pre-War society here at all, just a new town in a new world.
With new problems. When you talk to the guards at the gate, they'll tell you that radscorpions keep attacking and no matter how many of them are killed, more of them always seem to show up again, and they'd be very happy if you tracked them back to the caves that seem to be their lair and take them out. If you do that, when you come back, the town leader Aradesh's daughter Tandi has been kidnapped by raiders and you can go free her before continuing on to Vault 15. There's nothing in Vault 15 but looted ruins and the water control portion of the vault is buried under a thousand tons of rock, but in Shady Sands they'll tell you they trade with places further south, Junktown and the Hub, and direct you there.
That's the way the game proceeds. You don't have much direction but it's diagetic--the Vault 13 Overseer says that they have no idea what's out there since no one else returned, so you have no way of knowing where a water chip might be. As you ask around, you get directed to the Hub, and in the Hub you learn there's a group called the Water Merchants. If you talk to them, they'll tell you, "Yeah, we haul water all over and sell it to people. Except those ghouls over in Necropolis. For some reason, they never want to buy any." Or you can talk to the Hub librarian and if you tell her about your quest, she can give you a pre-War Vault Tek pamphlet that lists nearby vault locations, including one under what used to be Bakersfield. Or you can just stroll into Necropolis after tagging along with a caravan and the ghouls will happily be like, "Yeah, we still have a working water chip. It's pretty great."
And then, you can decide what to do about it.
Stay hydrated.
One phrase that gets used sometimes with video games is "choices and consequences," the idea that the player's decisions should matter and have measurable effects on the world. One of the biggest complaints I've heard about the Telltale games is that they're amazing when you play through them the first time, but awful when you replay them because you realize that even when you make different decisions, the exact same thing happens. In TTRPG space I've heard it described as the "Quantum Ogre" problem, where you have three doors. The illusion of choice path is that the first door has orcs, the second door has the ogre, and the third door has treasure, no matter order the players open them in. A lot of video games do this because actual branching paths are expensive, voice acting content most people will never see is extremely expensive, and that's why you need fan projects like The Nameless Mod to bring it to fruition. No one else is going to bother.
Fallout 1 is not as branching as The Nameless Mod--all choices in the main quest that don't follow the standard path lead to game overs--but there's quite a few in side quests and other content. You can beat the game without ever encountering the Brotherhood of Steel or doing their quests, though I've never done this. In Junktown, you can side with either Killian Darkwater, the law-minded sheriff, or Gizmo, the leader of the casino, and kill the other one to leave one person in unquestioned control of the town. You can work for the criminal elements in the Hub or take them out. When saving Tandi from the raiders you can kill everyone, pay a ransom, challenge the lead raider to a duel, or (apparently) if you have Luck 8+ and are dressed in leather armor you can act like you're the ghost of the raider leader's father and spook him into letting Tandi go. You can side with either the Regulators or the Blades in Adytum. When in Necropolis, you can repair the ghouls' water pumps to leave them with a supply of fresh water, or you can ignore it, take the water chip, and leave them to die. And after the game is done and all this is over with, you get a big slideshow covering all the places you went and what happened to them after your actions there.
This blew my mind when I was young. Being an Old, I grew up with games that were very linear, or if they didn't have a linear story, they didn't have a story at all except the one that your actions created (like Civilization). If there was a choice, there was maybe one or two endings. Had I been Japanese and grown up playing visual novels maybe I would have been used to it, but as a player of games like Loom or Quest for Glory or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (took me eight years to beat by the way), I was used to one story, with one set of actions you had to do, and one ending once you completed it. Seeing the effects of all my different choices was amazing. I even wish that Interplay had gone through with their original plan of bait and switch with Junktown. In the finished product, siding with Killian is the "good" ending and siding with Gizmo is the "bad" ending but it started the other way around. Killian would have become more and more obsessed with his own brand of justice and strangled Junktown under harsh punishments for small infractions, whereas Gizmo would have kept things loose and free because too much of a heavy hand was bad for business. Sure, I would have been shocked as a kid that trying to do good things led to a bad option, but it would perfectly have fit in to Fallout's world. It's a harsh wasteland. The road to Hell, and all that. Speaking of which.
"So what will it be? Will you join the Unity, or will you die here?Join!DIEJoin!DIE."
In Necropolis, Vault Dweller finds enormous mutants guarding the water supplies--Set, the leader of the ghouls, will offer a quest to kill them--and when returning to Vault 13 with the water chip, the Overseer reads the reports about the world outside and tells you that he's very worried about these "super mutants" and thinks they might be a threat to the vault, and so he sends you back out to figure out where they're coming from. If you do the missing caravans quest in the Hub, you learn that that super mutants are the reason that caravans have been disappearing, and if you talk to Harold in the Hub, you learn about an old pre-War base on the northwest. If you talk to the Brotherhood of Steel they'll mention all the mutants that keep coming from the northwest, and so you think that's where the game ends, right?
Well, there is one of the places you need to deal with, but it's not where the final boss is. The Master is one of the great video game villains for me, up there with Baldur's Gate II's Irenicus or System Shock's SHODAN, with amazing voice acting that immediately sears them into your memory. That quote above is my attempt to transcribe the dialogue, which consists of multiple voices from the Master's hive mind that sometimes interject when the main personality is talking.
The Master is obsessed with the Great War and the end of the world, and with improving humanity and trying to prevent the same fate from happening again. At the bottom of his hidden base you can find psykers, human mutants in which he has manage to cultivate psychic powers (at the cost of most or all of their sanity). He looked at the ghouls and determined they were a failed offshoot and through long experimentation he created super mutants. He'll explain to you his plan, to turn everyone into a super mutant and erase all differences that lead to conflict and thus create a single post-War civilization that will never fall to strife again. "The Unity", he calls it.
A Nuclear Roleplaying Game.
I was so used to bosses requiring a fight--including in this game, since the first time I played it I fought my way into the Military Base, fought the Lieutenant there, then fought my way out--that this caught me completely by surprise. That's it? I beat him with words? Wait, how come I can't do that with other games, I thought, and that really set the course of my gaming tastes for the rest of my life and it's why I'm replaying Fallout now and tracked down games like Arcanum to play as well.
The Master is obviously evil--that line above about "One race, one goal, one people" is clearly supposed to evoke "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!" in case anyone had any doubts--but it's possible to at least understand where he's coming from. And indeed, you do get the choice to say, "Alright, I'm in," and then you get a brief video of the Vault Dweller being dipped into Forced Evolutionary Virus vats and turned into a super mutant and the game ends, like the "join the Dragonlord" ending in Dragon Quest I. Sure, you don't actually get to lead the armies of the Unity across the wasteland, but it's a mark of the designers' commitment to letting your decisions matter that they would even give you the option to say that the Master was right. Choices and consequences would be refined in Fallout 2 and really reach their zenith in Fallout: New Vegas, the game where accepting or completing a quest infamously often barrages you with "Quest Failed" "Quest Failed" "Quest Failed" as a bunch of quests ideologically opposed to the one you just interacted with get locked off, but it got its start here.
Green good, red bad.
On a systems level, Fallout is a turn-based game that uses action points in combat, thus making it automatically superior to games like nuXCom. Each attack has a set action point cost, usually around 4-5 but sometimes higher or lower, and each character has a set number of action points in a turn, generally between 6-10, though some mutated creatures can be much higher (deathclaws) or lower (ghouls). Moving one hex--yes, they kept that part of GURPS--costs one action point, accessing inventory costs 4 action points, stealing has its own cost, and so on. Various perks can modify these costs or give you additional action points as well, though as I mentioned above, you probably won't get high enough level to get more than one of them.
Combat is thus slow and tactical, with a lot of measuring out the movement cost to make sure you still have enough action points to fire at the end of it or moving after attacking so the enemy is forced to advance again. One flaw is that there's no concept of "overwatch", so you'll frequently end up in battle where everyone is in a good position and then the enemy immediately runs in and hits you despite the presence of multiple people holding guns on them. Firing into melee is a concept, though, and in the non-modded game is probably the single biggest reason why people don't take any of the companions with them. You can avoid it with high enough skill and by making intelligent choices about who to target, but the AI will absolutely open up on full auto into a squad of their own teammates just because you're standing near the one enemy that ran into close range.
The non-combat side of the game is robust but much less obvious. Unlike the Bethesda Fallout games, there's no indication of why certain dialogue options show up or whether they're related to your skills, so while you're making Speech checks all the time when trying to persuade people there's no rolls displayed or percentage chances indicated, you just either persuade them or don't. Similarly, you'll only see some dialogue options if you have a high Intelligence--these are generally pretty wordy, so it's obvious because it'll be like:
If the system does have a major disadvantage, it's the number of skills that are mostly useless. There are eighteen skills and probably a third of them are pointless to ever invest beyond the base (Barter, Gambling, Doctor, First Aid, Traps, Throwing) and a few more are situationally pointless--no character is going to need to invest in Small Guns, Big Guns, and Energy Weapons, for example. That makes your skill points go further and is part of the reason why you can beat the game at such a low level compared to the max.
On the other hand, succeeding at low skill levels plus so many skills not being necessary means that you can have people speedrun the game in six minutes, though they're also exploiting a bug that lets you run past enemies by starting combat, taking your turn, ending combat, and immediately starting combat again. Since the enemy never initiates combat, they never go hostile and you just get turn after turn. But hey, what is a speedrun without bugs?
Greetings Brother (of Steel).
One thing that was totally different from my memory was the amount of content. When I think of the classic Fallouts, I think of a sprawling world that took me dozens of hours to explore, of multiple large cities, of spending in-game weeks in the north of the map before I ever finally made my way south. And that's true in Fallout 2 but Fallout 1 is a much more constrained game. This makes some sense, since it takes place closer to the Great War so civilization hasn't had as much time to recover, but I was a bit surprised at how much smaller it seemed compared to my memory. By about fifteen hours, I had accomplished nearly every major task in the game that wasn't one of the two endgame tasks: I had found the water chip, freed Necropolis from the super mutants (briefly), found out what had happened to the caravans from the Hub, resolved the tension in Junktown, done all the quests in Shady Sands, cleared the way to the Gun Runners, and joined the Brotherhood of Steel. After that it was all mopping up.
On the other hand, I really loved the twenty-odd hours that I played the game. The mood and presentation are unmatched. Each area map is themed--you can see above that the quasi-religious Brotherhood of Steel is done up like an illuminated manuscript, like something out of A Canticle for Leibowitz. Necropolis is a photo taken from a distance with a camera, the Glow is a satellite image, the Boneyard is a map of pre-War L.A., the Mariposa Military Base is a set of architectural plans, and so on. The PipBoy interface got its start here, with its chunky vacuum tubes, green text on a black screen, and happy Vault Boy mascot. The music is fantastic. There's no toe-tapping big band hits like Jingle, Jangle, Jingle or Civilization (a.k.a. "The song you feel uncomfortable singing along to"), the mood is completely different. The music is industrial and minimalist, with Metallic Monks (the Brotherhood of Steel theme) having instruments like "air raid siren" and "Morse code," Khans of New California has a lot of percussion and drums to fit the violent raiders, City of Lost Angels is a kind of electronic singing like an elegy for the dead city, and Moribund World with whistling sounds and some soft percussion, like the winds blowing against the few travelers slowly crossing the wasteland. The overall theme is desolation and discomfort. This is not the old world.
And that's one of the biggest themes of Fallout for me and I finally have to talk about Fallout 3. Bethesda absolutely does not understand Fallout. I played 700 hours of Fallout 3 across multiple games, I had a blast, but while I was a great post-apocalyptic RPG shooter it was a terrible Fallout game because Fallout is not about the world before the Great War. Like I mentioned above, the first community you find in Fallout 1 is a new city, built from scratch. A new life in the wasteland, leaving the old world behind. Bethesda Fallouts are entirely about the time before the War, from the music to the way people live in bombed-out houses and never bother to sweep up the trash from centuries ago to the way Fallout 3 takes place two hundred years after the Great War but with a setting that only makes sense if it takes place twenty years after--all I have to do is say Little Lamplight and anyone who has played will understand.
Its devotion to the past even extends to aping the presentation of Fallout 1. Fallout 1 is a desert with mutated lizards and no foliage because it's set in Southern California. Fallout 3 is a desert with mutated lizards and no foliage because Fallout 1 was, even though DC in the real world is a swamp.
The Guardian of Forever time-traveled here from Fallout 2.
I mentioned "modded" in the title, and it's because I played with the Et Tu mod that takes the entirety of Fallout 1 and lets you play it in Fallout 2's engine. The biggest benefit of this is UI-based, like the color coding of enemies vs. friendly on that screenshot above--requires a perk in Fallout 1, default in Fallout 2--or the ability to push NPCs out of the way so you don't get trapped forever if one stops in the doorway of a small room that you're in. But there are some nice other (optional) bits too. That screenshot is one--the Guardian of Forever is a special encounter in Fallout 2 where, if the Chosen One goes through, they wind up in Vault 13 in the past and in the course of their exploring, accidentally break Vault 13's water chip.
You can find a few unique weapons from Fallout 2 scattered here and there, some unique armor sets, Zack at the Gun Runners can sell you upgrades for many different weapons, and you can also get a motorcycle.
That said, it didn't actually matter that much for me. The Corvega in Fallout 2 was one of the best upgrades you can get, since you could store a bunch of your stuff in the trunk, it made travel across the wastes much faster, and you could keep it fueled pretty easily. The motorcycle in Fallout Et Tu shows up in Necropolis when a ghoul asks you to watch it for him and then never comes back from the sewers, later allowing you to retrieve the key from his body. Like the Fallout 2 car, it makes travel across the wastes much faster--though until you upgrade it with a sidecar, you can only bring one companion at a time--but by the time I got it, I had already done nearly every quest in the game. It was nice to be able to ride faster to clean up all the loose ends, sure, but the real benefit of the motorcycle was cheesing random encounters I didn't want to fight. Normally if you want to escape you have to run to the edge of the map and this means if you're fighting enemies with ranged weapons they'll shoot at you as you run. With the motorcycle, it was always close enough that in one turn I could walk over, hop back on, and ride away. It made scouting the northern wastes much less annoying because I no longer had to fight 238472834 super mutants on the way to the military base.
Probably the single most consequential change, though, is the improvement to AI. The memes in Fallout 1 are often about how Ian, the first companion you find, will inevitable get you killed by unloading an entire clip into your back while trying to kill a rat, but Et Tu brings the AI and companion management improvements from 2 into 1. They'll try to make sure you're not in the line of fire, you can give them different weapons and armor and they'll use them, and they'll actually level when you do so you don't have to try to keep 50 HP Ian alive for the whole game. This meant that while every previous playthrough I'd play solo, this time I took every companion possible: Ian, Tycho (the Desert Ranger), Katja, and Dogmeat. That meant that the early game was easier than it would otherwise have been, because every companion was an action multiplier. What's more, I could avoid having to invest in combat skills I didn't want because Ian and Tycho could handle nearly all of the early game endings, and then by the end of the game I had Energy Weapons 200% and could hit super mutants in the eyes with 95% accuracy from 25 meters away. In DotA terms, I was the Carry.
I could have just left the companions behind, though, like I did when I went to the Master's secret hideout. Nearly all the changes in Et Tu are configurable in the .ini files, from the motorcycle to the Fallout 2 weapons to the UI changes to the addition of the motorcycle, so if you just want to play with the bugfixes and UI improvements and nothing else, you can. If you want new special encounters and weapons and a trader in Shady Sands, you can. If you want to install even more mods, you can--there are very few mods for Fallout 1 but a ton for Fallout 2, including Et Tu mods. It's really just a best way to play nowadays if you're willing to spend five minutes configuring it. I played the entire game and the one bug I ever had was also a bug in the original game: I couldn't get the quest to rescue the Brotherhood initiate, but once I went and rescued him on my own initiative I could still turn it in and get the reward. That's very good for "move an entire game to a new engine" and like 500x better than any of my modded Fallout 3/NV runs.
That's me, the Vault Dweller, the Chosen One to go get the water chip, traveling like a Lone Wanderer across the wastes. I visit each place and move on like post-apocalyptic Courier, leaving everywhere better than I found it. If anyone tangles with me, I'll be the Sole Survivor.
I was talking with![[facebook.com profile]](https://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
Aaron.Hosek while we were playing FFXIV together and he mentioned someone he knew in his twenties who had just picked up Fallout 1 based on the Fallout TV series coming out, played through the whole thing, and loved it. You might look at the screenshots and think "Oh, that looks dated" and it is, but the interactivity and options are far greater than a lot of modern games.
And it's really the single best version of what Fallout is. Fallout 2 has a lot of wackier humor like the Hubologists (obvious stand-ins for the Scientologists) since there was no narrative lead and everyone's edgy jokes just made it into the game with no filter, the less said about Fallout 3's worldbuilding the better (the Republic of Dave is funny but it's very clearly a video game theme park exhibit and not something that would actually exist in a post-apocalyptic world), and Fallout 4 removed nearly all systems from the game in favor of pew pew pew and "A settlement is under attack!" When I play a roleplaying game, I want to be immersed in the world. I want to feel like this is a real place and anything incongruous is a limitation of the medium, and Le Epic Meme references--even things like the above Guardian of Forever special encounter--take that away. That's why New Vegas locked all that behind a toggle at the beginning of the game, so people who wanted the silly jokes could have them, and those who didn't didn't have to see them, and everyone was happy. Fallout 1 is the wasteland in pure form, isolated communities struggling to survive, gangs and raiders at every turn, and mutated monsters threatening to annihilate the fragile points of light. It is the low point from which the New California Republic would later arise.
Sometimes the first take on something really is the best.
One of the games I still remember to this day was Fallout. It takes place in "Scrapheap" (which was reused for Junktown), a town split by rival warring gangs, where you can side with either of the gangs (or kill them both, or sabotage the generator and doom the town). There's only a couple screens, no character creation, and two quests (deal with the gang, and meet Dogmeat), and I played that demo maybe a dozen times, scouring the entire town for everything I could find it in. Playing other RPGs had already taught me to talk to everyone, and at that point, the lack of total knowledge due to the rudimentary state of the internet meant that every single game was imbued with infinite potential because if I didn't discover something myself, it was possible I'd never learn about it. For example, I only learned you could sabotage the generator when writing this post!
When the full game came out later that year, I bought it immediately.
Well, that last guy they sent sure didn't get very far.
The demo throws you into the deep end and the full game isn't much better. The introductory movie is cool and moody set to "Maybe" by the Ink Spots (famously they wanted to use "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" but couldn't get the rights) but is all world background about the Vaults and the resource conflicts that led to the Great War, and after character creation you briefly talk with the Vault 13 Overseer who lays out the quest--the water chip is broken and cannot be repaired, the vault has only a few months of water, and everyone will die or have to abandon the vault unless a replacement chip is found. Then the giant vault door closes and you're in a cave filled with rats, standing next to a dead body wearing a Vault 13 jumpsuit. And when you fight or run past the rats and make it to the cave exit, it takes you to the world map shrouded in darkness.
I have problems with Fallout 3 that I'll mention later but one thing it does really well is the moment you leave the vault and your character sees sunlight for the first time in their entire life. The whole screen going white and suddenly fading into austere ruins while mournful music plays perfectly sells the sheltered Vault 101 inhabitant seeing the outside and realizing that they're totally out of their element. The beginning of Fallout had the same effect on me when I was young, a world map full of darkness with "Vault 13" and "Vault 15" as the only points of light. Most of the map is empty wasteland and traveling between towns takes days, with random encounters being mostly hostile mutants, checks to avoid dehydration, or the occasional corpse of a fellow-traveler. Since you're on a time limit before the vault runs out of water, talking to people and trying to find out where you should be going so you don't waste weeks wandering through trackless desert is an important strategy, but it's not necessary at the beginning. Heading to Vault 15 as the only other destination, several days away from Vault 13 you'll see another green circle on your map, indicating a point of interest.
Before I really get into that, though, I should talk about character creation.
Well, aren't you S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
Fallout semi-famously was originally going to be the first GURPS-based computer game but the GURPS license was dropped for still-unclear reasons and replaced with the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system, which stands for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck, those being your primary stats.
Now, one problem with this system is that it's extremely unbalanced. I went 4, 7, 5, 7, 9, 9, 8 for my stats--you start with 5 in each and get 10 points to put wherever you want, and the Gifted trait gives you +1 to each stat. I dumpstered Strength and Endurance because the power armor you find later increases your Strength by 3, and I didn't set anything to 10 because you can get cyberware installed later that increases every stat except Charisma and Luck by 1, and those can also be increased through other means. And of course, I did this because I've played this game a dozen times already and I know how it works, but it does work like that. Also, Agility directly sets the number of action points you have in combat, at the rate of (5 + [Agility / 2]), and since the single-greatest power in any turn-based game is the power to take more turns, high Agility is one of the best stats you can take. Similary, high Intelligence directly raises the number of skill points you can get--the default is 5 * (Intelligence * 2)--so while low Intelligence does have hilarious dialogue options as the people you're talking to all realize how stupid you are, high Intelligence will give you multiple times more skill points than low Intelligence. Perception increases how quickly you act in combat and reduces range penalties, and so on.
You can pick two traits, including Gifted, which has the above effects and slightly reduces your skill points per level; Bloody Mess, which makes the extravagant death animations play more often; Small Frame, which gives you more Agility but a lower max carry weight; or Jinxed, which means you get more critical failures in combat but so do all your enemies. You can also pick three skills as "tag" skills, which means that points you put into them count double. I tagged, as I usually do, Energy Weapons, Speech, and Science, to make some kind of 50s egghead with a blaster. This also kind of breaks the game and just now I learned why--the original GURPS-based skill list, visible in the above article, contains the skills Bard, Carousing, Detect Lies, Influence Skills: Diplomacy, Influence Skills: Fast-Talk, Influence Skills: Intimidation, Influence Skills: Savoir-Faire, Influence Skills: Sex Appeal. Those eight skills were all collapsed into the Speech skill, letting you take a single skill and dominate everyone in dialogue, just like in Dragon Age: Origins where I'd use Coercion to shut down quests near-instantly. In the same way that the stealthy sniper is the uberbuild that dominates every Bethesda game, the smooth-talking brainiac is the build that dominates Fallout 1.
Fallout didn't invent the concept of perks but it did call them perks (as opposed to Merits or Feats or Advantages or various other TTRPG terms), and I was so used to getting so many of them after hundreds of hours of Fallout 3 / Fallout New Vegas that I forgot in Fallout 1 they work more like feats in D&D. The maximum level is 21, and barring wandering the wasteland and murdering mutants for a dozen of hours you're not going to get anywhere close to that--I beat the game at level 13--and since you get a perk every three levels, in practice you only get a handful. Some of them are nearly useless, like the Healer perk (you will heal far more with stimpaks or over time while traveling than by using either First Aid or Doctor), or the Mental Block perk, which prevents one single attack type by one enemy that is easily defended against using an item. It's much the same problem as D&D, actually, where some perks like Bonus Rate of Fire are incredible and some like Friendly Foe (which just became part of the UI in Fallout 2) are a waste of time. It's definitely a first pass on a system that would be refined in the sequel.
It's fine and works, and it's very memorable, but it's very easy to win the game in character creation. On the other hand, that means it's easier to make challenge builds--just don't take Gifted and you're already playing on hard mode.
They may call it Junktown but the buildings are still clean.
Okay, that out of the way, let's get back to the story. The Vault Dweller (as the protagonist will be called in every later reference to them) arrives at the city they see on the horizon to find a new place.
Let me emphasize that--a new place. The people of Shady Sands aren't living in bombed out ruins that they inexplicably haven't even cleared the trash and skeletons out of. Their buildings are gleaming white adobe, clean and well-maintained, with walls around the town to protect from raiders and mutant wildlife. They're attempting to farm and build a life for themselves, and with a high enough Science skill, you can introduce the idea of crop rotation to help their yields. There are no references to pre-War society here at all, just a new town in a new world.
With new problems. When you talk to the guards at the gate, they'll tell you that radscorpions keep attacking and no matter how many of them are killed, more of them always seem to show up again, and they'd be very happy if you tracked them back to the caves that seem to be their lair and take them out. If you do that, when you come back, the town leader Aradesh's daughter Tandi has been kidnapped by raiders and you can go free her before continuing on to Vault 15. There's nothing in Vault 15 but looted ruins and the water control portion of the vault is buried under a thousand tons of rock, but in Shady Sands they'll tell you they trade with places further south, Junktown and the Hub, and direct you there.
That's the way the game proceeds. You don't have much direction but it's diagetic--the Vault 13 Overseer says that they have no idea what's out there since no one else returned, so you have no way of knowing where a water chip might be. As you ask around, you get directed to the Hub, and in the Hub you learn there's a group called the Water Merchants. If you talk to them, they'll tell you, "Yeah, we haul water all over and sell it to people. Except those ghouls over in Necropolis. For some reason, they never want to buy any." Or you can talk to the Hub librarian and if you tell her about your quest, she can give you a pre-War Vault Tek pamphlet that lists nearby vault locations, including one under what used to be Bakersfield. Or you can just stroll into Necropolis after tagging along with a caravan and the ghouls will happily be like, "Yeah, we still have a working water chip. It's pretty great."
And then, you can decide what to do about it.
Stay hydrated.
One phrase that gets used sometimes with video games is "choices and consequences," the idea that the player's decisions should matter and have measurable effects on the world. One of the biggest complaints I've heard about the Telltale games is that they're amazing when you play through them the first time, but awful when you replay them because you realize that even when you make different decisions, the exact same thing happens. In TTRPG space I've heard it described as the "Quantum Ogre" problem, where you have three doors. The illusion of choice path is that the first door has orcs, the second door has the ogre, and the third door has treasure, no matter order the players open them in. A lot of video games do this because actual branching paths are expensive, voice acting content most people will never see is extremely expensive, and that's why you need fan projects like The Nameless Mod to bring it to fruition. No one else is going to bother.
Fallout 1 is not as branching as The Nameless Mod--all choices in the main quest that don't follow the standard path lead to game overs--but there's quite a few in side quests and other content. You can beat the game without ever encountering the Brotherhood of Steel or doing their quests, though I've never done this. In Junktown, you can side with either Killian Darkwater, the law-minded sheriff, or Gizmo, the leader of the casino, and kill the other one to leave one person in unquestioned control of the town. You can work for the criminal elements in the Hub or take them out. When saving Tandi from the raiders you can kill everyone, pay a ransom, challenge the lead raider to a duel, or (apparently) if you have Luck 8+ and are dressed in leather armor you can act like you're the ghost of the raider leader's father and spook him into letting Tandi go. You can side with either the Regulators or the Blades in Adytum. When in Necropolis, you can repair the ghouls' water pumps to leave them with a supply of fresh water, or you can ignore it, take the water chip, and leave them to die. And after the game is done and all this is over with, you get a big slideshow covering all the places you went and what happened to them after your actions there.
This blew my mind when I was young. Being an Old, I grew up with games that were very linear, or if they didn't have a linear story, they didn't have a story at all except the one that your actions created (like Civilization). If there was a choice, there was maybe one or two endings. Had I been Japanese and grown up playing visual novels maybe I would have been used to it, but as a player of games like Loom or Quest for Glory or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (took me eight years to beat by the way), I was used to one story, with one set of actions you had to do, and one ending once you completed it. Seeing the effects of all my different choices was amazing. I even wish that Interplay had gone through with their original plan of bait and switch with Junktown. In the finished product, siding with Killian is the "good" ending and siding with Gizmo is the "bad" ending but it started the other way around. Killian would have become more and more obsessed with his own brand of justice and strangled Junktown under harsh punishments for small infractions, whereas Gizmo would have kept things loose and free because too much of a heavy hand was bad for business. Sure, I would have been shocked as a kid that trying to do good things led to a bad option, but it would perfectly have fit in to Fallout's world. It's a harsh wasteland. The road to Hell, and all that. Speaking of which.
"So what will it be? Will you join the Unity, or will you die here?Join!DIEJoin!DIE."
In Necropolis, Vault Dweller finds enormous mutants guarding the water supplies--Set, the leader of the ghouls, will offer a quest to kill them--and when returning to Vault 13 with the water chip, the Overseer reads the reports about the world outside and tells you that he's very worried about these "super mutants" and thinks they might be a threat to the vault, and so he sends you back out to figure out where they're coming from. If you do the missing caravans quest in the Hub, you learn that that super mutants are the reason that caravans have been disappearing, and if you talk to Harold in the Hub, you learn about an old pre-War base on the northwest. If you talk to the Brotherhood of Steel they'll mention all the mutants that keep coming from the northwest, and so you think that's where the game ends, right?
Well, there is one of the places you need to deal with, but it's not where the final boss is. The Master is one of the great video game villains for me, up there with Baldur's Gate II's Irenicus or System Shock's SHODAN, with amazing voice acting that immediately sears them into your memory. That quote above is my attempt to transcribe the dialogue, which consists of multiple voices from the Master's hive mind that sometimes interject when the main personality is talking.
The Master is obsessed with the Great War and the end of the world, and with improving humanity and trying to prevent the same fate from happening again. At the bottom of his hidden base you can find psykers, human mutants in which he has manage to cultivate psychic powers (at the cost of most or all of their sanity). He looked at the ghouls and determined they were a failed offshoot and through long experimentation he created super mutants. He'll explain to you his plan, to turn everyone into a super mutant and erase all differences that lead to conflict and thus create a single post-War civilization that will never fall to strife again. "The Unity", he calls it.
"Of course. Mutants are best equipped to deal with the world today. Who else? The Ghouls? Please. Normals? They brought nuclear death to us all. This will be the age of mutants!Mutants."But this is where playing a Speech character comes in. If you join the Brotherhood, you can speak to Vree, one of their Scribes, who has made it part of her life's work to study the mutations afflicting creatures in the wastelands. If you ask her about her work, she'll tell you about her autopsy reports on a large, green-skinned humanoid, about the mutations they seemed to have suffered, and about how they're absolutely, without a doubt, 💯 sterile. When you confront the Master with this knowledge, he laughs at you, but when you show him Vree's autopsy reports he is eventually forced to admit that all of the death, all of the atrocities he's committed have been for nothing and there will be no better world from the mutants. And then he tells you to leave and sets the self-destruct on his hidden base.
A Nuclear Roleplaying Game.
I was so used to bosses requiring a fight--including in this game, since the first time I played it I fought my way into the Military Base, fought the Lieutenant there, then fought my way out--that this caught me completely by surprise. That's it? I beat him with words? Wait, how come I can't do that with other games, I thought, and that really set the course of my gaming tastes for the rest of my life and it's why I'm replaying Fallout now and tracked down games like Arcanum to play as well.
The Master is obviously evil--that line above about "One race, one goal, one people" is clearly supposed to evoke "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!" in case anyone had any doubts--but it's possible to at least understand where he's coming from. And indeed, you do get the choice to say, "Alright, I'm in," and then you get a brief video of the Vault Dweller being dipped into Forced Evolutionary Virus vats and turned into a super mutant and the game ends, like the "join the Dragonlord" ending in Dragon Quest I. Sure, you don't actually get to lead the armies of the Unity across the wasteland, but it's a mark of the designers' commitment to letting your decisions matter that they would even give you the option to say that the Master was right. Choices and consequences would be refined in Fallout 2 and really reach their zenith in Fallout: New Vegas, the game where accepting or completing a quest infamously often barrages you with "Quest Failed" "Quest Failed" "Quest Failed" as a bunch of quests ideologically opposed to the one you just interacted with get locked off, but it got its start here.
Green good, red bad.
On a systems level, Fallout is a turn-based game that uses action points in combat, thus making it automatically superior to games like nuXCom. Each attack has a set action point cost, usually around 4-5 but sometimes higher or lower, and each character has a set number of action points in a turn, generally between 6-10, though some mutated creatures can be much higher (deathclaws) or lower (ghouls). Moving one hex--yes, they kept that part of GURPS--costs one action point, accessing inventory costs 4 action points, stealing has its own cost, and so on. Various perks can modify these costs or give you additional action points as well, though as I mentioned above, you probably won't get high enough level to get more than one of them.
Combat is thus slow and tactical, with a lot of measuring out the movement cost to make sure you still have enough action points to fire at the end of it or moving after attacking so the enemy is forced to advance again. One flaw is that there's no concept of "overwatch", so you'll frequently end up in battle where everyone is in a good position and then the enemy immediately runs in and hits you despite the presence of multiple people holding guns on them. Firing into melee is a concept, though, and in the non-modded game is probably the single biggest reason why people don't take any of the companions with them. You can avoid it with high enough skill and by making intelligent choices about who to target, but the AI will absolutely open up on full auto into a squad of their own teammates just because you're standing near the one enemy that ran into close range.
The non-combat side of the game is robust but much less obvious. Unlike the Bethesda Fallout games, there's no indication of why certain dialogue options show up or whether they're related to your skills, so while you're making Speech checks all the time when trying to persuade people there's no rolls displayed or percentage chances indicated, you just either persuade them or don't. Similarly, you'll only see some dialogue options if you have a high Intelligence--these are generally pretty wordy, so it's obvious because it'll be like:
But if you do pick that first option and have a Speech skill of 12%, there's a very high chance you fail and the raider leader calls you out as a weakling and starts combat. While combat always tells you what chance you have to make a shot, nothing outside of combat ever indicates how difficult it is or whether you can accomplish it at all, but on the other hand, the limits seemed to be pretty generous. I lockpicked a bankvault door with a Lockpick skill of 20%, which I assume means I got a critical success on the skill check, but I really appreciate that the game let me do it. On the one hand it's a little unnerving that I was never sure how successful my efforts were going to be, but on the other hand options were almost never locked off because of low skill and it avoided the Fallout 3 problem where the optimal move is to just reload over and over until you succeed at that 5% chance Speech check that's clearly listed as having a 5% chance. Like I said, you can beat the game with a level in the low teens having accomplished every single quest.
- "I believe we can come to some sort of arrangement, good sir. These are barbarous times but that is no reason for us to be barbarous men. I am sure if we just take our hands off our weapons and discuss this we can find a solution which will be acceptable to all parties involved."
- "How many caps for the MacGuffin?"
- "Nah, I think I'll just kill you."
- "Goodbye."
If the system does have a major disadvantage, it's the number of skills that are mostly useless. There are eighteen skills and probably a third of them are pointless to ever invest beyond the base (Barter, Gambling, Doctor, First Aid, Traps, Throwing) and a few more are situationally pointless--no character is going to need to invest in Small Guns, Big Guns, and Energy Weapons, for example. That makes your skill points go further and is part of the reason why you can beat the game at such a low level compared to the max.
On the other hand, succeeding at low skill levels plus so many skills not being necessary means that you can have people speedrun the game in six minutes, though they're also exploiting a bug that lets you run past enemies by starting combat, taking your turn, ending combat, and immediately starting combat again. Since the enemy never initiates combat, they never go hostile and you just get turn after turn. But hey, what is a speedrun without bugs?
Greetings Brother (of Steel).
One thing that was totally different from my memory was the amount of content. When I think of the classic Fallouts, I think of a sprawling world that took me dozens of hours to explore, of multiple large cities, of spending in-game weeks in the north of the map before I ever finally made my way south. And that's true in Fallout 2 but Fallout 1 is a much more constrained game. This makes some sense, since it takes place closer to the Great War so civilization hasn't had as much time to recover, but I was a bit surprised at how much smaller it seemed compared to my memory. By about fifteen hours, I had accomplished nearly every major task in the game that wasn't one of the two endgame tasks: I had found the water chip, freed Necropolis from the super mutants (briefly), found out what had happened to the caravans from the Hub, resolved the tension in Junktown, done all the quests in Shady Sands, cleared the way to the Gun Runners, and joined the Brotherhood of Steel. After that it was all mopping up.
On the other hand, I really loved the twenty-odd hours that I played the game. The mood and presentation are unmatched. Each area map is themed--you can see above that the quasi-religious Brotherhood of Steel is done up like an illuminated manuscript, like something out of A Canticle for Leibowitz. Necropolis is a photo taken from a distance with a camera, the Glow is a satellite image, the Boneyard is a map of pre-War L.A., the Mariposa Military Base is a set of architectural plans, and so on. The PipBoy interface got its start here, with its chunky vacuum tubes, green text on a black screen, and happy Vault Boy mascot. The music is fantastic. There's no toe-tapping big band hits like Jingle, Jangle, Jingle or Civilization (a.k.a. "The song you feel uncomfortable singing along to"), the mood is completely different. The music is industrial and minimalist, with Metallic Monks (the Brotherhood of Steel theme) having instruments like "air raid siren" and "Morse code," Khans of New California has a lot of percussion and drums to fit the violent raiders, City of Lost Angels is a kind of electronic singing like an elegy for the dead city, and Moribund World with whistling sounds and some soft percussion, like the winds blowing against the few travelers slowly crossing the wasteland. The overall theme is desolation and discomfort. This is not the old world.
And that's one of the biggest themes of Fallout for me and I finally have to talk about Fallout 3. Bethesda absolutely does not understand Fallout. I played 700 hours of Fallout 3 across multiple games, I had a blast, but while I was a great post-apocalyptic RPG shooter it was a terrible Fallout game because Fallout is not about the world before the Great War. Like I mentioned above, the first community you find in Fallout 1 is a new city, built from scratch. A new life in the wasteland, leaving the old world behind. Bethesda Fallouts are entirely about the time before the War, from the music to the way people live in bombed-out houses and never bother to sweep up the trash from centuries ago to the way Fallout 3 takes place two hundred years after the Great War but with a setting that only makes sense if it takes place twenty years after--all I have to do is say Little Lamplight and anyone who has played will understand.
Its devotion to the past even extends to aping the presentation of Fallout 1. Fallout 1 is a desert with mutated lizards and no foliage because it's set in Southern California. Fallout 3 is a desert with mutated lizards and no foliage because Fallout 1 was, even though DC in the real world is a swamp.
The Guardian of Forever time-traveled here from Fallout 2.
I mentioned "modded" in the title, and it's because I played with the Et Tu mod that takes the entirety of Fallout 1 and lets you play it in Fallout 2's engine. The biggest benefit of this is UI-based, like the color coding of enemies vs. friendly on that screenshot above--requires a perk in Fallout 1, default in Fallout 2--or the ability to push NPCs out of the way so you don't get trapped forever if one stops in the doorway of a small room that you're in. But there are some nice other (optional) bits too. That screenshot is one--the Guardian of Forever is a special encounter in Fallout 2 where, if the Chosen One goes through, they wind up in Vault 13 in the past and in the course of their exploring, accidentally break Vault 13's water chip.
You can find a few unique weapons from Fallout 2 scattered here and there, some unique armor sets, Zack at the Gun Runners can sell you upgrades for many different weapons, and you can also get a motorcycle.That said, it didn't actually matter that much for me. The Corvega in Fallout 2 was one of the best upgrades you can get, since you could store a bunch of your stuff in the trunk, it made travel across the wastes much faster, and you could keep it fueled pretty easily. The motorcycle in Fallout Et Tu shows up in Necropolis when a ghoul asks you to watch it for him and then never comes back from the sewers, later allowing you to retrieve the key from his body. Like the Fallout 2 car, it makes travel across the wastes much faster--though until you upgrade it with a sidecar, you can only bring one companion at a time--but by the time I got it, I had already done nearly every quest in the game. It was nice to be able to ride faster to clean up all the loose ends, sure, but the real benefit of the motorcycle was cheesing random encounters I didn't want to fight. Normally if you want to escape you have to run to the edge of the map and this means if you're fighting enemies with ranged weapons they'll shoot at you as you run. With the motorcycle, it was always close enough that in one turn I could walk over, hop back on, and ride away. It made scouting the northern wastes much less annoying because I no longer had to fight 238472834 super mutants on the way to the military base.
Probably the single most consequential change, though, is the improvement to AI. The memes in Fallout 1 are often about how Ian, the first companion you find, will inevitable get you killed by unloading an entire clip into your back while trying to kill a rat, but Et Tu brings the AI and companion management improvements from 2 into 1. They'll try to make sure you're not in the line of fire, you can give them different weapons and armor and they'll use them, and they'll actually level when you do so you don't have to try to keep 50 HP Ian alive for the whole game. This meant that while every previous playthrough I'd play solo, this time I took every companion possible: Ian, Tycho (the Desert Ranger), Katja, and Dogmeat. That meant that the early game was easier than it would otherwise have been, because every companion was an action multiplier. What's more, I could avoid having to invest in combat skills I didn't want because Ian and Tycho could handle nearly all of the early game endings, and then by the end of the game I had Energy Weapons 200% and could hit super mutants in the eyes with 95% accuracy from 25 meters away. In DotA terms, I was the Carry.
I could have just left the companions behind, though, like I did when I went to the Master's secret hideout. Nearly all the changes in Et Tu are configurable in the .ini files, from the motorcycle to the Fallout 2 weapons to the UI changes to the addition of the motorcycle, so if you just want to play with the bugfixes and UI improvements and nothing else, you can. If you want new special encounters and weapons and a trader in Shady Sands, you can. If you want to install even more mods, you can--there are very few mods for Fallout 1 but a ton for Fallout 2, including Et Tu mods. It's really just a best way to play nowadays if you're willing to spend five minutes configuring it. I played the entire game and the one bug I ever had was also a bug in the original game: I couldn't get the quest to rescue the Brotherhood initiate, but once I went and rescued him on my own initiative I could still turn it in and get the reward. That's very good for "move an entire game to a new engine" and like 500x better than any of my modded Fallout 3/NV runs.
That's me, the Vault Dweller, the Chosen One to go get the water chip, traveling like a Lone Wanderer across the wastes. I visit each place and move on like post-apocalyptic Courier, leaving everywhere better than I found it. If anyone tangles with me, I'll be the Sole Survivor.
I was talking with
And it's really the single best version of what Fallout is. Fallout 2 has a lot of wackier humor like the Hubologists (obvious stand-ins for the Scientologists) since there was no narrative lead and everyone's edgy jokes just made it into the game with no filter, the less said about Fallout 3's worldbuilding the better (the Republic of Dave is funny but it's very clearly a video game theme park exhibit and not something that would actually exist in a post-apocalyptic world), and Fallout 4 removed nearly all systems from the game in favor of pew pew pew and "A settlement is under attack!" When I play a roleplaying game, I want to be immersed in the world. I want to feel like this is a real place and anything incongruous is a limitation of the medium, and Le Epic Meme references--even things like the above Guardian of Forever special encounter--take that away. That's why New Vegas locked all that behind a toggle at the beginning of the game, so people who wanted the silly jokes could have them, and those who didn't didn't have to see them, and everyone was happy. Fallout 1 is the wasteland in pure form, isolated communities struggling to survive, gangs and raiders at every turn, and mutated monsters threatening to annihilate the fragile points of light. It is the low point from which the New California Republic would later arise.
Sometimes the first take on something really is the best.
