Fallout 1
Late last year I bought the Fallout 3 collector’s edition, which came with the vault tec lunchbox, art book, and vault boy bobble head. Since I’m a sucker for that kind of thing, I also bought the hard cover limited edition strategy guide. I had heard that this was a great game, but I was at least a little worried that the story/universe would be lost on me without playing the first two games.
Thankfully over the summer I found a Fallout trilogy re-release that included Fallout 1, 2, and Tactics. I didn’t have much of an interest in Tacticts, but I definitely wanted to play the first two numbered games.
I started playing FO1 almost immediately. Honestly I didn’t really know what to expect. Right away I was concerned that I wasn’t going to enjoy myself – I felt like the graphics were pretty heavily dated (although I’m sure fantastic by 1990’s standards), and the difficulty seemed pretty high. I was getting whomped by cave rats the minute I left the vault.
Well, the graphics are dated but passable and the difficulty was pretty much my fault – turns out I built a shitty character. After starting over and taking some time to pay attention and figure out SPECIAL (stat allocation – strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, luck) I built a character much butter suited to survive in the California wastes.
The game starts off fairly challenging (one bad random encounter in the wastes could wipe you out) with few weapons and little ammo and money. The difficulty evens out after gaining a few levels and additional skill points and perks, and at a certain point money and weapons are easy to come by. Once I hit that point it was fairly easy. I had more reloads due to party member deaths (I was determined to keep Ian and Dogmeat alive) than anything else. I think I finished the game on normal difficulty at level twelve.
Ultimately, this is an RPG, and at the heart of most RPG’s are the characters and the story. I can’t help but feel that most of the characters are underdeveloped. Sure, some of the secondary characters are kind of interesting, but sometimes when you have a game that is focused on decisions (am I good or am I evil), you wind up with a main character that is really just an avatar and doesn’t really have much of a personality – for me, this is definitely the case here. I understand the concept – with a game that revolves around decisions, you are supposed to make the decision in-game the same way you would in real life, and so your character should wind up with a personality similar to your own. Unfortunately, at least for me, it doesn’t really work out that way. This, to me, feels like a lifeless main character interacting with a relatively fascinating world. So it goes, I suppose. 13 years later and most developers still don’t do “build your own player character” very well.
The story and setting, on the other hand, are very well done, and the writers have definitely put a lot of effort into developing an interesting world. Many games are direct and to the point with the story and utilize cutscenes and extended dialogue to communicate major plot points; while Fallout does this to some extent, the fine details of the plot aren’t nearly as in-your-face as I’m used to from, say, a final fantasy or dragon quest game. The main plot points are obvious – Leave the vault, track down the water chip, return the water chip, eliminate the super mutant threat – but there is so much more fantastic detail than this, and it can be really easy to miss if you don’t pay attention to the world around you. The best parts of this story will fly right by someone focused on finishing the game instead of being immersed in the game and exploring the world that has been created.
I had my reservations at the beginning, but overall I really enjoyed this game – it was enough to hook me on the series. Completing the main story and all of the side quests took less than 20 hours of game play. Once I don’t have a shit ton of other games to play, I may go back to this one and try playing through as an evil character to see how different the experience is. In the meantime, Fallout 2…