themilo504 said:
I played both fallout 1 and 2 and found them both lacking, the combat was boring as it felt like a strategy rpg without the strategy, I?m pretty sure that half of your skills are only used like 4 times in each game.
Random encounters almost never happen so most of the game is spent in towns, this results in the world feeling very small and disconnected, not like it matters since the world isn?t all that interesting anyway.
I would comment on the story but for most of the game there really isn?t one, just a lot of uninteresting and short sidequests, and for a game famous for its choices I honestly don?t remember a single choice that was actually interesting.
And the game has about as much atmosphere as mercury.
I do admit that the soundtrack is nice, still prefer the radio stations from fallout 3 and new vegas.
Context is
enormously important when it comes to enjoying ancient games. In lots of ways, Fallout 2 shows it is an old game. It's mechanics are obtuse and combat offers you few options beyond trusting the dice and building a character well. Combat is fairly rare and there are long stretches where you hunt around trying to figure out what you're going to do. But in spite of all of that, Fallout 2 is still a bigger and grander and more
interesting game than Fallout 3.
Fallout 3 offered tremendous mechanical improvements to the formula, yes, but at the cost of nearly everything. The world might have been full of places but there was little to find. There were only a handful of quests in the entire game and almost nothing you did ever really mattered. Fallout 2 made the things you did
matter. Wiping out a Bandit camp consisting of a half dozen bandits could utterly change a town's fate. Resolving a problem with diplomacy or guile rather than savage violence was almost always an option. Fallout 2 treated violence as something that should be carefully considered. Until you were fantastically well equipped and fairly high level, death was just a bad roll away.
By contrast the only thing you really had to do in Fallout 3 was become an unstoppable killing machine by level 5 and then wander the wastes looking for a handful of trinkets that would make you nothing less than a literal god of destruction. What's more, nothing about the story makes sense. 200 years after a war and people haven't even built a single house or hut? Food made before the war is somehow still edible? Radiation is thick enough in places that it will kill you in minutes? Water itself is radioactive? The Brotherhood of Steel are the
good guys? Fallout 3 takes place in a world with no complexity - a sterile and lifeless place that only serves as a playground for your wrath. There's fun to be had there, certainly, but there was much to love in the old Fallout games as well. The only catch is, Fallout 3 had access to far more time and money and technology and countless lessons learned from games gone by.
Fallout 3, no matter how disappointing to old fans, is
only possible because of the games that came before it. That includes Fallout 2 for reasons beyond sharing a name +1.
