Developed/Published by: Black Isle Studios / Interplay
Released: September 30th, 1998
Completed: 20th November 2015
Completion: Finished it.
Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Oh no! I broke the theme month! Well, whatevs. I got jelly of all the people playing Fallout 4, but I was like “aye right I’m going to pay $80 for it, and then $400 for the PS4 to play it on.” So I thought, well, why don’t I play Fallout: New Vegas on my hilariously out-of-date PC (seriously, it’s like eight years old. I’ve only really recently realised this too. But any money I ever get will end up being spent on a new smartphone, blah blah thinkpiece on the changing priorities of the techy blah blah). However, I’m completely certain someone on Twitter once said that you should really play Fallout 2 before New Vegas, to enjoy all the references or whatever, and I’m a sucker for that kind of thinking so I did.

Now! I really didn’t care much for the first Fallout, which I feel like I played in the last decade or so (so not contemporaneous) finding it a bit dull. And, if you’re looking for controversial opinions on decades-old CRPGs, I didn’t even like Planescape: Torment either when I played it.

(Planescape: Torment is definitely one of those “I just don’t get it!” things for me. First of all, the Planescape setting makes absolutely no sense to me, a total hodgepodge of fantasy nonsense that gets away with it because it’s a multiverse or whatever, barf, and then it’s mostly reading text in a tiny window. I found it impossible to care.)

So imagine my surprise when I say that I really, really enjoyed Fallout 2. In fact, I’ll say it’s one of the best “really old CRPGs” that I’ve played. It doesn’t reach the heights of the king of really old CRPGs (of course, the still mind-blowing Ultima VII) but, you know what? It’s pretty cool!

I’m now going to praise Fallout 2, and I think a lot of folk will probably think to themselves “hang on, a lot of that is true about the first Fallout” but shut up.

Here’s a thing I like about Fallout 2: I like the sense of distance and travel. You play “the Chosen One” a guy (or gal) from a tribe who has been tasked to find a “Garden of Eden Construction Kit” in order to save his village (founded by the player’s character from the first Fallout). This involves walking across the wasteland, and as you do this, you watch your little dot move across the landscape, and you see the time pass, the sun rise and set, and occasionally you get little random encounters (which aren’t really that remarkable) but that feeling that it’s taken you days to get somewhere I just found so evocative. It’s made even better when you get your hands on the one car that apparently exists in the entire world, and feel how much faster you get places (even though it still takes days!) And it led to examples like my decision to walk for weeks just to get that car rather than progress with the story simply because the distance to where I actually was supposed to go just seemed insane. Even though, really, I was just “role-playing.”

Here’s another thing I liked about it: I liked that you can kill basically everyone. OK, that makes me sound like a total psycho, but hear me out for a second. Fallout 2 suffers a bit because it doesn’t have one of the things I loved so much about Ultima VII—the sense that you’re in a living place. If you haven’t played Ultima VII, characters go to bed, they get up, they go to the pub—it’s amazing. I like that sense of a rhythm—it also makes you role-play, because you end up having to sleep through the night because everyone is in bed—and while Fallout 2 is lacking that, it at least gives you the freedom to deal with situations largely as you see fit. For example: I took great pleasure in that after spending some time faffing about with the crime families of New Reno doing what they ask for the experience and items, I returned to New Reno one day and killed every. single. last. one. of. them.

It was amazing. Just walking up to a crime boss and blowing him away, and working my way out of his casino (or whatever) killing all of his flunkies. (This actually lead to an amusing situation where, because of the way the game registers hostiles, I found my ‘hero’ murdering all of a casino’s patrons and then an entire line of sex workers out the front, before I realised they weren’t actually hostile.)

Fallout 2 isn’t without problems. The main one is that as pleasingly open-ended it feels, it comes with the cost that the game’s main plot-line is utterly sketchy. If you’re not really paying close attention after you reach the first town it’s pretty unclear what to do next, and the game doesn’t try and pipeline you through some of the main exciting areas (I mean, I think you can skip New Reno completely.) And the two-stage arc of the game is very much a retread of the first game’s, anyway.

The worst thing though is that the game is, and I know I’m saying this after a paragraph where I talked about all the lovely scrummy murders I woz doing, incredibly juvenile. For the most part the writing is nothing to, uh, write home about, but the game is drowning in teenage-boy fun times, with prostitutes everywhere, and utterly terrible parodies and references all over the place (the absolute nadir being the “Hubologists” who are a crap parody of Scientology that must have been out of date even in 1998.)

It’s odd, really, looking at a game like this now. I mean, “horrible future where women are chattel” is a trope, but there are definitely ways you can use it and be thoughtful about it (subs please put in an obvious reference to Fury Road) but here it’s just “lol there is a whore house.” And worst of all, there are many segments of the game where (having researched this a bit) a female character can have sex with NPCs to make things happen. Which is pretty gross, yo, because there’s really not a lot of nuance in the writing.

So that stuff bothered me, I can’t lie (actually the next game I’m going to write about has, if not these same issues, some stuff on the same topic, so look out for that, fans.) And I’d also be lying if I didn’t say that Fallout 2 didn’t overstay its welcome a bit. In fact, once I’d killed everyone in New Reno I was kind of done with it, and rushed through the end-game which has some just awful writing (Dan Quayle parodies. Dan Quayle parodies.)

(Oh, and an interesting thing is that all the levelling and that stuff felt pretty… pointless. Getting new weapons and armour felt hella important though, but once I was about level 20, I actually stopped putting points into skills, because it doesn’t matter.)

But despite all this, I liked Fallout 2. I liked it enough that although I got a bit bored of it I sort of immediately wanted to start playing Fallout: New Vegas. I didn’t, admittedly.

Will I ever play it again? Nope. However, I do recommend it, especially in the form of GOG’s release, where they (Bethesda) have ripped off a bunch of cool community-made mods that make the game just run so, so well on a modern (well, in my case, eight year old) PC, all hi-res and with full map scrolling and stuff. It’s not an amazing interface (very dated) but it’s as comfy as playing it is ever going to be.

Final Thought: So, playing Fallout 2 is supposed to be a good pre-requisite for playing Fallout: New Vegas, but afterwards I was thinking and I realised that massive swathes of Fallout 3’s plot are a retread of Fallout 2 (getting a GECK, fighting the Enclave, and so on). And with Fallout 2 being very much like Fallout in terms of the pacing/outline… man, this is a real “if it ain’t broke…” series. I guess they stuck a bunch of Minecraft in 4? So there’s that.