Do Fallout 1 and 2 hold up? My experience.

The Fallout franchise has the same divide as Weezer. After beginning in the 90’s, the band and series disbanded, then returned with a very different feel, creating a large divide in the fanbases where one side prefers the new version while the other remains adamant that, “the classic stuff was better.” While I am not a particularly big Fallout fan, Fallout New Vegas is a game I deeply love, and after playing some Fallout 4 I began to really feel what the fans were saying. This blogpost isn’t about Fallout 4, but I felt some kind of disgust at the automated quests, the armies of generic Super Mutants and raiders without lore or character the game asked me to mow down again and again, and what felt like the complete absence of roleplaying in this roleplaying game franchise. This inspired me to install the first and second Fallout games, with the hopes of learning what this beloved series was truly about.

 The first step in my journey of discovery was installing a variety of mods to make the first Fallout even slightly user-friendly. I fiddled with files to make the game run in its sequel’s engine, I added keybinds to show items and lootable containers, I made sure the game reached a greater visual standard than its 1997 release date would suggest. Then, I made my first character. This was a mistake. I made a rather standard character, and immediately struggled to get through the rats patrolling the vault exit my character was leaving from. This game’s 1997 release date does not just age the graphics, but also its design. To explain for those unfamiliar with the Fallout franchise’s early installments, the first and second games are not first-person-shooter action RPG’s like every installment after Bethesda purchased the rights to the series, but is a top-down, isometric, turn-based RPG where your actions are limited by your AP, which is dictated by your agility stat. My first character had an agility stat of 6, and a similarly middling perception stat, which meant that every turn I had one middling chance to hit a rat with a pistol shot or a knife slash, and then I had to end my turn. Once I made it through the cave, using multiple stimpacks to get through, I passed through Shady Sands, got through Vault 15, and figured I should probably just restart with a new character.

This second playthrough would be successful, but it would also begin my main problem as I played through the games. This character had an 8 in both agility and perception, alongside the very powerful ‘gifted’ perk, which increased each SPECIAL stat by 1, making those stats 9. This, alongside high luck, allowed my character to be far more effective in combat and outside. I visited Shady Sands, left with the game’s first companion Ian in tow, and got through Vault 15 with little difficulty. Using this playthrough as my ‘true’ experience of the game, I view Vault 15 as a major highlight. While the vault’s are fantastic as the lynchpin of Fallout’s worldbuilding, the abandoned, rat-infested vault 15 makes for a fantastic, eerie early game dungeon where you find loot that can get you through a good section of the game, while also having your hopes of easily finding the water chip dashed. Sadly, it also marks a major shift in how enjoyable I found the game.

The issue I had was two-sided. The first is revealed with my troubled beginning in the game: Fallout 1 is a remarkably difficult game to understand and follow unaided. Most of this is due to the game’s age and nature. In the modern era games like Grand Theft Auto 5 and Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild can set you into a world with little guidance and your character can still easily find many different things to, but the technology and design principles didn’t allow for that style in 1997. Furthermore, there aren’t things like the markers on minimaps that are a gaming standard, and instead knowing and remembering where to go and what to do is down to the player. This works fine when it’s bringing a radscorpion tail to Shady Sands doctor so he can make an antidote to their poison, but it’s far more difficult when quests become more complex. My answer to this, utilizing an online guide, created its own problems. While I enjoyed going through Junktown, the Hub, and Necropolis, using a guide to make the large-to-massive areas comprehensible also removed the joy of discovery or real roleplaying from the game. Now I knew what I wanted to do, and the result it would cause, so instead of roleplaying being the point of the roleplaying game, I had to find my joy elsewhere.

This did not come from the game’s combat, which largely consisted of me firing my gun as many times as I could, reloading as needed, and then ending my turn. Instead, I primarily got my enjoyment from the game’s incredible atmosphere. In no other Fallout game does the world feel as post-apocalyptic as it does in the first. The Floater enemy is a particularly disgusting creation, and among the best creature designs in the entire series. Moreover, the enemies die in truly gruesome fashions when faced with a burst attack or energy weapon, making for great spectacle. My favorite area in the game was easily The Glow. The Glow, an underground military base exposed by nuclear blast, contains no enemies until you turn on the power, and instead the primary obstacle is navigating the bombed-out terrain and the radiation permeating the area. With the guide, I knew to take a proper amount of rad-x, but even still, navigating far away from civilization into a true wasteland was nerve wracking, and going through The Glow was fun. It was doubly exciting to discover the laser rifle in the base and transition my character from the small guns the game had flooded me with to the scarce but far more powerful energy weapons.

From then on, I got power armor, and the game’s combat became remarkably simple. I enjoyed meeting the Followers of the Apocalypse, seeing the Brotherhood of Steel be wary of outsiders even when you could encounter dozens of patrols of soldiers in full power armor, and in experiencing the final encounter with the Master, with its wonderful writing and fantastic voice acting. It would have been the perfect ending to the game if I didn’t have to go to the military base in the far Northwest of the Map to defeat the Super Mutant General. After that, it was on to Fallout 2.

I made a character with a similar build to my Fallout 1 character, building around unarmed combat rather than small guns, but still focused on Speech and Science. I found the trial dungeon that started the game more interesting than Fallout 1’s cave, but unfortunately Fallout 2’s opening puts you straight into the part of its story that has aged worst: the idea of “tribals”. In concept, the idea that American Indian tribal groups could survive in the post-nuclear apocalypse and have a distinct cultural identity that separates themselves from the rest of society is interesting and works. However, instead the lore behind the game’s beginner town Arroyo is that the vault dweller from the first game started the town. This means this “tribal” town that is clearly based on real American tribal groups shares no actual connection with the real history of America’s indigenous people. Your character’s origin plays into the games themes that question prejudice and superiority, but it still feels fetishistic in a way that we have rightfully left behind. This is doubly the case with the companion Sulik, who gave me a small ick every time I spoke to him to trade.

From the beginning, I was using a guide for Fallout 2, and while I enjoyed many of the game’s ideas it hurt the experience in this game far more than in Fallout 1. While First Citizen Lynette is perhaps the biggest bitch in gaming history (something I don’t say lightly), experiencing the pitfalls of attempting to reason with her and experiencing all the scenarios where she kicks you out of Vault City presumably makes you experience that far better than how I did (avoiding her almost entirely and only showing the situations where she ruins your day to my friends after a quicksave). People tend to say that Fallout 1 has the best atmosphere in the series and that Fallout 2 left behind the first game’s serious tone, but I disagree. While Fallout 2 certainly has far more wacky scenarios and ideas, the core ideas and conflicts you experience in the game resemble the beloved Fallout New Vegas, where you make inconvenient bedfellows, have options to do great evil, and where the most moral thing you can do often involves serious compromise. Where I felt the complaints about the game were most applicable were in parts of the game’s juvenile humor. The game’s obsession with sex felt gross. Yes, it’s funny that your character can become a porn star called ‘Arnold Swolenheimer’, but I don’t think it’s as funny as the developers thought it would be. And much like the game’s depiction of “tribals” the association of sex work and the degradation of society is something we have rightfully left behind.

Where the game most improves over it’s predecessor is in the ideas and scope of its world. The underground civilization near Modoc was a particularly cool idea, and New Reno is perhaps the most dense and well-realized city in any Fallout game. The scope, however, became my main issue with the game. As things got on, I felt lost, even with a guide to help me through. I skipped most of the New Reno quests and moved on to Vault 15 and the NCR, but ultimately, I felt equally lost. I was an actor without a script, and I wasn’t having fun. 15 hours into Fallout 2, I decided to quit, and felt so strange about it that I had to write this blogpost.

So here I am. I had a mediocre to bad experience with some games. Big whoop. My issue is, I thought I would LOVE these games. They’re so widely acclaimed and so beloved that surely someone with good taste could appreciate them. Me not appreciating the classic Fallout games would be like not appreciating the Beatles. In that metaphor, stopping not even halfway through Fallout 2 would be like giving up in the middle of Sgt. Pepper’s. That, and a helping of anxiety, made me panic about my taste as a critic and my firm belief in video games as an art form. Can I be a true supporter of this medium without enjoying veritable classics? Well, I can. Partially because nobody will have the same experience that I did, but also because video games might be the only medium where something being “classic” doesn’t mean it will be evergreen. Games as a medium are about the experience, and while the story and written experience of the classic Fallout games are incredible, the moment-to-moment gameplay has aged terribly. If you want something like the experience critics rave about the original Fallout games giving, I’d recommend Project Larian’s Divinity 2: Original Sin or Disco Elysium. What I’d recommend most though, is Fallout New Vegas. The game gives the best of both worlds, where combat can be fun, engaging, difficult, and tactical without sacrificing a remarkable story in the way I found Fallout 4 to. These games are a rich, powerful, and important part of gaming history. That doesn’t mean you have to enjoy them today.

They’re certainly more interesting than Fallout 4.