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Fallout 2
PC (Steam)
An Aggregation of Small Annoyances.
4/5 stars
Sequels can come in four basic flavors: 1) The sequel that is essentially identical to the previous game; 2) The sequel that manages to improve on the previous game; 3) The sequel that doesn’t improve on the previous game but instead adds an extra helping of flaws; and 4) The sequel that completely changes everything from the previous game and is a ‘sequel’ in name alone. After playing the original “Fallout” for the first time over a decade after its release, I was hoping that the sequel would work hard to iron out the plethora of small, annoying issues that dropped the first game from a near-perfect masterpiece to a game that was merely very good. Unfortunately, “Fallout 2” does little to change the formula of the original game… in fact they are both built in the exact same game engine. So instead of reiterating everything I said about “Fallout” that is identical in “Fallout 2,” this review will consist mostly of lists of the flaws shared by both original ‘Fallout’ RPGs and the new flaws that were added in the sequel.
Presentation
Returning Annoyances:
-Brown & Gray color scheme
-Weird transparency bubble that makes it difficult to see things that are behind buildings and open doors that are on the side of a building that faces away from the player’s viewpoint
-No ability to highlight interactive objects
-Area maps are still hideous and not very useful
-“Talking Head” NPC conversations still look pretty bad
-Plenty of bugs and easily-reproducible crashes that should have been patched
New Annoyances:
-The new opening cinematic and choice of ‘50s era music lacks the punch of the original game’s intro
-Companions don’t show the armor they’re wearing on their sprite
Improvements:
-Includes a built-in high-resolution graphics mod
-All movies and the world map are now full-screen instead of letterboxed
-Slain enemies’ corpses can be looted directly for their weapons (no more hunt and peck for tiny weapon sprites)
Being built on the exact same game engine as the original “Fallout” didn’t really do “Fallout 2” any favors. It’s still a relatively hideous eyesore with muddy sprites that don’t really look particularly different from each other and samey isometric environments. It would not have killed the dev team to add a few more custom sprites for recruitable NPC companions, at least. There are fewer NPCs with full voice acting, and the animated talking heads that occur (even less frequently) for important conversations actually manage to look worse about half the time (mutants, ghouls, and tribesmen look ‘okay’ for what they are, but there are a couple elderly folks with talking head portraits that look beyond awful).
Story
Returning Annoyances:
-Quests are tracked in the Pip-Boy personal computing/navigation device, but not in any detail
New Annoyances:
-While the main story is not timed like it was in the original game, it still seems like it is, which leads to a feeling of being rushed
-Horrible pacing at the beginning, including a mandatory tutorial mission
-A more open, less compact story mission with more drawn-out side missions
-Many side missions involve finding an item on one side of the world map and hauling it to a location on the opposite side of the world map
Improvements:
-More than two recruitable NPC companions
Whereas “Fallout” really did a great job of laying down the background for the game world and providing the player character with an urgent mission that could be achieved within a reasonable amount of time before throwing in a secondary mission that placed the entire world in danger, “Fallout 2” does… exactly the same thing, but worse.
Instead of focusing on a Vault Dweller as the protagonist of the tale, “Fallout 2” follows the exploits of the grandchild of the Vault Dweller from the first game, who is living as a savage in the small tribal village of Arroyo. Arroyo’s shaman tasks the new hero, the ‘Chosen One,’ to find a pre-war piece of tech called a ‘G.E.C.K.’ (short for ‘Garden of Eden Creation Kit’) that he read about in an old catalog that he was using to wipe his ass in the latrine. The G.E.C.K., says the shaman, is essential if Arroyo is to survive through increasingly dire droughts and famines.
The Chosen One is first put through an annoying tutorial mission involving melee combat and giant ants before being dumped out into the game’s large open world to start searching for the G.E.C.K. Two generations after the original game, the American wasteland is simultaneously in better and worse condition than in the original game. There are numerous locations to explore, some of which seem ridiculously prosperous while others are just barely hanging on. Each location has plenty of side quests and far too many non-talkative NPCs that only serve to clutter up the map. When every NPC looks alike and 90% of them just spew some floating text when approached, it can hamper the player’s desire to talk to everyone, which can lead to some confusion and frustration with regard to triggering important dialog options in quests.
Whereas the original “Fallout” was a fairly compact, yet still sandboxy experience, “Fallout 2” takes the sandbox elements a bit too far by giving the player too much stuff to keep track of and not enough indications of which items, objects, and persons among the grains of sand are important. It is far too easy to get sidetracked from the main story by the sheer amount of side stuff to do, much of which I found completely uninteresting in the grander scheme of exploring the post-nuclear holocaust remains of the Western United States.
There are more than two NPCs that can join the Chosen One on this quest, with the Charisma stat determining how many can join the party at once. Some are reformed super mutants that appeared in the original game, and there are a couple other non-human wasteland critters, but most are just human men with some questionable combat skills and essential stuff-carrying skills (it is also possible to get married to the most incompetent human being in the universe). There is also apparently a car NPC, but I missed it because I apparently didn’t click on every identical NPC in one of the towns I visited in order to shake him down for the part I needed to repair the car (which was, itself, in another town about a month’s travel away).
After finally tracking down the G.E.C.K. (which is not actually a timed quest, unlike the Water Chip quest in the original “Fallout”), a new threat looms large and the Chosen One is apparently the only one capable of dealing with it. After traveling with three NPC companions for so long, I found the fact that the final parts of the story quest rely almost entirely on solo stealth missions to be rather jarring. Actually, the fact that the entire final mission kind of comes out of nowhere is rather jarring. Sure, there are a few really subtle hints here and there, but there is ultimately little build-up to the grand finale.
As a result of its intensified sandboxification, “Fallout 2” is uncomfortably on the long side. It’s at least twice as long as the original game, if not three times longer. With the number of small issues that plagued “Fallout,” the short length prevented the annoyance factor from reaching critical mass. With “Fallout 2,” however, I got sick of dealing with random BS long before I reached the final set of missions.
Gameplay
Returning Annoyances:
-Companions are AI only, and profoundly retarded (Sulik, you have an SMG and hundreds of rounds of ammo… QUIT PUNCHING THE ENEMY!)
-Inventory management is a massive pain that takes hours of real time to deal with when inventories start to fill up
-Still several instances of insane-moon-logic that require a FAQ to figure out (Really? I have to use the metal pole (which I didn’t see on the ground) on the minecart, then use the lit dynamite on the minecart, then finally use the minecart itself to clear away that rubble pile? My regular dynamite next to the rubble wasn’t good enough?)
-Far too easy to build a useless character with the opaque character generation system
New Annoyances:
-Companions are no longer ignored by NPCs while acting idiotic
-Companions will gladly burst fire into each other, making friendly fire a massive liability in every combat
-Companions love to stand in doorways and narrow halls, blocking the player character’s movement, and will only move one hex at a time when told to get out of the way
-Bartering now favors NPC merchants and prevents the player from receiving full value in trades
-Far fewer NPCs are willing and able to barter, placing focus more on dedicated ‘merchant’ NPCs
-The world map is significantly bigger and traveling anywhere takes about 4 times longer than in the first game, making travel between the game’s locations a tedious chore
-Random encounters while traveling are incredibly frequent and a bit too random, putting possible encounters with savage cannibals armed with knives and rocks or heavy troopers wearing power armor and wielding energy weapons in the same areas
- All enemy encounters have huge numbers of foes, making AI companions mandatory to bring enough firepower, despite the ineffectiveness and friendly fire issues associated with AI companions
-Battles feel far less tactical since enemies and AI companions tend to just cluster-up into tight groups and fire point-blank at each other, plus aggro tends to accumulate on the player character, which can lead to some really dumb kiting situations
Improvements:
-Companion inventory management is built-in instead of being a third-party mod (but it’s still terrible, since it is just the mod from the first game incorporated into the core of the sequel)
If not for the couple of third-party mods made their way into the base code of the sequel, “Fallout 2” is essentially the same game as “Fallout.” However, it takes much, much longer to acquire decent combat gear and the stupidly large numbers of enemies in almost every random encounter had me reloading previous saves more often than attempting fights against overwhelming odds. The increased random encounter rate also had me traveling to numerous empty waypoints between destinations just for the purpose of creating a save that was closer to the end destination for when I hit an inevitable impossible encounter and needed to reload.
Aside from the broken balance in random encounters (which finally starts to smooth-out during the endgame when the Chosen One and their companions all have power armor and top-tier guns), the biggest issues are the fact that “Fallout 2” really plays down the bartering mechanic that was so refreshing and interesting in the original game and the fact that traveling ANYWHERE takes so, so, so, so long. I actually came to dread clearing out all of the quests in a given location simply because the trek to the next location would inevitably be a tedious, un-fun ordeal of watching my party’s little red + crawl across the map at a painfully slow pace before turning into a lightning bolt and dumping me into the middle of 6+ well-armed foes. Some locations I essentially skipped simply because they didn’t have anything to do with the main story quest and their local merchants had crap inventory.
Overall
The original “Fallout” had its fair share of small annoyances, but it did enough things well and was unique enough that the good aspects overwhelmed the bad. “Fallout 2,” however just doesn’t have the same quality of writing or gameplay balance as its predecessor, which, when combined with an ever-increasing number of small annoyances but very few improvements, leads to a rather mediocre experience.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 2.5/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
Update:
In the process of searching for folks who shared by bleak opinions about “Fallout 2,” I stumbled across a forum post that mentioned the possibility of speeding up map travel by changing a value in the game’s ddraw.ini file. Considering that the name of the file is a reference to the DirectDraw graphics engine, I never looked into that file much, aside from setting the game’s resolution to 1920x1080 and setting mouse/keyboard to run in background mode to fix a launching error. I also learned that, apparently, people thought the traveling speed in the original “Fallout” was too fast (they were clearly insane) and that some of the graphical goodies (like companions showing the armor they’re wearing) were all bundled into the “Fallout FIXT” mod I installed primarily for companion inventory management and high-resolution graphics.
What blew my mind, though, was that, in going into the ddraw.ini file, which is part of the “SFall” high-resolution graphics mod that is built-into all current versions of “Fallout 2,” I discovered a plethora of settings that allowed me to change or remove a large number of the biggest small annoyances I found in the second game. There is a setting that allows the player to hold the Left Shift key to highlight all small items on the ground (unfortunately, it doesn’t work on interactive background objects, but baby steps…)! There is a setting that causes NPC companions to level up with the Chosen One (though the player still has no control over their perks and skill points…)! The setting that speeds up travel on the world map also makes random encounter rates much more acceptable!
Most importantly, ddraw.ini contains a setting that ALLOWS THE PLAYER TO CONTROL ALL OF THEIR NPC COMPANIONS IN COMBAT! Enabling NPC control immediately made “Fallout 2” a much more enjoyable experience, as I was now able to strategically create firing lines with my group and lay waste to the large groups of enemies I encountered, while friendly fire became a non-issue. I was able to tell Sulik to burst fire responsibly and pull out his Super Sledge only when surrounded by close-range targets. I was able to tell other companions to aim for their enemies’ eyes, to great and gory effect. It’s like I was playing a completely different game. Unfortunately, there isn’t a ddraw.ini setting to make the story any better.
The fact that these incredibly important settings are hidden within a text-editable game file with no indication of their existence in the game’s option menu is a tragic oversight, as they drastically improve the gameplay, even beyond the quality of the original game. Anyone who wants to enjoy “Fallout 2” needs to familiarize themselves with all of the SFall options buried in ddraw.ini before playing.
Presentation: 2.5/5
Story: 2.5/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
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