Fallout 1 versus Fallout 2

mithrap said:
Every single town is so different from another, and yet, they interact with each other in a believable way (the whole plot centered around the Bishops, Vault City and the NCR is actually very interesting. It has that "global scale" that is missing from Fallout 1.)
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Eh, I'd say "global scale" is actually present in Fallout 1 far more than Fallout 2. Just like you said, every single town in Fallout 2 is indeed so different from one another. However, only the ones that's in direct vicinity of the Golden Trail (of NCR-New Reno-Vault City with Redding in the 'center) that actually have any meaningful interaction between each other. Places like Arroyo (starting point), Klamath (narrative hook from starting point), The Den (continuation of narrative hook), Modoc (stumble upon it on the way to Vault City, kinda like Shady Sands), and obviously San Francisco (as the endgame point) are actually detached from the rest of the Golden Trail. I guess you can cut The Den some slack since it has connection with New Reno (Frankie buying his alcohol from there, and Metzger's biggest buyer is the Mordinos iirc). Aside from San Fran, the second most jarring place of Fallout 2, in my opinion, is Modoc. While the game explicitly shown that there's indeed trading going on between Modoc and the rest of the region, for some reason it doesn't seem to be connected with the Golden Trail. It's weird that with RP, we have a quest to help that Vault Village establish trading with caravans, but no such quest is present in Modoc.

Meanwhile, in Fallout 1, literally ALL settlement is connected by trading, with The Hub acting as literal hub between the towns. Even Necropolis is included in the trading circle. Only Shady Sands for some reason not involved in this, though I guess you can say it's due to the Khans having a base between it and The Hub, and even then you can actually find a random encounter with a caravan group heading for Shady Sands.
Also, not to mention second-phase time limit of Fallout 1, where the Super Mutants will invade ALL settlement on the map should the Vault Dweller lollygag for far too long, I wouldn't say the sense of "global scale" is missing, or even lacking at all in Fallout 1.
 
I've been replaying them, and I thought I'd get enough experience with them to decide...but right now all I know is that I hate playing a melee character.
 
To be fair, Modoc is a farming community which is struggling to provide enough food at the moment. The Den and Klamath are two lawless shithole, that manage to sustain themselves through the surrounding lands. Klamath survive with rat food, gecko pelt and selling crap to tribals. The slaver thrive by selling slaves and drugs and trader survive by (litterally) stealing travelers or selling worthless craps. The junkies raise a question mark as there shouldn't be able to survive much longer, (unless they dwelve on how they make a living) and they don't have enough visitors to get new junkies, but i assume that Jet is a recent import there. And the tribals are irrelevants except for being abused. So there is a local economy there (involving Modoc a bit, with the tannery), plus exchanges with others communities, through the Den. But none of their good are truly unique, save for the slaves, so the demand isn't so high that they would sell stuff thousands of kilometers away.

On the other hand, San Francisco should definitely be mentionned much before and more often, even if they are not involved in the main power struggle. The monastery should also get a couple more mentions, at least in Gecko and Vault City, even if it wasn't in the vanilla game.
 
NMLevesque said:
I've been replaying them, and I thought I'd get enough experience with them to decide...but right now all I know is that I hate playing a melee character.
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That's interesting... I generally only play melee characters.... Though eventually they have to adopt the heavy guns; melee PCs cannot perform area effect attacks, and eventually they will really need that.
 
I stick to unarmed most of the time, and I don't really have any trouble with that. Its always interesting to see what people feel is necessary.
 
First Fallout works better for me, suffered less from tight deadlines which results in better though out post-apo world. For example, do you remember how every settlement was tied to water source? Main plot revolving around water shortages with water thief sub-quest included, biggest settlement flourishing thanks to water merchants, desperate ghouls in Necropolis begging to fix the pump before you take the V12 water chip away etc. F2 doesn't care, there are booming cities such as Reno in the middle of desert with buildings full of people in F2 and you won't find where the water goes from, no machinery to pump the water up to higher floors in any casino, none sewers for tons of waste produced by these people either.

I blame tight deadlines, as explained by programmer Dan Spitzley how they were rushing to fill the F2 world with something, without actually thinking whether it makes sense or not:

http://www.archive.nma-fallout.com/article.php?id=35386
Dan Spitzley said:
Fallout and Fallout 2 were both developed concurrently with Planescape: Torment, on which I was the lead programmer. Near the end of each of the Fallout game dev cycles there was a lot of scripting that needed to be done and very little time to do it. I was pulled from Torment for about two months on each of them to do area scripting. I don't really recall all of the work I did on Fallout 1, but I know I reworked pretty much all of the Hub. On Fallout 2 I scripted all of Vault City and the bulk of Broken Hills and Navarro. In addition, I did a bit of design work in Broken Hills which probably felt really out of place. I came up with Mickey the midget treasure hunter, the Professor and the scorpion, and running over the ghoul with your car. The area was pretty sparse near the end of development and something needed to go in there, so I did what I could with my programmer brain.
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SiriusShenanigans said:
I stick to unarmed most of the time, and I don't really have any trouble with that. Its always interesting to see what people feel is necessary.
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It's a case of adopt heavy weapons—or not have the option of area effect attacks. ;) The Melee character cannot attack five [clumped] supermutants with one action during their turn, but can if they use a grenade or the rocket launcher. :twisted:
 
Gizmojunk said:
That's interesting... I generally only play melee characters.... Though eventually they have to adopt the heavy guns; melee PCs cannot perform area effect attacks, and eventually they will really need that.
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I wanted to stick to HtH.

SiriusShenanigans said:
well, 6 attacks a turn, better crits and slayer often keeps them cycling through rather nicely.
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Do you take Fast Shot or use aimed shots?

naossano said:
The SM will do the area damage you need by themselves.
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SM?
 
NMLevesque said:
Do you take Fast Shot or use aimed shots?
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Fast shot got fixed in fallout 2 so it doesn't work with unarmed. So I used slayer and better crits for that.
In fallout 1 it still works, with 12 shots a turn, but you'd be more hard pressed to get slayer because its at level 18.
 
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