New Fallout Fan's First Playthrough Of Fallout 1/2

Turn based combat is an odd beast from my experience. I don't think i have played one where i didn't find it boring in early game, but then it starts to ramp up in the late early game to mid game and it gets a lot of fun.

A recent example of one i played was Underrail which is honestly pretty boring in the beginning, but like around 8 levels into the game it gets a lot of fun and around the mid game it gets ridiculous to the point that i actively want to fight things.

It also applies to Fallout 1 and 2 to me, the early game can be pretty boring combat wise, but when you start getting good weapons and getting to the perks you want to use, it gets pretty fun.

 

For isometric turn based is a necessity IMO. I cannot stand Real Time With Pause combat at all.

 

I like all the primary and secondary stats that are involved in Fallout and Fallout 2 because they're very directly applicable to tabletop rules, and real-time just renders all of that to be completely thoughtless spam clicking. In my experience of isometric RPGs anyway.

 

When designing my Fallout PnP rulebook I did some major rework on Doctor and First Aid and yeah I think they need to be independent skills.

 

I can tolerate it, but yeah, I'd rather just have turn based. Though I consider Witcher 1 and KOTOR 1 and 2 to be RTwP, I consider that to be decent for some reason. Their combat doesn't make me want to die.

 

Genres suck. You can't define things other than their impact. If they make an impact, then it becomes "A new genre."

"I like this or I like that." What you really mean is, "I like things that don't suck." One could say this is conjecture, but I would look at how certain genres of media encapsulate the attention of young people and also have mainstream appeal even after their paradigm has ended.

 

Real time with pause isn't a genre though, it is a specific gameplay feature. That is much easier and more fair to write-off when you consistently don't enjoy it than a genre.

 

That's why people call them "Genre defining features." Some do some do not.

 

As a general rule I prefer turn based combat; especially for party based games. But I do not like major mechanics reversal/swaps for series games. I would not like turn based in a Dawn of War 4, or Spacemarine 2; nor having realtime combat in Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus.

 

What about turn based Goldeneye 64?

 

Never played it; never owned a game console.

Sequels that stray from series is what I described. I would say no of a GoldenEye 2 having turn based combat; but not of GoldenEye 1—since it would obviously have been their intent.

EDIT:
* I would have been more okay with FO3, if they had designed the combat to play a bit more like Superhot; still with APs though.

Spoiler

But even that is not truly right for the Fallout games.

 

I'd say spinoffs that go turn based when the main series is not are fine. Age of Mythology DS is actually a pretty solid tactics turn based game and the main series is real time.

 

The combat is one thing that I will always say Bethesda did a better job at in terms of re-activeness and general fun. But that came at the cost of everything else that made those games flawed masterpieces. (This is not including New Vegas, that game was incredible)

 

Fallout was envisioned (before development) as a G.U.R.P.S. simulator. They lost the IP license, so they made their own, but the game was essentially the one they had in mind after three years of working on it.



So, Bethesda did not improve on anything, they simply replaced it with the combat from Oblivion; about as far from appropriate as can be imagined.
(This is a common thread with them.)

As to which is better job, or more fun—that's up to the player preference of course.

For myself, I find the Fallout combat reactions better than any reaction found in FO3, and as to what's more general fun... well... FO3 has a strike against it merely because it is not based on the series combat system—all merit aside, it starts off in the negative. In an RPG, I prefer to calculate my PC's options, and see them play out. In an RPG, strike & damage rolls are reflective of accuracy—not so when the player sees the barrel centered on the forehead. In FO3 those rolls can be low even with the barrel pressed to the skin. Headshots in VATS can miss if the hips are obscured by cover.

I have played Quake for 24 hours straight, before, and loved it (not only that... I didn't realize it had been more than 1 hour. I started at 7:00, and quit when the clock said 8:00 (and wondered why the Sun wasn't setting), but Quake is a shooter.

FO3 devs made the mistake of humoring the RPG combat heritage in a player directed interaction; meaning that the player aims & fires the weapon instead of the character—that's strike two against them, because it actively damages the FPS feel and reactivity of the shooter combat; ostensibly for the RPG aspect—which it doesn't really have. This is the principle reason you see players able to shoot NPC's 32 times in the head, and they shrug it off until the very last hit. That's not an improvement for a game of any style. (But who is to say what is fun?)

 

An FPS is an inherently weaker format for RPG combat because in an isometric a pacifist non-combatant character literally couldn't fight even if they wanted to. Whereas in an FPS RPG every character is one decision away from being a player controlled John Wick.

You could offset this by doing things like making reloading speed, recoil control, bullet spread et cetera heavily dependant on weapon skill but it's still not quite the same.