I'm replaying the series this year + arcanum, however i rather play only the official titles since theres so many mods and a lot of them have no translation patches or anything remotely close to that.
I just finished Fo1 to start with, went with a thief character, finished with 8 kills and mostly tried a non lethal approach, no reloads for failed stealings if i failed and was caught i tried to sneak out of a zone, its usually enough to not aggro the whole city, if it doesnt work i just abandon the city and ignore the quests in there
I ignored tandi in Shady sands
Sided with gizmo after stealing Killian's storage in Junktown
Joined the thieves circle in the hub/stole the merchant's necklace
Joined the BoS just to steal a bunch of shit and then never returned
in my second time in the Hub i got caught trying to steal and had to leave the city for good (one of the characters wouldnt forget so i couldnt just quit like i usually do)
After that i went to necropolis and tried to sneak into the vault to get the waterchip, but i was caught by Harry
in the military base i kept refusing to give info about my vault and then i ran to the locker in the upper part of the room and stole the key, it happens that i wasnt fast enough so they took my equipment and took me as a prisioner. i've never been locked up like that so i had no idea how to recover my stuff (oof, my eletronic lockpick and stealth boys
![R.I.P. :rip: :rip:](/../../xencustomimages/smilies/rip_1.gif)
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I had to run away with only 3 stimpacks and a gun i found on a corpse that was at my room (guess they are too stupid to check the room before locking me in) and no combat abilities, as i was playing on hard, i basically had close to no chance to hit, had to search for everything i could to help me but after way 25-30 minutes i got out of it.
i had to basically live from scrap and junk i could find after that, i noticed i needed money so i went to LA and searched for a quick job to get money without the need of combat skills.
as a result i stole a dynamite and accepted the job to get rid of Razor
i Killed her by planting C4 at her pockets, got 2K out of it +500 for going "extra"
I insulted the followers but offered to help them afterwards
Because of it i found more about the cathedral and as such i ve infiltrated the place as a child. because of the follower's scouts i mostly failed my first infiltration attempt, but after all of them died, i finally dressed up as a child and went down the whole thing, for some reason even if i had lost the key i still could set the bomb on using my repair skills (which i didnt have, i think the script is broken?) and destroyed the cathedral.
All i had to do afterwards was infiltrating the military based dressed as a child, set the whole base to explode and get out of there.
I ended my playtrought at L7 (print was from an earlier save)
As for my impressions:
Some of the things i liked:
+ Pacing is immaculate. theres not a single area that overstay its welcome, everything is sweet and fast, it also gives you a lot of agency as to how you can approach problems and quests, which adds to the feeling that its not combat heavy nor dialogue heavy.
+ Main story is quite well written and often foreshadow a lot of intricacies regarding the setting. it feels like much of the writing is more about the setting itself than a main narrative but the little there is about a central conflict is really well done, specially how well major areas like the Hub and Boneyard ties to it all.
+ I always liked the combat system, its very simple but decent. killing enemies feel great due to the gore system and you can use skills at strategic value quite a lot (sneak to run from combat or commit stealth kills, planting C4 at people's pockets to engage combat, setting up explosives at the ground and luring enemies to their doom, using alcohol to lower people's perception before engaging at combat,etc..), its a lethal combat and it ends fast, even if you have high HP, crits are frequent and lethal so things usually wont live to see the light. The quality of each combat encounter usually depends on the layout of areas, the most places to manuveur you have, the better. in general its quite fun.
+ Non combat itemization is rather good. Money isnt a very big issue in Fo1 so while economy isnt a real struggle (if you dont go for skill books), the ammount of useful items is quite impressive. you have a bunch of things for skill increases that are helpful tools in non-combat gameplay such as the lockpick kits, Stealthboys, Med-Kits and a lot more for other play-styles, i actually felt satisfyied once i obtained my first eletronic lockpick and making me feel good for getting something that isnt equipment is an accomplishment.very few games focus on Non-Combat itemization, this is one of my issues with Age of decadence for example, here its very well done.
+ Level progression system is rather great, the Special system is not only simple, elegant and cool but also great from a progression perspective, at levelling up you dont have a simple 1 point per level to distribute into a bunch of different things, you have multiple skill points and at each 3 levels a perk (which is an unique game-changing advantage). its probably still my favorite build system in eletronic Rpgs.
+ Talking heads have a great deal of characterization and are memorable enough to make you remember them. in particular i really liked what they did with Decker, Killian, Maxson and the Master (obviously)
+ I dont care how many Beth fans shittalk the endslides. they are great and a good reason to replay the games.
+The end section is great and easily the best part of the game, theres a lot of different stories you can get out of trying to blast throught mariposa and the cathedral and the entire finale is such a strong gut-punch.
Things i didnt like:
- Itemization is a bit lackluster in terms of combat itemization, theres only 3 Big guns. Minigun is worse than Gatling laser, RL is not as strong as you may think and the only standout is flamer. Armor has only 1 slot and it doesnt make much sense at times (Robes should have higher AC than heavy armor),etc...
- Party members are useless after early game since they cant level up nor equip armor. (Their a.i is quite bad either).
- You cant play as an evil char without being a mass murderer bc of the forced karma gains by completing the main story or killing mutants. You barely get negative karma by doing bad actions in quests, so you often will not be able to be evil unless you start killing people for no reason. I tried in this playtrought but couldnt, none of my past tries at evil playtroughts worked without going on genocide mode. Even then, the reaction system is buggy which means you wont be able to properly get evil chars to react to your evil PC.
- Ammo types are bugged. Everything deals the same damage as JHP which reduces tactical depth.
- Some areas are really messy and have not a lot of content. Boneyard for example is clearly less polished than other areas. A bunch of npcs in there with very few actual content in the area, from the few quests that there are, one of them is bugged and can never be finished (followers) and the other revolves around a huge town conflict that is buggy because its very easy to friendly fire an npc, which are not codded correctly and will turn on their enemy flag very easily.
- Half of the skills are worthless or just underwhelming (Big guns, Unarmed, Traps, Outdoorsman, first aid, science, Barter, Throwing,etc...)
- Theres a bunch of reactivity lacking on important parts. Very early on you can explore V15 as an order from the overseer and find nothing. You may try to return to V13 and tell him, however a dialogue recognizing that was never coded. Later on you may save tandi and when talking to her boyfriend after that, he wont notice, i didnt do that in this save, however i faced a lot of other moments of ghost reactivity.
- Some funny things are a bit lore breaking such as the terminal Joke about the interwebs. You can get it by a science check in a V13 educational terminal. It mentions cats and "interwebs" which was a term for the internet. The internet cant exist in FO universe, nor cats in the wasteland (althought the later is excused since its more explored in Fo2)
- diplomatic routes feel much more like metagaming instead of a proper playstyle, specially since Speech isnt as powerful as you may think. Theres only 15 speech checks in the game. Diplomat route is better in Fo2, even if you have to actually kill horrigan in that one. This became quite obviously since now that i have done a fully stealth route, the sneak route isnt like that at all, which means that from all the 3 main styles, Diplomats are the least well developed ones.
- Choice and consequence is a bit lackluster. The only in game consequences in Fo1 are Npcs getting hostile towards you, the best example outside of it would be leaking your vault's location. This was patched day one however. The other CnC is all found within the ending slides (some being buggy), so its not that much for the simulation aspects.
- some worldbuilding is a bit ilogical. It tries to do worldbuilding much more by visuals instead of telling us like i recall Fo2 doing, however this results in a bunch of unexplained things such as the fact that Gizmo runs an cassino that uses eletricity, but theres no power generator/supply in Junktown. Want a less nitpicky example? Gun runners literally live across a river full of radioative barrels/toxic water. To reach there you need to fight deathclaws, however its still somehow implied they receive caravans in order to get their material to make weapons. How? They couldnt live there less so have average merchants going in and out of that mess as their heart desire.
I enjoyed my time with Fallout and despite its issues, its still a quite solid title, i would rate it 7/10 as of now.