Remember when Fallout: Tactics was the Big Bad?

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Magnus

Water Chip? Been There, Done That
Modder
I've never played Fallout: Tactics. But now, after trying and failing to like the iconoclastic shitpile that is Fallout 3, to say nothing of the series' impending death knell due in November... I think I will.

From what little I've heard it actually sounds all right compared with its legacy. Anyone got any positive personal experiences with it? What are its strong points?
 
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Depends what you're looking for. FOT is a solid game of the general military science-fiction genre, not a role-playing game. I've always played it using turn-based combat, which is pretty decent; it's no Jagged Alliance, but there is plenty of room for various individual strategies and tactics on every map. The only real annoyance during combat (which is entirely what the game is about) is a function called "overwatch" where the enemies frequently get a free shot at you on the first turn; this means if you want to sneak up on them you have to kill them quickly with a massive volley that utterly incapacitates them.

You may want to try my mod as well, which both fixes many bugs and makes the game significantly harder.
 
Are you confusing FoT with "Fallout Brotherhood of Steel"?

From what I understand, FoT only had a few fan-issues concerning canon elements, and of course the departure from role-playing. Otherwise, most fans seem to enjoy FoT. I know I do.

In fact, for the longest time I would play FoT as a "replacement" for FO3, while waiting. I would even spend excessive time in some of the more urban/civilized mission maps, in order to pretend I was playing FO3... :D
This was before Bethesda's release, while most of us thought that FO3 was never going to happen.
 
zegh8578 said:
Are you confusing FoT with "Fallout Brotherhood of Steel"?

From what I understand, FoT only had a few fan-issues concerning canon elements, and of course the departure from role-playing. Otherwise, most fans seem to enjoy FoT. I know I do.

In fact, for the longest time I would play FoT as a "replacement" for FO3, while waiting. I would even spend excessive time in some of the more urban/civilized mission maps, in order to pretend I was playing FO3... :D
This was before Bethesda's release, while most of us thought that FO3 was never going to happen.
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Sounds like I might enjoy it then! I'd rather have a game that focuses entirely on one mechanic than one that tries to do several and fails miserably. I'll download this and give it a go. @Endocore I'll probably check out your mod as well!
 
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For the accuracy of the historical record, there were two primary tempests of controversy regarding FOT, both of which were fairly silly in hindsight.

As a preface, we can say most fans of Fallout and Fallout 2 had (and still have, myself included) an idea about a game. Let's call this game Fallout: Ineffable Goodness. The features of Fallout: IG are:

--An isometric 3rd person perspective game
--A game with turn-based action
--A serious role-playing game in the style of substantial pen-and-paper (PNP) games
--A game with choice and consequences, allowing great player freedom in narrative and characterization

and perhaps a few other matters. In any case, at the turn of the century the primary objections to FOT then were:

1) Why are "THEY" making this FOT game instead of Fallout: IG?
2) "THEY" are wasting valuable resources on this tangent niche game that could instead be used to make Fallout: IG happen sooner!

Fifteen years later, we see that Fallout: IG was a pipe-dream. No publisher was ever going to make such a game anyway, so the objections ("this" instead of "that") were deluded. Publishers are not interested in such resource-intensive endeavors as porting free-form literary-quality PNP quality worlds to crpgs, because it's not profitable. The miracle is that we ever got Fallout and Fallout 2 at all. This is why our modding community here is so important-- if want more gaming we enjoy (such as Fallout: IG), we have to make it ourselves.

There are certainly plenty of objections to FOT that are legitimate (related to gameplay, particularly in comparison to similar genre titles like Jagged Alliance, Tactics: Ogre, or X-COM), but criticizing the game because it's not something it was never intended to be (as happened years ago) was unsound and rooted in juvenile emotions rather than reason.
 
That's a damn good observation. Yeah, I personally never had any trouble with FOT, but then again I never played it.

But I think the game developing environment has changed. "They" did an incredible job with Pillars of Eternity, which is the perfect realization of this pipe dream you outlined. Even if it's not a fallout game and lacks the snark and grittyness.
I'm confident we'll see Fallout:IG some day, whether by community effort or done by a developer studio.
 
zegh8578 said:
From what I understand, FoT only had a few fan-issues concerning canon elements, and of course the departure from role-playing.
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Well, considering the main quest itself goes against Fallout canon, you know, with the whole Vault Zero thing and the origins of the brotherhood of steel, their motivations, weapons, talking deathclaws... Off the top of my head.

I do enjoy FoT though. I've finished it two or three times already, and it's fun enough. Some missions at least are.
 
Morbus said:
zegh8578 said:
From what I understand, FoT only had a few fan-issues concerning canon elements, and of course the departure from role-playing.
Click to expand...
Well, considering the main quest itself goes against Fallout canon, you know, with the whole Vault Zero thing and the origins of the brotherhood of steel, their motivations, weapons, talking deathclaws... Off the top of my head.

I do enjoy FoT though. I've finished it two or three times already, and it's fun enough. Some missions at least are.
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To be honest, it is difficult to please 100%
I was never a huge fan of ghouls and super-mutants for example - from FO1 right off the bat. Reminded me of trolls and zombies, but whatever, I'll play along, and it's a favorite game.
I disliked the idea of Vault 0 and robots in FoT, but hey, nice game none the less!
FONV is one of my favorites as well - but I could have easily done without those green vegetable-trogs... I won't even complain about them, unless pressed, because they aren't annoying enough to affect the overall FONV experience. In the same sense, the overall FoT experience, in my opinion, was nicely Fallouty, despite a miss here and a flaw there. I loved the super-mutant design there though, it "de-trolled" them, and turned them more into... huge, terrifying humans
 
zegh8578 said:
I loved the super-mutant design there though, it "de-trolled" them, and turned them more into... huge, terrifying humans
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Before I had ever played a Fallout game, I had heard they had "super mutants" in them, and that's exactly what I imagined: huge, terrifying, ruthless humans.

I was disappointed to find that they were basically a bunch of Hulk clones. The green color and drooling stupidity of many of them really offsets the terror factor. Although I've come to accept the super muties, I've always thought that mutant design is one department that is sorely lacking in the Fallout universe.
 
I always liked FoT. To me it is good at what it set out to be, a tactical game with RPG elements set in the Fallout world.
Yes, there are some issues like with canon, but all in all it's solid. And I like they way BoS is depicted here. They are neither knights in shiny armor nor lunatics that only care about technology that wont even help them survive. They are much more logical in FoT, caring about manpower, influence and resources. Well, except for situations when they aren't, like in the missions in St. Louis and Buena Vista where they act like complete amateurs.
 
Of course the reason for that is the setting itself. They are the afeared green monsters that come of the mysterious glowing green ooze; and ghouls from the scary atom bomb fallout. Classic 50's B-movie sci-fi trope, as per the expectation.

The difference in Fallout (prior to Bethesda's ham-fisted abortive attempts), was that they were all infirm, and likely in pain from their miserable fate; cracked supermen that could have been perfect, but none really were. They were powerful, but deformed. Intelligent, but monstrous and unacceptable to common society.
supermutant_zps2f18c66c.jpg

Smutants.jpg


They were to be the super society; and salvation of the human race, and it was all for naught, and the rug (of their dream) was pulled out from under all of them. The generic hulks were Bethesda's super-manikins; made cool to be cool, and with that, lost all of the careful trace of humanity from the first two games.
 
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