What did you NOT like about FO 1 & 2?

[TakLoufer]

Mouse said:

Also, earlier in this thread... I must've had a way different first impression of New Reno than everyone else. Other than the porn studio which was just illogical, nothing else about the place seemed off. Lawless like the Den, but with more people, more money. The bouncers in suits and fedoras were kinda weird.. but I was thinking more along the lines that the guys were the size of supermutants and thier animations were particularly stiff... not thier clothes.

For me, it was the constant nudge, nudge, wink, wink pop culture references that abounded. The place was just really silly and, while it was fun, it didn't fit. Everything in the town was a reference to something else.

I can't remember where I read it, but I read some post that pointed out that New Reno was basically a really big easter egg. That sounds about right.

To be honest, San Fran bothered me a bit too, though for different reasons. I'm not sure, but I'll bet that SF was a town that was designed as a half-realized after thought. It's a bit odd the most advanced, and possibly the biggest (at least in terms of population, maybe) city on the map has no political ties and few connections with any of the other cities in the game. I mean, IIRC, no one (or at least hardly anyone) even mentions the city. SF seems, for the most part, to exist in a vaccum. For a city such as SF to have such little political signifigance for the other cities seems odd.

That, and around SF the random encounter raiders carry plasma and guass pistols, which is just stupid.

Phreadbean said

Fallout1:
Lack of life. Completely excusable in the wasteland and in the devastation-carved craters and valleys, but the cities seem less like habitats and more like props.

Agreed, there just wasn't enough to do. The NPCs felt like cardboard cutouts littered about a movie-set. FO2 was much better about this. Say what you will about New Reno, but it did feel like a real place, what with the little things like "Jagged Jimmedy James" and the singing hobos.

OTOH, Arcanum suffered from this really badly, despite the huge amount of quests in the game. Tarent felt even more fake than the Hub. I can't quiet put my finger on why, though . . .

NPC AI. Take on that camp of raiders? Sure, just stand in the doorway, let them all charge up toward you, then blow eachother away as they stack up single file to get mowed down by their companions behind them.

It's even worse with supermutants.

Fallout2:
P90c and G11. I really don't need to elaborate on that one.

I know, they should have stuck with guns from the 50's, or retro-sci-fi guns. I can't believe they didn't put the Colt .45 1911A1 in the game. That gun's a classic.

Magic and crap. Nuclear radiation enables hulking mutants to summon deathclaws and pot-head shamans to talk to us in our travels, who knew?

The Shaman's telepathy didn't bother me, as that's not that fanciful, but yeah, "Mecklor the Magnificant" was pretty stupid. As was the ghost in the den.

Pop culture references. I hate TV, I hate most movies, a number of those references total eluded me, and those I did get made me squirm in discomfort. They just don't belong.
Porn studio. I'm recognized because everyone's seen my movies. Just where do all these people get VCRs in a PA world?

Some of the pop-culture references were OK. My favorite was the "Obadiah Hakeswill" reference in Redding, which was a reference to the Sharpe books (and UK movies), which is semi-obscure. But yeah, FO2 just went over board with it. IMO, they should have kept these easter eggs hidden, as in you would only come across them by accident, and not have them intergal to the story.

 

[Carib FMJ]

Well, perhaps the next round of mods can pump more life into Fallout 2. But telepathy should be viable, as radiation and the FEV cocktail in the air did strange things. The Rat god of Klamath was cool though, creepy.

 

[Lord 342]

Melchior wasn't "Magic" like D&D magic, he was just a stage magician. His pets were simply rats and things he mutated with the huge pools of FEV goop in the base. He actually throws them in and they show up a few rounds later. This is at least the explanation I read. The Espers* in Fallout 1 were perfectly viable, I believe they were the result of a science experiment made by the master, who was obviously a strong telepath. The Shaman dream sequences were overdone and annoying as fuck-all, and furthermore I don't see much reason why he's such a powerful telepath all of a sudden; no Richard Grey style FEV bath or brain salad surgery, he's just a plot device. I hated that, and the ghost. In fact I hated the Shaman altogether; he was a backwards tribal pot-head yahoo and I didn't shed a tear for him when he died. His dialog trees had some delightfully funny options, though. The Easter eggs were a tad too thick in places but I never actually got fed up with them or anything.

*Edit: Psychers. "Whoops", says I. I never touched FF6 since it's Final Fantasy Crap, but Star Control II used the term "Esper" to refer to anyone with psychic powers. As you can tell from my avatar, this is where I got that term. I leave this otherwise intact so Per's joke will not cease to make sense.

 

[Fez]

San Fran was a bit of a let down and always seemed half-finished. The tanker was a bit crappy too, with it's dungeon below. After all the rest of the towns it was only shown up even more for how poor it was.

 

[Dove]

I agree.

Too much was left unfinished in both games.

 

[Carib FMJ]

Fallout 2 was basically half baked, more could have been implemented, also they should have made the path to the darkside as fun as being good.... And not making it sooo hard to be evil.

 

[Per]

OTOH, Arcanum suffered from this really badly, despite the huge amount of quests in the game. Tarent felt even more fake than the Hub. I can't quiet put my finger on why, though . . .

Tarant felt very "square" in the layout of houses and streets, which is what you get when you use tiled maps instead of prerendered maps à la Infinity Engine. If I recall correctly there wasn't really anything to distinguish a warehouse from an upper class home from the outside.

The Espers in Fallout 1 were perfectly viable

The espers from FF6? Cool.

 

[Carib FMJ]

Fucktards, how come they couldn't use the Infinity Engine for Fallout 2? Hell, it would have been cool if they had made a better engine, which i guess would have been Van B project.

Again, they had a good game and let it slip through their fingers.

 

[Fez]

Tarant felt very "square" in the layout of houses and streets, which is what you get when you use tiled maps instead of prerendered maps à la Infinity Engine. If I recall correctly there wasn't really anything to distinguish a warehouse from an upper class home from the outside.

The tileset for Arcanum was pretty good, there were a lot of different house types, including basic wooden huts, red brick warehouses and more fancy stone housing. I made a few pretty maps that never got used. The editor was crap though. Crash and burn every ten seconds.

 

[TakLoufer]

Still, I see what Per means. The cities in FO looked more like real cities, and Tarant looked like it was designed using tiles.

OTOH, Arcanum had really beautiful wilderness areas.

What I was refering to when I said Tarant felt "fake" was the general lifelessness of the place. There was plenty of quests, but it still felt dead. I'm not sure why. I think the tile-look and the fact that you could only talk to passerbys only once attributed to it. It also could be because the NPCs lacked personality. Not to mention the mindlessly repetitive violin music.

I played Arcanum a few months ago and I don't remember a whole lot of the stuff in Tarant, so maybe I'm mistaken.

OTOH, I played FO2 over a year ago and I still remember from New Reno: Jules, Jagged Jimmedy James, the boxing promoter, the crime bosses, lil' Jesus, Renesco the Rocketman, Father Tully, etc.

Arcanum, for all it's creativity in setting, lacked the personality of the FOs.

 

[Tannhauser]

Fucktards, how come they couldn't use the Infinity Engine for Fallout 2?

So we could have Fallout 2 with a real time "with pause" combat system (and span multiple CDs)? No, thank you.

 

[Roshambo]

Fucktards, how come they couldn't use the Infinity Engine for Fallout 2?

Christ...when vBulletin goes up, I am definitely going to add in a random stupid quote line. It seems like more just keep pouring in.

 

[Fez]

But Fallout used a sort of "lego" system for building up the towns too. It's not prerendered art like the IE games, so it ends up with the generic tiles and buildings basically. I liked FO but I never considered any of it remotely realistic. I didn't think it was ever meant to be.

I was pretty pleased with Tarant as it was. I had a lot of fun on that map. The grid system might have seemed like it was done due to the tiles, but it seemed right for a modern city, so I didn't fault them for that.. The other towns and non dungeon maps were not quite so bad for the grids.

It could have been more, but those damn scripts have an upper limit. If you try to pile in too many it slows to a crawl due to the engine and the system not being able to handle it. They probably could have added a good bit more static buildings and streets, and got away with it, but once you add in extra wandering NPCs or important NPCs and all the scripts attached to them even a small add on starts to eat up resources. No excuse for the tile set not being used to it's fullest though. It was great and I've made wacky maps using all sorts of tiles and it runs fine, it's the scripts/AI that seem to trouble it. The sheer variety in building tiles means they could have done most of Tarant's buildings to look unique. It would have looked ridiculous though, for a Victorian style industrial town.

If it wasn't for the crashes the editor would be one of my favourites. That editor killed more mods than anything else. It can be heart breaking to spend ages working on something only to see it all snatched away for the second or third time. That's why I doubt I'll ever get to see a fan sequel to the Arcanum game, like FO is getting (hopefully).

An Arcanum 2 could have been a great game, shame no one wanted to make it.

If only for the improvements to the editor, damn you!

 

[Deticui]

id definitely say both games had much more potential than they achieved. What im yoyo-ing between with FO1 is how easy it was if you just did 10 luck and got the Alien Blaster before you even reached shady sands. It was tight to be able to frag a deathclaw into a pile of ash with one shot, tho.

FO2, as most people have put it, was very incomplete, looking at the Mod forums, what i gathered is that there are plenty of unused scripts that are either defective with the game or just plain not implemented.

as for Tarant in Arcanum, once i got in, i couldnt WAIT to *ahem* get the hell outta Dodge*. I only went back to sell stuff because the atmosphere was bland and there were only a few interesting quests, and the place was just so damn BIG. well, not huge or anything, but when you can place waypoints out of a city, then execute the pathfinder, get up, go take a piss, grab a soda, and make ramen, and get back before you make it outside the city, its too big.

 

[TakLoufer]

Yeah, if you were playing a techie, you spent most of your time sifting through trashcans for stuff, which isn't exactly fun.

 

[Chaos Blade]

Hmmm....

Well, I dunno if I can add anything else to this discussion,
but...

I am an old Ultima fan so my first impresion of fallout had been, well not that good.

don't get me wrong, the game is great, the atmosphere is to, but... npcs are just for show, they are nothing, they just stand up where they are and maybe walk a bit.
see, that's the ultima influence, I mean U7 is an OLD game, but it gave the player the impresion you were in a living world, that is the NPCs all had lifes, this I miss in most RPGs and I don't think adding a schedule would be that hard...

now, that I finished ranting, specifically on Fo, well, it was a bit short, but had no real complains bout it (I like the way the overseer bits it at the end, but exactly what triggers it?)

Fo2, well, the bugs

I wasn't too upset by teh tribal thing, but it would have been more interesting to see more small two bit tribes specialy arround klamath.
additionally, Sulik's sister, that dead end always bothered me
the lack of BoS, they were the power in the game and in the sequel they are playing it too low (a thing that bugged me was that after the BoS guy in San fran got killed I rushed to NCR to see if I could get their support but, nothing, he didn't even aknowledged the situation... it would be nice if a mod would fix this, in some way)
I hadn't had much problems with sanfran, they are a reminicence of the chinece empire, they are one of the biggest guys arround, but have no relations with any neighbous, they are aislationists
and I would have really liked to see where the hell the wanamingos came from...

 

[Roshambo]

Re: Hmmm....

Well, I dunno if I can add anything else to this discussion,
but...

I am an old Ultima fan so my first impresion of fallout had been, well not that good.

Actually, it did add a lot to the discussion, as that was also my first impression. That may shock some people, but I did consider those mentioned aspects to have been neglected in terms of depth. The keyword/topic tree dialog in Ultima 7 was top notch as well.

Well, I can see how it's easy for some developers to look at Ultima and go 'Origin? Oh, they aren't around anymore...must have been a failure!' considering that it would make their claims of innovation rather silly if they really had anyone over the age of 24 paying attention to their claims.

That is just an estimation, given that I know of more than a number of people who played U7 when they were 12 or older and are still able to remember good Origin games. Christ, now I feel old again...

 

[Chaos Blade]

heh, I know a rather large bunch of people that are still playing it (thanks to the exult) hell, there were even some plans to edit serpent isle to what it was suppoused to be before they decided to go for the sisors to meet the EA deadline (that removed almost half of the game).

hmmm... I guess that happened to fallout 2, with all these bugs and left out features (specifically the ending ones; and isn't it strange that in FT you could join the master, but in 2 you cannot do a thing with the enclave aside from reducing them to ashes?)

 

[mettalhed]

My biggest complaint was the AI. I can't count the number of times my allies either blew the shit out of me, or each other. The enemy AI could be just as bad however, they did the exact same things to each other.

That was infuriating.

I often debated with myself over whether or not you should have complete control over your allies, that definately would have prevented those little mishaps. At the same time, however, it could make the feel of the game less personal. Your supposed to feel attached to the protagonist, like he/she is your alter ego, having control of your allies might alter that experience.

Other then that, i didn't find too much else wrong with the games. I never thought about it until in was mentioned here, but San Fran did feel kind of isolated from the rest of the Wastes. You would think a city that large would have had more influence on its neighbors. Also, the whole Asian influence in the town felt out of place.

And, as its been mentioned before, the pron studio in New Reno was really off.

Just where do all these people get VCRs in a PA world?

Not to mention, the video tapes the movies were released on, the TVs they would need along with the VCRs, and the electric to power them. Not very PA at all.

As far as Arcanum goes, it suffered from the same stupid AI as FO. It was funny the first 10-20 times i watched Virgil charge into combat with a Lava Golem and get the shit pummeled out of him. That game would have been awesome with a good turn based combat system, or at least, dare i say it, a pause feature. I agree that Tarant was boring, although i did love the style of the town. I also liked the violin music, yes, it may have been repetitive, a little variety would have helped, but i thought it fit the environment really well and added to the ambiance.

I'm stil a youngster but i remember Ultima. I've never played 7, but i have played the first one, and Quest of the Avatar (can't remember what number in the series it was) and i thought they were fun. The eight virtues thing in QotA and how you had to master them was creative i thought. Ultima 9 sucked though, EA (i think it was EA) bought out Origin and really ruined that game. Richard Garriot had nothing to do with that one. That guy knew how to make a good game.

 

[Fez]

I hated the "ask me about" feature in FO. That kind of crap needs to stay in Infocom adventures. It was worthless and barely implemented.