I liked the Fallout 1/2 engine. Fallout was made during a time in computer game graphics where the graphics were good enough not to have pixels the size of lump sugar and still not being smooth enough to have the crappy plastic feel of X-Com Apocalypse and Deus Ex. To me, it still doesn't feel old in a bad sense, and I wouldn't have had any complaints if they made Fallout 3 based on exactly the same engine (at least then I would've been able to run it on my computer and the developers would've gotten the time to focus on other things than whoring it out to the Morrowind fan club).
The story of Fallout 1 is to get the Water Chip (GECK), only to find out that the Unity (Enclave) is making life miserable for everyone and needs to be exterminated with a nuclear bomb, but only after killing the Master (Horrigan). The story is basically a copy-and-paste where they've replaced the names. If you are looking at specific elements of the story then this is not true but if you look at the whole picture you see what I mean.
It's similar to how Dan Brown writes his books. If you've read one of them, you might think that it's pretty clever and the plot twists are unexpected, but after you've read two of them, you can tell how the story of every other one is going to unfold and you instantly know who the bad guy is. It's not like he's using a template - he is using a template.
The story of FO2 is acceptable even if it's the same procedure as last year. Most of the other settlements and side-quests they added are not even on par with Fallout 1 though. Compare any location in FO2 to Junktown, The Hub or The Glow. Most of them, in my opinion, feel either watered-out or as if they arrived from some other planet.
I agree that Modoc, Broken Hills, Klamath and The Den are (mostly) appropriate, but even Vault City and NCR are very neat and tidy considering that humanity can no longer manufacture any advanced tools or machines; the quality of life in the wasteland should rather have deteriorated even more since Fallout 1. Yes, the four or so quests in Redding that took fifteen minutes to finish were entertaining, but cleaning out the mine full of extremely tough space aliens (???) just made me want to pull my hair out.
I don't exactly hate Fallout 2 although I realize that it sounds like it. When you make a sequel you'd expect the whole game to be improved over the original and not just the engine (and yet, strangely, sequels are always worse, usually in all regards). The story of FO2 is basically the same thing and the rest of the content is worse. For me it was a disappointment. Just because it's worse than the original doesn't make it a bad game though; if I would rate them I would give Fallout 10/10 and FO2 maybe 7/10.
There's something we agree on. The engine in FoT was pretty good and it was always fun to see how people were blown in half by automatic weapons with blood and intestines splattering everywhere, unfortunately the rest of it sucked. I wouldn't even touch BoS or The Elder Scrolls V - Fallout.
