Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game (1997)

It wasn't love at first sight. Trust was earned. Boundaries were broken, new frontiers discovered. The first go-around, the curve seemed too steep for a (maybe) half decade ago me. My genre greenhorn brain slid right off of the opaque UI design and archaic map-tiling of this world I did still recognize as conspicuously sticking out from the noise, as an obviously full-bodied, end-to-end realized creative vision. Through osmosis, I knew it was hard to stick with, but rewarding. That its extinct design choices were long in the tooth for a gamer weaned on contemporary titles, but ultimately only tallied up to a few nasties of the time in a waterskin, whose sustenance was to die for... that wasn't the experience I had, though. Blanketed by the blinding bluelight of my computer, I tried to engage. And tried again. And again. It was tiring. I left frustrated, but mostly ashamed. This was, I would soon come to learn, one of the greats, belonging to the venerated house of literary epics in the medium, whose greatness would still be diminished sans interactivity. I wanted to enjoy it. That night, I practically needed to. It was nerd homework, and it sure felt like it. I did not enjoy it.

... and then we whip zoom to the present, and I don't know what to tell you. The nigh hundreds of hours I have poured into this game and its sequel on multiple platforms are saying a lot, very loudly. Chalk it up to mentally maturing, to the passage of time softening my vitriol, to one day waking up cognitively rewired... I wouldn't know either. Let me ask you: what makes a game a sore enough thumb to not only be understood proceeding the first playthrough and be capable of practically overwriting a player's personal history with it, of overriding their primal, long-standing, emotional predilections? An answer, if any, is magic.

Where to begin unmaking the tapestry? I could talk about the spellbinding hook, the cruel imperialism of the power armor on its cover and in its late-game, the sheer presence of Ron Perlman, the mobius strip of possible character synthesization, the openness of its frontier, the gentle hand-holding caress of its town-to-town progression, the expanse of its prose, the webs of its dialogue, the quaint sheen of its pre-rendered environs, the sprouts and the rotting, the rises and the falls, the beginnings and the endings in either sense, the guns, the mutants, the struggle, the humanity. But given the foot we started on... I'd still talk about it as a companion, not something need render into words. In the pursuit of analytical critique, the thanks are rarely exchanged. Thank you, Fallout. Thank you, Tim Cain, and every last person who worked on this game.

And, one day... maybe you'll ask me to come back again... and maybe, just maybe...

I'll say maybe.

Article: Crawl Out Through The Fallout - by Brian Shea

At that point in 1994, programmer Tim Cain’s primary job at Interplay Productions, the development studio behind Wasteland and The Bard’s Tale, was making installers for some of the studio’s games. Outside of regular work duties, Cain had spent the last six months creating a new engine. He showed it to artist Leonard Boyarsky, who suggested they make a game out of it. Unfortunately, Cain was forbidden from recruiting additional workers, as everyone at Interplay was assigned to other projects.

Using the oldest trick in the book, an office pizza party, he began recruiting after work hours. “I sent emails saying, ‘I’ll be in that conference room with pizza if you want to come and talk to me about games we could make with this sprite-based isometric engine,’ and I really thought that tons of people were going to show up,” Cain recalls.

That was not the case, as only eight people showed up, including Boyarsky. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was self-selecting for go-getters,” Cain says.

It's Fallout day, children of the wastes! Favourite Fallout game? Favourite Fallout moment? I've played a modded a lot of F4 the past few years, but my favourite will always be F3. I love the music, the characters and quests, but most of all I love the dystopian themes in Fallout and the commentary on capitalism, class, and warfare.

Here's hoping we get a remaster or remake of the original games at some point. I would love to replay them all.

Fallout stream from Bethesda in a short moment if anyone's interested:

I played and completed Fallout as a kid, though my experience was far from ideal. I had a pirated version and didn't realize there were talking heads and cutscenes until much later. My English wasn't great at the time, so I relied heavily on a walkthrough.

Revisiting the game now, it's not entirely unfamiliar. I still remember that Speech and Stealing skills are surprisingly useful, while many other skills are practically useless. Remembering some of the quests is also helpful, given the game's minimal guidance. For instance, I only knew Tandy from Shady Sands gets kidnapped by raiders because I remembered it; otherwise, there's little reason to revisit Shady Sands, and even then, you have to talk to her father specifically.

My approach to the game has changed. As a kid, I hunted every rat and scorpion for maximum EXP. Now, I only fight when necessary. However, the EXP from combat is quite good, so maybe my younger self wasn't entirely wrong.

The GOG version lacks children, which complicates things as it requires more than the usual patch due to its use of DAT files. I had to repack it myself, but it worked in the end. I also found a patch pack called Fixt, but it’s incompatible with 1.2 saves, and I wasn't motivated to start over.

Finding the Water Chip was easier than I remembered, even without a guide. Once you reach the Hub, you're directed to Necropolis, and you can also send a water caravan to Vault 13 if 150 days aren't enough. I found the chip at level 5, but taking it leaves the ghouls without water. A better solution is to repair their water pump, which they even point you towards. However, this involves pixel hunting for a tiny part called "junk."

The transition from searching for the Water Chip to hunting mutants is poorly handled. You encounter mutants in Necropolis, and once you inform the Overseer, you're tasked with eradicating them. The Barter skill seems broken as it doesn't improve prices, and Lockpicking is unnecessary since persistence alone works.

I now see the game as a puzzle, figuring out the optimal quest order. The Dekker fight seemed difficult initially, but it becomes manageable if you get the combat shotgun first by rescuing a Brotherhood of Steel hostage, which becomes doable after finishing Necropolis.

As a kid, I dreaded encountering Deathclaws in the caves, but this time I defeated one easily with a Combat Shotgun. Also trapped the Mother Deathclaw between three companions, exploiting the game's lack of aggro management.

I gave Ian the unique "Blade runner" pistol, making him formidable despite the AI's tendency to switch to a knife when reloading. The Boneyard quest involves avenging a mayor's son, only to discover his bodyguards were responsible. The battle between the bodyguards and the gang is epic for its time, but the Regulators try to kill key NPCs, making it a race against time to save them.

I always thought Necropolis and The Glow were the same, but The Glow is a robot-filled dungeon the Brotherhood of Steel sends you to. I didn't remember this. You can get two suits of power armor: one as a reward for rescuing a Hub hostage, and another by repairing one with the needed parts. Despite the hype around laser pistols, you should have more powerful weapons by then.

I never figured out the proper way to find the Military Base; I just get captured in Necropolis to be delivered to the Lieutenant. It turns out there's a computer in the Cathedral with the base's location. By then, I usually get rid of companions as supermutants with rocket launchers or miniguns would wipe them out. I started playing "Save Dogmeat," ironically something even the developers acknowledged, as Dogmeat's official death involves a forcefield. These forcefields are generally a pain, requiring lots of Stimpacks and luck.

At this stage, you gain so much experience from fighting supermutants that quests become unnecessary. There's a special perk called "Mental Block" used only in the encounter against the Master.

I'm glad I finally played Fallout properly, despite occasional crashes. It's impressive that a 25-year-old game is still enjoyable. However, it feels like there's only one optimal way to play: get a Plasma Rifle and burn everything. Any other approach takes more time.

Tim Cain, often cited as the father of the original Fallout, has an active YouTube channel where he talks about game development, career advice, and his own philosophies on both. A good portion is dedicated to Fallout, even though he only had his hand in the original Fallout, and a small chunk of Fallout 2. He spends a lot of time talking about Fallout because his videos are often responses to viewer questions, and people have a lot of questions about Fallout. Watching these videos gave me a hankerin' for Fallout, which I had played in 2008 or so after playing and enjoying Fallout 3. I recall really liking it, enough to give it a 5-star rating here on Grouvee when I put it on. But that was 16 years ago now (barf) and my tastes, like everyone else's, are fluid. I fired up Fallout last week to see if "late 30's me" liked it as much as "early 20's me". It's worth noting that I remembered nearly nothing about that first playthrough. This felt like the first time.

Fallout is among that pile of games people say are difficult to play because of antiquated mechanics and pacing. There are a ton of videos and guides giving you tips on getting started, it reminded me of Morrowind (though there is more Morrowind content out there it seems). It can make you think that you need these guides. Maybe the game is too hard, or there's some unclear mechanics that could cause you to create a character that couldn't beat the game. Possibly? But I didn't have that experience. Of course, through osmosis I heard that "dump points into Agility" so I did, and it's clear that that's very important. But other than that, my character was down the middle of the road for all other stats, and picked some skills that I barely used. I still beat the game with a powerful character and didn't have too rough of a time.

This is all to say that you might be fine just playing the game. Like my experience with Morrowind. Like my experience with Icewind Dale. A cursory search will reveal people considering these games impenetrable without a guide, which is untrue. Yes, there are games that require a certain build to even be able to beat the game, but I think people often round up too many games into that category. These games are beatable and enjoyable without perfect character building. Perhaps it comes from the fear of wasting one's time. Getting 7 hours into a game only to realize you can't finish it because you invested too many points in barter and not enough in melee combat. I can appreciate that, but it also seems to be exacerbated by the ever-spinning content farms, like YouTubers who need to convince you that you must play in a certain style so you click their video.

It's not that Fallout is without friction. There are design choices I disagree with, and mechanics that feel needlessly rough. Mechanically, you can blame the times. Yes, the way you pay for items in a shop is strange, but it seems obvious that it's a technical limitation since nobody would ever choose such a method intentionally. Also I think we were all willing to put up with some mechanical friction back then, much like how you didn't bat an eyelash watching your favorite movie on a grimy VHS tape on an 18" screen. However, the design choices I feel are less easy to swallow. Though, since these are design choices, I don't want to say they are "good" or "bad". I just want to say that I would have preferred a different direction.

My main gripe with the game is how easy it is for things to go totally sideways. You chose a dialogue option that seems innocuous, or maybe slightly funny and suddenly an entire gang is attacking you. And since you're fighting in a major city, now all the guards are hostile. And the locals. So now, because you said one thing you not only are wildly outnumbered in a combat encounter, but you locked yourself out of doing any quests in that town, since all the NPCs want to fight you. Naturally, you just reload a save, but that's not how I want to play Fallout (or any other CRPG for that matter). Years ago I used to fret about getting the "good" ending, but I eventually yielded to fate, and began playing however I felt (often good, sometimes a little chaotic neutral) and dealing with the consequences. It's no longer about "beating" a game by seeing everything and getting the best ending, but it's about my story. Maybe I missed a companion, or an entire town. Maybe I found the best weapon and armor, maybe I didn't (I actually did in Fallout, incidentally). But the point is that it's my story, and having such catastrophic consequences without even the slightest telegraphing is a problem. Unintended consequences? Sure! Locking yourself out of a major city for calling someone a bozo? I don't know, man.

Another common gripe is the timer for the main story (at least, the main story you are given at the beginning). You have a certain number of in-game days to complete it, which dissuades you from exploring. But I did explore, and paid the price. I had to pay someone in a city a lot of money to extend that timer by 100 days. It was annoying, to a degree, but it did make for a unique story. I was down to the wire with only 7 days left. I couldn't travel anywhere without losing the game, so I scrounged and I paid up. Would I have preferred that there was no timer at all? I'm not sure. I'm 50/50. In the moment it didn't feel great, but it made my story a unique one. Plus, I don't know another CRPG that does that, so I'll be fine with just one that does.

I'll end here with saying that I had a few more gripes, but most reviews will say the same thing (I, too, was baffled by the field emitters at Mariposa). Why ⅘ stars, though? Because I just could not put the game down. It's not bloated, it's not so linear, and when playing you can imagine a ton of other ways to play next time around. Fallout is a great first step for the franchise, but shows those growing pains. I tried my best to play without using my knowledge of the other games, and be immersed in what it really would have been like at launch. It was cool. I would play it again, one day. Maybe then I'll aggro the whole town, shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out.

Finally gotten around to playing this. Huge fan of Fallout 3 and new vegas, and now I feel like I can really appreciate the game that laid the ground work!

The controls are... old, as expected. The combat and turn based style isn't my cup of tea, but it's fallout, so I'm embrassing it which has been a nice challenge!

So far I've had to reload my first save 10 times after dying to a cave of ants over and over on my way to the first vault. Realised I had done a terrible build putting all of my points into charisma - I thought charisma would be important but apparently not! Had to refer to a build guide in the end to help me get on my way, now im at my first location, shady sands!

I don't plan to use a guide or walkthrough unless I get stuck... again. Enjoying it so far though, just gotta get used to the concept of the turn based movement with the action points. And yes, I have set the display to 1920 x 1080 which is why the UI is so small. Thinking about maybe decreasing it back to an older display ration so that things aren't so small, but it looks pretty crisp when you're playing! If anyone knows if there are patches available to upscale everything? I'm currently using fallout 1 in 2 mod which transfers 1 into 2s engine. It's meant to include a high res patch, but that doesn't seem to have increased the scale?

EDIT:

Fixed the scaling issues. If you're using the Fallout 1 in 2 mod, you have to go into the f2_res.ini file and lower the resolution to something like 960 x 540, and i've heard disabling 2x scaling helps too.

...oh no. I think I already forgot what the heck I was doing last time I played. I know I save scummed the heck out of those awful radscorps for Razlo, but I'm not sure if I progressed further than that.

The good news is that it'll be easy to pick it up from the start if I have to, but with Tears of the Kingdom on the horizon, it'll...probably be a hot minute before I make another serious attempt at a personal complete playthrough of this one. Drat!

I went into this game expecting a solid experience. Boy was I wrong. This game fuckin' rocks. The lore is really well thought out, and the combat is fun when you get used to it. There definitely are some flaws though. Sometimes, quests or what you have to do can be unclear (I'd wholly reccommend using a guide for a few parts. It's still a game where it's more fun to discover things by yourself though.), but aside from that, there aren't many more cons. Also, this game has one of the greatest final 'bosses' in gaming, in my opinion. So, yeah. 9/10. Play the game. (also you get to flirt with a Brotherhood guard, and that had me snorting with laughter, and I'm not sure where I'm going with this but I still think It's worth playing.) EDIT: I have updated this with my current review system score. 10/10 or WHAT THE ACTUAL FECK ARE YOU DOING FUCKAROO GO PLAY THIS MASTERPIECE OF A GAME RIGHT NOW YOU'LL ENJOY IT YA GLORIOUS SONOVABEEEEECCCHHH!

I recommend you to patch the game with the restoration patch so you have a less rough experience

Fallout is probably one of the most important western RPG games alongside The Elder Scrolls

1. The story is very intense because it is reflected on the gameplay. You have a set time limit which never goes away, if you save your vault you have around 300 days more before The Master’s goons attack your vault
2. Actions have severe consequences. If you anger someone on a town, the entire town gangs up on you; it takes time to get a reputation and minutes to destroy it
3. The combat is very slow but methodical. You have to specialize and do it properly, if you don’t you will be in trouble because you won’t hit your targets
4. You can talk your way out of things most of the time as long as you have high speech. You can even defeat the final boss that way
5. You can solve many quests in different ways, you have either two or even three alternatives
6. The music is very memorable and fit with the situations regardless of context
7. The companions on the base game aren’t that useful, Dogmeat is just a meat shield, Tycho is just there, Katja is useless and Ian is a trigger happy maniac. I recommend you download the patch to fix their AI so they aren’t as useless
8. It’s super easy to break the game’s combat difficulty from the start by abusing the gambling skill and having high luck. You will get hundreds of thousands of caps in mere hours, allowing you to simply buy overpowered weapons
9. The game tends to be very unforgiving without a guide. A newbie trap is set on the first quest, you have to explore Vault 15 but you need a rope, most players won’t know that you can find rope on Shady Sands and will go to Junktown which is way harder; another newbie trap is The Glow, if you don’t go there with Rad-X, rope and Radaway you will die in minutes since nobody on the game warns you about it

If you want a hard RPG. Play it!

Fallout is a 1997 open-world and role-playing game.Interplay Productions, the producer and distributor of the game, has done a great job.The story of the game is as follows.In Vault 13, the water chip, a computer chip responsible for the vault's water recycling and pumping machines, malfunctions. 150 days before the vault's water reserves run dry, the Vault Overseer tasks the protagonist Vault Dweller with finding a replacement.They are given a portable wristwatch-like computer called the "Pip-Boy 2000" that tracks map-making, goals, and bookkeeping. Armed with Pip-Boy 2000 and insufficient equipment, the November resident is sent to search. Vault Dweller has a free series to travel wherever they want in the fallout world and do what they want, but later games in the series clarify what Vault Dweller does canonically. The Vault dweller goes to Vault 15, the nearest known Vault, to be able to provide help, but finds it collapsed into ruins and abandoned. The Vault 15 survivors have founded a town called Shady Sands, and are given the Option to defend them from the Vault resident inns, a group of raiders who attack the town, and radscorpions, the town's swarms of mutated Scorpions plague. The vault dweller then headed south junktown, where they can help the mayor, Killian Darkwater, bring the corrupt casino head gizmo to justice, or help gizmo assassinate Killian to seize the town. Further south, the Vault Dweller finds the Hub, a bustling merchant city, where the Vault Dweller has the option to hire water caravans to help Vault 13 and extend the estimated survival time to 100 days. With tips from the Hub, the vault dweller went to the Necropolis, a city of mutated people called ghouls, which is occupied by large mutated people called super mutants. Below the town, a Vault resident finds Vault 12 and recovers a water chip. November After returning with the chip, the vault is saved, but the supervisor is worried about the vault dweller's reports of super Mutants. November 21, 2019. Believing that the mutations are unnaturally widespread and extreme and pose a threat to the vault, the observer blames the vault dweller for finding the source of the mutations and stopping them. Vault Dweller finds and assembles the remains of the Brotherhood of Steel, a top-secret genetic research program involving the US military, Decimated survivors of the war, and continues to research advanced technology. Brotherhood vault resident super mutants genetic research they did before the war that is directly associated with equipment and provides you with information about: people forced evolutionary virus mutagen that can be used to transform a given name, super mutants, however, all these mutants sterile as a side effect of leaves. The Vault resident goes to the Boneyard, the ruins of Los Angeles, and learns that the cult-like children of the Cathedral, operating in the wasteland, is a facade created by the master of Super Mutants, who uses children to preach.message. Vault Dweller boy explores the Cathedral and finds a prototype vault where the master commands a super Mutant army. Disguised as one of the children, the November resident infiltrates the vault and destroys the Master. The Vault dweller goes to a military base, where the Super Mutant army forcibly uses the evolutionary virus to turn people into super Mutants, strengthening their numbers. The vault dweller destroys the base, stops the creation of more Super Mutants and dismembers their army. The November resident returns to the vault and is greeted by the supervisor at the entrance. The butler is happy that the safety of the vault is safe, but the experiences of the vault Dweller have changed them, and it is the fears in the vault that encourage them to leave it to others to November hero worship. To make the vault better and maintain its isolation, the vault dweller is driven into the wasteland. If the November resident does not return to the vault with the water chip before the vault's water reserves are depleted, the player loses the game. In previous versions of the game, if the Vault dweller did not destroy the military base and the master before 500 Days had passed, the mutants found and invaded Vault 13, resulting in an automatic loss. This period is shortened to 400 days if you November in the vault dweller hub water caravans, as the vault dwellers allow super Mutant scouts to find them more easily. Patch 1.1 and subsequent re-releases of the game extend this time limit to 13 years, giving the player enough time to do as they wish. There is also an optional alternate ending triggered if the vault dweller has a negative reputation or "bloody mess", where the player November character shoots and kills after the supervisor banishes him. At various points in the game, the Vault Dweller also has the option to join the Super Mutants, which results in a small video showing the Super Mutants passing through the vault and ending the game.The gameplay is as follows.in this game, which consists of 18 sections, you complete the tasks and work on the section.The music of the game is beautiful.The graphics of the game are not bad.My rating for the game: 10/10 (y) Good games to everyone 🙂