By chance, opening Steam during this most recent Steam Winter Sale, I stumbled across Fallout 1 for a couple bucks – and many other cRPGs besides. It’s partially what kicked off revisiting these games, and what inspired me to start writing about it.
I’ve installed the small/fixes only version of the Fallout Fixt mod and gone through the character creation and intro, but I wanted to write down some of my initial thoughts before going further. Remember, I haven’t played any of the games discussed below for over a decade – please let me know if I am misremembering or misstating anything!
So, Fallout isn’t my favorite cRPG or the first cRPG I ever played – both of those titles go to Baldur’s Gate 2. Fallout lacks the dynamic party interactions and management that Baldur’s Gate 2 brings to the table. And I’ve always been more of a fantasy guy than into a Mad Max/post-apocalypse setting.
But it is one of my first cRPGs and one of my favorites, and I do prefer some things about Fallout.
All cRPGs worth playing have game states that react to PC characteristics and choices, i.e., these cRPGs are reactive. One way of the bigger ways reactivity shows itself in BG2, for example, is through party interactions. A mostly straightforward good-bad style reputation system, modified by player statistics, dictates how satisfied characters of different alignments will be with you over the course of your adventure. At a certain point they’ll leave if you fail to live up to their standards. On top of that system governing party members generally, there are unique outcomes based on a combination of quest and dialogue choices and player statistics. Anomen can become a knight or a knave; Haer’Dalis can become a friend or foe; and Viconia can be persuaded to change her views and turn her back on her former religion, to name a few.
Outside of companion interactions, which are almost nonexistent in the original Fallout, Fallout probably does a better job creating a world that reacts to PC choices, though. The player choices influence the main plot far more in Fallout than in BG2. You get a few “this side or that side” decisions in BG2, but if I remember correctly, there’s a little more nuance in how your choices about how to deal with the Vault’s waterchip in Fallout impact the narrative. And while there are some dialogue options in BG2 that are based on or influenced by skill or attribute checks, Fallout has an entirely different set of options for a “low intelligence” run on top of that.
Overall, with Fallout, I recall a world, NPCs and set pieces that are more hard-locked behind specific character statistics in particular.
Well, let’s see! I previewed a Fallout character in my last post, but I’ll go through my final build a little bit more here.
Fallout character generation starts with the SPECIAL system and includes (optional) traits, and skills, some of which you ‘tag’ as your specialties.
Since I want to be able to see as much of Fallout as I can in a single run, I’ve decided to make a generalist, and to that end I chose two traits that increase my available SPECIAL points; Gifted, gives you additional SPECIAL points to distribute at the cost of skill points; and Small Frame, which gives me an additional Agility point at the expense of a lowered carrying weight. For skills, I tagged Lockpick, Science, and Speech. There are multiple combat skills, but I hope to use my wits, my guile, and my looks to talk my way through or sneak my way around obstacles.
We’ll see how well I do!
