Classic Fallout - Fallouts 1, 2 and Tactics

DerKryptid

I killed byuu lol
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Aug 8, 2021
Fallout Series thread is overwhelmingly 3D-heavy, so feel free to take your love of the original Black Isle/Micro Forte series here.

Personally, I've been taking a long break from the series ever since dying for the 75586th time against calculator robots in tactics, but I've been pining to replay 2. Would be nice if chris avalone gave you a perk called "Way of the Fist" for defeating lo pan/dragon whilst also being a prizefighter.
 
Last time I played Fallout 1 and 2 was at the start of 2016, they are indeed some of the greatest games of all time.

2 would be my overall favorite, I really love that game.
They just don't make em like they used to anymore
bda.png
Screenshot_20211027-222919_Brave.png
 
1 is still my favorite, maybe because the water chip countdown is left a big impression on me and brokering a deal with the water merchants felt like a revelation of sorts. OF COURSE I should be able to do that in an RPG, it makes perfect sense and makes the world feel more interconnected and alive.

2 was also a fantastic game but it didn't have the same impact on me.

Hot take: Fallout 1 & 2 are far better than Baldurs Gate 1 & 2.
 
I dislike turn-based combat so it's hard for me to get into the OG fallouts. Mainly because I have the worst luck known to man when it comes to RNG. For example, here's what happened last time I tried to play Fallout 2:
>Get into combat with geko
>86% chance to hit
>Miss
>Miss
>Geko hits me
>Geko hits me again
>My turn
>86% chance to hit
>Miss
>Miss
>Repeat
>Die
 
1 is still my favorite, maybe because the water chip countdown is left a big impression on me and brokering a deal with the water merchants felt like a revelation of sorts. OF COURSE I should be able to do that in an RPG, it makes perfect sense and makes the world feel more interconnected and alive.

2 was also a fantastic game but it didn't have the same impact on me.
Understandable. Fallout 1's time limit made the game feel too short for me, even if the tradeoff meant better replayability as new avenues open up each time. Fallout 2 just captured the sheer awe and scale of the fallout world a lot better, and improved many things that fallout 1 had been lacking. Regardless, fallouts 1 and 2 do a great job being a self-contained story that could totally exist without the 3D games. Tactics is like that really fun michael bay epilogue that provides you with hours of mindless enjoyment as you plow through the wasteland on your slavshit tank while your reaver companions snipe enemies from miles away.

I dislike turn-based combat so it's hard for me to get into the OG fallouts. Mainly because I have the worst luck known to man when it comes to RNG. For example, here's what happened last time I tried to play Fallout 2:
>Get into combat with geko
>86% chance to hit
>Miss
>Miss
>Geko hits me
>Geko hits me again
>My turn
>86% chance to hit
>Miss
>Miss
>Repeat
>Die
Just run for it until you get OP gear or level up. I will say that tactics handles combat a lot better than 1 and 2 by actually allowing your low-level character to play stealthy until you get to a higher level.
 
I like the atmosphere of Fallout 1 better than Fallout 2, even though F2 is a better game with more fleshed out world and mechanics, polished interface and complex multi-location questlines. Those are the best cRPG games ever made to this day. F1 has this feeling of complete and utter destruction and total decay, almost to the point of hopelessness when one is visiting Vault 15, Necropolis and Glow.

What kinda grated me in the F2 is that the world sometimes stops getting itself serious and breaks immersion/suspension of disbelief with wacky easter-eggish kind of dialogue. Example: when you're walking through New Reno in Advanced Power Armor, the children say that you're looking like from Mechwarrior.

And F2 is...how many years after the war and they still haven't cleaned up skeletons from inhabited areas? Like, srsly.

Fallout: Tactics is...OK as a game but bad as a Fallout game. Exploring the world is kind of pointless and the game soon becomes just a string of sequentially played missions. Why bother with the rest of the world? F:T is disappointing by wasting such a potential of being a truely great masterpiece. Think about it being in the style of Jagged Alliance 2, where you take territory, defend it from attacks, train militia units, have to care about supplies a lot more and there's an economy to manage. That's what Fallout: Tactics should've been.
 
Understandable. Fallout 1's time limit made the game feel too short for me, even if the tradeoff meant better replayability as new avenues open up each time.


Just run for it until you get OP gear or level up. I will say that tactics handles combat a lot better than 1 and 2 by actually allowing your low-level character to play stealthy until you get to a higher level.
The time limit wasn't a time limit, it just felt like that until you had gotten to the hub and made the deal. The first time playing it it created that frenzied "shit shit shit" after noticing that I was on day 47 and didn't feel any closer to knowing how to solve the crux of the game.

For F1 and F2 I would recommend picking "small guns" and just pouring everything into that for the first few levels, up to 120-140 points I think. Then you can shoot people in the eyeballs from across the screen, in the dark, without a problem. After that you don't need to put points into any combat skills(maybe energy weapons...) and 3-4 levels points into an untagged skill will make you great at it.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: SCSI
The time limit wasn't a time limit, it just felt like that until you had gotten to the hub and made the deal. The first time playing it it created that frenzied "shit shit shit" after noticing that I was on day 47 and didn't feel any closer to knowing how to solve the crux of the game.

For F1 and F2 I would recommend picking "small guns" and just pouring everything into that for the first few levels, up to 120-140 points I think. Then you can shoot people in the eyeballs from across the screen, in the dark, without a problem. After that you don't need to put points into any combat skills(maybe energy weapons...) and 3-4 levels points into an untagged skill will make you great at it.
Considering you can get the yk42b pretty early in the game by rushing SF and doing the brotherhood quest, I rarely find myself putting small guns past 80. If anything, sulik's high outdoorsman skill helps me the most for avoiding those stupid random encounters until I get the highwayman
 
Just run for it until you get OP gear or level up. I will say that tactics handles combat a lot better than 1 and 2 by actually allowing your low-level character to play stealthy until you get to a higher level.
I was able to beat it after reloading a save. It was just an example of how my luck typically goes.
 
Back in the day I had my fallout 1 character at max level, with enhanced brotherhood power armor and ended up so well protected between that, stats and my level that literally the only thing in the entire game that could do any damage to me whatsoever was that one mother deathclaw that was in the destroy the deathclaw nest quest. I could just stand there and get shot at by literally anything and just wait until they ran out of ammo and rushed me with fists and then vaporize everyone. It was hilarious. I literally ended up punching the master to death while he tried to shoot me with those miniguns and psychic powers and did zero damage
 
Ok, I'll throw this on the wall here, since some might have not heard about it.
Slavs, particularly russians, are very heavily into classic F1 and F2.
If you want something modern by them, inspired by F1-2, check out newly made Encased (good game with weird but interesting world), ATOM PRG and ATOM RPG: Trudograd (basically the post-apoc USSR)
Now, besides that, there are new games, made with F1-2 engine. I'll throw the good ones on the table and provide links to the english traslation if its possible:
Fallout: Sonora- set in the deep south of California, south-east from the Glow, on the border between USA and Mexico, the srt style is inspired by Mexicano, put through Fallout sci-fi, inspired more by F1 than F2, so very little whacky jokes. Really big game, larger than F1 actually. Sorry, couldn't find any english version, but it is being done.
Fallout: Nevada- by the same team as Sonora, its their take on what would Vegas and general Nevada look if it was done in the vain of classic Fallouts. I dunno about this one. It's good, it's extremely high quality, but for some reason I found it somewhat dull.
Olympus 2077- uses the Fallout engine and the world as inspiration, but its a completly different one. I dont remember the particulars, but I think it was something about WWI never happening (or WWII happening differently) and the world is a mix of atomic and diesel punk, instead of just atomic.
 
They just don't make em like they used to anymore
View attachment 2665543
View attachment 2665541
A lot of it simply nostalgia, but there's something I really love about isometric, prerendered PC graphics of that era, of which Fallout 1 and 2 are great examples.

I really wish we got a Fallout 3 in that style.

On a side note, first time I played them was briefly playing the original Fallout in 2007, but didn't play Fallout 1 and 2 to completion until 2010, in preparation for New Vegas, I was so glad I did that since it made New Vegas much more enjoyable by understanding all the references to 1&2.
 
Last edited:
1 is one of my personal favorite RPGs. I adore what you can do within the game; it grants a lot more freedom than most games do nowadays, and it's all down to player preference. Reading about factions gets tiring after a while, so it's nice to either save a town or destroy it because I want to, not because some faction told me to. The water chip thing can be a turnoff to new players, but it's a lot more generous than you'd think. The game gives you plenty of time to get the chip and there are ways to increase the time limit. I also really like how powerful you are in the middle-ish part of the game, where you can quickly stomp all over bandits and scorpions that were giving you trouble just hours earlier.

2 took me a while to really get into because the opening is unfairly skewed towards melee builds. I always preferred guns in Fallout, but it takes you until the second town before you get one in 2, and a little longer for one that doesn't fucking suck (seriously, fuck the pipe gun). Once you get past that the game is really fucking cool. The lack of time limit means you can more fully explore to your heart's content and there are some very interesting things to discover.

I really wanna get into Tactics, but I'm flat out terrible at strategy games. I didn't try the genre out until I was an adult and I still can't wrap my head around basic mechanics. It's one of those things where I don't know if I'm too autistic or not autistic enough to understand it. I think I screwed up and had the game on that Continuous Turn-Based mode which quickly overwhelmed me. I'd probably be able to get into it more on the Individual Turn-Based setting. At least there I can stop and think.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Smaug's Smokey Hole
Back in the day I had my fallout 1 character at max level, with enhanced brotherhood power armor and ended up so well protected between that, stats and my level that literally the only thing in the entire game that could do any damage to me whatsoever was that one mother deathclaw that was in the destroy the deathclaw nest quest. I could just stand there and get shot at by literally anything and just wait until they ran out of ammo and rushed me with fists and then vaporize everyone. It was hilarious. I literally ended up punching the master to death while he tried to shoot me with those miniguns and psychic powers and did zero damage
It's wild what you can do with APA and a high enough luck stat. I remember causing the deathclaw mother to miss spectacularily and lose her turn simply by tanking her hits.

I really wanna get into Tactics, but I'm flat out terrible at strategy games. I didn't try the genre out until I was an adult and I still can't wrap my head around basic mechanics. It's one of those things where I don't know if I'm too autistic or not autistic enough to understand it. I think I screwed up and had the game on that Continuous Turn-Based mode which quickly overwhelmed me. I'd probably be able to get into it more on the Individual Turn-Based setting. At least there I can stop and think.
There's a lot of jank when you start off, but you'll find that sending one or two of your characters to scout ahead and keeping the rest of your party behind to guard your rear is a pretty exploitable strategy. Missions will take you a long time and a lot of patience to complete, but there isn't an arbitrary time limit of X number of years before the engine crashes, like the 13 years in fallout 2
 
  • Like
Reactions: Smaug's Smokey Hole
Considering you can get the yk42b pretty early in the game by rushing SF and doing the brotherhood quest, I rarely find myself putting small guns past 80. If anything, sulik's high outdoorsman skill helps me the most for avoiding those stupid random encounters until I get the highwayman
I like using the .223 pistol all the way to the end. 2 eye crits per turn are nothing to sneeze at.
 
Back