Rating of
4/5
Remember When ‘Fallout’ Was an RPG?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/09/13
At the dawn of the 5th Generation of console hardware, the PCRPG world was undergoing drastic evolution, lead largely by publisher Interplay. On one hand we had the Canadian startup BioWare producing “Baldur’s Gate,” which would set the quality bar for PCRPGs for decades. On the other hand, we had California-based Black Isle Studios working on an entirely new RPG series NOT based on Dungeons & Dragons: “Fallout.”
Being a D&D fanatic who only grudgingly suffered through the technical frustration of playing PC games at the time, I had heard of “Fallout,” but without a D&D setting (indeed, a post-nuclear setting sounded incredibly weird and unappealing at the time) I decided to give it a pass. With the RPG genre suffering mightily on both consoles and PC throughout the 7th Generation, with no change in sight for the 8th Generation, I’ve been going back in time and scrounging through the rubble of past RPG glory looking for something salvageable. As it turns out, much like the ‘50s era technology featured in the game’s world, “Fallout” was built to last.
Presentation
As a game originally published in 1997, “Fallout” isn’t exactly gorgeous. Indeed, since I wanted to play the game on a 1080p 55” TV screen, I went to the small effort of installing a hi-res mod created by fans of the game. Even with a hi-res mod, “Fallout’s” graphics are merely serviceable. Everything in the game is 2D and isometric, much like the Infinity Engine-based D&D games that both BioWare and Black Isle worked on. This viewpoint, however, isn’t the problem, as it still works incredibly well. The problem is that, as a post-nuclear-apocalypse game, “Fallout” became one of the pioneers in the use of brown-and-gray color pallets. “Fallout” also features a small transparency bubble around the player’s character when the character walks behind a building, instead of making the entire object semi-translucent. Then there’s the fact that “Fallout,” unlike the Infinity Engine game, doesn’t allow the player to hold down a button to highlight all of the interactive objects and dropped loot in the current environment, which is a huge problem considering how tiny the game likes to make the sprites for things like dropped weapons. Combining the weird transparency bubbles with the tiny, non-highlightable loot sprites makes cleaning up after combat in a building-cluttered area impossible (even worse, dead enemies tend to lie on top of their dropped weapons, making the weapons even harder to see).
Outside of the main graphics engine for exploration and battles, “Fallout” features a handful of video clips for important things like the game’s introduction, ending, and important key scenes. The game also features CG animated character portraits when speaking with important non-player characters. Both of these graphical flourishes look dated, primarily because of the large amount of pixilation in the videos and an intangible stiffness in facial animations for the NPCs (it looks like they’ve all been overdosing on Botox).
“Fallout” opens with a great piece of ‘50s era music accompanying the introduction video. This music selection really helps to set the mood for the rest of the game. Unfortunately, that introductory tune is the only piece of music in the game that stands out. The rest of the soundtrack is far too subtle and muted.
Despite its age, “Fallout” actually has some voiceacting, though not very much. The NPCs who were privileged enough to get animated portraits also get full voiceacting. I was surprised to see some big names in the voiceacting credits (like Brad Garrett), but completely unsurprised to see that the incomparable Jim Cummings (famous among RPG fans for his portrayal of Minsc in “Baldur’s Gate”) also participated in this game. The voiceacting quality in “Fallout” is superb, but adding a little bit more would have only served to make the game that much better.
Technically, “Fallout” is reasonably stable, especially after receiving a number of posthumous patches from the fan community and GOG.com. Unfortunately, it’s not as solid as console games from its era, as it crashed on me several times when I performed specific actions. All of the crashes were easy to reproduce (and easy to avoid by not performing the in-game action that caused them), which indicates that there are still a few unpatched problems in the game itself and that the crashes were not caused by OS/game incompatibility. Of course, I’m really surprised – and pleased – that it runs on modern systems at all.
Story
“Fallout” really stands out in the quality of its game world. The introductory movie does an excellent job of building the flavor and themes of an alternate universe in which the ideology of the 1950s never ended, despite accelerated breakthroughs in technology. Thus, in the world of “Fallout,” the United States is populated by fedora-wearing, pipe-smoking work-a-day men and their dutiful housewives who spend their leisure time watching black & white TV, listening to records, practicing duck-and-cover tactics in the event of a nuclear attack, and spending exorbitant amounts of money on fully-analog sports cars and advanced domestic robots…
…That is until the bombs fell. The actual game takes place 80 years after this idyllic alternate reality was shattered by a full-scale World War III in which a nuclear China was the aggressor. The people who could afford to hid in subterranean vaults where they and their descendents were kept safe from both the bombs and their radioactive aftermath. Others weren’t so lucky and were forced to survive in the irradiated wasteland left behind.
The story begins when the main character, a Vault Dweller living in Vault 13 is called aside by the Vault Overseer to help with a quest of utmost importance. It seems that the control chip for Vault 13’s water pump (a monstrosity covered in vacuum tubes, considering the microprocessor was never invented in this alternate universe) has stopped working and our Vault Dweller hero must set out into the wasteland to track down a replacement. Vault 13 only has 150 days of clean water left in storage so time is of the essence.
Setting out into the wasteland near what used to be Los Angeles, California, the Vault Dweller must learn to survive in the ruins of the world while racing against time to save his/her family and friends in Vault 13. While it’s possible to create any kind of character to play through “Fallout,” the game provides three pre-created options to start: a big, beefy dumb guy; a slightly-less-beefy, slightly-more-intelligent guy; and a stealthy, kleptomaniacal waif of a girl. While both of the male characters are 27 years old, the female character is mysteriously only 17. Since I hate beefy, dumb characters and love stealing things in PCRPGs, I went with the female character, Natalia. Of course, I modified some of her stats slightly, including changing her age to 27 like the rest of the pre-built cast.
Outside of the quest to find a new water chip and two other major quests that involve stopping an enormous threat to the tenuous human existence that still persists within the American wasteland, “Fallout” is a very open game. Obviously this non-linear approach to exploration and questing inspired later action/sandbox games, however “Fallout” is a much smaller, more compact experience. While I don’t have a hard number to pin on the game, I’d say it takes ~30 hours to see and do everything available in “Fallout.”
Of course, the fact that the game enjoys putting things on a timer contributes to its necessary compactness. The 150 day timer on replacing the water chip isn’t just an idle threat like it would be in so many other games – failing to replace the chip in the allotted time results in Vault 13 getting screwed. Likewise, the huge (spoiler-free) threat to the wasteland has a timer of 500 days (it was apparently much shorter in an earlier patch revision of the game). Even after finishing the game, it’s only possible to wander the wasteland aimlessly in post-game mode for 13 game years (which is a much more reasonable amount of time than the short deadlines on the major plot quests). Not only does “Fallout” love putting limits on the number of days a player can take to finish the major quests, but several quests involve shorter timers, forcing the player to explore irradiated ruins quickly to avoid dying of contamination or forcing the player to hurriedly escape from an area before it self-destructs.
In the end, though, the relatively short length of the game and limited number of sandbox-style sidequests actually makes replaying the game in its entirety a much more realistic proposition, allowing players to experience the game from a variety of moral viewpoints based on their character’s decisions without sinking hundreds of hours into replays.
Gameplay
“Fallout,” unlike “Baldur’s Gate” and the other Infinity Engine games, is a truly turn-based PCRPG. The Vault Dweller moves on a hex-based grid and has a set number of action points to spend during each combat round. Outside of combat, movement and environmental interaction is free, but in combat, everything costs a set amount of action points, ranging from firing a gun, reloading a gun, taking a step, picking up ammo off a corpse, or opening the inventory screen to chug stim-packs (the “Fallout” take on healing potions). Upon using all of the Vault Dweller’s action points (or ending his/her turn if there aren’t enough action points left to do anything relevant), each enemy and NPC takes their turn sequentially before the game loops back around to the Vault Dweller and allows the player to go again. I really loved this battle system, and it seems even better than the fake-real-time-but-really-turn-based combat in the Infinity Engine games.
Outside of combat, the Vault Dweller can speak with the variety of NPCs that populate the wasteland and navigate through a number of dialog trees. The greatest non-combat gameplay mechanic in “Fallout” is the bartering system, in which the player can trade items and/or bottlecaps (the in-game currency) with almost every NPC. Even better, bartered items always maintain their full value, preventing the player from getting hosed for 50% of the value of the stuff they want to unload with every sale, like in every other RPG ever.
Unfortunately, despite the main gameplay elements of the battle system and bartering system being amazing and unmatched by any other game to this day, “Fallout” has a few annoying problems. First of all, it’s impossible to command allied NPCs. While there are two individuals who can join the Vault Dweller and follow him/her around the wasteland, it’s impossible to tell them what to do. While the mod-pack I installed to ‘improve’ the game’s graphics also included some minor tweaks to the NPC dialog tree, such as the ability to tell them to change into the better armor they have been given, the fact that this is an unofficial tweak just serves to illustrate how awful the default “Fallout” party-management systems are. It’s not even possible to look at ally inventories without bartering with them or pickpocketing them! It’s impossible to tell them to use a specific weapon as well, so when I provided my buddies with rocket launchers and flame throwers, they insisted on continuing to use their pea-shooters or – insanely – their friggin’ brass knuckles! I would have much preferred full control of allied NPC, such as that provided in the Infinity Engine games, both for inventory management and combat strategy. Fortunately, the game seems to acknowledge that the allied NPCs are complete morons and allows them to run around like fools without breaking the Vault Dweller’s stealth during sneaky moments.
Another annoying problem is that the character development system, not being based on D&D, is a complete mystery until the player has had a chance to deal with it for a while. Upon character creation, the player can choose two Traits and three Skill Focuses, as well as assign numbers to an array of ability scores (which seem really, really low by D&D standards). I went with a mediocre-strength build for my character, focusing on small guns, lockpicking, and pickpocketing, expecting loot to be hard to come by in the post-nuclear wasteland. Boy was I wrong! I found myself constantly running into the weight limit on my character’s inventory (and then having to spend an hour or so fiddling around with the cumbersome system for moving stuff into my allies’ inventories so I could pick up more loot). I found that there are skill books that increase certain skills outside of spending points during level-ups, and that small guns are one of them. I also found that there are a lot of heavy arms and energy weapons still fully-functional and just lying around the ruined world… yet I couldn’t hit anything with them due to my amazing skill with pistols, rifles, and brass knuckles but complete lack of skill in heavy arms and energy weapons. It seems that energy weapons is the best weapon category to choose, as they are stupidly powerful and that one category covers a range of weapons from small plasma pistols to huge gatling lasers. I was also unaware of just how potent the Perks provided every three levels would be, thus when I created my character, I chose a Trait that gives an immediate boost to all skills but in exchange only gives the character a Perk every four levels. While this character development system is reasonably intuitive after experiencing it first hand, the lack of an in-game tutorial during character creation makes it more opaque than necessary. Of course, anyone buying a boxed copy of “Fallout” in 1997 would have been able to read all about this stuff in the instruction manual, so a solution is actually present, just not well incorporated into the game itself.
The final problem I had with “Fallout” is that there are a few moments in the game that border on the insane-moon-logic of old PC Adventure games. In one instance, I explored an area, defeated a boss, and found myself in a race against time to escape… only to be blocked by forcefields that weren’t there previously. Upon reading an online FAQ, it turned out that the solution for my problem was to USE a RADIO on a specific COMPUTER in order to setup remote control of the forcefields. Who would possibly think to do that? Who would even bother to click on every computer in an area when almost every computer in the game is a non-interactive object? This type of thing doesn’t occur very often in “Fallout,” but it further illustrates the point I made in the presentation section of this review: In lacking a simple way to highlight all of the interactive objects in the game environments, “Fallout” injects a completely unnecessary amount of tedious cursor-hovering and pixel-hunting that interrupt the otherwise great pace of exploration.
Overall
For those who only know of “Fallout 3,” a FPS retake on the franchise, the fact that the original “Fallout” is a tried-and-true, dyed-in-the-wool, honest-to-God turn-based RPG might come as a surprise. The fact that, despite a few cumbersome gameplay mechanics, this game from 1997 still holds-up when compared to modern games might come as an even bigger surprise. The overall greatness of “Fallout” serves to remind us that RPGs were objectively better during a certain time period and that solid gameplay ideas and excellent world building can withstand the test of time. Anyone who loved the Infinity Engine games but skipped “Fallout” due to the lack of the D&D license should definitely take a short jaunt back in time to experience ‘the other RPG’ from that PCRPG Golden Age.
Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 5/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
