Cornerstone Games: Fallout 2 (1998)
An occasionally appearing series of posts where I talk about the video games that have meant the most to me across my lifetime, based on my collective experiences rather than recent replays. Less reviews, more rambles.
January 1998 was the first time that the Pelit magazine arrived through the post on my doorstep. Pelit was (is?) Finland's top gaming magazine and in 1998 it still had the practical monopoly in the field, and it was young Flint's bible. I had spent years borrowing old issues from the local library, reading them over and over again from top to bottom, and eventually my dad succumbed to my request to subscribe to the magazine. So, a copy of the magazine arriving in my home on day one was quite an occasion. And in that January 1998 issue, a little game called Fallout received a superlative review.
I don't know why exactly I became so obsessed about the idea of wanting to play Fallout. I had never played RPGs before, the graphics weren't exactly flashy and besides what the review said, I had zero idea what I was getting into. But all I knew that something in me yearned to play Fallout. It would take a few months until I finally got the chance, simply because at the time we couldn't just order a copy online, I had to actually find a physical store that stocked it and my small town didn't have the most well-equipped PC gaming shelves. I ultimately found a copy of it during a trip to see some relatives, and I still have a very vivid flash of a memory of holding that box in my hands on the backseat of the car, eager to dig into the impressive and imposing sized manual. When I did finally get to play it, I became smitten with it - Fallout started my love for turn-based PC RPGs and my keenness to create characters that talk their way through the troubles in those games.
I'm not writing this entry about the first Fallout game. I write it about Fallout 2, infamously released almost exactly a year later, and which was effectively Fallout: Bigger, Bolder and Brasher. It took control of my life.
Some consider Fallout 2 a lesser game than the first for its very nature as Fallout But More (And Also More Exaggerated). Fallout 1 was a tight experience with lean-yet-expansive worldbuilding that took its pseudo-history seriously, provided a clear narrative for the player to follow while also allowing for enough unexpected side journeys to make the world feel like a living, breathing place full of adventure, and which overall felt perhaps a little more like a true passion project with a clear capital-V Vision. Fallout 2 in the meantime shrugs as it gives the player a vague MacGuffin-chaser of a main quest while shoving them into a massively vaster world, crowding every single hub and town with countless sidequests, surprises and easter eggs to discover, a plethora of pop culture references to add a heavy dose of comedy into the still-grim world and generally treating its premise with a more carefree attitude as it leaned into the surreality of it all. And, in all honesty, it's a fair point. I can understand why one would repel away the fans of the other, and despite my early love affair with the first game the older I get, the more I can get behind the beauty of its slicker, more defined design (maybe Bethesda's butchering of the series has made me retrospectively appreciate more).
But for a young li'l gamer who'd only just recently taken his first steps in the world of RPGs, Fallout 2 was mindblowing. It had the "see that mountain? You can climb it" effect, where the experience felt limitless: between the huge world map, the fact that nothing stopped you from ignoring the suggested path and how you could bump into so many tucked away surprises along the way that you never expected could've been there... it was incomprehensible. And it was incredible.
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Fallout has burst so openly into mainstream consciousness by this point that I'd be amazed if someone (especially someone who chooses to read blogs like this) wasn't aware of what the series is about, but the original game may have fallen by the wayside as the flashier re-imaginations under Bethesda have taken center stage. Developed and released in December 1997 by Interplay (from the team who would eventually become Black Isle and then Obsidian), it was originally intended to be a follow-up to the 1980s RPG cult classic Wasteland - however, licensing rights prevented this and when Interplay at the time was keen to have an RPG IP of their own following the success of their DnD games, Fallout spun into its own thing (the incredible Digital Antiquarian has a great article on the game's history, going into much more detail). It still took place in post-apocalyptic America, but now in an alternate timeline where the key scientific developments taking the mankind to the laser age had occurred in the 1950s, meaning all the technology bears a distinctive Hanna-Barbera-Come-Real retro-scifi look. The first Fallout, an isometric RPG with turn-based combat, placed the player in the shoes of a denizen from Vault 13 - one of the many nuclear shelter bottle-civilisations set up before the bombs fell and their doors waiting to be opened hundreds of years after the event. The story starts when the Vault's water purification chip breaks and as a last ditch effort, the Vault doors are opened for the first time in over a century and the player is pushed out to find a new one from a nearby Vault. From there, the player's assumed fish-out-of-nuclear-water explores the nearby towns and cities within the nuclear desert that now makes up the US South-West, discovers how the world had changed, and eventually uncovers and defeats the plot by a fearsome mutant called The Master to mutate the world in his image. For their efforts (and spoilers for a 30-year-old game), the player is rewarded at the end of the game with an exile from their home Vault - the outside world has changed them too much and the Vault's stability couldn't handle their wanderlust inspiring others. So, they are forced to return to the desert they now need to call their home.
Fallout 2, developed in a major rush using the same engine and released within a year due to corporate pressure to quickly follow-up the original game's surprise success, takes place 80 years later. After spending some time wandering around the wasteland with a few others who had joined him in exile having heard what happened, the original Vault Dweller settled down and created a small, isolated and self-sustainable community far away from everything. A few generations later the village is slowly dying due to a great drought, and the OG Vault Dweller's grandchild (that's you) is sent out to explore the world to find a Garden of Eden Creation Kit, available in every Vault to ensure its denizens can set up a successful life once the doors open. So, the great exploration begins again - fundamentally in the exact similar manner as the last time beyond a few UI tweaks and quality-of-life changes, attributable to the minimal development period and shamelessly recycling the same engine. The view is still isometric, the graphics dirty and grungy in a manner that balances between ugly and atmospheric, the combat is still politely turn-based, and the character development system has remained the exact same with all its minutiae and nuances. But the world? The world has changed.
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What very likely left that everlasting impression on young Flint's mind was the sheer vastness of Fallout 2's world. Perhaps my modern standards it doesn't feel so big - and much of the wasteland is made out of empty squares intended to breeze through in the map view, rather than tediously walk through - but for someone who was a newcomer to RPGs like these and who had already found the first Fallout a sizeable experience, Fallout 2's expanded scale was a seemingly endless, borderless horizon of opportunities. You also never quite knew what you'd find around the corner, except you knew you'd always find something - obscure side quests, hidden alternative solutions to other quests, environmental storytelling that provided you with some unique loot, interesting bit role characters with more effort put into them than most main characters in other games, easter eggs and secrets (and yes, many of which were immersion breaking, but which somehow made a perverse sort of surreal sense in the game and I enjoyed it anyway), party members, skill-ups, anything. You could approach all that in a myriad of ways which felt like the player taking control of the game in their own way, sometimes in a borderline sneaky fashion that felt like breaking the game but which the game itself shrugged off and let you move on: for a while it became a regular gameplay tactic for my otherwise (usually) morally strong characters to murder a particular merchant in one of the cities in the first third of the game in cold blood, because his isolated shop meant no one else was alerted and you could loot his corpse for his significantly stronger wares. Fallout 2's vastness was proven by the sheer amount of times I completed it over and over and over again (sometimes twice a year in my less busy teenage years), and how I still kept discovering new tricks and turns even though I had memorised practically the entire game at that point.
The game's more expanded nature also applied to all the other systems that I found so appealing in Fallout. If the original game had introduced me to just how great it was to be a talky-talky charmer who'd rather shoot his mouth than his gun, Fallout 2 made it even more rewarding with so many alternative quest solutions and so many more fascinatingly written characters with their intriguing side stories. The game simply being longer gave the player - me - more ways to experiment with different character builds as I could easily risk taking more esoteric perks (bonus skills and gameplay modifiers you get to choose from every couple of levels), knowing I could easily get one of my usual favourites the next time around instead (and I knew precisely when that would, given my intimate knowledge of the game's progression). Being a persuasive kind meant I'd be maxing my charisma, which meant I could also bring with me the maximum amount of party members - and again, this series taught me just how much I love having party members in RPGs like this. Adventuring with a company was so much more fun, and where the AI wasn't perhaps the best of its kind (I learned quickly not to give Vic a burst weapon or otherwise he'd gun down the entire party), the characters' vivid and wildly different personalities more than made up for it. The first time I played it, Fallout 2 was a grand journey to save my people. In the subsequent times, it became a power fantasy road trip of walking through the world with my favourite digital mates, making the wasteland better (or trying to, anyway) wherever I landed.
I loved the world and characters of Fallout 2 so much that it became a routine for me to continue playing the game long after the main plot had finished, once the game allowed you to free-roam to finish any remaining exploration and side quests (again, a first in gaming for me). But, having already done all those quests before the final chapter, I would simply spend the rest of my digital years in the wasteland running one of the game's many caravan routes, defending the traders against the hordes of enemies with my buddies, simply for the fun of enjoying the combat and the world with my party members, until ultimately the game's internal clock would reach its final year and the screen would abruptly fade into a game over. Before that, I would spend the effort to recruit every party member I feasibly could and I'd take them to a specific location within the game, building my own base with all these people who wanted to travel with me. I would daydream about how that base would do in "real world" far beyond the game's constraints, how it would continue to grow with even further people joining in.
And then I would share all these experiences with my best friend of my school years, who had become just as obsessed. Fallout 2 references would become our shared lingo, tales of our latest gaming sessions filled our school breaks and whenever one of us experienced something cool, the other would boot the game that evening to try it out themselves. Fallout 2, despite being a staunch single-player experience, became an offline social bond that lasted for years. There were many other similar shared experiences between my friends and I during those school years, some shared by multiple people, but when I think about those recess breaks of idle chit chat, the Fallout 2 chatter is what comes to my mind the most. The game had a life outside its own digital existence, in a manner few other games during those years did.
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I think, if you were to put a gun in my head and tell me to choose, I would very likely say Fallout 2 is my favourite game of all time. It's certainly the game which I feel made me the most (to borrow a phrase from Rock Paper Shotgun's early days). Both of the first two Fallouts influenced me so much as a player, helping me discover particular gameplay elements and traits that now form a key part of my gaming DNA: the freedom of choice and the meaningfulness of those choices, the intricate dialogues and the emphasis on exploring those conversations, even something as basic as realising how much I love turn-based combat. Fallout 1 lit the initial spark, but Fallout 2 was the bonfire itself - a gaming experience unlike many others, which just got better each time I played it.
For all these reasons, when I started thinking about the idea of doing little write-ups on all my favourite games of all time even if they weren't in my play queue (which is how I normally start writing about games on this blog), Fallout 2 felt like the right place to start. So much of what I am like as a gamer boils down to experiences shown by and lessons taught by the first two Fallout games, and the grip the second game in particular had on me for so many years is unparalleled. And though it is so tied down to these particular personal memories and experiences, it is still a fantastic game to play as well, having barely dated since 1998 (yes there's some modern QoL stuff that would be nice, like a less stupid inventory system, but absolutely nothing essential is missing) beyond its graphics. It's not just a cornerstone for me, but for RPGs as a whole genre, but its depth holds up so well that even now it can go toe-to-toe with any modern spiritual successor.
You know what, I haven't actually replayed through it in a while...
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Afterthoughts:
- When it comes to Fallout 2, I'm a purist. The F2 Restoration Project is a really cool idea and I enjoyed the novelty of playing through something familiar yet new when it first came out, but whilst the deleted content had some neat ideas they felt a little too tacked on for me and perhaps they were removed for a reason. But also, by the time it came out the original version of the game was so ingrained into every fiber of my body that touching it in any way would've likely felt awkward no matter what.
- For those interested, as far as other Fallout games go I'm a basic bitch classic Fallout dude. F1 and F2 reign supreme, the Bethesda games are varying levels of hot garbage, New Vegas is the real third Fallout game and a fantastic long-waited sequel, and Tactics is flawed but fun. The recent TV series was surprisingly good too, which I didn't expect at all.
- I couldn't find anywhere else to mention this more naturally, but Mark Morgan's ambient score is a thing of beauty - whilst much of the music was directly taken from Fallout 1, the new pieces made for the second game further expanded the musical vocabulary of the chosen style by including more metallic percussion work and urban sound samples, to highlight the progress the wasteland had made in the 80 years since the first game and to more naturally score the cities the player now explored. One of my favourite game scores of all time. "Khans of the New California") stirs so many memories alone the moment it begins to play.