Fallout

 Having finished every Fallout game and overall being a fan of the series I always was hesitant to visit the origins of the series. I finally got around to completing Fallout 1


Off the bat everything about the game is a true Computer Role Playing Game, from the beginning you are welcomed with a character creation screen and a spreadsheet of stats to choose from, being familliar with the 3D games a lot of this stuff I was aware of such as Small guns, big guns, Energy weapons, Speech, everything is here. If you go in blind without searching things its easy to get hungup on certain mechanics or just flat out miss major parts of the game. Every mechanic and function of the game is so obtuse and obscure its easy for everything to fly over your head.

For example, while choosing my stats I opted to go a typical Small guns, average intelligence, typical wastelander. I figured since I wont be using Melee much, that i'd put my Strength at only 3. Nothing in the descriptions made this sound lke it would be a horrible idea. But halfway through the game I realized that every single weapon has a 'Str' requirement to properly weild them, and most of the weapons I had been using need 5-6 str. Since I was at 3 str, that means I got penalized for improperly weidling my weapons, and I had a huge accuracy penalty. Now, unlike later 3d fallout games, its basically impossible to raise your core stats after you make your character, except a few minor items. So I had to wait until getting Power armor, which gave me +3 str, to fix my initial wrongdoing.

More on the stats, this is a turn based RPG, where everything you do operates under these dotted ticks. This is influenced by your Agility, so I figured it was a no brainer to max out Agility so I had the most amount of moves possible in a turn. This was a pretty good idea and worked out intuitively the way I thought it would, allowing me to have more shots per turn, and ability to heal myself more often etc.

When you level up, what happens is your health gets increased, and you raise your 'Skills'  these are your Small guns, science, repair, Speech, First aid etc. Every 3 levels you are able to choose a new perk, which if youre familliar with 3d fallouts is the same concept. They usually have pros and cons,  but I didnt find it to be a big deal in this game, EXCEPT, you know I said things can fly over your head? Well I chose a perk called 'Fast shot' in the beginning, and the descriptor didn't sound that big of a deal, however, quarterway into the game I realized this perk actually REMOVED my ability to go into 'Vats' mode where you can target individual limbs, eyes, head, etc. So I couldnt even experience that entire mechanic because of a perk choice I made in the beginning of the game, it didnt even warn me it would remove this ability...

Thats enough about skills, you quickly come to feel the obtuse and oldschool game design moments after picking the game up. Everything feels so rigid and controls so awkwardly. Even after 20 hours I will admit the controls are not good. Everything operates on a hex based grid movement, and theres multiple buttons for switching from Moving to interacting to looting and all of it feels a jumbled clunky mess and it never really gets better. Made worse by the fact that the camera doesnt even follow you as you move across the map, so frequently your character will get lost as youre trying to see whats on screen, having to press a button to recenter to your character.  The graphics and artstyle themself do have a  good charm to them, and the classic fallout wit is perfected on the original game here, but the clunky awkward movement and mechanics never really do feel better. The inventory visuals UI is fantastic though  but its just not that intuitive to use. You can recruit companions  to follow you around, and you can use them as mules for your items  - but it never made since why you have to 'Pickpocket' them just to give them items, you can also Barter with them, and it never felt like the game had a proper 'manage companion' inventory mechanic, it was a bit of a mess.

Speaking of companions, the game has a brutal difficulty curve, but in reverse. In the beginning of the game its brutally hard as you have no items, very low health pool, no companions, and its easy to veer off somewhere random and just get obliterated. But - as you discover you can recruit up to 4 companions, the game instantly gets much easier (atleast in the beginning to middle) as now you basically have 4x the firepower.  The downside though, is that theres no way to revive your companions, so youll find yourself savescumming constantly and reloading your save as soon as any companion dies, because its just not worth losing them. This becomes a common thing. Doing the same fight over and over and over, just because your companions have horrible AI, you cant tell them to retreat, or control them, and they will just blindly run head first up to an obviously way stronger enemy and just stand there and let themselves get obliterated. Then you have to reload, and hope this time you have better luck. It became a strategy to try to position my player character to tank the damage instead of the companions, as I could atlaest manage myself better.

Well the problem is kind of like I said, the game is super hard in the beginning few hours, then towards the middle/end it becomes super easy. Once you have multiple companions all stocked up with sniper rifles / strong weapons, and especially when you get the power armor and plasma rifle ,you just obliterate anything in your path mostly. You cant give your companions armor, so you will still deal with the pitfall of them dying in one or two hits to super strong enemies, atleast towards the end, by this point you can get rid of them and still annihilate all your foes easily. The difficulty just felt really strange and backwards in general.

The game has a huge variety of weapons and items to find and looting and finding all sorts of new weapons was really fun and enjoyable, but it wasnt until halfway through the game I learned how to even determine how much damage weapons even do so I was just kind of winging it. I focused on Small guns, then towards the game had a bunch of stat points and went into Energy guns as ammo was then abundant for them.


Well what is the actual story, missions, objectives, quests like? Well, incredibly vauge and slightly frustraing. The premise is amazing, your vault is running out of water, so you have to leave the vault and find a water chip. Thats it. Thats all you have to go on. Then it throws you onto this overworld map where youre a tiny little dot and you travel around "open world" style, where it will randomly stop you, Pokemon encounter style with random events. this was a fascinating mechanic and a brilliant way to handle early open world gaming.
But yes, thats where the directions start. You will go to locations/towns, and just aimlessly wander around talking to every NPC you can find, doing 'side quests' for them. The tricky thing about quests in this game, is theres no quest log. Theres no way to actually determine what the fuck you have to do. You do have a screen that tells you vauge notions of a quest in an area, like incredibly vauge, but you cant read any quest log or further details. And most of the 'quests' in the game dont even get jotted down on that screen.

So you'll go from location to location talking to tons of NPC's, they'll give you ambiguous hints, and if you forget what they said, or didnt pay attention, they sometimes wont even repeat it to you. You can easily find yourself wandering around the same location for hours on end searching every single corner, talking to every NPC multiple times, exausting all possible dialogue options, just to try to figure out how to advance a 'quest'  Sometimes its immersive and enjoyable, but more often than not its just a frustrating "What the fuck do I do" slog. To make matters worse, the first half of the game is on a Timer, if you dont find the water chip within a few hours, you permanently fail the game and ruin your save file. Because of this, savescumming is a MUST and you will be constantly saving in multiple different slots because it is easy to irreversibly ruin your save.

Even talking to NPC's its very easy to say something that seems tame and inoffensive, can cause them to permanently not want to talk to you and ruin quest lines. So you find yourself saving before almost every interaction and reloading when something really bad happens. Its just how its designed.

In the first half, I had only 5 days left to get the waterchip. Which means I permanently failed the main quest, luckily you can talk to someone in a city to repeat the timer a second time, so I did that. Eventually, I found someone that told me where I might find the waterchip, so I went there. However, I wasted too much time, and an area that was suppose to be inhabited by simple easy ghouls ,were now inhabited by the hardest enemies in the game - Super mutants, who basically kill me and all my companions in one hit, so now the game punished me even harder for taking too long. So at this point I had to rethink how I was going to proceed.

This caused me to have to go around to every location I could find, and talking to every NPC to obtain 'quests' to desperately try to level up and more importantly find stronger weapons and Armor, specifically Power armor, as when I was googling how to increase my afformentioned low strength unable to properly weild weapons, I found that power armor is one of the only ways. So I had to make it my top priority on obtaining power armor.

All of this took me through many interesting and exciting locations and interactions, taking jobs from a mercenary company to kill merchants and his wife, going to a cathedral and slaughtering the leader, going inside huge nuclear bomb holes full of radiation to find a holotape for the Brotherhood initiation required for power armor, etc. But honestly many of these things I had to aid myself with google, there are so many times and parts in this game where I just knew if I didnt google things I would be mindlessly walking around for hours and hours making ZERO progress, I couldnt accept it. I would guess maybe 40% of the game I had to google.

So many times the game felt like it would glitch out or just make no sense with NPC interactions and quests. Trying to recruit my companion, for example, had me go through this long quest line of fighting against the greedy town owner or joining him, well at the beginning I went to talk to him and ended up taking a job for him, then I later found out the potential companion wouldnt join me because he doesnt me want working for the greedy man, so I went back and killed him, but nothing changed. No one would even recognize I had killed the guy and the game basically broke or just didnt progress past that for these quest lines.  If you dont do things in a very specific order, the NPCs will no longer notice or react. This happens frequently. So the companion says "youre working with him, I wont join you"  So instead of killing, you have to instead go work for the other merchant, and complete his guest, THEN the companion will finally recognize that youre no longer working for him.

Things like this are frequent and just dont make sense. You would think if I kill the fucking guy that it would convince you that I'm infact not working for him, but nope, the NPC's dont even notice. And keep talking about him as if hes still alive. You can tell the programming is limited and outdated in this regard, things like this happen often. And this is what I mean by I just had to google things, because the game does such a poor job making sense otherwise.

After I had gathered up my companions, did some 'quests' to get better loot, did the Brotherhood quest line and finally got Power armor to fix my str issue and more defense, the game as I said had become super easy. By this point I had bascally infinite ammo, I bought every health kit in the game, I had no problem staying alive, just became a game of trying to keep my stupid companions alive, then I could go and obtain the waterchip by killing the super mutants easily enough.

After this, you're into the halfway/end game and you no longer have a timer. Then you can go around and try to complete all 'side quests' which I did. You know how I keep saying the game does such a poor job of making sense at all with the quests? I have VERY good proof of this.

I had obtained a quest that said "Find the child spy of the Followers"  So for hours, I had walked around multiple cities, talking to every NPC, searching how to complete this quest. Telling myself "I wont google it, surely I can figure it out, surely"

I found nothing. I could not figure it out
I eventually gave in, and googled it.
Guess what?
It's literally unbeatable.
The quest was not fully programmed.
The quest literally was not fully implemented.
You obtain a quest in your quest log thats not even possible for anyone to complete, ever. It wasnt programmed in.

The wiki entry for this quest literally says:

"The traitor was either removed from the final version of the game or never implemented, effectively rendering the quest impossible to complete"
"Find Children spy in the Followers is one of the unimplemented side quests from Fallout"

I mean this was unfathomable. Why are there quests in my quest log that are impossible to complete? Why did it give me the impression that it was a legit quest? Why did I waste hours honestly trying to finish it only to discover this? This is a token to the broken and SLOPPY design of the game overall. Thats a perfect word for it. Fallout 1 is SLOPPILY designed. Things rarely  make sense, and if you try to complete things in slightly an unexpected order, NPC's just break basically.

Desite all of this bullshit, I still enjoyed it a lot. Theres so much interesting dialogue and characters, one of my favorite is the Children of the apocalypse towards the end of the game. That entire cult is so fascinating and fun to explore, really amazing atmosphere and dark haunting music and visuals and characters.

But now even that location had bullshit nonsensical design. It would tell me "Just obtain this item, show it to the guard, and go upstairs, no one will hurt you"

So I did.
Except they shot at me anyway.
They were suppose to not shoot me.
I couldnt figure out how to avoid them shooting me.
Once again, I had to google.
Turns out you cant have any companions, or they shoot at you.
So I dismissed my companions, all except one
I have a dog companion, you cant dismiss the dog
So the game forced me to permanently kill my own companion just to properly progress without these cult members shooting me. Just awkward. It feels like maybe you werent suppose to get this far with him? I dont know, it just felt wrong. Nowhere in the game did it say "you cant bring companions up" The game is an awkward mess most of the time.

Well I can say the ending quests of the game are by far the greatest characters and moments. The plot and writing becomes super interesting and dark, the last 'villian' is great and morally ambiguous, leaving you to have many interesting decisions.

The endgame is basically going to two major bases and destroying them both. One is a cult church built ontop an underground facility, the other a supermutant headquarters. I will say the church is much more interesting, as the final boss is crazy, and extremely hard, but by this point in the game I had 80 health kits and a Turbo plasma rifle so I managed to get by. The other military base wasnt much of a challenge I felt pretty overpowered, but however the vauge and ambiguous awkward objectives once again reared its head.

For one thing, I recrutied the brotherhood of steel help me with the final military base, they show up outside it, kill a few guards, then thats it. They wont follow me inside. They say "Come on, lets go!" and they wont go inside. Apparently they only exist to help you kill the first 3 guards and arent programmed to walk inside with you? I dont fucking get it. Why is the game is NONSENSICAL and awkward. Whats the point of going through so much shit just to have the brotherhood help you, and they wont even follow you inside? Of course, i also googled this. And nothing. Just werent programmed to go inside? Ok then, pointless.  Then, after going through the whole military base awkwardly using 'repair' skill on some force fields to get by, I get to the end of the base where theres just a bunch of out of order elevators and computers, but everytime I try to use the computers nothing happens. Of course, I also googled this after 20 mins of walking around aimlessly. Turns out I have to use 'science' on one of the computers, and trigger a self destruct? Ok, I did that, strolled to the top of the base, then the game basically ended. End credits.

Well I really enjoyed how they handled the early open world exploration with the overview map, I really enjoyed all the items and various locations, the atmosphere is amazing and the writing is probably the best in the series, the artstyle is fantastic and the graphics are great, albeit at the original 640x480 resolution, because higher resolutions make everything tiny. the characters are interesting for the most part, and the whole game has this morally grey point of view where youre never quite sure whos good and whos bad. The turn based combat is pretty enjoyable, but the game is deeply flawed with horrible companion AI, horribly vauge nonsensical objectives and awkward janky broken scripting, frustratingly ambiguous methods to progress, deeply backwards difficulty curve, clunky and awkward controls that you never really get use to, etc.. Its still a 7/10, only because of how much I appreciate the atmosphere and graphics, and the true oldschool CRPG feel. I found myself thinking about the game for hours even when I wasnt playing it, and I played it for 12 hours straight over a weekend, so that must say something. I even think about replaying it with all of my knowledge to see how much of a breeze it would be the second time around

7/10