Matt's Video Game Backlog #8: Fallout 2 (1998)

Bioshock made me want to check out Fallout 2 next, and I had a really fun time. Fallout 2 is in my backlog as opposed to Fallout because I played the first game yeeears ago and was really turned off by the style of gameplay and by the stress the time limit imposed. Like, this is a game about roleplaying and exploration and consequential decisions, but you can also fail to make good-enough decisions and run out of time and lose, days down the line? No thanks. Fallout 2 ditches the time limit though, and is a much more enjoyable time. I’ve also had a lot more experience with tabletop RPGs since playing Fallout and as a result the gameplay felt a lot more intuitive. You can tell that these games were built on top of G.U.R.P.S., the play experience feels very similar to that of a TTRPG, just you click buttons instead of rolling dice, and theres a nice isometric visual of the game world instead of a GM + your imagination.

I think it was a really cool decision to make the protagonist of Fallout 2 a tribal descendant of vault dwellers rather than a vault dweller themselves. It’s fun to get to the first real town of the game and have people talk down to you for being a “tribal”, when you came from a relatively prosperous, safe community, while their town is beset by slavers and in literal ruins. I’m not that far in the game but I hope it continues exploring this dynamic. I feel like Fallout: New Vegas is unique of the subsequent Fallout games in terms of exploring the different sorts of societies that pop up in the post-apocalypse, and even then it frames the various tribes as sort of holdouts in a world moving towards Society(tm). Bethesda doesn’t seem to have a ton of interest in exploring this topic, judging by how mandatory it seems to be that their protagonists be vault dwellers. It seems to me that Interplay/Obsidian were moving away from the vault dweller obsession, since only one of their games (the very first one) features you playing as a vault dweller at all. I hope that remains the case if Microsoft actually ends up getting the band back together to publish the fabled “New Vegas 2”.