Fallout 1: A Masterpiece FRUSTRATINGLY Close To Perfection

 Chapter 1: A Brief Setup

Fallout

Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game is a crpg developed and published by Interplay Productions. Set in a mid-22nd century post-apocalyptic retro-futurist world decades after a global nuclear war led by the US and China, much of humanity has perished in the initial blast, with a lucky few managing to hunker down in vaults or bunkers or just get plain lucky surviving the bombs, well as the radiation that followed. 

Of these few survivors were the vault dwellers; a sect of humanity that signed deals with the Vault-Tec corporation, signing up for a "societal preservation program". This program saw the creation of "Vaults", underground survival shelters designed to protect individuals from nuclear wars, packed with food and water and any manner of basic living commodity you might need to survive the next few decades while waiting for everything on the surface to blow over, sealed in by one big, cog shaped, damned near indestructible blast door.

inside, nothing but joy and safety and merry living amongst friends and family! that is, as long as you were in Vaults 1-14 (sorry 15-150). Food is grown, water is treated, babies are made, and maybe, just maybe, a few experiments are conducted on you by Vault-tec; ranging from being locked alone in a vault with nothing but a crate of puppets, or having a vault of 30 people accompanied by 1 panther. 

Outside, things weren't so great. Between the radiation and the now much worse living conditions, what was left in the post-nuclear apocalypse was practically a wasteland. People adapted as they do, managing to find *some* way to rebuild,  growing new food and creating drinkable water, and these now brutal living conditions saw the birth of different factions. Religious cults, para-military groups, bands of raiders, good and evil, born from scarcity, all with some purposed goal or philosophy shaped by their surroundings.

                                                  "The Vaults, as depicted by Vault-Tec"

but going back, of course, for you, things aren't so bad. After all, you play as a vault dweller! Aged 25 at the events of the game, you've spent your whole life knowing nothing but the comforts and safety of your vault, sealed tight and hidden away in little old Vault-13 in some unmarked cave. Things have gone sour however as, unfortunately for you, the water chip's broken. A device which as you might have guessed, is pretty crucial for the continued survival of your vault. While water chips had a notoriously high failure rate, it was standard that each vault be provided a crate of at least 5, speaking to their unreliability. Due to a clerical error, your shipment never arrived, thus leaving your vault in a rather vulnerable state, with only 5 months worth of water left. 

So, of course, as logic goes, you're shat out of your vault into the wastelands by your Overseer, with nary but a dinky knife and a 10mm Peashooter to your name. You are the Vault Dweller, your goal is to find a water chip. You have 150 days to complete this task, good luck!

                                                               "The Prized Water Chip"

Chapter 2 Everything Else

So, with all that, how's the gameplay?

                           "Vault (-Tec) Assisted Targetting System, often abbreviated to V.A.T.S"

Ahem,

I've been playing a lot of fallout for the past couple weeks. The quality of the gameplay here really took me by surprise, I think nearly everything here has held up TREMENDOUSLY well. Rather, the pitfalls with Fallout lie not with things like poorly aged mechanics and whatnot, but rather just some iffy design choices which ended up hurting my enjoyment a fair bit towards the tail end of my playthrough.

The core gameplay here is wonderful, just absolutely gorgeous. A little weird and difficult to adjust to at first for a non-CRPG player, but once I felt that click with combat and the general design philosophy for where to find good content, everything from Junktown and onwards was an absolute blast to play.

Fun questlines, ultra tense turn based combat, Fallout 1's gameplay loop of narrative -> combat -> narrative -> combat works really well because one; the fallout universe is such a captivating rich tapestry for atmosphere + great storytelling, and two; the feedback, sense of growth, and emphasis on AGGRESSIVE positioning in every fight makes the combat feel fun even for someone like me who's not ever been the biggest fan of crpg combat

I'd say assuming you're a new player, honestly Fallout 1 really hits its stride pretty early, and keeps that momentum going from early game all the way to the later sections of the mid-game.

atmospherically the game is bleak as it sees you wandering wastelands to the tune of droning (sometimes even bordering on tribal) music, narratively every questline is the perfect exploration of the depths those who've truly adapted to the world have had to sink to and how hostile the world is, and gameplay wise; that constant tension in a gunfight breaking out any second and the fights themselves being so loud and brutal and in your face, well i mean

dying in 2-3 shots, fights being borderline unfair, ZERO handholding in where to go next, ZERO grace in the way the game literally *drops* you into the wasteland to fend for yourself.

it's perfect. absolutely perfectly perfect. one of the most captivating worlds i've ever had the pleasure to play through, not because you spend 50 hours in it, or because of some crazy deep story. Fallout 1 is such a short experience, yet it achieves this impeccable level of engagement and atmosphere and immersion purely because of its design. every system feeds into each other in such a tantalizingly perfect way that makes being part of this world just feel so *fuckin* good man

                                                                      "Fallout 1 Death Screen"

there's deliberacy in how *hostile* the game is to new players. controls are weird, your weapons are weaksauce, you are ALWAYS outnumbered, you can't reliably hit shots, and all of it just FEELS right. You're not some hardened badass, you're an untrained, inexperienced wimp; thrown out into the capital wastelands with nary but a kitchen knife and a 10mm peashooter, forgetting all you've ever known of safety and security as your path forward is positively LITTERED in raiders that will either try to kill you, rob you, rape you, or any one of those at the same time. 

this to me was where i found the peak of my enjoyment in Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role-Playing Game. the early game, growing in strength, finding weapons, slowly levelling up, FEELING yourself adapting to the world as you become stronger and more familiar with everything around you. that first Junktown trip, finding the merchant, dumping all your spare weapons and radscorpion glands, slowly upgrading from the pistol to the deagle to a rifle to a shotgun, god man, just incredible

you really do feel thoroughly immersed, truly *part of* the world here. improving your capacity for violence, familiarising yourself with big sprawling cities like Boneyard or The Hub, learning to adapt and eventually coming to master the world. 

My issues with Fallout 1 begin trickling in when it comes to that "later game" section. You've just gained the water chip, hurrah! A trek back to your Vault later, and after a nice little bit of rewarding dialogue and appraisal for your achievements, the game picks up a previously hinted at plot thread and gear shifts into "yeah dude, shit. like, okay so you're REALLY capable, and based on your reports this Super Mutant shit sounds super duper sinister, so please, go back out there and help eradicate their army, the safety of this vault is in your hands! (again)"

contrasting the tightness you'd come to expect, you can feel a rather... *steep* decline in the cohesion of the game's design past a certain point.

   "Ghouls, pre-FO3/4 mass Twinkification"

Necropolis is a fucking slog. A huge boring labyrinth of weirdly obscure man-hole covers and sewer treks, serving as your first real fighting against the mean green super mutants, and having none of the qualities that make Fallout 1 fun to play in it's early to mid section. You'll find, by this point, some of that hard as nails atmosphere has eroded, and combat lacks that same dangerous edge of earlier fights, both due to your newfound power and the fights just being super mutants completely swarming you in tactically sterile wide open spaces.

compare this to those earlier sections. assassinating a merchant and his wife by mapping out the area, picking the best place to start shooting, and taking on a whole troupe of armed guards through sheer corner peeking and clever zoning. repeating the same thing while assassinating a religious figure, but instead breaking into a storeroom first for top-tier weaponry to even out the odds of the blood-bath going in your favour. confronting a crime boss in a dingy cellar and taking cover in a backroom, left as the last one standing as the room full of criminals and law enforcers reduces just to you and the last unlucky bastard limping away and begging for his life.

I never quite connected to Super Mutants the same way I did to regular raiders. There's a certain brutality to those fights, messy and kinetic and extremely immersive to the setting. an intimacy. however violent, these are just other people trying to survive like you. said intimacy, and said brutality, being lost when your enemies from other humans just trying to survive to big green mutants firing lasers and miniguns at you.

and i get that this game is old but CHRIST. you couldn't spare more to make on paper extremely climactic moments in the story a LITTLE more cinematic?

The Water Chip was THE macguffin, wonderfully built up to, established as this rare, precious artifact carrying tremendous importance and extreme narrative weight, and then you find it, and it kinda just looks mostly normal, and with no cutscene you just grab it and throw it into a bag like any other item. such great buildup, such potential, only to really fall quite flat in its execution of a "finale".

I like the idea in concept, god i LOVE it in concept. Describing it back to myself in my head it sounds amazing. but When you've made the idea of the special artifact being tucked away in a vault hidden deep within a ruined city, once crawling with hostile ghouls only for you to see each ghoul torn to shreds thus introducing the new central antagonistic force; ala the Super Mutants, and you've undercut that subtle genius of hinting that Necropolis is the next major location by having a Water Merchant claim that said city has had no need for water deliveries, through SHEER overly opaque map design and enemy placement? I don't even know what to say man, besides the fact that i was left extremely dissapointed

and just to iron out some of my grievances, god the brotherhood

the brotherhood has such an excellent introduction, LITERALLY sending a new recruit to their death in the form of The Glow, a nuclear missile site in the middle of ass-crack nowhere, so insanely radioactive that standing within 100 meters is enough to make you puke out your organs and shit blood, just because they couldn't be bothered to just turn you down. the PERFECT way to establish just how scummy and morally dubious and fucked up these guys are, even before getting into the para-milatarism and religious zealotry.

                                                                            "The Glow"

one of if not THE strongest faction in terms of sheer militaristic strength. cold combat trained knights braving the wastes donning their fearsome power armor and laser rifles, hoarders of pre-war technology specifically choosing to focus on their *weaponry*. sending new recruits to their death in the same breath that they appraise The Brotherhood's righteousness and glory. The Brotherhood, what the fuck happened here dude

for such a cool set piece being a 4 storied underground bunker lined with classrooms and training rooms and workshops and roundtables and pretty much anything, why was it so weirdly barren of content when i finally got in??? maybe i just missed content, or shit maybe the game just totally bugged out on me (i personally suspect the latter), i mean my god it was even a whole puzzle just getting POWER ARMOR

A lot of the late game is rather plagued by just being really obnoxiously obscure with the best way to move forward. somehow, somewhere, some obscure tiny object be it the manhole, or the critical npc you never existed at the back of a random house, *THAT* is the key to moving forward. 

I understand the idea, I appreciate the lack of waypoints here. part of Fallout 1's genius is how it subtly guides you on where to go next in a way that feels so immersive and natural,,,

but at the same time, I feel by being THIS opaque while also being THIS weirdly hyper specific in how you need to carry tasks out, it just *killed* a lot of my motivation dead, seeming as how I'd be progressing a quest, only for it to just seemingly "end" with no clear path forward in sight because i'd hit a wall, and then I'd look up the next move in a playthrough and see that it's just some bullshit. 

it's frustrating. really really frustrating. Take all of that,  mix it with the combat that kind of loses its edge a little unless you choose to delibaretely nerf yourself by equipping lower-tiered weapons, and Fallout 1 went from a ruthlessly engaging, extremely fun CRPG blast from the past to just kind of boring and frustrating, and it really dissapointed me. While the game did frustrate me enough that I didn't wanna finish it, I did still care enough to at least watch a playthrough of the ending so I could get *some* closure.

Fallout 1, a masterpiece frustratingly held back. one of my new favourite games, a near perfect 10/10, sadly brought down by its mistakes. if i could wipe my memory (okay minus like, the controls), i'd do it just to experience that first playthrough joy all over again