Nononono, smiling bandit. You need to get him drunk first.
[uses 10 beers on smiling bandit, strips him to his skivvies]
Well, armed only with a .223 pistol, a hunting rifle and a leather jacket, my solitary assassin just took out the entire raider band. Yaay me!
Pity I won’t be able to shift the majority of the loot in a thousand years, but that’s just life. And there’s something disturbingly satisfying about the sight of the bloody, body-strewn cavern floor afterwards. I think I might adopt the raiders’ base as my own private little stronghold. I can keep my stuff there.
Arrrgh. I’ll have ot go home and try that some time, but the real pisser is that my Tactics character is a female named Buffy in leather. She uses a Ripper and has the Slayer perk. There is much carnage.
Okay, so it is a BtVS thing, then. I still don’t get it.
Mr Tambo, I always found the mechanic’s garage/car thieves’ hideout to make the best base of operations, m’self. 'Tis a bit more centrally located on the map, and so cuts down your travel times a bit.
I’ll also mention here as part of my packrat mentality that I tended to play Fallout2 a bit like Tatctics, long before Tactics was released, in that I collected NPCs, as well as loot.
Then, I’d select the group of 2-4 party members best suited for whichever town/job I was about to do next, leaving the rest hanging around the garage waiting for me.
(The BoS base in San Fran would be ideal, but again, it’s too far off to the edge of the world map for my tastes.)
I’m not sure if the Fallout 2 thing is a BtVS thing. My references are, but my last Fallout 2 character was a male ninja type and certainly not named Buffy.
Oh. And this may interest a few of you Fallout fans who don’t want to wait for Fallout 3.
Anyone get the Easter Egg in the dialogue at some point that is basically “You have to have a Perception of 9 to see this comment, don’t you feel special” or something like it? I think it was on a computer console or in Vault City.
I love this game!
<minor hijack>
I adored what I played of Fallout 2. I’d say I got 20 hours in, and then in a glitch concerning a mission which revolved around a nuclear power plant ruined my file. I was too pissed to ever mess with it again, having seen the fruits of my previous labor vanquished in seconds.
Ouch.
I’d say give it another try, but then I’m biased.
Hell, give it another try anyway. just make sure you’ve got the last patch that was released for it. IIRC, as of a couple months back, Black Isle or Interplay still had it available to download on whichever website I saw it at.
And when confronted by a buggy game, always always always use multiple save slots, to avoid a total catasrophe like that.
[sub]Only really helps if you know in advance that it’s buggy with save files, 'course. Given recent trends in PC game patch releases, I treat all of 'em as buggy, to be safe.[/sub]
Actually, I probably will, relatively soon.
That aside…how far into the game is the nuclear reactor?
Hmm…
Well, the game is seriously open ended, but the most common order, especially the first time all the way through runs something like:
Your village
The Den
Modoc and the Underworld farm
Vault City
The Reactor
(back and forth between VC and the ghouls)
From here, it can vary a bunch, but the other towns/places include
Redding
The Uranium Mine (Broken Hills, I think?)
The NCR (three locations on the world map)
New Reno
San Francisco
The Enclave
The Endgame
You’re not quite halfway through. And I’m sure I missed something or other in there. The wasteland’s a big place.
Yeah, the reactor is about 1/3rd of the way through.
I finished Fallout 2 again. A few thoughts.
It’s really in some ways a fairly flawed and slipshod game. Lots of broken quests, bugs and other nuisances. Still good, of course, but it’s not what you’d call a polished game.
I’m of two minds about the level of humour. It’s sometimes very funny, but it also somewhat breaks the willing suspension of disbelief. Fallout played things much more straight, with only an undercurrent of dark humour, and it was able to have an ending that was both poignant and bleakly funny. Fallout 2 is so camp, so stuffed with pop culture references and breaking the fourth wall gags that it simply couldn’t have pulled off the same thing. Every time the game begins to draw you in, another weird, silly and distracting joke pops up and you’re once again just playing a computer game.
That sounds a bit pompous, and as though I take the game much too seriously, I guess, but really. Whe humour works in Fallout 2, it’s generally low-key, deadpan and blackly comic, like the conversation between Valerie and Vic in Vault City. It’s the cheery 'Fifties safety videos look to the interface. It’s not fucking Monty Python.
I don’t like the way the endgame develops. By Navarro my guy, designed, you may recall, as a stealthy assassin, was wearing power armour and carrying a plasma rifle. I could have stuck with the sneaky leather-clad guy, but really, it was becoming increasingly pointless to resist the flow. I don’t like the way it becomes more or less imperative to get the power armour, and how easy it becomes once you do have it. It takes the edge off the whole gritty survival game when you’re basically a walking tank. I also don’t like the way both games narrow into a more conventional ‘beat the bad guy and save the world’ type thing. I’d like a more in-genre type goal, like rebuilding civilization or something.
The first time around I also didn’t like the President’s revelations about the purposes of the Vaults; they seemed too over-the-top and inconsistent. This time, after thinking about the concept a little, I like it more; it is a rather creepy idea.
Yep, agreed. It is my favorite game, but there was some element of slop in there (one of the most egregious is how, in order to truly assasinate Mr. Salvatore without getting caught, you must steal his oxygen tank while having the poison tank in your inventory. If you replace his oxygen tank with the poison tank (via steal), you get caught (i.e. the Salvatore clan will shoot you a bit after Salvatore dies). If you steal his oxygen tank without poison tank in your inventory, you get caught. Weird bug, and I needed a walkthrough upon completion to really understand what was going on.
Wow, agreed. Sometimes it seemed like it was trying too hard. Although the comedian in the Bishop’s bar was hilarious. “What is up with radscorpions?” Heh, most of his seinfeld-like material really shouldn’t be funny, but it is.
Hmm, I see your point, but I don’t think it is strictly necessary to get the power armor, if you can take on all the Enclave without it, or if your sneak skill is high enough. Have not tested it myself. For the endgame, no matter how diplomatic you are, I believe you do have to destroy the Enclave base, so it is indeed pretty restricting. I guess they were trying to have a viable end-game goal that would work for both evil and good characters (I mean, if they care about surviving, the Enclave has to go down). Not sure if an evil character would care too much about rebuilding society, although they could have a variation in which evil character builds an evil empire…
You do sort of push society along during Fallout II (if you’re good, at least), but I agree that it would be really cool if the endgame was more built around deciding how the political system will work, and who will be in charge. That would be quite open ended, as you can try to go for a pure democracy or a caste-based system (Vault City inspired) or a purely evil dictatorship, with you at the throne. A big part of that could also be figuring out how to get towns to join your govt (like NCR and their thuggish attempt at coercing Vault City). You could also try to settle mutual declarations of independence and recognition, if annexation is not your bag. And if things don’t go your way, you can always try to beat their brains into submission 
Wow, I’m liking this game. Fallout 3, please?
If you’re waiting for III and want to play Role Playing games that use the same engine try IceWind Dale II (you get to create 6 characters) and Balduar’s Gate II. You’ll be used to the gameplay. Character movement and development. Plus they’re pretty damn good games that keep your attention.
I haven’t graduated to Fallout 2 yet, I’m still trying to find a way to get through the military base without killing my beloved Dogmeat.
A tech question I would love answered- we recently upgraded to a new PC, with Win XP. When we play Fallout, the sound (like the shooting or Dogmeat attacking) goes out from time to time. We then have to save and load the game ad it works fine. Any ideas what we can do to fix it?
I do not think that Fallout or Fallout 2 use the Infinity engine…and their gameplay is very different. Fallout games are strictly turn-based, with an action point-based combat system, while the Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale games had real time combat based on D&D style turn-based combat. The character creation system in Fallout 2 was far more complex and customizable, in the D&D games you basically roll your stats and pick from several different character types.
I’ve played them all, and I found even Baldur’s Gate II far inferior to Fallout 2, although it was still a great game. I could not guarantee that someone who enjoyed Fallout 2 would like these other games.
Planescape Torment was a damn good Infinity Engine game. Maybe not as good as Fallout 1 and 2, pretty good for different reasons.
I have also played both BG games as well as Icewind Dale 1, and while I enjoyed them all, they were mostly fun tactical strategy games that was set across the backdrop of a decent fantasy story.
What I love about Fallout 1 and 2 is the relative freedom it offers. It surely is not total freedom, more like freedom within constraints, but I love how you can choose the way in which you want to tackle various quests, and whether you want to tackle them at all. I love that you can work for all of the crime families in New Reno, and that you can assasinate each of them without anyone else knowing about it (I only figured out 2 of the 4… a walkthrough clued me in on the booby trapping of Bishop’s safe). I love how the ending (though buggy) reflects the choices you make in the game. I love how you have to make a tough moral choice between exposing NCR’s thuggish plan of bullying Vault City into joining them or not exposing the plan and letting Vault City continue on with its slavery. I love having the option to sell people into slavery. I love being able to say you’ll do something, and then backstabbing that person without necessarily killing them.
The two Fallout games gave me more choices than any other RPG I’ve played, which is why I love them. PS: Torment gives you a fair amount of choice as well, but not at the same degree. I realized that in Fallout 2, you can go straight from your village in Arroyo to Navarro, and then San Francisco, by-passing 90% of the game. Kinda cheesy, but the option to ignore most of the game is quite… refreshing. Torment still makes you go through every a fairly linear path, though it was certainly more free within its bonds than BG II and the Icewind Dales.
Thus… I long for Fallout 3…
However, in the meantime, I am currently going through Fallout 2 with a different character. An uber-charming and brilliant female pacifist, who has taken a vow not to kill a single living creature in the wasteland. So far, she’s made it to the village of the ghouls doing just that, though regretfully she has to turn down quite a few people in need (she can’t slay the rat god, or hakunin’s weeds, or those wolves attacking the brahmin). It is quite fun just sneaking around everyone and talking through people. She has no combat skills but a charisma of 9 and int 10, PLUS she’s a woman, so she can usually talk, bluff, or seduce her way past a problem 
If not, then she just runs like a mad chicken on speed.