:rolleyes: Well, I have been known to piss people off
Why would the Fallout fans be opposed to an online game? Or am I completely mis-reading your note? Strikes me that people who liked the game would truly want to play around in it more.
I just had a look at Amazon, most of those are jewel-case only with no box and no manual. Is there a manual on the CD in the original game? Is the game reasonably easy to figure out, or are there lists and lists of skills or talents or whatever that are only viewable in a paper manual? Or can I get that stuff online somewhere?
I’d rather order from Amazon than buy it in person as Amazon already owes me some money, and I don’t trust brick and mortar stores to have an item like this when I go in.
Well, the original games came with ultra-spiffy spiral-bound rule books that were almost as entertaining as the game itself. However, they’re not strictly necessary. The game is pretty easy to figure out on your own, and even though it has reams of skills, abilities, and perks, all of them are explained in-game as well as in the instruction manual. At any rate, these repackaged bundles usually have a .pdf with the original documentation, so you shouldn’t really have any problems with them.
Having bought the bundle pack at a KMart for $10 (I saw it the other week at Best Buy in the same format, btw), I can say for sure that it comes with the documentation on CD in .pdf format. It’s pretty easy to noodle it out on your own for the most part, but reading the manual is worth it for the manual alone.
Fallout also has one of my all time favorite game intros.
One of the most theraputic games around. There is nothing more fun than having a unarmoured punk walk up to you while in full power armor and try to start something. Then just unloading a full Bozak(sp?) clip at point blank range. Criting a guy with maybe 60 HP for 3500 is just a good release. I wish I had battle armor and a mini-gun in real life 
A couple (mostly) random thoughts:
Anyone ever play a session of either 1 or 2, and get to wondering where Christine and Ace got to after all these years? (Fountain of Dreams my ass.)
Ever tried getting through either game with damn near no combat skills? 'Tain’t easy. Especially with Ian blazing away full auto at every damn thing that moves.
I’m not the only who’s entertained the fantasy of someone porting 1 over to the improved engine used for 2, am I? as Johnny Angel said, the storyline is a bit better in the first game.
Damn. It’s been long enough since I’ve played either game, that I’m trying to remember specific details and realize I’ve got both games all mushed together in my head. Time to dig out them CDs and head west again, methinks.
Ever end a game of 2 with no humans/mutants in your party? Two Robo-Dogs, one more sentient than the other, Dogmeat boosted from the flashback encounter, and the Skynet robot… Well, they’re fun to take out and bash random monsters with, anyway.
[sub]And how many guys started a female character on a replay of 2, just to see what responses the Porn Star got from the folks in New Reno?[/sub]
I started a female character because I heard you could make the car thief explode by having sex with him repeatedly. She turned out to be my favorite character - she started out as your typical ‘Small-Arms Diplomat’ with good gun skills, high intelligence, and I had some smooth talker kind of perks (can’t remember which one(s)). Then she got addicted to ‘Mentats’ (for those who haven’t played, they are a drug that looks like Mentos) - in New Reno I was trying to solve a mystery and I knew I needed higher intelligence and charisma to get some of the answers I needed, so I kept taking them to boost those stats.
Then I leave town, and at a random encounter my character can barely talk - her intelligence and charisma sank into the retarded zone. She got a little bit better but was still below-average in those stats unless she was high. I ended up losing all my friends, and wandered the wastes in my power armor for a while. I then went down south to try to fight in a martial arts tournament but my reputation was too good, or something like that.
You’re thinking of the “Big Trouble in Little China” version of San Francisco, where the two martial arts masters (one good, one evil) are vying for dominance. I think.
One or the other will spar with you (depending on your rep) and ask you to take down his opposite, if you beat his minions in hand to hand.
Yeah, coming down off any of the various drugs is pretty harsh. The stats that were boosted drop to normal, then below, for a while, while you’re in withdrawal. The mentats intelligence drop is one of the funniest, for the conversation options you get with an INT of less than 4.
[sub]Oh yeah: I’m also not the only one who slaughters the car thieves, and uses their garage as a base of operations, with all them handy lockers for extra ammo and stuff, right?[/sub]
Ooh, a bonus “almost a spoiler”
Anyone a fan of the game who doesn’t know how to get most of your weapons ‘upgraded’ by a special someone?
[sub]Combine the mentats withdrawal with a conversation with this guy, and learn the true power of suggestion.[/sub]
Slight hijack but this seems an appropriate thread to ask in. Some time ago I came across a site where some people were trying to port the game Wasteland (the “spiritual prequel” to the Fallout series) to the Fallout engine. Now, of course, I can’t find it (though it may be buried in the few zillion Fallout pages Google gives me). Anyone else hear of this or know the status of it?
Well, if you don’t mind putting up with a not-very-easy-to-use program, you can make Wasteland yourself. They’ve released the Fallout 2 editor. I’ve been fooling around with it a little. It seems pretty easy to make maps. The scripts that control the characters and dialoge, however, require some programming knowledge.
Damn, I still have my copies of Fallout, Fallout 2, and even Fallout Tactics, which takes place between the first game and the second. I never finished the first one or Tactics, but I had a great time playing them. Maybe after I get over Master of Orion 3, I’ll go back for a little post-holocaust action.
I sure do miss Wasteland, too. That game rocked my Commodore 64!
Doesn’t it? I went out and bought myself a Louis Armstrong CD after playing Fallout 2 for a while.
Spiritual prequel? Hell, Wasteland and Fallout were basically the same game! Extremely similar plot and situations, for example, the Brotherhood of Steel and the Guardian Citadel were analogous.
I thought the only reason that Fallout wasn’t called Wasteland 2 or was a re-release of Wasteland was because EA or somebody wouldn’t cough up the rights to Interplay/Black Isle, so they basically rehashed the game but with slightly different stuff all around.
psiekier wrote:
You might also want to take a good look at The Ink Spots, who did the song used in Fallout 1.
Not to mention the religious cult that worshipped the bomb (or the atom, anyway), the hidden military base out in the middle of nowhere where the big showdown at the endgame takes place…
Yeah, in all but name (for various legal reasons) Fallout was Wasteland 2. Well, Wasteland 1.5, mebbe.
The actual Wasteland 2 was what eventually became Fountain of Dreams. It’s available here and there on the net (no links y’all, sorry) but I don’t recommend it. Go replay Wasteland instead.
tanstaafl: I seem to recall hearing about that project some time back, but I’ve got no more details than you, at present.
[sub]Weren’t they calling it Radioactive Wasteland?[/sub]
I’m still waiting to see an answer to this. I, too, am curious as to why fans of the game would have strong objections to an online version.
I’m thinking they’d think it’d dilute the ‘purity’ of the series, by corrupting the series into something too far away from it’s RPG roots. Some hardcore fans are weird 
You could make an online RPG in the Fallout setting, but it would lack all of the charm of Fallout. The things that make it great are the things that wouldn’t work in an online game.
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Character Creation - Online RPGs rarely have character creation systems as customizable as that in Fallout. There is a reason why most online RPGs use a strict class-based system instead of a system where you choose skills and perks like Fallout - it makes it possible to make the various character types balanced with each other so there is at least some variety of play. If you give players the ability to pick and choose whatever skills they like, you end up with a situation like Asheron’s Call, where EVERYONE had the same skillset by the time they reached level 30. When the majority of players are using the same optimized character template, future content is going to be balanced for those players, making it extremely difficult for those who do not conform to continue to advance. If Fallout became an online game it would either have to become class-based, or the perks and skills would be stripped of all their character so that it didn’t really matter how you built your character as long as you had certain skills.
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Interactivity - The Fallout RPGs had an extremely interactive world. This does not work with online games because you have a large number of people who will be trying to exploit the environment to either benefit themselves or cause grief for others. You couldn’t have NPCs whose opinion of the player can vary based on your actions, whose deaths have repercussions - because that same character is going to either be invincible or he is going to be killed every 5 minutes or so, only to ‘respawn’ later. You can’t have environments filled with various goodies hidden away in unusual places, because they would all be found before most players got a chance, and if they came back after a while they would be harvested regularly.
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Open-endedness - In Fallout 2, it’s possible, though quite difficult, for a low level character to make their way into a hidden enclave of the bad guys and steal some very powerful equipment, that can make your character practically invincible in most of the regions intended for low-mid level characters. There are many places in the game where you can overcome obstacles far more powerful than you through intelligence and luck, and there are usually at least two ways to complete any task. There are frequently very different outcomes depending on how you approach the problems in the game - your character’s choices have meaning. With these aspects in a multiplayer game, you would have the problem of a large number of lower-level players using the ‘easy way’ solutions to the quests that had one available to get access to gear they shouldn’t have, and you would not be able to have your character’s actions effect the world because there are going to be hundreds or thousands of other characters, trying to complete the same quests.
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Story - The Fallout games gave your character a backstory that was sufficiently open-ended to allow all kinds of characters, but strong enough that you felt like your character was a part of the world that you are learning about as you go through the game. As you get further in the game you have the opportunity to become either a great saviour of the wastes or one of the worst villains in history - but the story centers around YOU. If you try to give every player that same experience, it’s going to be ridiculous (‘So, your a tribal too? Oh, you are also trying to save your tribe? They call you the chosen one too?’). If you don’t, it loses a lot of what makes Fallout great.
I agree with those who don’t like the idea of an online Fallout game. It just wouldn’t work. There are too many people in the world addicted to online games, and they seem to think that anything would be better as an online game, even when it makes no sense - when Morrowind came out there were people on the boards going on about how much greater it would be if it was online like Everquest. Morrowind is an even worse candidate for an MMORPG than Fallout.
You make some very good points, and I largely agree with them.
However, I, personally, have been hoping for a post-nuclear MMORPG for a while. I think the genre has been really underexploited. Sledge hammers and primitive guns are cooler than swords and sorcery - scrounged up drugs and medicine are cooler than magic potions. The whole post-nuclear genre could be used to make tons of great games - and the setting was one thing that made the fallout series great.
So, figuring that someone wanted a post-nuclear themed game, what better setting, history, and style than fallout?
It wouldn’t be fallout 3, but it wouldn’t be meant that way.
Good points Badtz Maru. I have not yet delved into the timesink of on-line gaming (I was a MUDder back in the early days, but realised that even that was going to take all my waking hours), but your comments on how the environment would be exploited make sense to me.
It’s a shame – I’d really have liked a world like Fallout 2 where I could just wander around and do stuff – maybe some other quests and so on. I’ve downloaded the F2 Editor, and I’ll play with that. Either that or write a Falloout module for Dungeon Siege (if I ever get finished with the Rogue one 