This turn based vs. real time argument is pretty silly. Sometimes one works well, sometimes the other works better. Sometimes you want to ponder a strategy for hours and enjoy seeing it come to fruition brilliantly. There’s a reason chess is closely associated with intelligence. Other times you want to feel your mind racing as fast as it can trying to out think your foe. My fondest videogame memories generally involve me hanging on by the skin of my teeth, racing to come up with a strategy to catch my foe off guard. It loses a lot of impact when he can pause everything for 20 minutes to reorient himself. Both styles have their places and to pit them against each other is pretty silly.
On topic, Fallout 2 is one of my all time favorites, but frankly, the combat is pretty weak by any objective measure. It’s fun because it’s visceral and pretty fast paced, but really, you don’t have a lot of effective options and it’s heavily dominated by chance rather than tactics. Fallout 3 is plenty fun in its own way, as well.
It’s not that I think real-time is inherently worse than turn-based, it’s just that, to me, Fallout epitomized the western turn-based RPG. A first-person, real-time Fallout game just seemed…wrong. It’s like what’s next, a Super Mario RPG?
That said, having begun playing F3 last night, a lot of my doubts have disappeared and I think the franchise is in good hands.
In Bioware’s defense, all of their games have pause+orders, which is essentialy “turn by turn when you feel like it” and allows one to blitz through easy fights on autopilot (instead of spending half an hour on a band of raiders armed with flintlocks. I’m looking at you, Fallout 1&2, Jagged Alliance and Silent Storm ;))
On the whole I agree with you, though. Real Time Strategy isn’t, and should be cleansed by fire (except maybe the Dawn of War franchise, cause… Warhammer 40k, maaaan. Nostalgia powah ).
The absolute best mix of real time and T/T I’ve ever seen is the Combat Mission series. Extremely detailed WW2 wargames, and the turn scheme is quasi-perfect : each turn lasts 5 minutes, during which your units try to follow your general directives, but may act on their own if something unexpected happens, or they think your orders are nuts, e.g. “run through that field that’s being strafed by 3 heavy machine guns and blasted by heavy mortars, hop hop !”. The fog of war is excellent too, because it relies on what each units sees AND thinks it sees. For a conscript brigade, every German tank looks like a Tiger tank, so that’s what you see, and that’s what they react to. A veteran unit will ID it correctly as a puny Panzer II and will likely accept to get close to it to bust it up with ‘nades. Friggin’ brilliant games… too bad the AI isn’t up to snuff, but multiplayer rocks. And even better : it’s play-by-mail. Huzzah !
You probably won’t like F2, then, ever. I like gritty realism, but the realism is that my reflexes just are not what they used to be. I used to spend hours at arcades, gleefully clicking buttons and moving my character around. Nowadays I just can’t do the clicking any more.
I love Fallout and Fallout 2. I still play them, now and then. I enjoy the story. I think that there are parts of both games that could be improved (I don’t know WHY that damned temple at the beginning had to be so tedious), but overall, I greatly enjoyed the games. Of course, now that I know, I usually get the power armor as soon as I can. Still, I get a lot of enjoyment out of those games. I particularly like to have a female character and lead Myron around by his…nose.
In pen and paper RPGs my characters usually have to start out by killing rats. Giant rats, sure, but rats all the same. I like to work for my rewards, as a general rule, even if I do opt for the power suit (I usually have a low strength so that makes up for it, some).
A lot of the fun of Fallout is interacting with the NPCs, whether they’re in your party or not. You can try bluffing them, or schmoozing them, or just simply being honest with them. Unlike in a lot of games, Fallout NPCs have their own lives, desires, and objectives. They aren’t just hanging around, waiting for a leader to come along and offer a place in the group. The bad guys don’t necessarily think of themselves as bad guys (except for Gizmo and the gangbangers in 1), they just think that they have a better way of improving the world than the main character does.
Some hints: it’s better to read up on some skills than to put points in them, until you can’t read for more skill level. Stealing is a great way to increase your resources, so make sure to put some points in Steal. Intelligence affects how many skill points you get each level, so it’s good to start off with a fairly high intelligence. Most drugs WILL have some drawbacks. Even the radiation poisoning cure can be addictive. Be sure you know what you’re taking, the risks, and the benefits.
What a load of garbage it was…and it felt like a betrayal.
It was pretty obvious when looking at it that they went to RT because that seemed the trend…and, more importantly, because they didn’t want to spend any time making good AI. When you slowed it down and examined it, the AI was low grade moronish.
Fallout 2 is one of my all time favorites. But yes, the beginning is slow, tedious, and boring. I know it’ll get better and I still have to stick bamboo under my fingernails to keep myself from falling asleep during the temple. It’s a shame the worst five minutes are at the very start, because it turns a lot of people off from the game.
The problem is that the temple is made for characters with melee attributes. If you spec for guns or speech you have no choice but to run from the ants or click 50 times to kill each one. The final encounter can be talked out of with a high enough speech and intelligence, but otherwise you have to slog through it the hard way.
But if you don’t like the turn based combat, you should stop playing. It’s one of the core components of Fallout 1/2, so if you don’t enjoy it there’s really no point in suffering through it.
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