Fallout - Part 2: RAAATS!!!

From the very beginning, it is clear that Fallout is not your typical roleplaying game. Once you finish creating your character, you are addressed by the Overseer, who tells you that you must leave the safety of your underground Vault in order to seek out a water purifying chip. The Vault can't build another one, which makes this errand one of dubious utility (clearly, this Vault lifestyle is unsustainable), but you're the only one bold enough (or expendable enough) to brave the outside world.

When you gain control of the character, you find yourself in a cave, standing in front of the sleek sci-fi architecture of Vault 13.

There's no telling what dangers await me out there in the surface world. So I need to equip a weapon. I click on the inventory button underneath that red button in the center.

You start with some sparse, but high quality equipment. The gun is going to be a staple of my combat toolkit for the first few hours of the game. The main limitation here is that I only have 72 bullets, which means I can't afford to waste them on minor threats. That leaves me stuck with the knife, which I'm not particularly skilled in (it's this early paucity of ammunition that makes Max Stone a viable character), but luckily, I'm in no immediate danger because the present threat is . . .

RATS!

So maybe Fallout is a bit like other roleplaying games after all. The first mission is always rats. The interesting thing (for certain values of "interesting") here is that it is played completely straight. In most modern games, you'll fight rats, but the game will wink at it. The rat mission in Morrowind, for example, is self-consciously bizarre. The Bards' Tale openly mocks the concept.

Here, there are just a shit ton of rats. It's kind of weird, when you think about it. These aren't giant, mutated rats. They're just regular rats. Why are they attacking humans, especially one at a time? Why do I, a human, even bother engaging them?

Experience points, obviously. Each rat is worth 25xp and is not particularly threatening, so I could snag an extra 500 xp by clearing them out. It's not particularly sensitive, ecologically, and it helps precisely no one, but it does let me practice the combat system.

The way the fighting works is that you have a certain amount of action points, based off your agility. I've got 9. Each action has an action point cost. Swinging your knife normally costs 3AP, but my fast shot trait reduces the cost to 2. So I can make up to four attacks a turn and still have 1 AP left to either move out of the way (each hex of movement costs 1 AP) or boost my defense (when you end your turn, your armor class gets a +1 bonus for each unused action point you have remaining).

To attack, you right click until your mouse changes into a target, and then you left click on the enemy. While your mouse is hovering over a target, it gives you the odds of your attack succeeding. My chances are 47%, due to my low melee skill. I'd have a better chance with the gun, but rats have terrible accuracy, damage, and defense, so 47% is not at all bad.

I quickly clear out the cave and find myself at the cusp of the outside world.

A whole big, unknown world is out there, filled with god-knows what.

It's not much to look at, but looks can be deceiving. The blue buttons on the right will take you to major locations (such as Vault 15, the most obvious place to search for a new water chip), but you can actually direct your character to any point on the map. The wasteland tiles don't have anything in them (usually - sometimes you can discover new caves and cities and such by moving directly into the unknown, though it's often better to wait until people tell you about a location before going there, sequence breaking notwithstanding), but as you move over them, you have a chance of triggering a random encounter.

This is indicated by a red lightning bolt. I'm not sure if these encounters are procedurally generated or just chosen from a list, but they can vary greatly in composition (and the attendant danger). My first contact with the outside world is MORE RATS

Well, giant mole rats anyway. I stuck with my knife, because I figured it was a starting encounter, and thus not worth wasting bullets. As you can see from the shot above, I was disastrously wrong. The "lesser" mole rats tear me apart, because this is an old-school game and it is not at all forgiving of sloppy mistakes like "using an inferior weapon" or "being level one."

The end result is that my bones will bleach in the unforgiving sun of the post-apocalyptic waste.

I'll be seeing that screen a lot.