I'm finding it difficult to get a handle on the Fallout 2 experience. It is a game that looms large in my personal history, and there's always the danger that instead of talking about the game, I will wind up talking about the reputation of the game.
Even though I haven't played it in more than ten years, and thus experienced it with ostensibly fresh eyes, I can't help viewing Fallout 2 as an artifact out of its time. There is greatness there, undeniably so, but that greatness comes at you from a remove. You have to appreciate the game for its context in the history of the genre, because so many of its individual choices are dictated by the technological limitations, prejudices, and peculiar obsessions of the era in which it was created.
I would liken it to reading an ancient epic. You know that situation where the text is clearly setting up for a massive battle scene, and you're like "this is going to be awesome," and then it just swerves off to the side and starts describing everyone's shields for ten pages. Or some character says something utterly inexplicable, and only years later do you learn that it was in fact a somewhat funny and violently racist joke that slandered a culture which has been extinct for three thousand years.
From the perspective of a contemporary audience, these are flaws, but you can't really say "get this thing an editor and update it for modern times," because that would be a desecration. You have to take the bad with the good, because it's the work's status as an original that makes it important, but when the rubber hits the road, you'd probably get more pure enjoyment out of something a bit more polished (breathtaking originality only counts if you haven't already experienced the myriad of inevitable copycats).
Which is to say that Fallout 2 hasn't aged especially well. I'm old enough to know who Monica Lewinsky is, and so the obvious parody in the Enclave President's secretary makes sense to me, but it was definitely a joke that's confined to a particular historical moment. And I'm pretty sure that even in 1998, referring to your Asian characters as "wearing funny pajamas" and having them call the player "round-eyes" was probably not acceptable behavior.
Yet the part of the game that has aged the least well is arguably its best feature - Fallout 2 is insanely ambitious. There's an item, the Super Stimpack, that heals you for a massive amount, but then does a smaller amount of damage to you after a set amount of time. It is possible, if you are not careful, to kill yourself this way, by stacking up too much of a hit point deficit. It is also possible to use this method to assassinate the president of the Enclave. Somebody thought of that loophole and then included it in the game.
They also thought of allowing you to infiltrate Enclave facilities by wearing power armor. This benefit even extends to your companions. As long as they are wearing the armor, no one will bother them. It's some great attention to detail that makes the world feel more vital and real. Yet that also leads into the game's downside. Though every human character is fooled by your companion's disguise, Enclave robots are not. And if you're thinking "oh wow, so robots are harder to fool, neat," you're probably wrong. The robots are fooled by your disguise, and will let you pass unmolested so long as you're alone. The fact that they attack your companions is almost certainly an oversight. (An oversight, by the way, that I discovered only after I'd gotten deep into the Enclave Oil Rig and was unable to retreat without facing more than a dozen power-armored troops, who also become hostile when the robots start attacking you).
Now, open-world game = bugs, obviously, but I feel like we've gotten to a point where our big games are a bit more functional. When it was released, Fallout 2 could coast on the jubilant sense of freedom it provided, because there was nothing else like it out there (the original Baldur's Gate wouldn't come out for another three months - early 1999 must have been a great time to be a PC roleplaying fan). Yet coming at it a decade and a half too late, I was somewhat underwhelmed by my ability to choose between the Hubologists and the Shi. I feel like, in a world where Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas exist, I'd have gotten the option to somehow acquire fuel for the tanker without having to engage in political assassination for people whose motives I don't really understand.
(Slight Tangent - when I first played this game, I had no idea what Scientology even was, so the Hubologists came off to me as just a kooky sci-fi religion, not particularly out of place in this wacky post-apocalyptic world where aliens were, in fact, a verifiable reality infesting an oil tanker not three screens away, and thus I had no idea why the game was so down on them, particularly since all of their shady actions happen off-screen and are relayed to you by their mortal enemies, and made especially cruel by the fact that going along with their weirdness can potentially boost your Luck by as much as 3 points)
I don't really want to complain about the game, though. Because it really is fantastic. There is just so much to do packed into this tiny little package. I think the original Fallout probably aged better as a pure gameplay experience, primarily because it is a tighter story with a more straightforward critical path, and fewer goofy pop-culture references (though nothing beats finding the Bride of Death from Monty Python's Holy Grail while wandering randomly through the desert). However, Fallout 2 is arguably the greater achievement. It is animated by an incredible sense of fun, and it rewards poking your nose into random corners of the map, creating this beautifully weird world that you just want to explore and inhabit.
I'm aware of the fact that I'm probably too keen to attribute great influence and innovation to this game. It is undoubtedly a branch of the rpg tree, and that if later games seem inspired by its formula, it's probably because both derived from a common source. However, in my personal canon, Fallout 2 holds an immensely important place. It was my first (okay, if you want to get technical, second) open world rpg. Due to the bundle I bought it in, Fallout came before, but it was in many ways a more conventional narrative. This game gave you a wide open map and then dared you to find the story. I now view this as a flaw, but at the time it blew my mind. You could just wander off and have adventures in areas completely unrelated to the main story! Why would it let you do that? You could join the evil factions! You could get gay-married (if, unlike my current character, you have the Charisma for it)! It changed my perspective on gaming, and what was possible to expect from the roleplaying genre.
So, if I come back to the game a bit more jaded, I am the way I am due in no small part to Fallout 2. If I want more, it's because this game gave me the audacity to demand it. That, I think, is worth remembering.
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