I think I realize now my problem with this game. I have not gotten into the hardcore mindset. I started playing it just after I finished Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell, and thus came to with a "bust down the front door and kill every mothafucker in the room" sort of attitude, and that only rarely works in a strategy game and is especially ill-considered in an old-school strategy-rpg. I needed to learn to take pleasure in the methodical, to cover all the angles, to fiddle with my inventory, to conserve my ammunition, and to save often.
This last one was especially important. I've played Fallout Tactics for five hours since my last post. Two of those hours were lost to an inopportune death. I have no one to blame but myself, of course, though that doesn't mean I'm mature enough to accept this with good grace.
FUCK!
Ahem. Okay, so I've only actually finished one mission in the last five hours. I managed, at least, to learn a bit of information about the Brotherhood's mysterious rival. They are apparently technologically advanced enough to build cybernetic replacement limbs. So the odds of them being Caesar's Legion are basically nil. I always knew that was the most probable outcome, due to the franchise's long hiatus and change of ownership, but I was kind of hoping to get more backstory on the series most despicable villains.
Although, come to think of it, the Brotherhood of Steel might itself qualify for that honor. Ever since the beginning of the game, they've been condescending to me, but I wrote off their obvious ethnic chauvinism as just a part of their militaristic hazing of new recruits. However, at the end of my most recent mission, I learned that they're planning on crucifying the raiders I defeated as a lesson to any other troublemakers out there. I think once you start breaking out the crucifixions, that's when you cross the line from anti-hero to villain. It was a little ambiguous, though. Seeing as how I only left two or three survivors, it's possible that they meant that they would arrange the corpses of my enemies into crucifixion poses.
That's a little gross and macabre, but it's probably no worse than my killing them in the first place.
. . . And that's pretty much all the plot I have to summarize, because as I said, it took me five hours to beat one level (it is embarrassing how many people I lost to land mines). Fallout Tactics so far has been really stingy with the plot and setting details, informing me of what's going on only during mission briefings and end-of-level summaries. I'm starting to think that the story is only a thin frame to go around the game's missions, and that the real enjoyment comes from being a total tactics nerd inside the Fallout universe (I know, it's almost as if the name of the game was Fallout Tactics).
Ordinarily that wouldn't bother me. I like turn-based strategy games, and one thing I especially like about something like Civilization V is the purity of the board-game like experience. It's less that these things I'm giving orders to are characters in the world whose actions I'm controlling and more like they're game pieces I'm moving around to maximize my chances of victory. That's an approach I normally enjoy.
It's just the feel of things is not quite right. Each member of my squad has their own character sheet and name. They aren't just troopers #1-6, they are Kyle and Farsight and Stitch and Jo and Trevor and Brian. It makes me nervous when they get attacked and just a little sad when they die. Yet I don't really know a lot about them. They are not true rpg companions. I should perhaps view them a little more pragmatically than I do. It's not a totally comfortable dissonance.
On the other hand, it's not a huge deal either. I think as I play this game more and more, my expectations are starting to scale back. I'm starting to view each mission less as a barrier between me and the story (though if I'm being honest, playing Fallout Tactics right after the first two Fallouts and right before the last two does in fact feel like hitting a huge speedbump) and more as a major operation whose points of interest are intrinsic to the activity itself. Moving through the maps, doing house to house searches, and adapting to various tactical situations is in fact the point of the game.
I think when I learn to slow down and really savor what's in front of me is when I'll finally start enjoying the game on its own terms, instead of loading it down with baggage I brought with me from the rest of the series.
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