Fallout 2

Release Date - October 29, 1998 (NA)

Developer - Black Isle Studios

Publisher - Interplay Productions

Platform - PC

One cannot talk about Fallout 2 without talking about the first game in the franchise, 1997’s excellent Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game. The two games share a lot of features, mechanics and even graphical assets, and both are outstanding examples of the Computer RPG (CRPG). Fallout and Fallout 2 stand shoulder to shoulder as standouts in the history of PC gaming. 

Fallout 2 began development even before the first game had been released. Due to financial struggles at Interplay, the studio was under pressure to get the sequel out as fast as possible, and the game was made with roughly nine months of development time. A herculean effort, although players will notice that the two games look nearly identical in terms of graphics and gameplay. Fallout 2 would be a sequel that built on the original not in terms of new graphics or mechanical overhauls, but mostly in terms of more locations, items and characters. Fallout 2’s accelerated development meant that a lot had to be lifted directly from the first game, so it’s a good thing that Fallout was such a great base to build upon. Some even argue that Fallout was the beginning of something of an RPG renaissance on the PC, reintroducing the market to the distinct ‘CRPG’ genre that had once been so popular with titles like Might and Magic and Ultima. Fallout 2 had some very big shoes to fill.

There’s a lot of places in the post-nuclear world that you just don’t want to linger in.

(All screenshots taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLNAd1JyNQw)

Fallout 2 puts you in the shoes of the ‘Chosen One’, the tongue in cheek alias of the player character. Set 80 years after the events of the first game and 164 years after an apocalyptic war. The Chosen One is a direct descendant of The Vault Dweller (Fallout’s player character) and now lives as part of a tribe founded by their ancestors. The village is on the verge of ruin, with the animals dying and crops failing, and The Chosen One must find a GECK (Garden of Eden Creation Kit) to restore the environment of their land. What begins as a relatively simple request soon becomes more complicated as The Chosen One stumbles upon multiple warring factions and sinister plots to control what’s left of the devastated continent. 

First and foremost of what was carried over from the previous game was the underlying RPG system that was created for Fallout; the SPECIAL RPG system that has become a staple for the Fallout series. SPECIAL represents a character's Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. These will all be set in your character creation process right at the beginning of the game. Each characteristic is given a rating between 1 and 10, with an overall cap on how many ‘points’ to assign. These SPECIAL stats persist through the entire game, with very rare opportunities to alter them, and will determine how you navigate the wastelands.

Each stat will affect a number of abilities. For example; strength affects things like the player’s hit-points and how much damage they can do with melee weapons. Perception will affect your accuracy with ranged weapons, but also how likely you are to spot traps or how far you can see (meaning you can spot enemies earlier). You can see already how drastically different a game might play out depending on how the SPECIAL attributes are allocated. Furthermore, they will also affect the starting level for the player skills, of which there are 6 combat, 8 active and 4 passive skills. Want to be a good ‘doctor’? You’d better have invested well in your perception and intelligence then! Building a character is a big part of the fun of Fallout 2, where you can mix and match SPECIAL and skills to suit how you’d like to play, with radically different options available to different builds. Unlike some other RPG games, it is entirely possible to build a ‘bad’ character if you don’t pay attention, which can make the game impossible to actually beat.

Be careful with your character build. You absolutely can make a protagonist that sucks.

Once the character has been created and you’re let loose in the world of Fallout 2, you’ll find that the player can roam freely around the West Coast of what’s left of former USA. The freedom can be overwhelming, but you’ll have some loose directions on where to go next at all times. With more locations to visit than the first title, the world also feels more cohesive than in Fallout; the settlements and towns often affect each other in a meaningful way, and quests will sometimes span across different locations or direct you to new places. It’s a nice bit of progress in storytelling too, indicating that in the 80 years since the first game the world has begun to get more connected and society has grown more complex. Locations have also begun to feature more permanent buildings, developed societies, and the bottle cap make-shift currency of the first game has been replaced with minted currency. The noticeable societal changes since the first game are a great bit of world building.

Among all these locations to visit, the player will find a number of side-quests to add to the fun and generally distract you from saving your village. There’s a crazy amount of things to do including, but not limited to joining an organised crime syndicate, becoming a prize fighter and starring in a porno movie.

Your SPECIAL stats will affect your entire game, but there are ways to improve them…

As the player travels through the vast world, they’ll find lots of new toys to play with; more items, weapons and pieces of armour than were featured in the first game. Perhaps more importantly are all the rich and varied characters to meet, and (if your charisma is high enough) some will even join you as a companion on your journey. Many of the characters feature voice acting, but even the ones that aren’t have rich backstories and unique personalities. They also often have conflicting goals or ideals, and The Chosen One can easily be put in a situation where they have to take a side (or try to play them off against each other).

Fallout 2 presents many solutions to the same problem, for every task or obstacle you come up against there are usually multiple ways to tackle it. Locks can be picked, people can be persuaded or paid off, violence can be used and computers can be hacked. As long as your character is competently put together, you’ll be able to find a solution to most anything you come across even though different character builds will lead to very different ways of approaching. Will you pick the locked door? Or reprogram the computer to let you through the back? Will you have enough charisma to talk your way out of a jam, or did you already pick-pocket someone’s ID to get out of a sticky situation? As you can imagine, this leads to a lot of replay value and a lot of thoughts like; ‘What if I made a character based around speech and luck instead of an agile sniper?’.

You can play the game in many different ways, but sometimes you really just need to get violent and leave a pile of bodies in your wake.

Despite the game’s lasting impression on a gaming public, at the time of release the sales performance was a mixed bag. In some regions the game did particularly well, whereas in others it was falling below Interplay’s expectations. Overall, the game managed to reach a satisfactory level, but it would be a long time before we saw a numbered sequel to the game (Fallout 3 would be released in 2008, about ten years later). Regardless of the sales, critical reception for the game was very strong. Fallout 2 was lauded for its mix of action, world building and depth of characters. Despite some bugs on release, and the very noticeable similarity to the original Fallout, the game certainly managed to live up to the lofty expectations of it’s predecessor and become a legendary part of PC gaming history.

With the release of the new Amazon Prime TV series, it’s a fantastic time to jump into the dark satirical world of Fallout 2!