Fallout: A Retrospective

Fallout is an important game. An important game that, up until yesterday, I had never played. I thought it might be interesting to try playing it before I finally get the chance to dive into New Vegas (which, in case if you didn't know, is developed by Obsidian Entertainment, who include among their number some people who worked on the original Fallout)

Fallout came along at a time when the RPG was supposed by many to be a dying genre. The market was glutted with repetitive dungeon crawlers, and it didn't help matters that, at the time, first person shooters seemed to be the only kind of games people were interested in playing.

Fallout was the first game from the legendary Black Isle Studios, and it was revolutionary because, unlike most rpgs at the time, and even more than the Ultima games (arguably the most important pre-Fallout rpgs), it was a non-linear game (There are multiple ways to complete the main quest of the game, and you can potentially complete the game without playing through the vast majority of its content. You can even betray your allies and side with the enemy, if you want, though this results in a game over) and it had an incredible atmosphere to it, as a result of its visual design and writing. The visual design, created by Leonard Boyarski (currently working at Blizzard, I believe), is influenced a great deal by the media of the 1950s. Specifically, it draws on old advertisements, nuclear propaganda, and pulp serials (laser guns and super mutants, etc.), and fuses them with a sort of retro-futurism (ie. the vacuum-tube powered computers). It also owes a great debt to the Mad Max movies (the world is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, you meet lots of people in leather jackets, and you get a pet attack dog, among other things). The interface itself looks like an ancient computer, which ties in with the manual's conceit that the entire game is some sort of grand simulation for training Vault Dwellers. Also, Fallout has great writing, and a subtle and pitch black sense of humour.

I feel like it should be noted again, that, at the time, good writing and non-linearity were not seen as being very important to rpgs. Which seems curious to me, in retrospect, because the entire genre is inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, and the word roleplaying implies playing a role, and playing a role, to me, implies the player choosing how they want their actions to affect the world around him/her. In fact, although games have advanced a great deal in terms of graphics, and, to some degree, in terms of writing, very few other mainstream games since 1997, if any, have offered the player such a pure roleplaying experience as Fallout does. Not even Planescape: Torment, my favourite game of all time, quite manages it.

Obviously, Fallout has what might kindly be referred to as "a few rough edges", mostly owing to it being an old game. It's fortunate that the manual is as well-written and interesting as it is (incidentally, you can number me among those who really miss the old encyclopaedic style of game manuals), because the interface and control scheme are somewhat complicated, compared to modern games, and the buttons don't have text pop up when you hover over them, to tell you what they do. This makes at least skimming the manual mandatory. Or, at least, I needed to do so. Fallout's graphics are, of course, somewhat primitive from a technical standpoint, though, as I pointed out earlier, they are still very cool to look at.

From a gameplay perspective, so to speak, I would argue that Fallout holds up reasonably well, even by the standards of a modern gamer. Or, at least, by my standards. Your AI teammates will often shoot each other, and you, in the back, and the game can be quite easy, and short, if the player chooses (Though, personally, I like short games. Games that have 100+ hours of content usually reach that figure as a result of having a lot of really boring content mixed in with the good, and the entire experience is worse for it.) Nonetheless, I had a lot of fun in some of the combat sequences I played, notably the first mission Decker gives you, and a mission where you clear out a farm taken over by bandits near the Hub. In particular, some of the text that pops up when you score critical hits was pretty fun to read. Apart from encountering radscorpions and cave rats all over the place, I felt like there was a good variety of enemies, all of whom posed their own unique challenges. As I said before, though, you can avoid combat in this game if you choose to do so. You can play this game pretty much however you want, and that makes it pretty much unique in the world of gaming.

I give Fallout, mm, 4 and a half dead ladyboys out of 5.