Games

It's less the age and more that they just plain don't play well. They always feel like you're supposed to be in control of a full party but you never are, even once you finally get companions they're AI controlled (and it's not even a good AI).

Btw those are also on sale. Steam has a Fallout Classics bundle with FO1, FO2, and FO Tactics for $5

I got that free game from Epic a while back: Encased. It took the isometric gameplay/feel from the first 2.5 fallout games and modernized them pretty well. I haven't finished it (my character is a psychic god. it's fun, but I've kind of lost the thread of the story. I think I'm in act 3 or something) but a mod porting FO1 or FO2 to that engine would be sweet.

I have a space in my heart reserved for Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel. :')

I really didn't like one element in Fallout 1: the fact that it has a timer on the game.

For an open-world game, it's nice to have time to spend wandering around. I'm not saying that it's not realistic, just that I didn't like having to worry about that.

There are mods that can adjust the damage scaling.

That being said, it kind of comes with the RPG genre. If you're going to make your character get steadily more powerful, then late game, everything is going to be trivial or you're going to have to implement some way of producing more challenges.

Most of the solutions to the problem are in some way unsatisfactory.

• You can have a level cap. The original Neverwinter Nights did this, and each expansion you bought would increase that cap and add new and harder content. Most RPGs have at least some form of "soft" cap, where the experience cost to level rises exponentially. I'm not sure what introduced this, though Dungeons & Dragons certainly popularized it.

• You can procedurally-generate harder content. The easiest way to do this is what Fallout 4 does, which is to keep jacking up enemy stats. This does get to kind of ludicrous levels if you keep playing the game for the long haul. This also keeps old areas interesting (and Fallout 4 does encourage you to backtrack through existing area).

• You can just keep pushing the character ahead via some artificial mechanism, but that kind of sucks from a "time to explore an open world" standpoint.

• You can not level. Most RPGs have some mechanism via which the character constantly gets more powerful, to have a sense of progression, but not all. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead -- really an open-world roguelike -- has the player learn skills (with a soft-cap due to exponential falloff), but in general, the stats you have are the stats you get when you make your character. There are some very exotic items that can enhance the character, but they are very rare and hard to find. Most of how you become more powerful is getting more powerful items. There are mods -- bundled with the base game -- that make the game play more like a traditional RPG, with level-up and stat gain. I think that this is realistic, as in real life, people don't really "level up", but I think that the "leveling up" concept is an appealing element of gameplay. People like progression.

Not only the graphic, the control is clunky and the UI is hard to navigate, it need to be remastered with QOL update to modern standard. I can look past the graphic but the control really need a lot of getting used to.

I think that's a little harsh. Can I ask what you feel is wrong with the graphics as they are?

I'm currently playing Fallout and my only issue is the UI scaling, the graphics themselves I find quite charming.

See, what they need to do is update the graphics on 1 & 2.

So, how? You mean retain 2D isometric graphics, but do something like 32-bit color? IIRC it used an 8-bit palette.

considers

It might be possible to run it through one of those AI upscalers, get double resolution and 24-bit color.

I have no idea how well they work on things with alpha masks, though.

There are some open-source engines that can use the isometric Fallout data, I believe.

googles

I think that FIFE is the one I'm thinking of, but it looks like they headed off in the direction of being a generic RPG engine, and I don't see reference there any more to Fallout in the docs.

https://nma-fallout.com/threads/fife-open-source-rpg-engine-with-fallout-support.163087/

This sounds like this is a separate engine reimplementation from FIFE, but apparently can run Fallout 1 and Fallout 2:

https://github.com/alexbatalov/fallout1-ce

https://github.com/alexbatalov/fallout2-ce

I imagine that if it can't handle higher resolutions and bitdepths already, someone could push a PR to add it.

I don't recall enough of 3 -- which I played the least -- to remember how they implemented invisible walls. Wasn't it mostly buildings in DC and rubble?

In Fallout: New Vegas, it was mostly terrain features, cliff faces and the like, though New Vegas also didn't consistently create features that blocked you, so if you really wanted to try to make your way up a cliff face, you generally could via jumping and careful movement. Fallout: New Vegas also didn't always consistently do this, like:

Fallout 4 and to a greater degree Fallout 76 didn't have terrain obstacles at the map edge. They just tried to avoid putting interesting things that draw you to the map edge, so that you wouldn't want to crash into the edge. Fallout 4 does a less good job of that than Fallout 76. For Fallout 4:

There are also some Fallout 4 mods that I've played that tuck things near the map edge, because it isn't used in the base game and they want to avoid crashing into other things, which I think isn't a great idea.

For Fallout 76, the game is designed such that there just isn't really anything that interesting near the map edge, and there's some buffer around it and terrain features that at least somewhat-discourage casually wandering up to the invisible wall in most cases. I think that most players will still try to scout the thing out to the map edge, given not knowing if there's anything interesting there, but of the games in the series, I think that it's probably the "gentlest".

Saboteur had one get interesting things pretty close to the map edge, but gave some visual hints and had one get some warning and get strafed by German fighters and ultimately killed if one went too far. Far Cry, IIRC, had one attacked by helicopters and sharks. I guess those are a little more immersive, but it's still clearly a gamish feature.

IIRC Subnautica did it via just having "soft" walls imposed by resource consumption, letting you travel a long ways.

The Planet Crafter tended to do it via terrain features, but also had some interesting stuff near map edges, and despite that game also using "soft" walls by making it somewhat harder to travel to the map edge due to resource consumption, I recall also feeling like I needed to scout out the walls.

Starfield totally eliminated invisible walls. You want to keep going as far as you want, you can. The game just procedurally-generates more stuff. I think that the idea the developers had was enabling late-game mod content -- there's always more space and one can keep playing with a single character, whereas with Fallout 4, there's a point where you just mostly run out of things to do and go start a new character. That does work, but also gives rise to one of the big complaints about Starfield, that procedurally-generated stuff just isn't that interesting. I think that solving that is probably AI-hard -- you'd need to have a human-level AI procedurally generating content for it to really be interesting.

I think that the best route I've seen to constrain the player and stay immersive is to have some artificial but semi-game-incorporated rationale, like a "you have a bomb implanted in your brain that blows up if you leave the area" or something.

The main problem with FO4 is the voiced PC and the asinine dialogue structure.

So, I get that some people don't like a voiced PC. I don't personally care about that, at least for the base game, though I agree that it makes it a pain for mods to fit in seamlessly, since absent speech synth trained on the original voice actors (which some modders have done), it makes mod stuff kind of stand out.

Some people don't like the voicing because the PC doesn't sound like them or doesn't sound like they imagine. But for those people, the voicing is really technically-easy to fix. Just...disable the voice. Heck, I bet that there's a mod for that. googles Yeah, looks like it.

Now, the dialog structure, aside from the voicing, is a pain, granted. The XDI mod has fixed the "you don't know what you're going to say when you make a dialog choice. As-is, the game only shows you a hint at what you're going to say, which I think is really obnoxious.

It doesn't fix the fact that (most) of the dialog doesn't really change game outcomes the way it did in Fallout: New Vegas, just alters relationships with the NPC one has in tow at the moment to some degree, which a lot of people don't like.