November 28, 1998
Fallout 2 is the sequel to the game awarded RPG of the year in 1997, that's right, Fallout 1. Fallout 2 has some improvements and a brand new plot and story line. It also has new equipment, more cities, more allies, a better artificial intelligence, and many other miscellaneous improvements over Fallout 1.
For those of you who have not played Fallout 1, it is played in a post-nuclear world in which your character must save his people from certain doom. If you want more information on it, read my review of Fallout 1.
The Story
The story from Fallout 1
is that your character leaves the bomb shelter called a vault in which he has been living
for his entire life to find a water chip that will fix the vault's water purifier and save
his people. When he returns, the dwellers of the vault disapprove of his means in
getting the chip, so they thank him politely, point a gun at him, and ask him to leave.
Your character in Fallout 2 is a direct descendant of the player in Fallout 1. As
it turns out, your character's ancestor founded his own tribe a ways to the north of his
former home in a village now known as Arroyo. The problem that the tribe is
experiencing comes from trying to farm in a desert. Stuff doesn't grow. You
are the Chosen One, the only hope for your character's tribe. You must find the
GECK or Garden of Eden Creation Kit. This device, which was used by vaults to
start a new life on the outside, is needed to get your tribe's crops in gear and save
everyone from starvation. The only leads you start with are a broken radio, the
sacred vault suit of your ancestor, and a water flask from your ancestral home, Vault 13.
Creating The Chosen One
Because each person has a different method of playing Fallout 2 and exploring the wastes
is slightly different, you have a lot of options in making your character. If you
don't want to spend much time, or you like the look of one of the pre-made characters, you
can take one of them and begin playing right away. There are three pre-made
characters: Narg, Mingan, and Chista. Narg is a combat boy. This means
he likes to bash things he can figure out, and most other things too for that matter.
Mingan is a stealth boy. He is has a softer step and is more perceptive and
agile, and good at relieving things from other people without them knowing. Chista
is a charisma girl. This means that she prefers to talk her way out of things.
She is very attractive and has high barter and speech skills.
If there are only a few things that you would like to change about one of the pre-made characters, you can simply modify the existing character. This is done in the same way as creating a character, just that most of it is already done for you.
If you want your own breed of hero, click "make character." This will pull up a blank character. First, you should select traits. Do this by clicking on the box next to the trait. These are optional and usually have both a good side and a bad side. You can select up to two traits. Next, a good thing to do is tag three skills. A tagged skill goes up twice as fast as other skills. Tag a skill by clicking on the box to the left of the skill. Keep in mind that every character should have some type of combat skill. Now choose statistics. When you click on a statistic, a plus and minus will appear to the right of it.
Use this to distribute the five extra statistic points you had in the beginning. You can decrease some statistics to increase others, but you can not decrease a statistic to one or zero. You also can not increase a skill past ten. Finally, finish your character by choosing a name, age, and sex for them. To edit the name, click on the button that says "none" in the upper left corner of the character screen. Don't make the mistake of leaving your character's name none, because it becomes really annoying later on in the game. You can change the age from 16 to ??. You can also change the sex of your character from the default male setting if you like.
Notice many of the derived statistics will change as you change some of your other statistics.
The Main Bar
Fallout 2 is controlled mostly with the mouse. The game is played in a window above
a small bar at the bottom of the screen. From this bar, the player can launch all of
the other windows, participate in combat, and explore the post-nuclear world.
The words to the left of this bar give you a text-based description of many things in the game. It allows you to be sure of things you may notice and discover things that would normally be too minute to notice just by looking at the game screen. It also tells you many things that you need to know, so keep your eye on this.
The red button to the right of the text area will switch the readied hand. This allows you to have two weapons at your disposal during combat, or to have a weapon holstered and ready for immediate action. Below that is a button marked [INV] This will pull up your inventory which shows what you are carrying with you at the time. On the bottom of that column is a button marked [O] This pulls up the options menu which allows you to save, load, quit and edit the preferences.
To the right of the previously discussed column are a series of dots. These dots represent your Action Points. Action points determine how many things you can do every combat turn. Every action requires a certain amount of Action Points and your character has a certain number at every moment. The dots dim as if they have been turned off when you use them to perform an action in combat. The dots all turn red when not in combat. This shows that they don't matter at the time.
Below the Action Point dots is a picture of a weapon. This is the weapon that is currently ready in your hand. Of course, if you want to have some other object ready such as lockpicks or a flare, you can do that as well. By reverse clicking on this picture, you can change the type of attack to make with the weapon (assuming it's a weapon). Most guns have settings such as single, aimed, burst, and reload. Melee weapons have swing and thrust attacks, and when fighting unarmed, you can alternate between attacks such as kick, snap kick, strong kick, hip kick, punch, strong punch, haymaker, etc. and other items usually have only the use option. The number of Action Points required to make the specific attack is shown in the bottom left corner of that box next to the letter AP (which stand for Action Points).
You may have noticed the series of green dots along the right side of the box showing the weapon. This only lights up when a weapon or item that can only be used a limited number of times is in your hand. The dots represent the number of times that you can use the item without reloading or recharging it some other way.
Hit Points and Armor Class are also shown below the letters HP and AC respectively. Hit Points represent how much punishment your character can take before falling lifeless to the ground. Armor Class is how hard your character is to hit. This goes up and down depending on how many Action Points you left unused, and depending on the type of armor you are wearing. The Hit Points field changes color from white when you are doing OK to yellow when you are hurt a bit, to red when you might as well kiss yourself goodbye.
The big red button with Skilldex written beside it pulls up a special window that allows you to use your character's skills. Below that are three buttons that are marked [MAP], [CHA], and [PIP]. These pull up the Automap, Character Sheet, and Pip Boy 2000 (your personal computer) respectively.
The Inventory
The inventory window is shown below. As you recall, this is pulled up by pressing
the button marked [INV] on the control bar. This is the interface used to see what
your character is carrying with him at any given time. There is a column to the
right with different items in it. There are two arrows that allow you to scroll up
and down. The arrow is yellow if you can scroll and white if you can not. The
items shown in this column are the ones that your character is just carrying in a back
pack of some kind. Displayed in this picture are a stick of dynamite, two pair of
dice, a combat knife, the holy GECK, 14 flares, and a plasma rifle.
There is a picture of your character in a window to the right of the main column. This picture spins around so you can see how cool he or she looks with all of their gear on. Below that picture is a space marked "ARMOR" where you put the armor that you want your character to wear. When you put new armor on your character, the picture above automatically updates. Below the armor there are two spaces marked "ITEM1" and "ITEM2." These two spaces represent your character's two hands. Pictured here are a set of lockpicks and a sniper rifle. These are the two items that can be switched by pressing the aforementioned little red button.
There is also a text field in the inventory window. This shows an abbreviated version on your character's statistics as well as information on your armor and the items you have in your hand. It shows your armor class, and your resistance to different types of attacks. For instance, in this picture there is a 5 which means that 5 damage is automatically deducted from a normal attack and the 40% means the remaining damage is reduced by 40%. It is also shown in the text field that your character has lockpicks in one hand, and a sniper rifle in the other. The sniper rifle has its statistics shown in this text field. It does 14-34 damage, has a range of 50, and has 4 out of 6 shots of .233 FMJ ammo. Finally the text field displays how much weight your character is carrying and how much he could carry at a maximum.
When you are finished here, press the done button in the bottom right corner. (Note: Accessing the inventory in combat takes four Action Points)
The Skilldex
The
next portion of the interface is the one that allows your character to use his or her
skills. Pictured here you can see that there are eight skills; sneak, lockpick,
steal, traps, first aid, doctor, science, and repair. The number to the right of the
skill is the percentage chance that your character will successfully complete the skill.
The sneak skill is your character's ability to move without being seen or heard. It is easiest to use at night or in the dark. Lockpick skill is your ability to open a lock on a door without the key. The steal skill is a representation of how easily your character can "liberate" an item from another person without them noticing. The traps skill is what you use when you try to disarm or set traps and explosives.
First aid does minor healing, and doctor heals more hit points as well as crippled limbs, etc. You would use your character's science skill to try and learn things from an object such as a computer or a dead body. The repair skill is simply how good your character is at fixing things that have been broken. The Skilldex is pulled up by pressing the button on the main control bar that is next to the word Skilldex.
The Options Menu
This menu can be called up by pressing the button on the
main control bar marked [O], or by pressing escape. When this menu is up, the game
stops, so this is a good way to pause the game. From the options menu, you can save
or load a game, edit the preferences, exit the game or resume playing. Saving or
loading pulls up a menu with 10 slots. If you want to save a game, simply click one
of the slots, name it, and save. When loading a game, all you do is pick a slot and
click load. The preferences option pulls up an entirely new screen with a great deal
of options.
Shown below is the preferences menu. This is the way to customize your game. I will now go through each option in turn and tell what it does. The game difficulty option will add 20% to all skills if set to easy, give no bonuses or penalties if set to normal and give some penalties to your skills if set to hard. There is no reward or penalty for using any of the settings, only your conscience. When the combat difficulty is set to easy, enemies are less likely to hit you, and when they do, they do less damage. On the rough setting they will be more likely to hit you and will do more damage when they do. Again, on normal there are no bonuses or penalties. The violence level can be set to none, minimal, normal, and maximum blood.
This option determines what the death animation looks like when a character dies. If set to none, the character just falls over. If set to minimal, they fall over in a pool of blood. If set to normal, there are some gruesome deaths, but the really horrible ones are held back. On maximum blood, you see deaths in all of their rib-cracking, head-splattering glory. I found it interesting that maximum blood is the default. The target highlights option will allow you to choose when you want a character to be highlighted. When set to off, you will never see highlights in combat. When set to on, you will always see them, and when set to targeting only, you will only see them if you are using the targeting cursor for an attack.
Combat messages are displayed during combat. These are such things as, "Ha! just missed my lung, I think. *Cough Cough*" This would be an example of a verbose combat message. A more brief version would be something like this; "Ow." As you can see, the flavor text used in the verbose messages is more fun. The combat taunts option determines if there are any combat messages at all. The default is on. Because there is some naughty language in Fallout 2 and Interplay is a family company, there is a language filter for the little kids, or those of us with virgin ears.
The language filter changes bad words into $%@# and the like. Your character can run by holding shift while clicking on a space to move to, or if you set the running option to always you can walk by clicking on a space while holding shift. When the subtitles option is set to on, there will be subtitles under videos in the game. The item highlight option will put a yellow border around an item when your cursor is over it.
The combat speed slider determines how fast non-player characters animate. If the affect player speed box is checked, your character will move faster as well. Text delay determines how long text will remain on the screen before automatically advancing. Adjust this for your own reading speed. The following sliders control volume of different things in the game such as the master volume, the volume for music and movies, sound effects volume, and speech volume. The brightness level will increase the brightness, and since Fallout 2 runs extremely dark on my monitor, I have to set it to full just to be able to see where my character is going. Finally, mouse sensitivity is how far your cursor moves for each movement of the mouse.
You can also reset all of the options to the default by clicking the button in the lower left corner of the screen.
The Pop-Up Mouse Bar
This bar will pop up when you click on something
with the pointer and hold the mouse button down. You then can drag down to change
icons. This method is hard to master and sometimes irritating. It is a shame
that they didn't fix this problem which was also in Fallout 1. The different icons
on the bar represent a different action that your character can do. In the picture,
I have just clicked on a person. The options you have with a person are as
follows. The first is to talk to them. This is the default option, and is
represented by a unisex-type face. This option is not available in combat,
however. The second option is to push the person. This is a new feature from
Fallout 1, and a very needed one too. In Fallout 1 you would have to wait 10
minutes if someone happened to walk in to the doorway of a building and stop, and in so
doing prevent you from leaving. In Fallout 2, you need only to give them a shove and
you can be on your way. This option is represented by a hand with an arrow behind
it.
The third course of action is to inspect whatever you clicked on more closely. This will give detailed description of that item or person in the text area of the main control bar. This is represented by a pair of binoculars. Next, you can use an item in your inventory on someone or something. To do this, click on the thing or person on which you are going to use an item. Then a window comes up displaying the contents of your inventory, not including items you have in your hands or armor. This option is represented by an icon depicting a back pack. The second to last option has a picture of the Fallout face.
This will allow you to perform a skill on whatever you clicked on. When you click on this, it will bring up the Skilldex. You then select the desired skill and your character will march up to whatever you clicked on and perform the skill to the best of his ability. The final option is a circle with a line through it. If you didn't mean to click, this will get you out of the menu without doing anything.
The RoboCo PIPBoy 2000
The PIPBoy or personal information processor is your very own personal computer.
It has seven main functions. A clock, calendar, alarm clock, task recorder,
automatic map maker, holodisk reader, and a data storage system. In the
picture below, you can see the date and time in the game. They are separated by an
icon of a bell. If you click on the bell, you open the alarm clock function of the
PIPBoy. Once inside, you can choose from a number of different times to rest for.
You can also rest until morning, evening, or midnight. You can also rest
until you are fully healed, or if you are traveling with other party members, you can rest
until your entire party is healed. This is a new addition from Fallout 1 where you
had to rest for days and days and keep checking to see if your party was OK again.
Below the pretty pictures is a button marked "status." This shows all of the locations you have visited and the missions you have been asked to complete in each city. If you have already completed the mission, then it is written and struck through. Opposite the missions, an area is designated for storage of information found on holodisks. Holodisks are the equivalent of modern day CDs. They look, however much like an Eight-Track Cartridge. Below the status button, you can find the Automaps button. This pulls up the PIPBoys's automatic map making and displaying feature. When you go into a new area, the PIPBoy will make a map of it for you. The Archives button will display any cinematic videos that you have seen during play. Finally, you can close out of the PIPBoy by clicking the close button.
Party Members
One of the coolest improvements over Fallout 1 is the better artificial
intelligence and control of the characters that decide to join you in your quest.
Many people, mutants, monsters, dogs, and robots will join your party if you ask nicely,
pay them, or convince them somehow. Once they join your party, you can make use of
their skills. In fact, that is another cool improvement. In Fallout 1, all of
your party members were of fair ability in combat, but lacked any other skills. In
Fallout 2, scientists, doctors, and repairmen can join your party and offer their
help. Of course, there are also many other people who will only offer their combat
skills. The interface used to control your party members is new and deserves some
explanation.
Pictured below is Sulik, a tribal like yourself, who will join your group if you offer to help look for his sister. His special skill is that he is able to consult the spirits for you if you would like. Their answers are usually cryptic, but they can sometimes lead you to finding secrets.
If you decide to go into the combat control interface, this window will appear below Sulik's picture. (Note: This interface is the same for all non-player characters who decide to join your group.) You can ask Sulik to use his best weapon, or to use his best armor. This is an improvement from Fallout 1. There used to be no way to give your party members new armor which left them dead pretty quickly. Below that, you can see his Hit Points, skills, carry weight, melee damage, and action points. Next, you can choose Sulik's combat behavior. Because of Sulik's warrior-like nature, you can not choose coward as his combat behavior. If you don't like any of the given options, choose custom. That will bring up the custom combat control screen.
By clicking on an action, you can tell your ally when to perform that action. When you click on one of the buttons, a small window appears with certain choices. For instance, when you click burst the options are as follows. Always, Sometime, Don't worry about hitting me, Be careful not to hit me, Be sure you won't hit me, and Be absolutely sure you won't hit me. Of course, some of these may be grayed out because of the specific character's personality and abilities.
Another interesting new feature about interaction with party members is that you no longer have to steal from them and plant items on them without them knowing to give them new equipment. Instead you can trade with them, but they aren't worried about money when you barter with them. Instead it displays the amount of weight that the items mass to.
The World Map
When you are in between towns, your positions are shown on the world map.
This is a physical overhead map of northern California. Cities are shown inside of
green circles. Your character moves between them faster or slower depending on his
outdoor skill. You may also experience random encounters when walking from city to
city. When you are in the world map, this menu is on the far right side of the
screen. This picture also shows the time and date as well as a cute little wheel
device that shows sunlight. Below that there are numerous cities listed and a button
for each. By clicking on the button, you will begin walking to that city. At
the bottom of the bar is a button marked Town/World. This will toggle between the
town map and the world map.
Screen Shots From the Game
I have provided two screen shots from the game. The first picture, on the
left, is me and my party standing amongst a gang of fallen enemies. These people
used to be part of a gang of marauding bandits. They decided to hijack the wrong
group of travelers and they all died. In the picture on the right, my character and the
rest of my party are standing around my car. That is right, there is a car in
Fallout 2. You can't drive it around cities, but it does make you move a lot faster
on the world map and gives you the option not to fight any random enemies you may come
across on the world map.
System Requirements
• Windows(R) 95/98/NT 4.0 SP3 Only
• Pentium(TM) 90 or faster
• 16 MB RAM
• 30 MB available hard drive space
• Direct X certified SVGA card
• Direct X certified sound card
• 4X or faster CD-ROM drive
• Windows(R) 95/98 only
• 100% Microsoft-compatible mouse
Recommended
• Pentium(TM) 120 or faster
• 32 MB RAM
• 150 MB hard disk space
• DOES NOT WORK IN DOS
Conclusion
Fallout 2 has captured my time and interest even more than Fallout 1, if that is
possible. Fallout 2 is harder to beat, has more missions, characters, locations, and
that is just the beginning. It also has new equipment and has fixed a lot of the
things that were irritating in Fallout 1. Like its predecessor, it holds true to the
old-style paper, pencil, dice, and imagination role playing games. It is more
lifelike than before and isn't just a new mask on the same old game.
Fallout 2 has more than passed the requirements for a good sequel, so I give it five out of five Go Inside Review Lights!
Copyright © 1998 by Shawn Lankton
"Go Inside" is a David Boles Trademark