Liben Hagos
Review of Fallout 2
Shooting tiny nuclear bombs from a hand-held catapult at giant crabs while you listen to bangin’ tunes from the 1950s is probably the definitive (and most marketed) experience players had when playing the modern three-dimensional fallout games. However, this is actually a major shift from the gameplay and themes of the series’ isometric ancestors: Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. The original Fallout games had as much if not more somber and dark moments than wacky and outrageous. The classics depicted the negative effects of extreme nationalism much more pointedly than the new gamers ever did. This review is concerned with only Fallout 2 but I will at times make reference to Fallout 1 in order to compare the two and better evaluate aspects of the sequel.
Fallout 2’s main narrative can be summarized very quickly. One plays as a tribal: a product of humanity’s degeneration from the powerful futuristic society that caused the apocalypse. Your goal is to find a “Garden of Eden Creation Kit” (G.E.C.K for short) to save your tribe from ecological disaster. The G.E.C.K is treated as an object of the divine by your ignorant tribe when in reality it is a remnant of the advanced pre-war America, created in advance of the nuclear apocalypse to make the war-torn land inhabitable by the refugees of the vault system. The player’s character is designated the “Chosen One” on his search for the divine G.E.C.K. The character then travels across the lands on his or her quest, making interesting friends, discovering new locations, and expanding their own knowledge and power. When they finally discover the G.E.C.K the player will find that their tribe has been abducted by the primary antagonists of the game (who have only been hinted at up to this point) – the Enclave, fascist remnants of the U.S. government. The player then has more adventures finding a way to travel to the Enclave oil rig where they save their tribe, a group of vault dwellers (who they are descended from, long story), destroy the Enclave and start a new and advanced society with the G.E.C.K.
Fallout 2 is a massive game, which is why the main storyline (though long) occupies only a small portion of one’s experience. Most of one’s time is actually spent exploring the various territories. The locations that act solely as dungeons like pre-war research facilities or lizard caves are boring so I won’t talk about them too much except to say that they don’t play to the game’s strengths and Fallout 2 would be better off without them. Fallout 2 is best when one is exploring the exciting settlements wrought by people who try their best to prosper in the wake of the wasteland the game is set in. Vault City is a highly advanced society filled with vault dwellers who used their own G.E.C.K to allow themselves a live of luxury and privilege… for themselves. All other denizens of the wasteland are relegated to living in slums on the city’s outskirts and “Ghouls”, humans who have been so horribly mutated by constant exposure to radiation that they have become physically deformed, are deemed “non-human” and sentenced to death by some of the city’s more radical citizens– a philosophy that will be later reflected in the Enclave. Broken Hills is a typical mining town but their edge is in their Super Mutant population. The super mutants were the primary enemies of Fallout 1, who would have conquered the planet if not for the efforts of the Vault Dweller (the protagonist of the first game), so the town is expectedly a hotbed of racial tensions despite the obvious benefits the powerful and virtually immortal Super Mutants bring. New Reno is a den of villainy and gangs with fun influences like South American drug cartels, comically large Redneck family, and the Godfather. The role the character can play in any of these settings is extremely varied, as well, being able to act as a diplomat, a detective, a prize boxer, a made man, and even a porn star. The possibilities are endless and overwhelming and it’s fantastic. The roleplay possibilities are endless.
A major theme of fallout is how there exists infinite philosophies for how society should be run, and an apocalypse is actually perfect for creating a blank slate for these philosophies to find the groundwork needed to prosper. The locations in the game have vastly different understandings of economics, standards of living, and humanity as a whole, and exploring those differences and evaluating exactly what works is an extremely fun part of the game. Vault City has had all the advantages but they are still at risk at being annexed by NCR, whose acceptance of anyone willing to work and their meritocratic society has allowed them to grow into one of the most powerful factions in the wasteland. The Brotherhood of Steel, formerly the most powerful and technologically advanced faction in the wasteland, is at risk of being deposed by the Enclave (and eventually the NCR) because of their insular and xenophobic views. Advanced power armor and laser rifles is not enough to carry a society built on hoarding knowledge and rejecting outsiders. At the end of the day, Fallout tells us that Humans are resilient and will carry the torch of civilization forward so long as they exist.
However there exists problems with certain locations being designed as more simplistic versions of existing settings (the den is just new reno but worse, Redding is Broken Hills but replacing the racial tensions with aliens from the “Aliens” franchise) or are just flat out boring (Klamath and Modoc) or severely underdeveloped (San Francisco lets me become a martial arts champion but unlike the reputation titles you can gain in New Reno this means literally nothing). Part of this is due to the bizarre design decision to have different teams work independently on different locations which makes continuity hard to enforce, but another part is that I believe the writers were just not as interested in developing a single interconnected world like they were in Fallout 1, instead opting for quantity and style over quality. These problems, however, pale against another major issue the game has in one of its major story elements.
The Antagonists of Fallout is the United States government. Their remnants, the Enclave, are two-dimensional fascists. Their goal is to wipe out every human on earth because their exposure to wasteland radiation has messed with their genes which, according to the enclave, means they are no longer humans. How anyone thought this a compelling reason when writing Fallout 2’s story is beyond me. The nuance from Fallout 1 (and parts of Fallout 2 even) of just how pre-war America fell into the fascist state it became is completely lost on the Enclave. They have no trace of anything resembling human within them, which is unfortunate because the risks of Fascism aren’t nebulous and it’s not only fictional bad guys who become nazis, any liberal society is at risk of Fascism if the populace is not properly informed. Fallout 2 could have demonstrated this by making elements of the Enclave empathetic, even if all they did was allow the player to have a candid and depressing discussion with one of the brainwashed young enclave soldiers before you were forced to kill them. Instead the enclaves are faceless and evil and utterly boring. The super mutants of fallout 1 had so much more humanity to them, ironically, which is why they were so much more compelling. The Super Mutants had a real ideology, they really thought they were doing what was best for humanity by turning everyone into a super mutant, they thought that through assimilation humanity could achieve peace and the horrors of the great war would never be repeated. They were wrong, of course, but their actions had reasonable thoughts behind it which made them seem realistic and interesting. The Enclave, on the other hand, are essentially just goombas – blatantly obvious bad guys whose only real purpose is to serve as an obstacle for the player to overcome. It’s lazy and awkward in context with the other much more interesting villains like the Bishop family or the NCR, where depending on one’s own morals these groups could play the role of antagonist or ally.
In a game about analyzing competing philosophies for governing and society it’s especially important for the player to have their own say. Fallout 2 is really good about giving the player choice and then conforming the Narrative around it. For that reason the game has elements of an Emergent Narrative, though it’s slightly limited by a reliance on actually writing potential actions into the narrative through dialogue/ effects on the otherwise static backdrops. However the player can pick and chose which philosophies they like better and effectively it is they who has control over who simply lives, who prospers, and who dies. This Narrative freedom is essential to the overall enjoyment of Fallout 2, because if the player does not have control over their own actions and if those actions do not affect the world around them, then fallout would be exceedingly boring.
I highly recommend Fallout 2, for even with all its problems it’s still a fantastic game for fans of the RPG genre. If one wants to explore the extremes of the human experience, then in my opinion there’s no better series than Fallout.
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