For quite a few of my Fallout friends, many actually tend to place this at the top of the top for the franchise and I generally gauge from them that it's down to how utterly tight the world / experience of it is and in general, it's the most tonally consistent and follows a pretty clear throughline thematically. It's my 3rd favorite personally, but I love Cain / Boyarsky / Anderson as a trio together and their work.

As someone pointed out though above me: I wish you the absolute most luck on Fallout 2 with the Python jokes. Any time people point to Bethesda as the catalyst of why Fallout "blows now" (I think that complaint lacks nuance myself), I always make it clear that it was, in fact, Fallout 2 that brought about so many of the pitfalls and ills that would go on to plague Bethesda's games in the franchise. Always felt you either embrace the mess or you just disregard them to the "Fan fiction" section (which, I still find Fallout 3 / 4 pretty decently fun, enjoyable fan fiction).

The Survivalist story of Randall Clark itself is proof alone that this game does what it's doing better than 'most' games that attempt it.

I imagine Josh Sawyer would love this entire write-up.