The last time I played it, around six years ago, the representative moment in Fallout 2 seemed to be killing the Hubologists as part of the Shi questline: the tiny, underleveled Tom Cruise sprite exploding into gore as his attending hooded cultists float taunts about how they'll kill you in the name of L. Ron Hubbard. The outrage-seeking, the easy satire, the inarticulate disaffection for trends in contemporary social life, and the childlike joy in explicit violence all made the game seem not only like a perfect relic of the attitudes of the turn of the millennium, but of the milieu of American game development at the time. It's a moment at which the line between professional game development and say, flash games about torturing George Bush, is shown to have been terribly thin.
On the last run, what stood out was the converse sense in which this is the progenitor of the post-millenial open-world game, remarkable in just how fully-formed the genre already is. The tight structuring of the first game is almost fully abandoned alongside the time limit: the only thing really keeping the player from the end sequence at any given time is the fact that it's on the opposite end of the map from the starting position, and the accompanying confidence that the player will want to consume all the content with which she's presented along the way. The notion of all this being in service to a main quest isn't totally dispensed with the way it is in the fully realized form of the genre, but it's treated as something of a running joke.
Jokes are really the stock and trade of Fallout 2, and range from Monkey Island-adjacent clownishness at best to something like an adult animated comedy at worst. A few stray lines genuinely worked for me this time: the option to call a woman homophobic for rejecting you and a dialogue option reminiscent of Disco Elysium which only pops up if you've got meth in your inventory to offer a starving child.
The character of combat encounters in this game is really determined by the way armor and health progress more steadily than damage output, which plateaus around the middle of the game unless one uses perks to squeeze out an extra attack or two per round. The high-lethality casino shootouts which characterized the midgame for me were enormously fun in their demands that the player think carefully about range, action economy, and cover. The early game's typified by low-stakes slapfights with rats, and the later game is more of a flat DPS race between bullet sponges, but that sweet spot makes the combat engine seem like it has genuine potential as a TRPG.
Playing this game in a four-day stupor made it easier to see that the game gets worse as it goes on, that the relative focus and sense of tone informing the early areas falls apart around NCR and San Francisco. Navarro and the Oil Rig, in particular, while themed impeccably and nicely built up to over the course of the game, are remarkably empty as dungeons. This time, as with every other time I've played the game, I spoke to the scientist who releases the virus before talking to the one in the reactor room, because the former is placed before the latter, and had to spend twenty minutes looking for a bomb so that I could still trigger the escape sequence.
The totally disparate nature of the world it creates, made up of stereotypes and references and the conflicting aesthetic and thematic preferences of its authors, retains it appeal for me. It's like a constellation of what it meant to be a socially awkward man in the late-90s, like a Rifts campaign frozen in amber. It's commonplace to present New Vegas as the more authentic sequel to Fallout 2 than Bethesda's attempt, but each game's making an effort to pare down an incredibly eclectic product into something like a brand.
On the last run, what stood out was the converse sense in which this is the progenitor of the post-millenial open-world game, remarkable in just how fully-formed the genre already is. The tight structuring of the first game is almost fully abandoned alongside the time limit: the only thing really keeping the player from the end sequence at any given time is the fact that it's on the opposite end of the map from the starting position, and the accompanying confidence that the player will want to consume all the content with which she's presented along the way. The notion of all this being in service to a main quest isn't totally dispensed with the way it is in the fully realized form of the genre, but it's treated as something of a running joke.
Jokes are really the stock and trade of Fallout 2, and range from Monkey Island-adjacent clownishness at best to something like an adult animated comedy at worst. A few stray lines genuinely worked for me this time: the option to call a woman homophobic for rejecting you and a dialogue option reminiscent of Disco Elysium which only pops up if you've got meth in your inventory to offer a starving child.
The character of combat encounters in this game is really determined by the way armor and health progress more steadily than damage output, which plateaus around the middle of the game unless one uses perks to squeeze out an extra attack or two per round. The high-lethality casino shootouts which characterized the midgame for me were enormously fun in their demands that the player think carefully about range, action economy, and cover. The early game's typified by low-stakes slapfights with rats, and the later game is more of a flat DPS race between bullet sponges, but that sweet spot makes the combat engine seem like it has genuine potential as a TRPG.
Playing this game in a four-day stupor made it easier to see that the game gets worse as it goes on, that the relative focus and sense of tone informing the early areas falls apart around NCR and San Francisco. Navarro and the Oil Rig, in particular, while themed impeccably and nicely built up to over the course of the game, are remarkably empty as dungeons. This time, as with every other time I've played the game, I spoke to the scientist who releases the virus before talking to the one in the reactor room, because the former is placed before the latter, and had to spend twenty minutes looking for a bomb so that I could still trigger the escape sequence.
The totally disparate nature of the world it creates, made up of stereotypes and references and the conflicting aesthetic and thematic preferences of its authors, retains it appeal for me. It's like a constellation of what it meant to be a socially awkward man in the late-90s, like a Rifts campaign frozen in amber. It's commonplace to present New Vegas as the more authentic sequel to Fallout 2 than Bethesda's attempt, but each game's making an effort to pare down an incredibly eclectic product into something like a brand.