Was Fallout 2 as good as I remember? - A forgotten vision of the wasteland's future

[Music] the year was 1998 and interplay had begun its March towards Financial ruin bad Investments and less than Stellar returns had driven the publisher into a corner causing the management to shove their developers into a dark room to produce art although the game was starting to be tinkered with a bit before Fallout 1 had even released full production didn't start on Fallout 2 until nine months before it shipped developers were snatched up from planescape torment and a hellish grind of non-stop crunch began as interplay continued to race the clock of bankruptcy to many this kind of development cycle would likely spell disaster for an RPG with the amount of nuance and detail that the world of Fallout encompasses and yet Fallout 2 went on to become one of the most highly regarded RPG experiences ever according to many Publications journalists and reviewers around the world I was still in high school when I discovered the Fallout series with Fallout 3 being my introduction a lot of the intricacies that black Isle set up were lost on me until I went back and played the first two games and what I ultimately discovered was that while I personally enjoy a more modern 3D aesthetic when it comes to exploration the original two games brought a tantalizing amount of World building to the table that I couldn't help but appreciate and immerse myself in Fallout 1 was a good start but Fallout 2 was a great continuation and expansion on the themes lore and presentation of this post-apocalyptic world that said it's been about 10 years since I've taken the time to run through the second game again so in this video I'm going to be taking another look at Fallout 2 and exploring its story mechanics and choices while analyzing what the game did well and what could have been improved before I begin I want to direct your attention to my brand spanking new merch shop with all of the good stuff you could ever dream of unless you dream of more than Shirts Mugs and stickers and I'll also note that I have a sponsor with hello fresh that will appear about I don't know let's say 24 of the way through the video so try not to be too alarmed all right let's get to it so Fallout 2 kicks off 80 years after the events of the first game the introduction cinematic to set up this new era is easily my favorite of the series beginning with a very light-hearted vault-tec movie whimsically describing what Vault dwellers should do when it's time to leave the Vault after it wraps up a group is seen going through the process of opening up a massive sealed door to the outside world on the other side of this door The Enclave awaits in their power armor seemingly prepared to greet this makeshift family of dwellers this is an absolutely fantastic way to immediately set the tone of this game it invokes an emotional response from the viewer and it instantly raises a multitude of questions about the world and how it's changed since the Vault dwellers days of course all of this Intrigue is going to be put on the back burner for a bit while you create your character and pull yourself through the tutorial so let's start with the general Optics of character creation I'm not going to go into a ton of detail here just because a lot of this stuff is similar or the same as Fallout 1 but I will at least paint some broad Strokes while detailing what's different here right away the game presents you with a few preset options which give you an average intelligence melee Bruiser type an average intelligence roguish type and an above average intelligence charismatic type while you can roll with or modify these characters to your liking one of the best parts of these games to me is creating your own person and building them your way that said Fallout 2 actually brings quite a bit more potential for XP gains over the previous entry so it's a lot easier to generalize your build by the end of the game rather than needing to commit to a specific playstyle so while you can start off as an a sniper you can end up being an a sniper who can switch to melee on the Fly take a sizable chunk of damage and even do something outlandish like being able to comfortably talk to people as always these special stats make their appearance as the game's primary attributes strength perception and endurance are all about the same as they were before with opportunities to improve them down the line Charisma on the other hand is more important here than it was in Fallout 1. seeing as it directly affects the amount of followers which you can tote around with you at the same time basically you get as many followers at one time as your charisma score divided by two rounded down though that said Charisma is still probably one of the objectively worst stats to Max in this game just because it isn't super useful compared to a lot of the other stats beyond the follower boost intelligence is still broken in terms of having an easier game and is definitely recommended to sync some points into for your first run of Fallout 2. but if you are looking to mix things up in a pretty drastic way running a dumb character completely changes how you're perceived as it did previously agility affects your AP so again very useful like it was before and finally luck affects your crit rates as well as general dice rolls in the game which makes it semi-important I'll note that a lot of these assessments are biased more towards what would create an easier game for the player or at least one where you get the opportunity to see as much as you can during your playthrough but if you're someone who wants to roll with the high Charisma low intelligence brute who relies on their friends to take care of the baddies that is something that you can pull off with the right planning it's always been one of the most beautiful parts of an RPG and it's something that I tend to sorely Miss and a lot of modernized AAA role-playing games traits make another appearance as well with the only real difference in choice being that night person has been swapped out for the sex appeal traits that one's pretty self-explanatory in that you'll Curry more favor with the opposite sex in exchange for being an annoying piss bag to members of the same sex fun fact night person stuck around in the German version of the game specifically because apparently Germany of all places has an issue with your little on-screen pixels having a fat dump truck stapled to their hips either way I decided to mirror my choices in the first game and stuck with the gifted and small frame traits which I'll admit are top of the line that make for an easier game I also One-Shot Melania with the Bloodhound Fang and the mimic tear sue me as far as skills go most are nearly identical in terms of what they do from the first game to the second with some minor tweaks to some of the math formula behind their initial starting points the outlier here is Outdoorsman which goes from being completely useless on a high luck character to being a relatively useful skill overall whereas before the skill only affected the amount of damage that you'd take on bad luck encounters the new and improved version outright increases your odds of getting special encounters while reducing the odds of getting into a regular encounter at all if you decide to pump the skill all right let's get into this so if you hadn't noticed the tiny description boxes of the preset characters all of them mentioned that you're part of a tribe this is the only Fallout game to not stick you into a vault immediately besides New Vegas which really shows what the original devs had in mind with this series The vaults are a big part of the world sure but they aren't the defining characteristic of it to Black Isle the need to start as a vault dweller really only had a place in the introduction of the series and from then it was more about the world outside of these vaults Bethesda did not get that memo either way you're part of a tribe from the village of Arroyo which was actually founded by The Vault dweller from the first game when he was cast out by his own people in the aftermath of bringing the master down as things stand the tribal Village is dying due to poor land quality wilting crops deteriorating animal conditions and so on as the village Elders child and the descendant of the Vault dweller the chosen one is sent to solve the tribe's issues by seeking out the Geck or Garden of Eden creation kit this item is a a concept that Bethesda ran with in Fallout 3 which I'll talk about more when we get to that part of the game for now we have to prove ourselves worthy of undertaking this challenge by facing the infamous Temple of Trials I'm gonna kick this off by including a snippet of an interview with Fallout Creator Tim Kaine yeah interplay demanded a tutorial level out of the dabs and so it was crammed into the game very suddenly as such many consider it to be the worst part of Fallout 2 and honestly after slogging through it I kind of agree the biggest issue with this whole thing is that it takes all of that good creativity from being able to build a character your way and just tramples it if you happen to take a high endurance melee build this Temple is a walk in the park but as things stand you're stranded in a temple with no other weapons besides your fists a spear and whatever pointy sticks that you can find throughout the area of course there's also a solid metal doorway part way through this Stone Temple with a chunk of C4 nearby to blow it up for some reason it's just really obvious that this whole place was more of an afterthought and while it isn't a particularly lengthy stretch of the game it also isn't a very fun introduction to have to push through I will say that the final test at least does its best to create some alternate ways of completing the trial which is definitely a sweeter note to end on basically a tribesman has been sent ahead to fight you he claims that it's not to the death but what he means is that it isn't to the death for him typically pat yourself up and keep reloading with your shitty stats or you have a couple of other options one you can pickpocket the guy for the key and just leave out the back behind him or two you can talk your way out of the fight by convincing the guy that fighting each other could lead to an unfortunate accident I believe you need to have tagged speech in order for that second one to work out it's not the Holy Grail of alternate pathing but it's not unwelcome after the temple turned out the way that it did either way welcome to Arroyo after making it through your trials you're now assigned the aforementioned task of seeking out the Geck from vault 13. in terms of what's going on around the hometown itself there's quite a lot more named NPCs than the earlier towns of Fallout 1. random people who want certain things or have some knowledge to impart unto you or just something to remark on you can upgrade your melee and unarm to a pretty decent percentage for no cost from a few of the villages men you can stop by your aunt's house and NAB some caps oh it's not caps in this game you can stop by your aunt's house and NAB some money there's a guy named after Fergus urkhart who [ __ ] about everything non-stop it's just these little things that make the place feel a lot more alive than say Shady Sans as such there's quite a bit to do here if you have the right stats you can sharpen up your spear by getting Flint from your Aunt who doesn't like you you can take on some sport plants in the healer's garden and then snatch up some roots and flowers to have him make you some healing powder after you can rescue your cousin's dog out in the hunting grounds and all of this can change based off of your stats and how you treat people if you piss people off they might rescind their request or just not give it to you if you don't have the right stats you might not get offered the training from the Warriors in town you can even choose speech options which has your guy getting upset with people and refusing to help them which is something that doesn't really happen very frequently in modern games it's a great introduction in terms of the RPG elements of Fallout 2 even if the town itself isn't Amazing by any stretch of the imagination so let's check on over to a slightly bigger town with a little more character clemath is a rundown [ __ ] but it's definitely got more of the Fallout character to it there's a town greeter who's just a drunk who tries to take advantage of your lack of knowledge and Shake You Down for some money there are Traders which range from scowling and permanently annoyed to charismatic and ready to sell there's a house of skank where your guy can experience his first time with a lady of the night if you so choose and while I won't run through every little inner action around these parts it's safe to say that clemath is a really good place to kick everything off the dialogue options that you get to choose between range from someone who's never seen anything like this before in their life to someone who knows when a person is trying to take advantage of them or is acting out of the ordinary in this completely new setting it gives you that option of choosing to play the role of a primitive tribe member or choosing to not let your guy get shaken down if you can help it it's something that a lot of these older RPGs tended to do well allowing you to balance and pick whether you want to play the game to win and succeed at all times or allowing you to experience the story of someone who's living through brand new interactions with the lack of wisdom to fully comprehend them I will say that for as good as Arroyo was about having a slew of named NPCs to chat with clemath kind of drops back into the normal shuffling nameless NPC ordeal it's really not all that bad but I did enjoy being able to talk to nearly everyone even if that was because my guy grew up in that area still there's a lot to do here in clemath regardless a herd of Brahman to protect a crashed Enclave vertibird to check out a man who wants you to refill his his alcohol still a woman who wants you to rescue her fiance and most importantly picking up sulik sulix our first companion of the game and he immediately showcases the upgrades to the followers compared to the previous entry he's fully voiced has his own model dialogue box and has a more compelling story than hey yeah I'm looking to travel wanna travel now sulik is kind of an outlier here a lot of the other NPCs later on do kind of follow the same trend of oh yeah I just want to get out of here but for sulik to be the first one that you meet is definitely a good choice I'm still going to skip on outright ranking the companions here just because they still aren't focused in a way that compares to say BioWare but it's still worth mentioning that they have a lot more personality than Fallout 1 selection as far as sulik himself goes he's a member of a tribe which he left after his sister got captured by slavers after tracking her down to the area around Klamath sulik was to meet a guy here who supposedly had her exact location when he couldn't find this guy sua not angry decided to get blackout drunk and wound up wrecking the in here sulik was then forced to begrudgingly work off his debt at the end from then on out which I paid off to get him to join me I'm kind of ballparking this info because a lot of the way sulik talks is odd slavery having information couldn't peep him got peeled drank like a fish spirits of anger and Chaos pop out and now we have to pay some coin to make it right but I'm pretty sure that I got this right and thus our new companion joins me on my quest to the west of the main area is Trapper town which is um where the Trappers stay there's only one guy to talk to here who you can convince to give you the key to the northern part of the Zone here you find piles and piles of rats Pig rats and mole rats to fight it's basically a dungeon which has a boss at the end in the form of this rat God which can talk while part of me is resisting the urge to complain about the lack of zooming and fluidity of moving from combat to combat I did know what I was getting into there are just these moments where the non-stop process of jumping into and out of combat gets agitating and combing for tiny pixels of loot doesn't feel much better still I will say that clemath made me realize that Fallout 2 delivers a major asset to gaming that isn't seen very often nowadays punishment I know that might sound weird to some but this game has a learning curve that you either roll with or you try to fight against and it makes the knowledge that you gather lead to Aha moments almost constantly here's a really good example so I said that there was a guy who wanted me to refill his moonshine still for him he gives me one day to complete this task before his alcohol goes bad well in the exact same house there's this lady whose fiance went off to some toxic caves and hasn't returned in my rush to take on whatever was handed to me in any order I forgot about the time limit and marched off to the toxic caves now earlier in the rat tunnels I wound up picking up a couple of pairs of boots it didn't occur to me to see what they did I just thought ah yes boots to sell so I took them over to a shop and tried to sell them they sold for a whopping zero dollars but I said to myself wow these things are just dead weight might as well Chuck them so I did now back to the aptly named toxic caves there's this radioactive goop all over the place every time I step in it it deals two damage to me but there was this door with a locker right and I thought well okay I'll save and I'll go see what's over there and when I made it to the other side the locker contained some meds and well boots and that's when it clicked having the boots means that I take no damage from the goo on the ground which is pretty much a requirement for this area at the time if I don't want to Blind myself with healing powder to brute force my way through the caves so after getting battered down to one HP I decided well [ __ ] it I'll come back later after getting my boots back from the vendor and then I trekked back to town that's when I remembered the time limit yeah whiskey Bob here was not happy about my failure to uphold my end of our deal My Punishment here not only taught me a load of lessons all at once it also decreased my reputation with the town which affects a lot of little things it again isn't something that you see too often in modern games which give you 50 chances and ways out of any given scenario and as frustrating as it was to go through I actually wound up appreciating it immensely after realizing everything that I learned from it but that's about it for clemath the whole town is definitely what you decide to make of it with a few chances for deciding whether to help out or to actively hurt its citizens it's not a Amazing by any means but it's a pretty good start of town let's head further south to the den though I described clemath as a [ __ ] it's shittiness pales in comparison when put side by side with the den drug users littered the streets slavers head up their operations here even the children will pick your pocket as you walk by them the only reason I knew about that last one was because the first time I played I noticed that some of my inventory was missing and then I had to go look it up there's actually quite a few fun interactions involving these thieves and what you can do with them so killing them outright is fine if they steal from you but you will wind up with the child killer reputation which will all but stunt your game in terms of how people will treat you you could have your followers kill them instead to prevent this or you could drop some lit Dynamite near them you can also light the dynamite in your own pocket and then walk by the kids in the hopes that they all pickpocketed what I personally like to do is pickpocket my items back from them and then proceed to punch them in the head after the dramatic experience of getting their jaws knocked loose and having a man with a giant bone threaded through his nose chase them around with a sledgehammer the kids will actually just run away from here on out at the side of you this is the kind of [ __ ] that I miss from RPGs I just want to leave an impression on people that I interact with even if that impression is absolute fear one last thing about this whole thieving kid situation though so in the EU version They removed kids right something about being able to kill children just didn't sit well with European game law but what's funny but also stupid is that the kids were still here they were just invisible so in the EU version there was a chance that you'd walk by them and just lose an item with no indication of what happened of course it does appear in a shop later on just because that's what the kids do with the items is sell them to the shopkeepers but still that had to be really annoying in terms of what we can do here the den has a few craps tables at the casino some gun and Drug shops a graveyard to defile graves in and obviously the whole slaver business you can actually choose to sell your companions to the slavers and become a slaver yourself of course doing so is bad but I mean the options that you have is an evil character in this game are fantastic and this is just one of many you can also choose to kill all of the slavers and set their slaves free though I'm nowhere near leveled or equipped enough to try that one out yet or so I thought so Marching In and striking the gun button to gun people with is not an option but you know what is dynamite so what I did was head to the main boss here pickpocket him and steal his shotgun plant a bundle of dynamites lock the door so that the reinforcements couldn't get in and then waited out on the balcony this made this fight a lot easier as I could mop up the first room heal and then take on the second row this also made picking up our second Canyon Vic a lot easier well barring me going down one of the Diplomatic routes which was definitely available the only reason that I highlighted this whole interaction was again to Showcase just what you can do in this game you're very much rewarded for experimenting and trying out more unorthodox methods to accomplish your goals and I'm gonna try not to do this too much more just because it's gonna get old but it does feel like a lot of more streamlined RPGs nowadays have a tendency to have very fixed methods of approaching a scenario if you try experimenting you'll often just slip into one of the preset methods and that's all that you can do if I were to compare how I felt with the slaver situation in Fallout 2 I'd say that a lot of it felt like Hitman and that I could stack the deck in my favor approach how I wanted and execute my plan and it feels so much better than a lot of the typical okay he's level 10 and I'm level five I guess I'll come back later that shows up in games nowadays as far as Vic goes he's a much more basic companion than old Sula care basically he's a traitor who makes runs back and forth between Vault City and the rest of the Wasteland there are one or two other things to him that come up later but the main thing is that he's actually the reason for the chosen one ever gracing the Wasteland with his presence in the manner that he does basically he's been scooping up these vault 13 canteens and selling them to various tribes around the Wasteland with Arroyo included this meant that when Arroyo started to wither the tribe's first thought shot over to Vic's stories about the vaults and its miracle-performing gecks it's a nice little addition to tie things together even if Vic is relatively basic when it comes to who he is while we're on the topic of companions we might as well talk about the overhauls brought to the table with the second game first off you can actually set your companion Behavior pretty handily with the combat Behavior menu this means that you can have them equip their best stuff if you want that and choose how they use particular weapons or fight in general stuff like being more careful with burst weapons the distance that they generally maintain in combat whether they use melee or ranged weapons and so on of course some of this stuff is actually affected by their personalities you won't be able to tell them to use healing if they're only hurt a little bit if they have more of a bold and Brash personality this is exactly what Fallout 1's idiotic AI needed and while there are still some hitches with how they act in two the improvements here are night and day secondly you no longer need to worry about being blocked by your followers which extends to other NPCs as well basically if they wall up a doorway with their body you can just shove them in this game which again is an awesome conclusion thirdly you don't need to to pickpocket them to move equipment around as a dedicated trade menu exists along with the amount of weight that you're shifting denoted towards the bottom all of this is exactly what the previous entry needed and it's clear that the devs paid attention to what needed fixing from game to game all of that said the whole thing definitely isn't perfect by any means telling your companions to heal themselves has them complaining that they don't have enough stim packs even if they do or they'll heal themselves for a very minor amount and then you have to babysit their health to make sure that they're keeping themselves patched up additionally though you can direct your people to not spray and pray near you there's a good chance that they still will and that they'll use the spray on a gun against enemies with very negligible Health the amount of times that I watched Cassidy just decide to unload on a rat would take up a 10 minute video in and of itself which is really annoying when you chews through ammo like bubble gum John oh God no I'm [ __ ] John John no John it's an egg for [ __ ] sake the last bits to mop up around the den include a handful of quests which range from collecting stuff from random NPCs for the bar owner at the start to getting to the bottom of how one bar is selling booze for so much cheaper than the other to starting a gang war between the east and west side thugs to delivering a meal to someone to going on a ghost hunt the gang war is actually something that I can't do now with how I approach things seeing as the slavers need to be going for me to still interact with the thugs it's not anything too special but I do like that there's some replayability involved in the decision to just stroll in and turn a town upside down speaking of the booze Quest involves you noting that the price is in one bar for whiskey are much cheaper than the other when you point this out to the more expensive bar the owner has you investigate in order to get to the back room of the Cheap whiskey bar you have to wait for the guard to move and then you can head in and find out that the owner here has her own still if you take a crowbar to it you can dismantle it and permanently piss off the owner of this bar reporting back to the other bar as its owner giving you some cash and you getting the option to persuade him to buy directly from the other owner in order to reduce his costs and sell at a cheaper price overall again on the surface this is kind of a back and forth thing but I love the realistic Intrigue of it all on the opposite end of the realism spectrum is the Ghost Hunt which feels a bit out of place yeah yeah Wasteland that's still a radiated giant mutated creatures ghouls etc etc but for some reason the ghost feels out of place in this universe I guess there's just a straight up ghost that walks around this house at midnight wailing about a lost locket evidence points towards a thug who took the locket which the ghost gets excited about when you walk it back to her then she disappears and leaves a load of Bones on the ground which you can take and bury in the graveyard it's an okay Quest it's just a little weird in what's been established as Fallout lore I guess all in all the den is probably the first part of this game where I felt pretty immersed in how a Fallout Town should be set up though there are these chem abusing mindless drones hovering between establishments there's an east and west side which compete against each other in both gang outfits and bars there are slavers which have the denizens under their thumb there's a Brotherhood of Steel Outpost with a guy who knows who you are and directs you to head towards the ncr's Outpost but won't talk any more to you and to tie everything together you have this kind woman who everyone in town loves who goes by Mom she runs a small restaurant and keeps everyone fed even making sure food gets delivered over to the car parts guy on the other side of town it just feels like this real place that could exist under these circumstances and the way that you approach it has you either going against the flow to free the people from the slavers or to join them and continue the cycle of misery there's one last little bonus thing that I accidentally found out when I was messing around in the den so when you're on the map selection for a town you can choose between the different parts of it by using the keys on your keyboard with the den you can choose between one or two with East or West well at one point I fat fingered the three key and it actually loaded a sort of beta map there's not much to do on it though I imagine you could probably get away with just blasting people if you wanted to and the only loot that I could find was a shovel but it was still pretty neat our next destination that we can pick from on the map would be Vault City where Vic hails from on the way over though is the small farming community of Modoc which we get right near the outskirts of before encountering what's basically a sort of cut scene involving The Enclave demanding that some Farmers come with them the farmers refused to join this gigantic 12-foot tall Metal Man and The Enclave proceeds to open them up like a can of Olives fingers in every hole and then they just walk away alright cool anyways Modoc so think of a very typical small town in the U.S Midwest or South that's Modoc except you know with two-headed cows and [ __ ] the farming Community is also suffering from drought like Arroyo is meaning that the Brahmin butchering business is booming at the moment talking to people around town reveals that most of the Traders here are pretty down about the town dying there is some Shenanigans to be had revolving around the various animal handlers my favorite of which involves attempting to break the record for the most Brahmin fries eaten in one sitting the challenge was to eat more than 36 which my guy does throughout the contest the fries are described as Round Golf ball-sized deep fried nuggets right around the 34th fry my guy tries his best to not hurl and decides to ask how they make the fries he gobbles down three more and goes for his 38th right as the woman behind the counter tells him that they chop off all four Brahmin testicles while they're still alive for the best flavor hey I had to read that and so you get to listen to it and although I got the meal for free for breaking the record I wound up poisoned Beyond this small Amusement though there's really not a lot of pressing matters to attend to just little things like clearing out some Rats on a farm fixing up a cow's broken leg solving a dispute over a missing watch helping a guy find his missing son and blowing up the townshitter with dynamite irreparably changing the map to be smeared with absolute piles of fecal chaos pretty ordinary Quest stuff if you ask me rescuing the Tanner sun is actually a side bit which has a bigger issue that Modoc has been facing which is the fact that a ghost farm has seemingly popped up in the middle of nowhere when a few citizens went to visit the thriving Farm no one seemed to live there and yet all of the crops and livestock were being maintained so one of modoc's residents decided to move into it before disappearing when some of the townsfolk went to investigate this matter they stumbled upon rows of bodies dotting the farm and paled on Sharp stakes from the ground since then no one's been back which is where I come in investigating the area reveals that the bodies are fake and the blood is of the Brahman variety after sliding down a trap door it turns out that there have been people living underneath the ground here since right around the time that the bombs dropped they're a peaceful bunch and although their eyes and general Constitution have adapted to the underground lifestyle that they lead they do still need Goods like medicine so I take a message back to Modoc which states that these people want to trade them much needed food and water effectively saving the town from ruin oddly enough that doesn't get me idolized with the town I wonder if it's because I blew up the [ __ ] killed the town's egg supplying deathclaw and repaired the town cow which just begins wandering into buildings at will now I probably just didn't do enough either way the whole place is a fun little diversion from the main event of the game and I thoroughly enjoyed my time in this region of the map before I roll on over to Vault City let's take a moment to hop over to my sponsor for this video hellofresh so every once in a while you meet someone who just can't cook for the life of them I mean not me I'm a great chef but sometimes I get lazy sometimes I just don't feel like trying to whip up a perfect five-star meal and instead wind up opting for ordering food or popping something in the oven from the freezer this is where hellofresh comes in to mitigate some of my um less healthy choices hellofresh is the first carbon neutral meal kit that offers pre-portioned ingredients for Less prep time while delivering fresh quality seasonal produce to your door my personal favorite bit is the sheer variety and customization involved with the whole process which makes it easy for me to swap out a particular side that I don't like for another or just overhauling a vegetable dish to include something a bit more carnivorous cooking up Meals is easy with step-by-step recipes and the whole process saves me trips to the grocery store saves me money from ordering takeout and makes me feel like I eat a lot healthier overall without sacrificing flavor plus I can pick out and sort Foods by calories which makes dieting a lot easier for me so if any of this sounds like something you could get on board with feel free to use my link or go to hellofresh.com and use code pug salt sept 16 for 16 free meals across seven boxes plus three surprise gifts thanks guys [Music] so now it's time for some real Fallout [ __ ] as Vault City really feels like the first place in this game that's more serious and in your face the music is this driving thumping mechanical theme there are armed guards everywhere keeping people on the outskirts of Vault city under control it just feels like you've really made it somewhere bigger for the first time and this is only the outer walls like I said likewise this is where the game takes a turn in the equipment Department before this a good gun was a hunting rifle and an SMG when I got an assault rifle and a special leather jacket from figuring out the ghost farm stuff I felt like a king and that feeling lasted for about 10 minutes as I ran over to Vault City and got into a few encounters which set me up with loads of new and better guns armor and items I mean we're talking about a trickle of small time guns and armor to a flood of medium to Big Time guns and armor it actually feels surprisingly unbalanced as the game just goes alright here's most of the small gun [ __ ] uh get ready for energy weapons and big guns next I know it sounds silly to complain about upgrades but I guess it was just the sheer amount of them though at the same time I guess it lends that much more impact to Vault city as a destination in the game so after dropping off Vic and arming myself to the teeth I pick up Cassidy John Cassidy is a tough old man who had to settle down here due to his heart condition since settling the guy has more or less hated his time in Vault City meaning that he jumps at the chance of getting on the road again which again kind of hearkens back to how Fallout 1 companions functioned hey you want to get out of here oh okay let's go he is probably the most fleshed out companion so far just due to his background and the random quips that he throws out I mean sulik had his sister thing happening but that led to a dead end when we confronted the slavers and it hasn't been mentioned since which is weird because it's like a driving force to his character or so I thought I guess it also helps that Jon's story was continued a bit through his daughter in New Vegas but I can't really count that too much when looking at just this game it is worth mentioning that Vic has a daughter here and there's a bit of back and forth between the two that reveals that the guy is a deadbeat dad but that's really about as far as he goes personality wise the city itself isn't a very nice place despite appearances the entire area is under heavy lockdown with the courtyard filled with people who aren't allowed in the city those who are allowed are citizens of the city or people who have a day pass which appropriately only allows you to be in the city during the day you can't bring any drugs or real alcohol into the city as all of the town's booze is synthetic in nature if you're not as Citizen and don't have a day pass the only way of getting in is by submitting yourself to servitude under these City's rules it's just kind of this daunting isolated rule-heavy City but its success can be attributed to these rules even if they are a bit harsh compared to the rest of the Wasteland that we've seen so far the citizens themselves tend to be pompous though generally still a bit more helpful than you would expect there's a bar some shops an office to sell your friends and loved ones into Eternal slavery under a futuristic regime a repair place a library of sorts which is currently transcribing all of the books around here into a digital format and so on it's all stuff that you can access to a degree but need to be a citizen to take full advantage of so how does one become a citizen well you can pass a ridiculously tough exam which requires nine plus perception luck and intelligence with no physical mutations from your travels or you can head over to the First Citizen and promise to take care of some ghouls which have been polluting the drinking water up in the small town of gecko my staff are good but they aren't that good so the whole gecko thing will be my route here I'll hold off on the Vault City summary for now since there's actually more to this place after becoming a real human being in the eyes of the illustrious Vault people I will say that there's some interesting back and forth with the first citizen here though she's not too keen on believing your story at first but backs down after you convince her to look at your Vault suit and canteen when she buys the story that you're a vault dweller from vault 13 she immediately feels bad for you for having been out in the wastes but that doesn't go far enough for her to actually welcome you into the ranks of the city proper it's a little infuriating the way that some of the townspeople here treat you but it's definitely supposed to feel that way I think an evil playthrough is in order sometime Gekko itself is the polar opposite of Vault City where VC is large sprawling and led by arrogant leaders who gatekeep their precious City away from the unwashed masses Gekko is a small and shitty Hub of ghouls led by a familiar face in the form of Herald from the last game who'd have thought I'd be making things right the old goal's done his best to keep the place under control but as he puts it there's only so much that he can do with the general intelligence of the ghouls that he leads the whole area is situated around an old leaking Atomic power plant which Harold needs repaired to patch the lake and keep things going fortunately this part is located within Vault City so that should be an easy fix for both parties involved unfortunately the lady who I received this Quest from despises the ghouls and wants me to take care of the issue by wiping them off the map which doesn't solve the problem seeing as the power plant is leaking contaminants into the water it doesn't matter how respectfully you phrase the argument here if you try to help Lynette here to see reason she bans you from Vault City I've had enough of your foolishness you are no longer permitted inside Vault City my guards will escort you to the front gate so yeah after reloading my save I take the issue over her head to her Superior who doesn't give a [ __ ] if there's ghouls around he just wants the actual problem solved he has me pick up the part needed to keep the plant chugging and Promises me citizenship regardless of any protest from Lynette meaning that I don't need to run in and wipe Gekko off the map I mean I could do that but I won't so walting into the reactor presents us with quite a few options with two or so results we can repair the thing or we can blow it up actually we can repair it and then blow it up for that sweet experience gain to do any of this I can have a couple of different [ __ ] ghouls walk in and turn off the coolant if I want to create a crater I can also head in myself to either save or kill the plant though I'd wind up looking like one of those glow-in-the-dark ceiling stickers that kids have in their bedroom afterwards but the smartest thing here is to Pilot the robot which has seen better days to even get the thing running I have to input a sequence of random alphanumeric characters though it is easy Once you figure out that you're just just looking for strings with a then B then C then you have to do a little trial and error logic puzzle which has you seeing what the robot does when you assign it a task and then inputting the correct sequence of actions before executing the command that you want but there's also a fun part so there's a secondary boot up option which has your guide noticing that there's a network linked to this computer if you apply the same logic as before you'll notice that there's an X Y and Z this time around the end result has a conversation happening with this fella from The Enclave is Enclave maincom but you should know that who are you chosen one huh well uh pardon me for not blowing Sunshine up your ass but I'm a little too busy for this your highness oh you're a wise guy huh look I'm chasing you right now pal let's see how smart you feel with internal security all over your freaking ass [ __ ] a few more moments and I'll have your sorry ass in a sling hey wait a minute this can't be right I've got you somewhere on the mainland well whoever you are I just dispatched a Verde assaulting to your location have a nice day that one was actually new to me since I don't think I noticed this option before when I played after the reactor Excursion you can choose to take a very back and forth kind of route between Gekko and Vault City a couple of times in order to optimize the power plan and get it running at full capacity so that Vault City can continue to expand this doesn't do a lot Beyond netting another chunk of experience and affecting the ending but the whole thing is a little aggravating with how much running there is I think the only thing that would have solved this was the ability to fast travel from the map portion to the head office and the actual Vault parts of Vault City but that doesn't seem to be an option here returning to Harold has him clapping you on the back and thanking you but I definitely recall gaining some stim packs from him for the efforts for some reason his dialogue is quite buggy for me this time around though as responding to him with certain prompts seems to have him regressing back into older dialogue which was really weird there are quite a lot of bugs in this game and although this is the only moderate one which has hit me so far I've definitely encountered quite a few minor ones in the past you can't really fault the devs too much with that though they kind of ship this game quickly as far as what I can do now with my shiny new citizenship the main thing for me personally is how people treat me now I know that kind of seems unimportant but with a game like Fallout immersion is everything and it does feel good to be accepted if only because I have a slip of paper that says that I'm acceptable beyond that though I can now purchase a lot more than I could before and gain access to the Vault itself for the main computer is the place is a copy paste of the vaults in the previous game but there's nothing wrong with that heading down to the bottom has me updating my Pip-Boy map finding out info about Vault 15 and learning about how Vault city was the recipient of a metric [ __ ] ton of water chips when a shipping error caused them to Veer from their much needed application at Vault 13. but either way this is about it for these areas of the game for now while there aren't a ton of actual quests involved with Vault City the concept of it alone makes it have a strong place in this game the way that it's ran how selective the town is with potential new candidates for citizenship and the mesh of helpful merchants and pompous Pricks makes for a tricky time navigating through the city the main quest with Gekko only further showcases what kind of people run the place as you have one side wanting its destruction despite the Town showing no aggression and the other side just wanting the real issue taken care of Gekko on the other hand is a rundown [ __ ] sure but Harold is always nice to talk to if hard to look at plus the ghoul bartender taught me how to play the universe's equivalent of Magic the Gathering called tragic the garnering which comes with a slew of references about Black Lotus equivalents addiction to the game and so on I mean come on how could I hate this place after that so now that the game has been split wide open I have a good four or five new locations to select from on the Overworld I typically save the NCR and new Reno for close to the end game but I do have a quest to pop by the NCR for the guards in Vault City part way through I stumbled upon a Raider Camp tried to take them on got my cheeks clapped and decided to bounce then I remembered something important there's a car guy at the den and I got the parts needed to repair and purchase the car from him this completely changes how slow slogging from one part of the map to the other is and makes my return trip back to the South take about a tenth of the time that it took me to get to the den of course pretty much everything in this game is South as far as the mid to late game goes so I decided that I would hit reading on the way back down to my next destination which I usually reserve for after broken Hills both reading and broken Hills are mining communities each specializing in their own form of ore extraction and Supply as such I'm just going to cover both in one go and save some time so strolling into reading immediately reveals uh casino and right next to that a bar I think he might be starting to see a pattern here at this stage the citizens here are pretty much all addicted to Jet and even the few that aren't waste their lives away in the mines at the casino or at the bar you can mop up a few Side Quests for the sheriff here like evicting a tenant breaking up a bar fight getting to the bottom of who cut up a prostitute's face and taking out some gangsters this is the best introduction to the town seeing as you quickly learn about the two mining outfits who are at odds with each other the gold that they mind being clamped down by the big three cities of the game and the corrupt way that this town is handled by its mayor both Redding and broken Hills trade with the NCR Vault City and New Reno regularly all three of which want to seize full control of the mining towns but the big thing to do in Reading is to buy the deed to an abandoned mine and clear it out in order to flip it for profit the enemies here are ones that haven't shown themselves in any other game known as juanamingos the SE are these very off-putting alien looking creatures with long tendrils for arms no discernible eyes and large moths the fun part is that they're later referred to as aliens in other parts of this game which is naturally what one thinks of when looking at them but the reality is that they were created in a lab as tools of War before they escaped much like deathclaws while they haven't appeared in their living form and any other Fallout Bethesda did plan on including them in Fallout 3 before they were cut and then they later tossed in a Wanamingo plushie in 276. now broken Hills is much more put together actually it may be the best looking place outside of Vault City in terms of its rigid structure and relatively clean streets it's also dreadfully boring there's a big ass yard with would-be Caravan Runners Milling around it I was desperately tapped for shotgun ammo after they won a mangoes so I pickpocketed a load a bit off of them surprisingly I got caught about three or four times with a sneak of 20 and a steal of 25 so I don't know what that's about beyond the yard and the Caravan people there's a few houses a doctor a store and a small Pub very normal nothing special going on but then there's Marcus and he single-handedly makes broken Hills worth visiting so Marcus is this very even-keeled calm and collected Super Mutant he's created a community of mixed mutant schools and humans here claiming that the days were super mutants and humans were at each other's throats are long over he himself established this town alongside his human best friend who started out as a Brotherhood of Steel Paladin after the two fought each other for a while both realized how pointless the fighting was and decided to Journey with each other while discussing the master and the brotherhood's philosophies it's a great background story that really shows what exactly black Isle had in mind with the vision of the super mutants they were these big ugly powerful enemies of humanity they were LED around by the nose by their master and now with the master gone they've had to go on to do whatever it is they could with the remainder of their time I took this line of thought a lot further in my Fallout 1 video but man Bethesda really did just go oh super mutants yeah those guys should always be a hundred percent evil monsters besides a couple of them it's such a tired concept to keep them as mindless monsters even if you do invent lore that makes the East Coast species different from the West Coast maybe when Fallout Kansas drops will see the two meet in the middle either way Marcus is available as a companion if you take care of some questing around town first it is worth noting that he actually recognizes my robes as the same kind that the Masters worshipers wore which I picked up from a man on a bridge earlier I'll talk about that interaction in a bit for now the east side of broken Hills is definitely a bit more interesting at the very least you got a guy who's worried about his missing wife a scientist who worked on mass-producing mentats and has created a talking plant and a smart scorpion and a ghoul who wants you to get him a porn magazine a sex doll and some alcohol in exchange for treasure the treasure is ten thousand bottle caps which are actually worthless in Fallout 2 funnily enough since the NCR minted actual currency that's been the norm for a while meaning that bottle caps are Just Junk now it's again another concept that points towards the idea that the developers wanted the Wasteland to grow and evolve to change and rebuild and it sucks that every Fallout after this is kind of regressed in that grow both Beyond New Vegas the main quests of broken Hills Have you fixing the mine's air purifier and getting to the bottom of the conspiracy against the super mutants one of the town's Merchants is heading up a rebellion against the mutants not that they're really keeping anyone down he just doesn't like them Marcus being the cool-headed mayor that he is wants to get evidence before taking any action unfortunately for that plan one of these super mutants who was scared for his life decided to kill off quite a few humans who were meeting and plotting to kill the mutants when you figure this out you can confront the mutant who atones for his sins by leaving while stating that he only acted in self-defense if you want to you can join the humans in driving off these super mutants by destroying the mind's air purifier after fixing it but you can also report back to Marcus and have the whole band of humans thrown into jail it's a snatch difference between the idealistic picture that Marcus painted about the community being a group of mismatched species that still get along despite everything and it's a healthy dose of reality for Marcus himself who's been struggling to come to terms that his human best friend may have been one of the few humans who made coexistence worth it the two mining towns of the game are Yin and Yang in appearance though the more Insidious nature of humanity lies within and comes out in broken Hills while things appear to be orderly and peaceful on the surface the mix Community isn't without its rampant speciesism boiling just beneath the surface Redding on the other hand is the epitome of The Human Condition with most of its residents just doing their best to get through their lives mining families struggle against each other desperate prostitutes sell SOB stories to try to get more money for their drug addiction the whole town is being taken for a ride by the big three cities of the game with new Reno having its hooks particularly deep in the casino toting rundown [ __ ] and that's the big thing that ties these towns together while broken Hills may have not had a jet problem courtesy of new Reno the ghouls who run the uranium Refinery do assure you that their town is struggling to stay afloat as well and then every bit of refined ore helps and with the busted air purifier in play you're also sent to new Reno for parts since all roads seem to lead to this bustling epicenter of sleaziness I think it's about time that we head on over but since we've been talking about traveling quite a bit now let's talk about encounters first so as mentioned before your encounters are affected by the Outdoorsman skill pretty heavily in Fallout 2. if you have a decent chunk of points in it you can pretty much outright avoid or purposefully enter encounters at will basically you're either getting jumped by whatever's out there or the game asks hey you want to fight some scorpions of course you can also run into cool [ __ ] like Merchants people fighting other people or creatures Caravans and so on the devs completely and utterly revamped the encounter system so much that I imagine that I could play this game 10 times over and still not see a good chunk of them I'm talking 34 different zones each with their own set of chance encounters enemies which range from banded slavers and Highwaymen to Enclave mutant creatures wanamingos and remnants of the Masters Army from the previous game it's an absolute wealth of possible abilities and also include some random special encounters as well these encounters occur based on your luck and level with some only happening at specific levels what I personally encountered ranged from a Monty Python quiz bridge to a cafe with fourth wall breaking characters to King Arthur's knights on a quest for the Holy Hand Grenade to a reference to an online Fallout fan forum with the quiz Bridge my character prompts me to save my game in a new slot the questions that I'm asked involve two softball questions and a bit of trivia about the game the first time I decided to answer correctly which has the bridge keeper angrily muttering about this job being shitty I reloaded and answered incorrectly on purpose only to die instantly on the third reload I asked the guy to clarify how many levels of these strong back perk factors into the question that he was asking which kills him instantly and finally I decided to try to attack the bastard which had him spawning exploding Brahmin and then ending combat repeatedly I decided to try for a while and after missing a ton of my shots I managed to hit him for all one of his HP the cafe was pretty fun in its own right and basically has several hero models from the first game reliving the type of player that was playing them it does get a little weird when the Black hero model starts complaining about the white people cutting him from the game and the red-headed female model complaining about having to sleep with the entire Dev team in order to make it into the game but you do get dog meat from the cafe if you strip down to your Vault suit the King Arthur thing is just a big reference to Monty Python as you might imagine and not much more happens with it I gotta say for his prolific as Monty Python and the Holy Grail was I think the internet is pretty much all but killed it for me at this point I know that Fallout 2 came out in 1998 but Jesus Christ man it's been non-stop since the goddamn movie came out basically then again I still laugh at Todd Howard jokes almost all the time so maybe it just doesn't tickle me the same way it tickles everyone else the fan forum encounter has a bunch of NPCs named after real-world screen names on a Fallout Forum known as unwashed Village The Forum itself is now defunct though the site still exists regardless the whole encounter plays out with all of these Forum members battling a known spammer at the time who was wreaking havoc on the site it must have been really damn cool to have stumbled onto this RNG event in Fallout 2 as one of these people all of these encounters really help to drive home the amount of times that you could reasonably play Fallout 2 and still have a brand new experience each time which is amazing I know that a lot of these are just jokes and maybe that bothers some people I kind of get it but at the same time it's still really fun for me personally it's just gonna be a preferential thing at the end of the day but either way though I only wound up getting about a quarter of them the rest are all fun in their own right and range from more pop culture references to bizarre Easter eggs that add a little more excitement to braving the wastes so the city of New Reno is absolutely huge with plenty to do in a daunting way for first-time players I remember the first time I pulled up I felt almost overwhelmed with the amount going on the big thing that you need to know here though is that there are four crime bosses which have divided the city and fight each other over the control of it constantly as such you can join any one of them as a made man if you decide to go through with all of their quests this is actually something I'm pretty excited about for this video seeing as I only ever chose one family to go through with but I learned later on that you can actually become a made man in every single one of these families if you know when to Halt the quest line that you're on and start the next one but let's start with an overview charging into new Reno and parking your car Nets you a little attention from a local who has all of the information there were a couple of notable info dealers in the previous Fallout but Jules here tops them all in pure personality the way that he talks is something that I can hear in my head and the dialogue here is Top Notch as such chatting him up and paying him 400 100 Fun bucks total to Spill the details on the four families here is always worth it for me right out of the gate you have the mordinos who used to be slaves before clawing their way to the top they're the jet dealers here and they Supply the entirety of California more or less with enough drugs to pacify the countryside through their copious amounts of factories they're always looking to improve their products so that people can fly higher so to speak and they hire the brightest scientists in the business to make that happen over in one of their facilities here where they test new batches of jet on slaves next we've got the salvatorees who specialize in Firepower specifically of the energy weapon variety they're a quiet and serious gang who tend to cut down people just for looking at them funny next up are the Bishops who Jewels here has the least to say about the only thing that he imparts is the knowledge that their leader is particularly protective of his wife and daughter and finally there are the rights who are all members of the same bloodline they deal in alcohol specifically which is the only thing that Jules really has to say about them so let's see what's going on around town before starting our gangster Extravaganza immediately across the street is a whorehouse where you can choose to play with many of the town's ladies they have Jenga Yahtzee Connect 4 anal Monopoly and Hungry Hungry Hippos if I'm reading the menu correctly all of them increase one of your stats by one for a little while which is nice then you've got the Desperado which is the casino where the mordinos Hang Out the mordinos casino if you will we'll get back to that one later for now heading up North reveals even more City to play around in you've got the gym with a boxing ring that you can participate in no armor fists only so my stats can only carry me so far in it across the way you've got the Golden Globes porn Studio it's a studio where films are made of two consenting adults practicing their pro wrestling against each other okay YouTube employee pro wrestling also you can get paid five bucks to wax shafts probably the chefs that keep the wrestling ring up but I didn't ask if you come back later after gaining popularity in town you can Star as one of the wrestlers yourself but I think you can do it sooner if your charisma is high further up the road are two more bar Casino mixes ones ran by the Bishops called the Shark Club or the sarc Cub I guess and the other is the Salvatore's which is run by the rights wait no it's run by the salvatorees huh not what I would have went with I actually have business at the Shark Club as I wound up snagging a briefcase in Vault city which is to be delivered to the boss here if you happen to shake down the guy who wanted the case delivered he slips a note into the briefcase stating that you're a piece of [ __ ] and the Bishops immediately turn on you which obviously cuts off any jobs that you can do for them I definitely learned that lesson the hard way before fortunately I prevented that particular outcome this time but I figured it was time for some payback anyways so I [ __ ] John Bishop's Wife and daughter who both immediately pull you into bed when you speak with them what the guy had it coming just you know in a different timeline regardless Jon forces you into doing his next job if you threw his daughter around the room like a pinball so I'll cover the details of that real quick basically he wants a guy who's part of the NCR dead but he wants it to look like an accident if you share a bit of pillow talk with Mrs Bishop she'll tell you that John's been trying to get in good with the NCR so that he can take advantage of its size and start rigging elections and controlling the drug trafficking there so the guy that he wants dead is likely someone who's stopping him from getting that done but we'll continue on that in a few for now Salvatore's beckons across the street it's a bar and uh yeah it's just a bar you can talk to Big Boss Salvatore if you want to but there's not a lot of Superfluous stuff on the west side is the um bad part of town I mean this whole place is an urban nightmare of junkies prostitutes and scammers but this is like the shittier part there are some shops one of which Nets those mind parts for broken Hills the other is the gun store where the guy up front has a low intelligence fellow locked away in his basement who does all of the gun modifications oh yeah there are gun mods in this game which is pretty neat but that's really about it in terms of important [ __ ] on the West Side the East Side however houses the Wright family and is probably the nicest part of town well nicest it's relative here it still looks like like this but the only thing to do here is to interact with the various products of incest known as the rights you can give a pistol to the kids outside and they'll be dead when you come back and if you want to you can have them lead you out to the desert to witness a transaction between the enclave and the salvatories for energy weapons Additionally you can talk to Mrs Wright who believes that her husband the alcohol Baron is working on cleansing the city of corruption while preaching Temperance obviously this is just a method to control the people of new Reno which Harkens back to the real world history of temperance in the United States which I thought was pretty fun but that's about it as far as side stuff goes in new Rhino Beyond collecting cats paw magazines for the owner of the brothel and recovering your stolen car from The Chop Shop so after running back to Broken Hills for Marcus it's time to really sink our teeth into the families of new Reno we'll start with the bishop since I already have an in with them now the issue here is that the guy that Bishop once killed is in the NCR area talking about this game in any sort of linear manner is already kind of a bit of a problem and this is Another Monkey Wrench that's thrown into the mix even if it stems from something good so I'll skip over any NCR dealings revolving around the victim here and jump into it in a bit because there are some things that can be done before putting him out of his misery after the deed is done returning to [ __ ] Bishop has him wanting you to kill someone else in the NCR go figure this time though it's the vice president of the faction which makes things a little more interesting than sticking an old man with a poison needle so we've got a couple of options here guns blazing which um isn't a great idea in the heart of the NCR or we can go with a more stealthy approach which has me either gaining the trust of the security here or pickpocketing the president's assistant for a presidential pass by the way I still have 20 sneak and 25 steel and I'm first trying these steals so again I don't think these are the best stats to dump points into after making it into the vp's estate I can stick him with some super stim packs which will drain his health after a couple of minutes or I can go for the tried and true Dynamite so here's the deal this was the last quest for John bishop and normally this is where he'd welcome you into his family but since I slammed his wife and daughter he basically forced me to take this first job and because of that particular interaction he decides that he no longer has a use for you after assassinating the vice president so yeah end of the line no matter how you slice it now I know that there's a burning question at the Forefront of everyone's mind at the end of the bishop family sequence and the answer is yes you can absolutely continue clapping John Bishop's widow's cheeks after his body hits the floor in fact you have to step over it to get to bed so she seems pretty cool about it all things considered meanwhile his daughter charged me with a knife so I guess she wasn't as okay with how things went down the fight out of this place is [ __ ] brutal though as we go down three floors of fighting at one point the prostitutes go berserk which I can only imagine is a coding error as they just start shanking both Bishops men and the casino patrons I mean nothing can stop these women from descending on their victims besides a Bullet to the Head or leaving the map but they're fine after doing so well I mean depending on your definition of fine all right next family time the salvatories were the ones with the energy weapons their boss is a decaying old man who speaks to you like Darth Vader through his oxygen tank setup but the muscle here is the most unbearable piece of [ __ ] who treats you like liquid garbage at every given turn thank God we're not siding with these [ __ ] the first mission has you tracking down a guy who cheated at cards Salvatore wants him dead and his money back which is pretty easy to accomplish having Lloyd here lead you to where he stashed the money has him taking you to Golgotha which is a very minor area that contains plenty of graves to dig up if you're into that otherwise it's not very important still it's pretty cool to find minor little areas like this in the game though I feel like it really continues to lend to that idea that this game can be played quite a few times without seeing everything the next mission is a Shakedown of a merchant in town which isn't anything to write home about but is still pretty fun in its own right and finally we get to meet up with The Enclave as one of the Salvatore's guards in the whole energy weapon transaction that we witnessed before if you move everyone on the map loses their [ __ ] so you have to just stay still and bathe in the glory of the Enclave or whatever though honestly the dialogue is the exact same as it was the first time that you witnessed the transaction so yeah and then that's it for the salvatores well that sucked when I played before I wound up with the rights and the Bishops so I can confidently say that although I had a bit of fun with the first two Salvatore missions they're easily on the weaker end when it comes to questing at least the fight on the way out goes a lot faster and the prostitutes don't lose their [ __ ] minds this time next up are the mordinos big Jesus mordino is also a decrepit old man though his health problems seemed to stem from obesity rather than old age his first job is a simple package delivery out to his meth lab called The Stables this is a simple back and forth but the Stables are worth exploring a bit for a new potential companion in Myron he's stupid [ __ ] [ __ ] jet here talking to its maker it's Creator it's God yeah this dweeb is the creator of jet which he's very proud of in exchange for his Cavalcade of drug knowledge he gets everything that he wants from the mardinos except for one important thing respect likewise you can convince the nerd that he'd be better off traveling with you than sticking around in this bunker I've never liked Myron even if I do think he's a good inclusion into the game it's fun to listen to other characters bully him and he's good for making cams he also has a mini Quest involving tracking down a cure for jet though you can also do that one without him and then we get to the second and final mission for the mordinos which again is awful because it means running over and collecting money from the porn studio and that's all that happens concerning this Quest but you can at least use this opportunity to pressure the porn man into giving you an audition if he wouldn't give you the time of day before it doesn't go well because of my for endurance but hey still neat there would be one more mission for big Jesus here but unfortunately I gotta jumped the gun on the Salvatore seeing as he wants them dead and since I killed them already there's nothing more that I can do which I think is kind of silly I would have absolutely loved it if big Jesus had heard of you making waves and preemptively eliminating his foes and then actually trusted you with a different job because of this hell maybe if you took out two or more of the families he turns on you out of paranoia but as things stand this is just a dead end which blows and finally we have the rights which I feel have the most fleshed out set of missions even if there are only technically two or three if you consider a side quest the side quest has you talking to Mrs Wright about the whole Temperance thing and then pointing out to her that her husband is running new Reno's alcohol Supply she vehemently disagrees stating that her husband dismantled his boost still forever ago and then she tries to prove it to you when she meets you at the church the next day she appears defeated before admitting that it's still up and running you can go and destroy it yourself or have her do it which I opt for the latter the real meat though is talking to Orville Wright who at first claims that there's no way that he'd let an outsider into his family but then he thinks about an issue that he's been having and realizes that he's made no Headway with sending his sons in to try to take care of it the problem is that one of his teenage boys recently died from a jet overdose he wants me to figure out who could have possibly forced his innocent boy to use the devil's methamphetamine so I questioned the big dealers in town one of which gets pissed and threatens me for some reason the guy sees fit to take a knife to someone who's wearing full combat armor who's wielding a full auto shotgun and has a super mutant and a deathclaw as backup the other two point fingers at each other and I can choose to turn one of them in or little Jesus mordino if he was alive but digging up the right son's body reveals traces of poison in his system and investigating his room has a stumbling upon a poison-laced jet canister upon questioning one of the jet Merchants he realizes that the Salvatore's ordered up some poison jet which he provided returning to Orville has the man laughing in better defeat seeing as he fears the salvatories with their laser Weaponry when I state that I wiped the family out he retorts with the news that the Salvatore are much bigger than the people stationed in new Reno but he does think up an alternative which has me stopping by the Sierra Army Depot for more Firepower the depot is as crazy or as tame as you make it as having good repair and science skills make it a cakewalk but if you choose to or if you just don't have the stats you can fight your way through the extremely heavy robot security the whole place is a playground of weapons ammo and general combat gear I particularly like the old news broadcast that you can read claiming that the U.S found a way to tap into the last known supply of oil which China was unhappy about with gas prices skyrocketing worldwide the last bit of oil caused the U.S economy to flourish leading to its annexation of a desperate Canada the U.S then impeached its president over jaywalking even though it was obviously because he pushed for Annex in Canada additionally temperatures in the winter hit lows of 90 degrees Fahrenheit riots took place over oil which was now more expensive than gold and China eventually invaded through Alaska before being pushed back and launching the nukes it's all very yes exaggerated but the hints of real possibilities still make this whole thing a fascinating read but there really isn't a ton of noteworthy things to do here I mean yeah there are fun little distractions and stuff to obtain you can pick up another companion called Skynet which is an AI that you can shove into a robo brain you can also extract your other companions brains and shove them into other Robo brains and then there's this fun little goofy fella who they tried to bring back with experimental metagel who then melts when he runs away it's just a circus of [ __ ] to loot and Tech to explore and it serves its purpose very well of course Orville is very pleased with your findings and makes you a made man of the right family this comes with an array of benefits which mostly amount to discounts but also as everyone in town treating you with a lot more respect overall new Reno is basically New Vegas on meth it's a scummy trashy pile of [ __ ] in the middle of the map and the setting is absolutely amazing in its own right the amount to do the way the people are and what you can make of it are all perfect additions to Fallout 2. now I'm not saying that it's better than the city of New Vegas there are better stories more interesting characters more intertwining plot lines and more importance placed on Vegas that blow new Reno out of the water but there's a certain quality of realism that Reno brings to the table and honestly these qualities probably wouldn't be seen in something like Fallout nowadays yeah sure there are scumbag areas and newer fallouts but something about games being fully voiced with 3D models make these sexual encounters and heavy drug use go way down even if those things could just be implied so while I do like New Vegas better as a setting I think that there's a strong case for new Reno's existence as well now all of that preys aside new Reno does have a lot of issues the amount to do is staggering yes the way that people talk is interesting to read but a lot of the questing seems more like filler than stuff with actual substance I think the salvatorees and the mordinos honestly could have been combined into a better family there's very little overlap between these families Beyond a handful of instances and that kind of sucks additionally for as good as this game is about there being alternate routes and questing based off of player choice these gigantic families which all compete for new Reno don't really acknowledge whether or not you're playing nice or playing mean with the other families sure Bishop will get pissed if you're a made man in another family but he was generally the only one who was super reactive about this kind of thing I just feel like wiping out an entire family should have made you more noteworthy to the others and that lack of impact is really felt when you can do pretty much everything the right east side of the map is also woefully underutilized in terms of what there is to do in it I'm not opposed to it existing I just wish there was a bit more to it even if I think the rights quests were my favorites and finally the amount of little technical problems that arise are at an all-time high in new Reno people going nuts during fights Bishop's Wife not noting that her husband is dead a scripting bug which causes your speech stat to flip-flop when trying to get your car back from the shop the entire town lagging to a point where I have to restart the game and probably 40 other bugs that hurt the game that all stem from this one area of the map I know I've been pretty lenient on bugs existing just due to knowing about the development cycle but it doesn't make this whole ordeal any less of a slog to get through either way let's jump back over to the NCR so the new California Republic is one of the first and only places that has a very strong tie to Fallout one it's kind of crazy actually all of these places that we've trekked through have had some roots in the first game ever here and there with a handful of characters some factions and obvious themes but the NCR is the first place that really built off of an idea from the previous entry basically the devs took a pretty minor character in Shady Sans and had him go on to form the NCR with his daughter going on to run it after him but we'll get to her in a moment for now the NCR does something that no other place does in this game and has the player put away their weapons and their companions weapons if they want to enter the city to do business it's a little bit annoying mechanically but it also makes complete sense and it makes me wonder why Vault City didn't have the same setup outside of the walls a bulletin board reinforces this role along with prohibiting people from being under the influence of chems or alcohol the prohibition of prostitution gambling and slavery and a nice little point about ignorance not being an excuse interestingly enough though there are slave pens and a bar situated right outside of the NCR so apparently that's just an inner city set of rules you would think that these slave pens in particular would be a No-No but uh I guess they only care about it within the perimeter at least officially inside the city's walls people are generally pretty damn polite probably the nicest in terms of what they have to say to you at random with the town being as big as it is there's plenty to do here to a degree we're covering everything would get a little bit stale so let's hit the big events round one is a bomb threat yeah dude's pissed about his ex-wife taking him for everything that he has after she got caught cheating on him and he's threatening to blow up the power plant here you have a couple of options but I went for the one where I talk him down round two involves the Rangers which are a group of charitable do-gooders that work to stop slavers from slaving now you see why there's a big [ __ ] off slave fence right outside of the town right because your first and only test is setting those slaves free I gotta say for as good as this game's been about setting up its Quest this is the first one that kind of sticks out as very video gamey just because it's like the NCR is against slavers the Rangers are against slavers and yet here they are not a hundred feet from the entrance of the town then after you're done freeing the slaves the ranger in charge goes congrats you're a ranger I don't know it just seems a little stupid this actually isn't the only contradictory thing about the ncr's bulletin board though as there is a bar inside of it also at first I thought they'd only serve like water or juice or whatever but no they serve alcohol so I guess as long as you don't get drunk at it or leave drunk or drink in the streets then you can consume alcohol then again a lot of these rules seem to be a don't get caught doing this or being stupid kind of thing considering that one of the first places that you can stumble into has a roulette table in the back behind a sealed door round three of this Carnival is the Church of homology which I talked a bit about in my Fallout 4 DLC video basically the hobologists are a humorous poke at real-life Scientology but with some twists that actually affect your stats if you go through any of their programs in this case the head Church [ __ ] here can stick you with a Zeta scanner to purge the bad vibes and invite the good which permanently lowers or raises your luck so yeah free luck 10 for me there's not too much involving the hobologists here as their main HQ is in San Francisco round four has me visiting the Westin Ranch which is owned by the guy who I assassinated for Bishop back in new Reno so this is where things get really interesting as black Isle has created some really cool interactions between the big three cities of this game so obviously they're all kind of fighting back and forth for territory general population control and any chunk of power that they can get their hands on but a lot of it goes much deeper than hey we want control of these Minds the biggest example revolves around Westin who's described by Vault City's first citizen Lynette as the last honest member of the NCR basically those Raiders who I had trouble with before had Direct ties to John Bishop in new Reno he hired them to put the pressure onto Vault city which they were doing before I lit them up if you decide to raid Bishop safe after you're done raiding his wife and daughter's holes you discovered that Bishop was actually hired by the NCR to get vault City to join the Republic The Mercenaries disguised as Raiders were his nuclear option when BC to client is offer Lynette has you card on back over to the NCR to talk to Westin about this who has me run a new Hollow tape back to Lynette which yeah you can describe this as kind of a back and forth Quest design but with the car it's no problem in fact I would say that a lot of the quests revolving around these three cities was built around the car and how quickly you can get back and forth between these places either way I still had to kill Westin for Bishop anyway so that kind of worked out as a two-for-one combo when I stuck him with a poison-filled syringe from the doctor in Town's cabinet but the best thing that the NCR has to offer in my eyes is the path to Vault 13 which to be fair is still the same place that it was in the last game a bit West of what used to be Shady Sans there are several ways of discovering the place where everything began and I went with getting the town drunk to tell me about the time that he scribbled a map to Vault 13 on the back of a painting obtaining this painting map reveals the vault's location on the Overworld map and b-lining it to 13 has you stumbling onto one of the most interesting ideas in all of Fallout to me personally the devs intentionally made the Vault appear empty but upon opening it up [Music] foreign I forgot about the twist okay so these guys are intelligent death claws which have been experimented on by The Enclave with the fev in order to create super soldiers akin to super mutants the ones that were experimented on became so smart that they pretended to be stupid and obedient before making their escape since then they've discovered the Vault and have been using its computer's voice activation to keep the place running they can read they can write they can manipulate their vocal cords like a parrot to mimic human speech their intelligence ranges from that of a human child to a fully grown smart human adult and they've chosen to do their best to make a good impact on the world they accept all into their home including a mother and her child a doctor a technician a depressed man who they began administering antidepressants to and someone who actively tried to destroy their egg Colony even that last one is still around here and has allowed freedom of movement to anywhere besides the exit this is a fantastic idea that plays into the creativity of just what Fallout can be because yes of course super mutants can be monstrous [ __ ] Merc types Who attack and eat all humans on site and yes deathclaws can just be big bad enemies but why not make more out of them or at least a handful of them the possibilities when writing and creating a whole universe are Limitless and confining certain aspects to a box only stifles any new ideas from coming forward and I'm not saying that these death claws should have went on to become their own nation and have equal footing with humans because their story is actually more or less wrapped up in this very game if you wind up completing their Quest and don't finish the game fast enough I'd normally put that off until later but I might as well hit it now basically these guys want you to repair their computer which has been tampered with if you're an evil bastard they won't even let you through the building unless you're dumb in which case they'll take pity on you if you patch the computer up they'll be happy with you and you can grab the Geck and be on your way later on The Enclave shows up in and massacres them which you can view part of on the recorded video logs of the Vault it's a horribly disheartening death to a morally good people one who were just trying their best to make it while showing Humanity that they weren't the monsters that they appeared to be and you could view this whole story as a tiny blip on the radar of Fallout lore right but the fact that it was presented as a possibility is a gigantic highlight for me because it opened so many more ideas on what Fallout could be what it could have maybe a couple of these deathclaws hide and survive the massacre and they go on to become these jaded haters of humanity they teach their young to hate humans but are still able to manipulate humans to written messages or forced coercion maybe you as a player in a new Fallout are able to meet these deathclaws who have strayed from their ancestors path of peace and can join them to be as mean as they are or dissuade them from this route instead showing them that mankind can be good too the potential for carrying something that stems from uh well well what if we made intelligent deathclaws into future titles is amazing and while things like this never happened in later games I still loved this scene immensely as such my newest companion is a deathclaw named goris goris is a highly knowledgeable deathclaw soldier who emphatically wants to learn more about humankind and the outside world while he doesn't have too much more to say to you beyond that he does let you know when The Enclave attacks vault 13. as he has a bit of a telepathic connection to his kin the only other thing worth mentioning is the fact that every time it's time for combat my man tosses his robes off in a dramatic fashion before charging the nearest enemy and Goring the [ __ ] out of them that's just cool as hell man the last real notable thing to do in the good old NCR is speaking to the woman herself president Tandy for as much as I like what the devs have done with Shady Sans and the NCR the amount that Tandy has to say to you is pretty lacking sure she Regals the time that she got rescued by The Vault dweller and fills in the blanks about how the NCR came to be this way but her personality is just kind of eh for lack of a better word she's Pleasant enough to speak to seems to know what she's doing and answers whatever questions you have to the best of her knowledge she explains that she doesn't like new Reno but she's still willing to politely Annex the [ __ ] out of them if she can she comments on her dad dying while looking for Vault 13. but the most important knowledge comes in the form of a hollow disk of NCR propaganda and if that's the most important and interesting thing here it speaks volumes about her character being almost non-existent the disc itself basically explains the process of how the NCR goes about spreading and claiming new land a town can apply to be part of the ncr's territory then they'll send out their soldiers clean up the bed stuff and then the town can apply for full citizenship with voting rights the president and VP are voted in by the people though with no term limits Tandy has been running the place for decades now so in a way she might as well be a queen the whole tape makes the NCR seem like a great place to live and a good faction to be a part of which makes sense given the disc's nature sure the task that Tandy gives you is to head on over to Vault 15 where a group of squatters as she puts it have taken over the outside of the Vault and aren't letting anyone near it arriving on scene has a woman pulling you aside for help finding her daughter who went missing a little while ago she claims that the NCR hasn't been helping or hurting these people who are just homeless and trying to survive out here but then they suddenly became interested in the vault claiming that it was their peoples the way that these squatters have been driving the NCR soldiers off is by enlisting the help of the Raiders known as the cons which had a minor role in the last game actually their minor role involved Tandy before too so it's kind of appropriate these guys have seemingly treated the squatters well but it soon becomes apparent that they're using them as a front while they try to tap into the Vault for some reason as smart as the cons had been up until this point they decided to kidnap This Woman's kid so that they could have some fun with her as they put it had they just killed her after there wouldn't be this link to them which exposes their plans to the squatters when I arrive the squatters decide to give me access to the vault which I then used to wipe out the cons then I convinced the squatters that if they let the NCR have this place that they can broker a deal to be taught how to better survive while being provided with the Necessities to live I'm actually not a big fan of this whole subplot I do like that the boss Khan's kid went on to lead this group and become a whacked out Maniac but I don't like what's going on with the NCR because when you look at what the NCR is like in New Vegas sure they're the good guys but they're extraordinarily inept that's their flaw and it makes playing with or against them a lot more fun from a role-playing perspective either you're the hero who's helping to clean up their messes or you're the well-oiled machine who stands in their way despite them being the good guys in Fallout 2 they're just these Messiahs everything is good they're here to create a society where democracy rules and law Breakers are dealt with I mean yeah they technically hired John Bishop ship to try to put the pressure on vault City but I'm pretty sure they didn't really have any idea about the actual Raiders being hired or even if they did I don't know I guess that's the worst thing that they really do here in this game and yeah there's nothing wrong with these goals of being good but it's the flaws that make the NCR interesting to me and they hardly have any in this game which makes them a lot more boring but that's it for the NCR the main things that this place has going for it are the other places surrounding it though I guess the whole don't run around with weapons thing is also unique at least I do like the setup here for the NCR as a faction in New Vegas but it doesn't do much beyond the setup the town itself isn't the most fun to explore the people are pretty boring and the most fun that I had was when new Reno was involved which I would count as new Reno questing it just felt like the devs could have done some more missions with the Rangers had Tandy have a bit more personality and maybe made the whole Council area of the map feel a lot more important I'd have loved it if it turned out that Tandy was directly manipulating votes to keep her in charge or anything to make these guys seem a little more not so Goody Two-Shoes but I guess it is what it is and not everything can be perfect so now that everything is relatively wrapped up regarding the big players of the game you'll recall that I retrieved the Geck from Vault 13. throughout the game The Village Shaman has been telepathically speaking to me and updating me on the state of the village which deteriorates as time goes on it's very much a product of PC games at the time and serves to basically remind the player that they didn't just get cut loose into a playground to do as they please but I suppose I never really talked about what was going on with the whole Geck ordeal so basically the Garden of Eden creation kit is a device meant to Aid in terraforming previously unusable land into something that can grow crops and support life each kit contains supplements for planting seeds stabilizing chemicals and purifying water along with a load of helpful information and supplementary technology basically it's an advanced gardening kit it was instrumental in the construction of Vault city which emerged from Vault 8 and is revered as an almost magical item by the people of Arroyo which is why you were sent out to find it when you ask everyone else out in the wastes who know about it they're pretty much like oh those old things oh yeah they're pretty useful they're just not really used anymore though because their purpose was to basically jump start a civilization which makes the Geck in Fallout 3 that much more out of place I know that that particular Geck unit was supposed to be a one-of-a-kind prototype but the fact that it really is that Miracle device that the Arroyo people viewed it as kind of just continues to play into this idea that Bethesda looked at the really big ideas from the first games and just ran with them in any direction that suited their narrative but either way after making a beg to Arroyo the town Shaman lays on the ground nearly dead he claims that The Enclave assaulted the town before taking a chunk of it hostage and killing the rest Dark Souls came they took everyone it's a game created by from software some say that video games truly didn't exist until it was bestowed unto the world you must hurt a Chosen One Stop hitetaka Miyazaki from spreading his Anor Londo to the rest of the world the fate of video game journalism is at stake so there would really only be one more big place left to go that we've been told about and that San Francisco but after the whole goris Fiasco we can also choose to hit up the military base from the previous game on the way over as well now story slash lore wise and this place is decent basically The Enclave had some miners digging down into the old Vats of fev so that they could obtain the [ __ ] directly from the source eventually the miners began to change into super mutants then overwhelm The Enclave guard before getting shut into the base when The Enclave blew up the entrance combat Wise It's a [ __ ] load of mutants flamers plasma throwers power fists and savory loaders that last one might seem unfamiliar to you but some of these guys had these weapons that just reloaded my save so weird right I mean it always seemed to happen right after they killed Marcus I I don't know maybe it was just a bug the real reason to come to this place though is the power armor you know in the last game I had like five strength or whatever and it was fine because I could NAB the power armor pretty damn early in this game my five strength has absolutely crippled me the amount of times that I could not carry the [ __ ] that I wanted was the worst damn thing possible for someone who likes to grab literally everything that they can so that they can sell it later this is literally the reason why I have three companions they are my mules and I feel nothing for them Beyond a slight fondness like I would a horse actually the horse would be cuter the power armor was my real friend all along and I don't care about these stim pack absorbers anymore more but then again now I can carry even more loot hmm yeah we'll see at the bottom of this mini dungeon is a former magician who was kidnapped from reading by The Enclave and forced to dig as such the magician summons his magical animals from the radioactive goo to help him out but killing him early obviously stops that process alright this was a well worth it distraction but let's head on over to San Francisco at last the first thing that you'll notice about the city is that it's a lot cleaner and more put together than its IRL counterparts I guess the devs assume that just cramming modern day San Fran into their video game would be confusing but yeah this place is great the music is interesting the equipment shops are stocked with amazing stuff and the whole place feels completely different than anywhere else in the game though that's definitely due to the chunk of San Francisco that you land in being the Chinatown portion of the city or I guess as the game refers to it she town of course with it being the late 90s at the time of development you're gonna have a throwback to martial arts in some form so there's this fighting ring in the center of this area where the bad boys and the good boys duke it out every day in a bid for control of the town if your morality is high you can go train with the good guys and if it's low you can train with the bad guys there is no room for neutrality here then you can challenge either to Mortal Kombat with no armor or weapons and that's it just a little diversion I guess though not an unwelcome one the more important bit is the Brotherhood of Steel bunker in the bottom left corner these bunkers have been continually popping up in a couple of areas in the Wasteland but you're never able to get into them since the guard outside who seems to have been watching you directs you two back away when you attempt it as mentioned before and guess what you're still not allowed to go in but the guy will actually talk to you now that you've made it this far I know it's weird but let's finally talk about what happened with the Brotherhood of Steel after they seem to be such a well-oiled and bureaucratic machine in the first game I'll try to sum this up as basically as possible so at the end of Fallout the Brotherhood was chilling and just doing their thing they were collecting weapons and handing them out to people that they felt had the same type of moral code that they had and they felt pretty comfortable doing it eventually they kind of figured hey you know what we're [ __ ] Chads No One's Gonna challenge us we're literally the best we got this down we're the kings of the tech Kingdom yeah and then The Enclave flew in with 40 flying machines that they had never seen before at this stage the Brotherhood had gotten a lot more lacks and understaffed seeing the Enclave show up like the big kids at the sandbox scared the hell out of them so they did what any anal retentive nerd would do they hid they hid and watched and tried their best to look inconspicuous one person at an outpost in the middle of a random Town who cares and that's been their philosophy they don't know how to deal with The Enclave if they attempt to invade in their vertibirds especially since they seem to have no qualms about killing dealing drugs and claiming slaves to get their jobs done they are quite literally the more evil and more powerful form of the Brotherhood and again if you look at what the Brotherhood is in Fallout 1 and 2 there's an absolute night and day difference between black black Isle Brotherhood and Bethesda Brotherhood hell even New Vegas had the Brotherhood kind of following the original plan of being a shell of its former self sure they're more or less one of the good factions in this hellscape but they're overly analytical overly controlling and they're always the underdog sure they have power but they're not the sweeping ridiculous blimp riding force of Destruction they're just doing their best to follow their code and make the Wasteland a better place and it's really never working out the way that they hope until one lone man comes in to push their agenda in the right direction I honestly think that this is the better way for the Brotherhood and I know that that's a preference some people are gonna love the mighty and in your face direction that the East Coast Brotherhood went but I personally feel more inclined to help thee down but not out form of the Brotherhood to help them pick things up and fight the good fight against seemingly insurmountable odds when I come into the East Coast Brotherhood and go yeah I want to help you and they go hey [ __ ] you we got this we're badasses and we know what we're doing we're gonna seize all the tech destroy all the synths and [ __ ] your wife's boyfriend before lunch I just feel like like I'm choosing them because ooh Big Shiny Armor I want to help out leonidas's 300 Spartans I don't want to help out the crypto Bros to snatch up more nfts either way these guys want you to infiltrate a new Enclave base up north and attempt to gather any information that you can that'll be our next stop after we're done with San Francisco the other way out of here takes us to the end of the game which we'll get to later obviously for now there's the two main factions of the city the she and the habologists the she operate to the East and seem to be researching all sorts of theoretical ideas such as the replication of the vertibird the use of polymers to create Fuel and the creation of new armor and weaponry as such the assistant to the emperor and the so-called steel Palace wants you to obtain the plans for the creation of a vertibird from the same base that the Brotherhood wants you to add to if you do this the assistant plans on letting you meet the emperor to ask about your loved one's location or you could just walk past him discover that the XI Emperor is a computer hack into it and figure out these things for yourself you can also format its hard drive which the guard who just let you Waltz in suddenly gives a [ __ ] about the hubologist on the other hand have themselves set up in an underground bunker with a makeshift space shuttle outside of it the devs went hard on Scientology basically mocking it non-stop which is pretty damn bold All Things Considered they had their own versions of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman who emphatically preached about herbology and how giving money to the church made them happier people there's non-stop Buzz about them being real live celebrities and I gotta say the balls on both black aisle and interplay here are pretty damn massive I gotta imagine that if the gaming industry had been a lot bigger when this game released and everyone was talking about it there probably would have been some ramifications here at any rate you can join up with these guys and basically push the third more neutral party in town towards siding with them you can also do pretty much everything that you could for the she but for them getting them the vertibird plans reformatting their drives redirecting the fuel to them all that [ __ ] it unfortunately feels like this whole place was kind of a a quick make two opposed losing factions sword of Dale and while the themes involved on each end are fun San Francisco ultimately Falls flat for me I won't really cover too much more of it because of that I guess it's just good to point out that for as many good to Great locations that there are in Fallout 2 with really well thought out factions San Francisco really doesn't follow along those lines too well so let's cut over to The Enclave base known as Navarro and we'll loop back to San Fran and clean up the notable leftover stuff alright so as always we have a couple of methods of infiltration and as always these methods Encompass the guns blazing [ __ ] everything up route or the more nuanced approach which involves leaving your companions behind and acting like a new recruit for The Enclave since obviously the second one is always going to be more fun we'll go with that the first thing that you're told to do is to go report to the drill sergeant that's around here but what they really mean here is go do whatever the [ __ ] you want I actually find this to be a mixture of fun and kind of immersion breaking like yeah it's fun to goof off to run around the base and to talk to people but you arrived at this car chop shop type of place which was a front for the real base that was located in the back you have to get a password from the guy out front who's keeping watch while pretending that he doesn't know about Navarro then you have to leave your crew behind because they don't want a posse of random people rumbling into the base but then when you actually get there you can just run around get yourself equipped in Enclave power armor run back out give your old armor to Cassidy run back in gossip with the cook about who's doing what around here ask the mechanic about the vertibird plans with zero suspicion cast your way etc etc etc it's just kind of silly after all of this [ __ ] that's required to get in I almost would have rather there been a sort of montage where you can talk your way into getting what you want or sneak around or utilize your repair knowledge or so on during a series of cutscenes where you're infiltrating as an enclave recruit as things stand the whole thing makes The Enclave look pretty inept though then again no one's been stupid or brave enough to try what I'm trying so I guess you could just call this a learning experience for these guys the end result here has me walking out with a load of New Gear the vertibird schematics the key to get the old tanker working in the San Francisco Bay and a new robo-dog companion again I just walked in as a new recruit started asking questions and telling people random lies and no one even looked at me funny for asking such obvious things which definitely paints The Enclave here in a light of incompetence so wrapping things up has us driving back to San Francisco and dropping off the things that we just collected the Brotherhood is kind enough to merely copy the vertebrate plans and let you keep the originals to give to either of the two groups here which is kind of weird when you think about the doctrine that the Brotherhood is built around you know the whole hoarding Tech and dulling it out to those who they think deserve it thing then again maybe they just trust my judgment at this stage still this is the largest source of Statin creases in the game as the bunker that you now have access to has an AI which will upgrade your strength into perception and Charisma by one point each if you have the corresponding memory modules to do so this is actually something that Fallout 2 does that's really cool sure not everything has a purpose but sometimes you'll just stumble upon a random piece of technology like these modules and go huh I don't know what this is for and if you're trained in the classical Bethesda style of looting you just kind of leave it there because it's junk but if you manage to gather up these pieces of Exodia and hold on to them until this stage you get rewarded big time for it I mean look at these [ __ ] stats sure I get two luck and one inch from the herbologists and their rituals but this is a [ __ ] character sheet and a half I feel like this glorious God for the first time in this game and that didn't happen until the last couple of hours of gameplay before this I mean sure yeah I could take care of myself but nearly any any fight with competent foes was a potential death sentence this game is a hell of a lot more balanced than the last and it feels very appropriate to become this powerful when I'm about to take on The Enclave I might as well note this now because I don't really know where else to say it but I did leave goris here because um he got bugged after my habologist initiation basically everyone got booted from my party and although I could pick up Marcus and Cass again gorris wouldn't speak to me at all I left him in San Fran with the hopes that he would figure it out but nothing really seemed to work so yeah it kind of sucks but he was also the weakest link in my party I guess speaking of bugs man there is a lot here going on that should not be and it's kind of unfortunate I actually didn't have most of these issues the first times that I played so it's just my luck for them to be happening now basically I joined the habologists then ran over to the she and gave them the vertibird plans now you can play Both Sides here for a bit if you want basically doing all of the little tasks that each side requires before pulling the trigger on the final decision in this case I could go murder the habologist leader for the she or I could flip over to the hub Side by killing the she leader and taking back the vertibird plans this works both ways but neither really matter in terms of hitting the end game stuff basically we need to hit up this third neutral party who are all hanging out on the ship at the Docks if you know what you're doing you can handle all of this yourself but you can also milk some more XP for some final levels before attacking The Enclave one of these things involves getting back someone's spleen after they bet it during a card game with the she you can figure out who has it then you have to find the doctor in town to get it back into the guy I do all of this but the doctor won't talk to me because I'm with the herbologists so I decided to go full scorched Earth with the Hub I killed their leader and then I report back to the she later after all of this I go back to the doctor who still insists that I'm a homologist when looking up a way around this supposedly you could head over to Doc Holliday and broken Hills and have him do the job but he doesn't have any dialogue regarding splainless Joe over here so yeah the whole Quest fails because the guy dies without his spleen after a couple of days it just feels like I'm navigating an unfinished game at this stage which again is a lot more frustrating when I've done a lot of this stuff with minimal issue before either way I insert the key into the ship install the navcom parts and get this guy to redirect the fuel from the she over to the ship and we are officially good to go at last overall San Francisco is pretty underwhelming like I said even if I do like the looks and feel of the place it just seems like the devs had a very basic outline that didn't have enough time to expand on it I would have loved it if something a little more intricate was going on though like imagine if you got the vertibird plans over to the Brotherhood member out in Chi-Town and then he radios it in and they respond to you and tell you that it's time to initiate phase two of their plan and what happens is that inside each bunker is a swarm of Brotherhood people ready to go they have connections volunteers and just people that they've been slowly bringing into their fold ever since the Enclave made an appearance and now they want your help to straight up replace a faction in San Francisco you'd have to go into the shebase or the habologist base get crucial information and take it back to the Brotherhood then you get to work figuring out how to replace key members of either side with Brotherhood members you pay off those who would notice or take care of them however you want though the Brotherhood will react differently depending on how you do it then eventually you have an entire faction that's replaced with access to the tech that either side had the Brotherhood can now begin using all of the knowledge that you gathered to initiate phase 3 which involves manufacturing vertibirds and weaponry that combines the info that you obtained with the flavor of the side that you replaced the hubologist side would have Spacey sci-fi looking armor weapons and vertibirds and the she side would have more traditional Asian inspired designs and the thing is I know that I said that I liked the Brotherhood being underdogs that kind of you work for them and they're not really a huge huge impact on the end game but I do think that even this wouldn't have them being a huge part of the end game it's just an optional thing that you can do a little reinforcement not the main assault and again I do realize that something like this would have taken a lot more manpower and or time so this idea is more for fun than wholesale criticism but I guess it's just a shame that a few of the ideas in Fallout 2 were condensed to a point where there just was no room for expanding on them before proceeding with the end game stuff I'll note that I did skip over quite a lot of little things in Fallout 2. and I'm not gonna go back to cover them though I will take a brief moment to cover the companions that I missed out on or just didn't pick up Modoc has two potential allies in miria and Davin they're absolutely nothing special as far as allies go and they both required a Charisma and or gender that I didn't have Lenny on the other hand is one of the ghouls over in gecko who's a decent doctor and has some fun interactions with a couple of ghouls in the game I've had him along for the ride before but he never makes the Final Cut in my party and finally there's the other Robo dog which you can snag from a doctor in the NCR if you feel inclined nothing special there it just kind of exists as do the other three dog companions that you can pick up so that's uh what 14 total permanent Companions and out of those 14 I'd say that six of them added anything of substance and even most of those six severely lack in the dialogue and personality Department after they tell you their stories there's definitely a quantity versus quality thing going on here with Fallout 2's companions which is unfortunate because the later entries actually tended to do them a lot better while also being fully voiced regardless after my upgrade Montage I do have one more companion slot raring to go since goris has lost his mind and while I could grab dog meat I do have this extra suit of power armor just lying around so he finally came around huh I knew you would you need me oh and also I guess since I don't quite know where to fit this thought now that I'm at the end of the game it's become painfully obvious from looking at my inventory that there's a severe lack of radiation in Fallout 2. and that's actually not a complaint all things considered it does seem like the devs were going for the idea that radiation naturally decays over time and that areas of the map like the glow were freak anomalies they didn't make a glow 2 glow harder because it's been 80 years now and what would be the point of it the only time that you'll ever encounter severe radiation is from radioactive barrels of goop which have spilled or creatures that have been altered to become more Radioactive in nature and again that's fine by me but I do think that radx and rat away should have been a lot harder to come by just given the Rarity of encountering radiation I mean I used I think one or two packs of rat away and no red X the entire game and seeing that I have this big of a stockpile I think that having every doctor carry around some form of these two seems a little silly given the lessened amount of the stuff and now it's finally time to hit the Enclave which starts off with one of my favorite scenes from these older Fallout games I know it's not really anything that special truth be told but you can tell that a lot of love went into it and the music as always is spot on so here's the deal same as before you can just wander around this place without a care if you're alone but I now have four companions with me so yeah either you go in and kick ass all the way to the bank or you goof off this place is absolutely massive and crawling with Enclave soldiers and power armor alongside them are people in Vault suits which seem to be living their best lives while spouting off about how great America is to lift the veil for those who don't know The Enclave are the remnants of the United States this was revealed a couple of times by a few people in the Wasteland but it does explain the Enclave sudden appearance and overwhelming power down below you'll find your people who are locked behind glowing cell walls of course if the cell wall power were to be cut well uh yeah now you've just got a hole in the wall I never really understood the logistics of that reinforced metal door no way what if they just pry it open with their hands gotta go for those glowing light walls now that's futuristic underneath this area is the way to the presidential zone of The Enclave here you have to fiddle with some terminals to open doors at seemingly random this always seemed more daunting than it is though the floor being electrified kind of amps up the danger if you manage to get all the way here and decided to not lug around the Geck with you then congratulations you [ __ ] [ __ ] go back to the start now the devs thought of this and placed a couple around the base including right around where you're at when the message pops up you can also NAB the best armor in the game in one of these side rooms so it's worth the diversion and now we meet the vice president he's a nut job with nothing of note to say and now we meet the president he's also a nut job but uh well he's got a lot to say so the goal of the Enclave is the polar opposite of the master in Fallout 1. whereas the master wanted to perfect Humanity by mutating them The Enclave wants to eradicate every mutant everywhere now if the ghouls and super mutants hadn't ingratiated themselves into society maybe this would be a good thing but then the president here goes even further he claims that any human with any sort of minor mutation would also be killed by the fev that they've modified to eradicate any organic with this sort of change in their body but wait there's more so obviously if the Enclave is recruiting then most people that they've been taking in have some sort of mutation judging by how frequently this kind of thing occurs I mean even your tribesmen in Arroyo have it so how would that pan out well The Enclave have cooked up a way to inoculate themselves from the modified fev meaning that they could basically vaccinate all the people that they care about and then just hold sale wipe out the rest of all life Everywhere by releasing copious amounts of modified fev into the world's water supply wonderful once again America will be the world's policeman the last thing of note that the president has to say here before you can grab his leg and use him like a baseball bat is something that later fallouts took very heavy inspiration from and this is actually a good thing because I've always loved this plot point he reveals the experimentation that went on in vault-tec vaults and while he only mentions a few examples such as vaults without enough food vaults with only men and ones which automatically opened after six months this explanation did lead to some of my favorite ideas out of Bethesda and obsidian later on he explains the process as a test to see what Humanity was capable of a grand experiment as he puts it ironically vault 13 was a control Vault that had nothing wrong with it so the fact that its water chip failed was something that was unplanned though the president does seem happy and self-righteous about the results regardless you really only have one course of action here as the game steers you very directly into dialogue which ends with the president's death it's a bit of a drop from the options that you had with the master though to be fair the president is only a stepping stone to the meanest [ __ ] around but we'll get to him in a very brief moment before we leave this area we can speak to one more important person a scientist who wholeheartedly believes that what he's doing is best for Humanity if your speech is good enough you can basically get the guy to chat to you about the idea of The Enclave using the ultimate example of social Darwinism when you remind him that humans grew evolved and came to thrive based off of the exact same tenacity that they're exhibiting now by taking on these mutations and rolling with the punches he comes to terms with his own blindness after swallowing his hubris he realizes that the only thing that's going to stop The Enclave is to permanently destroy it with no way of coming back with no way of coming back to Aid in this endeavor the man releases the vaccine into the cells of your loved ones vaccinates you and then pulls the switch to release the fev into the base if you wait about 10 minutes or so everyone not in power armor just [ __ ] melts which looks awesome onward to phase two of operation Kill The Enclave at this stage posted soldiers on this floor are fighting back though I could have avoided this with the super stimpak assassination routine of course this fighting doesn't extend to any other area so whatever I guess in the back area behind the president's Chambers is our ticking Time Bomb of the game if you hadn't released the gas you could get the guy in the back to shut down the generator but you could also just drop a load of plastic explosives to get it to begin its meltdown counter in a familiar but different scene we run our asses out of Dodge into the biggest Baddie in the whole game built like a brick [ __ ] large as a barge Frank [ __ ] Horrigan is standing guard ready to insert his hand up to the Elbow into your [ __ ] this is The Enclave secret weapon the agent that was assigned to the protection of the president well that one didn't go very well but you know he's big and he talks like this that's who the United States Secret service you aren't going anywhere from here so he's pretty cool but yeah in terms of what the player actually knows about him at this stage well he's kind of a random inclusion I mean sure you see him once or twice just blasting holes into anything deemed a mutant but he's just this roving chaotic hunk of junk and a lot less impressive from a lower point of view than say the master still you gotta respect that mass as the guy's been experimented on so many times after coming into contact with the Feb that his own people view him as a freak so how do you deal with a room full of turrets and a man liable to rip you in half and swallow the two halves well you go talk to his men outside of the room and you say um hey you want to live it doesn't always work but when it does they prove to be a lot more useful than your companions yeah I'm gonna put this one gently your companions [ __ ] suck I mean yeah great for early to mid game but there's a point where you just find yourself in the middle of a base of soldiers that have the power of freedom and Mom's Apple Pie and you're staring down an abomination of a man so [ __ ] girthy that you can feel his gravitational pull sucking you in and your companions just can't stack up to that so yeah the robo dog dies Marcus dies Cassidy dies and super Chad Myron dies in that order but hey the clave soldiers are here to clean up shop after magically separating his legs from his body this unit of matter gives us one last hoorah before his head blows clean off in a confetti paste that can only be replicated with Halo's grunt birthday party skull and then well that's it the ensuing cut scene shows off a mushroom cloud that only 1998 could bring us followed by everyone's favorite aftermath slideshow the main points are as follows your village merges with the remnants of Vault 13 bringing the related families back together so that they can incest out some new Heroes into the wastes they build a sizable city with the Geck and live happily ever after Vault City tried to expand failed at it due to their isolationism Enslaved the ghouls and Gekko because I optimized their power plant and then they kind of just withered after that Bishop's Wife popped out my kid from her hole and that kid went on to run the bishop family and Rule New Reno huh didn't see that one coming I mean I kind of just killed everyone there besides the wife but hey I guess he was pretty successful regardless the NCR just annexed the [ __ ] out of everything around them they swallowed a load of small to medium-sized towns and they just succeeded broken Hills died off after running out of uranium Modoc flourished with the help of the ghost farm and the den flourished without slavers and finally my favorite of these actually comes from San Francisco with the she running the place they transformed it into an Empire of Steel and flowers which I would have loved to see in later installations to some caliber I mean yeah there is West as West can be but um so was the enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel so I mean [ __ ] it right when the credits roll around there's a bit of an addition right at the start that made me laugh my ass off so basically later on when Fallout 1 and 2 were re-released digitally a lot of work had been put in by some modders to make the game function a lot more fluidly especially on newer machines they added some graphical overhauls made the game playable in windowed and 32-bit color mode allowed for the mouse wheel to be used in inventory fix some perks and script limitations and so on and so on and so forth while interplay and by extension Bethesda decided to take these mods without credit without payment and without permission they then repackaged these games and sold them with the improvements included so the mod developers decided [ __ ] that [ __ ] and included their own credits right at the start of the game which is amazing Fallout 2 is an absolute achievement in gaming and I'll spare myself the effort of trying to work in this question like it's Up For Debate yes the game is absolutely as good as I remember the game is a beacon of amazing player choice endless replayability and good writing all packaged into a game that paved the way for all of the fun ideas that you've seen in any of the more recent titles the good holy outweighs the bad to a staggering degree even with all of the bugs and errors this game is an institution to what games could be to what could be accomplished and pushed out in less than a year's time and it's difficult to raise any grievances about Fallout 2. even if some of it is valid I think the hardest thing to complain about with older games is the lack of quality of life features I mean you're launching a game that's a couple of decades old that had the budget of a jar of pickles and a handful of Dunkin Donuts gift cards and a lot of the time I didn't even expect some of these features that were in the game I played nearly the entire [ __ ] game for the third time and I'm sitting here in the military base watching 50 giant green men move at the speed of two snails pushing three snails when it finally clicked that maybe there was a combat speed option I know that was due to the modders doing their best to keep this game around but I didn't expect it because this was an older PC game experience for a lot of the 90s regardless after playing more modern games it's really hard to let some of the stuff that Fallout 2 does slide yes the companion system has gotten a complete overhaul but there's still no fine-tuning of their behavior yeah you can tell them to go hide if they have the personality for it but even if you give them relatively normal combat instructions with the commands to heal when low and whatnot they'll still charge head first into a fight get their asses kicked and then run and hide in a corner without healing themselves even if they do have stim packs you almost always have to heal them or they'll just die even when you tell them to heal themselves they won't it's like they were programmed to only use two stim packs at most and then to just dig their own grave after and healing them wouldn't be the biggest deal if you didn't have to administer literally one stim pack at a time I mean it makes sense for combat right but outside of it come on and if you queue up another heel too quickly your guy won't register the command so it's heal weight heal weight all the way from 20 Health up to 160. Inventory management with companions is also just a gigantic slog of opening dialogue hitting trade and repeating it for every bit of ammo that you want to give them or gun that you want to keep for later I just wish they had thought up an auto loot system for companions with choices on what they should always and never grab from bodies additionally companions in this game are lacking I don't mean a number I mean in personality yes I love Marcus and goris but that love comes from what they are not who they are you don't get any opportunities to sit down and talk to your followers to learn about who they are and do Quests for them and this is definitely more of an issue because of what later games in this genre have done for companionship it's hard to look at a game that came out 24 years ago and get upset that it doesn't have long drawn out conversations about what makes a specific companion tick and likewise I'm not that upset about it I just don't care about potential companions as much as I hoped that I would that said the game does do a lot better than its predecessor so at least there's that I will say that the sheer amount of bars in every town does get old after a while I mean don't get me wrong it does make sense given the environment but you start to expect it every time that you Waltz into a brand new town and it makes chilling at a bar a lot less immersive or special s weren't far behind of course but those were at least spaced out a bit more it almost feels like places like Modoc Gekko or maybe clamoth could have gone a different route I get that you want your quest top right but why not Spruce it up with more places like diners motels old prison cafeterias art galleries theaters barber shops playgrounds and so on when I saw Gekko introduce tragic cards I kind of hope to see a hobby shop pop up somewhere down the line where people hung out though maybe the devs didn't want to push their luck with Wizards of the Coast again the bars make complete sense as an established building in each town but it's just not always the most fun to go to a bar for info this complaint is gonna sound a little weird since it's the first time that I really mentioned it but it's become pretty clear at the end of the game that Fallout 2's locations lack a lot of cohesion to tie them together yes there are some great Illusions towards what the big three cities try to do to get at each other particularly in the new Reno Quests for Bishop Vault city has some connections and commentary directed towards the NCR and the NCR will talk about the territory that it wants to expand into Redding and broken Hills are also definitely affected by these cities but it really feels like the idea was only planted but never really expanded on in a significant way each of the towns in this game adds something to it and they feel very falloutish but they also feel more isolated from each other than connected by the end of the game I would have loved to be able to bury or to elevate the mining towns by getting them to side with a certain city it would have been really cool to see the player get to choose one of the cities to join and then to help it to get a leg up over the others and while these adjustments weren't needed to make the game good they definitely would have made it better but the biggest thing that Fallout 2 did wrong was what it actually did right the world of Fallout 2 is absolutely packed with great new ideas fun factions great interactions player choice sheer possibilities the treatment of non-human species and so on it's absurd how many Fantastic choices that the devs made when building up this game and the vision that they presented for this universe so how is it wrong well it's not but when you look at just how many of these really fun and inventive ideas were absolutely trampled into the ground by bethesda's Vanilla take on Fallout it hurts that much more I know I've historically had my share of issues with the direction that Bethesda has taken this franchise but I had forgotten how badly it hurt until I replayed this game again there's a reason why the Fallout Community is split and of course I still enjoy Fallout 3. of course I can still have a great deal of fun and four but the absolute lack of creative stimulation that these games bring to the table by comparison to two is night and day I can't help but to Lament The nearly complete loss of artistry and inspiration that Black Isles seem to pump out at nearly all times when thinking forward to what Fallout became but let's try to jump back to some positivity you're talking a long time ago the world's moved on the best thing that Fallout 2 does for me is the complete change in how the game can be experienced based off of your choices the way that its narrative shifts based off of how you treat others the way that it can be replayed with a completely new build and attitude there are so many instances where you treating others like [ __ ] comes back to haunt you later where stuff like you becoming a slaver or a child killer sticks to your reputation in a way that you can't shake that one thing that I mentioned in new Reno about blackmailing the suitcase guy and having that come back around to you is just one of many differences that can stem from decision to decision in fact as another example if you happen to be screwing around with Bishop's Wife and kid and you keep going up to throw their asses in a circle Circle he'll eventually begin getting more and more upset if you haven't done the job that you promised that you do for him after enough of this he'll just have his men attack you for not getting the thing done treatment of other people in RPGs is something that's more of an afterthought nowadays than a focus yeah sure there might be the occasional dialogue in a modern AAA game where if you tell the person that you rip their son's dick off they'll attack you or refuse to give you a quest but for the most part you can just be an [ __ ] and accomplish nearly anything in the game because the fear of missing out has been deemed as bad by developers so having this nearly 25 year old game include all of these finer details about treating NPCs like actual human beings just goes to show that a lot of these writing choices are a relic to many developers today but beyond this Fallout 2 does something with evil playthroughs specifically that I haven't really seen often since I know I didn't really Touch Too Much on this because I did the good boy playthrough as I usually do because it helps me to experience more of the game but the evil actions that you can perform are A Cut Above what a lot of modern RPGs tend to let you do the issue is that there are generally two things that a lot of games tend to rely on to convey evil choices one you go to the evil Guild people where they have an evil quest for you you do the evil thing and then you gain evil points or two you have some dialogue with a good or neutral person and they go hey my son's starving can you help and you get the option to tell them that you hope their son dies yes of course you can also generally steal [ __ ] or kill people or whatever but when the game presents specific evil choices you're almost always treated as a conduit for the evil actions of others yes you're the one performing the action but Mr Greg of the bad boy mercenary Battalion is the one telling you to do them there were a slew of points in Fallout 2 where I could just choose to tamper with [ __ ] that would obviously lead to chaotically evil results and when you do choose to do something like that the world fights back a town turns on you you cut off potential rewards whole swaths of quest lines and content in the game because you chose to play as a horrible human and you were punished for that choice that kind of possibility lends to so much more realism to the potential scum that I can choose my character to be and it's options like these that really give the world of Fallout more depth which a lot of games lack there's also a lot to be said about just which direction that black Isle thought that the world of Fallout should take and they stuck to that Vision the smaller and underdeveloped Maps became more bustling more clean there were these three massive hubs which all had equal importance and they were all developed in their own Direction you had new Reno on one end with its Bright Lights sleazy denizens and crime-ridden nature you had Vault city which was isolated kept out certain elements and ran like a well-oiled machine and in the middle of these two you had this town that dragged itself up from these small Huts into the massive Forest that it became and sure there were still these little small Shanty towns and their bars and people just trying to get by but there were also these towns that had it all together and just weren't as big of players in San Francisco and broken Hills and all of these areas had their themes their factions and their problems humans trying to kill off mutants mining companies vying for superiority slavers seizing control of a town ghouls keeping one of the big players running with nothing to show these interactions breathed a new life into the Wasteland and kept it from stagnating from becoming small town with rundown people after a small town with Raiders super mutants fell in with Society feral ghouls were much less common and there were even a slew of intelligent death claws which tried to cling to life Fallout was moving in a direction that has only really been seen in New Vegas since again I love Fallout 3 but the town variety consists of [ __ ] town with bomb in it a slew of run-down dilapidated buildings with super mutants in them and then a couple of decently fun ideas in Rivet City 10 Penny Tower and little Lamplight with Fallout 2 I could look at any of the towns in the game and immediately point out what it is who inhabits it and what the big problem is and yes of course I just replayed it but I could name most of the stuff that was going on with them before I started this video these places weren't making progress rebuilding in three they were still struggling 200 years after the bombs dropped there weren't other well-established factions there was just the Brotherhood and The Enclave for some reason and everything else was the Wild West between those two or the wild East whatever Fallout 4 did a little better with the implementation of new factions but the Commonwealth was a [ __ ] show of people that were still trying to figure things out with a handful of locations and factions that were ahead of the curve if you're gonna make these people still at the point of trying to set Roots I think you need to go back in time to make it make more sense but my point isn't to say this game good this game bad it's to point out what I liked most about too that I wish that I saw more of in these later games and I think that there's a lot of wisdom to be siphoned from the original developers you can still make the new games appeal to a broader audience with a lot of the more prominent themes being front and center there's nothing wrong with that and I personally love collecting caps's currency seeing the Brotherhood still kicking around and fighting the iconic monsters from the older games but with a little more Nuance in your storytelling and a little more Direction in your setting you could easily take the Best of Both Worlds and make something really damn special thanks for watching I would say that I'm done with these games but I guess uh fallout tactics is a thing and um the other one oh and the MMO well [ __ ] I'm done with the main Series games for now at least either way I'll be moving on and trying to cook up something spooky for October until then I've got merch over at my new and improved shiny merch shop we got mugs we got shirts we got stickers that's it just those three the shirts come in more than just t-shirts I mean what more would you need right I've also got a twitch where I stream nearly every Monday Tuesday and Friday I've got a Twitter where most of the time nothing but sometimes oh Baby I've got a Discord where everyone just kind of talks about [ __ ] and it's just general chaos but you know the good kind and I've got a patreon and that's it have a good one

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 1,044,393

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Id: YmwBlwaltZM

Length: 132min 9sec (7929 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 26 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Yamosake]

Oh pog. I was wondering when Salt would cover Fallout 2.

[u/DarkeningDemise]

Spooky game for October?

[u/NowTheMoonsRising]

Hey I’m not sure if anyone will see this but I was wondering if Salt was thinking of ever covering the neverwinter nights series?