Old Fallout Vs. New Fallout Which Is Better?

 

Old Fallout Vs. New Fallout Which Is Better?

By Olyver Trejo 

Introduction

Older Fallout and Newer Fallout games are very different in their game design, world building, and more. I will be using Fallout 2 and Fallout New Vegas to represent older Fallout games (Fallout 2) and the newer Fallout games (Fallout New Vegas) because they’re considered to be the best games in their respective eras by both me and many people who love the Fallout franchise. The differences between these two eras of the franchise are stark and both eras of the Fallout series are both loved by the fan base of the Fallout franchise but there are still discussions over which era of the franchise is better. It creates a divide between the sides of the fan base who like the older games more and the side that likes the newer games more. My review will hopefully help you with making a choice on which era of the Fallout series appeals more to you.

Background

Before we get into the meat and potatoes, I think some background on these games and eras is needed. The older generation of Fallout began when Fallout 1 was released on September 30th, 1997, developed by Black Isle Studios where it quickly established an identity for its dark post-apocalyptic world and deep role-playing game mechanics. All these things got further developed when Fallout 2 was released on December 1st, 1998, under very tough circumstances because of developers over at Black Isle Studios being rushed to put the game out because their publisher Interplay who also published the first game, needed money and gave Black Isle 9 months to develop Fallout 2. This led to Fallout 2 visually looking the same and having most of the game mechanics and systems with some light changes and a lot of cut content and more prevalent bugs than the first game (Dransfield 1).

The newer generation of Fallout games began when Fallout 3 was released on October 28th, 2008, developed by Bethesda Game Studios, and published by Bethesda Softworks making it so that Fallout 3 came out over 12 years after the original Fallout game. Fallout 3 marked a shift from the top-down perspective and detailed role-playing experience Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 had and pushed the series into a first-person shooting game with RPG elements like stats and skills remaining. This was supposed to simplify the Fallout formula for a broader more modern audience to enjoy the series in and fit among other modern video games at the time.

This simplification of the Fallout formula was a little bit toned down by the time Fallout: New Vegas was released on October 19th, 2010, and like Fallout 2, it was insanely rushed because Bethesda didn’t develop the game this time, but it was developed by Obsidian Entertainment due to Bethesda licensing the IP to them with an 18-month deadline. Like Fallout 2, Fallout New Vegas turned out to be an amazing and beloved game while ironically being made by some of the same people, but this rushed deadline made the game extremely buggy and unstable, which are still issues that plague the game 15 years later. History continues to repeat itself for Fallout New Vegas because it also looks the same graphically and has the same game mechanics and systems as Fallout 3 with light changes being made (Dransfield 2).

Accessibility

Accessibility is very tricky with the older games as they’re from the 90s and aren’t expected to run on modern computers, so much so that you need mods to make Fallout 2 run on modern machines but has a mod baked into modern copies of the game and in the game’s files by default to help the game run on modern machines with a high resolution patch mod being the one that comes with modern copies of the game to help with running the game at higher resolutions like 1080p.

Newer Fallout games like Fallout New Vegas, still have some accessibility issues on PC, Xbox 360, and Xbox One technically because of backwards compatibility, and the PlayStation 3, but Fallout 2 is only a PC game due to its age and the kind of game it is since it needs a mouse and keyboard and doesn’t consider modern controllers compatible with the game and it’s mechanics.

Fallout New Vegas has a lot of game breaking bugs and tends to crash a lot, which also makes people including myself, feel like mods are also necessary to fix some of these bugs and help with the crashes the game experiences. But thinking beyond of how either game interacts with modern hardware, Fallout New Vegas wins for me when it comes to accessibility because it is still a modern game that has more modern systems and gameplay while Fallout 2 definitely is an incredibly fun game, it isn’t as accessible in its gameplay or it’s ease to play on modern machines compared to Fallout New Vegas due to the need to tinker with the game’s files in order for it to even fit fully on a modern monitor and having to edit the settings via combing through a text file while Fallout New Vegas handles things like that from a configuration menu before the game is fully launched that is easy to navigate for anybody.

Gameplay

Gameplay is arguably where the old Fallout games differ the most from the new Fallout games and where it’s the most subjective out of all the categories I can think of. Fallout 2 has a fundamentally different gameplay style compared to Fallout New Vegas with its turn-based combat system, grid-based maps, and isometric viewing angles in order to make it seem like the world is fully 3D. Fallout New Vegas on the other hand is centered around being a FPS (first-person shooter) game and role-playing game at its core, ditching the turn-based combat of the original games. This makes it easier to play and you’re able to explore the world easier due to the perspective changes but for me it can feel a little bit restrictive because of things like field of view and only being able to see a small part of the world as compared to the isometric point of view of Fallout 2.

I love both forms of gameplay as each have their own pros and cons like Fallout 2 is a slower game due to its combat and viewing angle that lets you see more of the world and how your character fits into it. While Fallout New Vegas’ gameplay loop promotes a faster, diving headfirst into danger style of gameplay which on its own is a very rewarding experience, but I like Fallout 2’s slower more tactical gameplay and combat personally.

These two categories are, to me at least, some of the most important categories to get right and where the age of certain games tends to rear their heads the most than any other category. So, Fallout New Vegas is the more accessible and more modern game so far, but when it comes to gameplay it really depends on what you prefer to play whether it is turn- based games or FPS games. But both games do win points for pricing because Fallout New Vegas nowadays costs $19.99 with all of its DLCs (Downloadable Content) on PC and Xbox and Fallout 2 costs $9.99 on PC since it is only available on PC.

World Building

World building in the Fallout franchise has always been a strong suit for almost all of the games with how they build tone, atmosphere, and the environment the games are in, but each game has differences when it comes to world building. Fallout 2 tends to portray its world in a very grim, dark, and depressing way with how hopeless it seems to be with the early towns like Klamath and The Den being filled with drug addicts, rundown buildings with people who are just barely surviving, and even slavers in one of the first towns you go to on your journey. 

Fallout 2 also takes advantage of music playing in the background that sounds haunting, making it more apparent of what the world is now after nuclear war. Fallout 2’s world feels more hopeless than Fallout New Vegas’ world with how it’s big cities are portrayed especially with almost all of them barring Vault City and the NCR, having rundown buildings, crime almost everywhere, and addicts all over but with even less hope in in cities like New Reno for instance, the entire city is ran by three different crime families who all peddle drugs and one who runs a casino in the first part of New Reno and if you leave the first area with your car and you come back and your car is stolen. The sense of hopelessness is made even worse when the Enclave are fully introduced as a high-tech organization and the last remnants of the pre-war US government and begin to kidnap and kill the people of the wastes who they deem as mutants making change seem hopeless.

Fallout New Vegas still portrays a dark and grim world within the Mojave Desert but as you traverse through it you can always see New Vegas in the distance and the Lucky 38 tower as the crown jewel of New Vegas shining with light when it is night. This creates a very stark difference between New Vegas and the rest of the Mojave, as the people that live in the Mojave don’t live in New Vegas but in small, poor, and struggling settlements all over the wasteland. New Vegas itself isn’t even that big of a settlement, but it is wealthy and holds power all over the entire Mojave Wasteland, but it does nothing to help the people of the Wasteland, it rather exists to make money off the backs of the select people who are even allowed into New Vegas. 

The apathy New Vegas has for the wasteland and it’s people show in the stark contrast of Freeside, the town that surrounds New Vegas is poor, broken down, and filled with crime and addicts, and all that New Vegas has done is put up a gate barring anyone who isn’t wealthy enough to go into New Vegas but when a Freeside resident tries to get into New Vegas when the player goes to Freeside for the first time, the resident is shot on sight by the robotic guards.

It’s hard to choose which game does world building better than the other and where each game’s world has a specific feel to it that makes both timeless no matter how dated or modern the rest of the systems may be. But personally, I like Fallout New Vegas’ world a little bit more because it does show a little hope in the beginning, where Fallout 2 remains hopeless for most of the game, which isn’t a bad thing I want to make clear. Fallout New Vegas also has a certain charm about it with lots of it being based off Las Vegas and its casinos and spectacles. 

They compare in a few ways, namely in how it portrays what the average person has to do to survive in the irradiated wastelands of America with how they struggle to survive and what they go through in the more urban areas of these games highlighting how bad crime is in the cities and drug addiction being very prevalent in both of these games. But they do differ in the ways they portray to wealthy and the elites in their worlds since Fallout 2 doesn’t have a lot of focus on the wealthy outside of New Reno with the Bishop, Mordino, Salvatore, and Wright crime families, while Fallout New Vegas focuses a lot on how the wealthy interact with the world around them and how they turn a blind eye to the suffering the general populace faces daily.

Role-playing 

Role playing has always been a big part of the Fallout franchise and it’s no exception with the newer games either. Fallout 2 did role-play exceptionally well with how it balanced its skills and S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck respectively) making it so there were as many role-playing scenarios as you wanted to do in Fallout 2. For example, you could role play as a mercenary willing to do anything for money and I mean that quite literally as the game lets you be as evil as you want to be or as good as you want to be depending on what you want to do. 

The beauty of Fallout 2’s role playing system are the traits that you can select if you want to when you create your character with traits that have a positive but most importantly, a negative like the trait Jinxed which increases the chance of critical failures which applies to literally every entity in the game but this includes you in this pot. 

Fallout New Vegas also does role playing well with its good and evil choices, but it feels a bit less restrictive in what it will allow the players to do when compared to Fallout 2, but this is more so a case of more player freedom in older games in general with RPGs. What Fallout New Vegas does do better than Fallout 2 though is how it handles its four factions and how it can reflect a character that the player makes have a certain moral compass or values. 

The four factions in the Mojave include the NCR, Caeser’s Legion, Mr. House, and Yes Man. These four factions represent different moral spectrums for the player to explore and decide on which of the four should control the Mojave Wasteland, like the Legion is an obvious pick for an evil character or the NCR if you’re playing a good character. This faction system really expands role-playing in a way that was not seen in Fallout 2 and brings up a lot of new possibilities for role-playing.

When it comes to role-playing, it’s a very hard choice to make between Fallout 2 and Fallout New Vegas when it comes to the role-playing aspects of these games. For me, Fallout 2 wins the role-playing aspect because its age does work to its benefit here as since it was a 90s CRPG (Computer Role-Playing Game) it had a lot of the same systems as Dungeons and Dragons making it easier to role-play in and do what you want in the world of Fallout 2. Fallout 2, in my experience, allows more player freedom than Fallout New Vegas due to its older game systems and lack of hand holding but that also means that the game is less accessible as it doesn’t have things like quest markers for example. This makes it so Fallout 2 is freer and is like a choose your own adventure book in a sense.

Storytelling/Plot

The old and new Fallout games both do storytelling differently especially when compared to each other. Fallout 2 has a hands-off approach to storytelling that requires a lot of reading on the player’s part since the game has very little voice acting and doesn’t give you clear objectives when you do read the text when you talk to an NPC. Fallout 2 encourages you to explore the world with its lack of hand holding in its storytelling, but it isn’t always clear on what you need to do to progress as a consequence as the only form of a quest log is essential a to-do list that is simple and doesn’t list your progress or any next steps for the most part. 

Fallout 2’s plot does play into this lack of hand holding very well with it starting as an adventure to save the people of the town Arroyo from dying off by finding a G.E.C.K. (Garden of Eden Creation Kit). But this goal does supposedly have a time limit so you can’t just do whatever you want at the start without neglecting your dying people in Arroyo. Once you do get the G.E.C.K. and you return to Arroyo you find the village destroyed and its inhabitants killed, with only the shaman who sent you out on this quest barely alive to tell the player what happened to the village, talking about the Enclave as if they were demons in metal suits. This puts the player off the time limit but with a new goal of destroying the Enclave before they can carry out their genocidal ideas on the people of the wasteland.

Fallout New Vegas is more direct with its storytelling, having voice acting and a quest log that shows what steps the player has done, needs to do, and where the next step is. This approach holds the player’s hand more but is better for modern audiences and still lets the player explore the world at their own pace. Fallout New Vegas centers around the power struggle for control over the New Vegas strip and therefore control over the Mojave Wasteland, there are 3 (technically 4 if you count Yes Man who is the independent New Vegas option) major factions vying for control over the New Vegas strip between the New California Republic, Caeser’s Legion, and lastly Mr. House. 

Control over New Vegas is decided by the player and which faction they side with by the end of the game culminating in the Second Battle of Hoover Dam as the deciding factor of who gets control. So, I think Fallout New Vegas is better in terms of storytelling because it is more direct and clearer with its plot and mission structure while giving players plenty to do with its plot and how it encourages the player to meet all the factions both major and minor to make a decision on who should rule the Mojave. But I think Fallout 2 has a more compelling story because it feels more personal to the player when they play through the game because they are the chosen one to save the people of Arroyo and they get snuffed out by the Enclave as you come back with the thing that would save Arroyo. It makes everything so personal to the player and makes the Enclave a great antagonist as a faction for the player to face.

Conclusion  

In conclusion, my personal choice for which is better between the old Fallout games and the new Fallout games, my choice is old Fallout and more specifically Fallout 2, but this isn’t a dig at the new Fallout games and Fallout New Vegas as it was a very close call. Fallout 2 is a special game to me; it introduced me to CRPG games and a more hands off story-telling experience. Fallout 2’s gameplay being turn-based is something I love and that I prefer over the first-person shooter gameplay of Fallout New Vegas and the new Fallout games. Fallout 2 offers a lot more player freedom than Fallout New Vegas and that is something I value in the games that I play. 

The freedom of the player is shown best through how Fallout 2 tells its story with a hands off approach and lets the player explore the world by not giving clear directions or a detailed quest log like how Fallout New Vegas does, but it does still have a very engaging story of trying to save your people and having to fight the Enclave who kidnapped or killed the people who were trying to save by the time you return to Arroyo. 

I find the exploration in Fallout 2 to be interesting and exciting because of the lack of quest markers or logs. Role-playing is something that both games do well, but Fallout 2 with its Dungeons and Dragons related systems and a story that allows for a lot of player choice, it makes the possibilities limitless for role-playing. Fallout New Vegas also has a lot of player freedom and choice but it’s simplified systems and mechanics are what bring it below Fallout 2 for me. 

So, to me old Fallout is the better of the two eras based off my personal preferences but for people who prefer a modern and more simplistic game, the new Fallout games should be your cup of tea, and I would give Fallout New Vegas a try. For fans of turn-based games that are dated in most of their systems, older Fallout is for you, especially Fallout 2. Thank you for reading my review and I hope I was able to sway your decision to play either era of the Fallout series.

 

 

 

                                                         

                                                          Works Cited

Dransfield, Ian. “The Complete History of Fallout.” PC Gamer, PC Gamer, 4 Apr. 2019, www.pcgamer.com/the-complete-history-of-fallout/.