I happened to work on the mod, and while it's a mixed bag, if it still comes with the ability to disable features it's probably the best one out there.
It sort of has 3 kinds of features:
1) Gameflow fixes that make the progression not fall apart after GECKO. They're very small, and are basically stuff that would've just been patched post-release if the game was made later or wouldn't even be needed if the game wasn't rushed (simple but thorough playtesting would've alerted the devs to the issues they fix). All they do is make it so that if you go in blind and just follow the natural progression, stuff like ending up in NCR before you get to New Reno and then arriving at New Reno in Power Armor trivializing the midgame doesn't happen. You can still just go wherever whenever and do whatever, ofc, but this way you can give it to someone who's never played it and if they just follow where the game prompts them to go and do everything in every town, shit won't mysteriously break down at one point.
Mostly it's just:
- The scouting missions in VC that send you to Gecko and the to NCR have an additional quest between those two, which is scout around Broken Hills and report. This way you get involved with the whole VC-New Reno thing, which is supposed to be the midgame, at the right time, instead of skipping straight to NCR where you get thousands of XP just for talking to people and mad loot ahead of time. Small change, you may not even remember it not being like this always, but it'll suddenly make the whole game work better than it ever did, guaranteed.
- Some minor changes to the layout of the Raider base because since the other thing fixes the midgame, you get to actually play the midgame at the right time, and you're more likely to find the raiders through a questline than just run into the place, shoot it up, and end up with so much loot and ammo that you break the game without realizing it. I bet most people didn't even know the place has two entrances, simply because the screwup I outlined above.
- Some more stuff like that, with the Vault Village. If you haven't played in a while you might not even notice anything really changed, but you'll notice that stuff suddenly makes a lot more sense. And if you've never played it while turning every rock over you might discover things you never knew were there in all this time, because of either screwups with the og development/rushed release, or screwups by people making the RP who didn't know what they were doing.
- Some fixes to New Reno and the Military Base quests that finally make them play out the way the game implies they ought to, but folks didn't even understand it was screwed up because they'd never get to the place without being overgeared and overleveled to begin with.
So if the rest of it sounds like "weaponized autism", and, yeah, that's a pretty accurate description for some of it - you still probably want this part of the whole thing. If it wasn't a modding thing and I was just paying a programmer to do things without asking questions, those would be done before anything else was even considered, and I'd have done 2 more things.
One would be to fix the sometimes incredibly misguided way some of the RP content was "restored". The science facility is in the wrong zone, for one thing. You have to tank end-game level wilderness to get there, but the place itself is early-midgame in terms of obstacles and loot. And a lot of random things about the RP like placing loot/weapons in places was not the way it was in the original, makes no sense if you understand how the progression was meant to go, and causes a bunch of screwups. The "economy rebalance" part that the modder did was not all silly. A lot of it is actually undoing the damage that the RP modders caused. And it didn't start with the idea that they were incompetent. It's just that most of the time there was an unreasonable and progression-breaking pile of loot in the wrong place, or the challenge level of somewhere was too low or too high for when you naturally end up there, but when I'd go looking into wht happened there, it turned out to not be that way in the original game most of the time. Most often the way it used to be originally was exactly how I would attempt to fix it even if I didn't know how it was originally, because that's the only way it made sense. So pretty much always just checkign how things were in the original just confirmed that, yes, this is a screwup, and not by the original devs. Some if it was just bugs, like guns having the wrong ammo, too. So some of this did get done, but I would've done more if it didn't involve having to explain each case to someone who's simply not played the game start to finish probably even once before attempting to mod it, and who thought it was a wilderness survival game about guns.
The other thing would have been to simply add the "missing evil path" that's obviously supposed to be there but likely got cut because of needing to rush the game out. The "good path", that takes you from the Den to VC, then to Gecko, then to Broken Hills-New Reno-etc is there, and if you just do everything there is to do in every town when you get there - assuming someone fixed the scouting quests in VC - you wouldn't even think the game's non-linear. It all works. But there was obviously going to be a path that takes you from the Den towards New Reno, probably through Redding, which would have more content in it, appropriate for players arriving there right after the Den, and get you involved in the New Reno - VC - Raiders stuff from the New Reno Front. But that would take actually developing it and modding it in. I mean, you *can* go straight to New Reno from the Den, but that requires out-of-game knowledge. So just because you can do that, folks tend to assume that the game is non-linear, when it's really just unfinished. After you look at what's there you could really just mod in an evil path and a completely fresh player wouldn't even know that its modded content, and probably wouldn't believe you if you told them that it was ever missing.
2) Traps and a bit of an economy rebalace
Traps are actually totes fine and interesting, and with the increased difficulty they're pretty key for you to get through setpiece battles in towns. If the og modder did anything really, trully good, traps were that. Keep in mind that the guy was very young and started modding the game for bizzare reasons without ever having played it through (to my knowledge) so if you try playing it without a separate mod that lets you control the other characters in your party it's just going to be unplayable.
The economy rebalance is p handy because the game throws so much loot at you in general that it trivializes everything even if you don't go sequence breaking to loot places. It's not really *that* necessary if the progression is fixed with the gameflow fixes, but since the modder really didn't know that much about the game he couldn't understand that most of the way it breaks down can be fixed with a handful of light-touch fixes, so he thought the whole thing needed rebalancing. And to some degree he was right, and a bunch of stuff he did ends up working very well.
What I'd advise here is turning on the option that Stimpaks irradiate you on use. There's literally no use for anti-rad drugs in the game, and what ends up happening because of this is that anti-rad stuff ends up being 1000 c bills for players which messess with how much money you've got once you start finding it. After thinking about it for a while I concluded that it's actually likely that the devs intended Stimpaks to irradiate you all along, which is *why* there's anti-rad stuff all over the place but mysteriously almost no way to get irradiated. Since you down stimpaks all the time, and combat can't really work any other way, that would be a way to make radiation always relevant, as opposed to tying it to certain locations and making it completely missable. It would also explain so much anti-rad stuff and geiger's counters all over the place. And partly explain the feeling you can get that stimpaks are just so OP in vanilla, since making them irradiate you puts a bit of a cap on how many you can carelessly down per encounter, and just going around stealing all the stimpaks doesn't break the game if you still need to be at least a bit careful with their use.
So while it may sound like a drastic change, it's really not, and it does wonders for the progression and not breaking the economy. It just feels like it was meant to be that way but for whatever reason got dropped at some point towards release. But no other implementation of radiation was put in, while so much stuff was left around the place in a way that seems to assume that you'll be irradiating yourself (and checking your radiation level) all the time. And if you go trying to figure out what possible source of radiation could produce it so omnipresently, you just end up with Stimpaks at the only one that fits the bill. And when you try to see if you're right - yep, it absolutely checks out and plays like it was meant to be that way all along. And you finally get to actually make use of the Geiger counter!
3) Stuff a kid who knew his programming, loved his guns, but had very little idea of what he was messing with did
You know, "it doesn't feel realistic that a double barreled shotgun should do this little damage". I tried my best to steer him to undo the most egregious stuff. At one point anything around the Den would just one-shot you even if you did everything there was to do up to that point in the Temple, Village, Klamath and the Den and just getting from the Den to Modoc after it was literally the only thing there was to do was impossible. But if you managed to save-scum the trek from Klamath to the Den and somehow got Vic and an a entry-level Bouble Barrel shotgun on him, HE'D one shot everything for you, because doooh. I hope he actually fixed that. But it makes the game pointlessly difficult in mind-blowingly autistic ways. I'm not sure anymore what's what, but if the installer still comes with the options to turn features off, anything that looks like someone who knows more about RL guns than they know about Fallout 2 did it is probably safe to turn off. Maybe he got some feedback from someone who knew how to manipulate him into doing the right thing, or maybe he actually playtested things in the meantime and saw for himself, so maybe not turn them off for a first attempt.
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In short, just turn on the "gameflox fixes" part at installation and play it straight (no sequence breaking, just do stuff in towns and go to the next town where the game gives you an in-game reason to go) and you get "Fallout 2: The way it was meant to be all along" or "Fallout 2: If you didn't play it for a while you won't even notice anything's different, but it'll suddenly make sense from start to finish and you won't be sure why".
Turn on the some of the other stuff and you'll just not be showered with loot for no reason, more mechanics will be more useable, you'll have more options, and it'll be a very good mod.
Turn on some of the other options and it'll be like: "I tried the game once, but the sound that the shotgun made didn't sound like the sound shotgun makes IRL, and the guns were not as lethal in RL, so I made them be lethal, and the game is not meant to be linear at all, you're supposed to be scavenging around, so I made all the weapons in the game more dangerous so that if you actually go scavenging around you'll get one-shot because tanking bullets is unrealistic. What do you mean I ended up making it more linear?" sort of thing. So basically why it's best to pay programmers to do things, and only let them implement their ideas if they can get them past someone who hasn't sank most of his time into becoming a good programmer but instead had time to acquire whatever ability it takes to understand that something like that quote there is insane.
The guy was a great programmer, mind you, incredible. Did things for the game you wouldn't believe anyone would be able to without reconstructing it from the ground up, but seemed physically incapable of even imagining that "makes sense to me" doesn't necessarily mean "it makes actual sense and/or reflects objective reality". But since he was aware that he didn't really know (or care) what the game was about other than guns (so to speak), he couldn't be completely wrong on that but still insanely convinced that he was right, like a die-hard Fallout modder who was just as autistic but had reasons to believe he knew what he was doing would be. So I managed to get him to implement some actually sensible fixes into the mod, which most other modders would protest and refuse to even attempt on equally if not moreso misguided and insane grounds. And he ended up fixing a ton of stuff, and some of his ideas were even great and superbly implemented, and really enriched the otherwise objectively sparse scavenging/surivival/economy game in a way that doesn't mess anything up.
I wouldn't play the game without the mod again, as the important part, the gameflow fixes, are really just an obvious patch. I'd be very careful about the other stuff, though, but not *that* much of it is actually "ok, obviously military-grade stupid", including some things that might look like that at first glance, and plenty of it still makes it the best one I ever played.
