Fallout 1: Harbinger of the Decline?

[PorkaMorka]

Throughout this post I'll refer to the "gameplay elements" of a game as well as the "entertainment elements".

Gameplay is what the player does in order to play the game and gameplay elements include the game systems that the player interacts with. The key aspect here is the player doing something.

Entertainment elements are the elements that the player passively consumes, as they do in other forms of media. graphics, sound, animations, narrative, etc. The key aspect here is the player passively consuming media.

With that out of the way:
It seems that Fallout 1 has a lot in common with Decline era CRPGs.

Notable commonalities between Fallout 1 and Decline era CRPGs:

-single controllable character instead of a party

- shallow and simplistic core gameplay

Hide behind cover, pop out to shoot the enemy, then duck behind cover once again. Rinse and repeat. I think we have a word for this. Unfortunately, you can't call Fallout's combat turn based popamole because the enemies aren't smart enough to use cover.

And if you do manage to get hurt? For only 4 total ap you can use as many stimpacks as you want. Reminds me of certain early hack and slash games before they started putting in timers to prevent you from chain chugging potions.

Fallout's combat is heavily streamlined and simplified, what with the AI being put in charge of all party members except the PC and with the crouch and prone positions (vital for modeling combat with firearms) being omitted.

It does have an aiming system, but unfortunately you will find that depending on your skills there is generally a clearly optimal place to aim and after a while you'll just aim for the eyes all the time. This was an attempt at depth but it mostly ended up as false depth. Aiming for a weak spot in the enemy's armor might have added some depth to the aiming system, but in Fallout there is only one slot for armor rather than individual pieces to aim for. (Streamlined armor 14 years before Skyrim!)

Overall, it is kind of easy to see how the Devs of the next gen Fallout games thought that nothing of value would be lost by scrapping Fallout's version of turn based combat.

-Heavy focus on entertainment elements instead of gameplay elements

Despite how simple and shallow Fallout's combat gameplay is, everyone loved the combat, including me as an adolescent. Why? Those awesome death animations of course. They didn't add any depth to the gameplay but they sure looked cool. I bet a lot of you guys wasted a perk on bloody mess.

It is a classic early example of covering up shallow gameplay using graphics/animation and it works perfectly, people to this day will unthinkingly list combat as one of Fallout 1's strengths, possibly while criticizing next gen games that show the results of your attacks in cut scenes.

Ok, so the combat system doesn't demand very much from the player. But surely all that exploration and dialog based gameplay will demand a lot from the player? Well, a lot of patience, that's about it. Once the player has figured out the combat system, he has figured out the vast majority of Fallout's gameplay, all that's left are a few easy puzzles and some clicking of dialog options.

The rest is entertainment. In Fallout, the entertainment elements are generally well done, unlike the gameplay, so it's not really surprising that people love Fallout more for the animations, atmosphere, narrative, dialog, sound, graphics, cut scenes, etc., than for the gameplay.

Dialog in Fallout does present some gameplay in that you will have to pick options at times, but as a game, "read text and pick option" is far more simplistic than even cell phone games. Especially as many of the choices are rather inconsequential as far as winning the game, often they're more relevant to passively reading about certain cosmetic results of your choice later on.

As gameplay, dialog in Fallout 1 is a mini game at best. Mostly dialog in Fallout 1 is entertainment.

Conclusion:

While Fallout 1 was pretty fun back in 1997, it should be seen as a significant step towards that grim day when Devs realized "Making a game that stays fun for X hours is really hard, but producing X hours of entertainment content is much, much easier, especially since standards for entertainment in video games are so low".

It's not that big of a leap from Fallout 1 to the modern post decline CRPGs where people here will openly admit that the gameplay is shit and they're just playing for the entertainment elements.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I understand your point, but I always wanted to be chain-quoted by the rest of the people in the thread, so:

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

I understand your point, but I always wanted to be chain-quoted by the rest of the people in the thread, so:

 

[racofer]

Helping a fellow countryman.

I understand your point, but I always wanted to be chain-quoted by the rest of the people in the thread, so:

 

[SCO]

Helping a fellow countryman.

I understand your point, but I always wanted to be chain-quoted by the rest of the people in the thread, so:

 

[thursdayschild]

The character system is complicated. It doesn't matter that the combat itself is simple that's not what an RPG is about even for elite individual such as myself.

Any idiot can say well all you do in combat is move around or fire or use items or use cover for any game, and one just did for fallout 1.

 

[Excidium]

Helping a fellow countryman.

I understand your point, but I always wanted to be chain-quoted by the rest of the people in the thread, so:

 

[Sceptic]

Helping a fellow countryman.

I understand your point, but I always wanted to be chain-quoted by the rest of the people in the thread, so:

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Throughout this post I'll refer to the "gameplay elements" of a game as well as the "entertainment elements".

Gameplay is what the player does in order to play the game and gameplay elements include the game systems that the player interacts with. The key aspect here is the player doing something.

Entertainment elements are the elements that the player passively consumes, as they do in other forms of media. graphics, sound, animations, narrative, etc. The key aspect here is the player passively consuming media.

With that out of the way:
It seems that Fallout 1 has a lot in common with Decline era CRPGs.

Notable commonalities between Fallout 1 and Decline era CRPGs:

-single controllable character instead of a party

- shallow and simplistic core gameplay

Hide behind cover, pop out to shoot the enemy, then duck behind cover once again. Rinse and repeat. I think we have a word for this. Unfortunately, you can't call Fallout's combat turn based popamole because the enemies aren't smart enough to use cover.

And if you do manage to get hurt? For only 4 total ap you can use as many stimpacks as you want. Reminds me of certain early hack and slash games before they started putting in timers to prevent you from chain chugging potions.

Fallout's combat is heavily streamlined and simplified, what with the AI being put in charge of all party members except the PC and with the crouch and prone positions (vital for modeling combat with firearms) being omitted.

It does have an aiming system, but unfortunately you will find that depending on your skills there is generally a clearly optimal place to aim and after a while you'll just aim for the eyes all the time. This was an attempt at depth but it mostly ended up as false depth. Aiming for a weak spot in the enemy's armor might have added some depth to the aiming system, but in Fallout there is only one slot for armor rather than individual pieces to aim for. (Streamlined armor 14 years before Skyrim!)

Overall, it is kind of easy to see how the Devs of the next gen Fallout games thought that nothing of value would be lost by scrapping Fallout's version of turn based combat.

It's because we got a gutted version of Fallout with an ersatz combat system that was hacked together in a few weeks instead of a tried and tested system that a decade of development behind it.
I was always unsatisfied with the combat mechanics.

Also, you forgot about extremely random criticals which additionally decreased the role of tactics.

The rest is entertainment. In Fallout, the entertainment elements are generally well done, unlike the gameplay, so it's not really surprising that people love Fallout more for the animations, atmosphere, narrative, dialog, sound, graphics, cut scenes, etc., than for the gameplay.

Dialog in Fallout does present some gameplay in that you will have to pick options at times, but as a game, "read text and pick option" is far more simplistic than even cell phone games. Especially as many of the choices are rather inconsequential as far as winning the game, often they're more relevant to passively reading about certain cosmetic results of your choice later on.

As gameplay, dialog in Fallout 1 is a mini game at best. Mostly dialog in Fallout 1 is entertainment.

Conclusion:

While Fallout 1 was pretty fun back in 1997, it should be seen as a significant step towards that grim day when Devs realized "Making a game that stays fun for X hours is really hard, but producing X hours of entertainment content is much, much easier, especially since standards for entertainment in video games are so low".

It's not that big of a leap from Fallout 1 to the modern post decline CRPGs where people here will openly admit that the gameplay is shit and they're just playing for the entertainment elements.

You forgot about character building and character development and influence of skills and stats on gameplay. Something that was completely fucked up in modern games in the name of accessibility.

 

[EvilSatan]

I thought the Mastermind was the worst part of Fallout. Stereotypical final boss who has the desire to let you know about all of his secrets, but has the urge to kill himself after finding out a minute flaw in his plan.

 

[torpid]

I agree with some things you say, particularly with regard to Fallout's combat, but gameplay in an RPG also includes character building, quest design and skill checks. Figuring out what to do in a quest, and investing skill points into certain skills over the course of the game in order to succeed in quests in specific ways, are gameplay. Generally simpler than combat, which is another issue, but it's gameplay nonetheless. Having your lockpicking skill or your science skill at a certain level and thus gaining entry to a new area or accessing a computer are forms of gameplay, similar to relying on climbing skills or intuition in certain RoA dungeons for example.

After all, combat in an RPGs is also heavily based on the player's stats and the choices he made in that regard. Of course, ideally there's more to it than that, and the player has a host of tactical decisions to make to succeed in combat -- but the same can be said for quests and skill checks/uses: ideally, the game provides some challenge in how you solve the quest and how you use your skills. Undeniably, the challenge and range of decisions in a Fallout-style game tend to be smaller: too many quests will simply be a variation of skill check vs. combat. Do you have the a particular skill at a certain level? You get to select the dialogue option that grants you your reward; if not, fight to the death. That's not inevitable though.

I do think that Fallout attracted and inspired developers and gamers who were more interested in the narrative/world-building aspects of RPGs, and paved the way for the rise of the nefarious M) storyfag faction, but claiming that everything aside from the combat is fluff is a pretty unfair assessment of the game.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

The storyfags came from Ultima IV+ and Baldur's Gate. Fallout was for descriptionfags, aimincombatistsattacktypefags, nonlinearityfags and charbuildstatfags.

 

[flabbyjack]

 

[shihonage]

I'm heading to PorkaMorka's house right now to beat some sense into him with a shovel.

vvvv Yeah good luck with that nested quote limit vvvv

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Helping a fellow countryman.

I understand your point, but I always wanted to be chain-quoted by the rest of the people in the thread, so:

 

[Konjad]

Helping a fellow countryman.

I understand your point, but I always wanted to be chain-quoted by the rest of the people in the thread, so:

 

[hanssolo]

Logically, the decline immediately follows the peak.























(This, of course, means the decline began in 1993 with the release of DarkSun: Shattered Lands and the death of SSI.(fallout 1 what the fuck))

 

[ghostdog]

Decline of the codex more like it.

 

[Orgasm]

Dude, you post on the Codex. Larper central.
Fav games include Mass Defect, Arcanshit and Shitout.
There are like 5 people on here who play games.

 

[ironyuri]

I understand your point, but I always wanted to be chain-quoted by the rest of the people in the thread, so:

 

[PorkaMorka]

(This, of course, means the decline began in 1993 with the release of DarkSun: Shattered Lands and the death of SSI.(fallout 1 what the fuck))

Yeah, you can definitely see the early stages of the Decline in the Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, but by the time we get to Fallout it gets a lot more noticeable.

Some aspects of the Decline were visible in Dark Sun but still had a heck of a lot in common with the pre-Decline games.

With Fallout though, I'm honestly not sure if it had more in common with pre-Decline or post-Decline games. It really resembles the later next gen games, only with shitty turn based combat instead of shitty action combat. The focus is no longer on gameplay. Only its detailed (if somewhat broken) character development system really sets it apart from later games.

 

[Roguey]

(This, of course, means the decline began in 1993 with the release of DarkSun: Shattered Lands and the death of SSI.(fallout 1 what the fuck))

Yeah, you can definitely see the early stages of the Decline in the Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, but by the time we get to Fallout it gets a lot more noticeable.

Agreeing with this. Look at the good RPGs released in 1993: Serpent Isle, Ultima Underworld 2, Darkside of Xeen, Betrayal at Krondor, Shattered Lands. Or even the previous year with The Black Gate, Wizardry 7, Darklands, UU, and so on. But 1994? Well, you had Star Trail I guess, but also the disappointing Ultima 8, that lousy Wake of the Ravager sequel, some crappy Elder Scrolls thing, and a bunch of awful Dungeon Master clones (that continued being released over the next couple of years). 1995? Aside from Vogel's first venture into indie RPGs not a damn thing worth caring about. 1996? Daggerfall (nearly bankrupted Bethesda) and Diablo (which the gaming press declared had resurrected this dead genre). Fallout and the like were just minor bumps that slowed the fall.

 

[Azrael the cat]

There's nothing odd about the idea of a leading entry in a genre also being the 'beginning of the end', both in computer games and other media. What happens is that a talented team creates a new product, using what at that point in time is a new way of looking at the genre. Being a talented team, and making it as a work of love rather than a factory-line product, the game is innovative, challenging and a step above what has come before.

But then you get a fuckton of larger companies trying to imitate the product's success. They take up the same basic design principles, but are no longer making it as a labour of love. Instead of accessibility you get dumbing down, and instead of a slight edge of zaniness you get theme-park design. 10 years later you've got an industry pumping out soulless clones that - if you step back and just note the design elements - are descended from the original game, but without any of the heart. Part of it is that you've got less talented teams working under conditions less conducive to creativity, hence the clones are just of poorer quality than the original. But secondly, the mass-marketification of the genre means that the basest design elements are emphasised and the challenging aspects downplayed. So you get the one-piece armour, the simple combat, the gore>tactics and minigame dialogue, but you lose all the not-so-obvious approaches to quests, the quality of the writing and so on.

FO1 isn't the only all-time great crpg to be the herald of the decline. Planescape:Torment and Deus Ex both played a part, and I fucking love those games. When those games came out, a lot of folks like me thought that they were the future of computer games - games as interactive fiction, or even games as art. What we didn't realise was that when that same design became mainstream, you wouldn't be getting more games similar to PS:T/Deus Ex - you'd be getting the most shitty Mills-and-Boon, cinematics instead of interactivity, handholding instead of experimentation, D-grade cinema instead of game, pieces of shit. Also known as Dragon Age and Mass Effect. If I'm man enough to confess my role in encouraging the decline, the folks who lauded FO1 as the future of gaming can man up and do the same.

You can even put System Shock 2 in there as another great game that embodies many of the decline elements. Implemented the autoresurrect machines (the forerunner of the no-death-penalty policy of Bioshock and CoD) - sure, in SS2 you had to pay a small nanite cost, but the essence of the design was there and removing the token penalty while keeping the same 'res with all your gear and little loss of ground' mechanic was the obvious next step. Encouraged the 'insert rpg mechanics into freaken everything' trend. But most of all, SS1 and SS2 were the first major entries into the 'let's make shooters more cinematic, and rely more and more on 'mood' and story instead of gameplay' market. System Shock contained the seeds of CoD.

FO1, PS:T, Deus Ex and SS2 are all amongst my favourite games. But very often the best works in a genre are the same ones that contain the seeds of the genre's demise.

On a related note, am I the only one who's noticed the 'double-album genre-death' trend in music? It seems that whenever one of the dominant bands in a musical genre releases a double album, that marks the commercial death of that genre of music.

For example:
- Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' double-album ended prog/art rock.
- Guns N Roses 'Use your illusion' double-album ended hair metal.
- Smashing Pumpkins 'Melon Collie and the Infinte Sadness' ended grunge.
- Nine Inch Nail's 'The Fragile' double-album ended industrial.
- 2Pac's 'All Eyez On Me' and Notorious BIG's 'Life is Big' (out around the same time) ended gangsta rap.

Any I've missed?

 

[kingcomrade]

an attempt at a clever angle but unfortunately just wrong

 

[Serious_Business]

Fuck Fallout. Ogre Tactics is about 10 times better. Suck on it

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

(This, of course, means the decline began in 1993 with the release of DarkSun: Shattered Lands and the death of SSI.(fallout 1 what the fuck))

Yeah, you can definitely see the early stages of the Decline in the Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, but by the time we get to Fallout it gets a lot more noticeable.

Some aspects of the Decline were visible in Dark Sun but still had a heck of a lot in common with the pre-Decline games.

With Fallout though, I'm honestly not sure if it had more in common with pre-Decline or post-Decline games. It really resembles the later next gen games, only with shitty turn based combat instead of shitty action combat. The focus is no longer on gameplay. Only its detailed (if somewhat broken) character development system really sets it apart from later games.

It was supposed to be a Incline. A massive Incline. The problem is that we never got Fallout as it was originally designed (which would have combat somewhat closer to JA2 - including stuff like multi-round aiming and interrupts). Fallout got salvaged after losing it's ruleset, hence the shitty combat and broken character development. It was an ersatz, not a properly designed system.
The problem is that with the success of Fallout, they pushed for Fallout 2 without bothering to fix the system.
Even at the time of release, Fallout was no longer associated with being a game that was based on a sophisticated realistic system but only with S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
So, S.P.E.C.I.A.L. was the Decline of Fallout and cRPGs in general, and sadly it was decline that was loved by most of players.

Personally, when I was playing Fallout, I felt that the lack of realism of the game somehow was wrong. Back then I didn't know about GURPS and didn't know that Fallout was being based on GURPS but I have felt that it should be exactly something like GURPS.

The worst thing was that while Fallout's S.P.E.C.I.A.L. was an accidental decline, other games were continuing the decline intentionally and actually removed things that were good about Fallout, which makes Fallout not associated with that Decline.