Fallout

Fallout is a post-apocalyptic role-playing adventure game developed and published by Interplay Productions. It was intended to be a sequel to the 1988 cult hit Wasteland (1988), but eventually ended up becoming a spiritual successor to said game. Taking place in a retro-futuristic version of the nuclear apocalypse, the player takes control of the Vault dweller, an inhabitant of a nuclear shelter called a Vault, and is tasked with finding a component to restore the Vault's water supply. Development took place since 1994, and was released 3 years later. The game was released to critical acclaim and a commercial success, and is regarded as one of the greatest video games of all time. Its release helped kickstart the Fallout series and helped restore interest in computer role-playing games for consumers.

Why War Never Changes

 * 1) Probably the greatest strength of the original Fallout, and the three original games in general really, is its well-designed S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system for creating your character and advancing them as the game progresses. While the players can chose from 3 different pre-made characters to start out the game, the real fun comes in creating your own from a pool of 7 different stats, 18 skills, and an optional 2 traits to create a character that can either be entirely your own, or just one made to mess around the game with. The real beauty of the system is that it is so well designed for the game that every single stat is important to the overall mechanics are character advancement in some way.
 * 2) * Strength determines how much you can carry in your inventory, some health aspects, and how effective and damaging melee weapons are when used.
 * 3) * Perception aids in how much of the smaller details in the environment the player notices as well as aiding in how well you hit a target in ranged combat.
 * 4) * Endurance affects the player's health as well as their resistance to status effects such as radiation.
 * 5) * Charisma is used to adjust how well the player can communicate with others in the first place and assist with the dialogue options selected. It also helps with how prices are and how people react to your character as well.
 * 6) * Intelligence affects how many dialogue options are available in conversational encounters, as well as determining how many skill points you gain per level. It even determines how your character communicates in encounters as well.
 * 7) * Agility helps determine how fast and hard to hit you are, but mainly helps decide how many action points you have in combat, which helps determine how many moves or how much you can do in a single turn of combat.
 * 8) * Luck decides how often critical hits or misses happen to you and other characters in the game, and aids in what kind of random encounters you will come across in the game world.
 * 9) The combat is incredibly well designed and makes use of the combat-focused aspects of the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system in a great way despite very clearly showing its age. The player controls their own character in turn-based encounters against an enemy and sometimes with AI-controlled allies. How much the player can do in combat is determined by action points, which determines how far you can move, how many attacks can be made, etc. Actions in particular are assisted in use by their respective stats and skills in how effective they are. Leftover actions points can also be saved up when you end your turn to add on to your armor class value. That's about it in terms of the basics, but only in that simple description it illustrates how the main stats are interwoven with each other to make the combat balanced and engaging, and all relates to how well balanced Fallout really is compared to other RPGs of the era and even today.
 * 10) The world of Fallout is rather interesting in itself, as rather than having a typical post-nuclear setting full of desert areas and lots of incredibly broken societies that inhabit the world, while there certainly is a lot of that, Fallout brings its own sort of retro-futuristic setting to the mix that makes the world a lot more appealing. Good examples of this design are the many scrapped cars found in Junktown that are styled after 50s vehicles, the very imperfect and clunky look of power armor, and the almost pulp magazine style of the various robots.
 * 11) * The world is also well-designed from a game design perspective, as while there are only 12 locations to explore, with a good number of them only being found if you do the optional quests, each of the locations have a good number of stuff to do in them, ranging from optional side quests to learning more about the world and where you are from the NPCs that inhabit the world. The areas are also spaced in a way that you are likely to find a new location when going to one specific place along the way.
 * 12) Keeping in check with the mix of play-styles the player can have for their character, almost every encounter has a set of different outcomes that the player can choose to resolve an encounter. A good example of this is an early quest where the player can rescue Tandi from a group of raiders. The player can resolve the situation through a speech check, kill the enemies to break her out, buy her from the leader or fight the leader for her freedom, free her by stealth or blowing the door open. There is also an option only available with a certain character build, where if you have a Luck of 9 and have leather armor on, you can be mistaken for the leaders father who was killed, and take her back. Large freedom like this and these kinds of special encounters make the game fun and also add to the replay value.
 * 13) While it doesn't really pick up until the later half, the story has a fairly interesting setup in that it starts out as a sort of fetch quest but turns into uncovering a dastardly plot that can mean the end of all life in the wasteland. Some plot points in particular in both the main and side quests are fairly interesting. Some good examples are learning about the Brotherhood of Steel and becoming a member of their society and, probably the most well known, the final encounter with the Master where the player can either join him, kill him, or find a way to talk him out of his plan which goes in a very interesting direction.
 * 14) The traits system is rather interesting. In the beginning of character creation you can choose two optional traits that will provide both a positive and negative effect on the player. For example, Small Frame increases your Agility but decreases your carry weight, or Good Natured increases your communication and medical skills but gives a penalty to your combat ones. This allows for deeper customization and enhancement of a specific play-style you have, such as Kamikaze being useful for players who want to attack as early as possible at the expense of being easier to hit.
 * 15) Good sense of humor, as Fallout does what a lot of other post-apocalyptic media never do: include a level of absurdity and dark humor to brighten up the serious tone a bit. While Fallout has its share of serious moments, it also balances a bit of oddness to it that it never feels too heavy when it doesn't need to be. Good examples of this are the random encounters like the random field of cows, a giant footprint in the ground, and a crashed alien spaceship. Outside of those encounters, there's also stuff like intelligence determining how your character talks or the "Oh my god, you killed Kenny!" quote from South Park appearing when you kill a character named Kenny.
 * 16) The endings to the game are rather interesting, as the bad endings can have the player joining the Master and helping take over the wasteland as a super mutant or the Vault dying out from not retrieving the water chip in the time limit. On the other hand, the good ending has the player retrieving the water chip and stopping the Master, but aren't allowed to get back into the Vault because the player's fame will lead to others leaving the Vault for themselves and ending up destroying their society, which is a rather unique twist on good endings in games.
 * 17) An incredible atmospheric soundtrack that adds to the game's overall tone and is used at the right moments. The opening track "Maybe" by The Ink Spots is a haunting way to start and end the game as it plays over images of the broken world that you live in. Outside of that, the music by Mark Morgan is powerfully atmospheric, as it is often low sounds and the occasional rise or fall in the music that gives an almost unsettling feeling that keeps the player playing for more.
 * 18) Decent voice acting for the time despite being limited to cutscenes and the "talking head" characters, and was one of the few CRPGs to have that at the time.
 * 19) All in all, the game was a great start to the Fallout series and shaped a lot of the world and layout for future games, such as factions like the Brotherhood of Steel and the Great Khans, introducing characters like the Vault Dweller, Tandi, Harold, and Dogmeat, and overall being a great basis for the game world for other entries to expand upon.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Despite many examples of brilliant writing in the game, particularly with the final encounter against The Master in the game's memorable finale, an issue that plagues the original Fallout is its inconsistent writing as a whole, with excellently written encounters being in the same boat as very basic and "video gamey" questlines so to speak. The game's main plot doesn't really rise up to the quality it is generally regarded as until the later half of the game, with the first half being less well-written and generally less interesting than what you find later.
 * 2) * A good example would be the Junktown questline, which has some rather good examples of bad writing. The quest itself is about a feud between Killian Darkwater, who wants to take the town back from a casino owner named Gizmo who runs the town. Killian wants proof that Gizmo is against him, even though there are multiple clear instances of Gizmo clearly trying to get rid of Killian, including an assassination attempt where the assassin clearly says "Gizmo sends his regards". And even outside of that,the player can join Gizmo for the sake of being evil as there is literally no good reason to join him other than filling in the quest's evil option checkbox. It results in a quest that feels rushed in terms of writing and has a very generic black and white solution that is so generic it almost feels like the writing for a completely different game.
 * 3) While the game is very good, some aspects of it have not aged as well as others and can be quite hard for more modern fans of the franchise to get into. These badly aged aspects include:
 * 4) * The user interface can be rather clunky at times, especially in choosing what to do with an object in the overworld or when deciding how much of an item you want to trade or drop. This can also make the great combat hard to get used to at first.
 * 5) * The graphics are rather dated by today's standards in their almost grainy look, especially with the "talking head" animations which can look unintentionally creepy and unsettling to look at.
 * 6) Playing at higher resolutions above 1080x720p is quite painful to look at, as increasing the resolution only really makes the game zoom out and show more of the game world, but also leads to menus and icons being smaller and becoming a lot more difficult to read due to their sizes, making this one of the few games where playing at lower resolutions is actually recommended for modern gamers.
 * 7) Some endings are bugged and don't appear in the game, which is unfortunate because some of said endings are canon to the Fallout universe. They can of course be patched back in and restored.

Reception
The game was critically acclaimed and a financial success. It was followed by a number of sequels and spin-off games and kick-started the Fallout series.