#gonan try and write soemthing after every game that way I train up writing

[violasgamingpalace]

Fallout, Really good! Rightfully deserves its place as most beloved CRPG among mega-nerds. Which is, honestly, kinda a shame, because the game is so so flawed. But the CRPG genre is such a hard genre to develop that, in fact, yes the 1997 game you can beat in under 15 hours your first playthrough really is a pinnacle of the genre.

Now, part of what is impressive about Fallout is that the games flaws are turned into strengths by clever game design.

The gameplay systems for combat and skill checks aren't particularly dynamic? Sure! But it's a relatively brisk playtime so you aren't going to engage with those systems heavily enough to grow tired of them. Sardonic messages accompany the description of HP damage, which helps to add spice to individual battles.

A lot of the alternative options for quests are pretty finicky, but they're alternatives. Sure, I didn't bother to learn how explosives work, but now I can blow up the scorpion cave when I play next time. By focusing development time elsewhere and keeping the polishing off the table, the most important aspects of the game got finished and work.

Where the game works best, and why I loved it, is its very strong use of theme. That intro movie is famous for a reason, it's very good, and most importantly it MATTERS to the rest of the game. An intro like that could have very easily just been a cool starting point that is totally dropped as other designers worked on everything else.

But instead the themes it brings up are carried through the rest of the game. The war-mongering that led up to the nukes flying are, in fact, one and the same of the Mutant army. So much so, that observation players will realize the FEV that creates mutants is quite literally just another arm of the American war Machine. (One of my favorite illustrations of this is if you ally with the master another movie plays of the assault on Vault 13 that quite clearly mirrors the American assault on Canada we see in the intro)

Here we also see the perfect marriage of the games Theme and Tone. Theme- war never changes. Tone- the idealism of 1950s Americana contrasted with the war machine that created it.

That, finally, is why the game is set in California. It's biggest influence isn't post-apoclyapse genre fiction, but instead American Western films, the quintessential American Story about the necessity of violence, here turned into a parody of why, in fact, the strength and fascist ideologies that pushed these narratives can only end with inevitable fallout.