Interesting topic
To start with i would say the biggest problem i usually have with those games is the special system balancement, which was at its peak on fo2
Fo1 had half of its skills as useless or underpowered.
Steal has a broken formula which only uses the PC skill to boot you into critical sucess rolls or critical failures rolls, while your actual sucess or failure rolls only take your crit chance and the target's steal skill into account.
This could have been useful if you take item size and the face penalties of the first roll into account, but theres not a whole lot of heavy items to steal in fo1 with merchants and other characters carrying not much that you would need to take, which meant you would mostly steal weightless shit like stimpacks. So, steal was underpowered in 1.
Traps were poorly implemented by actually requiring Perception to actually detect the traps in any rooms. The game had very few traps and most of them were placed on the ground in which you couldnt manually disarm, this meant the skill would be meaningless.
Fo2 made it better by placing traps on walls and such, so even without a high perception you could manually check places and disarm them, also, the per requirement to detect traps were diminished.
Both unarmed and big guns were greatly underpowered in fo1 due to very few endgame options and better options in other weapon categories. The only benefit they could have over small guns, energy weapons and melee were if the player took fast shot which is a very specific playstyle for more advanced players, despite how OP it can get if you do something like Fast shoot melee 1 AP power fist hits, this required metagaming knowledge and you had extremely great builds with something like energy weapons anyways, so both big guns and unarmed are underpowered.
Throwing had literally one useful build, being the flare throwing + high crit one. Its utterly garbage.
Outdoorman is useless
First aid is horseshit compared to doctor since it heals less HP and it doesnt fix broken limbs, people can argue about the higher ammount of points it starts with, but this not only is bad for roleplaying as theres characters who clearly shouldnt be skilled with First aid and STILL can use it quite efficiently, but really feels like an filthy casual feature to try and ease it for first timers (which doesnt really matter since in 1 hour you are already swimming in stimpacks) the other argument try to point out to the timed quest and how doctor waste more time in comparison. Its also not a good point since you still have plenty of time to complete your quest and if you arent happy with it you can literally expand the time without any negative outcome (unless you are playing V1.0 thats it)
Gambling is useless. Fo1 has literally one cassino in the whole game and you can miss it depending on how you deal with the junktown quest. Barter being quite good in fo1 and being also able to break the game's economy make it redundant.
Theres some objectively bad traits like bruiser, but those werent that big of a problem in fo1 and its actually one of the things It does better than 2 (fast shot being better than 2, skilled being quite good for non combat and dumb characters,etc....)
And charisma is sadly a dump stat here.
All in all i would say we have 9 useful skills and 9 bad ones in fo 1 which is quite of a big deal in a game about playing it in your own way and having choice.
Some people say Fo new vegas has the best balance by merging skills and making them more useful, however i cant see how this is the case.
Medicine is often the example which people often point out to
Except i cant see how its that different from the OG games. It works as a buffer from shit like stimpacks (which you will be swimming in anyways) while survival works as a buffer for Food
They are literally two different options to healing yourself in which Survival gets to be objectively worse and useless unless you are playing on hardcore (in which, survival gets to be only for convenience's sake anyways, its far from required)
And they fucked up by merging small guns and big guns
The problem with small guns in fo1 was that it has way more options on variety compared to big, energy and unarmed
This meant you simply could end your whole game with only small guns and have a better time.
Fo2 made other weapon categories more useful by adding more options to mid/end game like they did with unarmed and big guns
Fo New vegas's solution? Lets add even more options to small guns by mixing it with big guns!!
Theres literally no reason to pick energy over guns. Yep, i know theres some incredibly OP guns late game for energy weapons, but some of the best weapons in the game are also avaliable on the Guns category, their ammo is easier to find, theres way more options when it comes to variety for either early/mid/late game and they dont really play out that differently on gameplay.
Unarmed is objectively better than Melee not only by having better weapons for endgame which are also more satisfying to use but because its skill tree is needed to get acess to the slayer perk.
Sneak was greatly nerfed in vegas compared to 3, sneak crits arent optimal builds anymore and the map layout just doesnt support sneaking that well. Theres a lot of confined spaces on vegas and not a whole lot of verticality to use sneaking as an advantage.
Atleast they got explosives right, as well as repair, science and lockpicking
Speech is objectively useful but i dont like how every skill is constantly used in dialogue checks, it makes the speech playstyle less unique
For vegas i would say we have something like 8 good skills and 5 weak ones
It also has the con of making charisma useless again
While fo2 had no dump stat, 12 useful skills and 6 weak ones and the only con compared to the other titles would be marginally weaker traits. Its by far the best version of the system.
Those games have way more flaws to be taken into account, but this would require to go quite in depth on those aspects as i did with the skills and i would rather just point out my biggest problem with them (this being again, the balancement)
To start with i would say the biggest problem i usually have with those games is the special system balancement, which was at its peak on fo2
Fo1 had half of its skills as useless or underpowered.
Steal has a broken formula which only uses the PC skill to boot you into critical sucess rolls or critical failures rolls, while your actual sucess or failure rolls only take your crit chance and the target's steal skill into account.
This could have been useful if you take item size and the face penalties of the first roll into account, but theres not a whole lot of heavy items to steal in fo1 with merchants and other characters carrying not much that you would need to take, which meant you would mostly steal weightless shit like stimpacks. So, steal was underpowered in 1.
Traps were poorly implemented by actually requiring Perception to actually detect the traps in any rooms. The game had very few traps and most of them were placed on the ground in which you couldnt manually disarm, this meant the skill would be meaningless.
Fo2 made it better by placing traps on walls and such, so even without a high perception you could manually check places and disarm them, also, the per requirement to detect traps were diminished.
Both unarmed and big guns were greatly underpowered in fo1 due to very few endgame options and better options in other weapon categories. The only benefit they could have over small guns, energy weapons and melee were if the player took fast shot which is a very specific playstyle for more advanced players, despite how OP it can get if you do something like Fast shoot melee 1 AP power fist hits, this required metagaming knowledge and you had extremely great builds with something like energy weapons anyways, so both big guns and unarmed are underpowered.
Throwing had literally one useful build, being the flare throwing + high crit one. Its utterly garbage.
Outdoorman is useless
First aid is horseshit compared to doctor since it heals less HP and it doesnt fix broken limbs, people can argue about the higher ammount of points it starts with, but this not only is bad for roleplaying as theres characters who clearly shouldnt be skilled with First aid and STILL can use it quite efficiently, but really feels like an filthy casual feature to try and ease it for first timers (which doesnt really matter since in 1 hour you are already swimming in stimpacks) the other argument try to point out to the timed quest and how doctor waste more time in comparison. Its also not a good point since you still have plenty of time to complete your quest and if you arent happy with it you can literally expand the time without any negative outcome (unless you are playing V1.0 thats it)
Gambling is useless. Fo1 has literally one cassino in the whole game and you can miss it depending on how you deal with the junktown quest. Barter being quite good in fo1 and being also able to break the game's economy make it redundant.
Theres some objectively bad traits like bruiser, but those werent that big of a problem in fo1 and its actually one of the things It does better than 2 (fast shot being better than 2, skilled being quite good for non combat and dumb characters,etc....)
And charisma is sadly a dump stat here.
All in all i would say we have 9 useful skills and 9 bad ones in fo 1 which is quite of a big deal in a game about playing it in your own way and having choice.
Some people say Fo new vegas has the best balance by merging skills and making them more useful, however i cant see how this is the case.
Medicine is often the example which people often point out to
Except i cant see how its that different from the OG games. It works as a buffer from shit like stimpacks (which you will be swimming in anyways) while survival works as a buffer for Food
They are literally two different options to healing yourself in which Survival gets to be objectively worse and useless unless you are playing on hardcore (in which, survival gets to be only for convenience's sake anyways, its far from required)
And they fucked up by merging small guns and big guns
The problem with small guns in fo1 was that it has way more options on variety compared to big, energy and unarmed
This meant you simply could end your whole game with only small guns and have a better time.
Fo2 made other weapon categories more useful by adding more options to mid/end game like they did with unarmed and big guns
Fo New vegas's solution? Lets add even more options to small guns by mixing it with big guns!!
Theres literally no reason to pick energy over guns. Yep, i know theres some incredibly OP guns late game for energy weapons, but some of the best weapons in the game are also avaliable on the Guns category, their ammo is easier to find, theres way more options when it comes to variety for either early/mid/late game and they dont really play out that differently on gameplay.
Unarmed is objectively better than Melee not only by having better weapons for endgame which are also more satisfying to use but because its skill tree is needed to get acess to the slayer perk.
Sneak was greatly nerfed in vegas compared to 3, sneak crits arent optimal builds anymore and the map layout just doesnt support sneaking that well. Theres a lot of confined spaces on vegas and not a whole lot of verticality to use sneaking as an advantage.
Atleast they got explosives right, as well as repair, science and lockpicking
Speech is objectively useful but i dont like how every skill is constantly used in dialogue checks, it makes the speech playstyle less unique
For vegas i would say we have something like 8 good skills and 5 weak ones
It also has the con of making charisma useless again
While fo2 had no dump stat, 12 useful skills and 6 weak ones and the only con compared to the other titles would be marginally weaker traits. Its by far the best version of the system.
Those games have way more flaws to be taken into account, but this would require to go quite in depth on those aspects as i did with the skills and i would rather just point out my biggest problem with them (this being again, the balancement)
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