How come Fallout 2 feels so low budget compared to Fallout 1?

TheHouseAlwaysWins

TheHouseAlwaysWins

Look, Ma! Two Heads!
The voice acting in Fallout 2 is pretty minimal compared to the original. The original Fallout is half as short but yet has way more voice acting in it. Fallout 2's voice acting is rare and only reserved for very important characters or a couple of jokes in it. There are also a bunch of oddities like the fact that some of your companions are voiced but other companions aren't voiced in Fallout 2 and the ending slides look like in-game screenshots and clip art rather than the drawn concept art at the end of Fallout 1, and there's also the infamous progression with equipment that's known to be slow where you only get a musket and a couple of 9mm's at the start of Fallout 2.
 
Because Fallout 1 was planned and worked on for 3 years and the team who made it reached 100 members. Fallout 2 was forced to be made in 1 year, was forced to be as large as Baldur's Gate, and had less than 1/3 of the team members. Also since Interplay was going through lots of financial problems, quite a few people left Black Isle while they were working on Fallout 2.

Funds and manpower were also being diverted to Planescape: Torment which was being made at the same time.

So, Fallout 2 was very low budget, with very low manpower and very short time to be made compared to Fallout.
 
The plot and setting are much cheesier and not as well thought out as Fallout 1, which adds to the cheaper feeling. There was no cohesion between the teams working on the various locations throughout the much larger map, leading to lots of side quests with no relevance to the main plot or themes that feel like they were discarded ideas from Fallout 1 or other games.
 
Fallout 1, in spite of being a great RPG, feels unpolished as well. There are various problems that should have been caught by QA and fixed with minimal effort (with the exception of talking heads):
- broken spy quest in FotA,
- buggy town maps: in Shady Sands the town map contains 3 markers, even though the town only consists of 2 areas. The Boneyard town map does not have a marker for FotA area.
- character creation is unbalanced: some skills are useless, agility is OP, as are Gifted and, to lesser extent, Small Frame. Miniguns deal next to no damage to armored targets, largely due to defects in damage calculations for AP ammo. The game forces range combat characters to tag both Small Guns and Energy Weapons, leaving only one tagged skill left. This was fixed in F2 with the introduction of a Gauss Rifle.
- when receiving a quest reward there is no message with information on what exactly the reward is,
- respawn rate of Deathclaws in Boneyard is ridiculous. That place feels like a precursor to MMO grinding areas.
- various sneak checks can be bypassed by entering combat,
- some talking heads are very similar - obvious reuse of assets,
 
0wing said:
It is three, 2 areas and a scorpion cave.
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Sentinel said:
I am convinced that the only way to get to the scorpion cave is a conversation with a guard at the entrance to Shady Sands. Wiki confirms that there is no map marker for the cave: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Radscorpion_cave_(Fallout)

Will reinstall F1 over the weekend and double check.
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shadysands.png

Eh, I vaguely remember there IS 3 marker on the map, but that Radscorpion Caves is kinda out of place for my memory, so it's probably added by mods and I'm convinced you actually need to talk to Seth to get there.

As you can see, there are indeed only 2 areas on Shady Sands, however the map marker point you directly to the entrance (first area), and then the garden and brahmin pen (both in second area). It's interesting to note there's no particular importance as to why the players can have immediate access to those two points in the second area, aside from having a conversation with that farmer in the garden to pass Science check and get XP, but that's for another discussion, I'd say.
 
Strange. I never had witnessed a third marker, neither on official patch nor on a fan patch or a localization.
 
The markers aren't directly tied to the amount of maps. In theory you could put a marker for every special location within a single map and thus save you plenty walkways.
 
Lexx said:
The markers aren't directly tied to the amount of maps. In theory you could put a marker for every special location within a single map and thus save you plenty walkways.
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No, in all other towns there is at most one marker per area.

"Brahmin Pen" and "Garden" all point to eastern area of Shady Sands. It takes 5 seconds to run from one to the other so they are clearly redundant.

See the attached screenshot from unmodded Fallout 1.2 - there are 3 markers in vanilla version of the game.
 

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Doesn't change the fact that - mechanically - the markers aren't tied to single maps. I'd setup a quick Fo2 example mod for you, but I'm a lazy pos and don't really care.
 
Lexx said:
Doesn't change the fact that - mechanically - the markers aren't tied to single maps. I'd setup a quick Fo2 example mod for you, but I'm a lazy pos and don't really care.
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Markers may not be tied to single locations in the game engine, but Shady Sands is the only location with 2 markers pointing to the same area. This makes no sense from player's perspective and should have been caught by QA and fixed before the release.
 
- Longer game.
- Less time to make it.
- They had teams working for separate locations, then spend less time making the whole cohesive. I still think they made an okay job putting them together, but the game is more the sum of its part than a great synthesis.
 
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