#geneforge

Round 1 Poll 66: Game Myths

Team Fortress 2 submission:

That this image of a coconut, if removed from the files the game will not start. This is false, there is a coconut in the game files, but if removed it will just cause a missing texture on the Fresh Brewed Victory taunt. It was started as a joke from a YouTube comment and was taken as fact from there

Geneforge submission:

There is an un-openable door in the original version of Geneforge 1

“May whatever pathetic god you worship have mercy on your soul, because you will find none here..”

Totally not related at all in any way but like.................. if that blurb above was interesting, then you should check out the Geneforge games!

Fallout 1 in my opinion was pretty much the perfect length. It wasn’t lacking in substance or anything, and I never found it starting to drag at any point. There was plenty to do and see, a story with enough plot points and settings to be really interesting with lots of variety, and it reached a satisfying conclusion before it started to wear out its welcome.

Fallout 2, in comparison, was a significantly longer game, with all the ups and downs that this brings. There was lots of content to play through; enough that even without doing every single side quest at every location I was able to still explore, find things to do, and generally have an experience that felt complete. On the other hand, if I had tried to complete everything in one playthrough, I suspect I would have gotten distracted and found it difficult to actually complete the game. That said, there’s no reason you have to do everything, so if you’re not a completionist, it shouldn’t be a problem either way.

Mechanically the two were pretty similar, with perhaps some slight improvements in the second game. I liked that while high-end energy weapons existed, there are also endgame level small guns (and presumably big guns too), so I didn’t have to specialize in one specific type of weapons to get access to the really powerful endgame stuff. The number of options for weapons and armor both increased in FO2, which was a small but nice improvement.

The companions in both games didn’t feel as fleshed out as they could have been, and both lacked in sufficient engagement with their characters for my taste. Neither game has much in the way of e.g. companion quests, which would have been a definite improvement in my opinion. As it stands, they wound up essentially being extra inventory space that did a little damage, soaked a little damage, and sometimes wandered off to get killed and force me to load a save. Or shot me in the back of the head and killed me at the end of a tough fight. Sulik is no longer allowed to own firearms, and Ian is on thin ice.

That said, between the two games I would say FO2 had considerably more interesting companions, so if there are mods that add such quests, that game has more material to work with. I especially liked Goris, the deathclaw companion you can recruit at Vault 13, but even many of the other companions were interesting in their own way as well. Ironically this actually makes the lack of companion detail more visible in FO2, whereas in FO1 they were all relatively generic enough that I didn’t find myself particularly wanting to learn more about them or engage with them in more detail. It wasn’t until I played Fallout 2 that I really noticed how lacking in engagement they were, for exactly that reason.

It’s difficult to say which I liked more; both had lots of freedom to do what you want and were solid games overall. I definitely recommend anyone interested in turn-based isometric RPGs (or RPGs in general tbh) give them a try at least. As I said, the first one is really kind of short and sweet, so it’s not that much of an investment to get into, and is a really satisfying game if you wind up enjoying it.