11 Ways Fallout 2 was Better than Fallout 3

A new article on Neoseeker offers a list of reasons why the author thinks Fallout 2 was a better game than Bethesda’s newly released sequel. One example:

9. Open ended quests

Not much tops Fallout 2 when it came to open ended quests. Let’s take one of the better examples in F2 — dealing with the Slavers in the city called the Den. The Slavers have a buddy of yours, Vic, that you want to rescue. There were many ways of getting this done.

You could go into the slaver headquarters and shoot them all up. If you were a explosive traps guy, (like my guy was), you could go in the building and plant dynamite, then leave, and blow everyone up. If you had high intelligence and high speech, you could convince the slavers to stop trading slaves, and get them to free Vic. If you were a jerk, you could join the Slavers, get a slaver tattoo on your forehead that would have consequences for the rest of the game, and sell your tribal companion into a life of servitude. If you were a chick with a decent charisma, you can have sex with the head slaver guy for Vic’s freedom.

The vast majority of quests in Fallout 3 are like this: go talk to this guy. Kill everybody in your way. The end.

Some of the quests, if you have a high speech skill, you can lie and not have to kill the dudes.

Yay. Woot. Let’s RPG it up. Let’s go kill all the enemy dudes and get the magical hamster or super Frisbee or W-ever-TF they want me to get. Yay this is fun.