this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur's Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn't have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.
I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that's just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.
Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It's still one of my favourite games of all time though.
First few hours of both FO1 and FO2 are pretty rough. Lots of almost comical kiting and a bunch of tiring save scumming seem mandatory.
Combat in the mid to late game is fun though. You have hard encounters, but you also have the opportunity to be prepared.
The whole aimed shots thing makes combat magnitudes more fun in the classic Fallouts. Maybe this is telling of when I first played the games (hint: I was a teen), but there is something about taking cheap shots at people's groin that doesn't get old. Becoming a Prizefighter by exclusively and indiscriminately punching your opposition in the dick is always going to be funny.
The critical hits and misses are also very entertaining, though definitely add to the notorious RNG. The animations and effects, like disintegrations and splatter, also make combat a lot more satisfying.