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RE: Nostalgia Gaming: Fallout (1997)
This is true. But the game forced you to take things one quest at a time and complete them. I find myself in Bethesda RPGs now trying to pick up every quest in every location at once and then having ADHD as I jump back and forth between completing them.
I think the old school way is really more realistic. If I take multiple jobs from multiple clients for freelance art that are not possible to be done in the limited time I have, I fail some in order to complete others. I guess some people like that quest and story line structure but I'm not a fan.
Strangely, I have the opposite experience! The new games have such good quest logging and progress tracking that I don't mind accepting tons of quests. I just let them build up until I can get to whatever sounds most interesting next, but don't really jump back and forth between them (other than in and out of the main questline).
With the old ones, there was no journal, really, and no quest tracking so I found it really easy to lose a sense of where I'm supposed to go next, what's expected etc... So it takes careful attention to what you are up to and like you say "forced you to take things one quest at a time and complete them" or else you'd forget what all sidequests you have going on.
And you'd sometimes end up picking up more just via dialogue you engaged in. I found this more the case in Fallout 2 which just seemed to have more going on.
Man, I really need to replay that game with Evernote or something open on my tablet. :)
Anyway, great post - I've followed you and looking forward to more!
I like the newer games for what they are, but like @wimpiam said above, I don't really consider them RPGs. The original fallout emulates tabletop play while the newer games are more adventure games with some light RPG elements.
In tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons, players rarely ever have more that 2 or 3 quests going on. For instance, in the campaign I'm running, the party has an overarching quest to defeat the ultimate bad guy, but as they journey, they may run into much smaller quests that take 1 or 2 sessions of play to get through that may not be linked to the main story arc, but move the players forward. It's impossible in a tabletop game to run to every npc and get every quest in that region and complete them. The smaller quests are contained stories to be completed all the way through without derailing onto to something else.
It's easier in a tabletop sense to have that kind of focus as a there is a person playing the game master. I think Fallout, the first two, are attempting to do that. It's often up to the players to keep track of what they are doing in a tabletop game. For instance, my players have journals where they write notes of the adventure so far and can recall facts or points that may have come up or things NPCs said.
It's just a more rough around the edges vibe that I think gave the original RPG games that appeal.
But like I said, I like the new games for what they are. I probably have 300 hours in fallout 3 and 500 hours in skyrim myself! Haha.
Haha oh wow, that is a lot of hours indeed!
Yes, interesting stuff you say about the tabletop side of things. I'd never really thought of it from the perspective of a tabletop RPGer, as that was something I never got into. I think I tried it twice in my life, and barring the social element and the laughs you can get with some friends, the whole thing was just a little too tedious for me, when computers can do so much of the work so much faster. :)
Yeah tabletop can be cery tedious. But if you have a solid group of people to play with and you have a good gm, it's a blast.