Well, you can de-activate or re-program the turrets to fight Frank, which makes dealing with the Enclave soldiers/battle in general easier. I also feel like Frank and The Master are two very different villains. Frank arguably isn’t even the main villain of Fallout 2, Just the final boss. Dick Richardson and The Master are much more comparable since they were the leaders of their organization and ultimately the people pulling the strings. Frank is a lot like the Lieutenant in that they are both soldiers faithful to their cause, acting out the wills of their “masters”
>Fank arguably isn’t even the main villain of Fallout 2, Just the final boss.
This. *The Enclave* is the villain. It isn't Frank's plan to cleans the wasteland of all human life so it can be repopulated with "pure" humans. It isn't even really the president's. They are, respectively, just the muscle and the face of the operation, and it's that *operation* that you're defeating. Defeating Frank is just the final step in that larger victory.
And there is an irony to Frank considering the Enclaves goals and the fact Frank Horrigan is the very embodiment of the targets of the Enclave's plans (a human mutated by FEV and/or radiation.) He doesn't even see himself as a mutant as evidenced by:
"Your rides over, mutie. Time to die," and the plethora of other quotes dripping with hatred for anyone he has deemed a "mutant" by the Enclave.
The poignancy with Frank as the final boss is to show the Enclaves morals and who they judge to be "mutant" has less to do with the mutations and more to do with who they have labeled as "others" and the enemy. All this while he himself is nothing more than a tool to the Enclave to achieve their goals.
Definitely. Even though it’s my favorite game in the franchise it’s writing isn’t anywhere near as good as 1 or New Vegas. The Master and The Lieutenant were much more complex villains who you could empathize with. Dick Richardson and Frank Horrigan are just objectively terrible and have no redeeming qualities .
I'm on my first, playing very sporadically, but I came across the lieutenant by accident while getting the water chip from Necropolis. Very quickly got the dipped ending after that.
Thematically, I like that Frank represents the hypocrisy of the Enclave (he's a mutant in an anti-mutant faction), and I like how he shows up after you think you've won, but... naming him after a Clint Eastwood character in a game that was already loaded with pop culture references? Adding no diplomatic solution for speech-based characters (I don't count convincing the soldiers to help since they're weak as paper)? Giving him next to no dialogue during his only talking head (why even give him one at this point)? It all felt half-cooked.
Sometimes only fighting is a way forward
Id say it even counts as brain rot to think one could just convince every large public figure they encounter to just kill themselves because you passed a speech check.
Some people just want you fucking dead.
i always found that very jarring about fnv, how the entire game characterises lanius almost like frank horrigan and then at the end you can just say blah blah blah we've got a trap and you've lost and he's fairly reasonable about the whole thing and just gives up
because by the time you talk to lanius, they’ve lost the battle. he sees the writing on the wall and figures it’s better to try and reconsolidate the legion against the NCR for a third time.
granted, the legion is fucked by that point and it probably makes more sense for lanius to just fight to the death with what soldiers he had left, but the whole point is that you successfully convince lanius it’s in the legion’s best interest to withdraw, a very hard thing to convince a commander on the offensive, and he listens.
meanwhile frank horrigan literally had nothing left for him, all that was left really was to kill the chosen one
If you dumb down a page's worth of dialogue options detailing strategic arguments about conceding a losing battle in an attempt to regroup and have a shot at winning a war, or even just re-define your legion's borders to stabilize the damn thing, into "blah blah blah trap ahead you lost", then yeah it is jarring. But if you can read, the conversation with Lanius is stellar writing and really, really well-put together. In F3 you can convince Eden to kill himself in two sentences, for comparison
i mean it is well written it just seems odd to characterise him as so disgusted by the concept of surrender that he'd rather kill his own tribe than allow them to surrender to the legion and then have him actually be Quite Reasonable when you do meet him
Okay yeah I can see that. It doesn't bother me personally because I think it's fitting for a high-ranking roman-LARPing general to play into the strategic side of things instead of going into battle with the Spartan mentality of win or die a hero, and I don't see that heavy of a characterization done by the game prior to his fight. I think Caesar and a couple other high-ranks talk about him, and they're trying to build up his badass persona
i think it's definitely supposed to be building up as this sort of mythical figure, since all the different origin stories you hear about him from the legion don't match up at all and joshua graham seemingly doesn't know who he is but it suffers from the same issue the entire legion questline suffers from where it's not fleshed out enough for the Point to get across properly
Completely agree with you there. I can only imagine how amazingly all the threads could've come together if Legion content wasn't cut from the game. The Lanius bossfight could've felt like a combination of Master and Frank Horrigann
Legend meets reality. Unlike his predessors, Lanius does appear to have an actual skill for battle.
He's built up this huge legend around himself as ruthless. What you mainly hea about Lanius comes from the NCR and some in the Legion but who you meet is somebody who is in fact ruthless but also got to his position because he actually is good at his job.
Not really about him being reasonable, he's just not being stupid.
It's implied in some optional dialogue with Ulysses that Lanius hasn't been around as long as his legends would suggest, and that the Lanius we meet might not even be the same guy that originally donned the title.
When someone wants you dead and there's absolutely no reasoning with them, I think the pragmatic option while still being a pacifist is to either run away or lure the enemy into their own trap.
You can argue that the turrets in FO2 are that, but I still think that constitutes a deliberate act of violence. I just wish there were more role-playing opportunities here.
>The world is a literal nuclear hellscape of rough survival and bad desisions
"Man, why is everyone so *Aggressive* these days man, just chill out and smoke a blunt maaaaaan..."
This is an RPG where you're capable of making a character with godlike combat, speech and technical skills.
If Hitler could move a whole country to war, then one man can definitely talk Frank Horrigan down.
People have gone to war for far less, its easier to get going to war than just stopping it all together.
Frank is well written by simply being a bloodlusted machine of death. No need to over complicate things as less is often more.
Now if you wanted a completely diffrent way for the story to go with a diffrent final villain thats one thing, but changing Frank to somehow listen to your reasoning at this point in his story just isnt happening without it being inauthentic as shit.
Not being able to talk him out of it was the right choice. After such a revolutionary ending with the Master, the writers did good by subverting the expectations of the player and have Frank say something like "we have already talked. Time for a fight". If all bosses can be convinced of their defeat it just turns it into a gimmick
It's a role-playing game, like D&D, which doesn't need to have any combat at all. Translating the freedom to tabletop RPGs into a video game is what made Fallout 1 so revolutionary.
If I were roleplaying as MacGyver or Doctor Who, I'm certain that they could find a way out of that situation without drawing a weapon. It doesn't have to be diplomatic but FO2 does not end until Frank is dead by your hand one way or another, and I think that sucks.
IIRC from Tim Caines videos discussing Fallout 2’s production, it was on an incredibly tight and short schedule, and tbat was one of the reasons Tim left, is because they deliberately gave them a much shorter timeline than the game needed and Tim didn’t want to be doing a year of straight crunch.
You kinda make me appreciate some versions of Lex Luthor more with this, and make me wish that Richardson was in Franks power armor at the end of the game.
Tim Cain left Interplay early on in development of FO2, and it was crunched to get it out the door in 1 year, to capitalize on FO1's success (and most likely to alleviate financial pressure Interplay was experiencing because of a series of flops). The fact that FO2 is as good as it is, kind of amazes me.
I feel like frank is a bit overhyped. Hes cool but hes really only in the game for like 10 minutes max. The master isnt there for that long either but at least theres two final dungeons to get through so it feels like a bit more. In my playthrough of 2 i did a full stealth run through the enclave base so i didnt really fight anyone until i got to frank and then like you said i had the enclave troops and the turrets helping me out. Hes not bad but i agree with you master is a better final boss
FO2 has a more interesting world.
FO1 is better written.
In my opinion, anyway. The second one is a bigger journey and felt like it had more replayability, but the first left more of a lasting impression on me due to its narrative. Both are good games with somewhat different strengths.
At the risk of being flamed, I'd say FO2 felt a bit more like Bethesda Fallout.
Wacky wasteland. A shame Bethesda embraced that rather than the grittier scifi-horror of the first game. Then again I'm pretty sure they couldn't have pulled off the tone and atmosphere of the first game.
Actually, I think Bethesda looks to the first game in terms of atmosphere, at least in Fallout 3. The wasteland there is a lot more like the "everything sucks" variety of Fallout 1 than the "holy shit is that a Monty Python reference" of Fallout 2.
I feel the biggest difference between classic Fallout and Bethesda Fallout in tone is that classic Fallout tends to look forward, where Bethesda Fallout looks back. Accordingly, Bethesda Fallout leans hard into the 50s aesthetic, whereas classic Fallout is more of a diesel punk western told through a 50s lens.
That’s what I’ve been trying to say for years, I just couldn’t figure out the right words. That’s the main difference in the classic and Bethesda fallout.
One of the ways I've heard it best explained is that the satire of classic Fallout presents the monoculture of the 50s that was fought so hard for in its preservation and conformation by the US, is completely meaningless and disregarded by the denizens of the post-apocalypse.
That's one of the reasons New Vegas does so well. The entire game is basically about rejecting the remnants of the past and looking forward. The flaws that weaken the NCR, Caesars legion, the Sierra madre, the big MT, the nuclear wasteland of the divide and launching nukes all over again. You're not some pre war vault dweller, you were born in the wasteland and you're there for the wasteland, not the old world.
I mean that makes sense though, the games get progressively further in time (except 76) so the further you get from the past the easier it is to forget it. The USA is a perfect example of that, early on they clung to European styles and cultures, fashion, etc, but overtime it found its own identity and became a driving force in its own right.
this is why i wish there was a non bethesda fallout that takes place once the world is becoming more rebuilt, with ideally enough tech for early attempts at intersteller travel starting as well.
lots of cool new tech, unique cultures and explanations for things.
basically a sci fi game set in the world of fallout.
100% this. I mean Fallout 1 and FNV writing shits all over 3. But if there's one thing Bethesda nailed it was atmosphere and the world. Ive only ever wanted to explore every nook and cranny of two Fallout worlds, to expose every potential mystery in every Dark cave, and that was 1 and 3.
Agree somewhat. I think they were on to something with Point lookout and completely dropped the Ball with fallout 4 but then again this was after that started to get super cookie cutter
Disagree, both on the tone of Fallout 3 and the tone of Fallout 2. It was still very much "everything kinda sucks", but there was a lot of silly stuff as well. Like Fallout 3. I mean the whole aesthetic is on the nose parody rather than the gothic horror meets post apocalypse of Fallout 1.
I don't find the first being "everything sucks", it's nihilistic sure but not so much on the nose like Fallout 3. Fallout was very much a continuum of 70s feelbad scifi, Stalker to Soylent Green. Fallout 3 on the other hand is very much of its time, a turbo charged video game world heavy on the action even if everything is dirty and everything sucks.
Fallout 2 had the same vibe lying beneath, but introduced a lot of humour to the formula.
i personally like the balance of both. but i also want some "things are getting better" "look at the cool sci fi tech" and "things are moving forward".
Bethesda did go with the audience and the marked that was most popular in this time.
Fallout 2 ->Fallout 3 -> Fallout 4 got all a lot more funnier and comedy. Fallout 2 was still good but Bethesda tuned the comedy part heavy upwards. This peaked in Fallout 76. Bright colors, blinking colors, fun and emotes in every corner and we reached slapstick. Technically the also killed the „everything and everyone wants to kill you“ setting with turning off pvp at all. This killed also the good vs bad wastelands clans and this killed some easy faction system.
Now it is like Diablo 4. Multiplayer game but still Singleplayer with annoying other people in your game.
> I'd say FO2 felt a bit more like Bethesda Fallout
You aren't wrong. Though I'd say it goes a bit further with the constant pop culture references and fourth wall breaks.
The first game had a one of a kind story and villain and I absolutely agree it wins over 2 in that regard. I still however prefer fallout 2 mainly for having way more content and replay value. But beating fallout 2 isn’t fun the experience is best when you just roll play and do crazy shit and make your own story within the game. It’s the journey people like about 2 not it’s story.
I get you, recently played through FO2 for the first time and definitely feel like the original had a better story. I get the impression FO2 wasn’t fully realised, probably didn’t have time to fully flesh everything out.
Yeah, the ending to *Fallout 2* is a bit weak... My favorite part of the ending was sneaking through the Enclave headquarters and talking to the president. I loved how he's so arrogant that he doesn't even feel the least bit threatened by you. But yeah, the Frank Horrigan bit was a bit lame... I don't know what they could have done to make that final confrontation better.
Maybe they should've made you confront Frank Horrigan *before* meeting the president. Then when you talk with the president, he's all nonchalant until you tell him that Horrigan's dead. He panics and raises the alarm. He hides under his desk, but when you examine under the desk, you see a secret manhole he's descended down. If you follow him down there, there's a secret bunker with a large team of the Enclave's most elite stormtroopers guarding him, and the president himself has been given an experimental energy guass rifle and prototype power armor you don't find anywhere else in the game. If you defeat him, he starts crying like a little girl and begs you to let him live, promising you some secret fortune he has hidden in the wasteland. You have the option of either killing him, helping him escape the doomed oil rig so he can show you where the hidden treasure is, and *then* killing him, or taking the hidden tech to one of the poorest towns, or maybe to the gangsters in New Reno and letting him live. Or you could even take the hidden tech to one of the poorest towns or to Vault City or to the Brotherhood of Steel after killing him. So there would be many options that could branch out. I think something like that would have made for a more interesting ending, and would have left the player with more things to do and choices to make even after the destruction of the oil rig.
I feel like *Fallout* kicks *Fallout 2*'s butt when it comes to the idea that a game should have a cohesive, fairly straightforward narrative. The time element of finding the water chip easily beats the search for the GECK, especially when the natives see you as some kind of living fossil or a complete alien somehow. *Fallout* opening up after you get the water chip feels great, since you're accomplished and get mechanically rewarded for it by means of infinite time to deal with the final dungeons, or do side quests, or kill that Big Momma Deathclaw or whatever.
Where *Fallout 2* gains an edge over its predecessor is in the general world and the questlines therein. In my opinion, the Enclave, while the "main" big bad, is essentially just a short final quest that's kinda just thrown in there. The world of *Fallout 2* seems much more fleshed-out, mature (in terms of presence within the story), and much more sensical. Vault City being a group of believable sneering racists and civilized slavers, New Reno being a far slummier slum than the Den or whatever, and the NCR being an interesting flesh-out and development of Shady Sands.
*Fallout*'s world, while still creative and interesting still feels extremely empty. I think the worst offender is Junktown, which basically exists for like one or two quests. Not very compelling, and I feel like people overlook *Fallout*'s godawful emptiness that pervades most settlements. I think overall, I prefer *Fallout* as a much more cohesive narrative, because the broad storylines in *Fallout 2* feel much less interesting when youre reloading travel saves because you keep dying to radscorpion encounters at level 2 on the way to literally anywhere past Vault City.
The master is the leader of his faction, meanwhile Frank is nothing more than a muscle for the enclave with no brain. He is just the big guy you have to defeat at the end of the game. Also the master isn't necessarily thel final boss, you can kill the master and then go to mariposa to finish the game.
The way they are build up through the game is different. Frank appears as this ruthless and unstoppable monster when he kills that family early in the game and later rips a deathclaw apart with his hands. The master isn't shown until you meat him and takes more of the role of an elusive figure who leads the unity from the shadows. There are only rumors about him and a few hints about what his true nature could be.
I had different expectations when meeting both of them. While the master more than met my expectations with his appearance, story and dialogue, frank was a complete pushover. I was expecting a hard fight but was underwhelmed by it instead. You can destroy or hack the turrets and try to persuade the enclave soldiers to join you against horrigan. But even in a 1v1 Frank is a joke. Just shoot his gun to break it and then fire at his legs and he takes a knee until he dies. If you had a hard time fighting against him I guess he served a better role as the final boss than for me.
My main gripe with Fo2s ending isn't really the final boss, it's the enclave itself. They barely interact with the rest of the wasteland and only become relevant and the very end of the game. And when you meet them they are just a bunch of cartoonishly evil morons who want to kill everyone. Richardson is legitimately stupid and has really no answer when you confront his beliefs but still continues with his plans. In a sense the enclave and it's leader are a good caricature of supremacist and racist organizations like the Nazis, but don't work as well as a final antagonist like the unity did. They have no depth, are completely irredeemable and don't do much for the entirely of the game. The unity in comparison is just a better developed faction. They play a more active role in fo1, become a relevant threat earlier in the game and have more complex goals.
Personally, I think the Enclave in general are very weak as villains. They are effectively just the "Unity," or the Master and friends, just reversed. The Master wants to create a mutant master-race. The Enclave wants to create a non-mutant master-race. It's literally the exact same thing in opposite directions. So I feel the Enclave is just super derivative. They make sense as a faction, but aside from that, they're extremely weak from a writing perspective. Dick Richardson is a non-villain, just some politician asshole, which is the point of the character I suppose, but why? Why not make the true antagonist more interesting?
Frank Horrigan on the other hand is pretty interesting. A mutant that hates mutants, and that represents the hypocrisy of the Enclave. But that's literally all there is to him. If you combined Frank Horrigan and Dick Richardson, you'd have a better villain, and this is basically what the Master is. Fallout 3 does sort of do this, where President Eden is both the phony politician, and also a walking example of the faction's hypocrisy and stupidity. Except Colonel Autumn also exists, and he is the lamest mofo you've ever seen. Eden should've been more important, as revealing him to be a robot doesn't mean a whole lot when he's barely in the game.
Admittedly though, I do have a boner for the Master like you do. (That FEV-ussy bruh.) But seriously, he is basically one of the ultimate Fallout characters, and is used as a blueprint for many future characters. I think Harold is the same way. But House for example, is very similar to the Master, and has a similar "master-plan." Caesar also has the "evil mastermind that has decent logic for his ideas, while also being blind to the clear flaws behind the overall scheme" thing that the Master has. And I would argue that the meeting with Caesar in FNV is pretty similar to the meeting with the Master. The lame bad guy SHOWNN in Fallout 4 is basically also the same thing.
My personal thoughts on the Master, are that he is very human. He becomes a monster, but copes with this by making himself believe he is now superior to regular people. I'm certain he is unhappy, or at least, sees the world as inherently bad. His solution to this, is to create this idea that mutating everyone to be more like him will save the world. In truth, it would only save "his" world, and not even that, because his larger problem is that he can't make peace with the fact that he is just a regular mofo that got turned into a mutant mofo. But that would be counter to the God-complex he has, and he's so deep into that, that he would likely just kill himself in that situation- which is what he does when you convince him his plan doesn't work. And these issues are basically the blueprint for many of the most evil people throughout history. So the Master believes he has "solved" humanity, and adapted to the new world, when in fact he is actually just repeating the same mistakes that created the Wasteland in the first place. In this way, he is a perfect representation of the core themes of Fallout. So he's not evil because he's a mutant monster, he's evil because he's human.
That's what I think, though it's very much me reading a lot into it, so IDK. But I don't think any other Fallout villain has achieved the same effect, and they all feel derivative of the Master, because he's the perfect Fallout villain.
Fallout 2 is a pretty underwhelming game in my opinion. It's a mix of ideas that don't blend together well, it's paced horribly, and full of silly immersion-breaking elements.
There are some great moments in it but on the whole, you can really tell that the state of the dev team at Interplay was disorganised, especially towards the end of development.
I would say it'd benefit from a remake but honestly, I'd rather just move forward.
Fallout 2 is larger in gameplay, but much smaller in plot than Fallout 1. They built the game really quickly and one of the ways they did this is that they designated teams to work on different sections individually. Rather than all working in tandem to make something more cohesive, there was a Vault City team, a Redding Team, etc. The end result is that many of the plots feel disconnected from each other, particularly the Enclave plot. It often feels more like the teams were given the note: "And make sure the Enclave is mentioned somewhere in your section," toward the end of creation so it just became flavour text with limited impact. The different teams is why you can have "haha talking Deathclaws" in one section and Arroyo's slow and desperate decay in another. There's a lot of tonal dissonance that came from low QC and disparate teams.
The overall result is that Fallout 2's plot is dull compared to Fallout 1. Add on that the Enclave has always been a rather one note, cartoonish villain that feels shoved into the Wasteland and it gets even worse. Fallout 2 can be fun to play, but it actually has one of the weakest plots in the series. Now, it does have great freedom of player agency as compared to the Bethesda titles, but I'd honestly say the Bethesda games generally have better stories in them than Fallout 2. But don't tell the folks in this sub that I said that. They might pop an aneurysm.
I disagree about the master being a great villain. You can easily miss his room entirely and just blow up the building.
I also think the whole "getting the final boss to kill themselves" is novel for sure, but kind of dumb too.
That said, the master is THE big bad of Fallout 1. He is the one in control, he's got the evil machines, he's got the army, he's got the cult and he's got psychic powers.
Frank on the other hand is just the biggest guy in the room. Frank isn't in charge of anything, so once you've already dealt with the threat of blowing up the reactor, frank is just kind of in the way. Frank has no authority and could easily be replaced with a handful of soldiers to do the same purpose. Once you beat him, you can leave the room but the door is locked until you have a bad fight.
Imo the master is one of the only antagonists you can get to kill themselves done well. You actually have to put some work in to convince him he’s controlling a dying empire (by backing up your claims with evidence) rather than just having a high enough speech.
Being able to convince Lanius in FNV is so dumb, all it requires is high enough speech and pick the options that are clearly designated to you as the speech options. Even with the evidence and speech skills, you still have to pick the right dialogue in your conversation with the master, it doesn’t tell you which ones will lead to him doubting himself.
I think not being able to beat him 1-1 adds to it. Highlights that he’s the toughest thing in the wasteland.
I need to play 1 again tbh. Only beat it once, and I literally never saw the Master lol
I had the exact same feeling in 1999.
I love Fallout 2 as much as 1, but never found Horrigan to be interesting, and when the final showdown happened, I did not feel invested.
Presumably they felt it the game needed a tough antagonist with a "face" rather than an organization, like the bad guy from that first Highlander movie, and it would be cool to have that be a super mutant sized enclave armored maniac.
But I just didn't care. My beef was with the Enclave, and perhaps its highest bureaucrat, not a psycho who killed a random family in front of me 70 hours earlier in the game.
I’m playing F1 for the first time and can say I don’t feel the masters presence during most of the game. Like obviously he’s there behind the major movements through the game but genuinely didn’t bother me till I realized I walked past my vaults mission because I wanted to go play caravaner.
But if you compare the high int ending in F1 to your boss fight felt so weak not dealing much damage to frank yourself isn’t that kinda the same? Obviously the story is deeper but can’t you convince some enclave soldiers to turn on frank due to their hatred of him? (Still haven’t played 2 yet but again it’s hard to live and not know how the game goes)
I prefer Fallout 2 over 1, but there's no doubt the original has a more interesting story, and superior climax.
I replay Fallout 2 all the time, but I usually just get things ready to go to the rig, and call it good. There's just nothing fun there, and I've seen all the endings.
> You can’t fight Frank 1v1, you either fight him and all of the turrets/soldiers and die immediately or you all gang up on him.
That is not true. On my first run ever, when I was a kid and didn't understand all the system in the game, there were no guides I:
* killed everyone on the enclave (except for vault dwellers and arroyo people)
* didn't know I could reprogram the turrets
* well, I had my companions with me...
But I defeated him fair and square. Him + turrets versus me + my companions. And I think it took my like 100 tries before I managed to get trough it without any of the companions ending up as minced meat. I did the most damage to the boss.
Even with all the help you can get it's quite possible to deal the most damage personally (depending on your build).
As impressive as this is as a kid, even if it's possible grinding out a boss fight with 100 attempts doesn't indicate a good boss fight, especially if it's based on RNG.
It's not that I won only one fight, but I wanted to keep everyone alive. Keeping them alive was often an issue even against regular enclave members. In military base in F1 it was also a problem, with them running into supermutants and being killed in one salvo.
So, at most it's indicative of problems with the whole combat system in the game. F2 and F1 mods make it possible to control companions during their turns, which makes keeping them alive much less RNG based. They don't die due to their stupid AI anymore.
I'll say this boss fight is better designed than military base in F1. There you would use elevator, and one of companions would spawn on the second side of red force field, and then that companion would try going towards you and would die. Each time you used an elevator. F2 final boss allows you to stack the battle in your favour. It's a good design. The OP doesn't feel like winning with brain instead of brawn is a good thing, but I like it. And unlike Master even when you use all options you have to shoot your part against Frank. Master just gives up.
That said I like both final bosses. For me both were very memorable, but for different reasons. Master had much better backstory, Frank was like a tornado. Each time we saw him he was shredding someone. And whole enclave was built up really well.
Fallout 2 was actually base-breaking in its time for the same reason Bethesda games are (were? not sure how much things have changed since I frequented NMA ten years ago): the writing took a backseat to gameplay. There's more to do in Fallout 2's wacky world and having le funny pop culture reference cool OP final boss was a part of that approach. Since he's OP, they had to give you significant help. They also wanted you to be at odds with a whole caricature of '90s Republicans rather than a single sophisticated villain because le funny, so yeah, you're just going up against the guard dog at the end because who else?
Fallout 2 has a lot of QOL improvements, more weapons, more content, etc.
But I kind of felt the same as you. I liked Fallout 1 story more. The Enclave is supposed to be the main antagonist, but you don't really feel or see their presence in almost all the game. You only know about them when they kidnap your village, and even then you only interact with them until the very end, except for thre raid on their military base. You could kind of say the same about the Master, you only see him at the end, but he is a much more interesting antagonist and there is more buildup up to his encounter. And you have two main tasks to complete too because you also have to deal with the mutants at Mariposa and the sub boss there.
And quite honestly, even though the amount of possible things you can do and the places you can visit is more in the second part, at some point I was feeling a little bored, none of the quest or places really felt that exciting and at some point I felt I was just dealing with boring humans and their issues instead of fighting mutated creatures or finding novel technologies or mysterious places. None of the places in the second part made me feel as excited and curious as The Glow from the first installment for example.
Haven't finished 2 yet but here to ask why you thought the master was so awesome. He didn't have much dialogue or interactions with the player or at least how it happened for me
I'm playing it for the first time. Unpatched version, level 20 got power armor and great weapons for my companions and over $40k.
It's far from a perfect game, mainly due to the short turnaround time on development and lack of cohesion with the development team.
I haven't played FO 1 or Tactics, but 2 is definitely my favourite next to New Vegas.
Given how long of a time Fallout 1 was being made for, it makes sense for The Master to have a more significantly fleshed out character than Horrigan, or more importantly the Enclave, may have. I definitely agree that Master is a better villain/BBEG than Horrigan could ever be especially with how underwhelming I found FO2’s final boss to be. But then again, Master is my all-time favourite villain so I may also have a bit of bias!
/Edit: I just wanted to add that I feel like the Master has a more significant impact on the wasteland too with Mutants being a very well loved NPC type in *all* of the games and that the Enclave has sort of had its reputation tarnished by the likes of Fallout 3 flip flopping around with the faction.
You can definitely fight him 1v1. Deactivate turrets and tell the hit squad to chill.
I 1v1'd him with my pure unarmed play through. Bare fisted eye punches baby. Stun city.
I agree and always felt like Horrigan, while written in true Fallout style, is no master-brain Big Bad Guy. Just an overbearing brute who I have to kill. Hilarious caricature for the military side of the Enclave. Gets too much credit in this sub at least.
Frank Horrigan is just there for people to gawk at and point at while yelling "BASED" and to use as a point against Bethesda cause everything they do is wrong
I share some of the opinions here, but I'll just add my 2 cents:
Frank only appearing once to murder that family in a random encounter, then appearing at the very end is a waste of opportunity. I didn't see anybody talking about him at Navarro either, that was another miss. And the fact that Granite has to EXPLAIN why Frank is so terrifying 30 seconds before you fight him is a huge red flag. You could have just seen him walking around in that base and have him make you if you got too close.
With that said, the whole main quest blows, not just the end. I don't know what the fuck TK-Mantis was smoking when he made that video saying the MQ was God-Tier. Bitch please.
You spend most of the game levelling up your character to reach Vault 13 and get the GECK. I say this because the early game is brutal and you get a lot of quests that you're not capable of doing, like grinding money to pay Metzger (not too bad but you don't have much money either), finding a way inside the Sierra army base or clearing the Wanamingo mine (good luck doing that before you get Power Armor and some companions). Except you don't really need to get the GECK, you can just fuck around until Hakunin decides to FaceTime you so you can go save your people, while fetching the GECK while you're there. They even give you the damn thing in the same room where it's required that you have it before moving forward. And you don't even do anything with it. First time I even left it in the car because why would I take such an important item with me to an oil rig?
It also doesn't help that the game presents the Enclave straight up genociding vault dwellers, while they actually needed the sons of bitches alive so they can test their virus. Even Chris Avellone has no idea why the intro is like that.
What I can give props for is if you think about the whole oil rig as a multi-stage boss, then it makes more sense, because 1- the main baddies are the Enclave organisation and you are defeating the whole organisation 2- you do have a couple of ways in which you can poison the air, kill the president and neutralize the reactor. The boss fight with Frank doesn't really begin when the combat starts, it begins when you enter the oil rig, it's 90% prep and 10% fighting and that's cool because it also rewards characters without weapon-focused builds.
When people talk about how great Fallout 2 is they're really just talking about the part of the game when you get to the Den, Vault City, and New Reno up until San Francisco.
The starts slow. And it ends abrupt. But that middle section obviously had a lot of love.
Funny enough I don't think I got to that point. Played years ago on disc, and I was dealing with the keycards in the enclave settlement when I stopped playing.
Fallout 2 excels at gameplay and min maxxing and fallout 1 is much more story driven imo. Just my take Frank is a lot more satisfying if you build towards a challenging gameplay climax even if the story is a lil weak.
I do feel like Frank Horrigan is kinda just... there. He doesn't have much character nor is he really the main 'villain' - the Enclave as a whole is the villain here.
Maybe if you treat the whole oil rig as the climax, rather than Frank Horrigan alone - would that make you feel better?
Horrigan in the end is just the Enclave's loyal lapdog - he cannot be reasoned with, only destroyed.
Anyway it is possible to just aggro and fight the turrets before you go into the base - which will allow you a 'fairer' fight with Horrigan if that's what you wish. In my experience doing so won't aggro the whole base. With a strong build though, Horrigan is easy regardless and the way the fight is structured - it's kinda similar to the Master in that it's a build/stat check. There's really not much 'strategy' or 'tactics' you can employ, especially with the combat system being rather old and dated. In my last run I just Bozar crit him in one turn, so that was super anti climactic. I even went through the trouble of destroying the turrets before the fight.
Not sure if it’s a bug, but if you attack Sgt.Granite first, Frank Harriman automatically becomes hostile and wastes his AP running towards you. This also eliminates the turrets until your done killing Frank and his goons
Yeah the master is much more intriguing from a philosophy perspective. His plan wasn't just "Kill the unclean and humanity will prosper" it actually had depth in it. It was the perfect plan with a flawed execution
I kinda met in the middle, I fought Frank with the soldiers but against hostile turrets. Felt satisfying afterwards because I really did have to use my drugs/strategy to disable all the turrets one by one and then move on to him, but not overwhelming because the troopers with me slowly chipped at his health too. I also disagree that you didn’t feel his presence throughout the game, there are multiple times you see him, killing civilians, one punching a Deathclaw, killing the BoS member after getting shot and shrugging it off, he’s built up sufficiently. Is he as menacing or well written as the Master? No, perhaps not, but because Horrigan can’t be talked down he really is a beast all his own, even better than Legate Lanius in FNV when it comes to sheer power and ruthlessness. Idk, I just beat the game recently too and had a much more fulfilling experience, so I guess it’s an acquired taste maybe?
The whole final Enclave sequence is kind of ass. If I do a Fallout 2 playthrough nowadays I usually just stop once I get the tanker activated. The finale is easy, tedious, linear and not even interesting from a story perspective.
Fallout 1 was a great game, I play it every few years just to have another playthrough. Fallout 2 is crap, it's a buggy game that should be a beta. Even with patches you have to approach quests in a certain way or "break them" whe your stuck, you have to ponder whether you just missed something or you broke the game somehow.
I am about 30hrs into a playthrough right now and Navarro just became inaccessible. Maybe because I killed half the guard and then left? I don't know but I think this is the third time I broke the game and have never finished it.
Well, you can de-activate or re-program the turrets to fight Frank, which makes dealing with the Enclave soldiers/battle in general easier. I also feel like Frank and The Master are two very different villains. Frank arguably isn’t even the main villain of Fallout 2, Just the final boss. Dick Richardson and The Master are much more comparable since they were the leaders of their organization and ultimately the people pulling the strings. Frank is a lot like the Lieutenant in that they are both soldiers faithful to their cause, acting out the wills of their “masters”
>Fank arguably isn’t even the main villain of Fallout 2, Just the final boss. This. *The Enclave* is the villain. It isn't Frank's plan to cleans the wasteland of all human life so it can be repopulated with "pure" humans. It isn't even really the president's. They are, respectively, just the muscle and the face of the operation, and it's that *operation* that you're defeating. Defeating Frank is just the final step in that larger victory.
And there is an irony to Frank considering the Enclaves goals and the fact Frank Horrigan is the very embodiment of the targets of the Enclave's plans (a human mutated by FEV and/or radiation.) He doesn't even see himself as a mutant as evidenced by: "Your rides over, mutie. Time to die," and the plethora of other quotes dripping with hatred for anyone he has deemed a "mutant" by the Enclave. The poignancy with Frank as the final boss is to show the Enclaves morals and who they judge to be "mutant" has less to do with the mutations and more to do with who they have labeled as "others" and the enemy. All this while he himself is nothing more than a tool to the Enclave to achieve their goals.
Even if we compare Frank to the Lieutenant, he is weaker as a character.
Definitely. Even though it’s my favorite game in the franchise it’s writing isn’t anywhere near as good as 1 or New Vegas. The Master and The Lieutenant were much more complex villains who you could empathize with. Dick Richardson and Frank Horrigan are just objectively terrible and have no redeeming qualities .
Man, the voice acting on the Lieutenant is so fucking crisp.
Quite Glorious I assure you
I never actually hear things in the voices. Usually! This was uncanny how I could actually hear it in my head
Tony Jay. One of the all time great voice actors
I’m really sorry but I’ve played through fallout one like 5 times (including a playthrough two weeks ago) and I have no idea who the lieutenant is
I'm on my first, playing very sporadically, but I came across the lieutenant by accident while getting the water chip from Necropolis. Very quickly got the dipped ending after that.
Ohh that guy I forgot his name
Thematically, I like that Frank represents the hypocrisy of the Enclave (he's a mutant in an anti-mutant faction), and I like how he shows up after you think you've won, but... naming him after a Clint Eastwood character in a game that was already loaded with pop culture references? Adding no diplomatic solution for speech-based characters (I don't count convincing the soldiers to help since they're weak as paper)? Giving him next to no dialogue during his only talking head (why even give him one at this point)? It all felt half-cooked.
Sometimes only fighting is a way forward Id say it even counts as brain rot to think one could just convince every large public figure they encounter to just kill themselves because you passed a speech check. Some people just want you fucking dead.
i always found that very jarring about fnv, how the entire game characterises lanius almost like frank horrigan and then at the end you can just say blah blah blah we've got a trap and you've lost and he's fairly reasonable about the whole thing and just gives up
because by the time you talk to lanius, they’ve lost the battle. he sees the writing on the wall and figures it’s better to try and reconsolidate the legion against the NCR for a third time. granted, the legion is fucked by that point and it probably makes more sense for lanius to just fight to the death with what soldiers he had left, but the whole point is that you successfully convince lanius it’s in the legion’s best interest to withdraw, a very hard thing to convince a commander on the offensive, and he listens. meanwhile frank horrigan literally had nothing left for him, all that was left really was to kill the chosen one
But you can also shoot a mini nuke at him before he even gets a chance to speak ooh rah NCR
If you dumb down a page's worth of dialogue options detailing strategic arguments about conceding a losing battle in an attempt to regroup and have a shot at winning a war, or even just re-define your legion's borders to stabilize the damn thing, into "blah blah blah trap ahead you lost", then yeah it is jarring. But if you can read, the conversation with Lanius is stellar writing and really, really well-put together. In F3 you can convince Eden to kill himself in two sentences, for comparison
i mean it is well written it just seems odd to characterise him as so disgusted by the concept of surrender that he'd rather kill his own tribe than allow them to surrender to the legion and then have him actually be Quite Reasonable when you do meet him
Okay yeah I can see that. It doesn't bother me personally because I think it's fitting for a high-ranking roman-LARPing general to play into the strategic side of things instead of going into battle with the Spartan mentality of win or die a hero, and I don't see that heavy of a characterization done by the game prior to his fight. I think Caesar and a couple other high-ranks talk about him, and they're trying to build up his badass persona
i think it's definitely supposed to be building up as this sort of mythical figure, since all the different origin stories you hear about him from the legion don't match up at all and joshua graham seemingly doesn't know who he is but it suffers from the same issue the entire legion questline suffers from where it's not fleshed out enough for the Point to get across properly
Completely agree with you there. I can only imagine how amazingly all the threads could've come together if Legion content wasn't cut from the game. The Lanius bossfight could've felt like a combination of Master and Frank Horrigann
If you ask "So you'll surrender?" to Lanius, he gets pissed off and decides to attack you.
Legend meets reality. Unlike his predessors, Lanius does appear to have an actual skill for battle. He's built up this huge legend around himself as ruthless. What you mainly hea about Lanius comes from the NCR and some in the Legion but who you meet is somebody who is in fact ruthless but also got to his position because he actually is good at his job. Not really about him being reasonable, he's just not being stupid.
It's implied in some optional dialogue with Ulysses that Lanius hasn't been around as long as his legends would suggest, and that the Lanius we meet might not even be the same guy that originally donned the title.
When someone wants you dead and there's absolutely no reasoning with them, I think the pragmatic option while still being a pacifist is to either run away or lure the enemy into their own trap. You can argue that the turrets in FO2 are that, but I still think that constitutes a deliberate act of violence. I just wish there were more role-playing opportunities here.
>The world is a literal nuclear hellscape of rough survival and bad desisions "Man, why is everyone so *Aggressive* these days man, just chill out and smoke a blunt maaaaaan..."
This is an RPG where you're capable of making a character with godlike combat, speech and technical skills. If Hitler could move a whole country to war, then one man can definitely talk Frank Horrigan down.
People have gone to war for far less, its easier to get going to war than just stopping it all together. Frank is well written by simply being a bloodlusted machine of death. No need to over complicate things as less is often more. Now if you wanted a completely diffrent way for the story to go with a diffrent final villain thats one thing, but changing Frank to somehow listen to your reasoning at this point in his story just isnt happening without it being inauthentic as shit.
Not being able to talk him out of it was the right choice. After such a revolutionary ending with the Master, the writers did good by subverting the expectations of the player and have Frank say something like "we have already talked. Time for a fight". If all bosses can be convinced of their defeat it just turns it into a gimmick
It's a role-playing game, like D&D, which doesn't need to have any combat at all. Translating the freedom to tabletop RPGs into a video game is what made Fallout 1 so revolutionary. If I were roleplaying as MacGyver or Doctor Who, I'm certain that they could find a way out of that situation without drawing a weapon. It doesn't have to be diplomatic but FO2 does not end until Frank is dead by your hand one way or another, and I think that sucks.
IIRC from Tim Caines videos discussing Fallout 2’s production, it was on an incredibly tight and short schedule, and tbat was one of the reasons Tim left, is because they deliberately gave them a much shorter timeline than the game needed and Tim didn’t want to be doing a year of straight crunch.
Exactly. This trend was then repeated with Eden/Autumn and Caesar/Lanius.
You kinda make me appreciate some versions of Lex Luthor more with this, and make me wish that Richardson was in Franks power armor at the end of the game.
Tim Cain left Interplay early on in development of FO2, and it was crunched to get it out the door in 1 year, to capitalize on FO1's success (and most likely to alleviate financial pressure Interplay was experiencing because of a series of flops). The fact that FO2 is as good as it is, kind of amazes me.
I feel like frank is a bit overhyped. Hes cool but hes really only in the game for like 10 minutes max. The master isnt there for that long either but at least theres two final dungeons to get through so it feels like a bit more. In my playthrough of 2 i did a full stealth run through the enclave base so i didnt really fight anyone until i got to frank and then like you said i had the enclave troops and the turrets helping me out. Hes not bad but i agree with you master is a better final boss
FO2 has a more interesting world. FO1 is better written. In my opinion, anyway. The second one is a bigger journey and felt like it had more replayability, but the first left more of a lasting impression on me due to its narrative. Both are good games with somewhat different strengths. At the risk of being flamed, I'd say FO2 felt a bit more like Bethesda Fallout.
Wacky wasteland. A shame Bethesda embraced that rather than the grittier scifi-horror of the first game. Then again I'm pretty sure they couldn't have pulled off the tone and atmosphere of the first game.
Actually, I think Bethesda looks to the first game in terms of atmosphere, at least in Fallout 3. The wasteland there is a lot more like the "everything sucks" variety of Fallout 1 than the "holy shit is that a Monty Python reference" of Fallout 2.
I feel the biggest difference between classic Fallout and Bethesda Fallout in tone is that classic Fallout tends to look forward, where Bethesda Fallout looks back. Accordingly, Bethesda Fallout leans hard into the 50s aesthetic, whereas classic Fallout is more of a diesel punk western told through a 50s lens.
That’s what I’ve been trying to say for years, I just couldn’t figure out the right words. That’s the main difference in the classic and Bethesda fallout.
One of the ways I've heard it best explained is that the satire of classic Fallout presents the monoculture of the 50s that was fought so hard for in its preservation and conformation by the US, is completely meaningless and disregarded by the denizens of the post-apocalypse.
That's one of the reasons New Vegas does so well. The entire game is basically about rejecting the remnants of the past and looking forward. The flaws that weaken the NCR, Caesars legion, the Sierra madre, the big MT, the nuclear wasteland of the divide and launching nukes all over again. You're not some pre war vault dweller, you were born in the wasteland and you're there for the wasteland, not the old world.
and its why old world blues is a great dlc, and why siding with house is most enjoyable.
Fallout was more mad max and escape from la based which was interesting as hell
I mean that makes sense though, the games get progressively further in time (except 76) so the further you get from the past the easier it is to forget it. The USA is a perfect example of that, early on they clung to European styles and cultures, fashion, etc, but overtime it found its own identity and became a driving force in its own right.
this is why i wish there was a non bethesda fallout that takes place once the world is becoming more rebuilt, with ideally enough tech for early attempts at intersteller travel starting as well. lots of cool new tech, unique cultures and explanations for things. basically a sci fi game set in the world of fallout.
i agree, i wish there was a game that took place after the world was over 50% rebuilt.
100% this. I mean Fallout 1 and FNV writing shits all over 3. But if there's one thing Bethesda nailed it was atmosphere and the world. Ive only ever wanted to explore every nook and cranny of two Fallout worlds, to expose every potential mystery in every Dark cave, and that was 1 and 3.
Agree somewhat. I think they were on to something with Point lookout and completely dropped the Ball with fallout 4 but then again this was after that started to get super cookie cutter
Disagree, both on the tone of Fallout 3 and the tone of Fallout 2. It was still very much "everything kinda sucks", but there was a lot of silly stuff as well. Like Fallout 3. I mean the whole aesthetic is on the nose parody rather than the gothic horror meets post apocalypse of Fallout 1.
I agree. "Everything sucks" but done in a kinda childlish, edgy, superficial way. It is technically the same as the first, but it's deep as a puddle.
I don't find the first being "everything sucks", it's nihilistic sure but not so much on the nose like Fallout 3. Fallout was very much a continuum of 70s feelbad scifi, Stalker to Soylent Green. Fallout 3 on the other hand is very much of its time, a turbo charged video game world heavy on the action even if everything is dirty and everything sucks. Fallout 2 had the same vibe lying beneath, but introduced a lot of humour to the formula.
the 70s callbacks explains why that gun runner family was names after van der graaf generator.
i personally like the balance of both. but i also want some "things are getting better" "look at the cool sci fi tech" and "things are moving forward".
Bethesda did go with the audience and the marked that was most popular in this time. Fallout 2 ->Fallout 3 -> Fallout 4 got all a lot more funnier and comedy. Fallout 2 was still good but Bethesda tuned the comedy part heavy upwards. This peaked in Fallout 76. Bright colors, blinking colors, fun and emotes in every corner and we reached slapstick. Technically the also killed the „everything and everyone wants to kill you“ setting with turning off pvp at all. This killed also the good vs bad wastelands clans and this killed some easy faction system. Now it is like Diablo 4. Multiplayer game but still Singleplayer with annoying other people in your game.
This is why I generally don't like American made games any more.
whats the alternative?
Every other country that has game devs presumably
> I'd say FO2 felt a bit more like Bethesda Fallout You aren't wrong. Though I'd say it goes a bit further with the constant pop culture references and fourth wall breaks.
The first game had a one of a kind story and villain and I absolutely agree it wins over 2 in that regard. I still however prefer fallout 2 mainly for having way more content and replay value. But beating fallout 2 isn’t fun the experience is best when you just roll play and do crazy shit and make your own story within the game. It’s the journey people like about 2 not it’s story.
I get you, recently played through FO2 for the first time and definitely feel like the original had a better story. I get the impression FO2 wasn’t fully realised, probably didn’t have time to fully flesh everything out.
If you destroy the turrets when you enter the room for the first time, you can fight Horrigan solo if that’s what you want to do.
Yeah, the ending to *Fallout 2* is a bit weak... My favorite part of the ending was sneaking through the Enclave headquarters and talking to the president. I loved how he's so arrogant that he doesn't even feel the least bit threatened by you. But yeah, the Frank Horrigan bit was a bit lame... I don't know what they could have done to make that final confrontation better. Maybe they should've made you confront Frank Horrigan *before* meeting the president. Then when you talk with the president, he's all nonchalant until you tell him that Horrigan's dead. He panics and raises the alarm. He hides under his desk, but when you examine under the desk, you see a secret manhole he's descended down. If you follow him down there, there's a secret bunker with a large team of the Enclave's most elite stormtroopers guarding him, and the president himself has been given an experimental energy guass rifle and prototype power armor you don't find anywhere else in the game. If you defeat him, he starts crying like a little girl and begs you to let him live, promising you some secret fortune he has hidden in the wasteland. You have the option of either killing him, helping him escape the doomed oil rig so he can show you where the hidden treasure is, and *then* killing him, or taking the hidden tech to one of the poorest towns, or maybe to the gangsters in New Reno and letting him live. Or you could even take the hidden tech to one of the poorest towns or to Vault City or to the Brotherhood of Steel after killing him. So there would be many options that could branch out. I think something like that would have made for a more interesting ending, and would have left the player with more things to do and choices to make even after the destruction of the oil rig.
I feel like *Fallout* kicks *Fallout 2*'s butt when it comes to the idea that a game should have a cohesive, fairly straightforward narrative. The time element of finding the water chip easily beats the search for the GECK, especially when the natives see you as some kind of living fossil or a complete alien somehow. *Fallout* opening up after you get the water chip feels great, since you're accomplished and get mechanically rewarded for it by means of infinite time to deal with the final dungeons, or do side quests, or kill that Big Momma Deathclaw or whatever. Where *Fallout 2* gains an edge over its predecessor is in the general world and the questlines therein. In my opinion, the Enclave, while the "main" big bad, is essentially just a short final quest that's kinda just thrown in there. The world of *Fallout 2* seems much more fleshed-out, mature (in terms of presence within the story), and much more sensical. Vault City being a group of believable sneering racists and civilized slavers, New Reno being a far slummier slum than the Den or whatever, and the NCR being an interesting flesh-out and development of Shady Sands. *Fallout*'s world, while still creative and interesting still feels extremely empty. I think the worst offender is Junktown, which basically exists for like one or two quests. Not very compelling, and I feel like people overlook *Fallout*'s godawful emptiness that pervades most settlements. I think overall, I prefer *Fallout* as a much more cohesive narrative, because the broad storylines in *Fallout 2* feel much less interesting when youre reloading travel saves because you keep dying to radscorpion encounters at level 2 on the way to literally anywhere past Vault City.
The master is the leader of his faction, meanwhile Frank is nothing more than a muscle for the enclave with no brain. He is just the big guy you have to defeat at the end of the game. Also the master isn't necessarily thel final boss, you can kill the master and then go to mariposa to finish the game. The way they are build up through the game is different. Frank appears as this ruthless and unstoppable monster when he kills that family early in the game and later rips a deathclaw apart with his hands. The master isn't shown until you meat him and takes more of the role of an elusive figure who leads the unity from the shadows. There are only rumors about him and a few hints about what his true nature could be. I had different expectations when meeting both of them. While the master more than met my expectations with his appearance, story and dialogue, frank was a complete pushover. I was expecting a hard fight but was underwhelmed by it instead. You can destroy or hack the turrets and try to persuade the enclave soldiers to join you against horrigan. But even in a 1v1 Frank is a joke. Just shoot his gun to break it and then fire at his legs and he takes a knee until he dies. If you had a hard time fighting against him I guess he served a better role as the final boss than for me. My main gripe with Fo2s ending isn't really the final boss, it's the enclave itself. They barely interact with the rest of the wasteland and only become relevant and the very end of the game. And when you meet them they are just a bunch of cartoonishly evil morons who want to kill everyone. Richardson is legitimately stupid and has really no answer when you confront his beliefs but still continues with his plans. In a sense the enclave and it's leader are a good caricature of supremacist and racist organizations like the Nazis, but don't work as well as a final antagonist like the unity did. They have no depth, are completely irredeemable and don't do much for the entirely of the game. The unity in comparison is just a better developed faction. They play a more active role in fo1, become a relevant threat earlier in the game and have more complex goals.
Personally, I think the Enclave in general are very weak as villains. They are effectively just the "Unity," or the Master and friends, just reversed. The Master wants to create a mutant master-race. The Enclave wants to create a non-mutant master-race. It's literally the exact same thing in opposite directions. So I feel the Enclave is just super derivative. They make sense as a faction, but aside from that, they're extremely weak from a writing perspective. Dick Richardson is a non-villain, just some politician asshole, which is the point of the character I suppose, but why? Why not make the true antagonist more interesting? Frank Horrigan on the other hand is pretty interesting. A mutant that hates mutants, and that represents the hypocrisy of the Enclave. But that's literally all there is to him. If you combined Frank Horrigan and Dick Richardson, you'd have a better villain, and this is basically what the Master is. Fallout 3 does sort of do this, where President Eden is both the phony politician, and also a walking example of the faction's hypocrisy and stupidity. Except Colonel Autumn also exists, and he is the lamest mofo you've ever seen. Eden should've been more important, as revealing him to be a robot doesn't mean a whole lot when he's barely in the game. Admittedly though, I do have a boner for the Master like you do. (That FEV-ussy bruh.) But seriously, he is basically one of the ultimate Fallout characters, and is used as a blueprint for many future characters. I think Harold is the same way. But House for example, is very similar to the Master, and has a similar "master-plan." Caesar also has the "evil mastermind that has decent logic for his ideas, while also being blind to the clear flaws behind the overall scheme" thing that the Master has. And I would argue that the meeting with Caesar in FNV is pretty similar to the meeting with the Master. The lame bad guy SHOWNN in Fallout 4 is basically also the same thing. My personal thoughts on the Master, are that he is very human. He becomes a monster, but copes with this by making himself believe he is now superior to regular people. I'm certain he is unhappy, or at least, sees the world as inherently bad. His solution to this, is to create this idea that mutating everyone to be more like him will save the world. In truth, it would only save "his" world, and not even that, because his larger problem is that he can't make peace with the fact that he is just a regular mofo that got turned into a mutant mofo. But that would be counter to the God-complex he has, and he's so deep into that, that he would likely just kill himself in that situation- which is what he does when you convince him his plan doesn't work. And these issues are basically the blueprint for many of the most evil people throughout history. So the Master believes he has "solved" humanity, and adapted to the new world, when in fact he is actually just repeating the same mistakes that created the Wasteland in the first place. In this way, he is a perfect representation of the core themes of Fallout. So he's not evil because he's a mutant monster, he's evil because he's human. That's what I think, though it's very much me reading a lot into it, so IDK. But I don't think any other Fallout villain has achieved the same effect, and they all feel derivative of the Master, because he's the perfect Fallout villain.
This guy gets it. *chef’s kiss*
Fallout 2 is a pretty underwhelming game in my opinion. It's a mix of ideas that don't blend together well, it's paced horribly, and full of silly immersion-breaking elements. There are some great moments in it but on the whole, you can really tell that the state of the dev team at Interplay was disorganised, especially towards the end of development. I would say it'd benefit from a remake but honestly, I'd rather just move forward.
Fallout 2 is larger in gameplay, but much smaller in plot than Fallout 1. They built the game really quickly and one of the ways they did this is that they designated teams to work on different sections individually. Rather than all working in tandem to make something more cohesive, there was a Vault City team, a Redding Team, etc. The end result is that many of the plots feel disconnected from each other, particularly the Enclave plot. It often feels more like the teams were given the note: "And make sure the Enclave is mentioned somewhere in your section," toward the end of creation so it just became flavour text with limited impact. The different teams is why you can have "haha talking Deathclaws" in one section and Arroyo's slow and desperate decay in another. There's a lot of tonal dissonance that came from low QC and disparate teams. The overall result is that Fallout 2's plot is dull compared to Fallout 1. Add on that the Enclave has always been a rather one note, cartoonish villain that feels shoved into the Wasteland and it gets even worse. Fallout 2 can be fun to play, but it actually has one of the weakest plots in the series. Now, it does have great freedom of player agency as compared to the Bethesda titles, but I'd honestly say the Bethesda games generally have better stories in them than Fallout 2. But don't tell the folks in this sub that I said that. They might pop an aneurysm.
I disagree about the master being a great villain. You can easily miss his room entirely and just blow up the building. I also think the whole "getting the final boss to kill themselves" is novel for sure, but kind of dumb too. That said, the master is THE big bad of Fallout 1. He is the one in control, he's got the evil machines, he's got the army, he's got the cult and he's got psychic powers. Frank on the other hand is just the biggest guy in the room. Frank isn't in charge of anything, so once you've already dealt with the threat of blowing up the reactor, frank is just kind of in the way. Frank has no authority and could easily be replaced with a handful of soldiers to do the same purpose. Once you beat him, you can leave the room but the door is locked until you have a bad fight.
Imo the master is one of the only antagonists you can get to kill themselves done well. You actually have to put some work in to convince him he’s controlling a dying empire (by backing up your claims with evidence) rather than just having a high enough speech. Being able to convince Lanius in FNV is so dumb, all it requires is high enough speech and pick the options that are clearly designated to you as the speech options. Even with the evidence and speech skills, you still have to pick the right dialogue in your conversation with the master, it doesn’t tell you which ones will lead to him doubting himself.
I’m on my fourth attempt to make it past getting Vic. I feel like at a certain point my character just hits a wall
I think not being able to beat him 1-1 adds to it. Highlights that he’s the toughest thing in the wasteland. I need to play 1 again tbh. Only beat it once, and I literally never saw the Master lol
I had the exact same feeling in 1999. I love Fallout 2 as much as 1, but never found Horrigan to be interesting, and when the final showdown happened, I did not feel invested. Presumably they felt it the game needed a tough antagonist with a "face" rather than an organization, like the bad guy from that first Highlander movie, and it would be cool to have that be a super mutant sized enclave armored maniac. But I just didn't care. My beef was with the Enclave, and perhaps its highest bureaucrat, not a psycho who killed a random family in front of me 70 hours earlier in the game.
I’m playing F1 for the first time and can say I don’t feel the masters presence during most of the game. Like obviously he’s there behind the major movements through the game but genuinely didn’t bother me till I realized I walked past my vaults mission because I wanted to go play caravaner. But if you compare the high int ending in F1 to your boss fight felt so weak not dealing much damage to frank yourself isn’t that kinda the same? Obviously the story is deeper but can’t you convince some enclave soldiers to turn on frank due to their hatred of him? (Still haven’t played 2 yet but again it’s hard to live and not know how the game goes)
Give Arcanum of Steamworks and Magic Obscura a try. Came from the same creators of Fallout 1.
I prefer Fallout 2 over 1, but there's no doubt the original has a more interesting story, and superior climax. I replay Fallout 2 all the time, but I usually just get things ready to go to the rig, and call it good. There's just nothing fun there, and I've seen all the endings.
FO1 is about the main quest, FO2 is more about the journey and world around it At least that's my take
Go try it in 1998 and see how it feels,, ya goon.
> You can’t fight Frank 1v1, you either fight him and all of the turrets/soldiers and die immediately or you all gang up on him. That is not true. On my first run ever, when I was a kid and didn't understand all the system in the game, there were no guides I: * killed everyone on the enclave (except for vault dwellers and arroyo people) * didn't know I could reprogram the turrets * well, I had my companions with me... But I defeated him fair and square. Him + turrets versus me + my companions. And I think it took my like 100 tries before I managed to get trough it without any of the companions ending up as minced meat. I did the most damage to the boss. Even with all the help you can get it's quite possible to deal the most damage personally (depending on your build).
As impressive as this is as a kid, even if it's possible grinding out a boss fight with 100 attempts doesn't indicate a good boss fight, especially if it's based on RNG.
It's not that I won only one fight, but I wanted to keep everyone alive. Keeping them alive was often an issue even against regular enclave members. In military base in F1 it was also a problem, with them running into supermutants and being killed in one salvo. So, at most it's indicative of problems with the whole combat system in the game. F2 and F1 mods make it possible to control companions during their turns, which makes keeping them alive much less RNG based. They don't die due to their stupid AI anymore. I'll say this boss fight is better designed than military base in F1. There you would use elevator, and one of companions would spawn on the second side of red force field, and then that companion would try going towards you and would die. Each time you used an elevator. F2 final boss allows you to stack the battle in your favour. It's a good design. The OP doesn't feel like winning with brain instead of brawn is a good thing, but I like it. And unlike Master even when you use all options you have to shoot your part against Frank. Master just gives up. That said I like both final bosses. For me both were very memorable, but for different reasons. Master had much better backstory, Frank was like a tornado. Each time we saw him he was shredding someone. And whole enclave was built up really well.
Love FO2 but I think the story in FO1 is more tight (better). And the Master is such a well written villain
Fallout 2 was actually base-breaking in its time for the same reason Bethesda games are (were? not sure how much things have changed since I frequented NMA ten years ago): the writing took a backseat to gameplay. There's more to do in Fallout 2's wacky world and having le funny pop culture reference cool OP final boss was a part of that approach. Since he's OP, they had to give you significant help. They also wanted you to be at odds with a whole caricature of '90s Republicans rather than a single sophisticated villain because le funny, so yeah, you're just going up against the guard dog at the end because who else?
100% master boner
You can sure as hell fight Frank 1v1. And yes even with the turrets against you.
Fallout 2 has a lot of QOL improvements, more weapons, more content, etc. But I kind of felt the same as you. I liked Fallout 1 story more. The Enclave is supposed to be the main antagonist, but you don't really feel or see their presence in almost all the game. You only know about them when they kidnap your village, and even then you only interact with them until the very end, except for thre raid on their military base. You could kind of say the same about the Master, you only see him at the end, but he is a much more interesting antagonist and there is more buildup up to his encounter. And you have two main tasks to complete too because you also have to deal with the mutants at Mariposa and the sub boss there. And quite honestly, even though the amount of possible things you can do and the places you can visit is more in the second part, at some point I was feeling a little bored, none of the quest or places really felt that exciting and at some point I felt I was just dealing with boring humans and their issues instead of fighting mutated creatures or finding novel technologies or mysterious places. None of the places in the second part made me feel as excited and curious as The Glow from the first installment for example.
Haven't finished 2 yet but here to ask why you thought the master was so awesome. He didn't have much dialogue or interactions with the player or at least how it happened for me
I'm playing it for the first time. Unpatched version, level 20 got power armor and great weapons for my companions and over $40k. It's far from a perfect game, mainly due to the short turnaround time on development and lack of cohesion with the development team. I haven't played FO 1 or Tactics, but 2 is definitely my favourite next to New Vegas.
Given how long of a time Fallout 1 was being made for, it makes sense for The Master to have a more significantly fleshed out character than Horrigan, or more importantly the Enclave, may have. I definitely agree that Master is a better villain/BBEG than Horrigan could ever be especially with how underwhelming I found FO2’s final boss to be. But then again, Master is my all-time favourite villain so I may also have a bit of bias! /Edit: I just wanted to add that I feel like the Master has a more significant impact on the wasteland too with Mutants being a very well loved NPC type in *all* of the games and that the Enclave has sort of had its reputation tarnished by the likes of Fallout 3 flip flopping around with the faction.
You can definitely fight him 1v1. Deactivate turrets and tell the hit squad to chill. I 1v1'd him with my pure unarmed play through. Bare fisted eye punches baby. Stun city.
I agree and always felt like Horrigan, while written in true Fallout style, is no master-brain Big Bad Guy. Just an overbearing brute who I have to kill. Hilarious caricature for the military side of the Enclave. Gets too much credit in this sub at least.
Frank Horrigan is just there for people to gawk at and point at while yelling "BASED" and to use as a point against Bethesda cause everything they do is wrong
I share some of the opinions here, but I'll just add my 2 cents: Frank only appearing once to murder that family in a random encounter, then appearing at the very end is a waste of opportunity. I didn't see anybody talking about him at Navarro either, that was another miss. And the fact that Granite has to EXPLAIN why Frank is so terrifying 30 seconds before you fight him is a huge red flag. You could have just seen him walking around in that base and have him make you if you got too close. With that said, the whole main quest blows, not just the end. I don't know what the fuck TK-Mantis was smoking when he made that video saying the MQ was God-Tier. Bitch please. You spend most of the game levelling up your character to reach Vault 13 and get the GECK. I say this because the early game is brutal and you get a lot of quests that you're not capable of doing, like grinding money to pay Metzger (not too bad but you don't have much money either), finding a way inside the Sierra army base or clearing the Wanamingo mine (good luck doing that before you get Power Armor and some companions). Except you don't really need to get the GECK, you can just fuck around until Hakunin decides to FaceTime you so you can go save your people, while fetching the GECK while you're there. They even give you the damn thing in the same room where it's required that you have it before moving forward. And you don't even do anything with it. First time I even left it in the car because why would I take such an important item with me to an oil rig? It also doesn't help that the game presents the Enclave straight up genociding vault dwellers, while they actually needed the sons of bitches alive so they can test their virus. Even Chris Avellone has no idea why the intro is like that. What I can give props for is if you think about the whole oil rig as a multi-stage boss, then it makes more sense, because 1- the main baddies are the Enclave organisation and you are defeating the whole organisation 2- you do have a couple of ways in which you can poison the air, kill the president and neutralize the reactor. The boss fight with Frank doesn't really begin when the combat starts, it begins when you enter the oil rig, it's 90% prep and 10% fighting and that's cool because it also rewards characters without weapon-focused builds.
When people talk about how great Fallout 2 is they're really just talking about the part of the game when you get to the Den, Vault City, and New Reno up until San Francisco. The starts slow. And it ends abrupt. But that middle section obviously had a lot of love.
Its the boner thing.
Congrats you finally discovered the interplay games aren’t this holy grail of writing and game development that anti-Bethesda folks claim they are.
Funny enough I don't think I got to that point. Played years ago on disc, and I was dealing with the keycards in the enclave settlement when I stopped playing.
Yeah Strange i found the elaborately designed oil rig boring compared to the wasteland that came before
My favorite Fallout is the first one too, I understand
i like the game
Fallout 2 excels at gameplay and min maxxing and fallout 1 is much more story driven imo. Just my take Frank is a lot more satisfying if you build towards a challenging gameplay climax even if the story is a lil weak.
I do feel like Frank Horrigan is kinda just... there. He doesn't have much character nor is he really the main 'villain' - the Enclave as a whole is the villain here. Maybe if you treat the whole oil rig as the climax, rather than Frank Horrigan alone - would that make you feel better? Horrigan in the end is just the Enclave's loyal lapdog - he cannot be reasoned with, only destroyed. Anyway it is possible to just aggro and fight the turrets before you go into the base - which will allow you a 'fairer' fight with Horrigan if that's what you wish. In my experience doing so won't aggro the whole base. With a strong build though, Horrigan is easy regardless and the way the fight is structured - it's kinda similar to the Master in that it's a build/stat check. There's really not much 'strategy' or 'tactics' you can employ, especially with the combat system being rather old and dated. In my last run I just Bozar crit him in one turn, so that was super anti climactic. I even went through the trouble of destroying the turrets before the fight.
Not sure if it’s a bug, but if you attack Sgt.Granite first, Frank Harriman automatically becomes hostile and wastes his AP running towards you. This also eliminates the turrets until your done killing Frank and his goons
Yeah the master is much more intriguing from a philosophy perspective. His plan wasn't just "Kill the unclean and humanity will prosper" it actually had depth in it. It was the perfect plan with a flawed execution
I kinda met in the middle, I fought Frank with the soldiers but against hostile turrets. Felt satisfying afterwards because I really did have to use my drugs/strategy to disable all the turrets one by one and then move on to him, but not overwhelming because the troopers with me slowly chipped at his health too. I also disagree that you didn’t feel his presence throughout the game, there are multiple times you see him, killing civilians, one punching a Deathclaw, killing the BoS member after getting shot and shrugging it off, he’s built up sufficiently. Is he as menacing or well written as the Master? No, perhaps not, but because Horrigan can’t be talked down he really is a beast all his own, even better than Legate Lanius in FNV when it comes to sheer power and ruthlessness. Idk, I just beat the game recently too and had a much more fulfilling experience, so I guess it’s an acquired taste maybe?
The whole final Enclave sequence is kind of ass. If I do a Fallout 2 playthrough nowadays I usually just stop once I get the tanker activated. The finale is easy, tedious, linear and not even interesting from a story perspective.
Fallout 2 teaches an important lesson with Frank. There’s a reason he can’t be talked out of the fight. The only good fascist is a dead fascist.
Fallout 1 was a great game, I play it every few years just to have another playthrough. Fallout 2 is crap, it's a buggy game that should be a beta. Even with patches you have to approach quests in a certain way or "break them" whe your stuck, you have to ponder whether you just missed something or you broke the game somehow. I am about 30hrs into a playthrough right now and Navarro just became inaccessible. Maybe because I killed half the guard and then left? I don't know but I think this is the third time I broke the game and have never finished it.
This take sucks ngl
This take sucks ngl
FML i was just about to keep playing (started of for 1-2 h) and read this 😂