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The CRPG Renaissance, Part 5: Fallout 2 and Baldur's Gate

As we learned in the earlier articles in this series, Interplay celebrated the Christmas of 1997 with two new CRPGs. One of them, the striking post-apocalyptic exercise called Fallout, was greeted with largely rave reviews.

Reviewers found it hard to overlook the bugs and glitches that were everywhere, the inevitable result of its rushed and chaotic development cycle, even as the more discerning among them made note of the jarring change in tone and the lack of overall cohesion to the story and design. I didn’t notice until days later that killing him — even though, I rush to stipulate again, he attacked me first — had turned me into a “fallen ranger.” I’m told by people who know about such things that this is far from ideal, because it means that you’ve essentially been reduced to the status of a vanilla fighter, albeit one who craves a lot more experience points than usual to advance a level. The latter failing would have to wait for the proper sequel to be corrected, but BioWare did try to shore up the former aspect by presenting an old-school, tactically complex dungeon crawl of the sort that Gary Gygax would have loved, a maze rife not only with tough monsters but with secret doors, illusions, traps, and all manner of other subtle trickery.

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