I have become very interested in Fallout 1 and 2. However, i did not grow up on those old hard games like many people on here. I will only be playing them for the story. How hard are they?

I only played 2, and this was after I played 3 and NV, I never played the 1st. The first time I played I went in nooby, I had no idea what to do and the tutorial is crap. I gave up after 5 hours. the second time I used a gamefaq guide and the game was much more fun. I got about a third of the way in, then I fell in love with Baldurs Gate. I do intend to finish 2 however because it is quite fun once you get the hang of it and you can actually deal damage. because it is extremely hard in the beginning.

You may find them challenging, particularly at the beginning of the game. As the games progress things get much easier. That was quite usual in the RPGs released at that time. This is because your character is really weak initially and yet you may run into somewhat challenging enemies. I believe Fallout 1 is easier on the player in that respect at the beginning. But to give you an example even rats can give you a little bit of trouble initially.

Now, back in the days it was quite common for a player to start a game and then, after a few hours, restart because of wrong approach and character. While an experienced player can finish the game with any character, regardless of the build, that's not the case for a beginner. So if you don't like to spend time figuring out the game yourself (or don't have time for that) I would suggest read a guide for building a character.

Once you leveled up a bit, and get used to (and understand mechanics) things get substantially easier, though you need to give a little bit thought how to allocate skills point as your progress and which perks to choose. Definitely, don't e mindless.

Play Fallout 1 first, the beginning of FO2 is painful. Combat difficulty depends a lot on how powerful the character is you create. Take the gifted trait and at least 8 agiltiy, dump charisma to 2 in favor of the useful stats, int grants dialogue options and the speech skill is checked for success.

Their open ended nature can make them pretty though sometimes, for example if you wander in the wrong direction. In the first Fallout there's a mention right at the beginning of the game of another vault to the east of of your starting location. You're told that the main quest item might be found there, but there's nothing that's obligating you to go there otherwise. You can easily miss it and go on to the first town and try to deal with the town's bandit problem without any of the gear you would've found in that vault had you started off by looking for it. That's what happened to me the first time, and it made it into a really difficult affair.

Fallout 2's difficulty is a tad above that of Fallout 1, but mostly in the beginning. It has this weird tutorial type section which is a bit of a pain to get through. Overall it also takes a bit longer to get going, but it's definitely the grander game of the two.

You can also screw yourself a bit with funny skill allocations when you level, and to some extent with a poorly designed character. Like kmonster said, definitely take the Gifted trait (you can pick up to two traits) it will give you 7 extra stat points to distribute, at the cost of reduced starting skills, and less skill points per level. But that can be offset by giving your character a lot of intelligence, say 8 or 9.

A guide is worth looking at beforehand, but for quick reference:

Action points are far more important here than in F3, and it's determined by agility : 5 + (agility/2) : rounded down. Agility can be increased by one permanently in the game somewhere, so I'd take 7 or 9 agility.

You get to tag skills in the beginning which causes them to increase at twice the rate. If you're aiming for a gunslinger, which is perhaps a good choice for a first character, then tag small guns, energy weapons and speech. Heavy weapons only include really big stuff like flamethrowers, rocket launchers and miniguns which you'll only encounter fairly lategame. Weapons such as combat shotguns and assault rifles are all small guns.
Spend a lot of skill points on small guns and speech initially, so that you can start to reliably hit things with your early game weapons, and so that you won't have difficulty conversing with people.

Strength should be at least 5 otherwise you wont be able to use several small guns without power armour.

Perception & Luck: If you want to make life much easier for yourself as a gunslinger, then there is a late game perk that you would want to take that, in addition to high agility, also requires high perception. Buuut, it doesn't work well without a moderate amount of luck. I would start with at least 6 or 7 luck, and 7 perception.

I'm not sure how important charisma is in the first fallout. I'm guessing like in Fallout 2, certain dialogue options won't be available unless you have a certain charisma. Regardless, its worth remembering that in Fallout 2 Charisma is far more important since there it determines party size, and you wouldn't really want to have less than two party members in the early game if it's your first time playing.

Thanks for all the replies. I think it sounds a bit too difficult for me, but i think i will buy them anyhow, as i find the dialouge and story very interesting.

I have another question: How is being evil? Is being good easier like most games?

Intending to be good is at least easy. Actually doing the right thing is difficult to find out what even is. There's usually a "good" ending somewhere, though. And figuring out what it is is normally what gives you the most completion xp.

Anyway - a lot of character builds are actually viable in the game. If you start with average intelligence and find out that's giving you a lot of disadvantages, because you're constantly exploited and tricked, and so on. Then there's the "smooth talker" perk, for example (raises intelligence for dialogue - intelligence is what matters to open up dialogue options). Skills in science and repair can compensate for a lot of things. But overall, the most satisfying playthroughs probably happen if you play a reasonably clever character. And avoid trapping yourself with 4 strength and no backup plan for single-handed weapons, etc. Same with the action-points and sequence early on. So good advice in the post over there.

Note on sneaking - it actually is possible to use sneak a few times, in and out of combat. And helps you escape a lot of difficult fights where speech skills fail, etc, or get closer to really dangerous enemies before firing. The guide on the fallout wikia also doesn't say this, but combined with hand to hand combat, it can be a pretty useful skill. But on the other hand, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by just using guns, raising the skill high enough, and having decent perception. So if you tag small arms you don't need to rely on finding good armor early on, and things like that. Basically - specialist builds have some sort of drawback that's difficult to overcome in the early game.

If you still intend to play start with Fallout 1. It is easier and your character will become quite decent pretty fast.

This is the build I used to beat the game. It is not optimal but it makes life easy.

% skills:
-> small guns
-> speech
-> energy guns/lockpicks

% tags:
(1) gifted
(2) fast shoot makes things somewhat easier but on the other hand makes battles less tactical;
you lose ability to aim into specific parts of body but on the other hand it costs you less action points to shoot.
Later on, this allows six(!) shots within one turn.
Alternatively, instead of fast shoot you can use other reasonable tags.

%
Strength 5-6
Agility 10
Intelligence 8
Charisma 4-6
Luck 2
Distribute the rest between endurance and perception

% Perks
Every three levels you get perks. The following are quite useful
- Awarness (lvl 3)
- Bonus moves (lvl 6)
- Bonus Rate of Fire (lvl 9)


% other tips:
-> a good tactics is to use your superior action points during fights early in game against rats/scorpions. Basically, swing a knife (or shoot) once or two and then move away. Your enemy will have to approach you and if you do it right then he will not have enough action points to attack you

-> make sure you find SMG. Initially it is a killer weapon. It has option to shoot burst. To use it effectively, move closely to your opponent and then use burst. It will slaughter your enemy unless they have a good armor.

Both these tactics work well in the early part of Fallout 1 and 2.

-> look for books to improve your skill which will be low (since gifted penalizes your initial skills). With the help of books and high intelligence you will be able to quickly improve your skills so that's not such a big issue.



Anyway, I am not an expert on Fallout (though I finished both 1 and 2 several times) so others may have better suggestions.

If you want to experience as much as possible on your first run with minimal difficulty then I highly recommend Per Jorner's guides to Fallout 1 and 2 (should be available on gameFAQS).

Although you should resist the urge to read the details of the quests (unless you're stuck or you've completed them already) to not spoil yourself, the character building section(s) are very useful since both of these Fallouts have a number of skills that are either not that useful, or have skill books available (only some skills have skill books, knowing which ones can save XP spent quite a bit).

Additionally it's useful to know which perks are useful, which ones are not (and/or broken), and what their skill/stat requirements are (especially stat requirements since only a few can be raised during the game, though there are temp buffs available as well).

That is the guide on the fallout wikia, yes. :p

Don't go out of your way to min-max, though. Limit yourself to plan for the perks you want at level 3 and 6, maybe, so you have the stat-requirements on beforehand (opportunity to raise stats permanently becomes available very late in the game - and you don't want to hold off on leveling up to "just until the Brotherhood quest" :D). And maybe avoid things that rule each other out mechanically.

Basically, most guides will expect you to spend a few hours fighting things in the wasteland purely for xp-gain. But even on a long-winded FO1 playrhrough, it's not necessarily the case that you actually get to level 18 before at the very end of the game. Putting you out of reach of the super-perks like Slayer or Silent Death, for example. Which has requirements that aren't actually "optimal" for a melee character once you get into the mechanics.

So that suggests something to me about the way this has been designed. That the super-perks, like most of the normal perks, are actually there to compensate for a sub-optimal build, rather than to be a way to transcend an optimal character to demogodhood.

The same goes for the skill-books - they're actually really expensive, and you don't have access to all of them very easily, or in infinite supply. It's basically useful for raising your skills up to a minimum level, but not for topping off your stats, or gaining another tag-skill.

And it means that what you do with the character for the 90% of the game you don't have the super-perks is a lot more interesting, as it obviously should be in a game that isn't designed by monkeys. Which probably is the case with Fallout 3&4.

So make a character that you think makes sense, adjust it slightly to the perks and playing style you want, and then don't worry about the min-maxing.

For example, I usually play a melee character with low strength. It doesn't make intuitive sense to play the character from Kung Fu, or Kenshiro or something like that in Fallout. But you can boost melee skills, like small arms, through 100% and gain improved critical chances on aimed shots. Basically, if you beat the defense rating for the melee, or the line of sight/perception check, by having a very high skill-score. Then you can have a very high chance to hit the areas of the character that would cripple or cause critical damage.

So if you go for "better criticals" (and maybe put that one extra point into luck - arguably the most important one single stat-point you can spend in the game), go with bonus move perhaps or action boy, improved sequence, etc. And boost your melee skill through 100%. Then you can usually punch a deathclaw in the face and flatten it to the ground, long before you get to level 19.

In the same way, if you went with fast shot and kamikaze, for example (which intuitively makes sense together, but maybe isn't that mechanically great) - then you actually need a way to compensate for the fact that you can't actually bank on causing critical damage on the first or second turn in all the fights. With things like the slayer perk. And heavy armor, which is unavailable for a lot of the game. But on the other hand, you do sequence a lot faster, and you will be able to run in and set an explosive on the ground, and shoot yourself dry of ammo, before running away, etc.

So a lot of weird builds can be made to work. Because the game really is designed to be played by sub-optimal builds that make narrative sense. While the min-maxing is kind of incidental, and not really required or encouraged. Not extremely unlike what's there in Sawyer's tweaking to the 2nd edition rules in Icewind Dale 2, or the .. now scrapped character design baseline for Pillars of Eternity. Basically, this is what role-playing games used to be about, to survive with the odd bunch working hard to overcome their supreme mediocrity. Now they're about super-abilities that make your balls feel bigger. Or something. I don't know.

The games are actually not super difficult.
I finished both on my first attempt with sub-optimal builds.

A few things to note.

1. There is a difficulty setting in the game. I picked "easy" and that was the correct choice, for me at least.
2. You can get into fights you can't win. Learn to avoid those and maybe come back later with a bigger gun.
3. You can get into situations from where you can't get out of. Keep multiple saves, including one at last safe location.
4. Read the last bit again, keep multiple saves. Don't keep one save and then ask how to cure an uncurable radiation poisoning you got in the Glow.

(5.) Consult internet when stuck, I usually only got stuck when I confused stairs for a crate, or just didn't find the item I searched, or something similarly stupid.
(6,) Have a pretty high agility score.

I like that,a bigger gun:)

Is tactics also worth buying?

I think so! It's pretty similar to Wasteland 2, imo, but way less polished, but better voice acting and writing actually.

Little bit of an interface getting used-to thing is all, really, but, yes, I think it is not mentioned enough.