Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel demo

Mark's Comments: I've been enjoying the Fallout Tactics demo off and on for the last week, but one thing has struck me about the game design, at least the little bit that the two mission demo reveals. It seems to play very much like a hack and slash RPG.

Why do I think this? The layout of the missions is such that even though they're outdoors, the player is still herded through a narrow path. To get to point D, you have to go through points A, B, and C first, in other words. This is different than the approach that Jagged Alliance and X-COM take, which offer wide-open areas that players can run or creep through and approach the enemy from many different directions. Not only are you shoehorned down a narrow path in the Tactics demo, but at various points there's a gang of enemies waiting. It's very much like a dungeon stocked with monsters.

So is this a bad thing? Not really. It's just different than we expected. It does raise some concerns, however. The AI in the demo needs some work. You can shoot at one enemy and another enemy several feet away apparently doesn't hear or react. I wonder if the confined nature of the mission layout in part is designed to overcome uninspired AI? It's easier to present an adequate challenge to the player if you can force the player to approach the enemies in a predictable order. The layout also mitigates the need of the AI to do much in the way of patrolling and reacting.

The mission design also mimics a dungeon crawl in the way the challenges pile up. Rather than a mission being comprised of one battle, like a downed UFO fight in X-COM, for example, in the demo the two missions consist of a series of small battles. Like a hack and slash RPG, this tends to wear down the player's party. Like a hack and slash RPG, the Tactics demo gives players "healing potions" to instantly repair the damage.

My other concern with the demo has nothing to do with the mission design. I'm a bit worried about the balance between the game's real-time and turn-based modes. These two modes of play offer a vastly different experience, not just within this demo in particular, but in all games. Real-time can be quite exciting, but it necessitates that the player give up a great deal of control, even with the ability to pause and issue orders. In real-time mode you're the director and not the lead actor. In turn-based mode the gameplay is much more intimate. You move each character. You aim for each character. You squeeze the trigger for each shot.

Each mode in Tactics seems to work well, but the game design seems tilted toward the real-time mode in one important way — the damage characters can take before being killed. These fellas can really eat some lead before they keel over. This makes sense in the real-time mode, because if one or two shots dropped most characters, the battles would last just a few seconds and would often be over before the player even had time to intercede. In turn-based mode it's a bit disappointing, however, to spend several turns creeping around to get good angles of attack on the unsuspecting enemies and then watch them absorb bullets like Jim Carrey in the final scene of The Mask.

I don't mean to sound too critical of what is after all just a demo. I certainly enjoyed it. It's got that good, gritty tactical feel, especially when you're sneaking your team around to get them in place for a fire fight, and I'm intrigued by the multiplayer possibilities that are promised. It's just a bit more RPGish than I expected, and that's not a bad thing. It's just a different thing.

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January 10, 2001

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