Introduction

History lesson

A long long time ago, almost a year before JcDent was born, a game by the name of Wasteland was released and critics said it was good. Roaming the wastes of post nuclear America, fighting robots and raiders, protecting the innocents, what's not to like? It is the prototypical post apocalyptic RPG, the grand daddy of them all. Strange how so few of them inherited the supposed quality of the game (looking at you, non-Fallout post-apoc games).

Anyways, Interplay and EA (early on its path to infamy) tag teamed in making sure it didn't get a proper sequel (the two games in the works didn't pan out as planed), so it took nine years before Fallout came out. It is a real classic (unlike all those "cult hits") and a good spiritual sequel to Wasteland. In F1, you were one of the dwellers of Vault 13, one of the great bunkers that this strange version of America used to weather the effects and aftereffects of a nuclear apocalypse. Unfortunately, your folks had overstayed their welcome and the equipment was starting to deteriorate. Specifically, a water purification chip broke. Thats why you got booted outside to find a replacement. Hilarity and isometric turn based combat ensued. Memorable characters, talking heads and good writing was also involved.

This time, EA was likely distracted ruining some other franchise and Interplay was lucid, so they quickly cranked out Fallout 2, a sequel that is superior to the original, if only for including the "Take all" button in the looting screen. Here, you played one of the Vault Dwellers (that's your dood from F1) descendants, living in a small tribal village of Arroyo. You got booted out to find the Garden of Eden Creation Kit, a suitcase of terraforming technology that only needed water to turn wasteland into, uh, party land. Adventures, more talking heads and Advanced Power Armor Mark II were soon to follow.

Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel was more of a spinoff than a sequel to Fallout 2, becoming a squad tactics game which made away with dialogues, exploration and non-linearity. Characters? Who needs characters when we have GUNS!

Environmental Armor, the second coolest looking armor in the game. I have to note that unlike this particular example, much of the art (included in the GOG package) is 90's bad.

Fallout: Brother of Steel was the first 3D Fallout game. Seeing how it was released for peasants only, I have never played it.

Eventually, Interplay croaked (or entered a horrible state of undeath) and Fallout 3, back then known as Project Van Buren, was canceled.

(UNPOPULAR OPINION TRIGGER ALERT)

Bethesda, best known for Elder Scrolls series, acquired the rights to the IP and translated the game into a first person RPG. Thus Fallout 3: Oblivion With Guns and Fallout New Vegas The Brilliant But Inevitably Buggy Obsidian Game were released. I think that older Fallouts are better than the new ones, especially in comparison to Fallout 3: Snot Green Caves.

***

As Much Plot As I Can Divulge in the OP

What a bad ass! Too bad you won't look like that till the end of the game

Back when the bombs fell, only few of the Vaults were in any condition to support life (~~and this was before any of the Shadow Government bullshit and Vaul experiments~~ The devs didn't read that much into Fallout Bible, so it seems). A military unit on the...West Coast? was one of the lucky ones to survive the blasts and managed to keep their shit together. They managed to keep their shit together so well that when everyone was running around with spears and rusty 9mm pistols, Brotherhood of Steel was clad in Power Armor and totting miniguns. Eventually they had to fight forces that could be considered superior in materiel (but not in moral highground): Super Mutant army of the Master, and then the Enclave. Both of those were taken down by the protagonists of the first two Fallout games. It would not have been accomplished without the Brotherhood, because they're the ones who teach messiahs how to wear Power Armor. It was nice and rad in F1 and F2, but the role of the Brotherhood deteriotated in later games, unable to defeat their final enemies: shitty writing and game balance.

Now, Brotherhood had one other problem: they would only hire from among their either own ranks or saviors of humanity, neither of which are that easy to come by. Some suggested that tribals could be molded into soldiers, just like, you know, in the military. Others said "nay" and the bleeding heart tribal fetishists were exiled to Midwest to hunt for the remains of the Super Mutant army. They kind of got lost, ended up near Chicago and decided to do their own thing.

Which is recruiting locals to their forces as good means of explaining why your character doesn't get Power Armor at the get-go.

You start the game as one of these scrubs.

***

Onwards to the LPing!

Hi, my name is JcDent and I just finished my Warlock 2 LP. People say it wasn't bad.

Back when I was a fat little kid, another fat little friend of mine lent me his copy of FT:BOS. An invariably pirated copy, since back then video games in Lithuania came in two varieties: pirated or made-up. I played it some, and I liked it, and thus Fallout 2 looked a little shitty in comparison. On the other hand, BoS remains the only unfinished Fallout game that I've played and gave me a lifelong boner for Brotherhood of Steel, which likely influenced the growth of Space Marine boner later on. I even had some of the phrases translated into French (I was pretending to learn French at the time), drew shitty imitations of BoS logo everywhere, dreamed of getting it as a tattoo, used Paladin Mike as username, shit like that.

I was so young that the unnecessary stag horns on the helmet didn't bother me

I haven't played the game in almost a decade and I'm happy to give it another go. People currently playing Wasteland 2 will be surprised how similar the plot is to W2's backstory.

I'll be doing it as an SSLP because:
*I remember relying on saves scumming a lot. This also involved saving once a minute or so. Not the best footage.
*I'm entirely unwilling to edit out once-a-minute saves
*I get stage fright while recording audio (stupid, I know), which makes me sound, well... bad.
*I hate audio editing
*Bandicam doesn't play nice with Fallout, and most recording programs don't play nice with my laptop.

I hope to update it once every two days!

I hear it's bad form to OP without ingame images. Well, here's one from the tutorial

A later game scene: First one on the left is one of the default characters you can pick, followed by Farsight and Stitch, the sniper and shotgun doc you start with, followed by Brian, the first guy you can recruit and an all around piece of shit who was the only character that I actually let die. Don't know about other two

***

Audience participation?

There aren't that many choices in the game, so there's little space for that, normally.

On the other hand, I'll take your input on what sort of character I should make into consideration, as well as any smart names you come up with. You have time till about Sunday, since Friday's update will showcase the tutorials!

Later on, you might get to vote on what people I recruit into the squad.

A very SPECIAL audience participation thingie would be if we managed to get multiplayer online. I think it's on GameSpy, so don't get your hopes up. But if there's a way to make it work and there are people with BoS around, I'd be glad to lead some scrubs to their deaths while fighting against you.

Whelp, let's slowly get this shit on the road.

Next stop: Friday of Tutorials!

All right, scrubs, three of you will distract the super mutant while I try to sneak up and put C4 in his pants

The Let's Play Archive

Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel

by JcDent

Introduction

Table of Contents