Fallout 2 Best Mods
There are several good mods for Black Isle's cRPG Definition of 1998, Fallout 2. The best mods for Fallout 2 are sfall and Fallout 1.5 Resurrection.
Due to increasing Fallout 2's stability, performance and playability, sfall is more valuable and useful than the UPU and RPU taken together. UPU just fixes bugs and fun exploits that I got used to years before unofficial patches came out, and RPU just cobbles together (mostly subpar) content for a campaign that was too big and bloated to begin with.
I usually play Fallout 2 once per year: almost always with sfall but barely ever with UPU or RPU. Moreover, UPU and RPU inject bugs of their own that weren't in the originals to begin with, and I'd rather not come across novel bugs when I replay one of my fave cRPGs.
Best TCM Fallout 2
Fallout 1.5 Resurrection is the best Fallout 2 total conversion mod (TCM). Fallout 1.5 Resurrection has the best writing, lore, battles, quest design and characterizations whereas Nevada and Olympus host some of the best examples of area design and set pieces that I have seen on the Fallout 2 engine (Hawthorne, Area 51 and Railway Depot in Nevada; Olympus Tower in Olympus).
In terms of custom graphics assets, both Olympus and Yesterday are ambitious.
All of the TCMs listed above are worth trying out, but I don't see FO1.5 being beaten in the foreseeable future.
Example of a multi-layered area that features non-linear exploration and environment-based problem solving (Fallout Nevada):
Fallout 2 Modding Considerations
Note that modding Fallout 2 is not easy because there is no official, dedicated toolset, only a collection of modding tools. Which is probably why there are not many TCMs in comparison to NWN and NWN2, which came bundled with toolsets (cf. NWN Modules).
That said, by virtue of its tile-rigged area design it is easier to make TCMs for Fallout 2 than it is for, say, Baldur's Gate, which employs inferior and largely unworkable pre-rendered backdrops.
So really, if you're going to make an elite 2D TCM in 2023, your target cRPG should be either Fallout 2, Arcanum, Jagged Alliance 2 or ToEE. And which one you choose depends on your mod's focus and its technical, thematic and aesthetic requirements.
If you don't mind working with 3D graphics that are inferior to classic Fallout's (supreme) aesthetic, NWN is unbeatable in terms of power, flexibility and ease-of-use. You can do things in NWN's toolset with a couple of mouse-button clicks that would require a fair bit of coding to do correctly in Fallout 2 (f.e., the properties of a door and its functionality).
That said, if you can overcome the barrier to entry Fallout 2 would be one of the best cRPGs to mod. Mainly for the following reasons:
- Turn-based combat system
- Trimetric perspective
- Seamless transition
- Tile-rigged area design
- Good ruleset and character building (SPECIAL stats)
- Mouse-over playing field for environmental storytelling
- Supreme, ageless aesthetic that no lame 3D engine could ever hope to replicate
- Advanced scripting capability
- Easily editable itemization, critters and encounters
- Strong world map aka overworld mechanics
- Tactile, moddable UI (you can mod in more inventory screen-space and extend the length of the feedback window to make the UI much better)
- Proper, screen-centered dialogue mode (which NWN and Arcanum don't have)
- sfall (which has FPC and about a dozen other valuable features)
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