I played Fallout 1 and 2 (and their mods) more times than I can remember.
I love deleveled worlds and exploration - as long as things make sense.
Left of the city = super destroyers of death and right of the city = shit mobs I can oneshot, that's not very good world-building.
Low hit chances make the combat way too RNG too, and it's especially unpleasant if you put most of your points into hit-chance-increasing stats.
Well there you go. You remember Fallout as a game you know perfectly after having played so much of it. The original Fallout is probably my favorite RPG ever. That being said, it's cruel, it's unforgiving, and while it's not really overwhelming right from the start, you can still feel completely lost very quickly. "Huuuh... Water... right... I'll go... south?" [Die horribly on random encounter, reload game] "Or maybe not..." It took me a certain amount of new characters before I started doing really significant progress in Fallout. Most of my initial playthroughs were composed of a lot of roaming around, dying horribly for various reasons, discovering amazing places I could not explore more often than not, getting killed a lot, and random mischief.
I loved the fact of coming out of the Vault after the intro scene, on the basis that "we need water. There's probably water outside, we don't know, we don't anything about the outside actually. Get out there and find it." You knew litterally NOTHING of what awaited, and that's including the terrible in inevitable death around every corner, and that was the whole point. And not to mention vague and generic quest related info "go somewhere east, maybe you'll find a guy... who knows... something... Maybe..."
It was amazing, but let's face it, if THAT wasn't disorienting, I have a hard time imagining that D:OS is.
Back to D:OS. Hit chances improve dramatically with each stat point spent, so unless you try to wield bows with 5 dex or two handed swords with 6 strength, RNG unfairness disappears quickly. Again, Fallout had % based combat that while being very enjoyable had obvious flaws nonetheless that we choose to forget.
Monsters have a level. If you mouse over them, you'll see it. Orcs on the west beach are lvl 6 more or less. If you go there being level 2, you get wrecked. After having played so much Fallout 1 & 2, I have a hard time understanding why you would find this disorienting and/or overwhelming.
Quest markers? Fallout had close to none. It was fine then but it's not now?
I just have enough experience with these kind of games to know when something is done properly or not, and this one needs polishing under these aspects if they aim to get the Fallout audience.
I'm pretty sure the original "Fallout audience" is an irrelevant thing 20 years later. I'm also pretty sure many of us here have played Fallout at some point or another, so I guess that makes us... part of the Fallout audience? Keep it simple.
