I don't think we're going to agree. However, I do agree Fallout 1 is a decent game.

Fallout 2 is supposed to be a lot better. I haven't got around to playing it in-depth yet, but I do have it on the shelf.

I just got done playing Anachronox. Worth noting there was no time in Anachronox where I felt like the deaths were forced. I'm not saying this makes Anachronox a better game, but it definitely makes it more playable for someone like me.

Jagged Alliance 2 also has some rare encounters you CANNOT survive, yet that's one of my all-time favorite games. The vast majority of encounters can be survived, but you have to know exactly when to escape. It's a very technical game with less talking and more shooting.

Many games attempt to prevent frustrating deaths using cheap gimmicks and by essentially robbing the game of spontaneity. They're completely on rails and everything is controlled. I guess it's somewhat like Anachronox, but even Anachronox has some surprises and doesn't prepare you for everything. I don't agree with this. I made comments about this in my Eschalon Book I draft review. I think going all the way to prevent frustrating deaths is just as bad as not doing anything. It's overcontrolling.

Here's what I wrote about it (EB1):

"I failed to mention that there're fatal consequences in this game at certain points that're sometimes hard to see beforehand. Although I only experienced a couple of them, due to the fact I played conservatively and tried to be a well mannered person, these kinds of things definitely were present in classic RPGs and can be the source of a lot of frustration. It's not so much that these kinds of things are frequent in EB 1, but that they can be so maddening when you experience them. For example, in one case, I failed to see the outline of a trap and walked on it and BAM I died. Many traps in the game will kill you, not just hurt you. This probably isn't even the worst example since I could technically see the outline of the trap, even though it was difficult. Bare in mind that a game like this which doesn't try to hold your hand or put rails in the game so you don't fall off cliffs is bound to sting eventually. Even if they put up a sign "Trap here, don't walk on this tile." many players will walk on it anyway and when they do and meet their death they'll think all the pain wasn't worth it and quit the game. In my view, even a well designed area with enough cues to spot things will still kill people because people aren't perfect. This is not to say in any form whatsoever that making a well designed area is not a worthy goal just because it doesn't produce perfect results.

Overall, my judgment of the game took this into account. My overall feeling was the frustration was not large enough to keep me from playing. However, players have different tolerances and some will think things like this don't belong in games. My feeling is when a game is non-linear these kinds of things will crop up and especially if the bar is set higher. It's feasible that trap damage could have been reduced and escape-from-certain-death options could have been made more plentiful, but then I don't think this game would be the same anymore. My opinion is if a fatal problem happens to me in a game and it's completely unpredictable, it's generally undesirable, but then again, when I pickup a game that says it has no hand holding, I kind of expect to die sometimes. The end result is random deaths are not fun and designers should work to make things at least somewhat predictable or foreseeable, but eliminating them completely would probably rip out a huge chunk of the game and make designers too restrained and make the game feel too controlled (too linear). This is because to eliminate them means preventing players from missing predictable or foreseeable outcomes by essentially giving them a modal popup or putting up a hard barrier. No matter how predictable or foreseeable something is players will still sometimes miss it and die anyway, thus producing what to them feels like a random death. You can't prevent that without easing the consequences!

I think this has a lot to do with the nature of progression games. We play progression games to acquire things and build an adventure, but when we die and lose those things, our purpose is somewhat thwarted. But here's the thing: being able to fail adds value to our successes. Too much failure kills the desire to succeed, but some failure can make us value victory more and thus feel a greater connection to the game. I know that's how it's with me and I'm not sure about others, but I agree with the saying "No pain, no gain."

But there's the issue of immersion too, in my case. I generally do not like save scumming. Preferably, I'd somehow resurrect after death. Repeating an older save game makes it feel cheaper and more repetitive. Then again, resurrecting skirts death and if not done right, it also feels cheap. And sometimes I just like permadeath. I've played some single player games without reloading a savegame. It makes you more alert. However, sometimes games aren't made for that and essentially you will die at some point. Basically, and this is especially true for classic RPG's, they were made in an environment where save scumming was common. Nowadays, people play mmorpgs and when they die they resurrect, so this save scumming idea is strange to them. Maybe what we need is a new kind of single player game that doesn't play like an mmo and neither does it make us save scum.

All in all, as stated earlier, I only died 4 times in my playthrough. I was a first-time player. These issues were on my mind. But I'd also like to say that there were moments where I came close to death, but a potion or a heal solved the problem. For example, I fell into a salamander pit and popped invisibility and avoided reloading a saved game. It felt great. Then again, just today before I finished I got squashed by a gate trap. You win some and lose some, but at least I saw the gate trap and hesitated before deciding "What the hell..." I henceforth exploded into a shower of guts, but at least I saw it coming. Why did I go against my instincts?"