Fallout 2 is an isometric role-playing game developed by Black Isle Studios set in a post-nuclear American wasteland. Players control the Chosen One, a tribal descendant of the original Fallout's Vault Dweller, on a quest to save their village with unprecedented player freedom to explore, negotiate, and cause chaos across a vast open world.
Fallout 2 is a role-playing game developed by Black Isle Studios and published by Interplay Entertainment, released in October 1998. Set 80 years after its predecessor in the post-nuclear ruins of the western United States, it follows the Chosen One — a descendant of Fallout's Vault Dweller — sent by their primitive tribal village to find a Garden of Eden Creation Kit (G.E.C.K.) that will save their people from starvation. What begins as a simple quest opens into one of the most expansive and reactive RPGs ever made.
Few games before or since have offered the degree of player agency that Fallout 2 provides. The SPECIAL system — Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck — shapes not just combat capability but entire branches of dialogue and quest resolution. A high-Intelligence character can talk their way through nearly any confrontation; a low-Intelligence character delivers hilariously mangled speech and is refused service by half the NPCs in the game. Skills in Speech, Barter, Lockpick, Science, and Steal open radically different paths through every town.
Combat is turn-based and tactical, with action points governing movement and attacks. Targeted shots allow players to cripple limbs, blind enemies, or knock weapons from hands. The game encourages experimentation: companions can be recruited, enemy factions manipulated against each other, and quests resolved — or deliberately sabotaged — in ways that ripple across the world.
Fallout 2 expanded the original's retro-futurist aesthetic with a broader sense of dark humour and cultural satire. Its towns range from a San Francisco rebuilt by Chinese survivors to a casino city modelled on New Reno, its mob families squabbling for control. The game does not shy from depicting slavery, drug addiction, and political corruption, and lets the player participate in — or dismantle — all of it. Pop-culture references and fourth-wall jokes sit alongside genuine moral weight.
Fallout 2 was critically acclaimed on release and has only grown in stature since. It is widely regarded as the pinnacle of the classic isometric RPG format and a defining influence on the entire CRPG genre. Its design philosophy — deep systems, reactive storytelling, and respect for player choice — became the template that titles like Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate, and decades later Divinity: Original Sin 2 built upon.