Having been recommended this game I've been looking into it a lot, but I don't really see the appeal. People say it's one of the best PC RPGs but to me it seems just like another old PC game. What am I missing here? What is the appeal for so many people? Or is it just nostalgia for an amazing game of its time?

For some people it might be nostalgie, sure, but I played it for the first time last year and loved the shit out of it.
 
Good combat, fantastic writing, and unlike most RPGs nowadays, your choices are actually meaningful. Also, I really dig the art style.

@Three0neFive: Meaningful choices Bioware style with a concrete good/evil choice or more akin to the The Witcher?

@Three0neFive: Meaningful choices Bioware style with a concrete good/evil choice or more akin to the The Witcher?

@Three0neFive said:

For some people it might be nostalgie, sure, but I played it for the first time last year and loved the shit out of it. Good combat, fantastic writing, and unlike most RPGs nowadays, your choices are actually meaningful. Also, I really dig the art style.

Played it for the first time a few weeks ago and couldn't agree more. Besides the rather clunky interface, I don't think it's aged particularly badly at all, it's still a really great game.

Didn't enjoy Fallout 2 anywhere near as much, however.

There wasn't any direction when I played it. Like you had quests, but from what I could tell there wasn't much description on where to go and what to do. That was my main problem.

At the time it was released it was pretty unique.  But yeah if you have no fondness of the Fallout universe it isn't going to be an enlightening experience because the gameplay mechanics are dated and games since then have improved upon those mechanics.

Well, I played FO1 for the first time last year; what I enjoyed about it:

• Very open ended gameplay - you can talk, kill, steal etc... your way out of almost any situation.
  
• The gritty (but not too serious) atmosphere.
• The universe in general and the themes/ideas that stem from it (although, I guess this could relate to any fallout game)
  
• Satisfying combat system.
• Lots of character progression - I really liked how much you could control every detail your your character's skill-set.
• The presentation - personally I really liked the graphics and the atmospheric audio.
• The game had some really fun and brutal weapons.
• Quirky/interesting characters.
  

@TheMustacheHero said:

There wasn't any direction when I played it. Like you had quests, but from what I could tell there wasn't much description on where to go and what to do. That was my main problem.

This was actually something I did like a lot, as long as you keep going to towns, talking to people and completing quests, you should know what you're doing, but it never outright points you in the exact direction of every little objective. That's exactly what ruined Oblivion and Fallout 3, the sense of scale and exploration is completely destroyed. I also liked that you actually had a time limit to recover the G.E.C.K. before your vault would die out, it gave you pressure to complete the main objective and not just mess around with side quests and gave the game a sense of urgency (though I can at least understand why others didn't like this).

If you play RPG's for anything besides graphics and a false sense of openness, you should enjoy the original Fallout a lot.

The truth is... 
 
...wait for it... 
 
Fallout wasn't that great even when it came out. 
 
There, I said it. 
 
Don't get me wrong, I *like* it. And I love Fallout 2 enough that I consider Fallout 3 a travesty, but they were never perfect games. The combat is frustrating and often random unless you're min/maxing like a bastard. Which sucks, because the strong suit of the game is the clever, unique way in which it has fun with character builds by throwing perks at you (for the first time ever in gaming) and using them to make the game weird or interesting, rather than just balanced or easier. But again, with combat that can go perfectly but still kill you in the last shot at random and a time limit the game can be (and often is) just annoying to play. And then there's the story, which has good situations and some funny dialogue but, frankly, not much else.  
 
It also, like many games of the time, steers you towards exploiting the save system all the time. You save before a fight, you save before a conversation, you save before pickpocketing, hacking, stealing, travelling (because random encounters, so yeah) and you save because you haven't saved in a while and that just feels wrong. It was a decade in which PC games just had you glued to the quick save key, and we were all worse for it. In fact, it was common knowledge back then that console games were just more hardcore because if you died, you actually lost progress, while PC gamers quicksaved every five seconds. How times have changed, eh? Perception is a funny thing.
 
Also, the humour is great. That doesn't age. 
 
I'd say it's worth a playthrough, but I wouldn't blame a current-gen gamer for giving it a try and not liking it. 

For some reason I couldn't play it, but I'm enjoying Fallout 2 a lot better. I still think the combat's annoying and dumb and the inventory is aggrivating, but there's something about fallout 2 I much prefer...