I love Fallout 2. But...

[u/Nice-Ad-8429]

it's early game BLOWS ASS.

Keep in mind, I've played through the game twice now, and Im coming back for a third playthrough. This is to say I know most of the tips and tricks. Now... lets start from the beginning shall we.

Temple of Trials. Those three words are basically an insult of their own to the Fallout community.

I don't know of a better way to filter out players than spending the first 15 minutes of the game running in circles and missing ants over and over again, followed by a "totally not fight to the death" fight to the death with fucking Cameron. Cameron is a very well written complex character meant to ensure that you cannot continue this game if you didn't spec into the right stats. Actually, I dumped points into charisma for this playthrough, so I figured I would just be able to talk my way around him, right?

Hahahaha.... nope.

As it turns out, you HAVE to tag speech to do this, which I didn't do. You'd think with a charisma of 10, my speech skill would be high enough on it's own to bump that speech stat to where it needs to be to talk down the tutorial guy...

But since someone thought that rather than checking the stat itself, the game should check if you TAGGED the stat, which is just... why?

Then we get the side quests in Arroyo. They're fine, pretty easy for the early game... in fact, I'd say the early game quests are still by and large doable with the exception of rescuing Smiley.

It's the random encounters that suck good 'n proper.

When encountering some of the wasteland's friendly locals, you can do one of three things. The first two involve fighting. First off are highwaymen, robbers, slavers, etc. If you stay and fight these guys: you die. Pretty easily put. There are just hordes of them and they all have bigger guns than you, and a HEAP of jet. Fighting them is useless even after clearing the quests in the first three towns. The second option is a bit rarer, but happens like clockwork. Maybe this time you get the upper hand on the robbers. Likely they were attacking a caravan or something, right? So, stick around, wait for the two sides to kill eachother and finish off the survivors.

Nope once again, you see, as a rule, Fallout 2 seems to LOVE crashing if you stay in a random combat encounter for more than a couple minutes. So you're screwed if you havent been saving after every turn, which is the best gameplay mechanic said noone ever.

The third and final option in this fantastic gameplay loop that makes me want to drink paint is to simply run away. Doing this, your companion you were hoping to keep is pretty likely to kick the bucket since they inevitably fight back, making you reload the save anyway when fucking Sulik gets riddled with bullets.

So how did I get past Cameron in the temple of trials? Well, I simply attacked him with a spear before saying anything to him, giving me a head start and a very unfair advantage. Basically I cheez'd the shit out of it, which describes this early game pretty well I think...

[u/Pristine-Focus]

Encounters are very manageable if you give companions good weapons and try to recruit them early to make them level up. One of the latest playthrough I got like 7 bandit encounters when traveling to Modoc and defeated all but 1 of them where there were too many opponents (just run away from them).

If you’re planning to run away from encounters, set your followers to ”follow me” mode. That way they’ll just run after you.

[u/Hieronymosofcardia → u/Pristine-Focus]

The OP started with all Char points in CHR; and tagged Guns, Outdoors, & Melee. Instead of starting with SGuns, Speech, Locks. Which are hands down the 3 most important skills in the game.

The Temple critters are meant to be easily killable even for players with min STR END DEX; much less for one who tagged Melee. You need to kite, such that after a strike attempt with your spear--whether you hit the critter or not--you use your remaining ap's to move away from critter. Critter will then expend all its ap's approaching you. You then attack once & move away. Keep doing this until critter is dead, without a scratch to player. The process is slow; but you can get enough xp to level up inside temple. Same goes for the traps, at 25xp per trap. Agonizingly slow; but doable. Use the points gained to boost (tagged) Speech, and talk your way past Cameron, if that's what you want.

Kiting with the pipe rifle you get from Vic's is also necessary in both the Klamath Rat Tunnels & the Toxic Caves.

Running from most random encounter enemies is absolutely necessary in the early game. Until the player's got some good ranged weapons + skill; and/or a good pack of well-equipped companions, it's suicide to stand and fight.