I think the official patch for Fallout 1 actually removed the hard time limit in the original release. There's still some pressure at some parts of the game but players are no longer required to pass on exploration to rush to the end.
Some fans were unhappy with certain thematic changes in F2, e.g. the (at that time) excessive increase in pop culture references and muddying of the 50s retro sci-fi backstory.
For the uninitiated: There's a reason one of the original major Fallout communities was derided as "glittering gems of hatred" at one point. Fallout 1 had a very emotional following and what happened after Fallout 2 was a series of bad business decisions around a franchise with fans that just wanted another game in the series.
Basically Interplay tried to open the franchise to the combat strategy demographic with Fallout Tactics but had outsourced the entire game to a study with no sensibilities for the established setting or even premise of the first two games beyond "kinda like Mad Max with retro sci-fi".
Then they followed up by trying to do a console shmup with desperately oversexualised marketing (press packages contained actual condoms). Again, outsourced, and with no resemblence to the original two games at all.
In the meantime they killed off the actual in-development Fallout sequel codenamed Van Buren, which was the closest the fans ever got to a successor to Fallout 2.
Then they announced plans to create a Fallout based online game with another external company, which luckily never went anywhere (fans referred to the hypothetical Fallout Online as "FOOL" even before anyone took the idea serious).
At some point all the mismanagement and continued failures caught up with Interplay, long-time employees managed to sue for lost wages and a certain company that gave the world cookie-cutter fantasy combat RPGs with two dimensional characters bought the rights to Fallout 3, 4 and 5 (and possibly more) and created what people born in the late 1990s or later think of as Fallout today.
There were some other tearful events with ex-developers creating Fallout-like RPGs (in gameplay, not in story) at other companies (just to namedrop a few: Lionheart and Arcanum) but let's just say there were good reasons to be very angry and disappointed even before Bethesda had any chance to screw anything up.
On the bright side, Steam has Wasteland 2. I haven't played more than a week or so of it, but if you're looking for "isometric turn based combat RPG in a post-apocalyptic wasteland", it nails it. It felt like a Fallout, probably because Fallout took so much inspiration from the original Wasteland. The only thing that made it Not-Fallout was the absence of Pip-Boy or Nuka-cola.
Some fans were unhappy with certain thematic changes in F2, e.g. the (at that time) excessive increase in pop culture references and muddying of the 50s retro sci-fi backstory.
For the uninitiated: There's a reason one of the original major Fallout communities was derided as "glittering gems of hatred" at one point. Fallout 1 had a very emotional following and what happened after Fallout 2 was a series of bad business decisions around a franchise with fans that just wanted another game in the series.
Basically Interplay tried to open the franchise to the combat strategy demographic with Fallout Tactics but had outsourced the entire game to a study with no sensibilities for the established setting or even premise of the first two games beyond "kinda like Mad Max with retro sci-fi".
Then they followed up by trying to do a console shmup with desperately oversexualised marketing (press packages contained actual condoms). Again, outsourced, and with no resemblence to the original two games at all.
In the meantime they killed off the actual in-development Fallout sequel codenamed Van Buren, which was the closest the fans ever got to a successor to Fallout 2.
Then they announced plans to create a Fallout based online game with another external company, which luckily never went anywhere (fans referred to the hypothetical Fallout Online as "FOOL" even before anyone took the idea serious).
At some point all the mismanagement and continued failures caught up with Interplay, long-time employees managed to sue for lost wages and a certain company that gave the world cookie-cutter fantasy combat RPGs with two dimensional characters bought the rights to Fallout 3, 4 and 5 (and possibly more) and created what people born in the late 1990s or later think of as Fallout today.
There were some other tearful events with ex-developers creating Fallout-like RPGs (in gameplay, not in story) at other companies (just to namedrop a few: Lionheart and Arcanum) but let's just say there were good reasons to be very angry and disappointed even before Bethesda had any chance to screw anything up.