Your character's life has been spent entirely within one such vault. A broken chip for your vault's water recycler forces your character to leave the relative safety of the vault to search for a replacement chip aboveground in the wasteland, where you'll encounter struggling communities of survivors, Road Warrior-esque gangs, human mutants, and even stranger creatures. Hardly a typical setting for a role-playing game, but the originality of the setting is one of the strengths of Fallout. The old 90210 neighborhood has changed, gang violence is rampant, two-headed cows roam Rodeo, and the new fashion accessory is a rocket launcher. And if the guns of the locals don't get you, the radiation might.
Fallout oozes style.
Special mention should be made of Fallout's classy introduction, which unfolds like a 1950s Public Service announcement but depicts a future that is disturbingly bleak and hostile. Little tributes to classic science fiction films and TV shows such as Dr. Who, Road Warrior and Blade Runner pop up all over the place. Fans of Charlton Heston's cheesy science fiction filmmaking days will enjoy the opportunity to yell out Charlie's best lines from Soylent Green. The choices you make will affect your character's encounters and, in particular, how the nonplayer characters in the game respond to your character. Most of the nonplayer characters in Fallout aren't big on conversation and run around blithely and inconsequentially.