Most AD&D games don't fit your argument at all btw, since diversity in builds was so limited - in most cases, the only player-defined aspect were the stats, and in the vast majority of older DnD games, those could just be ramped up to the racial maximum. Making overpowered characters is more a hallmark of younger games, like BG2 (and even that game did not have any really crappy classes IIRC).
BG2 is from 2000 - 3 years later than Fallout.
No, in 2nd Edition AD&D you could severely underpower yourself by focusing on the wrong weapon or picking the wrong spells - and even the wrong class, with especially thieves and bards being jokes. It's very easy for a person unfamiliar with the system to completely mess up their character.
Choice of weapons in particular was a huge issue if you didn't understand the system well enough or wanted a specific kind of sword or whatever for flavor. Balance is a complete joke in this way.
Just because the old Gold Box games allowed you to cheat yourself to maximum attributes and hit points doesn't change that if you rolled a character legitimately, you'd SEVERELY gimp yourself by not doing it wisely. Stats are everything in 1st Edition AD&D. Yes, it's a simplistic system - but it's still awful in terms of balancing the importance of specific attributes, weapons or spells. Try playing a non-human fighter with 18 in strength versus a human with 18-100 in strength and call it reasonably balanced. How about a female character with 18-50 as a maximum? What a joke.
Balance issues were even more prevalent in 3rd Edition D&D - and Neverwinter Nights is a good example being very relevant to the era we're talking about. The difference between a good character and a bad character can be GIGANTIC in Neverwinter Nights.
That's because the amount of choices is huge - and the complexity of the system is very signficant. Guess what - that's why I love it. I especially love it because there's such a huge variety of both extremely powerful and extremely weak builds - and there's a LOT of diversity even within similar builds.
I'm sure you hate that - because the D&D system doesn't make all the good choices glow or sort the powerful combinations from the weak combinations, right?
Then we have Arcanum - again very relevant - which makes Fallout seem like one of the most balanced games in existence. It's still great fun, though.
But still, it's true that I was talking about Fallout specifically, rather than matched against other games. Seems legit to me.
Yes, you're talking about a game as if it was unique in a specific way where it's clearly not unique. If you want to call that legit - that's on you.
It's true in that a lvl 1 Fighter played exactly like a lvl 30 Fighter. Which is a weakness it shares with many, many RPGs - which should therefore not be called out as a weakness, if I got your point.
Why would a shared weakness not be a weakness? I'm not singling it out like you're singling out Fallout. I'm just mentioning a huge weakness in a game that shares such a weakness with many other games.
Fallout shares overpowered and underpowered builds with pretty much all RPGs of the 90s and early 2000s. You're calling it a flaw almost unique to Fallout.
Obviously, you didn't get my point at all.