[4] The player assumes the role of the Chosen One, the grandchild of the first game's protagonist, and undertakes a quest to save their small village on the West Coast of the United States.

The protagonist, known as the Chosen One, has seven primary statistics that the player can set: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck.

In Fallout 2, the player explores the game world from a trimetric perspective and interacts with non-player characters (NPCs).

The player can barter with other characters by trading unwanted valuables or by using gold coins produced by one of the game's major factions as currency.

Having positive reputation with an entity will usually result in rewards from leaders of the community, as well as opening up new questlines or ways to complete certain quests that might not have been available otherwise.

Negative reputation will result in many of the community's members shunning the player and refusing to work with them and may even cause them to turn hostile on sight.

Combat is turn based and uses an action-point system, the number of action points that are available depending on certain perks and the player's allocation in the agility statistic.

Different actions such as attacking, moving, reloading, interacting with objects mid-combat, and accessing the inventory consume different amounts of points.

Faced with the calamity, the village elder asks the direct descendant of the Vault Dweller, referred to as the Chosen One, to retrieve a Garden of Eden Creation Kit (GECK) for Arroyo.

Vault 13 was supposed to be closed for 200 years as part of a government experiment,[4] making them perfect test subjects.

[8] Cain later clarified that the sequel entered development before the launch of Fallout, as the previous game had "really caused a buzz in the studio about six months before it was released".

[10] In order to reach this deadline, many staff were taken from the Planescape: Torment development team and made to work on Fallout 2.

[23][24][25][26][27] The editors of GameSpot wrote, "A bigger, better Fallout, this sequel to 1997's RPG of the Year was populated with more characters, more places to go, and more things to do.

"[24] Positive reviewers praised the gameplay, storyline, and worthiness as a successor to the original Fallout, while detractors criticized frequent bugs and lack of improvement over the first game.

[29] In the United States, it secured third place on PC Data's computer game sales rankings for the first week of November 1998.

"[29] According to Keza MacDonald of Eurogamer, Fallout 2 was unsuccessful in the United Kingdom; she noted that the game and its predecessor totaled just over 50,000 sales combined in the region.

[35] In retrospect, the designers of Fallout 2 expressed reservations about the game, with Chris Avellone calling it "a slapdash project without a lot of oversight".