Fallout 2 has 13 voiced characters – modders are expanding that by 10x

After almost 25 years the original Fallout 2 from Black Isle Studios is being overhauled to include new voice-acted lines for already modded-in extra talking heads. The classic isometric RPG game still makes the rounds all these years later, with a free Fallout 2 FPS game available now for example, and this voice lines mod aims to combine with another to enhance the original Fallout 2 experience naturally. Hopefully this fills you up ahead of the Fallout 5 release date.

The original Fallout 2 has 13 ‘talking heads,’ which are close-up portraits that move their mouths and have voice-acted lines for specific NPCs. These heads were based on pre-made clay models, and back then they took quite some time to make, so the number of talking heads in both Fallout and Fallout 2 was greatly reduced from original expectations.

That’s going to change, however, as the Talking Heads Addon mod from Goat_Boy from last year is going to be expanded and enhanced by a new project, one that wants to give every single extra talking head voice-acted lines. Goat_Boy’s mod adds over 100 original talking heads to Fallout 2, so there’s a lot of work to be done.

This extra mod from Black_Electric is currently in an Alpha release and has 17 of the extra talking heads now voice-acted with over 600 lines of dialogue, but there are “well over 100 characters that we are still looking to cast.” The volunteer project wants people to submit some voice lines for a character they think they can do justice to, with one person then picked to voice all the lines.

“This is a monumental task covering around 150 characters and thousands upon thousands of lines of dialog,” Black_Electric says. “While we may not be able to get every single one voiced, we are hoping to cover most of them.”

Fallout 2 continues to get love after all this time, and we’ve even chatted with co-director Feargus Urguhart about why Fallout 2 is one of the many games to define the RPG series.

For me, the truly incredible thing about this project isn’t just that it’s a colossal labour of love for Fallout 2, it’s how the project combines two separate mods of a large scale and still attempts to act like a natural extension of the original game. I’m sure if Black Isle had the time, money, and resources when originally developing Fallout 2 the developers would have wanted more talking heads and voice-acted lines as they already had a few in, so to see the community come together and make it themselves is amazing.

You can download the Alpha version of the Fallout 2 mod right now over on Nexus Mods, with the aforementioned 17 extra characters and over 600 lines of dialogue, and more to come. You can also download Goat_Boy’s Fallout 2 talking heads mod (the one with just the modeled heads) on Nexus Mods as well.

If you want mods for a more modern game in the series you can check out our breakdown of the best Fallout 4 mods available now, or our look at the very best open-world games to give you even more exploratory goodness.