[Joie Perez]

Another mechanic could also be that the wanderer entering a small town carrying a veritable fortune in heavy armaments and sporting a Santa sack full of jingly bottlecaps (or coins), should maybe expect to get themselves mugged in the night and even drugged food from the locals.

*Or even an honest hotel owner that just won't accept storage of that much cash and equipment in their locker.

[Michelle Serenity Boss]

Indeed, perhaps as his rich noteriety grows he gets into more and more highwaymen and raider encounters that get tougher and tougher the more wealth he acumulates. Something perhaps like the Restoration encounters wit hthe rival Chosen one? They would run off then come back later better equiped for another go at your wealth.

[Shannon Lockwood]

When/if they release a trailer, the better play 'Viva Las Vegas' in the background, if not, great opportunity lost.

[Harinder Ghag]

A PC that spent the time reading up on their use would greatly benefit from finding such a cache, over one that honed their skill with a hammer or brass knuckles instead ~but both could benefit from selling the arms.

But wouldn't that potentially result in a too sudden dramatic drop in difficulty - thus destroying the balance?
(I already experienced such an annoying difficulty drop in FO2 when I got my first gun, after many hours of struggling to keep my character alive with a spear.)

How about this... Another thing that I think the Witcher got right:
What if the character could carry only a very small number of weapons?
Like if he could carry only one large gun or melee weapon + one or two small guns or melee weapons + the armor he's wearing.
+ limited inventory space only for small & cheap items (so no tons of loot)
Then ammo could be weightless and you could carry all you want (as long as you had available inventory space) - and you could be limited only by the amount of weapons you have on you and not by the amount of weapons that are available in the world.

oh.. that could fix the problematic economy too... the Witcher might have been short on character development but it did get a lot of things right! (it had that excellent journal too!.. I want such a journal in any game... if CDPrject did it in their game, Vault Tec should be able to do it in their Pip-boy too!)

[Charleigh Anderson]

The Witcher got many things right, as well as a new way to deal with Choices and Consequences (by delaying the consequences to a later time during the game).

[Madeleine Rose Walsh]

Although I admit that I find the rare ammo idea to be completely sensible, I keep being against it for that exact reason.
If ammo was in Fallout as rare as it was in Mad Max then I just wouldn't use guns at all!
Why waste valuable skill points on a skill that I'm going to use rarely?

The point is to strike a balance I think. Perhaps something that adapts to the player. Do you use a lot of ammo, in that case you will find more ammo. Are making your shots count less ammo.
Personally I liked it when the items and caps I had, had to be traded for ammo and supplies. When you came into town hoping to sell your loot for that extra ammo.

:shrug: Ammo had weight, weight vs usefulness, vs sale value. In Fallout you could very likely regret leaving that third rocket for keeping the minigun ammo (or vice versa). Fallout [to a point] was self limiting... FO3 is?

I'm not talking of FO3. Fallout 1&2 even with it's weighted ammo, allowed you access to an amount of ammo an armory would be jealous of.

~Also [at the risk if ignoring the 500 pound gorilla here], FO3 should be held to a double (even triple) standard, given that it's got 6 to 9 years on Fallout, and it requires 64 times the ram, a dedicated 3d accelerator and a 2400 MHz CPU (instead of 90 MHz).
Point being... it doesn't matter if Fallout3 surpasses Fallout in some ways, what matters is how greatly it surpasses... IE. simply having the same [arguably less complex] dialog mechanics should never be sufficient given the enhanced demand on the system (and the enhanced capability of common systems)...
FO3 should have amplified the original intents of the series by having the most detailed environmental affecting C&C dialog system to date ~and it doesn't. That doesn't make it a bad game by any means, but it does make it fall short of its potential. Fallout 3 could have had the best of TES, and the best of Fallout (magnified and enhanced by several years progress), but it only has the best of TES and the trappings of Fallout (and several TES flaws carried over).

Que!? (insert pear with mouth here). Ammo sacristy =/=> FO3 dialogue system.

Amended quote: I actually disagree with this quite a bit; No one forces the player to max out Traps or Barter (or medical ~which should never have been merged IMO); but for those that choose to, there should be options unattainable by any other choice... The maxed medical PC should have surgical options where the 50% PC has none (or at least a really high chance of failure and no chance of the best possible outcome).

The point wasn't about mastering all skills. It was that an extremely rare ammo system (ala Mad Max) would deter people from using and investing in gun skills.

In Fallout, skills could (IMO should) be restored and added to, where the PC can read information on say... energy weapons, and have an inkling about them when they find one, but were previously unaware that they existed prior to learning (or at least were totally unfamiliar with them ~kind of like Samuel Jackson's character in Diehard 3, where he knew nothing of automatic weapons, and was unable to shoot one ~for not understanding the safety lock).

The problem with this is that it limits your character design choice. Tagging skills in unknown skills is never possible. And you have to wait in investing in a skill until you've come across something to learn it from.

[Silencio]

The Witcher got many things right, as well as a new way to deal with Choices and Consequences (by delaying the consequences to a later time during the game).

But the combat... the combat!!! And those nudie cards!! *bashes head into keyboard*

[joannARRGH]

True, that wouldn't be the most popular decision, I suppose. But I don't really care about what anyone else wants in these games - I'm really only concerned with what I'd like to see...

Yes, and that's the problem, isn't it? Any game design is a compromise of player wants and desires. There is already a mechanic in game for scarcity of ammo and caps. I still think a series of sliders would work well in these cases. Sliders for caps, ammo, food/water, and "high tech" (stimpacks, energy weapons and energy ammo, etc) would go a long way in tweaking the game, without mods. Seems pretty easy to do as well. Random loot process controlled by slider variables, and static placement loot could be selected from different loot tables based on % chance derived from sliders. That is, on the floor in front of the vault door is either a laser pistol, or if the high tech slider is set low, a lead pipe, or something else from the "low tech weapon loot table".

Would this solve the problem? Level balance would ahve to be set for default values. Using sliders may make the level more difficult, but that's probably a good thing.

[Robert Jr]

Yes, and that's the problem, isn't it? Any game design is a compromise of player wants and desires. There is already a mechanic in game for scarcity of ammo and caps. I still think a series of sliders would work well in these cases. Sliders for caps, ammo, food/water, and "high tech" (stimpacks, energy weapons and energy ammo, etc) would go a long way in tweaking the game, without mods. Seems pretty easy to do as well. Random loot process controlled by slider variables, and static placement loot could be selected from different loot tables based on % chance derived from sliders. That is, on the floor in front of the vault door is either a laser pistol, or if the high tech slider is set low, a lead pipe, or something else from the "low tech weapon loot table".

Would this solve the problem? Level balance would ahve to be set for default values. Using sliders may make the level more difficult, but that's probably a good thing.

More options is generally a good thing. But I'm not sure that would be the most... elegant solution, either. When I play a game for the first time, I'm probably not going to know just how much tech I want to see in the game, or how rare I want things to be. Because at that point, I don't know what the baseline is going to be. Do I want it all the way up, or is the normal setting going to be just fine for me? Even if I can change it later on in the game, it's still not the ideal solution, I think. I think that would work, but can't help but think there might be something better out there, as well...

I posted this over on the Fallout 3 thread, and it came out really, really long; but the short version is: What I really liked about Fallout 2 was how they spread things out a bit more in terms of gaining equipment. At the start, it's really quite a feat to get anything better than a sharpened spear and a pipe gun. You make do with what you have, and learn to make really tough decisions about what you want to sell versus the value of what you're getting in return. In all 3 Fallout games you end up with more stuff than you're ever going to need towards the last half of the game. But I also appreciated it so much more in Fallout 2 because of how hard I had to work to get there, and how long I'd spent on each "rung" of the equipment ladder.

I think the best solution, possibly, that I can think of would be to simply extend that climb towards the best equipment and effectively infinite supplies as much as possible. And considering that the end result is inevitably going to be your PC with a whole treasure trove of supplies - to just work that into the game. Make it so that the thrust of the latter portion of the game isn't still ostensibly about just trying to scraqe by and survive - but that now you have everything you'll ever need; what do you do with all of that power? At that point, stop having quests that reward you with more money that you're never going to use, and instead giving you something that ties into a more "meta" sense of accomplishment in some way...

[Brittany Abner]

But the combat... the combat!!! And those nudie cards!! *bashes head into keyboard*

I liked the combat on hard, creating chains depending on the movement of your sword.

As for the cards, lawl, totally out of place.

[Schel[Anne]FTL]

Simple solution is to tie the amount of caps and ammo you get from enemies and containers to difficulty. Don't have difficulty greatly alter stats or game mechanics, make it increase the scarcity of valuable essentials.

[Katy Hogben]

But wouldn't that potentially result in a too sudden dramatic drop in difficulty - thus destroying the balance?
(I already experienced such an annoying difficulty drop in FO2 when I got my first gun, after many hours of struggling to keep my character alive with a spear.)

For myself... it doesn't matter. If you acquire a gun, fighting others becomes easier; If they have no gun, it becomes trivial ~but it sure would seem silly if that were made to be not so.

IMO the best method is still the careful incremental difficulty increase as the player travels farther from their point of origin [on average]. In practice, the player walks into a town of yokels armed with pipe rifles and a few melee weapons... further on he finds a larger town where guns are more prominent and the fights more deadly; farther still and he encounters a secluded base ~of enclave, super mutants, robots, auto-turrets... where the enemy has heavy weapons and hard armor of their own, and those big guns are not so effective against the new threat. If the player strays into tough territory, and they make it out alive ~then they know better than to roam those regions without heavy armor and weapons. :shrug:

How about this... Another thing that I think the Witcher got right:
What if the character could carry only a very small number of weapons?
Like if he could carry only one large gun or melee weapon + one or two small guns or melee weapons + the armor he's wearing.

Fun trumps realism no? Silly as it was, I never got tired of watching the PC pull a 3' minigun out of his hip pocket, nor felt odd watching them not get tossed on their butt for trying to use it. This is a real sense of loss with FO3, and its increased level of detail (in everything)... That just no longer works or feels right once you put in Havoc physics and close visuals.

The point is to strike a balance I think. Perhaps something that adapts to the player. Do you use a lot of ammo, in that case you will find more ammo. Are making your shots count less ammo.
Personally I liked it when the items and caps I had, had to be traded for ammo and supplies. When you came into town hoping to sell your loot for that extra ammo.

I'm against dynamic leveling (both in NPC's and economic effects).
Perks like scrounger really annoy me, for basically rewriting the past to provide you with additional loot that would otherwise not be there.
*example from the wiki*

For example, a single ammo container can occasionally yield as many as 28 missiles if you have this perk.

I'm not talking of FO3. Fallout 1&2 even with it's weighted ammo, allowed you access to an amount of ammo an armory would be jealous of.

Que!? (insert pear with mouth here). Ammo sacristy =/=> FO3 dialogue system.

The point wasn't about mastering all skills. It was that an extremely rare ammo system (ala Mad Max) would deter people from using and investing in gun skills.

Those comments were addressing more than one post at a time.

The problem with this is that it limits your character design choice. Tagging skills in unknown skills is never possible. And you have to wait in investing in a skill until you've come across something to learn it from.

Should it be?
In Fallout [1 & 2] your PC is the next guy the Overseer/Elder picks to send out for the chip/GECK. Your PC is a typical vault guy/tribal with a past that has undefined specifics; By contrast, in FO3 your entire life is laid out, your family, friends, school, aptitudes, and even your experience with firearms. In FO1 the PC may plausibly know just about anything, while in FO3 the PC is overly defined, and the idea that they can tag energy weapons, or big guns is kind of absurd.

[Mel E]

Should it be?
In Fallout [1 & 2] your PC is the next guy the Overseer/Elder picks to send out for the chip/GECK. Your PC is a typical vault guy/tribal with a past that has undefined specifics; By contrast, in FO3 your entire life is laid out, your family, friends, school, aptitudes, and even your experience with firearms. In FO1 the PC may plausibly know just about anything, while in FO3 the PC is overly defined, and the idea that they can tag energy weapons, or big guns is kind of absurd.

It is kind of absurd, but of a necessary kind.
Most people aren't going to hold back a load of skillpoints (when the game doesn't force you to use them all outright) for the skill they might come across later. Though it's not that realistic to know of all the skills at the start, it's not that fun to find that the skill you really want comes to you half way through the game and you already put focus on several other skills. Skills that open up later are going to be less used, because the others skills are better developed.

[Beulah Bell]

It is kind of absurd, but of a necessary kind.
Most people aren't going to hold back a load of skillpoints (when the game doesn't force you to use them all outright) for the skill they might come across later. Though it's not that realistic to know of all the skills at the start, it's not that fun to find that the skill you really want comes to you half way through the game and you already put focus on several other skills. Skills that open up later are going to be less used, because the others skills are better developed.

This seems like crippling the game to accommodate the impatient ~yet Fallout was a game series for the patient player.

*I know that I would almost always play with 5 points in reserve.

**Its not good (in the long run) to have a "yes men" style game that caves in and allows you to do whatever you want in any situation ~ makes spoiled brats too when applied to child rearing

[Sammie LM]

You should never design a system that encourages you not to develop your character. That's a failure of epic proportions, especially for an RPG.

[JAY]

Do you guys reckon Vegas will be mostly destroyed like Washington D.C or will it have spared the nuclear blasts a bit more like Reno? I'm just trying to think of how the city might look. I suppose some of the buildings would have to be destroyed so that it looks like a Fallout game and not a Tom Clancy one.

I don't know what was directly nuked in the Fallout games.

[sam]

To my knowledge all the Really big mayor cities. Like in the originals San Fran and La where leveled to the ground basicly. So I'm guessin most if all cities of that size and concentration would have been hit too.

[Britney Lopez]

Do you guys reckon Vegas will be mostly destroyed like Washington D.C or will it have spared the nuclear blasts a bit more like Reno? I'm just trying to think of how the city might look. I suppose some of the buildings would have to be destroyed so that it looks like a Fallout game and not a Tom Clancy one.

http://defonten.az/New_Reno_1920.jpg

[Philip Rua]

Hopefully Vegas will look really hammered and seriously more wasteland feel than Washington D.C. was. I mean really, after 200 years, and no maintenance, any building built like 50s style houses were are sure to be A LOT worse than they are in FO3. Hopefully the buildings in Vegas will give us more of a Stalingrad type enviroment.

http://www.topfoto.co.uk/gallery/rian1941_1960/images/prevs/1044634.jpg
http://www.talkingproud.us/ImagesHistory/Soviet60th/Stalingrad.jpg
http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/64/127264-004-206B38E9.jpg

[RaeAnne]

I mean really, after 200 years, and no maintenance, any building built like 50s style houses were are sure to be A LOT worse than they are in FO3.

We haven't been told anything official regarding where NV is set in the Fallout universe timeline, right? I mean they could distance themselves from the events of other games if they wanted to, and have it set even before the events of FO1 (not that I'd necessarily want to see that - a more fitting place would be between the events of FO2 and 3 if you ask me).

And yeah, after 200 years most pre-war structures would have collapsed a long time ago, but I for one don't mind this realism "error" since exploring those old sites is so damn fun.

[Irmacuba]

Hopefully Vegas will look really hammered and seriously more wasteland feel than Washington D.C. was. I mean really, after 200 years, and no maintenance, any building built like 50s style houses were are sure to be A LOT worse than they are in FO3. Hopefully the buildings in Vegas will give us more of a Stalingrad type enviroment.

http://www.topfoto.co.uk/gallery/rian1941_1960/images/prevs/1044634.jpg
http://www.talkingproud.us/ImagesHistory/Soviet60th/Stalingrad.jpg
http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/64/127264-004-206B38E9.jpg

I don't know, I think FO3 pulled it off quite well. You don't want it too leveled otherwise it can become boring to explore.

That concept art is fantastic btw. I really hope the final game looks something along those lines.

[Naughty not Nice]

This seems like crippling the game to accommodate the impatient ~yet Fallout was a game series for the patient player.

*I know that I would almost always play with 5 points in reserve.

**Its not good (in the long run) to have a "yes men" style game that caves in and allows you to do whatever you want in any situation ~ makes spoiled brats too when applied to child rearing

Not really, Fallout 1&2 did this as well. You design your character before you start the game.
Though it is true that it seems strange that you learned all those skills in the vault and especially a tribal village, the alternative is to either allow access during or quickly after the introduction part (people already complained about having to do the FO3 intro over each new game) or let you come across them late in the game, finding that you can never catch up your energy weapons unless you focus on it solely and neglect all others skills, screwing up the character you had planned until then.
The first one is essential pointless, except for a making it seem somewhat logical (so hey, here's this book/computer file about big guns, now you know and can get better at it). The other is limiting the players options.

[Your Mum]

Not really, Fallout 1&2 did this as well. You design your character before you start the game.
Though it is true that it seems strange that you learned all those skills in the vault and especially a tribal village, the alternative is to either allow access during or quickly after the introduction part (people already complained about having to do the FO3 intro over each new game) or let you come across them late in the game, finding that you can never catch up your energy weapons unless you focus on it solely and neglect all others skills, screwing up the character you had planned until then.
The first one is essential pointless, except for a making it seem somewhat logical (so hey, here's this book/computer file about big guns, now you know and can get better at it). The other is limiting the players options.

I would have to say, "that's too bad... Your PC became a big-gun rocket & grenade specialist before you ever saw an energy rifle to study or learn to be good with... That's just tough".

No amount of debate can convince me that crafting a game so you can "recover" from previous commitments is a good thing; As I see it, it is the game industry's equivalent of, "Everyone at the softball game gets a trophy, and no one goes home a loser". This kind of insanity goes counter to biological brain development and fosters a fantasy world in one's real life.

If I make a character in a game that finds a sniper rifle and commits to mastering it completely, and then finds an energy weapon and can't use it... that makes sense and I'd not have it any other way ~If the guns were reversed, he'd be an expert in laser weapons that are not affected by wind speed at 500 yards (and not be very good with a sniper's rifle) :shrug: ~this is normal no?

Fallout let the player tag whatever they wanted and within context it was plausible that the PC could know these skills before hand; Its not plausible in FO3, and a change in the mechanics might have been warranted if it worked smooth and showed good results.

In FO:NV if the PC again has a fully defined past, this mechanic again won't make reasonable sense; Though if you start in a vault and spend an hour or two defining your PC, then perhaps something like visiting the vault archives (library) could allow the PC to unlock certain skills (or discover new skills entirely).

[Vicki Blondie]

And when random luck determines whether or not tagging and wasting skill points on small guns or energy weapons is a total waste.. then it's bad luck? No. Stop supporting bad ideas.

But you aren't even arguing the right point, no surprise there. If you find something and invest in it, that's a choice you make and you can get tangible benefits from it immediately. That has nothing to do with spending tags, skills and/or perks on a weapon type you won't see for many gameplay hours. Someone is just supposed to assume they will find it and it will work out?

Just because something was in Fallout doesn't mean it was done well. Sorry, the games weren't perfect. They had many flaws. Deal with it.

[The Time Car]

And when random luck determines whether or not tagging and wasting skill points on small guns or energy weapons is a total waste.. then it's bad luck? No. Stop supporting bad ideas.

If you find something and invest in it, that's a choice you make and you can get tangible benefits from it immediately.

?

Who?
[my apologies, but I don't think I understand the post ~But I do agree with parts of it.]