Quite the opposite, I'm a hard core PnP RPG-er.

I recognise the threngths and weaknesses of both ways.

Because I believe New Vegas is as close to a true sequel to Fallout 1 and 2 that we will ever see. It takes place in the same general area. It has at least 2 characters that I know of that are connected to Fallout 2. 1 Was even a follower in Fallout 2. And in general, Obsidian is leagues above Bethesda in dialogue writing and story telling. Though I do have to say that Bethesda is quite good at visual stories, with props and things.

Are you really only going to read the first sentence of my extensive post and then ask for clarification I already gave in the same post? That's kind of insulting.


I agree that kicking down a door or blowing a lock should be an option. Such things were available to you in FO1 and FO2. But such an action should come with a penalty - alerting the nearby NPCs of your larceny, initiating combat (because kicking in a door or setting off explosives in a civilized area could certainly be considered agression), and a chance that some or all of the contents of the container are broken by using such tactics, leaving only Junk to loot.


Sounds like it would be a good option, and would prevent the baby-stepping I mentioned.


It sounds like an excellent way of handling lockpicking without a minigame, but it still sounds like skill gates are involved. 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons had an interesting mechanic where if you failed on a lock you couldn't try again until you gained a level. I don't know if anyone used it in practice (since few campaigns are going to have adventures revisit the same area as a lock after character levels have come and gone), but it would probably work much better for a video game.


I would prefer there to be some small chance at success always, but I see no good way of doing it in a video game. As I said, before, such chances and dice rolls work amazingly well in a PnP game, but in video games, it simply encourages baby-stepping your way to success. If a player knows that there is, let's say, a suit of T-51b power armor behind a locked door, and the player knows that they have a 5-10% chance of picking the lock to said door, most are going to be unable to resist trying and trying again until they succeed - the potential payoff is just too great to ignore. If what is behind the door is not known, the mystery may even add to the need to get in and see. In a PnP game run by a human, the GM could simply tell them that the lock has proved to be beyond the current skills of their character if they failed the first roll, and the player has to except that.


I think skill gates are needed if you are going to have a RPG that uses a mix of player skill and character stats. In the end, it does come down to whether or not the player is going to have the commitment to role-play the character the way they designed them, but skill gates help.

Just having the mini-lockpick game for the player to attempt to open regardless of skill becomes game breaking when player skill outstrips any possible ability of the character. We all know that this is what happened in Oblivion, and was the reason skill gates were added to FO3. No one invested in Lockpicking in Oblivion after their first playthrough, because even with a skill of 5, a skilled player could pick Very Hard locks with ease. That doesn't make any sense at all in an RPG.

Skill gates are a compromise that allow player skill and character stats to both matter.

And thank you, Gizmo, for reading my entire post. Sometimes I wonder if it is worth typing out such long and thought out posts if people are just going to read the first sentence and run with it.

As I said, I see only one. Feargus Urquhart (he worked on the HUB)

Sawyer and probably most of the Obsidian team were working on Van Buren, the scratched Fallout 3. Just because it got canned because the Interplay CEO dude is an idiot doesn't mean they didn't work on Fallout prior to this.

I really liked how lockpicking works in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, where you'd still be able to attempt to unlock anything, but would fail if you didn't have the appropriate amount of points in your lockpicking feat (at least I think that's how it worked, it's been a while since I played it). So it sounds like how the skill/speech options in dialogue work in New Vegas, where you need a certain amount of points in a skill in order to succeed.

That's almost spot on to how it should be. You didn't have a Luck stat to consider in Bloodlines but otherwise yes, spot on. The only difference for Fallout would be your Luck stat could swing in your favor and help you unlock a door that you really aren't skilled enough to unlock. As in your hand accidentally slips but that causes you to trip the last tumbler at just the right moment to unlock the door. Alternatively, your Luck stat could play against you and keep you from unlocking a door that you are skilled enough to unlock. Again, your hand slips at just the wrong moment and you break your lockpicking device.

I agree with this, but I have not found an RPG that tried it that I liked ~much. (For me its either one or the other ~like Garlic and Cake).
:goodjob:

*Longer posts usually have more to say on the matter. :rolleyes:


Josh Sawyer didn't work on Fallout (nor did Chris Avelone); I know some would call this semantics, but there are real differences in the treatment between Fallout 1 & 2. Of the Fallout devs, Feargus is the only one that actually worked on Fallout and works at Obsidian (that I am aware of, and I am fully aware that I could be wrong or amiss, and some have worked uncredited, or I just didn't see them in the credits).

I never played in F2, I hope it's not like Oblivion. Damn, lockpicking in ES 4 made me rage so hard.
I found F3's lockpicking quite challenging though but the only problem was that it was like obligatory to lockpick everything, everywhere.
"RAMIREZ, LOCKPICK THAT DOOR!"

I'm almost 100% sure that I read that Sawyer worked on the canceled Fallout 3. I wonder if he would be so kind as to pop in here and clear this up for us. :ninja:

No need. Its a fact. (That was actually the best part of his recent interview IMO, where he recounts a bit of it).

***Edit:

Speaking of being wrong... It seems that I am. Obsidian's Wikipedia entries for Chris Jones and Darren Monahan list both of them as working on Fallout. :facepalm:
(with some sort of footnote that I can't find).

***Edit 2: Found the footnote. Maybe I'm not wrong.

I really hated breaking bobby pins in "Fallout 3" because I was not as adept with the controller/keyboard+mouse as, say, a 13-year-old. Successful attempts derived from statistics works for me.

Then why are you saying he never worked on Fallout? He may not have worked on Fallout 1 or 2 but he did work on Fallout and I'm sure if he's even vaguely passionate about his work he was disappointed that his work never saw the light of day. I personally would feel a sense of ownership over the franchise, even if I actually owned nothing of it. The fact that he invested the better part of 2 years (maybe longer) of his life on a game that was canceled. To someone like me who is passionate about creating, it would be like a pregnancy that goes 6 months then ends in miscarriage. It's heartbreaking. I know that from experience, the miscarriage part I mean.

Gizmo is saying none of the New Vegas devs worked on Fallout 1 except Feargus, not that none of them ever worked on a Fallout game before.

Hmm... ok... Well still, I think a good portion of them probably did work on Fallout 2.

Yes. (http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1118394-lockpicking-like-f2-or-f3/page__view__findpost__p__16436151 )

Yes, and did a great job IMO.

It uses a skill for mechanical affinity; the better you are with machines, the better your chances with locks. I don't know... but I assume that its skill rolls and not gates.

I believe Gizmo is more concerned about those developers that worked on the original game than those that worked on a sequel because everything since the first Fallout game has been largely derivative, and those additions that deviated very far from the original in terms of tone and other things haven't been very well received by everyone. See: The pop culture references (which have been addressed in NV), the Vault experiments, New Reno mobsters, Hubology. talking Deathclaws, wanamingos, etc. The Vault experiments are derived from only about 2 sentences in Fallout 2, one on a computer, and the other from the President, and people took the ball and ran with it, especially in the Fallout Bible (which alternately has things become canon, and removes other things from canon as Chris Avellone changes his mind). I find it particularly telling that we never encounter experimental vault residents in the games - there always seems to be another "control Vault" or one whose experiment was so innocuous that the Vault still functions like they were originally said to in Fallout 1. The Vault experiments make no sense unless Vault-Tec believed a nuclear war would never really occur. Anyway, that's a whole different topic.

Having people that worked on FO2 working on NV is nice, but not entirely reassuring, as some things in FO2 were pretty bad design or writing decisions. And though many members of Van Buren are working on NV, and Van Buren has a mythical cult status of presumed awesome-ness about it, we have no guarantees that it would have been good or awesome, just our assumptions, so there isn't much we can draw from as far as expectations go with those develop staff previously involved with it.

Well said, though of Fallout 1 and 2, I think I prefer Fallout 2. Fallout 1 did have a much better main story, I will admit. But the general improvements in Fallout 2 such as companion controls help me to look over all the silliness of some of the story and the more random and silly special encounters.

I would like to point out this has wandered from a topic about lockpicking to one about developers and story.

How else are we supposed to pass the time waiting for this beautiful game?

Not to mention the general level of dialogue writing being much better in Fallout 2 than Fallout 1, especially for the protagonist. Yeah, most of the Talking Head dialogue is pretty awesome in F1, but most of the rest of the dialogue isn't anything to write home about except to say 'this is very generic and boring', again, especially what the protagonist says. Fallout 2 has a lot more characters with better-written dialogue, even though its main plot isn't nearly as good as Fallout 1's. The Fallout 1 dialogue was on par or worse than the Fallout 3 dialogue in most places (though it never had such a stupid sentence as '[Intelligence] So you fight the good fight with your voice?', so it's still up there which has the worse dialogue). I'm very happy that some of the old developers, and Obsidian in general, are involved in New Vegas.

Touche' sir. It was basically everyone repeating the same thing over and over again anyway.

Since it seems to be the new topic in the topic and i am curious, does anyone know specifically why Black Isle Studios disbanded?

BiS was a division of Interplay. When Interplay went down the toilet, they laid off their employees and that was the end of BiS.

With Chris Avalone's other great game (Planescape: Torrment)?

I was unaware of that, thanks. I assume this is when gamesas bought the rights for Fallout?