Using google now.

It was a few years later I think. I'm not sure of the exact time table but Bethesda didn't get the rights to Fallout immediately after Interplay closed shop. It was some time later.

My 2001 PC might not be able to run that...
Legitimately.
I can run WoW, but not without problems.
I guess I'll just have to wait it out.

So.... does anyone have a source to clarify how lockpicking will be in New Vegas?

Your 2001 PC should be able to run it fine. It was released in 1999. (And yes, it's an absolutely awesome game with some of the best dialogue writing I've ever seen, though if you dislike reading you might not like it so much)

I do tend to replay FO2 more than FO1. FO1 has a better story and tone, but FO2 has gameplay improvements and more to do.


That's true. And though I generally don't like pop culture references in Fallout, I about choked with laughter when you give Renesco the glasses in New Reno and he asks what you want in return and one of the things you can say is - "Someday, and that day may never come - I'll call upon you to do service for me. But until that day accept these glasses as a gift on my daughter's wedding day". His sputtering exclamation of "What the hell are you talking about?!" is golden.

Obsidian always has great dialogue in their games, so I am excited about that in New Vegas. The dialogue possible in Alpha Protocol between your character and Conrad Marburg is incredibly tense and well-written, allowing you to play it nonchalant, arrogant, insulting, cool, ignorant, or professional, all with appropriate responses and reactions from the NPC, steering the conversation in wildly different directions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xokWEaLono&feature=related The sound is a little out of sync, but you can see how good the writing is.

Alpha Protocol also has an interesting lockpicking mechanic where you can attempt any lock regardless of skill level, but the larger the disparateness between the lock difficulty and your skill, the more tumblers where present to align and the shorter the time you had to pick the lock. Timed lockpicking may not fit well with traditional locks like exist in Fallout though. (And . . . back on topic! :laugh: )


It has been confirmed that the lockpicking and hacking minigames will be identical to those in FO3.

Good observation i would like to point out that Mass Effect did a excellent job at multiple styles of dialog as well.

I'm just fine with the minigame setup we have now. It doesn't take me more than a few moments to get into any lock I need to get into.

I always wondered where the character found the screwdriver.

Fantastic game ~utterly. I own two copies of the four CD set, and I just bought it again from GOG tonight. (installing it as I type this).

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/planescape_torment

But on topic... I think this topic was answered many times over. The answer is that it will be as it was (in FO3).
*Though one can hope for a switch, from "Force Lock 10%" to "Use Skill: 62%" :whistling:

I liked the way they did lockpicking in FO3 better. But then, I like minigames in general.

Well I read the entire post now.
And I'm completely lost.
I don't like reading long texts because I'm really thick.
So... Yeah...
Can you uhm... Simplify that`?

Simplify what, gabriel77dan? You snipped the entire post - I don't know which of the several I've made in the thread that you are referring to. If in regards to the original post, basically if you want the break down "Crayola-style" as we said in the Marines: Pure stat-based lockpicking only works well in PnP games. Skill gates to determine whether you can attempt the lock or not, combined with player skill, are the best for video games. Otherwise baby-stepping is encouraged as the optimal strategy for progress.

Meant the first post, think I get what you're saying.
But I'll reply later I'm off to work in a nano-second.

Why is it best, though? Because it detracts from the characterskill since there can be no minigame that would be equally challenging for everyone (to some it's a difficult chore, and to some it's just annoying busywork, and to some it's fine) - thus making it also distract from the character?

There are ways to discourage baby-stepping - e.g. by making it a chore enough that the tedium of it encourages the player to quit hitting the quickload and accept that a skillboost is needed.

Maybe a minigame isn't necessary, but having lockpicking based on a dice roll versus a percentage chance doesn't work very well. Player's will always save and reload until they get the result they want. The only other way I know to discourage baby-stepping is to do what some Rogue-likes have done, and either eliminate saves or save over the single save available immediately once a result is reached. People wouldn't be happy about that. Plus, those actions still didn't stop people from baby-stepping! They just left the game to copy their save file!

Human nature means people naturally seek optimal strategies in everything they do. It's a survival mechanism of pretty much every life form ever. Baby-stepping is an optimal game strategy. It is cheap, it is probably "cheating", but no one is there sitting over your shoulder making a face at you or telling you how awful you are for using it, and the game doesn't even know you are using it - from its perspective, you are only doing everything once - it is everyone else in your personal gaming Groundhog's Day scenario.

The only way to prevent baby-stepping is not, in my opinion, to make it a chore or tedium or penalize, but to reward NOT baby-stepping. Since the game literally can't tell if you are doing so or not, you need to design the game mechanics and skills not to be a random chance of failure or success. Instead, skill gates or requirements mean that you either can always do something, or you can't do it at all. I know that sounds a little dogmatic, and in real life, flukes do happen, but they are hard to put into a put into a game without also introducing a lot of stress and frustration. Because with the chance of fluke success, you must also have the chance of fluke failure.

And dice rolls versus percentages can be really annoying sometimes. For instance, today I was playing FO2, and my character had an 80% chance of hitting an enemy. I got two chances to hit them a turn, and I didn't hit them for 12 straight turns. What are the odds? I'm not about to subject myself to unneeded math, but missing 24 times in a row made me want to kill something (but I couldn't). I sometimes run into the same situation with locks. I have a very high lockpick score, and I know this footlocker in a Raider base must have an easy lock, but I end up failing several times before it pops open. I almost feel the need to save before trying ANY lock, even when I have a high skill stat. Dice are needed in PnP games - they aren't in video games.

Bethesda had the right idea with their changes to how skills worked in FO3. Weapon skills help determine damage and spread and accuracy, but if you hit the enemy, you still do damage. Medicine determines how much you can heal - not if you can heal. Repair determines how much condition you can restore to something, not whether or not you can restore it. And the skill gates attached to everything force some real C&C on the player. If you didn't invest in Repair, those leaking pipes or repairing that robot are simply beyond you. Didn't invest in the Medicine skill? You have no idea what is wrong with that woman. Decided to beef up Big Guns instead of Lockpicking? You aren't going to fluke your way into that safe. Yes, the chance of some amazing success yanked from the jaws of failure is gone, but for me, that is a small price to pay for elimination of all the frustration of random chance. And let's be honest - anyone with patience could baby-step their way to "amazing success yanked from the jaws of failure" if they wanted to. Only if you played with restraint and were honest enough to stand by every failure would that amazing success mean anything significant to you.

Also, notice how Obsidian is now giving visible skill gate numbers to skill related dialogue in New Vegas. Now there will be no baby-stepping it either. You'll know whether the bluff will work or not. Whether you remain in character and try it anyway (for the unique failing dialogue they have added for such options), or decide against when you see you won't succeed is up to you now. And that really isn't so unrealistic either - most of us can tell immediately with people whether a lie will work on them or not, or at least have a good idea.

Sorry to give you another essay to read, gabriel77dan! :whistling:

I don't actually disagree with your point, especially the "Maybe a minigame isn't necessary".

But the way I see it, penalizing baby-stepping by (for example) making an attempt to take a certain amount based on the lock difficulty and chance of success, with numbered attempts (perhaps even with a soft skillgate that allows sufficient skill to open the lock without a chance) poses a question to the player, how much is one willing to go through in order to get the job done. How many times is one willing to go through a sequence of, say, y seconds of animation for x times-reload-y seconds of animation for x times-reload - rince and repeat ad nauseum? If a player truly does want crawl through it, I'd say let him (I know I couldn't bother).

I like situations that are unpredictable to a certain degree. And success achieved through chance is - to me at least - more rewarding than "being able - not being able". This ofcourse doesn't apply to speech where you either know or don't know the right words, but just to those activities in which the character skill can offer the element of "fluke" like lockpicking and hacking.

I prefer the way in F3 .
i think gamers would be more relaxed if there was high availability of lockpick pins .

But flukes are really only possible with certain actions. You can open some locks through luck - mainly the cheap ones - but some locks are impossible to open by chance. And I don't think ANY hacking can be done by chance. You either know what you are doing or you don't. Most of the time even doing simple hacking - like guessing a password - is beyond the realm of chance if you don't know something about who the computer's owner is and their personality, or how many letters the password contains. The odds of random fluke success on something like that are like picking the correct word out of an unabridged dictionary - providing the person only used a single word - or an actual word at all - or spelled it correctly, etc. You know what a fluke would be in regards to success with hacking? Finding the password on a post-it stuck to the monitor.

In the real world, flukes have much lower chances of occurring than would matter in a game. Let's take a cheap combination lock, like Gizmo mentioned earlier in the thread. What do you think the odds were of him turning it to the exact correct combination on the first try without even looking at the lock? I bet lower than 1 in a 1000. Much lower. But lets just say the odds were 0.1% for success. Is it worth it in a game to even have those kinds of fluke odds versus "being able - not being able"? Even baby-stepping isn't going to help much there.

I like unpredictable as well. I thrill to the roll of a die in PnP games. Life or success teetering on the edge of a spinning chunk of plastic. But in PnP, the dice lay where they fall. There are no "do-overs" or reloads. You have to live (or die) with each failure. But a computer game can't enforce those same consequences. It can't reach across the table and smack you for trying to roll again. Beyond that, it can't make failure as interesting as a good GM can. In a PnP game, failure to pick the lock on a door isn't the end of things either - new strategies to gain admittance are possible, etc. Not so in a video game. If you can't pick the lock, you can't get in - a dead end. So if you want in, you keep trying over and over and over again, baby-stepping along until you achieve success. All you end up doing is wasting your time doing something that is repetitive and not fun to reach what is already a foregone conclusion. Better in that case, I say, to cut out the chance and frustration and leave it with a simple, "Yes, you can" or "No, you can't".

*Goes off to put on some coffee*

Yea but then what stops you from sitting there trying to force the lock over and over until it works? You could get through any door in the game by simply mashing a button. I agree it 'breaking' is stupid, but they need some other way of limiting you.

well that′s what the limited amount of bobby pins are for.

I think we're thinking too much in to realism of this "fluke" aspect here (real life possibilities and such). I mean, it's only fluke to the player but not necesserely so much to the character. The skill (in this case) is an abstraction of the characters basic understanding of the subject through which he operates, and with the player guidance, either succeeds or fails. The abstraction comes to play in the attempt by the premise that, unless the game tells otherwise, nothing is basically beyond possible (that's how I've viewed it anyway) and purely based on luck in blind attempts. The success or failure then represents the characters aptitude in solving the task. Think about the lock being picked (or a computer being hacked) as a Rubiks cube, the basic understanding of how it works is there (in a game presented by skill being over 0%). Now, someone tries it for the first time and is confuzzeled, but as he has the basic understanding there is a fair possibility that he "gets it". Gameplaywise this possibility to "get it" through what knowledge is available is presented through the skill. So, I don't view it so much as a lucky strike, but more as an excersise in agility and wits in what ever task is attempted.

As for baby-stepping... As I said, if it is properly discouraged, and a player still wishes to go through all the trouble, I don't see it as a problem as I don't do it - sometimes I'd like to, but I am not that determined or patient; and I think doing so robs the pleasure of succeeding no matter what the prize. I do agree that hard skillgates (can or can't) are more effective in restricting player access and forcing characterbuilding, but I just prefer having a possibility (no matter how low the initial chance).

I have mixed feelings about the hacking mini-games from FO3 (which are supposedly going to be directly ported to FONV)

If there was one thing about being able to raise most skills to 100% by level 30 in FO3 it's this, hacking is SO much easier when your Science is at 100%. I've only tried it on one character build but it does make a world of difference from say 50% where I usually keep it. Hacking is actually tolerable and less hit or miss when your skill is that high.

With that said, unless there are broader uses for the science skill in FONV I probably won't raise science so high since there will be less skill points to attain distribute by Level 30. The hacking minigame in general though is kind of a pain and I rely more on luck than anything else because determining the right combo in your head can get boring sometimes...

As for the lockpicking mini-games, I didn't mind them so much. The only locks that I found were a real nuisance were the very hard locks, mostly because the tolerances for when the lockpick would break was really tight and you really had to focus to make sure you got it right. I suppose that required a bit more hand-eye skill than is normally required for your traditional RPG. Listening for the clicks and getting vibration feedback from the PS3 dualshock controller also helps.

Still, I like FO3's lock picking system better than say Oblivion's, it just seemed more intuitive, though I do like the "Auto Pick" option of Oblivion better than the "Force Lock" of FO3. Because the "Force Lock" had the chance of permanently breaking the lock, I pretty much never took that chance.

I personally don't mind if these minigames get ported straight from FO3, since I'm pretty used to working with them in FO3 I won't have to learn some contrived new system.

It will probably be a bit more of a challenge in FONV however, since you won't be able to max your peripheral skills as much as you could in FO3 so I will probably not go higher than 50% or 75% to get past the Average and Hard terminals/locks respectively, in either Science or Lockpick. I'm also hoping that skill mags will give a high enough boost (say 25%) to get me past the "Very Hard" locks and terminals...

even though all you had to do was make a save prior to attempting a lock, the FO3 system was still good for lockpicking and it worked fined, you couldn't get in any lock unless you have the right skill level so that did prevent you from opening all the locks, at least until late in the game when you had the skill high enough, and that worked fine, early on you couldn't get in many locks, so there is a prevention system, the lockpicking system is fine how it is and oblviions lockpicking system was annoying and i liked FO3's way of doing it. so this is not an area of the game they need to"fix".