Fallout 4 Speculation, Suggestions and Ideas #232
The map would need to be larger.
Game Skyrim Forum
http://www.gamesas.com/
http://www.gamesas.com/fallout-speculation-suggestions-and-ideas-232-t378754-100.html
The map would need to be larger.
Been suggesting that since 2008.
I would think that most towns would have to restrict the car to outside the town as well.
I would of course, love the map to be on par with the originals... something like a FO2/Skyrim hybrid would be nice.
*Something like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mhb0u90nucxjrta/Fallout-styled-3d-map.mp4?dl=0
The real problem is that cars like a chryslus highwayman would need proper ground to ride on. The streets are broken and that's a flavorful reason imho why normal streetmobiles (non modified unlike F2's) haven't made it back so far. All-terrain or military vehicles and motorcycles are a different thing.
The repair feature:
It isn't broken. Ha! Repair is broken, fix it. Hihi. Every weapon (NV style guns serves as example) has several statistics:
-Damage per shot
-Rate of fire
-Critical chance multiplier
-Critical damage
-Action Point cost (VATS)
-Spread
-Magazine capacity
-Weight
-A Skill requirement
-A Strength requirement
-Weapon Durability
These statistics can be converted into pros and cons (with additional factors like ammunition quality and availability taken into account) for different playstyles. If you have no LUCK, what do want with high critical multiplier? Without strength, you don't even meet the requirements! High spread? Either you fight close quarter and specialize in it, or you take some Steady and guess what? You can specialize in taking chems, too! Wow (Logan's Loophole was op and should be cut as a trait, there should be no need for it -even as a mode- with good game design)! The skill system in Fallout allows for pretty much everything. And a weapon that easily breaks, it needs you to have high repair or find other means of fixing it. The same goes for armor and other kinds of weapons.
See this is the context in which you have to observe REPAIR. Weapon durability is not part of a situation, it's part of any kind of equipment, one of the parts that either gives it quality or takes away from it. EQUIPMENT IS BOUND IN THE SAME SYSTEM THAT ANIMATES THE WHOLE OF THE FRANCHISE: THE DICHOTOMY OF EXCEL AND CRAP.
I love the LAER (+Elijah's advanced one), because it's a primary example for the context in which weapon durability is to be seen.
It would be neat if the player had to leave the car parked, in order to travel straight across a mountain; or decide to spend the days [and fuel] to drive around it.
*FO4 really needs the concept of actually accounting for time, and of being late ~restored back to the series, as it always had been previously.
Difficult one (because WAITING -or essentially waiting, like having to find a way around an invisible wall- is NOT fun) but you're right.
First: Healing items should heal over time to prevent menu exploiting.
Second: Actions like repair and doctor's bags (or FIRST AID YEAH, BRING IT BACK BABY) should be shown to require time. No repair during combat! Have the screen go black, then clear again, boom, 30 minutes spent on time account.
Third: A sense of urgency brought into quests. And by that I mean quests that give you all the information you need BEFORE you decide to go on the mission (better not the main quest). No unfair
Fourth: A sense of actually progressing time. I love CHAPTERS in a STORY that introduce new elements that haven't been there before. Have some SURPRISES.
An other point is availability of items. Quality stimpaks = scarce. Certain ammunitions = rare.
We would get rid of that stupid fast travel worldbuilding breaking teleport. Of course, we might get rid of that without cars, but there would be complains.
Yeah, it breaks worldbuilding, that's a true word.
Why would I even care making the game world and traversing it interesting when I can just lean back in my comfortable seat and be like: "Hey, why care? Players gonna use fast travel, so c'mon. Not going to make the game world awesome when in a game about travelling you don't have to make traveling interesting or feel like travel whatsoever."
First: TRAINS OR SOMETHING! Fast travel shouldn't be a mighty map device but a successfully integrated PART of the WORLD.
Second: WORLD MAP! We need the feeling of a true wasteland, with several points of interest and vast spaces of barren lands in between LIKE IN THE OLD GAMES (I'm not nostalgic, I can't be, since I didn't play the originals before F3/NV). And you know what's handy? You wouldn't even need to care about designing the game world to accomodate this feeling of 'wasteland' to that extreme amount and have it be like a themepark nontheless (which totally breaks the feeling for some). Because that which is of interest is the show! And this does not come at the expense of exploration, because you explore the map AAAANND you explore the points of interest (varying in size) like F3 or Vegas!
Third: TRAVELING = PART OF ROLEPLAYING! Seriously, we have a Survival skill. This could become what it's meant to be and make traveling easier for the skilled people (by enabling you to find ways across mountains on the world map or making map travel faster or helping you find oasises and hidden locations for example - along with the 'hardcoe' elements of NV that should come by default imo).
There is, which is the way in which every item gets the correct decay rate to prevent it from being broken one way or another, and no such way exists.
Also, that video shows nothing that is broken, so I am not sure what it was you were trying to prove with it. Unless you are suggesting the entire concept of character skill is broken, and that every weapon should kill realistically like a full on action game?
Except
A. It isn't a teleport, as time passes while you fast travel. Fast travel is a quick simulation of you walking to that place, not a teleport.
B. You can only fast travel somewhere you have already been, so you would have had to experiance all the world between there and location you walked from. Fast travel can't destroy worldbuilding, since it forces you to see the world at least once.
C. You shouldn't get rid of something no one forces you to use, you can just chose to not use it.
What do you mean? Is a weapon like LAER broken in your opinion?
A. C'mon you know how he meant it. It DOESN'T feel like traveling.
B. Makes the world stagnant. Everywhere you've been remains the same.
C. That's a good argument. But it has a deep flaw. First, you can excuse EVERYTHING with this argument. Second, it's not like fast travelling isn't taken into account when creating the world. And that is the root of the problem.
You know that this is not the logical conclusion. World map PLUS locations of a grander size than in Fallout and Fallout 2 is totally possible.
I'd like to see that... I can't, because it's not true... but I'd like to see it tried.
Wasn't bad in the first two games, but I missed the scale of the 3d locations. What would you say about combining both styles?
Well my opinion was based largely on concerns arising from seeing how horses were implemented in Skyrim. If driveable vehicles could be as good as, say Farcry3, that would be no problem. But, I just don't think the game engine that Bethesda uses could cope with it, as it's clearly not something it was designed for. Maybe when we really do get a "brand new engine", it's something that could be included in the game.
Anyway, motorbikes? cars? Forget them, I want one of http://www.defencetalk.com/pictures/showfull.php?photo=45400. (if you do an image search for "mobile military command post" you get some awesome vehicles, and the Russian cold-war era ones look quite Fallout-friendly)
Now, talking of maps and gameworlds, I see Boston gets mentioned a lot as a possible location for Fallout4. Is this just because "The Institute" is mentioned in Fallout3, or is there something more substantial behind the rumours?
The only substance I see behind the rumors is rumors (beth employees checking out Boston started it in 2011 or 12 I think). It's quite possible that it will indeed be Boston, since it was hyped in Fallout 3 with the Institute, yeah.
There are many possibilities for this location in my humble opinion. Those who think Bethesda will ruin it because androids, well if your trust in the developers is that low, they could just as well [censored] up any location. Androids being a bad idea as a whole is a different matter (and I think they can be executed well, if we diverge from the common tropes or subvert them).
With the Institute, we could explore transhumanism in a nonbiased way (we only have dystopian or utopian scenarios so far) for example.
It totallty is, the total area of all actually explorable areas is around 1/10 the size of the plyable game space of Fo3 or NV. All the stuff on the map isnt actually explorable, its like DAO's map, just a little less primtive.
Either it decays too fast, thus making it worthless, or it decays too slow, thus making it overpowered.
A. No form of map travel has ever felt like traveling, becuase you don't actually experiance the content between the places you travel. That's not really an argument.
B. Not true, new random encoutners can happen in places you have already been.
C. Not exactly, you can't avoid things like the repair feature, or the stat system, and still complete the game.
Except it really isnt, as theres tons of dynamic and random content happening in places you have already walked through. The only game so far that is built around the fast travel system is NV, since it removed any form of dynamic and/or random enoucnters for a 100% static world which heavily inctivized the use of the fast travel system by making nothing new happen.
Mostly it comes from The Elder Scrolls, ever since Redguard released in 1998, Bethesda has had clearly etablished pattern of dropping hints on what thier next game will be about, or where it will be set.
And Boston/The Institue is the only location mentioned multiple times across the base game and its DLC, besides The Pitt, but we got that in a DLC.
I lost the link of the thread that deal with that issue. My answer will be shorter than the previous article. Sorry for being shor.
A - You click on location X, you are at location X. Gameplaywise, it is a teleporter.
B - You can go from Goodspring to Primm, then teleport at Goodspring to go to Sloane, then teleport at Primm to go to Nipton. Feel like everything is one click away, not close to this or far to this. Only happen once.
C - Would you be kind enough to list me all the alternatives for travelling they included in Fo3-FoNV ? Alternative that applies often ?
To have a choice, you need options. Let's say you want to go from LA to NY, and only planes exist. You aren't force to use planes, but if you don't, you don't go to LA. If you could use cars/trains/bus/boats/motorbikes/horses, you could say you have choice and not take plane. But if you use planes, planes should also be used by other people. I didn't see much NPC use fast-travel. They wouldn't need me to give new got to all those NCR camps if they could use fast-travel.
You mean the "correct" as in real life or "correct" as in for the game. The latter, as "correct" as it can get for what the game intends, very much exists and is up to the designer but there is no universal "correct" that is "correct" everywhere.
The way it is handled there it is. The abstraction of "nick in the ear" for -5 HP doesn't work there because "show, don't tell", the character is not inept with the gun, the gun is inept. And the skill simply angering the bullets leads to stupid situations like that in the video; and others like backpedaling away from enemies or cricle strafing while spraying them full of lead that tickles them until they die while spamming stimpaks, with none of the guns having any "oomph" at all outside of the all too frequent criticals.
And no, I'm not suggesting for "realistic" shooter combat - quite the opposite, I'd want the series to move away from being combat heavy, for the [censored] that the combat is. I am suggesting that the skill actually concerns the character. The gun is the gun whether it takes 1 or 5 shots to the head (instead of 20+) to kill the opponent (or the PC), that the combat situations are not to be taken lightly especially if you lack in skill. The characters hardship and reward should come from actually scoring the hit (and not get hit yourself), not heating the ammunition.
A. Except, if it was a teleporter, time wouldn't pass in-game when you fast travel, which it does. Gameplay wise, fast travel is a process that makes your character walk to a place, but skips the actual visual process of you, the player, having to manually make the character walk there.
B. If you feel that way then don't use it, walk, see the sights of the randomly occurring events, well, in Fo3 at least, NV has no such things for unexplainable reasons.
C. Walking.
You do see NPCs use fast travel though, every time you see them walking around the wasteland, because that is what fast travel is.... walking, except you, the player, don't have to experiance the time your character spends walk. That's why the NCR needs you to deliver those orders.... because someone has to walk there, which is what you do, even if you fast travel there.
Fast Travel is no more teleportaton then using carriages or dragon riding to move to places across Skyrim is, they are all just methods of fade-to-black simulated travel that remove the need for the player to manually walk/ride for 10-20 real world minutes, while the character/carriage/dragon moves to another place.
And the designer intended for decay rates to be set at a point in which items decay at such a speed as to be useful, but not overpowered, which literally no game has achieved.
Except it isn't, as almost no one actually cares if its damage or accuracy that skill controls. Its no more or less stupid then a sword that very obviously hits an enemy, or a bullet fired from a gun at point blank range that should logically hit the enemy, not doing so because "LOL RNG SAYS SO!" In fact, I've seen more complaints about skill based accuracy, then I have skill based damage, as skill based damage still allows you to actually do SOMETHING to your enemy, which is far less frustrating then doing nothing at all to them, as such when you miss with skill based accuracy.
And skill does concern the character, if it didn't, you would be able to easily kill things with a single head-shot from most weapons, as damage would be realistic, which it isn't. While you may not prefer the means by which character skill is abstracted, that doesn't change the fact that your ability to do things well is character skill based.
As for your claim of "all too frequent criticals" the maximum base crit chance in Fo3 is 10%, from having 10 luck. The finesse perk can add another 5, and one specific path of the wasteland survival guide can add another +3, if you pick all snide answers when talking to Moria. That leads to a grand total of a 18% crit chance for the majority of weapons, if you get all three of those things. Now, when loking at the Fallout 3 weapon list
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_3_weapons
We can see that the overwhelming majority of weapons have a 2 or less crit multipler, which means that most weapons have a 36% or less chance of getting a crit, assuming you have all three of the crit bonuses listed above, which, not everyone has, leading to a even less crit chance then that. on avarage. That's actually pretty low, as most RPGs easily let you get a constant 50%+ crit chance.
The only weapons with a consistant crit chance in Fo3 or Nv are unarmed/melee weapons, and only if you have the ninja perk, which adds a +15% chance for crits with those weapons.
It's quite clear that in an FPS-RPG you have to get creative in order for combat not to be completely ridiculous but still be skill-based. Though I know jack [censored] about RPG mechanics, I never quite delved into it, but I would say that having Critical Failure be much more likely and creative would be a good solution. Or maybe say that XY gun can only be used with a Small Guns skill of 25 and even then Critical Failure is very likely.
So what? The designers job is to create the systems that enhance the experience the way they want it to be, if he does poor job, which he can, he needs to improve it, come up with a better solution.
Reverse that and you get "LOL I'M SHOOTING MARSHMALLOWS". It works with a sword since it is the character who does the blow with his strength and skill; that does not apply to firing a bullet. At least when it's about accuracy, your bullets get to do something when they hit.
And by the way, you put the "point blank should logically hit" there, while I never argued otherwise. I didn't say a thing about ranges, or even about RNG.
And it still baffels me that it is actually considered less frustrating that you are always succesful even though an individual success does next to nothing, compared to having less frequent successes that all pack a punch.
No, the skill concerns the guns. You can hit anything if you know your controls, and you can afford to miss a couple of shots because missing is not a concern for two things 1. an individual hit is insignificant, and 2. the game is designed to accommodate the bullet sponging so you are not really losing anything by missing those few shots amidst the dozens you put out before and after.
LAER isn't broken, just needs high repair/barter to be maintainable (and doesn't serve as primary weappin) - it's NOT worthless. Guess what, with some additional depth to repair (like the 4 stage system Undecaf proposed and different kits for field repair instead of only duplicate fixing) the system could become interesting and balanced.
And those weapons/armors that don't decay as fast should have some other DISadvantages to make up for you not requiring high repair.
A: Well, an essential teleport (during which you can't encounter anything) certainly is different from a map (WASTEland you know) you travel across while being shown how DAYS pass and that let's you encounter and find stuff. To me it feels like traveling (yeah not the rl equivalent, you have to translate it of course. Fast travel is a lame translation).
B: Yeah, can happen everywhere. That's not so special.
C: These things aren't what I was talking about. Random content is random. And thus it requires interchangeability to function. It's not 'living' content that is in any way bound to where you are. Not bound to locations and certainly not to characters.
This idea is most likely half-baked, but would a reactive cut scene of the pc walking through the wasteland for days (shifting from day to night etc) to get to his next location, while passing by landmarks in the game etc work? We could also have enemies provide an encounter with them traveling to the pc in the cutscene.
I'm not sure if I have the linguistic ability to proper depict my idea
But basically gizmo's video but brought up to current cinematic standards, instead of a red marker we have a fully rendered PC with his companions and instead of the satellite view we have something closer like a birds eye view of the journey and instead of the red lightning indicating an encounter we see it physically manifest?
All this is is a vague remark of "they should make it better", without actually giving any sort of detail into how to make it better.
The things in Cheeze's wishlist post are mostly actual arguments, things like
What do we want: No races like ghouls or super mutants
Why: because the game wouldn't react to that choice properly
How to do what we want: by either making it to where the game can react to those choices, or by not making the races at all.
This is a clear and complete idea, that can actually be followed through with.
All this turns out as
What do we want: better repair systems
How do we get this: by making repair mean more
In what way: by making it have more of an effect
How do we achieve that: by making it do more
It's nothing but an endless circular loop of "make it better" without actually saying anything about how to, and then complaining that the devs didn't find the magical other way that is asserted to exist, yet no on can actually seem to describe in any real detail. What makes it more annoying is that this tactic also assumes they didn't try to make it better, and couldn't find a way to do so, which is almost always actually what does happen. You can say "its their job to fix it" and "they should have made it better" all day, but if you can't actually go into detail about how to do so, then you shouldn't expect anyone else to find the magical "good way" to do it that you yourself cant explin in any detail beyond "it should be better".
-And as Morrowind showed, people end up being more frustrated by seeing MISS MISS MISS on the screen, then seeing their bullets hit and do little damage because the person is of high level.
-Unfortunately, that is a problem that has, and will, exist in every RNG accuracy game.
-It's because bullets dont always pack a punch in a skill based accuracy game. So not only do you not hit most of the time becuase the hit forumlas are designed to be stacked against you in every way possible, you arent even guaranteed to do any significant damage to the enemy when you do hit. which makes impactful hits even less frequent then they are now, unless you are very heavily overgeared/stat for the level of monster you are fighting.
-The skill concers your characters ability to use said gun in such a ay as to do the most damage with it.
1. Its only insignificant if you have a low weapon skill, and are using a terrible gun. Using something like the AMR, or any other end game weapon, makes every hit significant, becuase each hit does massive damage.
2. Not every shot IRL is a life or death situation either, especially when we have so many automatic guns that can shoot tons of bullets a mintue.
Missing would be logically highly significant in a game set in like the revolutionary war, when reloading took 5 mintues, but modern guns are called the great equalizer for a reason.
I never said it was, i gave a general statement about the problems of weapon decay in general.
That just makes those armors even less viable gameplay wise as not only do they still decay improperly, but they are now stacked with even more things that are likely just as imbalanced.
A. your character ahs already walked there once, and thus knows the dangers on the route, and how to avoid them. Thats the trade off for not just being able to fast travel everywhere from the get go.
B. All of Fallout's random events count happen on basically any tile of the overworld map. that's just how the series has alwys been.
C. Why would most content be bound to a location when it wouldl ogically have nothing to do with that location? Animals attack people and other animals all over the place, raiders will raid people anywhere they find them, stuff like that logically happens everywhere naturally.
Here's a bit of everything (including repair stuff):
General gameplay:
- More direct skill and stat uses on items, environment and NPC's (healing, repairing, examining, entering worldmap, etc) -- with a supportive interface in the vein of old school RPG's and adventure games.
- No level scaling; or, at most, an adjusting scaling where easy fights do not disappear when the more challenging ones appear.
- More frugal skillpoint economy and higher gaps between levels to make it slower.
- Upwards scaling skillpoint costs for mid and high level increments.
- Wold map and nodes large enough to support exploration (+classic map travel).
- Grid inventory (with both weight and space limits).
- One page character sheet.
- PDA pipboy.
- No compass markers for quests, no compass markers for locations, no compass markers for enemies.
- More comprehensive quest descriptions and mapmarkers for general quest areas (toggleable if possible), let the player find things out him self but don't leave him in the dark without any hints.
- Minimap with perception based (including distance) detection of close by NPC's or critters (also, perception/perk/trait based color codes for disposition).
- Less aggressive wilderness AI. Combat is generally where you want it (not always, but often).
Timed dynamic quests:
- Quests that have timelimits; but instead of said timelimit causing pure failure, it would open up new possibilities (where appropriate, not always).
Lockpicking, repairing, hacking, manual healing:
- A skillcheck with a timebar (not a "timelimit" but how long the attempt takes for the character based on skill versus task difficulty).
- No pausing the world. Everything happens in realtime, so you can get interrupted.
- No minigames.
Gunplay and VATS:
- Skills for projectile weapons greatly (!!!) affect accuracy (spread, sway), recoil control (each bullet fired throwing the aim off the target, and increasing spread), and general handling (reloads, holstering, unholstering, etc).
- Static bullet damage ranges regardless of skill, and generally higher damage output across the board.
- Melee/HtH skills affect attackspeed and damage.
- Critical failures.
- Close proximity penalties for firearms in.
- Less loot and supplies.
- Action points into combat resource; every action aside from moving eats up AP (shooting, reloading, opening inventory, doing stuff in inventory, quick key use.....).
- Focus on less frequent and less "run'n gun", but more slow paced, tactical, challenging and character driven combat.
- Categorized craftable and modifiable weapons with tangible upsides and downsides.
Healing and drugs:
- Tolerance meter for drugs and medication with severe OD effects.
- Maual healing (made viable and needed through less available provisions) - a skillcheck with a possibility to fail and critically fail to cause more damage.
- Animated stimuse to prevent spamming -- or, heal overtime.
Skillsystems:
- Retaining the premise, greatly upping the effects (skills and stats being more of requirements than recommendations as they are now), but revising the workings to better suit the current style of gameplay.
Example:
Point at a locked chest; click mousewheel; available commands drop down:
Examine (PER 5)
Pick Lock (54%)
Bash (27%)
Open (Locked)
Lock (--)
Repair (--)
-------------------
World Map
Heal
...
General gameplay:
The general gameplay would be quite similiar to F3 and F:NV. You roam around the wastes doing quests and exploring. But combat would be less frequent unless the player decides otherwise - in other words, you could pick some of your random fights. (Though I'd very, very much prefer it, I'm not suggesting ISO/TB gameplay, since I don't believe for a second that Beth would implement it no matter what. [] )
This could partly be handled through wildlife AI, which would be set less aggressive in general. An aggression stat would be implemented which would vary from species to species - from completely neutral (only defensive combat) to total aggression (hostility almost immediately). The animals would have their own immediate surroundings, or personal spaces, somewhat like in Risen and Gothic series, and partly in F:NV. Get too close and you get a warning sign from the critter giving you time to get out of their space, linger and be chased off (or be attacked, if you don't flee). The radius of the space and the time you are tolerated in it would depend on the critter.
The mainquest would be scaled to a certain degree through chaptering it (not visibly, as in presenting a loadscreen: Chapter 1: In which you slither out from the uaginal cavity and learn the first lessons of life, but through certain major events through the main quest). And after those, the game would replaces some of the lower level enemies with higher level ones in the MQ areas - defeating which (if not gettin past by other means) would require you to level up some more. Or through a nonlinear levelscalingsystem where, for example, when one starts the game at level one, the enemies in the levelscaled zones would range from 1 to 10, and after one hits somewhere between levels 12 to 15 (which ever works the best) some of the lower level creatures scale up to about level 18 to 25 (but not all, to not make the world appearing to spin around the player too much). This would offer both, challenge and sense of progression to the player, as one becomes better than the current enemies before they scale up again.
There wouldn't be any quest- or enemycompasses, but there would be (toggleable, perhaps) minimap in which you could see the living beings in immediate vicinity. Perception would determine the range in which you see things, and with a perk (with appropriate requirements - outdoorsman and perception, for example) you could tell the difference between friendly (green dot), neutral (yellow dot) and hostile (red dot) targets.
The questcompass would be replaced by mere markers on the map which would point towards a general area instead of the exact target. And with that, the quest descriptions would be more accurate.
The wrist pipboy would be scrapped and replaced by a more handheld PDI like contraption, which would offer a more userfriendly inventorysystem (something like mix of what Morrowind or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. had, for example) with less scrolling while still holding the tabs to sort items by their nature, a one page charactersheet much akin to the original games -- no more tabs behind tabs behind tabs. All actions during combat but shooting and moving would cost action points (opening inventory, using items inside it, using quick keys, etc) - more on this later.
Skillcap would remain at 100, but the cost to raise them would rise as follows: 1-50 1:1, 51-75 2:1, 76-100 3:1, the point being, the better you get the more difficult it is to get even better - this would make a maxed skill equal to skillcap of 175 - and I think it'd be easier to utilize the full scale of the skill, if it caps at 100 (instead of having skills cap at 200 or 300). Also, the gaps between levels would be raised:
How it is now (first number is the level, the second XP needed to reach the level from previous point, the third is total amount of XP needed to reach that level):
You haven't in this thread, nor have I seen it before, nor did you quote the relevant part in any of your posts, forgive me for not being all knowing and reading all 231 other threads.
Though I will say, just by reading over the repair section, that it doesn't do anything to actually fix the problem of repair rates being either too fast or too slow, it just imposes further negatives upon lower item conditions, and also makes it harder to fix said items in the first place, furthering the already terrible problem item condition imposes upon gameplay. Repair, as it is now, is only remotely decent becuase of how easy it is to negate the poorly set decay rates, making that harder just makes a broken system even more painful to sit through.