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Possibly the ability to scavenge parts to build something you could hide behind, adding more parts increases the weight but gives it more health?

Great idea. I like it. We have 'Oblivion with guns', so why not 'Fallout with Shields'?

I'm sure a lot of people will complain about that too...

Fallout already has swords, big swords too, needs shields for people to complain about.

And as for texture and clipping problems, as commonly happens when a Radscorpion wanders across a rocky area, I'd assume the Devs would be smart enough to have the shield behave like a mine once placed, it won't move at all and has to be activated to pick it up again. Wouldn't be hard to do since that coding is already there for mines, just use put that onto the shields. Health and weight of the shields could be taken from what's used for Armour, so just adapt that for the shields and it's done, might not be easy work, but it's a lot easier than starting from nothing.

Sounds like an interesting idea, and definitely not what I was thinking when I first saw the title of the thread.
*cough* Gears of New Vegas *cough*
:spotted owl:

Sounds like an interesting idea, and definitely not what I was thinking when I first saw the title of the thread.
*cough* Gears of New Vegas *cough*
:spotted owl:

Me too. I thought it was a thread about the art of deciding when to run away. :ahhh:

I was going to just LOL and move on, but decided to reply anyway. Lets see... you're skulking around out in the wastes, you get jumped by overwhelming foes because you weren't paying enough attention or got careless. Normally, someone would either run to the nearest cover, if there is any, or run like a molested ape for the horizon in hopes of outdistancing those foes and living to come back and seek payback in the near future. If those foes are ranged, you can usually run in a zigzag pattern with your weapon holstered and get out of effective range fairly quickly. If those foes are melee, cover doesn't matter, and any magical stationary 'cover' that you could deploy on the ground would be useless against them anyway. They'd just run around it and rip you open. And with 1 or 2 companions distracting your foes and soaking up much/most of the damage being flung at your group, it should be a rare occasion indeed where you couldn't get the hell outta dodge when you have to.

/snip/

There would be different types of cover available, made of different things with different sizes, from something as small and useless as a STOP sign, like the Nightkin wear on their arms, to a Car door, obviously carrying a Car door is going to be heavy, so they'd have high weight.

The idea behind the deployable cover would've been the same thing you had on your arm "Car door" was just an example, I doubt you'd be able to carry that around with you, even if you do have the super-human strength to carry multiple suits of Power Armour, weapons and a few thousand rounds of ammo...

But the whole idea behind shields being worn is that they would be pretty weak, mostly just for a bit of extra DT, like helmets usually are, they break extremely easy.

In that case, it would likely extend your lifespan by a couple of extra hits, and then you'd still be standing out in the open, but now with a broken shield, dead companions, and your enemies even closer and better prepared to finish you off. I think I'd prefer to stick to playing smart, not depending on contrived, arcade-ish contraptions like that. There's a reason cowboys didn't pack midieval shields around when fighting indians, and why no armies since the invention of gunpowder and explosives have issued them to infantry. You survive by finding real cover, or moving out of range- not by carrying a big chunk of metal around to hide behind while standing foolishly out in the open.*

* Diesel-powered Abrams tanks excluded, natch

I'm cool with having a Riot Shield available in game but I'm not sure about the usefulness of deployable cover (Soldier talent in Borderlands comes to mind).

I don't get it- what's wrong with "Wait, let me deploy my Portable Instant Debris Pile?"

"Hang on, I've got an inflatable car door in my backpack!"

"One moment, I've got a brick wall in a box that opens like an umbrella!"

:P

Yeah, let's stick with "Cover is stationary," tyvm.

I'll play the devil's advocate here. How is it that you can pull a massive minigun out of your pocket?

It's not always possible to find suitable cover when someone starts shooting at you, you're often more focused on finding out where they are, assuming they've surprised you, and firing back at them, or in the case of Melee users, a shield would be extremely helpful.

Because the game's already deeply into the http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HyperspaceArsenal motif, and the question is do we want to keep it where it is, or extend it further?

Why add driveable cars, let's just put them in our backpack! Who needs player housing- carry it all with you!

:shrug:

# Fallout lampshaded this with the perk Pack Rat (which increases your carrying capacity); the picture for it showed Vault Boy stuffing a grandfather clock into his backpack. The second game was particularly odd in that the trunk of the car could carry any amount of items as long as its very high weight capacity wasn't exceeded, but if an item would exceed it, the game told you that there was no more space in the trunk

* To be exact, the trunk counts size, not weight. Weightless items like chems DO take up space so those are better off in your inventory. On the other hand, you can happily stash all the ammo you get your hands on into the trunk and the game won't object (even though ammo does have weight).
* The player's inventory itself in Fallout 3 is limited by weight, but ammunition and chems doesn't weigh anything. Thus, you can be carrying so much that a single knife slows you down, but you can still pick up 500 rounds of 5.56mm ammunition (or 500 rockets, for that matter) no problem.
o Much worse even, though there is a carrying limit, it is usually so ridiculously high. A character with a decent strength score has no problem carrying four different handguns, two different assault rifles, two shotguns, a hunting rifle, a minigun, a rocket launcher, a miniature nuke catapult, an oversized flamethrower, a sniper rifle, a small assortment of chosen melee weapons and can still pick up an entire wardrobe of combat armor and several backpacks full of loot, and all you can see of it is what the character is currently wearing and armed with.
o This has the added charm of being able to stuff a rocket launcher inside a first aid kit.
o Fallout 3 has a rather gruesome 'exploit' in that if you were deep in a vault, for instance, and weighed down with stuff you plan on selling or craft materials, you could use a stray leg, arm, or even eyeball as a Hyperspace Arsenal. Since all of the dismembered pieces from cinematic kills can be 'looted', you could open the part's inventory, transfer whatever was weighing you down to said arm/leg/eyeball and then 'carry it' (with the cursor, not in your backpack) to the door of the area for quick retrieval later. (It's not a true exploit because you can't bring objects you're carrying via physics manipulation with you between zones, but you can put it neatly by the entrance so when you fast-travel back it's readily accessible.)
* Since weapons not being used are invisible, enemies will sometimes pull off strange tricks like firing a pistol at you while you approach then suddenly pulling out a hidden flamethrower the size of their torso the moment you're in range.
* The second game also had an exploit: stealing from hired teammates is coded to always succeed. However, reverse-pickpocketing also works, meaning that by using your Steal skill, you can pack tens of thousands of pounds onto them and the only drawback is that they can't run.