agris
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 16, 2004
- Messages
- 6,832
Could you elaborate more on this? The overall idea with this part of the project (see link below) was to make starting inventory vary a lot more based on what character and difficulty was chosen, thus making a more unique starting experience for each playthrough.Big Guns, Melee and Lockpicking. Started the game with a flamer + fuel in the rat cave (...) this is an anathema to Fallout 1 and must be purged.
I can understand people disagreeing based on (for example) the item being worth a lot of caps or being overpowered at game start.
On the other hand, I personally feel it's pretty stupid for only half the skills to have any game-start item advantage whatsoever:
-- If I tag Big Guns and Energy Weapons, that helps me literally zero until mid/late-game for most players.
-- If I tag Gambling, Speech, and Traps, I get jack shit besides base items (and base items don't vary based on difficulty either in Vanilla btw).
-- If I tag Barter, Sneak, and Melee Weapons, I also get jack shit on game start for it.
^ I don't really understand how that's a "good thing" in terms of game mechanics. Just because a mechanic/experience was the way the game shipped, doesn't necessarily mean it was a good or fair or reasonable mechanic/experience.
Here's exactly the formulas for starting items: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3kd14bzwbn0li9z/Starting_Items.xls?dl=0 -- let me know agris if you have any other specific thoughts about this sheet.
The plan for the next release is to allow players to enable or disable Base Items and Tagged-Skill Items in the installer and customizer. So if you want you can set everyone to only start with base items and tagging does not affect inventory. Or only start with tagged-skill-based items (hence why each skill has an associated item). Or can set everyone to start nekkid.
I think your "fixes only" option should not touch the items that the player starts with based on tagged skills. Big Guns and Energy Weapons are purposefully gated content that the player doesn't see, much less have access to, for the first 1/3rd or so of the game. To give the player a Flamer or Laser pistol at the start breaks this.
Does that penalize a player who picks either of those skill at the start? Yup. But that's the era of games that Fallout comes from. You can tag Outdoors, Gambling and Doctor and do fuck-all in the game world. If you're against this, find it too ivory-tower (which it is, no doubt), then why not provide a pop-up warning the players about the relative uselessness of these skills? It's a slippery slope to go from 'help the player out' to changing the nature of the game. To a brand new player, Fallout can be hard. The game expected you to start over a few times.
That being said, wrap your modified starting items into an optional enhanced component, and the problem goes away. But I don't think it belongs in the "fixes" category at all.