Fallout has distorted the way many Codexers think of combat difficulty in CRPGs

Yes, I see the strategical (and tactical) benefits in partybased systems. But - in games specifically like Fallout, where you get your "followers" and which are inherently desginged around one character that you create - I can also value the need to adapt to the quirks of the AI (which obviously would need to be good "enough" and which Fallout obviously did not have); the more personal, rather than simulational, feel about it. The companions' mistakes and oddball moves as well as their successes add to their in-game personalities, and through that it gives the combat itself a more personal feel. It's more of a "roleplaying" thing than strictly mechanical, but I like the relative uncertainty and bigger need of my characters individual input on the outcome however it may go.

 

I don't think we disagree on the core, just on the scale.

 

I dislike demos.

 

Pretty much this. But one-character tactical combat is still retarded, just like playing chess with only two pieces on the board. One-character combat can be OK but it will always be inherently less tactical than multi-character tactical combat.

 

FO2 RP with the controllable companions in-combat on makes combat way more fun. I just couldn't handle the stupidity of the AI any longer...

 

I'm a little sauced so maybe i missed something here, but I don't feel like this argument really pertains to the original Fallout games. For one, the industry hardly took after Fallout when Diablos and BG's were around. And for another, I don't think people approached Fallout as a combat-focused experience to begin with. Sure, some people might think some aspect of some game should apply to everything, but you're gonna get that everywhere with every game. It doesn't really matter, does it? Isn't it more important how the industry as a whole sees things? Surely the people who have a "distorted" view would, in some way, still be preferable to the direction the industry went in, right?

 

*spit coffee*

WHAT?!

*leave*

 

Well, I didn't go to that much detail about it, because really, I was talking about RPGs in general, not just Fallout, and actually the point of this whole thread was mainly about how Fallout's design philosophy shouldn't apply to party-based or combat-centric games anyway. Even so, it seems to me you didn't read very carefully. That's all right, it means I have a reason to write another wall of text.

It was not my contention that better combat in Fallout would slow down the game. Combat in Fallout is pretty slow and boring as it is. That's actually the point. The defining feature of Fallout's combat, if anything, is how little player skill is involved, and the implications of this. In most games, the gameplay hits a sweet spot of fun when the game is "challenging" - basically, when the player is more or less evenly matched with the opponent, and player skill is the factor that ultimately decides the outcome of the battle. Combat in Fallout, however, is still not fun when you're evenly matched with your opponent - you will eventually win, of course, but whether you do depends primarily on the RNG. Combat is only ever slightly entertaining in Fallout when you're either grossly overpowered, or end the fight before it even starts by gunning someone down before they get to do anything.

So how can I possibly say that this is a good thing? Well, here's how I see it - if Fallout really did have fun combat, the player has an incentive to try to maximize his fun by playing the game to maximize the amount of challenging combat encounters. At least, that's how I would play. Since the combat is not fun, it emphasizes the simulation aspect, and incentivizes resorting to combat only when you're much stronger than the opponent, and avoiding it when you're not. If the combat was fun, combat solutions would also inevitably outshine most other solutions, particularly those using speech, which after all have no more gameplay than having a high enough Speech skill and picking the correct dialogue option. And yet, something about Fallout makes finding those solutions - like talking the Master to death - feel special and memorable. I think a large reason for this is that the game manages to make the combat solution feel like a drab, stock solution in that situation. Talking your way out of combat wouldn't be nearly as much fun if the combat was great fun.

Of course, you're welcome to disagree that there's any merit to un-fun combat. That's a valid position, really - but my point is, if you did change Fallout combat into something that's generally fun, this wouldn't just change the combat, it would change how the game as a whole is put together. Or, really, you tell me - why would you ever take the mechanically simple and uninvolved option like speech to deal with the Master, if the alternative was a fun, epic, involved boss fight? Roleplaying? Just to see what will happen? I think it would feel very anticlimactic.

 

How do you get more punishing than making it so any enemy with a gun can kill you from full health in one shot even if you're wearing the best loots in the game? Fallout combat is basically always a bad idea if you care about the PC not dying. This is a direct translation of game style from GURPS. I think a basic failure of Fallout is that it grossly underestimated the median player's willingness to reload and spam moar eyeshots - surely my 17th fight against this room full of mutants will work out. Surely Ian is supposed to be alive and my close party bro and carrying shit for me the entire game even though he gets turned to bloodspray within 6 seconds of trying to fight rats

 

I can't believe you are seriously suggesting that the designers went "remember to make the combat unfun... or else people just won't talk their way out of problems"

 

I largely agree, but I'm fairly sure most of the extreme criticals weren't an intentional part of the mechanics, but the result of an oversight. The devs made sure they had an immensely complex and well-thought out damage model, especially when it came to criticals: they clearly modeled crit damage on the potential for hitting vital organs (for instance, legs might have had a higher frequency of criticals than the torso, but also had a far lower damage count from them). The problem was that armor bypassing (the "you've hit x in a place without armor" message) was part of the same crit mechanic, so that every time you hit a weak part of the armor, you'd "coincidentally" also hit a vital organ, which would be really weird armor design. I've been trying to separate the two, but the damage model is a lot harder to change than the to hit one.

 

FFS stop comparing this game to GURPS. They have next to nothing to do with each other. This goes for combat lethality as well.

 

Some people call this roleplaying.

 

I'm still confused though. Are we talking about encounter design or skill systems?

Let's get one thing straight here. The idea of passive skills is merely to represent the character's proficiency in a field. When it comes to small arms, the skill represents the character's ability to aim, fire and hit the chosen target with a weapon that fits the designated skill, and it does so adequately. It's the same thing with prof's in AD&D, although there's a lot of room for specializing within each field -- certainly more than with perks. Now, unless your suggestion to make this basic run-of-the-mill RPG core system more interesting is the obligatory addition of party-based combat, spells, magical items and 'chaotic randomness' you're left with a fairly small number of choices on how you would like to represent said ability differently.

If your argument is for more player agency, then there are direct methods of aiming and timing the shots available at our disposal; the always popular pop-a-mole system. In these scenarios, the challenge stems from the ai's ability to avoid being targeted by the player, mainly using the only real defense against ranged weapons -- taking cover and breaking the line of sight.

If you're arguing for a more tactical approach, remove skills and random chance from the equation entirely and implement assisted targeting, like they did with VATS. If every shot is sure to hit, the challenge of building a viable character is discarded in favor of targeting priorities, which forces you to be strategic about which targets to eliminate even without a party-based system. After all, giving the enemy the same 100% chance of success in their assault means that the only way to win is through resource management and tactics.

However, a skill-based system such as the one in Fallout already has that with the addition of random chance, and the basic goal and challenge of character building is to minimize the randomness or to tilt it in your favor, though that's all save scumming aside, which has no real place in the argument. It sort of takes tactics out of combat and smears a big chunk of it out over your LVL-up screen. I personally don't see the problem, as to me it makes perfect sense that a grandmaster gunslinger would breeze through peons without any effort, and if that's what a player wants to make out of his character I see no reason to dissuade him. As it is, small arms scales off anyway and there's no real point in capping any of the combat skills in Fallout. In addition, seeing as how the game has so much more to offer than combat, dumping every skillpoint into combat proficiencies really does cripple the character outside of such encounters, so it's still a trade-off.

I'm also amazed that you seem to be arguing for scripted events in combat as a way of countering what you'd consider flawed system design. Scripted events are inherently linear and take away from both replayability and challenge, and they're also the mainstream method of working around simple AI and shoddy char systems. If you really want more glorified QTE's to spice things up, you already have a huge library of games to choose from.

Last of all, could you explain your statement on MMO's? It really sounds like shit you just pulled out of your ass, but I'm curious to hear where you're coming from on this one.

 

Not just the animations. There's no other crpg where scoring a hit is so satisfying as in the Fallouts, from bodypart targeting to the beautiful damage model to the descriptive texts to the animations. It's like the guy said, it's a wonderful violence model. I really don't understand why everyone always wants the game to become a tactical shooter, it wouldn't even make any sense in the context of the pop culture it draws from (untactical "violence model" shooting fits much better with the Road Warrior than the alternative).

 

One thing has nothing to do with the other. JA2 is everyone's go-to tactical game but in essence it's like an action b-movie and really does feel like one.

 

You're the one who started this thread lamenting how Fallout's combat only revolved around character skill (like an MMO!!!1), and that the Codex should pay more attention to the wonder that is player skill. So if that's not tactics, then what player skill would you like to see featured?

 

Interesting. Do you think people have that reaction in games that have good combat systems? Maybe here at the Codex people are predisposed to take any chance to avoid combat through dialogue they get, but I suspect that comes from the idealization of Fallout, Arcanum and Planescape: Torment, all of which have combat that's not fun, mechanically speaking. Fallout does, of course, have fun death animations, but that just means killing things is fun, not the actual fighting. As for me, I can only speak for myself when I say that if a game has fun combat and quality hand-crafted combat encounters along the lines of Final Fantasy Tactics, Valkyria Chronicles or whatever, I can't imagine ever wanting to skip them, because combat is simply the highlight of those games.

Well, I didn't say the designers said that. My memory on Fallout's design history is hazy, but given how they were rushed with the system and had to cut out a lot of content and ideas, while something as fundamental as companions were a last-minute addition, I get the feeling that it's something of a happy accident that Fallout came together as well as it did. In any case, there wasn't really anything else like Fallout around at the time, so the designers probably couldn't have anticipated how players would react to the the kind of mechanics the game had. That said, according to the retrospective at NMA, they wanted combat to feel overwhelming and brutal and for people to have to rely on skill use to overcome obstacles, while "Multiple solutions" was #1 on their list of rules, so... yeah. They wanted the combat to push people into using other skills to solve their problems. It seems to me that they succeeded.