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Which feauture did you always miss/want in Fallout1/2?

Surf Solar

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The purpose of this thread shall be to list some minor feautures you think the original Fallout games should have, but were never in (for technical reasons, lack of time, different design decisions etc).

Such feautures could be a button to highlight items on ground or such. What were your annoyances over small/missing things in those games? What can be brought back, improved upon? Please post these suggestions here. :)
 

CrazyLoon

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That and the menu switching screen. It annoys the hell out of me and the most frustrating thing is there's no way of turning it off. It has to go.
 

Surf Solar

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What exactly do you mean with the menu switching screen CrazyLoon?

@Krap - look in the other threads, we're giving full control over party members. ;)
 

CrazyLoon

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When you go from dialogue mode to barter mode, or to the party member control menu, where the platform goes down and rises back up.

fallout02.jpg


This little guy.
 

Surf Solar

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Ah! Hehe, you mean the arbitrary unskippable animation. I can safely assure, there is not such a thing in my game. ;) Another graphic just pops up without any animation. As I am rather having PS:T'esque dialogues (lengthy ones...) I can safely assure you too that the game does not automatically skip to the next part of the textblock (I hated that in Torment and Fallout) - you can decide that on your own pace.


Offtopic: Seeing your screenshot, I kinda miss the "Tell me about" button. :( But I realize no one really used it and it would be a waste of time to implement it sadly...
 

Quetzacoatl

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Surf Solar said:
@Krap - look in the other threads, we're giving full control over party members. ;)
I blame shitty memory oh and will targeting anything besides the eyes have actual benefits?
 

Surf Solar

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Krap said:
Surf Solar said:
@Krap - look in the other threads, we're giving full control over party members. ;)
I blame shitty memory oh and will targeting anything besides the eyes have actual benefits?

Eyeshots are entirely taken out (ridicolous) and it will be much harder to target any part aside arms or legs. Headshots will be scarce. This doesn't mean that burster builds will be the one to play, they will be adjusted aswell. ;) Only the most dedicated gunslingers (taking ridicolous powerbuilds) will be able to make reliable headshots, the rest relies on party based teamplay, just like it was in our all favorite party based games.
 

Stinger

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I really could have used a journal or dialogue log or something that'd help me keep track of my progress in quests and where to go next.

My first time in Fallout 1 I met the ghouls in Necropolis who told me about a water chip in their old Vault but the quest only told me to fix that thing for them. I put the game down for the day but the next day I couldn't remember where I was supposed to find that water chip so I got stuck until I had to check an FAQ to find out where it was.

It was annoying since I had no way to look back over dialogue history or even to ask the ghouls about it again.
 

kaizoku

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Krap said:
Having full control over party members obviously.
This is important. But personally I'd like to see some AI working too. Nothing special, but it would give a sense of realism to the NPCs instead of them behaving like robots.
Having an internal stat which would affect how much can the NPC bleed until it decides to: fall back (walk away but leave enough AP for a shot if the player decides it so), fall back completely (moves as far as it can without leaving any AP for the player to use), goes paranoid (psyduck hurts himself in the confusion). This "courage" value could, for example, be affect by the PC speech skill (leadership).


Surf Solar said:
Ah! Hehe, you mean the arbitrary unskippable animation. I can safely assure, there is not such a thing in my game. ;) Another graphic just pops up without any animation. As I am rather having PS:T'esque dialogues (lengthy ones...) I can safely assure you too that the game does not automatically skip to the next part of the textblock (I hated that in Torment and Fallout) - you can decide that on your own pace.
I for one really liked the talking heads :(
I understand them not being present in WR.

Surf Solar said:
Offtopic: Seeing your screenshot, I kinda miss the "Tell me about" button. :( But I realize no one really used it and it would be a waste of time to implement it sadly...
You could always go all Sierra on it alá Hero's Quest
176767.gif
sounds good... yes it does



I can't remember anything Fallout specific (I think it has been over 10 years since I last played it).
But when thing that annoy me in RPGs in general is that when a fight breaks loose there is no way to end it until someone dies. This was even more annoying when you failed to steal someone.
Another thing was that fights would always have to be with firearms. I would like to see some importance given to melee combat.
Ok, some things that at least in theory sound good to me:
- before entering an area with some kind of law enforcement, you should be ordered to put your weapons down. If you're seen walking with a weapon in your hands you should be seen as an attacker and issued a last warning and if you ignore it then you should be attacked.
(mmm, this may be tricky to implement with NPCs)
- because of the above, unless you're in some shaddy parts of town, when a fight breaks it should be mellee. Obviously that the PC may want to intimidate with a gun, or even use it; but in the latter case there may be consequences (eg: guard nearby ears you).
- it should be possible to end fights before someone dies! there should be some mechanism for the PC and NPC to surrender. This would be of special importance for failed steal checks. Losing 10-20% of HP should be a good time to quit.
- if you kill someone with firearms, any armor that critter may had should be useless or at least very nerfed
 
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Surf Solar said:
Krap said:
Surf Solar said:
@Krap - look in the other threads, we're giving full control over party members. ;)
I blame shitty memory oh and will targeting anything besides the eyes have actual benefits?

Eyeshots are entirely taken out (ridicolous) and it will be much harder to target any part aside arms or legs. Headshots will be scarce. This doesn't mean that burster builds will be the one to play, they will be adjusted aswell. ;) Only the most dedicated gunslingers (taking ridicolous powerbuilds) will be able to make reliable headshots, the rest relies on party based teamplay, just like it was in our all favorite party based games.
Sounds good. I hope that headshots will be much more lethal than in Fallout, then?

kaizoku said:
- if you kill someone with firearms, any armor that critter may had should be useless or at least very nerfed
Just because of a few small bullet holes?
 

oscar

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I generally enjoyed the lowish level, gang style fights against human opponents. Fighting gang members with brass knuckle punches to the balls (followed by that sickening crunch sound effect) and SMG bursts was fun, brutal and stylish.

As often said, combat was sorta ruined when you could start getting 95% chances for headshots all the way across the screen.

I think my absolute favourite fight was the Fallout 1 fight in the basement in the Hub against the local mafia. It was difficult and I died several times but boy the joy of unleashing that 9mm burst in an enclosed space was great.

Another great moment is getting power armour and becoming a walking tank. The way people freaked out when they saw you and the big jump of being immune to anything short of a gauss rifle was great. The new Fallouts didn't really seem to capture that feeling that power armour really is something awesome. Partly because it's effect isn't as great and small-calibre bullets and knives still hurt you so it just becomes a good late-game armour rather than bringing the game to a new phase.
 

oscar

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kaizoku said:
Ok, some things that at least in theory sound good to me:
- before entering an area with some kind of law enforcement, you should be ordered to put your weapons down. If you're seen walking with a weapon in your hands you should be seen as an attacker and issued a last warning and if you ignore it then you should be attacked.
(mmm, this may be tricky to implement with NPCs)

This was implemented more or less exactly as you said in NCR :D

The Shady Sands guard also asks you too holster your guns but I don't think he attacks if you keep them out unlike in NCR (probably realises that if you've got a gun, he doesn't stand a chance).
 

Lonely Vazdru

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Excidium said:
A ruleset that isn't completely unbalanced.
Please, keep these crappy comments to GRPG Discussion or even the workshop if you really think they're that witty. This guy is seriously trying to make a game here. FFS !
 
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Excidium

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But he can at least try to achieve balance! :lol:

In fact, I remember reading some changes regarding skills on the What Remains blog. Can you tell us more, Surf Solar?
 

Lonely Vazdru

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Excidium said:
But he can at least try to achieve balance! :lol:
It's pretty obvious he does try.
It still has nothing to do with the fact that answering the very serious and important "Tell me what feature you missed in Fallout, so I can try to improve my game" question with "Change the whole rulesest, LOL !" was both stupid and uncalled for in this thread's context.
 
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Excidium

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Well yeah, I don't mean changing the whole ruleset, just rebalancing. Merging skills, tuning modifiers, that sort of thing.

Can you even change the whole ruleset in the Fonline engine?
 

Surf Solar

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Everything can be changed, yes.
But Lonely Vazdru was kinda right that "fix the system" is a bit of an ambigious comment, don't you think? ;)

Pinpointing particuar issues or broken mechanics would be better. I've written about critical modifiers already somewhere but I can't find it here - aswell as the removal of eyeshots, tweaking to hit chances, lowering amount of SPECIAL points to allocate to at the start (but giving more possibilities to alter/add more during the game) etc... There'll be changes to some perks too, but I'll write them in the "manual" then or in some future changelog.


kaizoku said:
This is important. But personally I'd like to see some AI working too. Nothing special, but it would give a sense of realism to the NPCs instead of them behaving like robots.
Having an internal stat which would affect how much can the NPC bleed until it decides to: fall back (walk away but leave enough AP for a shot if the player decides it so), fall back completely (moves as far as it can without leaving any AP for the player to use), goes paranoid (psyduck hurts himself in the confusion). This "courage" value could, for example, be affect by the PC speech skill (leadership).

Yeah, I had a similar idea like this - I thought maybe when a companions hp drop below a certain treshold, you lose control over them - the more speech/charisma you have, the less this happens. It sounds a bit weird though, so it would need heavy adjusting. :P

kaizoku said:
But when thing that annoy me in RPGs in general is that when a fight breaks loose there is no way to end it until someone dies. This was even more annoying when you failed to steal someone.
Another thing was that fights would always have to be with firearms. I would like to see some importance given to melee combat.
Ok, some things that at least in theory sound good to me:
- before entering an area with some kind of law enforcement, you should be ordered to put your weapons down. If you're seen walking with a weapon in your hands you should be seen as an attacker and issued a last warning and if you ignore it then you should be attacked.
(mmm, this may be tricky to implement with NPCs)
- because of the above, unless you're in some shaddy parts of town, when a fight breaks it should be mellee. Obviously that the PC may want to intimidate with a gun, or even use it; but in the latter case there may be consequences (eg: guard nearby ears you).
- it should be possible to end fights before someone dies! there should be some mechanism for the PC and NPC to surrender. This would be of special importance for failed steal checks. Losing 10-20% of HP should be a good time to quit.
- if you kill someone with firearms, any armor that critter may had should be useless or at least very nerfed


"Drop your weapon or we make you drop" etc will be in, yeah. It will be stupid to run around with holstered weapons in some places, just like in Shady Sands what oscar said.

The idea of "surrendering" somehow is a very good idea. :o This indeed annoyed me too in the old titles, noted!

If you kill someone, his armor will receive a few points added to the deterioration counter (if it reaches 100%, it is broken and can only be used again with a succesfull repair check - don't worry, it takes quite a while for an item to be broken).


oscar said:
I generally enjoyed the lowish level, gang style fights against human opponents. Fighting gang members with brass knuckle punches to the balls (followed by that sickening crunch sound effect) and SMG bursts was fun, brutal and stylish.

As often said, combat was sorta ruined when you could start getting 95% chances for headshots all the way across the screen.

I think my absolute favourite fight was the Fallout 1 fight in the basement in the Hub against the local mafia. It was difficult and I died several times but boy the joy of unleashing that 9mm burst in an enclosed space was great.

Another great moment is getting power armour and becoming a walking tank. The way people freaked out when they saw you and the big jump of being immune to anything short of a gauss rifle was great. The new Fallouts didn't really seem to capture that feeling that power armour really is something awesome. Partly because it's effect isn't as great and small-calibre bullets and knives still hurt you so it just becomes a good late-game armour rather than bringing the game to a new phase.

These fights were always my favorite too. :)

As for the Power Armor, it is in, but not in a way how you'd expect it (can't spoiler) ;P. There will however be some equivalents to it, so players have some new unheard of toys at hands.
 

Monolith

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Surf Solar said:
kaizoku said:
This is important. But personally I'd like to see some AI working too. Nothing special, but it would give a sense of realism to the NPCs instead of them behaving like robots.
Having an internal stat which would affect how much can the NPC bleed until it decides to: fall back (walk away but leave enough AP for a shot if the player decides it so), fall back completely (moves as far as it can without leaving any AP for the player to use), goes paranoid (psyduck hurts himself in the confusion). This "courage" value could, for example, be affect by the PC speech skill (leadership).

Yeah, I had a similar idea like this - I thought maybe when a companions hp drop below a certain treshold, you lose control over them - the more speech/charisma you have, the less this happens. It sounds a bit weird though, so it would need heavy adjusting. :P
I think Dead State will have similar mechanics, although they couple that with an elaborate motivation system.

The idea of "surrendering" somehow is a very good idea. :o This indeed annoyed me too in the old titles, noted!
I like how it was used in Gothic, although that system can't be used in a game with guns, obviously (it already seemed quite artificial with swords). But making unarmed combat lead to a knockout first, and being lethal only if the target gets hit again would add a lot of possibilities for quests, as well as make unarmed combat actually a valid choice (as far as I remember that was used in Fallout 2 in NCR, you could have a barfight leading to a knockout).


One thing that always annoyed me about Fallout (and most RPGs) was the constant walking from one part of town to the other. Would it be possible to fast travel from location to location using the minimap?
 

kaizoku

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Monolith said:
The idea of "surrendering" somehow is a very good idea. :o This indeed annoyed me too in the old titles, noted!
I like how it was used in Gothic, although that system can't be used in a game with guns, obviously (it already seemed quite artificial with swords).
Why can't it be used with guns? Why would it be artificial?
It mostly depends on the situation and the characters involved. Not all characters should surrender (there are some crazy fucks in the wasteland). And others may "surrender" even before you start fighting them (speech skill (*)).
You know that if you continue a fight there is a chance that you will die. Self preservation is above anything else (the ones who thought otherwise are long dead).
This is a gameplay aspect that will just need some fine tunning, but I think it would be a great thing to have.

(*) This reminds me that it would be cool to have some perks accessible only if you comply with some stats, example: bully perk: gives you +20% on intimidate; requirements: speech > X and STR > Y).
SS, will the dialog options have some tag/icon indicating what you're attempting / what skill you're using?
PLEASE add this to the game as an option! At the start of a game a player would choose to enable/disable this option.


Monolith said:
But making unarmed combat lead to a knockout first, and being lethal only if the target gets hit again would add a lot of possibilities for quests, as well as make unarmed combat actually a valid choice (as far as I remember that was used in Fallout 2 in NCR, you could have a barfight leading to a knockout).
I don't think getting a character unconscious should only be possible through melee fighting. Any critical, may it be from (unarmed or armed) melee or firearms could lead to the loss of conscious, possibly until the end of the fight.



Monolith said:
One thing that always annoyed me about Fallout (and most RPGs) was the constant walking from one part of town to the other. Would it be possible to fast travel from location to location using the minimap?
IMO this wouldn't be needed. While most RPGs rely on backtrack to increase the gameplay hours, I don't recall this being the case in Fallout which was most about exploration (I could be wrong here... it has been a while).
I doubt this game will be a fedex type of game ;)




Cloaked Figure said:
The first and most obvious thing that comes to mind is a proper inventory system.
FO inventory wasn't perfect but it wasn't that bad either.
I rather have SS spend his time on other tasks.
 
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Excidium

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I think Surf Solar already reworked the inventory. I can't find an image of the inventory itself, but here's the loot window (p. old screenshot):

pickup7n9r.png
 

kaizoku

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A couple of more ideas:

(SS, this is kind of a reply to your first post in the sticky thread)
I've always fancied the idea of the outdoorsman skill affecting the quality of the map and minimap. Although this one could be a bitch to implement.
In any case, in this game's setting it's certain that there still will be real world maps from pre-war times. They should be scarce and valuable, and most of them in bad conditions, but it should be certain that the player will be able find/buy one when he reaches some medium/big city.



Do consider having encounters of considerable different difficulty in the same regions. So that if the player gets too "Rambo" his face will be used to wipe the floor.



It would also be cool if a combination of stats and skills allowed you to perceive how though someone is.
The player would right click on a critter, choose the view action, and get the corresponding description for it. Then an additional line with something like "HP range 70-130". This value would represent his real HP with some added random error (different upper and lower errors), where the amount of error would depend on your skill value.
Ideally even the textual description could contain some extra information if your stat/skill (outdoorsman + PE + IN ???) is high enough. But I understand this being way too troublesome to implement. Maybe only for a couple of strong enemies with a weak spot?
 

Monolith

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kaizoku said:
Monolith said:
The idea of "surrendering" somehow is a very good idea. :o This indeed annoyed me too in the old titles, noted!
I like how it was used in Gothic, although that system can't be used in a game with guns, obviously (it already seemed quite artificial with swords).
Why can't it be used with guns? Why would it be artificial?
It mostly depends on the situation and the characters involved. Not all characters should surrender (there are some crazy fucks in the wasteland). And others may "surrender" even before you start fighting them (speech skill (*)).
You know that if you continue a fight there is a chance that you will die. Self preservation is above anything else (the ones who thought otherwise are long dead).
This is a gameplay aspect that will just need some fine tunning, but I think it would be a great thing to have.
Sorry, I was referring to how it's used in Gothic and how adding weapons to that would seem artificial (there are lethal fights and unlethal brawls, using guns in the second doesn't seem right. You don't shoot somebody if you just want to knock him out).

Doing it the way you describe it is very satisfying, but involves a lot of work, whereas the more artificial mechanic Gothic uses is easier to implement with a similar outcome. Here's a thread where this was discussed extensively, especially by Davaris (it's weird to read my old posts). http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=16919


Monolith said:
But making unarmed combat lead to a knockout first, and being lethal only if the target gets hit again would add a lot of possibilities for quests, as well as make unarmed combat actually a valid choice (as far as I remember that was used in Fallout 2 in NCR, you could have a barfight leading to a knockout).
I don't think getting a character unconscious should only be possible through melee fighting. Any critical, may it be from (unarmed or armed) melee or firearms could lead to the loss of conscious, possibly until the end of the fight.
I agree. But I was talking about the intention to knock somebody out without killing him, sorry if I wasn't clear. I'm sure you'd agree that in such a case using your fists instead of a knife or a gun is preferable.


Monolith said:
One thing that always annoyed me about Fallout (and most RPGs) was the constant walking from one part of town to the other. Would it be possible to fast travel from location to location using the minimap?
IMO this wouldn't be needed. While most RPGs rely on backtrack to increase the gameplay hours, I don't recall this being the case in Fallout which was most about exploration (I could be wrong here... it has been a while).
I doubt this game will be a fedex type of game ;)
I recall this being annoying in Fallout, especially in the later part of the game. Much worse in Fallout 2. Atrocious in Arcanum. And agonizingly painful in BG as it was coupled with bad pathfinding...

From what I've read that's something VD dealt with in Age of Decadence using fast travel via minimap. Then he had to deal with the game being suddenly quite short, so he's adding interesting spots for exploration. That's a good way to solve that imo.
 

kaizoku

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Monolith said:
Sorry, I was referring to how it's used in Gothic and how adding weapons to that would seem artificial (there are lethal fights and unlethal brawls, using guns in the second doesn't seem right. You don't shoot somebody if you just want to knock him out).
Ok, to get everything clear, there are 2 different gaming aspects here: (1) terminate the fight by the having a faction surrender and (2) terminate the fight by having someone (party leader? everyone in the party?) knocked out.
I was talking about (1), not (2).

In (1) this can happen anytime and it's independent of the weapons involved.
For example: bank robbers inside bank and police outside. In reality both of them just want the conflict to stop, the difference being robbers want to leave with the money and police wants to lock them up. Different scenarios can happen here: robbers surrender unconditionally? robbers surrender after 1 of them gets shot and dies? etc, etc, etc

Whereas in (2), you win the conflict and get to choose if the opponents live or not, independently if they wanted to surrender or not. It wasn't clear for me, but I guess what you're asking for in the game is to be able to deal non-lethal damage. Is that it?
Ok, it's true that using knifes and guns to get someone knocked out and survive is not very realistic. But I'm not aware of any game that is realistic combat wise. My perception is that in real life when you get shot in 95% of the cases you stop there (no moving around, no shooting, etc) and if you survive or not is a different story.
But cRPGs are very combat centric. If you remove the combat mini-game (ie, set the victor to be the one who's able to shoot and hit first), most people will twitch their nose on it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm interested in this as well. I'm just not sure if it can work.
For anyone interested, threads on RPGs without combat:
http://rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=63256
http://rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=63838
http://rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=971108
But I digress here.
I'm ok with non-lethal damage being delivered in any form: with all types of weapons OR with just unarmed combat + non-cutting melee weapons (clubs, knuckles, hammers, electric cattle rods, whips, etc).
The latter would definitely put more pressure and make some quests/encounters more interesting. But it would still be prone to a small exploit: shoot at few rounds first to drain most HP and then finish it with a
vgpp3.gif
 

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