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[quasimodo]

As long as Bethesda gives us shit like little lamplight I will feel the need to kill children.

 

[Decado]

LL was pretty terrible.

 

[Kalin]

Just when I had repressed the memories of that abomination, you bring it all back.

 

[Pope Amole II]

To be perfectly honest, it's not like childkilling in F1+2 had any meaning. Like, sure, you were severely punished for it (it denied access to lots of quest and those bounty hunters random encounters were pain in the butt), but why would you actually kill a child? Neither of games gave you any kind of reasons to do so, so you gained that title either by accident (stupid NPCs in stupid random encounters) or during town massacring (for which, once again, there was no goddamn reason, but then, when you're citykilling in F1+2, it's not like you care anymore). However it was, it wasn't integrated into the game at all so, well, what was the point of it? Apart from lulzy animations, that is.

I don't give a crap about dumbfuck morals (nuking an entire town - ok! killing one kid - oh noes, the horror, the horror...), but if you're putting heavyweight shit like that into your game, you'd better make sure that shit is used. There was tons of ways to implement that - from straightforward revenge/assassination quests (like, some dude fucked up someone's life, now someone want to fuck up that dude's life by killing his beloved kid) to botched theft jobs (like, you're stealing some shit from some house - kid enters the room and either he alerts everyone or he dies; one nice touch here would be adding an option to simply stun the kid, only to have it die anyways - wow, who could've guessed that kids aren't made for taking kicks in the head). And with a good, good reward so the player has an actual incentive to perform this crime. Otherwise, there's no reason for implementing consequences if there's no reason for making the choice.

 

[Excidium]

If it's in the game then it should be killable. That's it.

 

[Infinitron]

Personally, I wouldn't even mind if the game instantly went dark and told you GAME OVER CHILDKILLER after you shot a kid, but not even letting you do that is basically the difference between morals and censorship.

 

[Johannes]

Killing kids gives me a hard on so it should be in.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Otherwise, there's no reason for implementing consequences if there's no reason for making the choice.

Yeah, kinda agree with that. Guess they didn't want to go too far, though. Getting a quest to kill kids would probably have been unacceptable even at the time Fallout was released.
And they made it so you're almost fucked if you're a childkiller. Not sure if they just wanted to moralize you (child killing is bad, mkay) or they just wanted to avoid as much problems as possible, though.

Killing kids gives me a hard on so it should be in.

 

[Kalin]

What I don't understand is why anyone living in a post-apocalyptic lawless wasteland would pay thousands of caps to have you killed simply because you offed some wretched little pricks that attacked you first with huge fricking rocks just because you ended up having to fight one of their distant or not-so-distant relations.

Now, if you killed someone that mattered, then yes, a bounty and angry mercs on your tail would make sense. If you killed an innocent well-behaved monocled little child, sure, it could probably stir up sympathy and outrage in even the most cynical survivors. But the kids in Fallout? They are fricking terrorists, firing back is justified self-defence!

To illustrate:

 

[Tommy Wiseau]

No, I don't think I will.

ETA: Nice ninja edit -- why did you remove the line about "Your thinking isn't welcome here, fuck off!!"

Anyways there is a whole bunch of shit you can't get away with in games nowadays. As I mentioned in the article, your Roman soldiers can loot and pillage a town, but no game (to my knowledge) lets you engage in the post-battle mass rapes that were so common at the time. And I'm pretty sure no sane developer would ever try to put it in a game.

ETA#2: I don't want to derail this thread. Feel free to start another one and I will participate.

Fuck off. Nothing is more pathetic than a bunch of grown-ass men telling me what I can't do in a goddamn video game or other work of fiction.

 

[Decado]

No, I don't think I will.

ETA: Nice ninja edit -- why did you remove the line about "Your thinking isn't welcome here, fuck off!!"

Anyways there is a whole bunch of shit you can't get away with in games nowadays. As I mentioned in the article, your Roman soldiers can loot and pillage a town, but no game (to my knowledge) lets you engage in the post-battle mass rapes that were so common at the time. And I'm pretty sure no sane developer would ever try to put it in a game.

ETA#2: I don't want to derail this thread. Feel free to start another one and I will participate.

Fuck off. Nothing is more pathetic than a bunch of grown-ass men telling me what I can't do in a goddamn video game or other work of fiction.

If by "telling you what you can't do" you mean "what the designers chose to include in the game" then every single mechanic a designer leaves out of any game -- ever -- is that designer "telling you what you can't do."

Which (hate to break it to you) makes you sound like you're fucking 12 years old.

 

[Broseph]

No, I don't think I will.

ETA: Nice ninja edit -- why did you remove the line about "Your thinking isn't welcome here, fuck off!!"

Anyways there is a whole bunch of shit you can't get away with in games nowadays. As I mentioned in the article, your Roman soldiers can loot and pillage a town, but no game (to my knowledge) lets you engage in the post-battle mass rapes that were so common at the time. And I'm pretty sure no sane developer would ever try to put it in a game.

ETA#2: I don't want to derail this thread. Feel free to start another one and I will participate.

Fuck off. Nothing is more pathetic than a bunch of grown-ass men telling me what I can't do in a goddamn video game or other work of fiction.

If by "telling you what you can't do" you mean "what the designers chose to include in the game" then every single mechanic a designer leaves out of any game -- ever -- is that designer "telling you what you can't do."

Which (hate to break it to you) makes you sound like you're fucking 12 years old.

Except child killing would be no different from any other combat in the game (which is already implemented) so in this case it is precisely the designer telling you what you can't do. Not that I think this should be a deal breaker, but consistency is important. This is why essential NPC's piss me off. Like Infinitron said, even a game over screen would be preferable.

 

[Tommy Wiseau]

There's a difference between prioritizing certain game elements over others and wanting to censor something that could have otherwise easily factored within the game's scope, like attacking children in Fallout 3. One of the aforementioned doesn't implicate a tampon.

 

[Awakened_Yeti]

Remember kids, inflated expectations are bad for you. Don't have them.

 

[sea]

I don't give a crap about dumbfuck morals (nuking an entire town - ok! killing one kid - oh noes, the horror, the horror...)

You know, come to think of it, Megaton doesn't have any kids in it. So if you nuke the town, you still are free of the dread Childkiller title. It's like even the game world knows in advance which town can get nuked, and nobody bothered bringing their kids there.

BETHESSSDDDDDDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

 

[Excidium]

There is one kid in megaton.

 

[Brandon]

I'm late to this party, but earlier there was some discussion on the arbitrary nature of non-combat skill checks and viability of hybrids.
Would like you to consider this play-through:



I started off with an even distribution of civil skills with 3 in Persuasion, Streetwise, and Trading, which in my opinion are the mainstay of talking skills, with perhaps Etiquette & Lore coming in 2nd place. With my first skill points I did increase Persuasion to 4, but could have done Streetwise instead to solve the Raider/Outpost quests.

The rest went into combat skills and was enough for the fights. To be fair, I did know which fights to do in which order due to metagaming.

Basically, 3 at character creation and 4 or 5 later on seems sufficient for most skill checks in Teron. And this example was as a hybrid, if I had created a pure non-combat character I could have gotten to 4 in all skills more quickly and had room for some Etiquette, plus higher Charisma would have opened up some free increases in Streetwise/Persuasion/Lore/Crafting from either Feng or Cassius.

If you pick 3-4 skills that seem to fit together fairly logically and keep them in that range, I don't think you really have to do much save scumming.

The only exception to this might be a Thief character where it does seem that you need quite a range of skills and some of them need to be 4 early on. Thief in general is pretty tight on skill points, this is probably the only background where I feel like I rely on metagaming at least to a degree.

 

[Infinitron]

Oh, hey, it's "BrandonAoD".

 

[hiver]

-

I started off with an even distribution of civil skills with 3 in Persuasion, Streetwise, and Trading, which in my opinion are the mainstay of talking skills, with perhaps Etiquette & Lore coming in 2nd place. With my first skill points I did increase Persuasion to 4, but could have done Streetwise instead to solve the Raider/Outpost quests.

The rest went into combat skills and was enough for the fights. To be fair, I did know which fights to do in which order due to metagaming.

Basically, 3 at character creation and 4 or 5 later on seems sufficient for most skill checks in Teron. And this example was as a hybrid, if I had created a pure non-combat character I could have gotten to 4 in all skills more quickly and had room for some Etiquette, plus higher Charisma would have opened up some free increases in Streetwise/Persuasion/Lore/Crafting from either Feng or Cassius.

If you pick 3-4 skills that seem to fit together fairly logically and keep them in that range, I don't think you really have to do much save scumming.

The only exception to this might be a Thief character where it does seem that you need quite a range of skills and some of them need to be 4 early on. Thief in general is pretty tight on skill points, this is probably the only background where I feel like I rely on metagaming at least to a degree.

Yeah, great job telling him this. Thanks a bunch.
You know why skill checks are so tough in this game? So far, whenever someone would describe an easy thing to Vince, each time the mechanics were reworked to be made harder.
And now you show up. Eight or so years later

haha, snort.
just great.

 

[Tommy Wiseau]

There is one kid in megaton.

Two kids. So they're presumably dead when you nuke the shanty town anyway.

 

[eric__s]

The only exception to this might be a Thief character where it does seem that you need quite a range of skills and some of them need to be 4 early on. Thief in general is pretty tight on skill points, this is probably the only background where I feel like I rely on metagaming at least to a degree.

I was thinking about your last point recently and it's something I agree with. Right now, the thief path is by far the hardest because you get so few skill points to distribute over so many skills. There are often thief solutions to non-thief scenarios, but there's very little exclusively thief content that contributes skill points. Thieves need to distribute their points over a fairly wide spread: sneaking, lockpicking, traps, stealing and often secondary skills like streetwise, disguise and critical strike. Because of the required spread, they can't be as good at their skills as fighters and talkers, who don't require as large a spread to succeed and get more content directed specifically toward them.

For comparison, the Miltiades chain, Kemnebe, the Arena and various thugs throughout Maadoran and Teron are all exclusively fighter content that contributes skill points. Helping Flavius, stealing from the blacksmith, stealing from the merchant in front of the Teron inn and stealing from the rich woman in Teron are exclusively thief content that do not contribute skill points. The investment required to fight pays off more because you get items from dead people and it allows your character to keep growing whereas the investment required to steal just gives you gold. What you guys could do is add skill point gain to these thief checks or add more significant exclusively thief content.

This also isn't meant to undermine the thief solutions to the content that's not exclusively for thieves. Directing Livia to Cado is awesome and so is getting Azim to scare off the raiders by stealing the goblet from the alchemist. Breaking into Feng's house and sneaking into Antidas' palace are also great. Asking for more seems like a tall order and also entitled, but as someone who's probably seen everything in this game so far, thieves have the least amount of content by far and are the least satisfying and most difficult to play. I'm sure you've got plans for them, but I thought it was interesting and significant that someone who's very knowledgeable about the game thought the same thing I did.

 

[eric__s]

What you guys could do is add skill point gain to these thief checks or add more significant exclusively thief content.

OR make social and thief skills function like combat skills, where skills influence each other and contribute to the success of related skills like I suggest in this post!

 

[Excidium]

I don't remember if it is the thief or assassin that had a really mongoloid merchant cart ambush scenario in the Theron demo that made me hate the career and decide to never play it again before I am done with all the rest.

 

[oscar]

Hey I've entirely avoided playing anything past the combat demo but is a warrior-persuader hybrid character viable or a waste of time and I'd be better having a pure warrior and pure talker play through?

I.e a range of easy and medium persuasion checks even into the late game

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk

 

[Johannes]

Hey I've entirely avoided playing anything past the combat demo but is a warrior-persuader hybrid character viable or a waste of time and I'd be better having a pure warrior and pure talker play through?

I.e a range of easy and medium persuasion checks even into the late game

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk

I'm no expert but it seems that a one-dimensional character is much easier to pull off. When you've gotten more meta information about how everything works, hybrid is doable too.