KickStarter ATOM RPG - Wasteland Soviet style! - now with Dead City update

[Cromwell]

Everyone but Katya's writer thought that to be a great idea. He's blueballing a hefty chunk of players. At least let us have sexy times with her, geeez!

so you cant sex her up? whew and I thought I fucked that up by telling her about her fathers fate. I would treat romances as sidequests and stay away from making them possible with partycharacters and shoving them into the players face. This way the player can chose to do it or leave it be instead of being forced to read whatever cringy shit and cringy options the writer thought would be romantic and kinky (not being a shit writer also does help).

 

[Sòren]

Everyone but Katya's writer thought that to be a great idea. He's blueballing a hefty chunk of players. At least let us have sexy times with her, geeez!

she's just perfect the way she is. a true waifu who doesn't suck cock for a handful of mushrooms.

 

[Vorark]

Atomboy, you've got a lovely game here but the camera makes me uncomfortable, I've always had problems with the overhead perspective. Is there a way to increase how far you can zoom out and how much you can tilt it? I don't mind editing ini files if necessary.

 

[Shadenuat]

just hold rmb or wheel and drag around? You can change angle and zoom and rotate camera

she's just perfect the way she is. a true waifu who doesn't suck cock for a handful of mushrooms.

Galina deff is the only waifu. She knows exactly what to do with all the world and npcs in it. She likes pirate ships with burning skeletons. And she actually has non-suffer DEX, even though overall still not as good as you can do with ampoule.

I don't think I ever seen a character so edgy and completely retarded, even in JRPGs. I would almost say she's Bethesda-level retarded, but she is so over the top cringe inducing 501% dumb shit that it's almost an art, and Bethesda is incapable of art.

I tried playing something else, different choices, but didn't achieve much. Anything but guns+speech or picking different (like evil and stuff) options seemed to lead to
being weaker
less options and quests
aggroing NPCs or
aggroing whole world on yourself (raider battles are full of frustration when they can't get into locked door or run around trying to kill all the pigs)

Being strong boi - not very fun running into machine gun fire, although with maxed hp/armor tree/shield probably possible
Being lucky boi - one very funny instance during shashlik mystery; didn't even get any lulzy encounters, maybe I didn't travel around much; didn't notice any particular increase in caravans or their items; no changes in loot; was not impressed with crit.
Being crafty boi - grenades take a lot of AP and endgame enemies have 100-200 hp, good luck; crossbow range is too short imo, the rate of fire is poor too. Highest recipe is 70; arguably stats of items should increase as you raise Crafting skill, which would make all this more viable. Also allow using babushka scarf same as any bandana to create molotov; or better, allow using paper instead. Honestly many recipes need reworking and cut on amount of junk you need to use for them (that amount of rope you need to finish crossbow line lol).

Then again even approaching crafting is very difficult as skill tree is total fubar imo; could be fixed by shit/flavour skills being grouped into separate branch or having different skill costs (transition garbage like +10 something could cost less than actual good stuff).

In the end I feel that Fallout/Underrail allowed more freedom and was more fun with a simple list and requirements than a skill tree which feels arbitrary and unnecessary constraining; no wonder players made a "free skill tree" mod which streamlines all the nodes. In a open system like that it is also easy to track what players find useful and what they hate investing their points in.

 

[Vorark]

I know but it wasn't enough, hence why I'd be ok editing ini files.

 

[Sykar]

I'd say Manhunter because of the ridiculously hard endgame fight. But maybe it was patched already.

I am level 6 playing on normal so the decision right now is between Witcher and Manhunter at level 6, taking the other at 9. Also I do not even have a scoped rifle yet so I might not even get the bonus to crit damage.
I am not sure I am even tempted to try Expert or higher since the perk point buy system is so terribly restrictive to begin with. Even on normal you can barely fill out your weapon perks which makes supplementary perks like Gobseck completely unattractive. In that regard FO 1/2 and NV were superior to ATOM rpg.

From my experience combat in early parts of Atom is quite easy (or easily avoided). Difficult battles with heavy hitting opponents come in the endgame.

So first I maxed out noncombat perks, that gave me tons of additional exp and skillpoints. With them playing the game, which for the most parts consists of talking, exploring and passing skillchecks became pretty easy (no locked doors or difficult negotiator could stop my progress).

In combat your weapon and allies carry you more than the weapon perks. I only invested in them in the middle and late part of the game (just recently maxed out pistols/smgs tree at level 19). And now they are really useful.

Gobseck is nice and so is Swift Learner, but I do not feel like the other perks in that line are worth it.

 

[Shadenuat]

If you play game as pass skill check: rpg then you can just take more skill points I guess. If you're trying to find problems on your ass tho I don't see how you can do without upper right tree.

 

[Gunnar]

I finished the game. Level 15, and I think I explored everything I could. Good game. Played 4/4/6/9/8/5/5 with morphine doctor for the +1 intelligence. I put some points into pistols (70) until I could get my hands on an assault rifle (125). Spent the rest on speechcraft(123), lockpicking (85) and technology (95), as well as Throwing (65), when grenades starting showing up. I only found 2 skill books for sale at the bookstore throughout the game.

My biggest gripe is that there is nothing to find, lots of containers and junk loot. I want handcrafted and hand placed loot. Very few tactically exciting encounters, lots of times I just start combat surrounded by the enemy. I had some fun wiping out the Factory bandits at level 3, but this seems to have cost me the best quest lines. I got overwhelmed by banal chatter from NPCs and starting clicking through them after a while, skimming for quest topics. YMMV, I guess. I liked how there were speechcraft and personality gates on NPCs. You get very few perks and they come slowly. I had 4 at level 15 (assault rifle line). It would have been better if you could get some more and experiment with the other trees. It sucks that I have to pay 5 points to get a beginner perk from one tree once I got a few perks from another.

 

[Sykar]

I finished the game. Level 15, and I think I explored everything I could. Good game. Played 4/4/6/9/8/5/5 with morphine doctor for the +1 intelligence. I put some points into pistols (70) until I could get my hands on an assault rifle (125). Spent the rest on speechcraft(123), lockpicking (85) and technology (95), as well as Throwing (65), when grenades starting showing up. I only found 2 skill books for sale at the bookstore throughout the game.

My biggest gripe is that there is nothing to find, lots of containers and junk loot. I want handcrafted and hand placed loot. Very few tactically exciting encounters, lots of times I just start combat surrounded by the enemy. I had some fun wiping out the Factory bandits at level 3, but this seems to have cost me the best quest lines. I got overwhelmed by banal chatter from NPCs and starting clicking through them after a while, skimming for quest topics. YMMV, I guess. I liked how there were speechcraft and personality gates on NPCs. You get very few perks and they come slowly. I had 4 at level 15 (assault rifle line). It would have been better if you could get some more and experiment with the other trees. It sucks that I have to pay 5 points to get a beginner perk from one tree once I got a few perks from another.

I do not get it. I crafted tons of stuff, from armors to weapons to ammo to stuff like bags and toxin filters and that was just for starters, thougb I agree with your comment about the the perk system, imho there should be fixed points, less locking behind perks and instead give them requirements like in FO, that was a lot better.
As to banal chatter, you can ignore most NPCs though and just go for the important ones.

 

[flushfire]

Though to be honest, pro-tree arguments I hear from players and team members are pretty cool too and the tree is more or less balanced right now.

Sorry for being blunt but that is quite far from reality. Nurse, gobseck and (most of) survivor lines are all close to worthless. Burst line is terrible. Quick reaction is so OP it's almost a must for everyone. The positioning of many abilities in the tree make no sense. Some abilities even straightforward should not exist at all. Fallout had similar issues with perk balance but the tree structure makes things worse.

crossbow range is too short imo, the rate of fire is poor too

Best crossbow w/ metal bolts is actually really good, regularly does 40 x 2 non-crit damage vs 6B2. Eye shots are fatal most of the time. And that is without any abilities (not sure if gun jesus works with crossbows) Problem is the crafting of ammo is a chore making it only really practical in hard fights. The ammo is about as rare as shotgun shells.

 

[Shadenuat]

It's 5(6?) ap +4 ap on reload and it uses 2 bolts always. you can shoot rifles twice and pistols maybe even thrice at the same time.
it's an option for starting weapon sure, but not worth all the effort you put into it. and relying on crits is not great. at least on Expert you can do 10+10 damage in the eyes with it no just 50. with 11 luck.

 

[Gunnar]

My biggest gripe is that there is nothing to find, lots of containers and junk loot. I want handcrafted and hand placed loot.

I do not get it. I crafted tons of stuff, from armors to weapons to ammo to stuff like bags and toxin filters and that was just for starters,

Instead of finding things, you find components of things and then you need to find recipes and invest in Tinkering to make those things. I would rather the things just be properly itemized. I don't like crafting. In ATOM there is almost nothing to find outside of lots of crafting components, and it sucks. You don't even find any skill books.

 

[Shadenuat]

Early armors aren't useful (and easy to find on first dead group of somewhat serious dudes), I'd say only shields are ok
Weapons are mostly early stuff easily replaced
Ammo is plentiful after a while
Bag is only worst one, killing some random dudes give you better ones
Toxins not even sure whats it about - drinking water removes them; and to actually survive real toxic places you need 100% resist, which is why you should buy 100% gasmask the moment you see one.

my first (and only real full) playthrough was technophobe with 1 in crafting and I never really suffered from it.

 

[Sykar]

My biggest gripe is that there is nothing to find, lots of containers and junk loot. I want handcrafted and hand placed loot.

I do not get it. I crafted tons of stuff, from armors to weapons to ammo to stuff like bags and toxin filters and that was just for starters,

Instead of finding things, you find components of things and then you need to find recipes and invest in Tinkering to make those things. I would rather the things just be properly itemized. I don't like crafting. In ATOM there is almost nothing to find outside of lots of crafting components, and it sucks. You don't even find any skill books.

There are books which give experience or perks and I am fairly certain even skill points. Finding so much junk in a post apocalyptic society is more believable than finding super duper loot everywhere. Most of the junk is also found in believable places, like trash bins, trash heaps, ruins, etc. It would be very unlikely to find good stuff in those. By the way, you can craft gear which is endgame viable from what I have read, so crafting is a viable alternative to bartering.
If you do not like to grab junk from trash heaps and the like, get a good barter skill, Gobseck perk and trade for quality stuff right away. It also helps to have a decent luck value for that which influences to some degree the quality of items merchants offer.
In fact did I found the amount of Stimpacks for example you could find in the original Fallout to be unbelievably high, never having to really buy them from vendors. ATOM rpg on the other hands I only found these really weak healing pills but the stronger stimpacks? Nope. Healing outside of combat is easy, but during combat especially early game is more limited than in Fallout.

Early armors aren't useful (and easy to find on first dead group of somewhat serious dudes), I'd say only shields are ok
Weapons are mostly early stuff easily replaced
Ammo is plentiful after a while
Bag is only worst one, killing some random dudes give you better ones
Toxins not even sure whats it about - drinking water removes them; and to actually survive real toxic places you need 100% resist, which is why you should buy 100% gasmask the moment you see one.

my first (and only real full) playthrough was technophobe with 1 in crafting and I never really suffered from it.

I did not say it is vital to craft, just that you can get some nice stuff from it, the best weapon I got early game was a self-made double barreled shotgun which could pump out 30+ damage per shot, one or two shooting most early game enemies. Poison can rack up fast and to get the 100% mask you need a lot of luck since they are really rare, so you just make do with what you can, not like there is much else to wear for the face slot. Water weights actually quite a bit, 10 bottles easily rack up like 12 kg of carry weight. They also do not purge much toxin, something like 75 out of a potential maximum of 1k.
Combat early on is deadly, and costly, even if you have Fidel around and you won't get a lot of rubles directly from loot, mostly from quest and selling the right stuff. Merchants during early game also have limited amount of Rubels so you cannot sell huge stashes for a lot of cash either.

 

[Shadenuat]

I think you can get PPS fairly early and it's the better of early weapons out there.
I never had any problems with poison, maybe I just never got hit or overprepared for locations with it?
some of the combats early on are deadly but you also get tons of loot out of it. and if we're talking like level 6 it is very, very early; you will see things pick up extremely quickly after.

 

[Gunnar]

Books should have been hand placed in hidden locations, not sold at the store. Junk items are found everywhere including locked containers in the deepest bunkers. I'd remove 50% or more of the containers in this game, there is just not enough interesting stuff to find to warrant it.

 

[Sykar]

Books should have been hand placed in hidden locations, not sold at the store. Junk items are found everywhere including locked containers in the deepest bunkers. I'd remove 50% or more of the containers in this game, there is just not enough interesting stuff to find to warrant it.

I have yet to find books in stores, at least early game. The few books I did find where hand placed. Why remove the containers? Why not just ignore them? It is an rpg, you do not have to rummage through them. In fact what do you think to find in trash containers exactly? A Dragunov or an AK-47? I dare say there is almost too much stuff to be found. I'd rather see more junk and people learn to actually role play instead of whining that they are "wasting" time because 100th trash bin they rummaged through still had no super duper weapon or armor in it.

I think you can get PPS fairly early and it's the better of early weapons out there.
I never had any problems with poison, maybe I just never got hit or overprepared for locations with it?
some of the combats early on are deadly but you also get tons of loot out of it. and if we're talking like level 6 it is very, very early; you will see things pick up extremely quickly after.

I found a cave with a lot of those poison mushroom patches. Went to the end of one of those tunnels and must have slightly hit one of those patches, gave my a lot of poisoning, think like 200-300. Needed 4 or 5 bottles to get rid of it.
No idea when it picks up, but so far crafting served me well. As mentioned there are alternatives to it, bartering and stealing work too if you do not want to bother with crafting. I think it is fine that there are basically 3 ways of obtaining stuff apart from straight killing and looting.

 

[Shadenuat]

these caves are just in random encounters and often don't have anything useful.

stealing I heard is disproportionately difficult.
I tried barter, some checks are very high (80 wasn't enough for me)

killing however gives you all the things you might want. that and trading with caravans.

 

[Gunnar]

The containers in ATOM are just like the NPCs with their banal chatter. There are too many with nothing interesting happening.

 

[flushfire]

I have yet to find books in stores, at least early game. The few books I did find where hand placed.

There's only 1 skill book outside of the bookstore.

It's 5(6?) ap +4 ap on reload and it uses 2 bolts always. you can shoot rifles twice and pistols maybe even thrice at the same time.

You don't have to rely on crits. Across 100 shots against 6B2, the crossbow deals around the same damage per bolt as the SVD does per AP round. With gun jesus it does more. It's not bad at all.

 

[Sykar]

The containers in ATOM are just like the NPCs with their banal chatter. There are too many with nothing interesting happening.

Is it really so hard to ignore trash bins and random NPCs?

 

[flushfire]

If it's not your first playthru, sure.

Here's an example: Death tunnel - a military installation in which the inner area is sealed by poison. Have to solve a puzzle or pass the highest Tech check in the game to get through. After that is a central area with around 50(?) lockers and other containers, most of them locked. All contain junk. Go on deeper and you'll come across a lethal radiation wall + deathclaw-ish guards. Before the most recent update, it also had nothing but junk and rusted weapons. It's only natural to assume that with all these hazards in place there must be at least something decent in there. If multiple computers work with no problems it shouldn't be outlandish that at least 1 weapon isn't all rusted. It doesn't even have to be a weapon, even a skill book would be nice. But no, there's nothing of the sort (until the update anyway).

And it's not the only such place. Another example are quests, they reward nothing but cash or food/junk. There's nothing like Fallout's combat leather jacket. It's a valid criticism, such hand placed loot/rewards makes exploration actually worth it and quests more memorable. And the devs have already acknowledged the problem anyway, so why even argue.

 

[Sykar]

If it's not your first playthru, sure.

Here's an example: Death tunnel - a military installation in which the inner area is sealed by poison. Have to solve a puzzle or pass the highest Tech check in the game to get through. After that is a central area with around 50(?) lockers and other containers, most of them locked. All contain junk. Go on deeper and you'll come across a lethal radiation wall + deathclaw-ish guards. Before the most recent update, it also had nothing but junk and rusted weapons. It's only natural to assume that with all these hazards in place there must be at least something decent in there. If multiple computers work with no problems it shouldn't be outlandish that at least 1 weapon isn't all rusted. It doesn't even have to be a weapon, even a skill book would be nice. But no, there's nothing of the sort (until the update anyway).

And it's not the only such place. Another example are quests, they reward nothing but cash or food/junk. There's nothing like Fallout's combat leather jacket. It's a valid criticism, such hand placed loot/rewards makes exploration actually worth it and quests more memorable. And the devs have already acknowledged the problem anyway, so why even argue.

It is equally valid to assume that with that much hazard around and after such a long time that most stuff will be degraded. As to hand placed loot, that is nice on a first playthrough but afterwards many people will optimize for getting those sweet loots asap to make the game as easy as possible for them.
I never cared much about rewards for quests. I care much more about complexity in quests, c&c and subtleties/nuance when applicable. Or even just conversations like going through the landmine that is the dialogue with First Bitchizitzen Lynette in FO 2 which to this day is one of the most memorable to me due to the fact how easily you can go wrong and be barred from the city.

 

[flushfire]

It is equally valid to assume that with that much hazard around and after such a long time that most stuff will be degraded.

But food in there is good enough to eat? Please.

As to hand placed loot, that is nice on a first playthrough but afterwards many people will optimize for getting those sweet loots asap to make the game as easy as possible for them.

Exactly. It is nice. What you do with the next playthrough is up to you.

I never cared much about rewards for quests. I care much more about complexity in quests, c&c and subtleties/nuance when applicable.

There is no reason to not have both.

 

[Sykar]

It is equally valid to assume that with that much hazard around and after such a long time that most stuff will be degraded.

But food in there is good enough to eat? Please.

As to hand placed loot, that is nice on a first playthrough but afterwards many people will optimize for getting those sweet loots asap to make the game as easy as possible for them.

Exactly. It is nice. What you do with the next playthrough is up to you.

I never cared much about rewards for quests. I care much more about complexity in quests, c&c and subtleties/nuance when applicable.

There is no reason to not have both.

Depends on the container the food is in and whether the previous surviving inhabitants were able to take the good stuff with them or not but whatever it is clear we won't see eye to eye on that matter. There is no reason for anything. It is a personal preference what you value. I care very little for loot apart from it enabling me to go through the entire game without save scumming.