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

[Jenkem]

Wow, really surprised by how generous some of yall are to the infodump NPCs here, given how much shit Numanuma and Pillars gets here. NPCs aside, itemization so far has been very weak. Exploration seldom yields to cool finds. at least in the more "dungeon" type of areas I've visited. I was dumbfounded by how many containers there were in bunker XXX and found zilch. Maybe there are other bunkers/labs that yield better shit. I'd hate to think that they lock all the good shit behind the crafting system. Also, really bizarre how some of the areas in the world map literally contain like 2 cars with loot and nothing else. Seems like they could have downsized the map a bit.

some highlights so far:

Spoiler

the election, the creepy mutant in the sewer, Dan is a pretty interesting take on Declan/Gizmo

because in this game the 'infodump NPCs' are actuallly interesting to talk to and have distinct personalities that feel like people instead of actual infodumps

 

[Gunnar]

How is it interesting to interview a hundred random people about the banal details of their lives? It's wearying and ultimately pointless. NPCs should have a purpose or they shouldn't be there. Most of them should have just had simple barks, and the game would have been better for it, while freeing up some dev resources to apply to areas of the game that were lacking.

 

[Ivan]

I kinda like how you never know whether you're in over your head on any of the quests. Signed up to protect a caravan and the scripted ambush just rekks my team.

I was hoping to like this as unanimously as some of you have, Commissar Draco , but there are problems here. I think the problem of giving so much exposition to every NPC is that it makes it hard for any one of them to stand out (e.g. Pillars, Numanuma). The only NPC that made a real impact on me was the farmer who's tied to Dan's quest. He has a nice map that tells his story and there's cool c&c if you do some dumb shit.

Where I'm at: saved enough money to go to Mountain of Woes now. Gonna see how this levels out since I think I've crossed through the whole map already. Now I just need better armor since my team gets wiped pretty easily.

 

[Lord_Potato]

How is it interesting to interview a hundred random people about the banal details of their lives? It's wearying and ultimately pointless. NPCs should have a purpose or they shouldn't be there. Most of them should have just had simple barks, and the game would have been better for it, while freeing up some dev resources to apply to areas of the game that were lacking.

What else? Maybe questgivers should have exclamation marks above their heads for easier identification?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

How is it interesting to interview a hundred random people about the banal details of their lives? It's wearying and ultimately pointless. NPCs should have a purpose or they shouldn't be there. Most of them should have just had simple barks, and the game would have been better for it, while freeing up some dev resources to apply to areas of the game that were lacking.

What else? Maybe questgivers should have exclamation marks above their heads for easier identification?

I agree with this, there should be 100x more NPCs to simulate real towns and you should have to manually go talk to each one to figure out who actually has story-related content.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Yes, but remember: it's a small team. Let's stay realistic with our hopes and expectations.

 

[Gunnar]

How is it interesting to interview a hundred random people about the banal details of their lives? It's wearying and ultimately pointless. NPCs should have a purpose or they shouldn't be there. Most of them should have just had simple barks, and the game would have been better for it, while freeing up some dev resources to apply to areas of the game that were lacking.

What else? Maybe questgivers should have exclamation marks above their heads for easier identification?

you will get irrational responses from fanboys

 

[Ivan]

Found best items like best armor, backpack, sniper riffle and attributes addons thru quests and exploration

Hm, I wonder if I missed something in the Roaring Forest caves? There was scripted interaction with the stalagmite...

 

[Lord_Potato]

Found best items like best armor, backpack, sniper riffle and attributes addons thru quests and exploration

Hm, I wonder if I missed something in the Roaring Forest caves? There was scripted interaction with the stalagmite...

Yes, you missed quite a lot there... like two additional stat points you can get

And vintorez!

 

[Atomboy]

Wow, three pages to answer to. That's what I get for playing games after I'm done making games. Thanks for keeping the thread alive, guys! Soon, it's gonna get a lot of sweet updates. We're now going to have a few text only quests, which will look like that stuff in Space Rangers 1-2. Like, you have a picture on the right, text and options on the left, and maybe music, and like if you're doing a kinky quest about sexing people up it's gonna have funky music, and if you're disarming a bomb it's gonna be fast paced and action packed or not.
What do you people think about partial voice over? Like, when you click on an NPC it says "Stay awhile and listen" but the rest is text only or if there's a text quest and a narrator reads the intro? The last one is debated currently. Would that liven up the game? Because I think it makes the game look cheap and nasty in modern times. Like, wow you got some hobo to do the first lines of your dialogues? Cooooool, noooice, so what you bums couldn't get him to voice everything? Plus it's gonna be shit because we'll have like 3-6 voice actors for 100+ NPCs. Plus, it's tons better for the player to imagine the voice and manners of a character, than to associate said character with some dude we hired for peanuts. Not that great. Text-only is much more kino. Right? I think so. I'm asking because we probably have the budget to do this and some folks asked us for it. But should we? I think no. But maybe I'm wrong?
We also picked the song for the menu screen, and new death picture will have your disfigured corpse lying half way in snow. Snow will be everywhere. NPCs will do stepping on packed snow sounds while walking and steam is coming out of their mouths as we speak. We're making tons of warm clothes and shubas and shit and there's gonna be frostbite probably. Now I'm gonna go through these three pages, read on and reply when needed.

 

[Shadenuat]

What do you people think about partial voice over? Like, when you click on an NPC it says "Stay awhile and listen" but the rest is text only. Would that liven up the game? Because I think it makes the game look cheap and nasty in modern times.

only retardo would think that. most of your audience is probably used to partial voice overs. hell, PoE1 and Pathfinder did it, don't think there was much arguing over this. you're not a big studio so nobody should expect full vo.

It's only when DoS2 came out developers or rather their bosses went retardo with this and decided game must be voiced all or nothing, which brought more trouble on them than not.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Partial voice over is ok.

Those short "stay awhile and listen" or "I sense a soul in search of answers" can really give more soul to your characters - just like you already do with unique portraits for everyone, which is a great touch.

And let's face it: a small studio with a limited budget will never be able to fund full voice over (espiecally in several language versions). Even middle size studios like Obsidian had trouble with it and it blew their budgets out of proportion. So it's a choice between no voice over at all or some sort of compromise.

And remember, only a Sith deals in absolutes

 

[Gunnar]

Text adventures sound great. Voice overs are a waste of time, but if you must put them in, partial is better than full. I think voice overs would actually exacerbate the issues with NPCs in this game.

 

[Sykar]

Wow, three pages to answer to. That's what I get for playing games after I'm done making games. Thanks for keeping the thread alive, guys! Soon, it's gonna get a lot of sweet updates. We're now going to have a few text only quests, which will look like that stuff in Space Rangers 1-2. Like, you have a picture on the right, text and options on the left, and maybe music, and like if you're doing a kinky quest about sexing people up it's gonna have funky music, and if you're disarming a bomb it's gonna be fast paced and action packed or not.
What do you people think about partial voice over? Like, when you click on an NPC it says "Stay awhile and listen" but the rest is text only. Would that liven up the game? Because I think it makes the game look cheap and nasty in modern times. Like, wow you got some hobo to do the first lines of your dialogues? Cooooool, noooice, so what you bums couldn't get him to voice everything? Plus it's gonna be shit because we'll have like 3-6 voice actors for 100+ NPCs. Plus, it's tons better for the player to imagine the voice and manners of a character, than to associate said character with some dude we hired for peanuts. Not that great. Text-only is much more kino. Right? I think so. I'm asking because we probably have the budget to do this and some folks asked us for it. But should we? I think no. But maybe I'm wrong?
We also picked the song for the menu screen, and new death picture will have your disfigured corpse lying half way in snow. Snow will be everywhere. NPCs will do stepping on packed snow sounds while walking and steam is coming out of their mouths as we speak. We're making tons of warm clothes and shubas and shit and there's gonna be frostbite probably. Now I'm gonna go through these three pages, read on and reply when needed.

Imho the most pressing matter is a rework of the perk tree, actually you should scrap it and make it like in Fallout, give each individual perk certain level and stat requirements so we can freely pick and chose instead of being locked into one particular tree path. You could still make 2-3 dependent on each other, but otherwise I think the current tree is one of the most critizised features in the game. You could change that tree window into sections like "Combat", "Defense", "Utility" or some such if you want to keep it. I'd also change perk costs to fixed cost of maybe 1-3 depending on how powerful the feat is.
Second suggestion would be to give more incentives to use other skills than Speechcraft, it is basically recommended for every build no ifs or buts. I understand that it was a huge thing in Fallout 1+2 but due to the fact that you never knew on your first playthrough which options were opened up by it it felt much more "organic". Here it usually is "look out for the Speechcraft check and hope you succeed at it".
Lastly, review some skills which are universally considered useless or of questionable use. Gambling would be on top of that list, melee is still considered vastly inferior to any gun skill, though I have no idea how to easily rectify this outside of making ammo much more scarce and expensive.

 

[ArchAngel]

Hmm, I just started playing the game. I got robbed and found a brick to use as weapon. I moved to next area with the village and went around to explore a bit. Got attacked by a few groups of rats and giant flies and after killing them log says I get some XP but on my character sheet I my XP does not move.. what is happening? Major bugs in first 10 minutes of the game?! WTF?

EDIT: OK I reloaded a save in that area and now I am getting XP again from killing stuff..

 

[SniperHF]

I think partial voice overs would be better applied to the standalone expansion (You might even re-think calling it an expansion for marketing purposes). Miniquel? Epilogue? I dunno. But you call something an expansion even if it's standalone I think it hurts impulse buys.
But that said if it's only 3-6 voice actors I'm not sure the expense is worth it. I'd rather have Those 3-6 actors do 6-12 key characters more fully rather than try to sound different and do a hundred.

The text based mini-games are okay, Pillars and Tides had them recentlyish. Not terribly uncommon. Try not to overdo it though, I think a lot of the fun in Fallout-likes is directly interacting for alternate solutions. Text solutions feel like a workaround a lot of the time.

just like you already do with unique portraits for everyone

Though the subjects of such portraits are not necessarily unique to ATOM

 

[Saduj]

What do you people think about partial voice over? Like, when you click on an NPC it says "Stay awhile and listen" but the rest is text only. Would that liven up the game? Because I think it makes the game look cheap and nasty in modern times. Like, wow you got some hobo to do the first lines of your dialogues? Cooooool, noooice, so what you bums couldn't get him to voice everything? Plus it's gonna be shit because we'll have like 3-6 voice actors for 100+ NPCs.

IMO, it adds very little, is going to cost you money and people will notice that everyone in the world has one of six voices. Even for people who like it, I doubt it is going to be the deciding factor on whether to buy the game. So I would invest elsewhere.

 

[Atomboy]

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).

Nope, unfortunately not. She's a saint and all that.

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.

Thanks! I'll ask if this can be edited in a hack sort of way, but I doubt it. It's Unity after all.

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.

Thank you! Yeah, the loot spread is a problem in some places. We'll be doing a better job in Trudograd, since the abundance of containers really pisses some players off. Perks will be a bit more varied hopefully, and the tree structure reworked a bit.

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.

We really fucked ourselves over with the tree. There's a whole project on improving it. Trudograd will have more choices while keeping the whole tree structure (because we can't dispose of it until we make a completely new game). Though I really wouldn't call Gobsek and Burst useless! One is really useful with trading if you're not levelling barter and the other has it's uses in battle. The positions for some others will be 100% changed tho.

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.

Very true! I can't find the post you're quoting right now for some reason, but yes, Sykar, the books are all sold by book merchants!!!

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.

This is also very true. Loot was spread by hand in most places, but the guy who spread it didn't like the "Best item lies in the hardest to get place" for some reason and wanted it to look "realistic" (e.g. trash is everywhere). I'll be joining him in loot spreading for Trudograd and we already made some changes to loot in that one patch a month ago to make it look less random. Also, I recently figured out that containers can just be made to look broken or opened and empty to lessen the amount of containers. Trash bins, on the other hand will stay. They won't have good loot and only shitty stuff. They're trashcans. a non-crafter should just ignore them like Sykar mentioned here.

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?

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.

with SVD you can kill 2 ppl from afar from stealth no problem just with 10 dex however. you have no luxury like this with a crossbow. and its armor pen on other bullets is like 60.

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

Tis all great logic but developers actually put dozen of notes in these bunkers with passwords and quest solutions and lore.

have fun collecting all the cards

Hey, we almost always write in the description that the notes are on some sort of fantasy laminated paper or sealed in plastic!

If I would point to something that could get some additional work it would be the economy. Both financial and the skillpoint one.

I finished the game with 100 000+ rubles and the car trunk filled by half a ton of high quality, expensive equipment that no trader was able to buy and my team simply could not carry anymore. Food was plentiful, same with medical equipment - I amassed enough medicits, stims, anti-rads, anti-poisons, painkillers and other stuff to start not one hospital, but a whole network of them.

Actually, I never needed crafting, game was so generous with everything I needed there was simply no point.

Same with skillpoints: I was able to max out everything I really wanted, simply wanted, kind of wanted and did not really care but I guess ok wanted. I know I played a character with 10 Int and all the brainiac percs but still... I never had to make any difficult choices concerning the skillpoints (unlike perks, but they have a minor role - I finished the game wielding Vintorez and throwing grenades left and right and despite the fact I had no perks in automatic rifles or throwing, I had no serious problems in the final confrontations). My heroine was proficient in pistols/smgs, automatic rifles, grenades, speechcraft, lockpick, technology... a true Mary Sue of the Soviet post nuclear wasteland.

I would really like more tight resource management implemented.

Oh geez, I really hope we'll manage to make Trudograd interesting even for players like you! That's a really powerful char you've got.

If I would point to something that could get some additional work it would be the economy. Both financial and the skillpoint one.

I finished the game with 100 000+ rubles and the car trunk filled by half a ton of high quality, expensive equipment that no trader was able to buy and my team simply could not carry anymore. Food was plentiful, same with medical equipment - I amassed enough medicits, stims, anti-rads, anti-poisons, painkillers and other stuff to start not one hospital, but a whole network of them.

Actually, I never needed crafting, game was so generous with everything I needed there was simply no point.

Same with skillpoints: I was able to max out everything I really wanted, simply wanted, kind of wanted and did not really care but I guess ok wanted. I know I played a character with 10 Int and all the brainiac percs but still... I never had to make any difficult choices concerning the skillpoints (unlike perks, but they have a minor role - I finished the game wielding Vintorez and throwing grenades left and right and despite the fact I had no perks in automatic rifles or throwing, I had no serious problems in the final confrontations). My heroine was proficient in pistols/smgs, automatic rifles, grenades, speechcraft, lockpick, technology... a true Mary Sue of the Soviet post nuclear wasteland.

I would really like more tight resource management implemented.

You should view crafting as an alternative, not so much a requirement. From what I read you can craft endgame viable items with it.

That's true. We did everything to make crafting just one of the playstyles. For one, because I hate crafting. If the game would rely on it entirely I'd noose myself.

IMO skill point gain is alright, the problem is a combination of lack of use cases, too many items giving bonuses and balance.

• Speechcraft replaces Survival in travel and Barter in quests rewards. Barter is already nearly pointless without that, so is Survival.
• Martial's advantage over Melee is so big it renders Melee useless, and because Dex increases % to hit (it really shouldn't) there's no point in leveling Martial too unless playing close combat-oriented, since everyone starts with high Dex anyway.
• Lockpick is practically maxed at 40 points.
• Pickpocket is understandably difficult to balance. Right now even with 199 points there's still too much RNG involved
• Technology is used like twice in the entire game lol
• Tinkering is pointless to level because recipes have no set/hard requirement, and the failure chance even after passing the soft requirement is too high. Player is practically encouraged to savescum
• Gambling might as well not exist
• First Aid is meh

So that leaves either rifles or autos to 120-199, Speechcraft to 115 or so, and Stealth to 80 + leftover points. Even with just 7 Int that's achievable by level 12. Survival does change things up a bit though, so that's an option at least.

You're totally right about some stats not doing enough. Trudograd will find uses for some, like since it's a high tech city, it will ask for a lot of Technology. But Barter is pretty cool! You can buy more! On Tinkering: some recipes cannot be done (at least are supposed to be impossible) even with savescumming on low tinkering. A man can savescum most of things in a game where reqs for success are not completely tied to a certain number. Games with freedom and success chances will always be plagued by the possibility of savescum. I'd rather leave that in, than make it so you can't craft some thing if you lack 1 point of Tinkering. That's even worse!

Car gives 99% evade encounters only on main map and speech doesn't work on most annoying things in Dead City so Survival is not so useless.

Which perk paths are good for the dog companion?

Honestly it dies regardless of how you level it.

NO IT DOESN't! Although we fucked up with his endurance stat. But there's good armor for him.

I tried to play ATOM, it was my shortest playthrough for a cRPG.

I'm not asking for much, really, just an optimized engine and not animation everywhere bullshit, like every fucking bush is animated ... Why ?

It's because it's windy outside! Dude, Unity is okay as is, but our programmer did so much for optimization that even I can run it lag or crash free. And my PC is actually designed in a way, that does not let me play 90% of Unity games out there, at least not comfortably. If you can tell me what is wrong, we'll fix it for you most likely. The quickest way to do that would be to list your PC specs and problems in a letter to support@atomrpg.com
Some graphics settings can be turned off if you're running an old machine and some visual glitches can be totally obliterated by updating your drivers, especially on ATI. I really hope we can help!

Almost reaching the point of dropping my virginal playthrough. I think my biggest gripe with the game is how the game handles its NPCs. It's hard to tell which NPCs are relevant to quests and which are there for flavor. It kind of reminds me of those backer NPCs from Pillars 1. I interacted with all of the NPCs in the starting town, then realized that it would be like this for EVERY SINGLE npc here on out. Fuck that shit. Once you get to the big city, imagine talking to each and every NPC. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that they are secret quests buried behind a particular branch. Also, I'm not a fan of how most NPCs are treated like Lore Infobooks, it reminds me a lot of Morrowind in that respect. It doesn't feel organic.

Gonna give it a few more hours and see if the games non-npc heavy areas scratch that Fallout itch for me.

I dunno dude. We have the same thing with NPCs that say one line. They don't feel organic and drive us out of the fantasy. We already had a huge discussion with comrades out here and I totally get the other side of this opinion. The only thing I can say for myself is that the NPCs are totally not like the POE ones, I skipped these myself most of the time because A: didn't give EXP and kewl dialogue branches just presented a story. Doesn't really compare to huge branching dialogues. B: Didn't give actual factual helpful lore like most of ours do. It's pretty easy to spot a non-quest one and will be even easier in the future, but I disagree that the total concept is wrong. I'm sorry that this is not your cup of tea

Wow, really surprised by how generous some of yall are to the infodump NPCs here, given how much shit Numanuma and Pillars gets here. NPCs aside, itemization so far has been very weak. Exploration seldom yields to cool finds. at least in the more "dungeon" type of areas I've visited. I was dumbfounded by how many containers there were in bunker XXX and found zilch. Maybe there are other bunkers/labs that yield better shit. I'd hate to think that they lock all the good shit behind the crafting system. Also, really bizarre how some of the areas in the world map literally contain like 2 cars with loot and nothing else. Seems like they could have downsized the map a bit.

some highlights so far:

Spoiler

the election, the creepy mutant in the sewer, Dan is a pretty interesting take on Declan/Gizmo

Now here I can agree. We'll rework our loot placing system a lot in the future.

Atomboy any plans to include sleep and thirst as well? Or maybe companions having to deal with hunger, radiation and poisoning on Expert/Survival or as an extra option?

We had thirst and several other "needs" like regular sleep in the first alphas of the game and I still have them in my own pet projects, so I naturally like the idea, but it reeeeeeeeeeeeallly didn't work in Atom. It just killed the vibes. You had to focus on simply surviving and fed \ gave drink \ slept half of your playing time and had to constantly keep an eye on everything for every party member. Just by adding a single one of these, like thirst, we'll take away from what we want the player to concentrate on. Having water and sleep in some special difficulty level like in NV isn't off the table for the next project.

Finished the game second time this time with all 1.17 addons and mods only skipped some find gangsters quests at the end got good endings for all towns and companions except poor Fidel, level 21, my body and save are ready for Tutograd.

Thank you!

Wow, really surprised by how generous some of yall are to the infodump NPCs here, given how much shit Numanuma and Pillars gets here. NPCs aside, itemization so far has been very weak. Exploration seldom yields to cool finds. at least in the more "dungeon" type of areas I've visited. I was dumbfounded by how many containers there were in bunker XXX and found zilch. Maybe there are other bunkers/labs that yield better shit. I'd hate to think that they lock all the good shit behind the crafting system. Also, really bizarre how some of the areas in the world map literally contain like 2 cars with loot and nothing else. Seems like they could have downsized the map a bit.

I liked the game overall, but your observations are correct. NPCs spew a huge amount of banal chatter, quest rewards suck (both loot and exp) there's nothing to find in this game and way too many containers. Encounter design is also abysmal. If you want loot and experience, the best thing to do is fight random battles against bandits and then sell their stuff to random caravans. Take the money and buy stuff from the random moneysink shops in town. I said the same things a few pages back. If you point out these obvious flaws, you will get irrational responses from fanboys and they will even straight up lie about it. For example I suggested that skill books should be hidden throughout the world so there was something to find, instead of sold at the store and some fanboy tried to tell me I was wrong and there were plenty of skill books to find, which is simply not true.

Atom doesn't even have fanboys. Dude, the NPCs tell you stories and nod and wink to quests or happenings in the game as much as they are for flavor. You never spot an NPC that looks like it does not belong in this world (unless it's a time traveller from the circus or the Warhammer parody thing). NPCs build this world, and ofc you can ignore most of them, there's no problem.

How is it interesting to interview a hundred random people about the banal details of their lives? It's wearying and ultimately pointless. NPCs should have a purpose or they shouldn't be there. Most of them should have just had simple barks, and the game would have been better for it, while freeing up some dev resources to apply to areas of the game that were lacking.

What else? Maybe questgivers should have exclamation marks above their heads for easier identification?

I agree with this, there should be 100x more NPCs to simulate real towns and you should have to manually go talk to each one to figure out who actually has story-related content.

Ohhh I would if I could :D
Really!

What do you people think about partial voice over? Like, when you click on an NPC it says "Stay awhile and listen" but the rest is text only. Would that liven up the game? Because I think it makes the game look cheap and nasty in modern times.

only retardo would think that. most of your audience is probably used to partial voice overs. hell, PoE1 and Pathfinder did it, don't think there was much arguing over this. you're not a big studio so nobody should expect full vo.

It's only when DoS2 came out developers or rather their bosses went retardo with this and decided game must be voiced all or nothing, which brought more trouble on them than not.

I dunnnnooo... It's clearly a matter of taste. I just don't like it when games that are inconsistent like that. Am I really alone in this? Full voice over wouldn't be an option even if we could do this with 100 greatest actors in the world, I'd be against this even more than I am against partial voice over. I still think it would make us look cheap. Because we'd hire cheap voice artists. But on the other hand, you're correct about cool games having it... Pathfinder is pretty cool...

Partial voice over is ok.

Those short "stay awhile and listen" or "I sense a soul in search of answers" can really give more soul to your characters - just like you already do with unique portraits for everyone, which is a great touch.

And let's face it: a small studio with a limited budget will never be able to fund full voice over (espiecally in several language versions). Even middle size studios like Obsidian had trouble with it and it blew their budgets out of proportion. So it's a choice between no voice over at all or some sort of compromise.

And remember, only a Sith deals in absolutes

Sorry, I phrased my post like a complete retard. We'd never consider the full VO option if we had the money cuz it would be anti-roleplaying imo and for obvious reason you stated which is messing up with tons of language versions and stuff. The choice is between text only and partial VO in text quests and maybe dialogue. Sucks that it would sound cheap 100% because we never did this before and voice artists will probably not be professionals. Still it might be a nice touch, it's not that intrusive in some games that pull it off nicely. Thanks for the opinion. We'll be debating it next Saturday.

Wow, three pages to answer to. That's what I get for playing games after I'm done making games. Thanks for keeping the thread alive, guys! Soon, it's gonna get a lot of sweet updates. We're now going to have a few text only quests, which will look like that stuff in Space Rangers 1-2. Like, you have a picture on the right, text and options on the left, and maybe music, and like if you're doing a kinky quest about sexing people up it's gonna have funky music, and if you're disarming a bomb it's gonna be fast paced and action packed or not.
What do you people think about partial voice over? Like, when you click on an NPC it says "Stay awhile and listen" but the rest is text only. Would that liven up the game? Because I think it makes the game look cheap and nasty in modern times. Like, wow you got some hobo to do the first lines of your dialogues? Cooooool, noooice, so what you bums couldn't get him to voice everything? Plus it's gonna be shit because we'll have like 3-6 voice actors for 100+ NPCs. Plus, it's tons better for the player to imagine the voice and manners of a character, than to associate said character with some dude we hired for peanuts. Not that great. Text-only is much more kino. Right? I think so. I'm asking because we probably have the budget to do this and some folks asked us for it. But should we? I think no. But maybe I'm wrong?
We also picked the song for the menu screen, and new death picture will have your disfigured corpse lying half way in snow. Snow will be everywhere. NPCs will do stepping on packed snow sounds while walking and steam is coming out of their mouths as we speak. We're making tons of warm clothes and shubas and shit and there's gonna be frostbite probably. Now I'm gonna go through these three pages, read on and reply when needed.

Imho the most pressing matter is a rework of the perk tree, actually you should scrap it and make it like in Fallout, give each individual perk certain level and stat requirements so we can freely pick and chose instead of being locked into one particular tree path. You could still make 2-3 dependent on each other, but otherwise I think the current tree is one of the most critizised features in the game. You could change that tree window into sections like "Combat", "Defense", "Utility" or some such if you want to keep it. I'd also change perk costs to fixed cost of maybe 1-3 depending on how powerful the feat is.
Second suggestion would be to give more incentives to use other skills than Speechcraft, it is basically recommended for every build no ifs or buts. I understand that it was a huge thing in Fallout 1+2 but due to the fact that you never knew on your first playthrough which options were opened up by it it felt much more "organic". Here it usually is "look out for the Speechcraft check and hope you succeed at it".
Lastly, review some skills which are universally considered useless or of questionable use. Gambling would be on top of that list, melee is still considered vastly inferior to any gun skill, though I have no idea how to easily rectify this outside of making ammo much more scarce and expensive.

Yeah, these are our priorities. Like I said, perks will get a nice comb-over, the tree will look a bit less like a tree (though we can't skip on the structure completely since this is not truely an independent game, but an addon). Useless skills will get more use, and we'll continue making checks more diverse, though Str\Dex\Barter checks already fight Speechcraft for dominance in a lot of dialogues. There will be more. A lot of checks are invisible if you don't meet the reqs for the check so it might seem like it's speech only, but some times it isn't.

Hmm, I just started playing the game. I got robbed and found a brick to use as weapon. I moved to next area with the village and went around to explore a bit. Got attacked by a few groups of rats and giant flies and after killing them log says I get some XP but on my character sheet I my XP does not move.. what is happening? Major bugs in first 10 minutes of the game?! WTF?

EDIT: OK I reloaded a save in that area and now I am getting XP again from killing stuff..

Are you sure you weren't getting it? We polished the game, especially the starting areas day and night for a year now. What do you mean by it not moving? If you ever get something like that again, please email the save to support@atomrpg.com cuz that's really weird and among the millions of bug we fixed there was never a "no xp" one.

I think partial voice overs would be better applied to the standalone expansion (You might even re-think calling it an expansion for marketing purposes). Miniquel? Epilogue? I dunno. But you call something an expansion even if it's standalone I think it hurts impulse buys.
But that said if it's only 3-6 voice actors I'm not sure the expense is worth it. I'd rather have Those 3-6 actors do 6-12 key characters more fully rather than try to sound different and do a hundred.

The text based mini-games are okay, Pillars and Tides had them recentlyish. Not terribly uncommon. Try not to overdo it though, I think a lot of the fun in Fallout-likes is directly interacting for alternate solutions. Text solutions feel like a workaround a lot of the time.

just like you already do with unique portraits for everyone

Though the subjects of such portraits are not necessarily unique to ATOM

We're going with Addon right now, but it's an open question still. Because it will be a separate game with a lot of improvements from the first one. But it will be 30% of the original's length and cheaper. So... What do we call it? Thanks for the opinion. Giving it only to some is also a fun idea. The quests with pictures won't be too plentiful.
Yeah... Some of them really aren't... :D

 

[Gunnar]

Atom doesn't even have fanboys. Dude, the NPCs tell you stories and nod and wink to quests or happenings in the game as much as they are for flavor. You never spot an NPC that looks like it does not belong in this world (unless it's a time traveller from the circus or the Warhammer parody thing). NPCs build this world, and ofc you can ignore most of them, there's no problem.

I've never played a game that does NPCs the way ATOM does. I believe there is a reason for that, it should tell you something. The documentary film crew interview approach is boring and conditions the player to ignore the NPCs. If people are ignoring the NPCs, or any content in the game, that's a problem. Saying that people can just ignore NPCs It isn't a good answer to the criticism. It isn't good design. Players shouldn't want to ignore things, they should be excited to interact with them. Imagine if I identified a problem with pistols in the game, and you said, well you can just ignore pistols! It's true, I could just pick a different weapon, but that doesn't fix the problem with pistols. If you were writing a book, and included background stories for every person on the street unrelated to the plot, the book would be bloated, plodding, meandering and tiresome. Any editor would tell you, hey you should cut some of this. It's the same with the game and the NPC dialogue. It should be efficient, interesting and as spare as possible. I'm a person who really likes to read, and I feel like a lot of the writing in this game wastes my time. No one likes to have their time wasted.

Consider the containers in ATOM. You acknowledge a problem:

Also, I recently figured out that containers can just be made to look broken or opened and empty to lessen the amount of containers.

Not every container shown on screen needs to be interactive, it's exhausting and bad design - some can be broken or already opened. I agree! Otherwise, I just start ignoring the containers. It's the same deal with the NPCs. Not every NPC needs a full backstory, some can just give simple barks and that's fine. It keeps the game going at a brisk pace.

 

[ArchAngel]

If anyone is interested in first impressions of a guy that spent 1-2h playing it so far..

I liked the opening cinematics and the main menu where you got a guy that walks away and sounds become quieter.
I am not sure how I feel about the tutorial section where you are left to wander around on your own until you run into areas where stuff is happening. But once I did wander in, I learned useful stuff. Only problem was the battle vs two dudes. Tutorial pop up comes about how you can command your companions and I tried to do that on the one dude that was in the arena on my side of the battle and he never did anything the whole battle (I held left click on him, chose choose target and pointed him at same guy I was attacking).

Then you get a mission and the ambush part and that was kind of OK. Kind of cool how you get to battle them (and lose of course). Then a little sequence when you go to cross the bridge. But that part is funny because it seems like you were next to village but decided to camp outside anyways.
Then I ran around the village, killed everything I could find and looted all I could. Found the secret room and the old guy and the stash. Talked to guards and a couple of people in the village. Ended after I talked with that other ATOM soldier (who is a jerk).

My impressions and problems: Graphics are kind of weak and without enough details (everything is brown). Sounds are even weaker, I miss a good soundtrack but mostly I miss people sounds. The game does not need VO but it needs background sounds of people and other stuff. Game sounds lifeless. UI is basically a copy of Fallout 1 and 2, not sure why. That UI can and should be improved, not copied. Also when I want to melee stuff but enemy is out of range my character didn't move automatically to them to attack.. no need to have these kind of limits in 2018/2019.
Crafting is the worst part. Why the random roll to succeed? I got 30 or 35 in crafting and I fail more than I succeed even the basic recipe (bullets for pipe pistol or bag). I didn't save scum and save scumming should not be basic design. Even worse is that you lose the materials when you fail these checks. At least I got lucky crafting the basic unarmed weapon so I can fight with something.

Writing has spelling errors and it is strange in English. You can tell it is not written (or at least edited) by a English person or writer sucks. I hope it gets better later. For comparison, Underrail has much better writing and that one is made by a Serbian. Maybe it gets better later.

Combat was slower and less interesting than Underrail. Camera is too close to characters, I had to fiddle with camera all the time. At one house my character didn't want to enter it. It took me 10 attempts of different positions and camera angles before he would enter it.

My conclusion: If I was not a big Fallout and Underrail fan I would skip on this game. So far it is just a noticeable worse version of both.

 

[Commissar Draco]

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).

Nope, unfortunately not. She's a saint and all that.

its to meet pretty girl who is not whore or/and slut Comrade, from what we did I can imagine my PC and Katya married and had children after game finished, I am sure Comrade Kovalyev will be proud watching them from the People's Militiamen Heaven. Also loved the fragment about ex cop who returned from retirement and lead survivors to Metro station its was very satisfying to find out what happened to svolotch who did not let those poor people in.

As to voice over goes my advice is to not add them Comrade unless you do have some quality and cheap voice actors... maybe some lines for Companions would work like in Arcanum but for me this game is already for players who were educated by glorious Soviets to read and don't need such capitalistic luxuries. Add some more portraits, Russian and Soviet weapons (Like Cult HMG Maxim), quests and stories who were in majority fun and added to game.

 

[flushfire]

On Tinkering: some recipes cannot be done (at least are supposed to be impossible) even with savescumming on low tinkering. A man can savescum most of things in a game where reqs for success are not completely tied to a certain number. Games with freedom and success chances will always be plagued by the possibility of savescum. I'd rather leave that in, than make it so you can't craft some thing if you lack 1 point of Tinkering. That's even worse!

Like you can't pick some locks because you lack 1 point of Lockpick? Or you can't fix the turbine because you lack 1 point of Tech? Maybe I'm wrong, but my assumption is that few people will nitpick like that. I've never seen anyone say why can I pass this Speechcraft check with 90 but not with 89. Anyway it's not about stopping savescumming, it's about not encouraging it. Right now, even if players take Technophobe, they're able to craft anything with 2 cigs + magnifying glass + savescumming. Why would anyone put points in Tinkering? Even the quests that check it require no investment in the skill. Then the failure chance is too high even after meeting the soft requirement, cigs supposedly require 2 Tinkering, at 50 I still fail like 20% of the time so why bother increasing it. What you have in place basically encourages savescumming. When nobody invests in the skill, and even the most viewed guides say there's no need to invest in the skill, doesn't that mean there's something wrong with it?

 

[Ivan]

Crafting is the worst part. Why the random roll to succeed?

This is bothering me as well. I'm at the 2nd bunker of the game (Mountain of Woes). So many containers to picklock/open is a huge pain the ass. Gives me Expeditions: Viking ptsd.

Anyway, I gotta admit a lot of love and care went to the NPCs. Despite what I said before about them being infodumbs, you can tell a lot of work went into making each one unique. I would have liked to have seen that attention aimed elsewhere. I would have liked more sensible exit zones for certain areas (e.g. Factory - why not move the exit zone closer to the camp instead of wasting the player's time, same goes for the castle in Mt of Woes).

Once I lowered my expectations I gotta say I'm enjoying this a bit more. I think it was waaaaaaaaay too overhyped for me here on the codex, however it's heart is in the right place. Hopefully the Dead City brings some incline to the title since that's my next destination.

Edit: Gunnar left an important post near the bottom of the last page. I also advocate that the devs should re-approach how they handle dialogue with NPCs. While it's probably too late for the expansion, it would serve them well in future titles to try something else. Why not mix in some Attention checks to reveal more expository/descriptive text instead of dumping it from the get-go. Also, I'm glad that Atomboy acknowledges that there are way too many interactive containers in the world.

 

[CoronerZg]

Hello guys,

I see a lot of talk about camera and camera angles so I'll just leave this here;

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1689887503

I'm currently using it, and it's amazing. No idea why something like this was not enabled to begin with.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

Btw, only the left ALT key is recognized as being an ALT key. I think the same goes for the CTRL key. That makes it hard to play left-handed.