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review-bombing is pretty much the only tool available to gamers when it comes to sending a message to developers/publishers.
Skyrim got review-bombed back in 2015, which lead to Valve changing their plans and removing paid mods functionality. Ion Maiden got review-bombed when the devs decided to placate to SJWs and censor the game, they reverted the censorship after their review scores tanked.
I tried Atom at the release but quit few hours in, considering a second playthrough now that the game is fixed and polished.
Without spoilers, what things should I know? What to avoid, are there builds or skills that are dogshit?
Glutton is a good trait.
Personality and Luck can be a dump stat.
Crafting is your friend.
Drugs are your friend.
Speechcraft is useful for skipping random encounters.
Make sure you keep the slave and use her for lockpicking.
Survival at 40 for dog encounter.
Don't waste money on a vehicle it is a ripoff.
There is a raiding story path that will lock you out of the endgame if you join them. The Deth gang.
There is a mod I am going to use that fixes a few things. Not sure on all the changes.
Interesting for starting distinctions, party heal, fishing (I never fished in ATOM) and armed combat buff but too many changes seems to make the game way easier.
A difficulty mod but with QoL improvements would have been nice.
I checked Nexus and there is a couple of interesting mods, besides the car one most of them are gameplay mods and even one with an improved AI and a mod for full party control.
It seems the one improving enemies AI is a total reconversion mod. Phenomenon
I tried Atom at the release but quit few hours in, considering a second playthrough now that the game is fixed and polished.
Without spoilers, what things should I know? What to avoid, are there builds or skills that are dogshit?
Sniper Rifles and Automatic Weapons don't disappoint, or Martial Arts if you prefer close combat.
Speechcraft & Charisma if you feel like people should share their wives.
Interesting for starting distinctions, party heal, fishing (I never fished in ATOM) and armed combat buff but too many changes seems to make the game way easier.
A difficulty mod but with QoL improvements would have been nice.
I checked Nexus and there is a couple of interesting mods, besides the car one most of them are gameplay mods and even one with an improved AI and a mod for full party control.
It seems the one improving enemies AI is a total reconversion mod. Phenomenon
I tried Atom at the release but quit few hours in, considering a second playthrough now that the game is fixed and polished.
Without spoilers, what things should I know? What to avoid, are there builds or skills that are dogshit?
Sniper Rifles and Automatic Weapons don't disappoint, or Martial Arts if you prefer close combat.
Speechcraft & Charisma if you feel like people should share their wives.
I was almost ready to try Phenomenon Expedition but it seems it's not complete and the development seems to have been slowed down a lot, if not frozen, for at least a year.
I don't think Neutron is my thing, it looks like a cheap mod with more cheat options than anything else and the base game is easy enough.
It's not worth it if I already want to turn off 80% of its features.
Thanks for your opinion. I kinda feel the same way but now I basically know what the skill checks are to begin with. Everyone I asked at NMA thought it was fine but they love New Vegas like no other.
My third try on survival I died at lvl 6 to a rat ambush at night at the circus. What a dumbfuck move. Every run I am getting better though. I got the lucky goldfish with 1 luck so that shows how important luck is.
Field report #1:
I wonder if the writers were paid by the wordcount, because Atom RPG might be the most egregious example of bloated text I've ever seen. Anyone you talk with will have something to say, and it appears those dialogues are - as far as I've seen - unique. What a horrible, sensless thing to do. What were the creators thinking? That the more text there is, the better? After the first town I was already thoroughly sick of it and most of the time skipping the dialogues. Last time I was this enraged by text bloat was Pillars of Eterenity 1, but that game at least had the decency of varying things up and not giving the same five dialogue options to 99% of NPCs.
More is not better. Without exaggeration this is the biggest sin of Atom, pointless walls of texts that will put you to sleep. If clicking every single dialogue tree was a fluff mechanic, it wouldn't be that bad, but this is how you are getting quests in this game. This is atrocious. Has no one played the game before they started implementing it all? Extremely blatant quantity > quality design.
And in case some retard wants to argue that 'Down to earth dialogue is a part of creating distinct, post-apocalyptic amosphere' then this is not how you do it. All of this should be cut in half and distilled to its most important parts. Instead there are few crumbs of relevant information among tons of bland, boring text that didn't need to be here.
It's the dialogue equivalent of exploring the world just to see 5 gold coins or rusty sword everywhere. After a few hours of that the player would stop exploring because there is nothing interesting to be found. That's why the developers pace the loot and still give 5 coins in random places, but vary it with some note, an interesting consummable or rarely an artifact. So that there is something interesting to look for. In Atom the developers are actively demotivating a player from engaging with their material, making it as off-putting as possible.
That's retarded. To criticize even beloved games is a very important process, how the fuck did you not figure that out after spending here 10 years, I've no idea.
I didn't realize I was talking to your punk ass. I said COMPLAIN not CRITICIZE you fucking faggot. Did you get that now? Do you get the difference between the two words? Ok now fuck off then.
I didn't realize I was talking to your punk ass. I said COMPLAIN not CRITICIZE you fucking faggot. Did you get that now? Do you get the difference between the two words? Ok now fuck off then.
Field report #1:
I wonder if the writers were paid by the wordcount, because Atom RPG might be the most egregious example of bloated text I've ever seen. Anyone you talk with will have something to say, and it appears those dialogues are - as far as I've seen - unique. What a horrible, sensless thing to do. What were the creators thinking? That the more text there is, the better? After the first town I was already thoroughly sick of it and most of the time skipping the dialogues. Last time I was this enraged by text bloat was Pillars of Eterenity 1, but that game at least had the decency of varying things up and not giving the same five dialogue options to 99% of NPCs.
More is not better. Without exaggeration this is the biggest sin of Atom, pointless walls of texts that will put you to sleep. If clicking every single dialogue tree was a fluff mechanic, it wouldn't be that bad, but this is how you are getting quests in this game. This is atrocious. Has no one played the game before they started implementing it all? Extremely blatant quantity > quality design.
And in case some retard wants to argue that 'Down to earth dialogue is a part of creating distinct, post-apocalyptic amosphere' then this is not how you do it. All of this should be cut in half and distilled to its most important parts. Instead there are few crumbs of relevant information among tons of bland, boring text that didn't need to be here.
It's the dialogue equivalent of exploring the world just to see 5 gold coins or rusty sword everywhere. After a few hours of that the player would stop exploring because there is nothing interesting to be found. That's why the developers pace the loot and still give 5 coins in random places, but vary it with some note, an interesting consummable or rarely an artifact. So that there is something interesting to look for. In Atom the developers are actively demotivating a player from engaging with their material, making it as off-putting as possible.
I don't think the problem is the amount of text but rather having the same questions in every conversation. Makes talking to NPCs a bit too monotonous.
Anyway, Atomboy has responded to criticism about the conversations many times in this thread, e.g.:
Well, one thing I agree with is the fact that the conversations are overwhelmingly generic. Atomboy commented somewhere that there was a reason why all interactions follow exactly the same pattern: "work", "how's life", "talk about yourself", "rumors"; and that's it. Sometimes a new option or two depending on some quest or context. I do understand the logic of "why I could ask this question to certain people and not to others" (that ended up leading to this), but the final effect really didn't turn out to be very organic, precisely because the characters end up stuck to that same basic skeleton of interaction. I think I liked the motivation behind their existence more than the final outcome, I guess.
They are generic with generic people. Like, when you get to Patryk the grenade-necklace wearing freak based on our favorite Polish letsplayer you won't get boring stuff about beetroot. But normal "boring" mundane people are a huge part of our worldbuilding. We want to show, that this is a relatively normal, toned down world where some people's biggest worry is beetroot harvest or spooky stories about mud ants. We'd fail at that pretty hard, if we would make every character a unique and unforgettable roller coaster ride. I remember like ten times when I toned down an NPC because he was too entertaining.
Though to be honest, I don't actually see any NPCs as boring, because not a single one is a copypasta of another one, most have hidden clues, checks, or simply just stories. But that's just me.
A lot of people critique Atom for these walls of text, but we don't actually push the player to read them. You're good if you only speak to important people. These dialogues are there as much for the player to read, as they are to make the world believable. Like, you don't talk to every single person on a street when you drive to some town for some reason in the real world, right? But if you WOULD, they would all have some boring (or not so boring) unique shit to tell you, right? They would not have a single line of text or just nothing. That's why Atom's NPCs are like that. You are not obliged to talk to them, and most of the times it's pretty easy to see which NPC is a quest giver and which one is not, and we'll try to make this difference even larger in Trudograd. But in case you would for some reason WANT TO chat with a rando grandma, you will be able to do it. I know it's not OBJECTIVELY better than games with single line NPCs or things like Skyrim where every single NPC is fun and entertaining. But it's something I will do even if I make an FPS. My biggest rage moment in any otherwise good game (not just RPG, even god damn GTA 5 I dropped because I couldn't talk to my character's friends when I visited them while not doing a quest) is meeting a one-line NPC who serves as a decoration. So yeah, there's some of my freaky OCD thing with one line NPCs in the pile of reasons for this in Atom too, won't lie...
Oh and the other part you remembered correctly, the system must be there, because if you can ask one NPC about the weather, but you can ask the other one about pine trees, it would be illogical. So we even wrote in that story about you being trained to ask these specific 4 questions unless you can't for some reason :D
Since video games will never deliver the quality of a decent novel; decent by 20th century standard; I don't really care about writing quality beyond an average quality threshold.
It never felt like ATOM writing was terrible or too wordy.
Other well regarded games feature retarded writing like the tribe of the mammoth lords in illiteratefinder.
Combat could be better, sure, even way better but it's hard enough in the first half of the game to make it interesting and late game is no different than 95% of the games where nothing can hurt you anymore.
I find ATOM way better than Trudograd due to the scope of the game and the optional quests making the first game everything but a railroaded experience.
"I don't want games with characters that have unique dialogue I just want to click shiny buttons to advance the game for another dopamine hit"
I can't believe how retarded some of you are, you don't deserve ATOM
go do meth or something to get your fix
"I don't want games with characters that have unique dialogue I just want to click shiny buttons to advance the game for another dopamine hit"
I can't believe how retarded some of you are, you don't deserve ATOM
go do meth or something to get your fix
You cannot possibly be so stupid as to think writing generic walls of dialogue is a good design. By that logic Skyrim has extreme amounts of content because it has its (in)famous 'radiant quests.' Writing should be concise and to the point, not stretched across 100 NPCs making the same point.
If you are willing to eat a ton of shit for one decent meal then do so, but don't you dare call it a good design.
"I don't want games with characters that have unique dialogue I just want to click shiny buttons to advance the game for another dopamine hit"
I can't believe how retarded some of you are, you don't deserve ATOM
go do meth or something to get your fix
You cannot possibly be so stupid as to think writing generic walls of dialogue is a good design. By that logic Skyrim has extreme amounts of content because it has its (in)famous 'radiant quests.' Writing should be concise and to the point, not stretched across 100 NPCs making the same point.
If you are willing to eat a ton of shit for one decent meal then do so, but don't you dare call it a good design.
"generic walls of dialogue"
"those dialogues are - as far as I've seen - unique"
I'm sorry reading is difficult for you, may I suggest you go play games in a different genre?
and yes, I talked to every NPC I found and exhausted all dialogue. I liked that the characters actually seemed like people who lived in the world, not just nameless questgivers.
