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Hand-Placed Loot, Randomized Loot or mixed system?

Which do you prefer?

  • I am a monk swore to poverty and have no need for your puny material belongings, just my fists (KC)

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  • Total voters
    24
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So I've been remembering people talking about Wasteland 2 loot's system and how it was done somewhat wrong due to the fact you often found items in weird places despite their value and scarcity - Like finding twenty shotgun shells in some trash bin while a locked safe has a wrench and two nails. Essentially they would need a system assigned to value, where, say, Value 1 is placed on a trash bin while value, say, 5-8 is placed on the safe because people don't thrown perfect shotgun shells in the trash and nobody guards wrenches and two nails in a locked safe.

Implementation should't be hard, Jim did in his mods with some SFall Scripts, surely we could do it in a similar way but perhaps including shelfs and chests as well.

So should we have a randomized loot system (Wasteland 2-style), Hand-Placed loot (Original Fallouts) or a mixed system (critters in Jim's Mods for Fallout 2)?

Advantages of each:
Randomized: Makes the game much more random, making builds more unpredictable and adding more variety and exploration to loot.

Hand-Placed: Better for game-balance, makes game progress more logical, less randomness

Mixed System: Normal loot with the additional chance of finding a few surprises in every played game.
 

ERYFKRAD

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Randomization within limits, would be fine, I think. As long as enemies give loot of a WYSIWYG style.
 

Whisky

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If it can be done right, semi-randomized loot. If it doesn't become too randomized, it can create a few nice surprises on repeat playthroughs.

If not, hand-placed.
 

hexer

Guest
I used Bioware's semi-randomized loot system for my (ancient) NWN 1 module. And I remember the randomizer was more like a trinket-junk generator than anything useful. If you could make it produce something useful and not out of place, that would be great.
 

Surf Solar

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It's so easy to attach loot to enemies pockets, containers, scenery objects etc so its really not a big timesing to put stuff in where it makes sense - I wouldn't go with a randomized loot system. That's just me, but random stuff everywhere feels wrong.
 

dibens

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Mixed. Weapon rack in an abandoned farm gives a random tier 1 weapon, a tribal drops 1-250 currency, 1-3 random semi-valuable items he may have scavenged and the weapon he used. Hand placed loot for quest/boss/special encounter mobs.
 
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hiver

Guest
semi randomized, if it would be possible to do.

Hand placed for important NPcs, places and characters or factions. While criters and other generic enemies, random containers have their own small list of appropriate items that is a bit randomized.
Carefully hand placed stuff is practically indispensable to make really good quests. I wouldnt mind hand placing items in any location i would work on. In fact i would prefer it, as a part of world building tools.
 

Ranselknulf

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In general, I'd say fully randomized loot but with triggers that can affect the fully random loot table. (and this isn't to say all items must have equal drop percentage chance either)

Like certain "loot" might not become randomly droppable until a player has performed a certain event, completed a specific quest / plot line, or attained a particular level.
 
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I'd say hand-placed for containers and randomized for critters (because you have more variables to work with: you can base weapon value/ammo count on experience value besides area wealth, weapon type on atts/skills or vice versa, etc.), but given the insane amount of maps you're dealing with, you could try randomized containers along the lines of associating containers with critters on the map (FO2 already did that occasionally, to decide who gets pissed off when you tamper with which container, but if you do it consistently, you'll have all the critter stats to work with in deciding container contents: high science critters have a high chance of science manuals in their associated containers, etc.)
 

Jaesun

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Random loot should just make sense within the area it is acquired from. You possibly could do some tables for areas and then have it pick something from that.
 

felipepepe

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Hand-placed loot in certain locations/NPCs/enemies, random loot for the rest.

But the random loot tables should be tiered, so killing/looting high-level stuff does drop better loot than just opening trash cans .
 

The_scorpion

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Mixed System. Random loot mostly for "scenery" items, junk, consumables stuff like that.
 

tuluse

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Mixed system, but with small specific loot tables.
 

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