What follows amounts to little more than a rough draft of ideas and while it hardly breaks any new ground it is an earnest submission covering some of my thoughts on matters concerning both general game design and New Vegas. (Truth be told this more recent article/dissertation sags a bit in the middle. My apologies.)
Hacking, Lock-picking and how Deus Ex did it better.
In New Vegas hacking/lock-picking is simply a matter of having both sufficient character skill and a personal aptitude for the required mini-game. On the side of character skill it is only a matter of investment in the related skill (either lock-picking or hacking for this discussion). I don’t take issue with the fact that there are only four various levels of locked-containers I take issue with the fact that this approach does not take full advantage of the 1-100 scale used by New Vegas to determine skill levels. Morrowind for instance took advantage of having such a large range of possible skill levels by including a large range of corresponding locks levels (anywhere between 5-100 with 10,15,30,50,60,80 and 100 being most common). Why then does New Vegas give us access to 100 varying levels of skill and only four levels of locked-containers? On the side of player aptitude is the fact that the mini-game for both lock-picking and hacking are both frightfully easy and tedious (especially in regard to the hacking mini-game) and if things do go sour for some reason you can simply exit and try again without drawback. I will say that the mini-game from Oblivion is actually an improvement not because the mini-game itself is better (which it is not) but because it requires less skill investment on the part of the player (though Oblivion took this way too far). If in New Vegas I want my character to be able to pick locks or hack terminals I am required to make a rather sizeable skill investment and nothing more is asked of me besides a quick and easy aptitude check. At first it is difficult to take issue with that but let me remind you of a better system from days gone by.
In Deus Ex hacking and lock-picking was had five skill levels: untrained, trained, skilled, expert and agent (if memory serves) which is essentially the same as in New Vegas though without the useless clutter between skill levels. Dues Ex also had locks/terminals of corresponding difficulty levels, again quite like New Vegas, but in Deus Ex the tools required for lock-picking/hacking (picks and muli-tools respectfully) were treated like a resource all to their own and that is what made the system work. As the difficulty level of locks moved farther away from the players skill level a greater and greater number of multi-tools or lock-picks became required. As a player I could choose to put only one extra point in the hacking skill and still be able to hack any terminal in the game provided I had a sufficient number of multi-tools; eventually it would take the low skill character 5+ tools to bypass a terminal. This allowed players to hoard tools and only use them for the most important tasks. It left the option to bypass terminals open to the player and made the use of that skill (for a low skill character) less about actual skill level and more about management of the tools as a resource and because the tools and picks were not common enough to allow a character with low skill to simply open/bypass every obstacle they came across it became important for that player to decide when he would be best served to use up the tools he had been saving.
What I’m proposing is that games treat the actual tools needed to pick-lock and hack terminals as a resource. Why insist that every character be required to invest in these two skills or loose access to the mechanics all together. Let players who make a minimal skill investment still be able to occasionally pick a lock or hack a computer so long as they’ve been diligently managing their quantity of tools. Of course this assumes that the tools are both sufficiently uncommon and that there are enough uses for these skills in the game to make choosing the best time to use them an interesting choice. On a related note it should be mentioned that Deus Ex also allowed players to bypass lock doors and often times security systems (such as laser fields, cameras and security turrets) with the use of explosives both in the form of grenades or a rocket launcher. Why then force the player down one single path to success without allowing for alternative routes? Without getting too far off subject and into too much detail about Deus Ex I will say simply that lock-picking/hacking skills and there implementation in regards to both mechanics and gameplay should be looked at very closely by developers before working on any system of their own design.
On quest design and skill checks.
It is quite clear that New Vegas is a great leap forward from its predecessor in regards to skill checks but where skill checks can be well implemented they can also be taken too far. New Vegas often offers a non-combat path through quests in the form of speech checks or other skill/stat checks but these checks are too often used as a complete alternative allowing players to bypass content instead of as an augmenting factor. What I mean to say is that skills checks could be used to alter a characters path through a quest instead of simply allowing a character to bypass a quest. For example:
If I take a quest to stop a group of bank robbers who are armed and have taken hostages two situations are bound to arise 1) I can walk in the front door and use my combat skills to kill the robbers. 2) I can walk in the front door and pass a speech check convincing all the robbers to simply give up and go home.
Instead why not make it so that a player with a moderate speech skill in simply able to convince one of the three robbers to give himself up? Why does it all too often seem to be all or nothing when there are so many gradients of possibility in between? Why rely so heavily on speech when there are so many other skills available? Why not give a player with a high explosives skill an opportunity to disarm a trap on the front door making the combat route much easier? Why not let a player versed in stealth approach through the locked rear door and take up a better position before confronting the robbers? Why not let speech come into play before you even enter the bank? Players could learn about one of the robber’s personal motives, break into his home and use the information gained to help him persuade that robber to turn himself in when the inevitable confrontation arises.
I will be frank in admitting that New Vegas handles skill checks fairly well in several quests but it never hurts to push for even more and so I’m letting it be known that this is the direction quest design needs to head. In the future quests should take skill checks, exploration and a clever use of the surrounding environment all into account. (Deus Ex often handled that last part extremely well).
Of course there are numerous examples that can be cited showing the ways in which New Vegas has poorly implemented skills checks but was glad to see they are the exception rather than the rule and I was also quite pleased to see that New Vegas make far greater use of over a range of skill checks then it’s predecessor and that is certainly a step in the right direction.
Encounter Design and why games stopped being 2D in the first place.
With the advent of 3D gaming the designer needs to begin to design content while keeping three-dimensional spaces in mind. Why then do all the enemies in New Vegas appear at roughly the same elevation? Strangely enough I actually think that Fallout 3 handled encounter design in a 3D space much better the New Vegas has. In Fallout 3 it was very common to engage enemies that were positioned several floors above or below my character, this was particularly prevalent in the ruins of outdoor building and in the subway tunnels. Enemies would fire down at me from the window of a second story building as I worked my way up to them or would notice my character while patrolling the upper levels of an underground subway platform. Yet all of this has been conspicuously absent during my time with New Vegas and I’m left wondering why. There are still outdoor ruins but I have yet to see any enemies in the upper levels of these even though they are surrounding the building at ground level and there are still plenty indoor factories and vaults with a network of catwalks for enemies to take advantage of. So why then does it seem like the designers approached encounter design with a two-dimensional frame of mind? Perhaps it all stems from Obsidian’s lack of familiarity with fully 3D environments? After all New Vegas is the first time they have worked in a fully realized 3D space (at least to my knowledge) and because of this I am willing to chalk it is as understandable oversight. Of course there are times when New Vegas remembers to take advantage of its extra dimension but these instances are the exception rather than the rule and in the future I would beg developers to remember why games gravitated to 3D in the first place and to be sure to take full advantage of that extra dimension when working on any aspect of game design. Remember that not everybody out there thinks that every game has to be 3D but if you choose to design a 3D game be sure to take advantage of all the extra possibilities it offers, otherwise what was the point in the first place.
