Game News Oblivion modder working on Fallout: New Vegas

[MetalCraze]

Bethesda hired the guy who made the combat mod for MWSE/MWE (I think it's the latter and the same guy that also wrote MWE. Correct me if I'm wrong) that made it actiony and less sucky.

Except Morrowind combat is better than the one in Oblivion. Stats did affect it (but in a far from ideal way) and you did miss.

 

[Black]

I've seen people who disliked that because "IT LOOKS LIKE IT SHOULD HIT BUT IT MISSED AND I CANT BLOCK MANUALLY SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT".
Of course later bethesda listened to its fans.

 

[JarlFrank]

Why is it that modders always make some good modifications to the core game, and when the professionals try to do the same in the sequel it ends up being shit?

 

[markec]

Why is it that modders always make some good modifications to the core game, and when the professionals try to do the same in the sequel it ends up being shit?

Because professionals think they know better then modders but they dont feel like doing complex tasks?

 

[Dionysus]

Except Morrowind combat is better than the one in Oblivion. Stats did affect it (but in a far from ideal way) and you did miss.

Technically, stats also affect combat in Oblivion, it's just that everything is scaled so you might not notice.

The distinction between damage and accuracy mods is mostly irrelevant when comparing Oblivion and Morrowind. Although they did screw up by allowing magic damage to go unaffected by weapon skill in Oblivion. But the system was still better than Morrowind's.

 

[Black]

I sure do love hitting everything even if my skill is 1, I'm a next gen gamer after all!

 

[Dionysus]

I sure do love hitting everything even if my skill is 1, I'm a next gen gamer after all!

In practice, there's no big difference between hitting every time for 1 point of damage and hitting 1/10 of the time for 10 points of damage. It's mostly an issue of aesthetics, and people that make a big deal out of it one way or the other are being equally unreasonable. Personally, I like to see damage mods for melee and spread-affecting accuracy mods for missile weapons, but the most important thing is that the skills affect something in a noticeable way.

 

[Black]

There's a huge difference between always hitting an enemy for 1 damage and hitting 1/10 of the time for 1 damage.

 

[The Ninth Circle]

I sure do love hitting everything even if my skill is 1, I'm a next gen gamer after all!

In practice, there's no big difference between hitting every time for 1 point of damage and hitting 1/10 of the time for 10 points of damage. It's mostly an issue of aesthetics, and people that make a big deal out of it one way or the other are being equally unreasonable. Personally, I like to see damage mods for melee and spread-affecting accuracy mods for missile weapons, but the most important thing is that the skills affect something in a noticeable way.

An enemy with 4hp would only take four attacks to kill regardless of skill if every attack landed a hit. The alternative would be depending on my skill it might take many, many more than four attacks to land a death blow. Consider also that when your fatigue was worn out it might take a lot of additional attacks to actually land one, depending on your skill and they're vastly different scenarios.

Your example is as close as they can get to being even, and they're still not the same. You forget that it my skill were low enough it may take 10 hits to that 1 damage.

 

[merchant's skeleton]

Why is it that modders always make some good modifications to the core game, and when the professionals try to do the same in the sequel it ends up being shit?

Modders are obsessive individuals who see the worth in making such modifications even though they don't (usually) get paid for it. They do it for love of the game, or an idea of the game should be, and that passion (generally) shows.

Professionals are (mostly) just doing it to try and shift the most units, or to get critical plaudits. They'll put as least an amount of work into the game as possible to obtain these, and then wait to be feted by the media and masses.

 

[hiver]

From what I've heard, Sawyer is tweaking the gameplay pretty extensively.

Any hard info chips on that one?
What is he changing?

 

[Dionysus]

An enemy with 4hp would only take four attacks to kill regardless of skill if every attack landed a hit. The alternative would be depending on my skill it might take many, many more than four attacks to land a death blow. Consider also that when your fatigue was worn out it might take a lot of additional attacks to actually land one, depending on your skill and they're vastly different scenarios.

You are right. I was thinking of an oversimplified system in which enemies have 10s of hit points. But that is just a matter of balance, and you can always throw variability into the damage mods too (they typically do). I'm just saying that one could easily make an outrageously draconian skill system that is purely based on damage mods.

Your example is as close as they can get to being even, and they're still not the same. You forget that it my skill were low enough it may take 10 hits to that 1 damage.

And if we modded damage into fractions, then it could take 10 hits to do 1 damage.

I do think accuracy mods work better than damage mods when they affect missile weapon trajectory (instead of Morrowind's hit-and-still-miss system) because it easily captures the deleterious effect of distance on accuracy.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Why is it that modders always make some good modifications to the core game, and when the professionals try to do the same in the sequel it ends up being shit?

Modders are obsessive individuals who see the worth in making such modifications even though they don't (usually) get paid for it. They do it for love of the game, or an idea of the game should be, and that passion (generally) shows.

Professionals are (mostly) just doing it to try and shift the most units, or to get critical plaudits. They'll put as least an amount of work into the game as possible to obtain these, and then wait to be feted by the media and masses.

There's also the fact that modders don't have other aspects of the game to worry about, like time restraints. They also don't HAVE to worry about how the mod will affect the rest of the game.

 

[Panthera]

The best thing modern Creative Assembly did was hire the guy who did Lands to Conquer to balance their games.

 

[DraQ]

A shame no massive overhaul mod ever came about that fixed the entire game, including the stupid main storyline and gameworld/dungeon blandness. People only touched things up.

Well, that would have to be Oblivion to TES total conversion.

it would be cool if they wiped the existing world space, filled it with true-to-lore Imperial City, plus some surrounding islands with wilderness to roam, made more complex, mysterious (figuring out who, why and how to convince others it wasn't you, for starters) and far less combat reliant MQ, and limit the OMG daedric invasion to grand finale at most.

Except Morrowind combat is better than the one in Oblivion. Stats did affect it (but in a far from ideal way) and you did miss.

This. It was crude, but made sense most of the time and had it's occasional highlights. What they should have done was adding things like dodge/miss/parry animations and generally adding more complexity to make whackwhacking the enemy more interesting. Maybe refining their trivially bypassable implementation of attack associated with footwork.
Instead they toned the complexity down and replaced the old mechanics with something easily surpassed by '80s fighting games.
Banal. Shit. Boring.

The distinction between damage and accuracy mods is mostly irrelevant when comparing Oblivion and Morrowind.

Statistically. Statistically a human has half a dick, one boob and one ball - do you?

I'm just saying that one could easily make an outrageously draconian skill system that is purely based on damage mods.

One could also make one based on tetris minigame. It still wouldn't make sense.

There is more to combat than just hitting or missing, but it's more convincing and less repetitive mechanics than scaling damage.

Additionaly, deabstracting the mechanics and making it more literal by removing missing, for the sake of silencing gamers going "WAAAA!" over the fact that the engine doesn't portray failed attacks differently, then failing to portray differences between effectiveness of attacks and defense so that an unarmoured npc standing still will lose just a fraction of their health when chopped in the head with a claymore if your skill is low is just epic.
And don't get me started on Oblivions armour system. Just don't.

I do think accuracy mods work better than damage mods when they affect missile weapon trajectory (instead of Morrowind's hit-and-still-miss system) because it easily captures the deleterious effect of distance on accuracy.

That's true.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

What they should have done was adding things like dodge/miss/parry animations and generally adding more complexity to make whackwhacking the enemy more interesting. Maybe refining their trivially bypassable implementation of attack associated with footwork.

yeah, that's the thing that bothers me most. If the combat is static or observed from afar, it doesn't really matter, but Morrowind's combat involves running around and jumping. It feels very weird to see the enemy walking through your attacks for a while then all of a sudden it connects. Watching your weapon clip through them while they advance Terminator style makes it seem unfinished.

I don't have any problem with the skill-hit system otherwise.