Fallout So, Fallout 1....I'm raging so hard now.

[Surf Solar]

Because clicking "6" on the keyboard and then clicking at the computer or clicking directly at the computer to see what happens surely is a huge time waster.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Fallout is a game of skills, dialogue and C&C. The designers should have helped the player discover those qualities by making them easier to use!

No. It wouldn't allow a nice gun image.

Also, skills are very easy to use. You want Skilldex? Press S.
You want to sneak? Press 1.
You want to pick a lock? Press 2.
You want to steal? Press 3.
You want to use science? Press 7.
It is even advised in the manual that you should use 1-8 keys if you want to save time.
That's faster than any menu.

And under F1 you have a list of all keyboard shortcuts.

Fallout is a game of skills, dialogue and C&C. The designers should have helped the player discover those qualities by making them easier to use!

No. Game design isn't about what the Infinitron thinks and about how the Infinitron can't notice that there are skills and about how Infinitron can't even read the fucking manual if he doesn't understand something.
You're creating an artificial problem and then spinning a tale about how Fallout is a bad game because the Infinitron didn't get something when everyone else and their 10 years old brother and their retarded classmate got it.

Also, one think you don't understand is that Fallout is a game from the era when there were still manuals and manuals were made to be enjoyable to read. Fallout has an over 100 page manual that is full of mechanics and interface informations and images and little jokes. If you lack intelligence and can't get that stuff like most of even moderately intelligent people could, you had it all spelled out in the fucking manual that was an integral part of the game package.

(For the record, I also think Fallout's dialogue UI was kind of fugly, although I can't quite put my finger on why. Putting the dialogue in a window in the center of the screen and adding a portrait might have helped. On the other hand, the Infinity Engine games had a very a similar layout and their dialogue was much prettier to me. Maybe it's a matter of color and font.)

No, Fallout's interface looks great and the whole sliding broken TV screen thing was awesome.

 

[MetalCraze]

Man it's like a hipster coming out day on the Codex

 

[Infinitron]

Because clicking "6" on the keyboard and then clicking at the computer or clicking directly at the computer to see what happens surely is a huge time waster.

The player should not have to check all options by brute force to discover how to use his skills. What is this, a text adventure where half the challenge is guessing what verbs the parser expects you to use?

The skills are the core element of Fallout's character progression. Why make them unfun and confusing for the player??

 

[Multidirectional]

This thread made me reinstall Fallout.

I'm feeling that itch too now man, I only finished it 3 times because I happened to like Fallout 2 more, but it's been too long.

 

[Jestai]

^ I think that post is actually the best proof yet that me and Infinitron are right, Blaine. It's fine that you love it, but, "atmosphere" and sense of mystery is something that can be said about a lot of games depending on who you ask.

So? "Atmospheres" and "senses of mystery" can objectively be done better than others, and it's a quality that should be praised like any other... Some games didn't work on me even though the way the atmosphere that was rendered was decent. In the case of Fallout, it was grand and whoever thinks "meh" either can't like any sort of post-ap setting or are have an obscenely exclusive taste.
"I loved popamole combat of Mass Effect and romances, to each his own, you can't judge my feelings ^^^^^^^". It's the same, really.

About Fallout's flaws: Like I said in my first post ITT, a lot of them come down to easily corrected interface issues.

For example, Fallout is a game with a huge emphasis on skills and skill usage, so why not encourage the player to use his skills, instead of hiding them in that weird Skilldex thingy which is so easy to forget it even exists? The option to use skills on things should have been in a context menu attached to each object in the environment.

Also, objects in the environment - all of them, not just items on the floor - should have been highlighted when you mouse over them, to encourage the player to look for objects in the environment and experiment with them.

It's little things like these that can change your entire experience of a game.

Fallout isn't exempt of critics, but this is some serious nitpicking.
As I am not a monkey, I used my skills when I thought one would be useful. I mean, are you fucking kidding me? Hidden? At most, and that's if you're a bit slow, you would have some trouble the first time. And if you don't like the Skilldex for WHATEVER REASON, you have a right click contextual menu (maybe it was fallout 2?) and hotkeys... What else do you want? It wasn't perfect but definitely good enough. Once again, that's if you're not a monkey.
Are you old? Your brain seems to need shiny things and big "HELLO I'M THERE, DON'T FORGET ABOUT ME RETARD" buttons.

To refresh everyone's memory:

Yeah, I'm sure people giving game hints over the phone got rich on this one.

Are we gonna argue about the "I" of the skilldex being hard to read, therefore ruining the Fallout experience?

 

[MetalCraze]

The player should not have to check all options by brute force to discover how to use his skills. What is this, a text adventure where half the challenge is guessing what verbs the parser expects you to use?

The skills are the core element of Fallout's character progression. Why make them unfun and confusing for the player??

Well if you can't figure out that clicking skills button then selecting a skill with cursor changing and then pointing and clicking at where you want to use said skill and it's ambiguous as fuck to you no wonder retards like you can't find Caius Cosades

Yet the fucking awful interface of Ultima 7 where you must try to drag items few pixels wide is GREAT

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

The player should not have to check all options by brute force to discover how to use his skills. What is this, a text adventure where half the challenge is guessing what verbs the parser expects you to use?

The skills are the core element of Fallout's character progression. Why make them unfun and confusing for the player??

Why make skills unfun and confusing to the Infinitron when everyone else finds them fun and clear? Why?

 

[Infinitron]

Jestai It's not "hidden", but it's not given enough prominence either. Look at the IE interface. Skills are much less important in those games, but they're still much easier to access and use. They're not all dumped together in some weird pop up menu.

 

[St. Toxic]

Tag-team-trolling thread detected.

 

[Infinitron]

Tag-team-trolling thread detected.

Who's trolling who?

 

[St. Toxic]

Tag-team-trolling thread detected.

Who's trolling who?

It's usually the most active posters in the thread v.s the rest.

 

[Infinitron]

Baldur's Gate Thief UI:

First of all, there's the fact that each class get its own customized UI. Imagine if Fallout gave you a customized UI based on your skills. It'd be easier to use the skills you specialize in. Wouldn't that be great?

Second, notice how all the Thief skills can be directly accessed from the main screen. Detect traps, stealth. Lock picking and pick pocketing are mutually exclusive skills - you can't lockpick a person and you can't pickpocket a locked chest - so the UI is streamlined to let you use those skills with the same button. For the more esoteric special abilities, you can access a submenu on the far right. On the left, you can select one of two weapons. Baldur's Gate is a much more combat-focused game than Fallout, yet the weapon selection UI is much smaller.

And don't even get me started on the Pip Boy.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Jestai It's not "hidden", but it's not given enough prominence either. Look at the IE interface. Skills are much less important in those games, but they're still much easier to access and use. They're not all dumped together in some weird pop up menu.

Only because they are class-specific. If you'd have 8 skills for every class, they'd get relegated to the special abilities menu from which it wouldn't be possible to access them using shortcut keys.

Also, it doesn't need to be prominent. It wouldn't make the interface look better if there would be 8 skill buttons lying around. And the Skilldex menu looks good.
No one who wants efficiency uses GUI - that's what keyboard shortcuts are for. GuI is for looking good or accessing information. Skilldex provides both (it reminds you what are your skill levels).

Baldur's Gate is a much more combat-focused game than Fallout, yet the weapon selection UI is much smaller.

And the weapon icon looks like shit while Fallout's weapons look great.

 

[Melcar]

I can't believe I read all this.

 

[dunno lah]

Fallout is a game of skills, dialogue and C&C. The designers should have helped the player discover those qualities by making them easier to use!

No. It wouldn't allow a nice gun image.

Also, skills are very easy to use. You want Skilldex? Press S.
You want to sneak? Press 1.
You want to pick a lock? Press 2.
You want to steal? Press 3.
You want to use science? Press 7.
It is even advised in the manual that you should use 1-8 keys if you want to save time.
That's faster than any menu.

And under F1 you have a list of all keyboard shortcuts.

I was an ignorant gamer pirate back in 2010 when I played FO1, my first cRPG for the 1st time. Needless to say, F1 saved my life and made me a better gamer.

 

[sea]

I think another way to improve Fallout's combat experience, other than rebalancing it, would be to just make it a lot faster. Make it essentially a turn-based version of Ultima VII combat. Faster animations, simultaneous enemy movement, streamlined UI with less clicks required to attack, etc.

I dunno about that. First of all, having all enemies move at once would be harder to understand for the player - your brain can more easily process individual actions. Second, it could easily lead to AI issues like people getting stuck when they all try to move somewhere at once. Third, it could lead to them hurting themselves more than the player. Turn-based combat in this case could be sped up a little (and you can in the options menu, by the way), but otherwise it's what, like 5 seconds for all enemies to act when you have max combat speed on? That's about as fast as it can get without fundamentally changing how combat works.

The designers of the Infinity Engine games realized that players do a lot of routine actions in the environment - opening doors, opening chests, and other random "frobbing". So those things are instantaneous - there's no animation, you just need to be close enough.

Fallout makes you watch a boringly slow animation for every one of these actions. Again, it's a small thing, but all of these small things, together, ruin the player's enjoyment and de-incentivize environmental interaction, which is supposed to be an important pillar of the game.

I agree with your complaints about Fallout's UI. It's something you get used to but it isn't exactly great and by no means is it perfect. A context-sensitive radial menu on right-click would have been awesome. But the hotkey solution encourages experimentation and also works pretty well, once you have learned them.

I very much disagree with your "frobbing" complaint. The animations in Fallout serve as a disincentive from endlessly click-spamming repeatable actions, i.e. trying to pick the lock in a door 5000 times just so your 0.05% chance will succeed. Arguably stuff like critical failures are enough but I really think those interaction animations are meant to be a deterrent against abuse more than anything else. You also drastically overstate the length of those animations. They are literally 1 second long, and if you're going to waste 2 minutes doing something over and over and over and over and over and over... you're probably trying to cheese the game, and deserve to wait those 2 minutes.

Baldur's Gate Thief UI:

First of all, there's the fact that each class get its own customized UI. Imagine if Fallout gave you a customized UI based on your skills. It'd be easier to use the skills you specialize in. Wouldn't that be great?

Second, notice how all the Thief skills can be directly accessed from the main screen. Detect traps, stealth. Lock picking and pick pocketing are mutually exclusive skills - you can't lockpick a person and you can't pickpocket a locked chest - so the UI is streamlined to let you use those skills with the same button. For the more esoteric special abilities, you can access a submenu on the far right. On the left, you can select one of two weapons. Baldur's Gate is a much more combat-focused game than Fallout, yet the weapon selection UI is much smaller

So you'd prefer if Fallout had 8 giant icons on the bottom of the screen, or in a hotbar, that were all plainly visible? Would you make even more space available by removing other useful stuff (combat start/end, weapon selection, etc.)? Or do you want fewer slots, like 3? Does that mean if you specialize in stealth then you don't get a speech option visible there unless you put points into it?

The idea works for Baldur's Gate because most classes have both unique skills and a very limited number of them. It doesn't work well for Fallout.

 

[Rivmusique]

What a dumb game, lets you pick Anomen as PC portrait and doesn't even have the decency to add a long lost brothers questline. Anyone that plays it is a moron.

 

[Infinitron]

But, I disagree with your "frobbing" complaint. The animations in Fallout serve as a disincentive from endlessly click-spamming repeatable actions, i.e. trying to pick the lock in a door 5000 times just so your 0.05% chance will succeed. Arguably stuff like critical failures are enough but I really think those interaction animations are meant to be a deterrent against abuse more than anything else. You also drastically overstate the length of those animations. They are literally 1 second long, and if you're going to waste 2 minutes doing something over and over and over and over and over and over... you're probably trying to cheese the game, and deserve to wait those 2 minutes.

Picking a lock, yes. Opening or closing an unlocked door, no.

Actually though, now that I think about it, the really annoying bit about those animations was that your character put away his weapon every time he did them and pulled it back out after he was done. That was what made them really long.

 

[Grunker]

To paraphrase Roguey/Josh, a good game would be even better with a good UI.

Another example: If the combat in Fallout kinda sucks and is to be avoided, why do combat related things dominate such a huge portion of the interface?

Your face sucks. Again, the only cRPG with better combat than Fallout is JA2.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA

 

[Blaine]

Oh man, this thread has me in stitches.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I agree with your complaints about Fallout's UI. It's something you get used to but it isn't exactly great and by no means is it perfect.

Pressing 1-8 to do stuff. So uncomfortable.

GuI is another thing, but again, when it comes to GuI looks are more important than usability, because it's something that one uses only until one memorizes the keyboard shortcuts.

I would never resign from looking at the gorgeous weapon icons just to make place for 8 buttons.

On the other hand if one wants for example to know what current skill levels are before attempting something, Skilldex is superior to Baldur's Gate's GUI which doesn't provide such information.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA

Provide me a list of cRPGs with aimed attacks and critical hits depending on body part targeted and critical hit descriptions, then.
Oh wait, there are none.
Almost all of them just offer you magic items or shitty pure HP attrition combat.

 

[Infinitron]

So you'd prefer if Fallout had 8 giant icons on the bottom of the screen, or in a hotbar, that were all plainly visible? Would you make even more space available by removing other useful stuff (combat start/end, weapon selection, etc.)? Or do you want fewer slots, like 3? Does that mean if you specialize in stealth then you don't get a speech option visible there unless you put points into it?

The idea works for Baldur's Gate because most classes have both unique skills and a very limited number of them. It doesn't work well for Fallout.

A user customizable UI would be the best bet. And, how fortuitous, Wasteland 2 is doing just that.

However, like I said, that UI would be an additional layer on top of a context menu based interface.

 

[sea]

Pressing 1-8 to do stuff. So uncomfortable.

GuI is another thing, but again, when it comes to GuI looks are more important than usability, because it's something that one uses only until one memorizes the keyboard shortcuts.

I would never resign from looking at the gorgeous weapon icons just to make place for 8 buttons.

On the other hand if one wants for example to know what current skill levels are before attempting something, Skilldex is superior to Baldur's Gate's GUI which doesn't provide such information.

Read my edited post, I clarified my thoughts a bit. I don't have a problem with hotkeys but I would like the mouse use to be a little more streamlined, like with NWN2's right-click list or ToEE's radial menu. Fallout has something similar admittedly, but you can't really use skills from it.

A user customizable UI would be the best bet. And, how fortuitous, Wasteland 2 is doing just that.

However, like I said, that UI would be an additional layer on top of a context menu based interface.

Yes, let's compare the UI, usability and technology between a game released in 1997, and one in development in 2012. That's very reasonable.

 

[dunno lah]

Maybe Infinitron only has one hand? That could really justify his argument for an unintuitive UI...