And more on Van Buren's vehicles

[Mr. Teatime]

<strong>[Game -> Update]</strong>

<b>Sean K. Reynolds</b> has posted some more information in a <a href="http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewto ... >thread</a> on <a href="http://www.nma-fallout.com">NMA</a> about the five vehicles in <b>Van Buren</b> that we <a href="http://www.duckandcover.cx/forums/viewt ... previously reported</a> on.
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<br>Apparantly the camper van would have looked something like <a href="http://www.airstreamphotos.com/photos/s ... 2">this</a>. Since it's a slow news day, I'll post the whole lot here:
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<br><blockquote>True, you'd have to be a very good Science Boy to get all of them working, but much of VB was about what things you could salvage and get working again, even if it only meant your character was running around with a bunch of pipe rifles and zip guns instead of standard firearms (whether he made them himself or got the Blackfoots to do it for him, or got the "people" on the Reservation to sell them to you). Sawyer did a great job of making the resource management/salvaging significant enough that you wouldn't end up with ten .45s in your inventory by the end of town #3 ... every piece of technology (vehicles included) was to be accounted for in a master checklist, and if a site or encounter didn't NEED that bit of tech, it wouldn't go in (i.e., random encounters with SMG-toting raiders are a no-no because you could just cruise the wasteland waiting for SMG-raider encounters, gather up a ton of functional weapons, then arm yourself and NPCs with them or just sell them off at a huge profit and buy the crap you really want.
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<br>I don't remember what all of the found locations were for all five vehicles (cop car = Dogtown, train = the Dome, the others = ??) but you had to go all over the map, and the map was BIG. Like "shows four southwestern states" big. The odds of finding four vehicles that had the potential to be repaired in an area that big aren't too bad. It's not like The Road Warrior where you have an entire gang riding around in cars....</blockquote>
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<br>Followed by...
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<br><blockquote>The rocket didn't count as a vehicle as you couldn't steer it, it was a plot device...
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<br>The cars were one of the most fun parts of the game add-ons for VB, IMO. Just the mechanics of getting them working, providing fuel, and their limitations added a lot to the game, especially as the map was VERY BIG and you needed the vehicles to get anywhere in a (game-)timely manner.
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<br>I wish I hadn't lost my render of the four vehicles, they all looked very good and very 50's, especially the camper for the semi.</blockquote>
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<br><b>Josh Sawyer</b> also posted in the same thread:
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<br><blockquote>I suppose we could be realistic and have un-oiled firearms across the wasteland rust closed and all the ammunition expire, but I wouldn't guess most players would find that to be particularly interesting or fun. I'm sure some people would like that, but I don't think they would be in the majority, even here. Even so, a modern car or motorcycle with a non-combustion engine would probably survive for a long time fairly intact if it weren't placed in harm's way.
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<br>These vehicles were single, stand-alone items that could be repaired to a functioning level of operation; there certainly weren't loads of dudes cruising around on motorcycles or in cop cars. I certainly understand the desire to make society feel like it's falling apart, but I don't personally think that the Fallout world was intended to be physically/metaphysically entropic like the homeworld of the Last Gunslinger.
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<br>Also, I think one of the unique leather jackets you could find in the game had a Khans logo on it. Tom and I talked about putting the Corley Motors logo on instead of the quasi-Harley logo, but we were afraid of being sued to death by Lucas.</blockquote>
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<br>Seems to be fashionable to be harshly critical of <b>Van Buren</b> at the moment, but a lot of this sounds very good to me. And, honestly, who thinks <a href="http://www.bethesda.com">Bethesda</a> is going to do any better? Feel free to prove me wrong, <a href="http://www.bethsoft.com/">Bethesda</a>. Retracting that <b>multi-platform</b> comment would be a good start.
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<br>Spotted at: <A HREF="http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewto ... art=0">NMA forum thread</A>

[Retlaw83]

Those ideas sound fine. But not for Falllout.

[Lunchmeat]

I'd play it.

[Mr. Teatime]

Seriously, I think Tim Cain himself said Fallout shouldnt be so set in stone that nothing can change or evolve. I am much happier with Josh, Puuk etc doing things like this, when it's clear they have a real passion for Fallout, than other companies changing things to make it more appealing to the mainstream (no names mentioned, Beth....ahem).

[S4ur0n27]

How do you lose renders of something that important.

[Mismatch]

I can accept the vehicle part. Might have been fun. Indeed it woyuld have lost some feel with all them vehicles, and it'd prolly have been more fun if one managed to find the SAME car one used in FO2... By some strange twist of fate.

This quote bewilders me:

Sawyer did a great job of making the resource management/salvaging significant enough that you wouldn't end up with ten .45s in your inventory by the end of town #3 ... every piece of technology (vehicles included) was to be accounted for in a master checklist, and if a site or encounter didn't NEED that bit of tech, it wouldn't go in (i.e., random encounters with SMG-toting raiders are a no-no because you could just cruise the wasteland waiting for SMG-raider encounters, gather up a ton of functional weapons, then arm yourself and NPCs with them or just sell them off at a huge profit and buy the crap you really want.

Wouldn't this lead to less encounters, or only easy encounters... or well.... I'm not quite sure what he's getting at. I can understand what he means... but not what encounters will be instead of the raider SMG encounter.
As I understand there can be A, an easier encounter, which will be no fun.
or B, a harder encounter, but this will have the same result as the SMG encounter.
Or, C: No encounter. Which would have sucked...

I think VB'd prolly have been worth playing indeed, had it ever been finished. Might even have been good enough to bear the Fallout name.

Hmmm, I suppose that there's nothing quite like dreaming of things that might have been.
The one thing I can think about is worrying about the thing that will be insted of what might have been.

[Retlaw83]

I wasn't saying anything about the vehicles. That would work just swell. The whole scavenging parts for one item thing just doesn't sound like intriguing gameplay to me.

[S4ur0n27]

Mismatch, maybe guns , especially automatic ones, would have been rarer. Fending off 7 raiders armed with knives with one 9mm pistol wouldn't be that easy, me thinks. I think FO would have benefited in stronger opponents, later in the game. Or a weaker hero.

[Mismatch]

ah, so THAT was what he was aiming at.
sometimes things go past me, and I am left here...
bewildered.
and sad.

[Saint_Proverbius]

Seems to be fashionable to be harshly critical of Van Buren at the moment, but a lot of this sounds very good to me. And, honestly, who thinks Bethesda is going to do any better?

Hell, the fact you hop in a rocket ship and blast off to tackle bad guys on a space station is enough to make me thumbs down Van Buren. Toss in vehicles, making supah dupah hi-tech gizmos, robot rampages, and so forth, and you have something that's not even remotely like Fallout.

You have to ask yourself, how far in to Fallout were you when you saw your first robots? The Glow? That's pretty far from where you start. How about Fallout 2? The malfunctioning one in Klamath at the vertibird crash site, right? Well, that's the Enclave for you, but the next one was in the core of Gecko's power plant. Of course, there's also the sentry bot in the trapper caves, but you needed to get electronic lockpicks to get in to that and have a decent repair skill. Van Buren, though, starts with robots.

It seems to me that Fallout got it right. You shouldn't see technology like that except in extreme cases. Robots, vehicles, and other forms of tech should be a rare thing in Fallout. Something you shouldn't just start off the game with, and they should be reserved for highly unique situations.

The rockets and space stations stuff.. That takes the cake.

Fallout didn't work by throwing lots of high tech shit at the player at every turn. Fallout worked because there wasn't much high tech shit around at all. When you saw something high tech, it had an "OOooooo Aaaaah" factor about it. You were highly anticipating it the whole time, waiting just to catch a glimpse at what the world used to be.

When it starts off like that and stays that way, there's nothing great or interesting about it. There's no post apocalyptic coolness there. It goes from being, "A robot.. OH SHIT, IT WORKS! AAAAAAAH!" to being, "Eh, another robot."

Retracting that multi-platform comment would be a good start.

Meanwhile, Van Buren had co-op multiplayer and both real time and turn based combat mode switching. Both of those things are just as bad as cross platformization.

Cross platform can hamper the interface and result in dropping options from things due to the limited control scheme allowed by the eight-button control pads consoles use. Co-op multiplayer, though, totally screws with quest design and scripting. Having two modes of combat that are exact opposites screws up the AI, the placement and number of enemies, and the system itself.

It's hard to say Bethesda will do a worse job on Fallout than BIS would have, all things considered.

[Mr. Teatime]

Point taken, though I am really hostile to console involvement because it hints at more things than just interface adjustments. It tells you about the target audience, for a start. And if Bethsoft announce a turn based, single player RPG (among other things), I'll take back all the bad stuff I've said about them.

[S4ur0n27]

They won't announce anything for a fucking while though. They'll work in secret probably, hiding their developpements and avoiding us, critizing folks.

[Spazmo]

Yeah, how dare they not really announce anything until they've got something to show us! Susan, you nub, every damn developer in the world waits until they at least have a design doc or something before they kick off the interview tours.

[Saint_Proverbius]

Spazmo:

Bethesda didn't.

[Pope Viper]

Spazmo:

Bethesda didn't.

Point - Saint.

[Spazmo]

They announced buying the license and that they would make a game, not that they're making a game. There's a difference there somewhere.

[S4ur0n27]

I meant they'll probably wait till it's nearly over to show us the real deal. No dev diary and stuff like Troika, not devs posting in NMA forums, etc.

[Briosafreak]

A Fallout game needs cruncky vacuum cleaner style robots, and the space station part was really clever, making a master quarters type of area with much more cooler efects on the gameworld than what was previously done, and hinted on the death from above paranoia from those times, with the sputnick and the first russian military balistic missile launches causing a great impact, even in pulp fiction and comics from the time.

So i`m with Cain on this, if i thinks saint is right in several specific issues, the big picture was turning out to be quite satisfying.

And the shuttles to go the station were Flash Gordon style rockets from the 30s, wich was the theme of the first conversation i ever had with saint_Proverbius, on #vault13, many years ago, how that retro futuristic look was so wonderfull.

[LlamaGod]

I agree with Saint and Briosa and I also think Fallout bots should stick with the 1950s 'ROBOTS OF THE FUTURE' kind of style, such is the case with the Brainbots and Mr.Handys (Handies?).

FO:T had plain mech-style robots and that was ass, Van Buren either had those or junk-bots. Last I remember, Fallout isnt ROBOT WARS.

[Briosafreak]

I was saying Van Buren had a lot of 50s Robots from the future, and that`s a good thing, if they were mech thingies i wouldn`t be enthusiatic of the idea either. Also i was defending Tim Cain idea of doing new things on the Fallout world, as long as the fundamentals on the visions of Scott, Leon, Tim and many others were protected. Cain was hinting that evolution, Van Buren style, can be a good thing, a whole new direction, FOBOS style, is wrong.


Still the future is more important now, and i don`t have a clue on what Bethesda will bring us, i hope Troika gets a publisher to the PA game though, safer bet i guess.