Wasteland Merc News

[Haris]

Charisma is not that useless. You will notice that if you get hit by high radiation. You die much faster if you have low stats. As soon as any stat reaches 0 you die of radiation. But thats the only thing its good for in this mod.

But than again its a single player game so it doesnt really mather if your char isnt that good. It would be different if it was actuall mmorpg and you had less advantage towards other players.

[VasikkA]

Then maybe you should try and figure out some use to all stats and skills in Merc 3. The lack of character interaction makes charisma useless. I'm already starting to get bored, want some dialogue.

[S4ur0n27]

I'd say Charisma is even more useless is MMORPG?

[PaladinHeart]

You need a balance between your MMORPG ideas and the RPG itself. Don't go all out for the sake of making it more like an MMORPG. Keep the crafting. That's a lot of fun. But toss the stuff like not being able to loot. That sucks in MMORPG's and it sucks here too.

If you want the enemies stronger than you could give them a bonus to damage or even have a nonlootable weapon which they use, and a lootable weapon which they drop that is not as strong. Is it not also possible to have random loot on the people like you have in the chests? That'd be nice.

I agree with what the other guy said. Make all the skills useful. Put in a gambling table. Make Charisma a factor in a lot of various instances such as.. oh I don't know. Surely there are ways you could make it useful like it is in the original games? In the first Fallout you could practically talk your way out of fighting an army if you played the right way. Heh. Make it possible to talk your way out of fighting with the people at the combat zones. Maybe even possible that they would give you stuff because "ooh! Yer so purrrrdy! Me give you rubber doll. You like that. Yes?"

You're never going to have player to player interactions so I think you should start thinking "single player" and how to make the game a better experience in general than thinking "if you could trade with player X or interact somehow with player Z then this skill or that skill would come into play"

If you were to take the original Fallout games and add in the brahmin meat, cooking it, the use for water and finding water in random encounters, and also add in the mining and crafting, then you'd have a really great gaming experience.

Also, have you considered making better use of the random encounters? Isn't it possible to put in there the people and items you need for quests instead of having the combat areas? Though you seem to be working towards that end with Merc 3.

I like the combat areas but I think they would be coolor as region specific random encounters. Isn't there a way to isolate the encounters such that you only run into low level critters at the areas near the towns the whole game and you only run into centaurs and such if you venture further off the whole game? Even at low levels you shouldn't be able to access the whole map so there should be very hostile areas on out in the wastes.

[PaladinHeart]

Also, you might want to refine your skill system. Outdoorsman should be used solely for getting meat and how much meat you get. You also need to put back in the game what type of encounter you're having. It really sucks to get the dialogue where you choose whether you want to encounter something or not only to not know what it is until you go see a couple floaters and centaurs.... :crazy:

The science skill should let your character determine what kind of rocks it is you're mining. Knowledge of the outdoors shouldn't have anything to do with mining. That's basically just hard labor but you can't just dig anywhere and get ore. That should be where the science skill comes into play.

Now I agree with you that the repair skill should be used to make stuff but it should be how effectively it's made. A high repair skill should give better weapons, armor, more bullets, etc.. That means you are skilled at making it but doesn't imply you know how to make it.

Again Science should come into play. Have science determine whether the character knows or rather how effective they are at learning the information. Shouldn't there be design documents for making this stuff? Hey wouldn't it be cool if the game was like the original game except you have the crafting, like in your mod, but you have to go to these old factories and find the designs to make it? You could find it on various computers... if your science skill is high enough. Though you really shouldn't require this to be higher than 150%. Maybe even 125%. Players need a lot of their skill points put into their weapon skills so they can actually hit stuff at a decent range. :-P

But anyway.. if you made a regular RPG game and had the crafting in it as part of a series of quests that would be really cool.

[Haris]

If you go back in this thread and read the WM3 idea you will see that there is no world map. You hunt around town by using your car and that works as random encounters. And its in them were your gonna find locked chests with the loot for redoable missions. And allso there will only be one npc that collects them instead of tons of them. So you wont have to keep track on what npc collects what item.

And there will still be 10 combat locations but they wont work as mission places but as actuall quest places where you will eather kill something or if your speach is high you will be able to avoid fighting in those 10 areas. And once you clear them out or solwe them other way you wont need to do it again. And rewards you get for them will allways be improvment on your char in way like that he knows where the mines are and he can drive to them or that he knows where war tech facility is so he can drive to it or for example that his car wastes less oil when driving and so on.

You should read the mod idea for wm3 its better explained there. And i wrote it on first page of this thread.

[Kashluk]

Charisma is not that useless. You will notice that if you get hit by high radiation. You die much faster if you have low stats. As soon as any stat reaches 0 you die of radiation. But thats the only thing its good for in this mod.

Ok, that has got to be the shittiest use for charisma in the history of gaming so far.

[PaladinHeart]

Merc 3 sounds good but will you still have those insanely high 200% skill requirements?

If your skill is 100% then it should always work but if it's higher then it should work better. Go with that instead of the "Oh I have 100% outdoorsman skill but I burn over half my meat! Gee I'm so dumb."

Have it so that it works with 100% just fine but if you have a higher skill it is possible to get double meats and maybe even 5 if your skill is 300%. This would help a lot if someone wanted to specialize but wouldn't handicap a player that just wanted to sell a bit of cooked meat for profit.

Plus how many people do you know that would actually burn meat after cooking it over 1000 times? :-P

Same idea with making ammo. Get more of it with a higher skill. *nods*

Weapons and armor? How about having a small percent chance that when you make it that you'll make a special variant that has better stats? Well for people with higher than 100% skill anyway. Maybe every point over 100% should be a percentage toward the chance of making that better armor?

[Haris]

Well crafting and entire arsenal is still open for discusion in WM3. We are yet not sure if we are gonna make all new weapons if its gonna be exact same weapons as wm2 or a mix of it or if we are just gonna have really limited amount of them like 1 gun, 1 shotgun, 1 submachine gun, 1 sniper rifle, 1 minigun, 1 rocket pistol and 1 laser gun. If we did it that way with less weapons than making quality of weaopons that look same but have tags like superb quality and bad quality would be really eazy to do.

And i really like your idea of ability to make everything with 100% repair and than when you raise more repair you have biger chance of getting better quality weapons. Its perfectly doable thing cause we have the scripts that do that all we need to do is edit some % numbers in them and put dialogs to it.

I allso like you idea with cooking. We allredy had it with mining but it never striked me to use same system on cooking and fishing.

You have good ideas for balancing the mod. Usually when people sugest something to me its eather not doable or stupid.

[PaladinHeart]

It would be nice if the shops had some basic stuff available but to get the really nice stuff you have to craft it yourself.

Err.. the shops also need to have a script that restocks their ammo. Oh and make sure this basic equipment is good enough to take out anything that the player could meet close to town. See this way the player can build up close to town, buying and selling like in the typical Fallout but then when you want to go fight the tougher critters you could simply make a better gun and better armor than you can get simply from the town's shops.

But if you keep running into floaters with your piddly weapons it makes for a frustrating experience which kinda saps the fun.

Just throwing out more ideas. I hope you find these helpful too. :-D

[Haris]

There is only gonna be one shop in WM3, it will restock mauser and crossbow shots wich wont be craftable and those 2 weapons suck anyway, well crossbow is decent against less toguh enemies. The best part of WM3 is actually that 13 years time limit will never happen.

[S4ur0n27]

The best part of WM3 is actually that 13 years time limit will never happen.

Yeah I'm really looking forward to that!

[PaladinHeart]

*blinks*... What 13 years time limit?

[Nicolai]

I'm not the only one who totally scrolled past Paladinheart and Haris's posts, right?

[vx trauma]

no you're not.

[PaladinHeart]

I try not to read my posts but it's kinda hard not to read something while you're writing it.... *twitches*

[vx trauma]

your sig is an offense against all forms of reason.

[VasikkA]

your sig is an offense against all forms of reason.

He's trying to convert us, just like you're spreading the word of The Wasteland across these forums.

[PaladinHeart]

I happen to like my signature. There are a lot of signatures that I don't like but I never say anything because it's none of my business.

[Blargh]

I hope your liking your sigaginature provides some measure of comfort, because Sutekh the Destroyer certainly won't. Ohoho.