Fallout version of battlenet

[HeckHoundHarry]

Consider this a set of guidelines for designing an online aspect to Fallout 3 without losing a large amount of the fallout atmosphere.

Combat System: for the sake of this idea fallout 3 will be turn based.

Weapons/Armor: Whatever they have in fallout 3. Combat armor and every thing that is more powerful will be ridiculously hard to get in the battlenet aspect. The same goes for all the most powerful energy weapons and big guns.

Death (revised): when you die, you lose a portion of your experience (say... 1-4 levels, the number increasing by how many levels you have in total) and any skills and perks you had with those levels are greyed out (hence, you can't simply die a lot if you want to redistribute perks/skills). You are also booted from the game you were in and cannot rejoin that particular game.

Now, to guns and armour. Your armour is lost when you die; your gun is dropped, but unusable by scavengers due to battle damage or some stuff. All the available ammo for that gun can be looted. When I say armour lost, I also include any armour or weapons sitting in your inventory unworn (I don't cae if it's unrealistic, it has to be this way for it to work. So shut the hell up!). All other inventory is retained.

This is less extreme than the 'start again' method of death but also packs a hefty punch to the player with the loss of valued equipment, and prevents massive guns and power armour finding their way into the hands of new characters.

Travel/traveling with other PCs/random map encounters:
Again, what they use in Fallout 3 will be used for online aspect. As an example I'll use the fallout 2 map screen. To travel with other PCs you would go to a sub-screen from the main menu click on the name of the PC you would like to join and a little window would pop up on that PCs screen stateing that you would like to join forces (or whatever). If the PC clicks yes than you are part of a group. When PCs are travelling as a group and one of them does something that would be considered bad or just stupid (i.e. pulling out a weapon in NCR and attacking the guards/police/whatever) the rest of the group would be forced to fight as well. You could leave a group at any time except during battle by going into the sub-screen and clicking the leave group button. Leaving a town/area and going to a different part of a town/area would be accomplished in one of two ways. 1)If one member of a group steps into a leave town/area or go to next area in town/area spot than the entire group goes where that one person goes. 2) The majority of the group has to be in the leave town/area or go to next area in town/area spot in order to leave town or go to the next place in the town/area (if you know a better way to do it please tell me). Also, certain character traits will benifit the entire group (i.e. if one PC in the group has the pathfinder ability than the entire group will travel faster).
Random map encounters, therefore, would be done the same way as in Fallout 2. If you're in a group than the group will be there with you for the encounter obviously.

PKs: I do not believe the problem of pks will be as bad as one might think once they realize that it is possible for a level 3 with a SMG to kill their level 16 character in a single turn. PKs will only be a minor annoyance anyways seeing as you don't lose anything important when you die.

Game Time: This was the bane of my Fallout Battlenet because as soon as a player leaves the starting town he will be have a different game time than every other player. Assuming that Fallout 3 starts on the same premis as Fallout 1 and 2 I have a two part solution. As everyone who has played fallout and fallout 2 knows when you start out you are told that you have to save your home. The First part of my solution is this: For the Fallout 3 single player game when you are told that you must save your home from destruction you will be able to say no. If you say yes to the main quest then you will play through the game with time restrictions akin to those of Fallout 1. There is no way in hell you will be able to do all the quests or go everywhere and if you run out of time it's game over. As it should be. If, on the other hand, you refuse to do the main quest you could do all the same quests you could do if you had said yes, but there would be no time restriction and if the people of your home died out it wouldn't be game over for you. For playing on the Multiplayer aspect you would automaticlly say no. Now the second part of my solution. For game time there would be two clocks. Lets call them the big clock and the little clock. The big clock keeps is used on the world map screen and only keeps track of the day, month, and year. The little clock is a 24 hour clock only used in encounters, towns, etc. It keeps track of hours and minutes. For multiplayer the big clock has very little use or no use as the game will not end if it hits a certain date. The little clock is a different matter. If you join a game and there is a person in the starting town (where you begin no matter what) your little clock will synch with that player's little clock so both clocks will display the same time. If, for some reason, two players entered the same town/area at the same time when that town/area has no other players in it (near impossible) their little clocks would both change to 00:00 (remember it's a 24 hour clock).

Vehicles and NPCs: If they put a vehicle in Fallout 3 it would also be in the multi player aspect. Remember, Battlenet is made up of many small games, the car and anything stored in it would not come with you if you left the game in which you aquired the car. Also, there would only be one car per game. Meaning in each game only one person can have a car. As for NPCs (this is would be where putting points into speech and charisma pay off) the same rules apply. Any NPCs you have in your party do not come with you if you log off or go to another game and any items they are holding are lost to you.

Special thanks to Raejak for revising the Death section.

If you belive that you have a better (or new) idea and (for whatever reason) you want me to add it to the above list just post your suggestion in this thread and if I think it is good I'll replace/add the section here.

(Last edited aug. 07)

[Mikey]

if they stick to anything, i'd want them to stick to the original fallout rather than the sequel.

a turn-based MMOG = hell.

about death and experience-loss. hmm... i heard good things about that dungeon siege death/experience system where you don't have to gain experience points or whatever to grow stronger, but you depend on your own talents and abilities. i can't elaborate any further, i haven't played it myself. sounds interesting though.

[HeckHoundHarry]

I must agree the dungeon siege thing does sound promising, however there are many things that sounded good when proposed but later turned out to be complete crap. Time will tell and until it does I will continue to try and refine my idea. Eventually I WILL figure out a solution to the time issue.

Also, I would like to point out that Battlenet and MMORPG's are not the same thing. There is no single player in a MMORPG, it is all on-line and always the same thing. You just keep playing until you get sick of it, occasionally something new will be added to try and keep player interest. Battlenet is the multiplayer aspect of a single player game. Unlike an MMORPG a battlenet game can end and rather than having a large eternal world where nothing changes battlenet is compsed of many games where the actions of the player are permenant, creatures killed do not respawn and quests completed do not come back.

[Darkness40k]

What game are you modding to make this?

[Rel@x_Guy]

i'd like it to be continuous turn based with permadeath.
:twisted:

might piss off some newbs but remember that in fallout the average

character MAYBE got up to level 30.. not hard to work back up to.

this system would also make people think twice before walking into a town and declaring war. also, unless u have uber armor(which i'd limit the number) a high level character could die if enough people gang up on him.. something sadly lacking in other online rpgs.

what do you think?

[Strap]

i like fallout SP the best, and a turn based MMORPG would really really suck, some asshole would get in the game, and hold it all up by not ending his turn.

bah

[HeckHoundHarry]

After a long period of time I have finally solved the time issue that was holding my idea back (check the main post to see it) I also added a small section on vehicles and NPCs.

Now I'd just like to say a couple of things. First of all, if you arn't going to bother to read my idea then don't post in my thread (this means you strapon2). Secondly, I enjoy getting responses to my idea, but if you are going to post something negative please try and make it more than three sentences and try to give an intelligent reason for your opinion. And please remember that my idea is not a stand alone online game or a mod dammit.

[vVolf]

Well said, HHH.

[HeckHoundHarry]

Wonderful. The first post my thread has gotten in four months isn't even about my idea.

Time for me to open my eyes I suppose. I began this thread (and it's predecessors) to try and prove that it was possible to have a MULTIPLAYER Fallout aspect without losing the majority of what makes fallout what it is (plus, I had nothing better to do at the time). Unfortunately, I really don't know if I succeeded or failed miserably. The people have lost interest. Well, at least I managed to be one of the first people to post a pro-fallout multiplayer idea on the old Vault 13 forums. Without getting flamed into the ground that is.

I hereby declare my Fallout version of Battlenet thread to be officially dead.

So it goes.

[vVolf]

Um, well if its dead, its dead.