J.E. Sawyer on Fallout 3

[OnTheBounce]

...I'm also a fan of real world firearms and some times get really pissed...when they misrepresent the weapon, give it the wrong ammo capacity, or in my mind give it the wrong damage values. The glory of Fallout 1 was that everything was in fact generic, I couldn't say "Hmm this M16A1 fires a .223 bullet but does more damage than this M14 that is for some reason chambered in .303 British and NOT .308!" In Fallout: Tactics you could do that, especially since their were a whole butt-load of weapons. Fucking Hell the M249SAW did more damage than the M60 GPMG!!...

Yes, you're absolutely right there. I frothed at the mouth m'self over some of the bastardizations that the FoT designers implemented. This is the perfect FO-universe example of why it would have been better to keep the generic categories since lots of the choices were made in the name of game balance, such as keeping the generic 7.62mm round useful throughout most of the game, just like the .223 round was useful throughout FO. However, in FO you didn't end up saying, "Goddammit, that's not the right caliber for that weapon!!!" or "That gun doesn't hold X number of rounds, it hold Y number of rounds!!!"

I still think Civilian firearms should be more prominent in the Fallout world, but have military weapons be a rare and powerful commodity that you find by either killing a head honcho who's come across it or by raiding an old Armory. let's face it, unless you come across an armory or my home in a Post Nuclear World you're not gonna be finding AK47s, M16s, or any other military weapon.

That's a very good point, and it's also one of many things that FO did better than FO2: explaining where the military arms were coming from. In FO the BoS was trading w/the Hub, so that's where their Assault Rifles and Combat Shotguns were coming from. The Gun Runners were also producing military-style arms, and Jake in the Hub had been a member of the Union of Atomic Workers ("...like the Brotherhood, only less friendly.") In FO2, on the other hand, you simply had thugs running around w/experimental weapons of the '80s and no real reason given for it.

I'd imagine if I picked up some Vault-Tec tool my description would be "Something that looks a bit like a toaster with a little round thingy on the end."

That's exactly what I'm talking about! For someone w/very little knowledge of a field the items relating to that field would be absolute bare-bones, giving only very terse, physical descriptions, basically what the player could tell about it from looking at the graphic. While the character w/a very high skill level in Repair would be see something along the lines of "An XP-38 Explosive Space Modulator for use in a Vault Door cracking kit. These were issued to emergency workers in case of Vault Door malfunction."

What you just described is eerily similar to what we're implementing. We're simply calling it 'character knowledge' vs. player knowledge. On most levels, if we've 'abstracted' properly, player knowledge only needs to go so far to describe the 'world' to the player efficiently and have them immediately understand it, and for the player to have fundamental expectations from that world and its behaviour. Character Knowledge 'teaches' the player so to speak...your smart character is going to give you more information about your world.

If that's the approach you're aiming at I will buy your game. :)

You see, I've always been of the mind that tabletop RPGs played with a decent group of human beings will always be superior CRPGs except in two aspects:

1. The visual component. No matter if you game w/the best in painted miniatures a modern CRPG will blow whatever diorama you've set up out of the water, especially if you have all sorts of templates set up for spell/weapon effect areas, lighting etc., since the game represents this graphically and the mechanic are handled discreetly out of the player's view.
2. It's always been very hard to seperate a player from a character. I know people will say that good role-players can always overcome this, but it's my experience that it's extremely difficult to play a character that is significanly less intelligent than yourself, and downright impossible to play one that is more intelligent than yourself. (Of course, playing a character more intelligent than yourself well will always be a limitation of any game. Ask Boltzman about that one. ;) ) A CRPG forces a character very handily to interact w/a world, much more consistenly than a GM who has to do everything on the fly.

Now you just have to make sure that Red and DJ Slamak's identification system is implemented so that a brute character can talk to an egghead about that little thing he just found out in the Wastes w/all of the wires and buttons on it so as not to cripple anyone w/less than genius-level IN. ;)

Cheers,

OTB

[Red]

Well, for the most part the brute force character will only care about this:
"It looks like a toy gun but when you press the little button it shoots light that hurst like a bitch."

As I mentioned, regardless of intelligence - for the most part - weapons are pretty straightforward. An electronic lockpicking kit's another matter though.

You can learn about pretty much anything given you have perseverance. Even a total idiot can be tough everything about some type of gun or another - though he probrably won't understand the principles of it, he'll still be able to clean, fix and use effectivly his own gun.

This is why I really don't think Intelligence should be directly linked to knowledge about items. With enough fiddling you can probably figure it out, if only by accident. Intelligence should only speed up the identifying process if there can be such a parameter.

[Saint_Proverbius]

Regarding the subject of crossbows and bows , this may sound like a cheap solution for it , but i bet there were a lot of sport stores and warehouses , that survived the destruction , in there the population would find excelent bows , crossbows and arrows .

The patent on the compound bow is 1967. So, something like a compound bow may or may not exist in Fallout, and I certainly can't recall any bows in Flash Gordon and other sci-fi serials of the era in which Fallout stems from.

Tho i dont think bows would be a good idea , maybe just a few tribals would use it , it's takes a lot of time to learn to use a bow properly , crossbows on the other hand are as easy as weapons. As for being a worst weapon in terms of damage comparing with guns , maybe you could gain a perk that gave you the hability to put some radscorpion poison on your arrows , attach a small explosive to an arrow , like a stick of dynamite .

Well, first and foremost, a bow is a ranged weapon. You already have two types of ranged weapons, guns and grenades. How would you justify a bow in that situation? If you can strap on a plasma grenade and shoot someone with it at a decent range, then you've just made the Throwing skill useless.

On the other side of the fence, how would you balance bows with.. say.. An aveneger minigun? Or a M72 Gauss Rifle? Or a flame thrower? Plasma rifle? After all, if there's a skill for bow use, you should expect it to be useful through the whole game, so what would be the bow's equivalent of the gauss rifle?

How could you ever possibly balance bows with guns, anyway? A bow is a one shot weapon. Every time you fired, you'd have to waste APs to reload, so even if there was some super bow that did gauss damage.. Why use it when you're constantly having to reload? When there's no way in hell a bow could have the range of those guns?

In FO2, on the other hand, you simply had thugs running around w/experimental weapons of the '80s and no real reason given for it.

Let's not forget those experimental weapons were also much more powerful than the pre-Great War era weapons. You'd think the AK-112 would be better than the circa -1990s weaps, if only for having 70 more years of innovation.

[Grey_Ghost]

Since when did Fallout have generic names for its guns? To my best recollection almost every gun in Fallout had a unique name given to it. You just had to go into the inventory and read the text box description of it to see it. Like the 10mm SMG was like an H&K MP9 if I recall. I personally liked it this way with the extended names in the detailed description.

Which reminds me on the inconsistencies of FO:T, where the Real World 9mm MP5 is the wide spread SMG of that game, whereas the fictional 10mm MP9 is the one in the first 2 Fallout games. I was personnaly quite happy with the mixture of real world/fictional weapons they had in Fallout 1 & 2. Things like how H&K ended up producing the P90c in the Fallout universe, when really FN did it in the real world doesn't bother me at all. This was probably an error by whoever put it into the game, but it really ends up becoming lore in the Fallout Universe, and I take everything in the Fallout Universe very seriously.

I'd personally be in favor for Small Guns/Big Guns to remain as they are.

Grey_Ghost

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

Crossbows and slingshots/catapults could easily be controlled by the small guns skill, and in another post apoc. game they would make good starting weapons. Where the disadvantages would be balanced by the availability of the basic ammo in a world where bullets were scarce. In the Fallout games though bullets have always been more common than food and water so like many of the melee, throwing and unarmed weapons become redundent real fast.

[chrisbeddoes]

Well, first and foremost, a bow is a ranged weapon. You already have two types of ranged weapons, guns and grenades. How would you justify a bow in that situation? If you can strap on a plasma grenade and shoot someone with it at a decent range, then you've just made the Throwing skill useless.

On the other side of the fence, how would you balance bows with.. say.. An aveneger minigun? Or a M72 Gauss Rifle? Or a flame thrower? Plasma rifle? After all, if there's a skill for bow use, you should expect it to be useful through the whole game, so what would be the bow's equivalent of the gauss rifle?

How could you ever possibly balance bows with guns, anyway? A bow is a one shot weapon. Every time you fired, you'd have to waste APs to reload, so even if there was some super bow that did gauss damage.. Why use it when you're constantly having to reload? When there's no way in hell a bow could have the range of those guns?

Crossbows are silent other weapons not.

Sometimes you need just a shot to kill something.

Crosbows could be used to deliver drugs (use small darts) to make somebody sleep instead of killing him..

or put him/her in a frenzy or poison him her so that he can die later.



Roleplaying.

Explosive charges like Dukes of Hazard.

For some curius reason police or something does not allow guns but crossbows are allowed.


Range ? Effective range of some crossbows is more than say 100 meters.


One check for hitting not hitting .

A second check with a penalty for using explosive darts or poison or healing or other darts .

A thrid check with an even bigger penalty for using drugs succesfully AND people not noticing you.



And what about the equivalent of a crossbow bozar ?

A totally mecanised crossbow able of firing 10 darts per second with a very fast speed .( it uses a small nuclear charge every 10 darts)


( remember how they made unarmed as good as Bozar ?

The blue impoved thingie + slayer )

[Vergilius]

Crossbows are silent other weapons not.

Sometimes you need just a shot to kill something.

If you forgive me I’ll flaunt my ignorance when it comes to weapons, but isn’t there guns that are silent as well, especially if you fire from a long range?

[OnTheBounce]

You can learn about pretty much anything given you have perseverance. Even a total idiot can be tough everything about some type of gun or another - though he probrably won't understand the principles of it, he'll still be able to clean, fix and use effectivly his own gun.

This is why I really don't think Intelligence should be directly linked to knowledge about items. With enough fiddling you can probably figure it out, if only by accident. Intelligence should only speed up the identifying process if there can be such a parameter.

I agree here, which is why I said that descs should be determined by skill level. A tribal w/loads of raw intelligence is not more likely to know something about a technical "thingie" than a Vault Dweller with a hopelessly mediocre intellect.

If you were referring to my quip about crippling people of less than genius-level IN, I was referring to people w/lesser IN getting fewer SPs, which in turn means that they skills will be lower.

Let's not forget those experimental weapons were also much more powerful than the pre-Great War era weapons. You'd think the AK-112 would be better than the circa -1990s weaps, if only for having 70 more years of innovation.

Well, suffice it to say that progress isn't linear and that older weapons are often harder hitting than currently used ones. That's both a function of the changing nature of the battlefied as well as politics, though. I'll just say, "It's just another reason to go w/a fictional, generalized weapons catalogue," and leave it at that.

Since when did Fallout have generic names for its guns? To my best recollection almost every gun in Fallout had a unique name given to it. You just had to go into the inventory and read the text box description of it to see it. Like the 10mm SMG was like an H&K MP9 if I recall. I personally liked it this way with the extended names in the detailed description.

Take the following two examples: the Hunting Rifle and the Sniper Rifle. Both use .223 ammo and are non-burst-capable, precision rifles. One is a civilian game getter, the other is a military/police weapon. In game terms they both do the same thing, namely fire single shots, great for taking out opponents singly at long range. One is more powerful, and therefore available later in the game. What this is, is a gaming convention which allows a more-or-less believable reason for the character to have more powerful weapons available as the game progresses. Note that there aren't 7 different types of "sniper rifle" floating around in several different caliber options all doing roughly the same thing. That is the point I'm trying to make.

Cheers,

OTB

[peasofme]

i don't think anything should be changed. specially the gun names. this immerses u into the fallout world. why mess with a formula that is perfect. fallout is proally the best game ever, why would u want to change it. people are always changing things that already worked and ruining them. if its not broke, dont fix it.

[Mr Carrot]

Um Fallout 2 changed the Fallout 1 theme of not having real world guns, which one do you prefer?

[atoga]

I think he's talking about Fallout 1, not 2.

Wasteland is another good example of the made-up-but-still-familiar-gun-names.

[Red]

OTB: My last comment about itelligence was meant as a retort to EvoG's post:

Character Knowledge 'teaches' the player so to speak...your smart character is going to give you more information about your world.

It was meant to agree to some degree to his vision but slanting it a bit since he seemed to imply that intelligence would be the main trait realting to the descriptions the player gets.

[Megatron]

It would also be kewl if a tribal didn't know what an alien/centaur was in fallout 2, espeacially if his outdoorsman skill was below 30%
I played FO2 before fallout and I udnerstood how he could know about stuff in his region, like deathclaws and rats, but knowing all the mutants names was a bit..weird.

What also was a little annoying was seeing peoples names before you met them, but this probably was for gameplay reasons.


Firing a laser rifle might be simple, but what about reloading it? And wouldn't tinkering about with something valuable/dangerous be a bit risky?

[Spazmo]

Well, Megatron, there's real logic and then game logic, AKA the answer to half of the FOB questions. It's much better to have the player facing off against three Super Mutant and one Super Mutant Leader followed by a Floater than Great Big Green Things With Guns and a Walking Diarrhea.

[Saint_Proverbius]

Well, suffice it to say that progress isn't linear and that older weapons are often harder hitting than currently used ones. That's both a function of the changing nature of the battlefied as well as politics, though. I'll just say, "It's just another reason to go w/a fictional, generalized weapons catalogue," and leave it at that.

Then ignore the "power" of the weapon, then, and go by technology.

[avenger69ie]

forgive my ignorance, but does this mean FO3 is a go ahead or what?

[Zetura Dracos]

forgive my ignorance, but does this mean FO3 is a go ahead or what?

Yeah. The new poll says that Van Buren IS FO3. Is this true or is it just a theory. Id like to know so I can get to franticly running around and screaming and charging at random people to tell them the news and getting repliews such as. "No more crack man, No more crack" or perhaps "Get the fucking hell away from me!" Its really quite fun if you dont mind the insults.

[Zbyram]

According to Killzig "it's just a poll"... http://www.duckandcover.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5208

[avenger69ie]

ok, now i know i'm ignorant, i've seen that thread and i still dont know what teh hell Van Buren is ... help me out here please?? what is van buren? does anyone have a link or something to let me know what it is? who's making it? why is fo3 being mentioned? etc...

[First Force]

*starts drooling and twitching*

this looks promising