Duck and Cover

The random encounters in fallout are..a bit boring. Mabye it's good the first few times when you encounter 20 mutants that surround you in the middle of nowhere, or a bunch of dogs attackins some spore plants, but otherwise they're fairly generic and annoying (They're TOO generic really. In other games they have plenty of landscapes to work with, but in fallout you only have dirt, mountains, a few tress and some pre-war crap)

So mabye in fallout 3 random encounters could be stepped up.

Mabye something like:

Basic:The one we have at the moment. You usually start off on a map with not a lot to do, and mabye one or 2 monsters you HAVE to fight or a trader with some random crap you don't need. Except instead of the current crappy few maps, mabye throw in a few random landscape items (could be something simple like trees that randomly appear on the map, or a building that randomly chooses from a list)

Complex:Small quests. Stuff might include healing a guy that's stuck in the middle of a mine-field, talking a guy out of killing himself, encounting a small tribal village being attacked by a deathclaw. Just harder stuff you can do, with bigger rewards than getting a bit of 9mm ammo and about 6 of the same crappy pistols.

More rarer than basic..the wasteland isn't widely populated

Advanced:Larger quests. This stuff leaves a greeen circle on your map. Might involve hunting down an escaped prisoner in an abandoned town, helping to assault a rogue bos outpost or mabye breaking into a hi-tech tower and stealing some artifact (like a bottle-opener or something)

These would be about as rare as special encounters, except these aren't meant to be funny easter-eggs and are more like bigger quests.

Thoughts?

Pyro wrote:Thoughts?

Nah.. ya know, if they ever make Fo3 they will certainly improve random encounters system so there's no really need to discuss it. It's just obvious. 8)

But yeah - special encounters should be like quests, not just annoying easter eggs on every step.

Meths wrote:
Nah.. ya know, if they ever make Fo3 they will certainly improve random encounters system so there's no really need to discuss it. It's just obvious. 8)

Well they didn't even try to 'imrpove' it in FOT so we might still be stuck with the crappy encounters of shitty poo in fo3 (HYE DAT RYMES!)

An interesting idea. However, there is a danger, here. If the game starts creating random villages and outposts all over the place, the game as a whole will suffer from lack of focus.

Also, the basic encounter set you describe is pretty much what's already in Fallout 2. Which is probably the idea. Shut up.

Pyro has so many ideas!

I think if they keep the annoying encounter but make outdoorsman more effective you can solve your problem by peppering in unique/rare encounters that are more like small towns. Remember the little farms you'd find every now and then? Something like that... but populated. Maybe a cult of religious cannibals... a small tribe of children. There's so much depth in the actual hubs of civilization the one thing that could really improve the fallout world would be adding more nuance to the wastes themselves.

i think the random encounters that are more advanced should be a little less random than just... Pop! all the sudden you're at a town in a random location fighting off mutated wolves to save a damaged robot and his little friend timmy the ghoul!... so rather than Pop! it should be determined by some luck (not Too much) your location (around a city, or at a certain time in the game) and/or if your perception, or karma were low or high or midway enough (why save timmy and the robot when you can blow their heads off!? :twisted: )

this way you wouldn't be doing that kinda stuff all the time, completely randomly, but still it wouldnt be as dificult to acheive, or take as long to find as say "the gaurdian of forever" in Fo2.

overall it think it would be a good idea to beef up some of the random encounters so that they are more and less random (more situations, alterations, but not like the rad-scorpians hiding in spore plants type odd randomness) and also, there should be those not as common Uber encounters like with the mine field and timmy the ghoul. agree?

oh, and in responce to the title of the thread, i definatly agree that there should be some boats or something! that would definatly increase some of the fun. if a couple of locations where on islands or an island it would be really cool. i mean... how radioactive could the water be after so many years? heheh. but lets stay away from FEV infected fish and whales.

Eh... maritime adventures doesn't really capture the feel of the wasteland. I mean, unless you have geiger counter eyes, how could you tell radiated water from clean water?

And don't tell me you wanted the tanker in FO2 to meet pirates on the way to the oil rig. Arr, matey! We've been drinking FEV by the gallon and we're looking for pirate booty!

lol, no. i just wanted some kind of fairy thing (distance wise)

i wouldnt think of traveling farther than the eye can see, or out of view of land. just to get across something small, or get to some military installation or some town on a small offshore island, not like going to hawii or anything

Intriguing. Would this be affected by the Outdoorsman skill or Luck?

Q: What do you get when you cross a lame Kevin Costner movie with fallout?
A:Really f-ed up special encounters!

Alright, gentlemen, wrap your minds around this:
You get another water-travel mode (I.E. tanker in 2), but you control where it goes. Think of the possibilities! With all the FEV that went up in the air when the enclave exploded, imagine encounters with spear-throwing mermen, muto-shark attacks, and even harpooning whales for cash! The potential is limitless, for one with an imagination, which the good people at black isle and interplay certainly have!

So basically the chosen turns in to a fisherman ?
I like it :crazyeyes:

Hey, you all know what the cash situation was in fo2 until you hit SanFran.
Unless you had amazing gambling skillz, you were probably like me, living from stimpack to stimpack, much less having to supply my allies! :roll:

Bloodgeon11 wrote:Alright, gentlemen, wrap your minds around this:
You get another water-travel mode (I.E. tanker in 2), but you control where it goes. Think of the possibilities! With all the FEV that went up in the air when the enclave exploded, imagine encounters with spear-throwing mermen, muto-shark attacks, and even harpooning whales for cash! The potential is limitless, for one with an imagination, which the good people at black isle and interplay certainly have!

The more possibilities the better i guess...
However, try to convince me that this would fit the Fo universe, since i doubt so. Fallout is rather about surviving on the desert wasteland. And there are plenty of more interesting ways of making money than fishing .

like kicking around the desert for 5 months trying to kill enough raiders to get enough money for smiley to install your fuel converter?

Bloodgeon11 wrote:like kicking around the desert for 5 months trying to kill enough raiders to get enough money for smiley to install your fuel converter?

you don't have money = you don't do any quests. Try to look around and you'll find plenty of jobs to do on every step.
By the time i reach gecko i usually have about 10k.

Even if you were right, do you think fishing would fix it? You could hunt on geckos, take their pelts and sell them off. Fishing would look more or less the same.

I dunno about this water-fallout thaing. I hated Waterworld man!

I doubt it could work. As stated before, there's tons of better stuff to do then be a fisherman...

A thing I disliked about Fallout2's random encounders was how frequently you'd find say "A band of raiders fighting a band of slavers". All you had to do was to wait until they'd killed each other off and then pick up tons of items that you'd never be able to find that early in the game had you not encountered them. While I wouldn't want to leave them out completely, I think they should be reduced considerably. Maybe have Luck affect how often they would apear.

you don't have money = you don't do any quests. Try to look around and you'll find plenty of jobs to do on every step.
By the time i reach gecko i usually have about 10k

You don't have any money=you're really into melee weapons. Hey, just taking on the slavers guild cost me mucho moola for ammo, armor, weapons, and stims. And Becky doesn't give half what you spent!
Hey, theory on our $ differences:
Barter-23%
Speech-55%
Karma- -500
plus, i didn't get dough for being a slaver and capturing innocent slaves. I wasn't a woman, so couldn't sell myself, and had to pay Metzger the full 1000!

P.S. i hated "Water World" too. I'm just trying to stay within the thread topic.

I miss the old threads about a Fallout prequel.
Now that was fun to laugh at, unlike this water... thing.

Bloodgeon11 wrote:

you don't have money = you don't do any quests. Try to look around and you'll find plenty of jobs to do on every step.
By the time i reach gecko i usually have about 10k

You don't have any money=you're really into melee weapons. Hey, just taking on the slavers guild cost me mucho moola for ammo, armor, weapons, and stims. And Becky doesn't give half what you spent!
Hey, theory on our $ differences:
Barter-23%
Speech-55%
Karma- -500
plus, i didn't get dough for being a slaver and capturing innocent slaves. I wasn't a woman, so couldn't sell myself, and had to pay Metzger the full 1000!

P.S. i hated "Water World" too. I'm just trying to stay within the thread topic.

I don't really know what you're used to doing with those slavers if you don't end up with a tons of 10mm pistols, ammo, drugs etc after the fight. You don't need to buy Vic, just take him after you kill Metzger. By the way - search his corpses, what you find should be enough to buy whatever you want at the beggining.

You can also use Lara's gang help:

Meths wrote: As for the slavers in the Den. I've worked out some very easy way to wipe them out. :

- Make all the Lara's quests first, try not to let too many of them be killed.
- leave Sulik in the church or nearby - otherwise, he will be extremely annoying.
- start a fight with slavers at the distance.
- run away to the church
- Lara's gang will do most of the dirty work and you get normally xps for that, just like they're your team.

Then you don't have to waste just ANY ammo... or maybe a little but that's it.