Problems with Fallout

Since Bethesda decided to make Fallout 3, we figured we might as well have a forum about it.
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Franz Schubert
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Problems with Fallout

Post by Franz Schubert »

We all know FO1/2 were as close to perfect as any game has ever been... but I want to know what you guys think are some of the problems in those games, things that you wish had been done differently, that could be done in FO3. (The ideas in the other thread are largely already in FO1/2, so list some things that you want in FO3 that weren't in the originals)

For instance, (and I know Saint disagrees with me on this), but from a gameplay perspective I always wished ammo and other critical supplies (stims, radaway/antidote, etc.) were MUCH scarcer in FO1/2. I do understand that several factions were manufacturing new ammo, but I like the idea of really having to scrounge for supplies, and being forced to use them wisely or perish. Burst-fire should be a luxury for the very rich.

Another thing that wasn't in the originals: it always annoyed me that the only course of action NPC's took when they got mad at you was to initiate combat. Like you're talking to some woman in Vault City, she pisses you off so you insult her back, and next thing you know she attacks you and you've got 50 guards up your ass.

What about you all?
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Post by Retlaw83 »

I think the AI in towns should be able to differentiate between an argument and tussle between the PC and an NPC and an attempt at by the PC to wipe out the town. I think it would help significantly if there were a reliable way to knock people out, or a way the AI could end combat and run away once the game dropped back into real time.
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Post by Wolfman Walt »

Something I kinda felt was missing from the previous ones were better NPC intereactions in terms of your comrades. I know we just had a giant debate on this in another thread on here however not much of a solution we could agree on was really suggested. It was either "Keep it like how it was in FO2 with maybe afew changes" or "Give me the ability to control them like in FOT" for the most part.

Ofcourse my idea uses those little handy radial menu's that were used in ToEE, IE one of the options could be "Give an order" or "Give a suggestion" and then you select the appropriate party member and then yell out a command such as "Give me cover fire", "Go after specific Target", "take cover here" or whatever and it'd take up like 1 action point (You have to verbally yell this out after all.)

Ugh another minor complaint was that you couldn't really change your characters appearance. IE - No matter what his stats he was still a tall, relatively well muscles, brown haired guy or a slender woman with dark hair and such.

Also - I do kinda agree with you Franz on the subject that is ammo. It should be abit rarer then it was. Maybe not "Road warrior" rare, but atleast rare enough that half of my guys inventory isn't dedicated to ammunition.
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Post by Role-Player »

To be honest i don't think reducing ammo is the main thing. In Fallout 1 there was less combat, and therefore less ammo, but in Fallout 2 there were many more combat situations, so ammo was somewhat necessary. I think more combat is the issue, not ammo.
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Post by Wolfman Walt »

Well really, thats the thing, more combat isn't neccesarily a bad things, however, that also means you have more of a tendancy to just waste ammo on shots you probably don't have a chance hitting with (Edit) when you have more ammo. Ammo should be something of a luxury.
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Post by S4ur0n27 »

I think there should be much less ammo, and guns too, but as much fighting. Make melee weapons more useful. Make the guns rarer, more special. For example : raiders. The leader has a gun, maybe his lieutenant, but all others have arrows or knifes. In New Reno everyone had a gun.
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there are so many things that I want

Post by xbow »

Scarce ammo in some areas is a cool concept and why would the powerful organizations that make the stuff it want to make it available to everyone? How could a little tin god of a warlord maintain control of the populace and keep his serfs working for sustinance if they had easy access to weapons.

would a fortified town ever let well armed strangers walk around free buying guns and ammo.

In such a town bartering for weapons and ammo would be a crime unless you can bribe someone connected to the kingpin. You could make back street deals with guns and ammo merchants.

Gunsmiths like the Gunrunners could be located in remote areas and have no aliegance to any warlord. But you gotta find em first! once you find a good smith he should be able to upgrade the weapons you have or sell you new ones.

I would also like to have the ability to cache supplies and loot anywhere on the world map and of course be able to return to it. this is important because entry into some towns should often involve a body search for guns.


You should also be able to use sneak to slip past guards and get into some towns with your iron to take out a target on an assination mission.

like someone else mentioned there is no way a whole town should turn against you for a fist fight. What about getting arrested and fined for public brawling?

Encounters where a force that wants to rob you has a chance to do it! how many piss bum spear and knife wielding raiders would attack a well armed party?

I would also like to see weapons like bang sticks( a pipe with a shotgun shell loaded into it attached to a spear), crossbows, spear guns, poisoned arrows, a hand ax, machetes, crude single shot rifles, zip guns, hand made versions of rifles, pistols, and submachine guns, the list is endless but the point is the array of weaponry available should be big and variable in quality, power and caliber. Finding a sweet pre war production bolt action sniper rifle should be a signifigant event as would finding a .44 magnum Smith and wessson revolver.


Absolutely Fallout3 needs better combat combat controls for the NPC's. Perhaps just an expanded set of instructions over the fallout2 combat control screen is what is needed. something like this.....http://www.geocities.com/tankermo2/combatcon.jpg

You should also be able to set combat controls without 'conversing with your NPC's' at any time.

Your NPC's should also have a sense of survival. NPC's that takes some hits should cut and run and even depart from the pary if it happens too often for too little gain.

You should have to grease the NPC's with money booze and booty to keep them loyal and motivated.
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Franz Schubert
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Post by Franz Schubert »

xbow wrote:I would also like to have the ability to cache supplies and loot anywhere on the world map and of course be able to return to it. this is important because entry into some towns should often involve a body search for guns.
You can drop items on the ground anywhere in a city and it will be there forever.
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Post by Blargh »

@ Franz - This might well be unique to my experience of Fallout 1/2, but I have noticed items I have dropped in game disappear over time. That said, I am not entirely certain that this is due to any programmed NPC behaviour, item limits or simply bugs. :drunk:
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Post by Franz Schubert »

I had a gigantic inventory on the ground near the entrance to San Francisco... I wish I still had a screenshot of it. Throughout the entire game I dropped off all my extra stuff right on the street (organized in rows and columns). I bet you just forgot where you put your shit. Or more likely, you fell victim to some bizarro bug.
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Post by Kashluk »

Yeah. No stuff ever disappeared on me either.

You should propably be able to occupy some abandoned bunker or something and be able to store all your stuff there. Either that or another car trunk.

Less ammo in general is good, but I think more calibers would serve the game better. There could be like 30 different sorts of ammunition and maybe 1-2 weapons that can use each.
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Post by SDMVersion3 »

Kashluk wrote:Less ammo in general is good, but I think more calibers would serve the game better. There could be like 30 different sorts of ammunition and maybe 1-2 weapons that can use each.
I disagree. I'd like to see 5-7 calibres of ammo at most with appropriate derivitives.

9mm ammunition, in armor piercing, hallow point, and standard varieties.

Shotgun shells, in slug, pellet, maybe explosive slug?

Rifle ammunition, say, 347. Standard, armor piercing, depleted uranium...

Belt ammo for Bozars and Miniguns. Standard and armor piercing.

Magnum rounds. Standard and armor piercing.

That's five, and it covers most weapon types. Add in grenades, flamethrower fuel, energy cells, crap ammo like BBs, and guass slugs, and you're rolling. The chances of finding a discarded weapon in a post-apocolyptic world is high, but the chance of finding a substantial cache of varied ammunition is low. Thus, there shouldn't be five hundred and one types of ammo, because it's much harder I imagine to find and break into some ammory somewhere then it is to rechambre a rifle.
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Post by S4ur0n27 »

Wowowowow. Stop it with your ammo types and shit. I don't want to have to study guns for hours to play FO.
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cache

Post by xbow »

I know you can put stuff anywhere in a town I usually just dump stuff at the intersection of two streets. What I want is the ability to cache supplies outside of a town if indeed town guards start as they should searching travlers for weapons or contraband (ref: Vault city). I think in a town you should be vulnerable especially if it is run by folks like the regulators in Adytum.

There is an abandoned city south west of the Brothherhood base in Fallout1 when you go there and hover your pointer over it you get color=yellow]City[/color]. But dont try to cache anything there because it will be gone when you return. You should be able to stash loot anywhere
you want but you should also run the risk that that it might get pilfered if you leave it there too long, and a cache in the open desert should be marked on your map until it is pilfered or you come back and take the stuff.

Caches would be important if carry weights were more realistic. a players basic carry weight excluding armor should be something like.

((Strength + Endurance)/2) * 10 = Base_Carry_weight
(( 8 + 7 )/2) * 10 = 75 pounds

you could also factor in the players size and use that modify the result

small frame = .8, medium frame=1, large frame=1.5, huge frame=2,

Base_Carry_weight * size = Carry_Weight

and thats pretty generous.
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Post by Kashluk »

@SDMVersion3:

Let's take a hypocritical situation of an apocalypse happening right now, or say the 50's. How many different ammo calibers were used back then? 10? 50? 100? 500?

Which is more likely - 5 different kinds of ammo, 1000 pieces each left or 20 different kinds of ammo, 500 pieces each left after the dust settles?

The whole PA-theme is about living in the ruins of the old civilization, that's why generalizing in ammunition seems strange, because there would propably be much much more other kinds of ammunition and guns for that ammo.

Unless you're talking about taking the path of completely removing names, like you somewhat partly stated on your reply. I mean having one ammo called 'rifle ammo', another one 'pistol ammo' etc. but it's still too vague in my opinion.

And not all shotgun shells are the same, there's different kinds of diameters and lengths in that ammo as well. Try firing a .12/79 with a .16 shotgun and you know what I mean.

My utopia of Fallout would be this: you find a gun, maybe 10 or 15 rounds for it. Say a 10 mm pistol and 10mm JHP. You save them for the 'rainy day' and when you run out of ammo for it, you'll propably discard the gun as well. Then you'll take a weed knife and stab people. One guy you stabbed was carrying a machete, then you slice another guy with that. You throw the weed knife away and take the guy's .10 shotgun and 5 shells. It goes round and round and round...
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Post by SDMVersion3 »

Kashluk wrote:Which is more likely - 5 different kinds of ammo, 1000 pieces each left or 20 different kinds of ammo, 500 pieces each left after the dust settles?
The former is more realistic but unbalances the game. If you have limited ammo in multiple types, it basically limits the usefullness of a weapon. If you stuck with 9mm ammo you could make it all the way through Fallout 1. Same with Sniper Rifle ammo. You couldn't do that if you increased the amount of calibres while limiting the quantites of each... it would mean that you had to, as you suggested, throw out guns. This might work in a movie... the Matrix? But in a game, it would get very tedious, taking on power armored foes with a knife because all the guns you carry only had 50 or so shots and you can't carry anymore. It just wouldn't work.

It's true as well that thereare plenty of calibres of ammunition, but many are more plentiful then others. I would say that you keep the most common ones and tailor weapons around that, because I don't think the way you suggested setting it up lends itself to an enjoyable gaming experience.
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Post by Kashluk »

Well, you could be right. A man can still dream, eh?
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Post by Hatchen »

one thing they should never do is something in fallout one. you can give and npc on your team some items, but you need to trade something equally as good or better to get it back. it was really annoying so i usually played without party members.
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Post by American Tourister »

You can just use steal to freely trade back and forth with your F1 NPC team, they won't even notice.
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Post by Kashluk »

Yeah, but it was rather confusing. FO2 did the bartering system better.
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