J.E. Sawyer

I await the inevitable Steel Battalion controller remapping for PC.

Aaron's been getting that since before I started working with him at Black Isle. There are worse people to look like than Iron Man.

My experience with semi-auto handguns is pretty limited, but the Springfield Armory M1911 .45 I used jammed 1/4 times on releasing the slide after reloading, and there was about a 50% chance one of the rounds in the mag would jam during normal operation. Anthony Davis (ex-U.S. Army) told me that it was not uncommon to be issued a semi-auto sidearm that had some sort of jamming issue and that some soldiers would carry personal revolvers for that reason.

doit

Revolvers are extremely practical and dead reliable. AP's firearms are a little on the "fantastical" side of realism, but video games in general tend to be pretty forgiving about how ammunition is loaded into weapons. You pick up endless magazines of ammunition and it magically gets sorted into full mags by the time you need to reload. Yippie!

Isis owns. I saw Isis open for Mogwai at the Knitting Factory L.A. several years ago. P. sweet.

That's how Mikey gets 'em.

@___@ 10mm pistols have a lot of recoil, though the F3 one is enormous so maybe that could reasonably offset it. Recoil, from an animation perspective, is just an animation with no ties to where the projectile actually goes. Spread is a stat on the weapon (modified by the appropriate weapon skill), and applies whether you're firing your first shot or your fiftieth. Currently, F3 does not have (that I know of) any sense of progressive spread from recoil.

The Scoped .44 Magnum in Fallout 3 is based on Lord Humungus' gun from Road Warrior. This should be required viewing for any Fallout player. http://www.splotchy.com/images/blog/humungus.jpg And Chris Redfield must be the most limp-wristed dude in Christendom if, despite arm muscles the size of my torso, every "Magnum" shot has enough recoil to practically smack him in the face. But yes, the recoil in Fallout 3 is very subtle for all pistols.

Pathfinder owns. BTW, you'll be able to get the 576-page Pathfinder book in .pdf form for $10. Pretty sweet.

The Bourne Identity (really the entire series) is basically all about one guy trying to figure out who he is (personal motivation) within the context of the CIA engaging in sinister neocolonialism (serious, real-world political stuff). I don't think these things are incompatible or at odds at all.

I actually had the opposite response. This is why I think working on real-world games with real-world problems and themes is important. People are more likely to take games seriously if they deal with actual problems instead of vaguely displaced angst. Not that all games have to be serious (or be taken seriously) of course, but it would nice for a few of them to be.

Neocolonialism is so 20th century. Come join AP in the 21st. Yeah I said it.

@__@ The Scoped .44 Magnum does a lot of damage and the Blackhawk/Callahan's Magnum are the best small guns in terms of MDPS.

I played Basic and Expert D&D first, then Bard's Tale, then Tony introduced me to 1st Ed. AD&D.

Yes, they can. Pistol scopes can be mounted on revolvers or semi-autos and typically have a much lower magnification than rifle scopes. Pistol scopes are often used for hunting.

It's sand.

I can't find the old CQC thread, but I wanted to let folks know that we have added two additional 5-move CQC chains in the interest of variety (for a total of four). It makes a big difference, so it was a good thing for the community to bring up.

Colonel Dietrich was actually pretty awesome, though. There was nothing about him that was not stereotypical. He even had a Schmi

I can't talk about F:NV's content or mechanics yet. I can talk about game content and mechanics in general and explain my own preferences as a player and the thought processes behind game development design decisions. But please, everyone, stop extrapolating this information into conclusions about F:NV. I'm sorry, but it is infuriating. I'm not designing this game according to my personal preferences as a player (which are actually pretty wide), nor does any specific design methodology automatically apply to the work we are doing on this project.

Thanks for clarifying. I usually used melee outside of VATS, and I could typically hit the body parts I wanted to hit. In that sense, non-VATS gun use wasn't much different to me than non-VATS melee use.

At least in real life, it always matters. You have less control over where rounds are going with increased range and felt recoil, but your level of control (or lack thereof) doesn't change terminal ballistics. Soldiers with assault rifles don't just hold the weapon at hip level and blindly fire in the direction of enemies. Even an M16 or M4 with standard peep sights can regularly score tight three-shot burst groupings at 50 yards in the hands of a competent shooter. Whether this needs to be modeled or abstracted in games is definitely a separate issue, but the person to whom I was responding implied that placement was not a factor with inflicted firearm damage but did think it made sense for melee weapons. The practical effects of ballistics -- whether it's from a baseball, a bullet, or a piece of shrapnel -- always have to do with what specifically is being hit, at what angle, with what applied force, etc. It's not just a matter of the ft-lb of force at the point of impact. You're effectively breaking apart a complicated living machine, not hitting a cube of ballistic gelatin. Rockets/RPGs, like flamethrowers, are sort of screw-up-your-nice-RPG-system weapons if you want to be "realistic" with them. "Realistically" -- putting aside issues of weight and bulk, which even in F1 and F2 were stretched to absurdity -- rockets are awesome. Like, you win with rockets. Congrats. You have something that is incredibly easy to aim and shoot and will kill virtually anything within 20-40 yards of where it hits. People, armored personnel carriers, whatever you got. We don't hear stories about "rocket aces" or "flamethower aces" because once people learn the basics of their operation, the learning curve pretty much flattens out. Again, it doesn't mean that they shouldn't be in games, and it doesn't necessarily mean that no statistical model will support them, but they are dissimilar enough from traditional firearms that they often present some conceptual issues.

I don't really care what system is used as long as it allows me to build my character how I'd like and the gameplay is enjoyable. I thought the effects of skills on firearm accuracy in Bloodlines (for example) were pretty un-fun. There's something irritating to me about pointing at a wall ten feet away and hitting something 45 degrees off from the center of my crosshairs (it's been a while since I've played Bloodlines, so it might not have been that extreme, but it was nutty). New shooters are inaccurate with handguns, but Bloodlines' implementation both stretched the boundaries of realism (not necessarily top concern for me as a player) and made for frustrating gameplay (biggest issue). I completely disliked Morrowind's melee combat for similar reasons. Actually, that was more bothersome to me than Bloodlines' firearms because in Morrowind you would actually see the weapon hit the target but you'd still miss. Were the gunplay abstracted and removed heavily (as it is in Fallout 1 and 2), it probably wouldn't have been as irritating. F1 and F2's implementation only irritated me with things like flamethrowers at two hexes, but edge cases and wacky weapons will always cause problems unless you just get rid of them, which is sort of like cutting off the nose to spite the face sometimes.

I was responding to his suggestion that it makes sense for melee damage to increase because of better blow placement but it doesn't make sense for firearms. Poor inference.

Firearm shot placement tends to matter a lot more than caliber or raw energy.