Gizmo

What's the werewolf ~is it another cheesy 50' monster they put in for thinking its all about cheesy 50' pop culture nonsense? Please do tell. I had thought the Vampire thing was bad enough (and used only to recycling another part of Oblivion's code). Why not? I never played the game just waiting to click... I watched the opponents actions and worked out their AP's and potential, I used positioning and carefully decided whether or not to spend all my AP's or to save some (or all) for defense during their turns. Fallout's combat is rather amazingly similar to SSI's Gold Box games, where its true, that you had up to 8 characters, but its also the case that you might easily be using just one while the rest lay bleeding on the ground; and it was also the case that hired mercenaries were not under player control, but did come in handy to have (just like Ian ~usually a hired merc).

That is pretty funny. Never had that happen to me though. Whenever I get that close to a super mutant they switch out to go melee against me. Could be a fluke ~it is why I recorded it... but its not why I'm disappointed that they went FPS instead of High TPP. You can't appreciate the landscape from a worm's eye view. I'm not the least bit interested in FPP combat (and never had that problem with any other game in the entire series before Fallout 3 ~its not what drew me to the series. Using it shows that they know nothing about what they bought, except that they own it and are allowed to screw it up with impunity if it means that somebody will buy it from them. . )

Real time Combat should have never been even considered for this series... and if they were forced to use it, the they should have considered making it better designed that they did. This is just sad.

I prefer the latter style for this series, and as part the Fallout series... FO3 is a boil in its butt. The future is closer than we think Animal Crossing is likely the future of all gaming.

No I'm remembering what they achieved on a Pentium 90MHz using 16 MB ram, and that FO3 demands 32x the ram and a 2400MHz Pentium and is barely par but for the graphics and Havok (both of which are superfluous to the actual gameplay)

No one should take a deep game, and make it shallow [because the masses can't swim]; If your market is the mass consumer, than you don't need a deep IP and could whip up practically anything and it would suffice. Companies that do this, are pulling down the greats and all potential for any new greats. Its like selling "Shakespeare" or "The Worm Ouroboros" translated from English into debased English; or selling expurgated copies of Mark Twain... for the sake of selling a book. ~This is sadly reminiscent of Orwell's 1984 coming true on several levels; Games are the new New-Speak, and publishers are beaming with pride that each new batch has fewer words than the last one. Agreed. I thought Troika collapsed after a deal [with Activision?] fell through. I would hope he does follow it, though I agree, that you can't sell a Rapidograph on a shelf full of Biro's.

Not yet (working on my own )

IIRC, the RR IP was sold for around 400k about 5 years ago. Who knows... I would love to see that game redone/continued with Id's Tech 5 engine.

Redneck Rampage had the Booze and moonshine healing mechanic down pat (and pies N chips). Pies gave you a gut and eventually started you passing loud gas unexpectedly (that actually moved you a bit... You could fart yourself off a ledge ); Booze healed better than beer, and the more you drank the worse the controls got ~then the graphics would blur, and finally your keys were remapped. (The most incredible "egg" in that game was that in perfect theme... the player could know he was drunk and try to compensate by looking a bit to the left and if he wasn't too drunk, it worked, and he could go where he wanted and shoot with a bit better accuracy).

Ratings? [ESRB rating?] "M" is all but certain. Dehydration damage as temporary stat damage might work really well. (but that bit of the game is the least of current concern I think). Heh... Dehydration damage should also give Speech penalties

Imagine if you were down to 1 HP on your way into town for medical help *Really all that mattered is that it happened... It would have been just the same if there was no damage and just the note. ** The same is true for the one where you tripped on a rock.

That would end up into too much trivial micro management. I don't think so. You would just have to gather some food & water apart from ammo before you leave town. I think it's a neat idea, a nice addition to the feeleing of town safety vs. dangerous wasteland. One [or both] of the first two games required that you actually had a canteen before a long trip, or you could get dehydration damage. *Ausir would know the exact details (or could find them).

I dunno.... By rights the premise should probably be "life in the 10 to 20 major metropolis cities that have sprung up in the last 150 years, and some even out in the middle of nowhere [Where Fallout 1 & 2 were set.]

Hmmm.. I'd rather prefer it be a limited "level" or quest, than the norm. (Consider if it were done on a caravan run and the PC was a hired merc, expected to defend the cargo).

I can see fighting on truck-back as functionally identical to to fighting in a room with dynamic hazards. I bet not falling off the truck would be about the same thing as not stepping off the edge of a wall; And you can't take a truck into a man-hole, or subway, so the VtV combat would only occur in wide outdoor spaces (though it would be neat if the NPC hitting a bump (or rolling over an opponent) would shift the truck/or car such that the PC risked falling off if they weren't careful. What I'd like in a game turned FPP explorer is for the game to include climbing as a full feature. (quick non-sequitur) In Oblivion I had my PC climb the walls in Tamriel and found... nothing up there; I found alcoves on the wall where I'd expect a bed-roll or an assassin's perch, but there was nothing. When I had my PC scale the Arena wall to get in secretly, I found it to be alike an old MGM back lot set... Which was a bit of a disappointment... Oblivion suffered badly from poor player expectation. When I played, I found that every town could be climbed out of via the wall, but that the game assumed that you were still inside, and so dropped/degraded most of the outside hills and lakes until you went back into town and then left by the door. ~and there was nothing really to find in places that were off the beaten path. I put my PC on the roof tops in the temple district to "bow-shot" the unwary, and it mattered not, as they all knew exactly where to look, and that my PC had done it, and I even had a guard hop 30' straight up onto a roof to give the "criminal scum" speech.

If there are vast tracks of barren [and flat] wasteland, then an NPC can drive from point A to B while the PC defends the vehicle from attack (similar to the train levels in Blood in a way), or the PC can drive the vehicle and get close enough for the NPC's to make shots at their attackers. Consider a pick-up truck with raiders trying to leap onto the truck bed and overtake you, or steal something that you have, and the player must deal with them and not fall off the truck. ~It'd be tricky. but I think the way (if done at all) is to study Mad Max. It worked pretty well in the PnP games called "After The Bomb" made by Palladium Books. Notes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_Hogs

Hey Gizmo, that would have taken at least half a day to accomplish. Were you so patient or you wanted all that Killian’s staff badly? I suppose I could have been, but it was not like that... My PC had a strength of 2, a luck of 10, and tagged Gambling. He would still lose, but usually not as often as he won [it seemed]. So I just tapped the hotkeys for the bets in rapid succession and the winnings fluctuated up and down quite a bit, but generally went up over time, and I quit at around 1500 [rather than risk dropping several hundred and having to make it up again.] It couldn't have taken more than 10 to 15 minutes.

The original [GURPS] Gambling skill was to tip the PC off to a rigged game I believe. (Not reflect your skill in a game of chance). Still... I remember walking my PC into Gizmo's casino with 5 caps, and walking out with 1500. ~could they use "Crafty" to pick the NPC's [chess] moves ya think? *That's a wicked video clip

Same here. I suggested some threads back, that a section of the map [inaccessible], be made to look like endless wasteland, and during Fast travel, if an encounter occurs, it pulls you out of FT and into this endless waste (for a timed encounter that ends after combat ends, when the clock ticks down ~or perhaps with distance traveled or a bit of both).

I agree 100% ~but then... I'm of the opinion that FO3 should never have been made a first person game I haven't played Tactics enough to discover that; It sounds good though... I'd be all for that [split skill] method.

That would likely lead to a can of [acidic] worms ; They had it that way in Baldur's Gate 2, and the main problem is that sometimes a player just wants to peruse their inventory and not worry about random monsters murdering their party while they are reading item descriptions. One could instead unpause in combat only, but that makes it behave differently at different times, and also, I used to like opening the inventory as a way to pause the game... pick up the phone, fix a snack, etc... Was doctor a requirement in the Brain swap for FO2? (I don't recall, but its seems logical). ~I will always be one for more skill granularity being better ~its a throwback from the PNP days and the realization of just how those skills can be applied to a myriad of situatio *Would Doctor have been as useless in FO1&2 if it had been named "Un-cripple limbs"? It was useful because it uncrippled your limbs and cleared blind effects. If they had it again, it would be a specialized skill that could be used for specialized skill checks (that most would fail, but a few would pass), this could open options that should only be opened to certain kinds of charters. As you streamline and merge your skill set (pairing it down to only a few) you begin to approach a game world not unlike the world of Harrison Bergeron, where the town doctor is no better at patching you up than the town bartender. Specialized skills are basically "Class skills" like in the D&D style games. Secret knowledge that not everybody has. Fallout had a classless system, but had several skills, and you effectively picked your class by how you developed them. Trimming the skills begins to skirt the edge of the superman that is master of all guilds ~its Bethesda's old haunts all over again.

I like that the animations in FO3 change when the creature is crippled. * (I'm considering modding the Supermutants to use the crippled walk cycle as the normal mode for a few types and adding a leg brace to the model) But The game's Cripple effect seem broken to me. In FO3 if you get crippled, you pop a stim pack into the affected limb (on paper this sounds ~sound, but in practice its flawed... bad) When I first was playing, I barely noticed the crippling, because taking stims regularly would heal hitpoints and heal crippled limbs in the process. That trivializes the entire mechanic IMO. When the PC is crippled in Fallout 1 or 2, they are in real trouble ~especially if in a fight atm. They can't just pop a stim to un-cripple themselves Fallout 1&2 had a brilliant system for medical (I thought); It worked like this... You had two skills that governed medicine. They were First Aid & Doctor. Both medical skills were for when you had the time ~so you don't waste Stim-paks. First aid could be increased by books to a high level and was great for healing basic injuries on your PC, and NPC's. First Aid takes only half the time needed by Doctor [and you get half the XP]; Doctor gives double the XP of First aid, takes twice as long, but its the only way to heal crippled limbs and blindness ~and Doctor cannot be raised with books. (this meant that unless you put a lot of points into doctor, it might take you a while to fix your crippled limbs or eye trouble). Because they split the two, this means that you have a maximum of 6 heals per day, but only three chances to heal crippled limbs or blindness, and you must decide carefully who gets what, when healing two or more injured. (Also the time element plays a part, as you would not want to use either if standing in a radiation hazard). I know it might be futile to suggest a return to the old (better) way [with an explanation in the manual of how to use the skills]; but in the very least I'd hope that New Vegas addresses the broken mechanics of FO3 as they are, and improves upon them such that "crippled" actually means something dangerous, and is not to be taken lightly... (as almost everything is in FO3 ).

I disagree. It started out as a GURPS experiment that grew into the Fallout experience/setting. But I believe the Fallout setting grew bigger than that archaic game system. Of course, there's no way of proving either for or against in this case. Funny though that I played Fallout despite its combat/gameplay system, while you seem to have played it because of its combat/gameplay system. Each instance of the Fallout series [to date] has declined (Fallout 2 was bigger, but not better IMO), and Fallout Tactics was not even an RPG, FOBOS (by appearances only) seems to be some kind of arcade game RPG ~In the was that was an "RPG" Each game sliding away (Heh... like the blood of N

Want to know something funny? Mario turned 3D on the Nintendo 64. And it worked! Still a Mario game! Just like Fallout 3 is still a Fallout. Mario is a character based franchise (a specific character), the same goes for TombRaider and Duke Nukem; Any game featuring them as the lead is a franchise game regardless of gameplay. ("Duke Nukem Manhattan Project" is a Duke Nukem game) Fallout is not based on a single character, one that would be recognizable or carry a title on its own. Its a gameplay based franchise (as opposed to a setting based franchise like Warhammer or Forgotten Realms) ~The reason being is that if you compare all games with the Warhammer or Forgotten Realms license ~they vary a lot, but if you compare all the games in the Fallout license most don't vary that much (except the latest one ). I'd say that I was certainly drawn to the game mechanics over the setting. The setting is a good one, but it was an afterthought and mattered nil or none to the gameplay itself. A prototype of an early build shipped on the game CD that shows it looking like Ultima Online. The games inception was about GURPS. GURPS is Gameplay ~it has no setting.