Fallout So, Fallout 1....I'm raging so hard now.

[Jestai]

Just when you think it's over, this thread keeps on delivering.

Coming up next on the RPG codex show:

Fixed.

 

[Juggie]

Skills that interact directly with quests, like repair, are always 'non-systemic'. At most, they have a systemic secondary effect (like for example, preventing weapon jamming).

What, did you want to use repair or science to check all broken computers in the game for finding a randomized voice module?

Quests don't need special treatment of skills unless you want to employ skills which make no sense outside of special use cases. What I mean is that science is such a broad and abstract name of a skill that it has no use apart from certain special interactions with gameworld objects. If you take Deus Ex as an example, there's Electronics and Computer skills and they both have very systematic uses. With the help of level design both can be used without the need for special handling to progress through the levels. They can provide you extra information or extra access routes, extra items etc. If every functioning computer in Fallout could be interacted with using the science skill and this interaction would in majority of cases provide something meaningful then it would be systematic use and at the same time some of the computers could provide some quest specific info, or whatever. In reality there are probably hundreds of computers in Fallouts and only a tiny portion of them does anything meaningful and the only way to find out is try.

In Fallout several skills do nothing on their own and the devs need to make a per specific object script for the skills' usage and then if they want a solution to a quest involving an interaction with a computer they need to place the computer and make the scripts. What I'm proposing is that they make a skill which itself systematically handles the interaction with all computers and when they want to do a quest involving computers they just add a computer and decide how will the interaction proceed. And if they wanted even more systematic approach, all computers of one type would have the same sort of interactions etc. This problem can be seen in other areas as well - many games have hundreds of NPCs, but only a chosen few can be talked to or have hundreds of dialog options, but only chosen few are affected by your speech skill, etc. I would like to see a game where instead of trying to find those few important NPCs that can be talked to, all NPCs would have at least some basic dialogs allowing you to ask them for directions, information on some topics, etc (yea, Daggerfall, except more options and more meaningful info gained through the conversations). And instead of a couple of [Speech 40] dialog options I would like to see a more complex dialog system taking into account such things as character reputation, relations, and possibly many more things. Ideally, but that's a very distant future, games could generate whole dialogs based on some attributes of the character, which would allow having some sort of meaningful dialogs for all characters in games with many characters without requiring huge amount of work.

Also I would much prefer if Fallout told you which objects could be interacted with using special skills, but it seemed that they expected the player to come up with the solutions just like in most adventure games. Often it's just using random skills on every object just to figure out if they do anything special, which in most cases they don't.

 

[MasPingon]

GOD DAMN IT CODEX. MOTHERFUCKER.

Comprehend simple shit ffs: Infinitron IS saying that that shit DOES make games better. He's just saying it's NOT ENOUGH on its own. Fallout is praised for the sprinkles, but lackluster elsewhere. That's his fucking point. Sprinkles do not save a cake. They improve the quality of an already good one. Nobody would argue against sprinkles. FFS FFS

r00fles!

Why the fuck are you suggesting in every other post that we don't understand what do you got in mind ? It's starting to get tiresome. WE KNOW WHAT YOU ARE SAYING AND IT'S STILL RETARDED.

 

[Tigranes]

Skills that interact directly with quests, like repair, are always 'non-systemic'. At most, they have a systemic secondary effect (like for example, preventing weapon jamming).

What, did you want to use repair or science to check all broken computers in the game for finding a randomized voice module?

Quests don't need special treatment of skills unless you want to employ skills which make no sense outside of special use cases. What I mean is that science is such a broad and abstract name of a skill that it has no use apart from certain special interactions with gameworld objects. If you take Deus Ex as an example, there's Electronics and Computer skills and they both have very systematic uses. With the help of level design both can be used without the need for special handling to progress through the levels. They can provide you extra information or extra access routes, extra items etc. If every functioning computer in Fallout could be interacted with using the science skill and this interaction would in majority of cases provide something meaningful then it would be systematic use and at the same time some of the computers could provide some quest specific info, or whatever. In reality there are probably hundreds of computers in Fallouts and only a tiny portion of them does anything meaningful and the only way to find out is try.

In Fallout several skills do nothing on their own and the devs need to make a per specific object script for the skills' usage and then if they want a solution to a quest involving an interaction with a computer they need to place the computer and make the scripts. What I'm proposing is that they make a skill which itself systematically handles the interaction with all computers and when they want to do a quest involving computers they just add a computer and decide how will the interaction proceed. And if they wanted even more systematic approach, all computers of one type would have the same sort of interactions etc. This problem can be seen in other areas as well - many games have hundreds of NPCs, but only a chosen few can be talked to or have hundreds of dialog options, but only chosen few are affected by your speech skill, etc. I would like to see a game where instead of trying to find those few important NPCs that can be talked to, all NPCs would have at least some basic dialogs allowing you to ask them for directions, information on some topics, etc (yea, Daggerfall, except more options and more meaningful info gained through the conversations). And instead of a couple of [Speech 40] dialog options I would like to see a more complex dialog system taking into account such things as character reputation, relations, and possibly many more things. Ideally, but that's a very distant future, games could generate whole dialogs based on some attributes of the character, which would allow having some sort of meaningful dialogs for all characters in games with many characters without requiring huge amount of work.

Also I would much prefer if Fallout told you which objects could be interacted with using special skills, but it seemed that they expected the player to come up with the solutions just like in most adventure games. Often it's just using random skills on every object just to figure out if they do anything special, which in most cases they don't.

But then, I fail to see how Deus Ex's use of Electronics and Computer was markedly superior to Fallout's use of Science or Repair. Or how using the former in the latter would make any significant improvements. Did hacking terminals in DX1 (which, by the way, was perfectly fine for that game) really give a superior experience to using Science in FO? You're talking on paper only.

 

[Juggie]

But then, I fail to see how Deus Ex's use of Electronics and Computer was markedly superior to Fallout's use of Science or Repair. Or how using the former in the latter would make any significant improvements. Did hacking terminals in DX1 (which, by the way, was perfectly fine for that game) really give a superior experience to using Science in FO? You're talking on paper only.

I never said that skills in DX were in any way superior to those in Fallout. I said systematic use of skills related to quest could be done. The superiority would be possible if the skill system would be more complex. As an example you can take this post:

There should be three usual ways to use repair: 1. Passive. You can see how broken thing is and what you can do with it, just by looking on it. Changes message on mouse over, or "look" interface command. 2. Fast. Something you can do just in a matter of seconds (disable alarm, for example). Usable in combat. 3. Long. Takes 10 minutes or more. Can give permanent bonus or penalty for using it again on some item. Each consequential use is 10 minutes longer, and can consume disposable parts.

Using repair on item in inventory - if possible, dismantle it for spare parts and/or upgrade it with spare parts.

Speech: getting good dialogue options (or getting good results out of using them) should have specific Speech requirement, further modified by local reputation (+10% per level, unless you speak with Asocial person), perks and traits (certain speech bonus +/-20% for sex appeal, for example), your karma (+5%/level for good persons, -5%/level for bad, nothing for neutral) and your relations with this specific person, which can be raised or reduced by related quests.

You could come up with several ways of improving systematic skills in a unified way. If you want complex interaction using non-systematic skills you need to script every single instance which takes much more effort.

 

[tuluse]

I don't see how hacking in Deus Ex is more systematic. The designers still had to hand place all the computers, hand write all the information on them, hand set the difficulty of each one. Other than there being a lot more computers, how is this systematically different from Fallout's hacking?

 

[Infinitron]

I don't see how hacking in Deus Ex is more systematic. The designers still had to hand place all the computers, hand write all the information on them, hand set the difficulty of each one. Other than there being a lot more computers, how is this systematically different from Fallout's hacking?

Because all computers look the same and work in the same way, and are placed regularly throughout the game world. It's a skill you can "depend on".

 

[tuluse]

Because all computers look the same and work in the same way, and are placed regularly throughout the game world. It's a skill you can "depend on".

I'm not convinced. It more like it's a skill you can rely on because there are a lot of computers to be hacked. If Fallout had another 30 computers that you could use science on in the exact same way, it wouldn't change anything systemically, but you could then "depend" on it.

It seems more like a content problem than a system problem.

 

[Infinitron]

Because all computers look the same and work in the same way, and are placed regularly throughout the game world. It's a skill you can "depend on".

I'm not convinced. It more like it's a skill you can rely on because there are a lot of computers to be hacked. If Fallout had another 30 computers that you could use science on in the exact same way, it wouldn't change anything systemically, but you could then "depend" on it.

It seems more like a content problem than a system problem.

Did anybody claim otherwise?

 

[SCO]

Anti-adventure puzzle design is decline incarnate.

Also, i don't like you

 

[Kirtai]

For me personally, I can't see the point of playing against mathematical equations, because there is nothing behind them and no purpose to it. Each to their own.

Doesn't the real world run on mathematical equations?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

nobody cares.

I had to press spacebar like 5 or 6 times to get past your post, though. Proactive uncaring?

All in all, Infinitron seems very butthurt that Fallout didn't held his hand all through the game.

He sure does, unlike the people who have been crying about this fact for over 30 pages

 

[tuluse]

Did anybody claim otherwise?

The last 5 posts were all about how Fallout's hacking is systemically worse than Deus Ex, when there is really nothing *systemically* interesting about Deus Ex hacking. They just supported it with a lot of content.

 

[Infinitron]

Did anybody claim otherwise?

The last 5 posts were all about how Fallout's hacking is systemically worse than Deus Ex, when there is really nothing *systemically* interesting about Deus Ex hacking. They just supported it with a lot of content.

Systematic != systemic

 

[Juggie]

Because all computers look the same and work in the same way, and are placed regularly throughout the game world. It's a skill you can "depend on".

I'm not convinced. It more like it's a skill you can rely on because there are a lot of computers to be hacked. If Fallout had another 30 computers that you could use science on in the exact same way, it wouldn't change anything systemically, but you could then "depend" on it.

It seems more like a content problem than a system problem.

What is the difference between content and system problem? You mean that it's problem of Fallout not having enough computers to be hacked? If so then yes, partially. In DX you know that whenever you you see a computer you can hack it and you may or may not get something useful out of it. Usually you get some backstory fluff, but sometimes you get some gameplay relevant info. In Fallout when you see a computer you usually cannot do much with it and only if the devs decided to make a custom interaction script you might get something out of it. I believe that this is also cause of the 'content' problem. If you have strong system you just need to add some data. If you have no system then you need to have a custom script for each use case, which leads to fewer computers you can interact with.

Anti-adventure puzzle design is decline incarnate.

By adventure puzzle design you mean games with challenge based on static content? The strength of such games is that all their content is usually hand made, which is pretty cool, but the gameplay time is pretty expensive. On the other hand in games with dynamic content usually the content content is cheaper, because instead of thinking about every possibility you just describe how they work. Most games combine both approaches - story/setting/world related stuff is static, while most gameplay systems are dynamic. You need some dynamic mechanics, otherwise the whole game is just a simple tree the player is traversing from the root to some leaf. If you want to have game with complex interactions then you need gameplay systems. It's unfeasible to list and handle all possibilities of very complex interactions, therefore you don't try to list them all, instead you systematically describe the interactions. I believe that this is exactly what most RPG rulesets attempt to do anyway. It would be very impractical for the GM to come up with a way to handle every specific situation, therefore there are rules that govern general actions - such as skills, stats, saving throws, attacks, etc. These may be quite crude, but they describe pretty complex interactions and allow much greater freedom of choice than games with branching choices.

 

[Davaris]

Doesn't the real world run on mathematical equations?

Are you comparing the toy equations invented for computer games, to the goings on in the universe?

 

[Dreaad]

Here's an example of "sprinkling", straight from one of shihonage's post:

Fallout is about having your gun jam when you have low LUCK.

Sprinkle.

It's about walking down a corridor when your character notices a medpack in a nearby locker because of high PER.

Sprinkle.

It's about an NPC being intimidated by your weapons.

Sprinkle.

It's about certain doors subtly closing and opening when a situation or character build allows.

Sprinkle.

It's about dynamic textual descriptions, and it's about a gleeful virtual DM laying an imaginative layer of detail over the abstract isometrically presented world.

It's about having long-term consequences that do not immediately manifest themselves, modular outcomes that provide a fitting finale for the footprint you left in its world. It's about a convincing illusion of freedom, which may not technically work very well on a macro level, but combined with the micro level (what you do within an individual settlement), it is a better illusion than anything a story-driven RPG has provided before.

I am not convinced by the illusion.

That's not to say that all of these things aren't cool, but to me they're embellishments. The icing on the cake. The cherry on top. When I play a CRPG, they're not the first thing I look for. They're not what I consider the most important thing in a CRPG.

I rarely have a completely closed mind to people's opinions... but this is just wrong. It's the little details that make a game great. When I think about fallout I don't remember my combat with 20 supermutants as I repeatedly shoot them in the eyes. Hell I don't even remember the details of the talking to the last boss, something about fertility issues right? What I do remember is the "sprinkles" I remember very clearly and with great fondness the time my gun jammed in a critical situation against gecos. I do remember finding alternative routes because of my PER.
The game is interesting to play because you CANT fucking hack every computer in the game, you can only hack some and you have to find out which ones by yourself... If you know how to repair cars in real life it doesn't mean you walk around repairing every car you see on the street. If you remove the sprinkles from a game you are left with TES Oblivion, a lifeless husk where the only thing that works is combat. Yes Fallout has flaws, mostly in the combat department, but since later on you claim you mostly played adventure games... I don't see how the combat in Fallout could ruin the game for you since you can avoid huge sections of it.

As for the cakes... I think a cake made of sprinkles would taste fine, would be better with tasty dough inside, but if it was just dough it would be fucking bread.

 

[Grunker]

I think a cake made of sprinkles would taste fine

 

[Blaine]

As for the cakes... I think a cake made of sprinkles would taste fine, would be better with tasty dough inside, but if it was just dough it would be fucking bread.

I'm pretty sure that cake is made of Nerds candy.

Coincidentally, true nerds is what it takes to create a truly great game.

 

[mondblut]

X-com and JA2 are RPGs now????

And the Lord hath decreed, "Lo, thou shalt not have a good combat in an RPG! Good combat a non-RPG maketh!"

 

[Lady_Error]

Finished Fallout 1 again, after a long time, and noticed some interesting things in the credits:

- Richard Dean Anderson (MacGyver) was the voice of Killian!

- Guido Henkel was involved in Fallout 1 too, not just PS:T and Fallout 2.

All in all, the game seemed sort of short. Fallout 2 is definitely better length-wise.

 

[TemplarGR]

I am one of the most dedicated fans of the Fallout series. I own all of them and have played them countless hours. I read most of the discussion here and i would like to add my 2 cents:

The problem with games, is that you can never judge/rate them without considering the time they were created. It is not only unfair, it is stupid. Games tend to become obsolete very fast. And that is the problem with the OP and all those who say Fallout is overrated, they do not take into consideration gaming in 1997... Seriously, what games competed with Fallout back then? What were the technology constraints? If you consider those, and have a look at reviews back at 1997, you will find out that Fallout was underrated if anything... It received far lower praise for the timeless classic that it became... Many games scored higher on reviews that NO ONE even remembers now... Same for example with Starcraft 1, few remember that while it did get nice scores, it wasn't considered anything special at 1998...

Does it mean that picking the game now for the first time will wow a player? OF COURSE NOT. Not only the graphics are ugly today, the sound sucks, and the interface looks severely dated, but after 16 years we had great experiences from newer games. It is only natural to play FO today for the first time and say "what is the big deal". It is not possible for a new player to appreciate an older gem the way a veteran who played it at release can. That doesn't make the game overrated. Both the veteran and the newer gamer are right, on their part. It is simply a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding about how to rate a game.

If i rated FO for a gamer today, i would give it a score of 5-6. In terms of modern gaming, FO is low on content, graphics, sound, UI. It is still perfectly playable and enjoyable, it just can't compare to modern gaming. And that is perfectly fine. Fans of FO need to stop saying "Fallout is still the best". It is NOT. It has been surpassed. You are doing FO a disservice by placing FO on a pedestal, creating opinions like the OP's.

On the other hand, people need to stop saying FO is overrated. It is not. Rated for its time, it is a masterpiece, even with its faults. It is definately not overrated. No serious gamer will take your opinion seriously...

 

[Rivmusique]

Games tend to become obsolete very fast.

It is still perfectly playable and enjoyable, it just can't compare to modern gaming.

No serious gamer will take your opinion seriously...

If they aren't taking things seriously are they really serious? Serious.

 

[Davaris]

- Guido Henkel was involved in Fallout 1 too, not just PS:T and Fallout 2.

Got a source for that? I can't find any Fallout 1 credits with his name attached.

All in all, the game seemed sort of short. Fallout 2 is definitely better length-wise.

Always leave them wanting more.

 

[shihonage]

Does it mean that picking the game now for the first time will wow a player? OF COURSE NOT. Not only the graphics are ugly today, the sound sucks, and the interface looks severely dated, but after 16 years we had great experiences from newer games. It is only natural to play FO today for the first time and say "what is the big deal". It is not possible for a new player to appreciate an older gem the way a veteran who played it at release can. That doesn't make the game overrated. Both the veteran and the newer gamer are right, on their part. It is simply a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding about how to rate a game