Anyone else find computer hacking depressing?

Makatak

Makatak

First time out of the vault
On the surface, it looks more technical than the hacking procedure found in other FPS/RPG games.

In practice, it's just a matter of opening up the terminal several times, taking 3 guesses at a time, repeating, until you get the correct password. And most of the time, the password isn't even directly related to the place you are in or the function of the terminal. So it's not like the player could make a reasonably educated guess at what it is.
 
Its always related to the place. Trust me on that. Its just difficult to suss out why sometimes. As for taking 3 guesses and repeating, dont reload and tell me its easy. Hehe in reality if you fail, you fail. Until you get the skills to try again and if you fail again, your screwed. I don't personally do redos in this game. Unless its a redo due to a bug.

If you play that way you end up having a hefy number of failures and life seems bitter, cold and the world sucks. Which frankly it does. You dont get to save the princess most of the time. Your buddies die. Your jobs fail. You starve.

Of course I can understand reloading if you die. Thats just practical.
 
Well yeah, the passwords could be sort of related to the place. But you will find many words in the hacking code that fall into that category. So it still is, by most accounts, a guessing game.

And my science skill doesn't seem to make hacking "Easy" terminals any easier. It simply lets you hack harder terminals when you pass the 25, 50, 75, 100 threshold. Other than that, they are all just as difficult to hack.

And I don't reload my saves when I fail, I just exit out and log back in to a terminal after 3 failed attempts (4 means you get locked out).
 
It seemed like a fun game at first, but it gets annoying pretty quickly, especially since it leads to something useless 99% of the time. Do you sit there trying to get the right letter combo, and ger rewarded with a bunch of useless one-liners as a result. Be-a-fu**ing-utiful.

I also don't get why all the random terminals need to be hacked. Couldn't some have open access?? Srsly.
 
Jahnri said:
Its always related to the place. Trust me on that. Its just difficult to suss out why sometimes. As for taking 3 guesses and repeating, dont reload and tell me its easy. Hehe in reality if you fail, you fail. Until you get the skills to try again and if you fail again, your screwed. I don't personally do redos in this game. Unless its a redo due to a bug.

If you play that way you end up having a hefy number of failures and life seems bitter, cold and the world sucks. Which frankly it does. You dont get to save the princess most of the time. Your buddies die. Your jobs fail. You starve.

Of course I can understand reloading if you die. Thats just practical.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you are saying here. Taking three guesses and repeat, don't reload and tell me it's easy? No, it's not easy if you take the four guesses and get it wrong, but it's obviously functional to take three guesses, exit out of the terminal, go back in, and take three more guesses, or else why would that work? It's more practical to do this than to save, try it, fail, and either reload your game or continue playing. I wouldn't save and reload, that's time consuming, but taking three of the four guesses, and then exiting out to try again, that I will do.
 
I found the mini-game pretty good if you actually *try* to guess the correct password, instead of hitting random words and hope it will work.

The balance is off though, I found easy hacking much more difficult than very-hard ones. The way the game balances difficulty is wrong (adding more letters), as increasing the "difficulty" only make the mini-game easier. I usually need a lot of save and reload to open easy terminals, yet I never fail the mini game for hard or very-hard ones.
 
Jahnri said:
As for taking 3 guesses and repeating, dont reload and tell me its easy.
Click to expand...
you dont need to reload your game, just leave the terminal and start over...

and yes, hacking pisses me off. makes it feel totally fucking worthless.

but lockpicking is even fucking worse... the most irritating loss of time i've ever seen. so i just boost lockpicking to 100% and let the game take it from there. :roll:
 
I found it to be an entertaining logic minigame.

Not sure if anyone else knows about it, but if you look for symbols that are closed bracketed (specifically things like <#$%#>, (HUSTLER), and []), the either remove duds or refill your tries.

The easier hacking terminals means you'll find more of these code bits, harder means fewer. While yes the "SCIENCE!" skill doesn't really determine any dice roll of what chance you have in hacking, it was a nice little logic puzzle I didn't expect.
 
You will need 100 skill to open Very Hard terminals. Skill reduces number of passwords. @ 100 VE/E/Avg terminals have 5-6 passwords. Its highly probable that after checking 1st work there will be only one matchin the pattern. SO in the end you waste time ONLY on H(5-15 sec) and VH(20-45 sec) terminals. Rest go super-easy.
 
I never knew about those "retry" bonus thingies.

I just noticed that the "harder" the terminal, the more letters in the word. Ironically, it is far easier to match a large word than a small one most of the time.

Having higher skill results in fewer actual words appearing on the screen; i.e. removes most of the duds by default.

Personally I wish they'd remove the blanket skillcheck. I like the challenge of the hacking game.


Anyway, as it stands, unless you are really impatient, it should never take more than 3 tries TOTAL to correctly get any password. Most can be gotten in 2 tries.
 
The sad thing is of course than one can basically just headbutt ones way in because of the "tries refilled when you re-entered the computer". It's stupid design, especially considering they did put in the stuff where you can "blow up" duds so to speak. Who cares if you can basically just force your way in anyways? It's meaningless.

I wish they had done it somewhat similarily to Bloodlines, where you had a nice looking computer interface but it was completely governed by skills (unless you found out the password of course). Add in some modifers for the SPECIAL stats, and there ya go.

I'm not a fan of the lockpicking minigame, but I find it fairly non-intrusive.
 
Oh yes!

You can get it in 2 or 3 tries, without reloading, if you're not functionally retarded. It's pretty easy really. Matching the letters in the right positions and such... also removed duds or giving back allotments by finding enclosed brackets or parenthesis. Really... try it!
 
well now that I know about the closed brackets and parenthesis, I can take back most of what I said before about hacking.

I also didn't know that when it says something like "2/6 entry correct" its not just referring to the letters, but their placement as well.
 
Yep...

Yeah, honestly, that got me too. At first I was horrible at it... though I didn't read the instruction booklet nor the warning screen when you try it the first time. My bad. The hacking trick with the closed bracket sets I didn't even find out on my own, a friend of mine pointed it out one day. Pretty sneaky.

With those two things together, the game is pretty interesting and doesn't leave much room for the retries. However, it could have been more difficult or at least the Science skill and Intelligence perk should have played more of a role in this. Though I can't think of a good example right now...
 
It's a shitty mini-game, as mini games go.

At least the lock-pick one is a tad better than the one in Oblivion, which was utter crap.

All in all though, I'll take my RPG's sans-mini-games, thanks.
 
Mini-game mania

Yes, Bethsoft loves their mini-games. The Oblivion one was pretty wretched but, once you got the hang of it, it was pretty easy. Or if you had the unbreakable lockpick, then it was cake.

The Fallout 3 mini-games were better than the Oblivion ones, but still made little sense to me. There had to have been a better way to implement this stuff!
 
I will say one thing, though. I am DEFINITELY glad there is no mini-game for speech. The persuasion mini-game in Oblivion was probably the most ridiculous thing I saw in that game.
 
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