I liked the combined total of factors put into armor that were represented in Tactics. It wasn't just that each armor had a series of damage types with different reduction rates, or that the resistances were one one component of several, and that each armor had different Armor Class, but that the heavier and heavier armors ALSO reduced your Sneak incrementally more, the bulkier they got. I thought that was the best representation of armor in the entire series.
For a very short while, I was convinced that Bethesda was faithfully representing what armor was doing (again, blame the starvation... I must've been delirious!) until I actually remembered how DIFFERENT it was from the original formula, the total lack of detail involved in the absence of damage types, and that they thought heavier armors should impact your agility, not your ability to be quiet and undetected. An argument can be made that bulky armor should ALSO affect your AG, but not all the rest. A MECH would do more than just increase your strength by 10% of "maximum human potential" (which is a LOT), not to mention that while a sharp dressed suit MIGHT have an impact on your ability to be more convincing (not because YOU can string together a better sentence, simply because of what clothes you put on, but because of the impression someone ELSE gets from visual receptors in their brain telling them "this guy means business") or a really glamorous set of silky pajamas MIGHT make you look more attractive (but it's tragically eye of the beholder... cause it could ALSO make you look ridiculous), the idea that a "parkstroller" outfit would make you more agile or a SPECIFIC set of leather armor would make your combat ability better, or that a goddamned COAT would make you more capable at computer hacking were just ridiculous. A lockpicking set increasing your Lockpick skill made sense, because this was a set of all manner of shapes of metal items made for picking locks, versus you doing it McGuyver style. It could be loosely construed that some of these outfits have "pockets" that contain useful items associated with certain skills, but at this point you're just stretching your imagination to excuse the extra perks of wearing CLOTHES. Added carry space? Sure. More attractive? Sure. Better at smashing two broken guns together and making one working gun? Not so sure. Smarter and more knowledgeable all of a sudden? Definitely not...
But back to the original games, and their SHOOTING mechanics. Limited animations notwithstanding (post #4), they were really great. You didn't KNOW exactly where your bullet landed, except where the description told you. It was REALLY hard to land a shot on an incredibly small target area (like the eyes), but the pay-off of a successful hit was the best. Every area of the body had a unique affect on the character of you critically damaged that part of their body. Whether it was represented by a nifty animation or not (and they largely weren't) is kinda irrelevant. Sure, it would be NICE if a critical hit to the eyes would result in their FACE exploding (not their chest or right arm), but at the end of the day, what I cared about what the GAMEPLAY impact of these decisions. When I was facing Kaga in the Restored version of FO2, targeted shots were my godsend, because I was able to stop Kaga from shooting me by crippling ONE of his arms, then stop him from escaping by crippling both his legs (took 2 encounters to get all 3 successfully), and preventing him from showing up again and again with increasingly broken odds stacked in his favor was WONDERFUL.
I miss those mechanics... =(
