Thanks for the well-thought-out response!
Colt said:
Think about how it was done in FO, FO2, and FOT. You had places to go and things to do, but you could also wander the wasteland within certain the map boundary. This was a good way to jack up experience and equipment through random encounters, some of which were scripted.
That's what I'm somewhat of afraid of with something like a brahmin transport system. Someone new to the game would find it and scream "Oh my God! 0wn4ag3!" and use it to get everywhere and ignore gaining levels then get pissed later on when they die if something sneezes at them.
Well, that's the price we pay for feature abuse, right? I don't know how forgiving a game has to be, really. That's one interesting thing about Fallout: there's always a spiffy way to die within short walking distance. Actually, depending on how far into the future the sequel takes place, coal, solar, or even fusion-powered trains would be a reasonable possibility -- but
only between major population centers, right? The "metropolitan" areas would be carefully planned and balanced in any case. And there would be the classic problems associated with train travel: broken track, robberies, landslides, hostile natives... Heck, your character might even want to rob the train himself, or have to try to thwart a robbery like Vash the Stampede on the steam freighter in Trigun.
One way around this would be for the character to have to travel to a certain location (the main depot) to be certified as fit to use the trains. Sucks to be a Child Killer or Berserker, huh?
Hehe, as before, I hope the game makes gratuitous use of reputation.
Take a good 3-d global map (like the one the folks writing Xenophobe have), modify it for civilized, populated, mutated, wasteland, ruins, and/or radiated zones. Use those parameters to generate different types of settlements where appropriate.
A global map, in my opinion, would just get a little too big. There's certainly something about being able to visit different parts of the world but would that really fit the feel of Fallout? In Fallout you get people saying they've never left the area around their city. To travel the world? Seems like a tad of a large leap.
It's been kind of a common theme, over the Fallout games, to have a character travel more than the locals, each time more than the last. Fallout Tactics had your BoS squad covering a pretty large area in the midwest. I think it would be a matter of how well a very large map could accomodate a tight main plot. Of course, long distance travel isn't anything to take lightly. If food, fuel, and fatigue were taken into account...
But the original premise of Fallout is extremely international in scope. What if your primary mission was to recover some pre-war technology for the BoS that was used by the American troops who invaded the Chinese mainland? Or head up into Alaska to track down some descendents of the defense force? Could be quite cool, if it was done well.
Certain locations from the series could be preserved to whatever degree is appropriate to stimulate nostalgia, and some of them would probably figure into the larger gameplot, but in between there'd be a whole lot of chance.
*cough*cafe of broken dreams*cough*
Ya know, I never got that random encounter in the times I've played FO2. I was thinking more of the continuing saga of Vault 13, or maybe we have to navigate the bureacracy in the NCR again on a larger scale, or... just about anything, really.
Maybe even model seasonal weather patterns? A lake that presents an impassable barrier most of the time might be crossed on foot during a winter freeze.
One thing I have always wanted to see is winter in Fallout. What would it look like? Snow? Lots of rain? Would the snow or rain be radioactive? Glowing snowmen! Fallout seems to totally ignore the nuclar winter idea unless it was only like three years after the initial war and in Fallout, you were in a vault then.
I want to see a mile-wide radioactive twister!
As for vehicles, they're obviously going to be rare, and the character may need special training or some NPC recruit to operate a moped or an enclave helicopter or a brahmin cart or whatever. And there's the matter of finding fuel, which could be the motivation for any number of subquests or random encounters. This is one area where FO:T really made some progress IMHO, having vehicles play a larger role could be an interesting plot device.
They can make good plot devices indeed but I would be afraid (if they were thinking that while making the vehicles) that it would become something like Red Faction. When that first came out I was kind of excited about the vehicles in it but it turns out when you get to use them, they're just like arcade driving games and only for short bits. The vehicles in Tactics were pretty cool though.
The problem with Tactics was that you only got to use the vehicle in a mission if you found it there. Like we're just going to wander into a hostile city on foot when we could be in an APC? What are we, stupid? They could have been implemented better, but it was still pretty cool. I'd like to see some serious Road Warrior action this time around!
And what about the language barrier? This wasn't really addressed in earlier Fallouts, but it could be an interesting addition to the game. Maybe the main character gets one or two or three starting language proficiencies based on intelligence, and gets more through spending skill points or using perqs or spending time in a region. If you wander through Germany, you'd better have a character who speaks German, or hire a translator, or most of that nice dialog and floating text is going to be incomprehensible.
One problem with this is adding an extra complication to the game. This is why Star Trek never does this.
What would happen when people in Germany played the game? Probably laugh at the bad German dialogue and think "Nice touch but totally lost on me."
Just cos the German gamers buy a German edition of the game doesn't mean their character automatically speaks German! They'd see gibberish instead of German, too, without proficiency or a hired translator. Maybe there could be some automated device you'd get at some point in the game that would do the babelfish thing? Dunno. But it could be added fun.
This also brings up the possibility of multiple starting points. Maybe you get a choice of starting the game in three or four locations?
Depends on what kind of character they decide to go for in the game. If you're just some tribal, this could work well... But both of the original Fallout games had your chracter starting with some noble purpose, there was something unique and important about him. Not just some random tribal out to make a name for himself. it all depends on how they go at it. Hopefully they'll do it well.
Maybe your character starts in one of several BoS bunkers, Enclave (residual) bases, or the international equivalents, or (as you suggested) a tribal. The overall quest might turn out to be the same, but you could have different starting scenarios used to build experience. I think there's some good times to be had, if Bethesda doesn't blow their chance.
Great first post by the way! - Colt
Thanks! I used to be a semi-regular over on IPLY's forum, but they shut down a few months back, and I got all bummed about FO3 being cancelled and stuff... oh well. That's all behind us now.
a "vik" is the norwegian(and danish and swedish I think) word for bay, thus "viking" what the vikings *did* was raiding(allthough not only raiding, their power and influence were just as much based on trading)
