Fallout 3 Realism Overhaul

V

VeritasWaits

First time out of the vault
Let me get this out up front: Fallout 1 & 2 are two of my favorite games of the last 10 years, hands down. I'm also really enjoying F3 so far. But I think a lot could be done to strengthen the game. I can't understand why Bethesda felt it necessary to be so goofy at times, when the great strength of the game is its immersion and atmosphere. I'd love to see someone (I'm not much of a modder myself but I'm thinking of trying for F3) take on a Realism Overhaul project to address some of these issues. Here's what I'd like to see:

1. Make skills matter again

The whole point of tagged skills was that you couldn't get good at everything. It's much to easy to raise multiple skills at once, especially since you can take skill perks at every level now. Which brings me to point 2...

2. Make perks more significant

Why on earth did they assign perks for every level? I'd like to see them spaced out to every third level again (or at least every second level), and have their values increased slightly.

3. Knock it off with the gimicky weapons

I love the idea of custom weapons (I wish they'd taken the idea further and let you modify any weapon with attachments and upgrades), but a gun that shoots...teddy bears? A mini-nuke launcher? I'd like to see some of the sillier weapons removed.

4. Make us think about survival

I suggest that water shouldn't heal hit points. Just like the game tracks if you are "well rested", it should track hydration. You need to drink regularly to stay hydrated. If you don't your stats and skills start to decline. Since the "well rested" system is already implemented, it seems like this should be possible. Removing the freebie source of easy healing should also help beef up the challenge a bit and make us prepare for long excursions, rather than plan on ducking into an old bathroom and drinking from the toilet to heal our shotgun wounds to the face...


For me, just a few simple changes like that would go a long way towards improving the game. I'd love to be able to really enjoy getting sucked in to the world and the grim atmosphere without getting reminded all the time that "hey never mind this is just a game."

Anyone else have suggestions for a Realism mod?
 
VeritasWaits said:
I love the idea of custom weapons (I wish they'd taken the idea further and let you modify any weapon with attachments and upgrades), but a gun that shoots...teddy bears? A mini-nuke launcher? I'd like to see some of the sillier weapons removed.
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I agree with customizable guns, maybe have a vendor like in fo/fo2 to upgrade your stuff?

and there isnt *really* a "teddy bear launcher" in the game... there's the Rock it launcher, which shoots... everything, but its pretty useless since carrying around random objects weighs you down, and ammo for real guns weighs nothing.
 
VeritasWaits said:
I suggest that water shouldn't heal hit points.
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Yeah I was like "wtf I thought this was FO not Prince of Persia??"

I agree on most of the points you made.
 
I agree with almost all of your points, I personally had a similar thought about the water issue.

I personally think that water should heal SOME health, but for the most part I think that you should gain more rads than health from drinking (seeing as Rad-Away is so plentiful and your rad cap is 1000)
However I think drinking water should NOT be an easy way to gain life, the amount you gain per drink should be insignificant to the point that due the time it takes to drink makes it really only good for toping off those last 10-20points of health.

There is one teeny tiny issue I see though, what about Purified and Dirty water that you can carry? I believe this falls under the 'food' catagory in game and would be difficult to setup to seperate into 'water'.

Also should eating be a factor? I mean there is so much different food in the game already, but it has weight and stimpacks do not, not only that but stims are affected by your med skill so why wouldn't you just pickup and use stims whenever possible over food which gives so little health AND gives you rads?
 
For the sake of logic, I think the rad count of water is high enough.

I mean, if it were higher everybody in the wasteland would be dead already. They gotta have something to drink, y'know. Small doses of radiation as it is now makes sense, I wouldn't up those.

I'd just lower the amount of HP healed per sip.
 
I couldn't agree more on the points made by everyone else in this topic (especially the thing on skills being too easy to get, and caps are too low. I had a character with 10 charisma, 8 intel, 6 luck, and my remaining points into strength (per and agi were 1), and i ended the game with 100 speech, 100 med, 100 sci, and 100 sneak. yes, not only did i make my main skills maxed, i also took a skill i had no points in, and maxed it too (granted all of my perks were the one that gives bonus skill points, daddy's boy (3 levels of it), and whatever helped speech).

Also, I think that waiting should be killed. sure, it is a nice feature, but it really breaks flow and realism when your character stands around idle in the middle of a nuclear wasteland. It's like running from a psychopath, and then stopping to have a picnic.

Finally, radiation effects, drug effects/withdrawal and injury effects should not be see able (i.e. you have a broken arm. what that does to you, however, isn't revealed, and you can guess based on how you suddenly can't carry as much). though this has been done, it does bring me to my next point; make things like addiction and crippling have more visible effects. for example, while on jet, colors are polarized (i.e. dark things are darker, bring things are brighter), and you get an AP bonus. When you get withdrawl, however, colors get distorted, sound warped, etc. If you break a limb, your character will stop using it for holding a gun/walking on a leg (hard to do an animation for 2 bad legs/arms or head). I know these are hard to do, but they are cool ideas that could on day be done.
 
I mostly agree with the points made.

The perks at each level was a bad design choice, as you can take each and every interesting one and don't really have to choose between two excellent abilities. Also, too many of them only give skill boosts, I don't remember this was the case in the original games, save a couple of perks. They were mostly side abilities.

Skills already matter, but in a rather silly way. Weapon skill affect weapon damage (huh?), V.AT.S. accuracy and aiming "sway", but not enough in my opinion. The player should *not* be able to compensate his character weakness with his own skill, it's a RPG not an action game. Lockpick and Science don't make much sense, as once the 25/50/75/100 are reached all attemps are successful. Why should I not be able to try and hack a computer, even if I'm fairly bad at it ? Just make the mini game harder, it's not that complicated.

I don't think gimmicky weapons are an issue. The Rock-It launcher is unpratictical as "real" ammo weights nothing... The Fat-Man is a very limited use weapon, here for the one or two times you need it. Weapon balancing is an issue, as some are completely useless : who ever used the .32 pistol ? or the chinese 10mm ?.

I have no problem with water the way it is now. Having to manually eat or drink don't add much and are more bothering that anything (see S.T.A.L.K.E.R.). Maybe using up my stock of water automatically as I roam the land, and finding a way to fill flasks back once emptied with either radiated or pure water, could be better.
 
Would it be possible to implement a hunger system too, as well as the thirst idea? If you didn't eat anything, your perception, endurance, and strength started declining slowly after 24 hours without food or so? Also, maybe slow down the game clock, since it felt way too fast for me (I left Megaton after nightfall, and arrived at Tenpenny during dawn, running directly there).

I liked the way STALKER implemented it, where hunger increased slowly, and an icon appeared on the HUD when you got hungry, changing from green to yellow to red as it got worse. After it became red, your health started lowering.

I rarely got hungry while walking around, and mostly only noticed it right after I rested. The only issue with that is that I would sometimes wake up with just a few health points left, because I forgot to eat before resting (maybe you would wake up just before you started taking damage?). If hunger is implemented, there should be more food without any radiation, that you could find lying around in houses or supermarkets.
 
It would be interesting if medicine capped the maximum ammount of health you can recover though any means. For example, if you have 45 in medicine, you can only recover 45% of your health. If you want to heal more, visit a certified doctor.

If hunger is implemented, there should be more food without any radiation
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No, it would be interesting because radiation would start to have some interesting weight into gameplay, becoming a real danger.
 
Don't stop there!

Add a fatigue meter that lowers as you run, or perform other tasks (could be purely Time Awake, with some extra factors in it.), slowly of course, requiring sleep or else seriously hindering your stats, making you move slower, shoot less accurately, and lowering you science and lockpick skills, among other obvious things that happen when you get extremely tired.

Making crippling of both legs force walk, or at least make it far more obvious they are crippled. I'm not sure the extent of chest or arm crippling, but I don't think you can hold a rifle with a crippled arm.

I adore survival games, and I adore the Fallout universe, and I'd love to see an EXTREME conversion (no hud at all, perhaps. Everything in PIPBOY 3000?)

Also, the ability to cook food to lower radiation count, or up health gained. Just general things I can think of from reading survival manuals that I think could be implemented without TOO much trouble.
 
agreed to the OP mostly

1) the game is dumbed down very much, its up to us to un-dumb it.
i dont like playing dumb games, dont know of others.
we do need the difficulty/survival overhaul.
and apart from weapons/armors/monsters, there are lots of things need changing considering your everyday wasteland adventure life.

2) removing waiting seems bit to harsh - how do you propose for me to wait until the shop opens? wait for 6 hours realtime or what. having to find place to sleep everytime i need to pass time is a little harsh as well.

3) having to eat/drink - whats so bad about that, it shouldnt be a burden like STALKER did it though.
if the day/night timerate is changed (currently its ridiculously fast), i dont see anything bad in having to drink / eat once a day. this way you will get those rads and will have to think how to heal them. you will get worried - is your food clean, is your water clean?
and lower attributes if you are thirsty/hungry accordingly, so you actually have to prioritize your search for this tin can with dog food, just like Mad Max did.

4) spending some kind of stamina everytime you run or do stuff - not sure about that, looks interesting, but will possibly require alot of tinkering to make work propely.
 
Yes please, TeamX WHERE ARE YOU?

1.) Make it grittier,

2.) Remove the fluff and bling bling made for console players.

3.) FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, FIX THE GUI AND INTERFACE, what the fuck is with the over blown green text and crap? We aren't blind, looks like a console interface. (EDIT: Nevermind, found the mod for this :)
 
Realism Overhaul

Make children killable - hows that for realism?

I want to bring evil woe and suffering onto the already savaged world of Fallout 3
 
I've done quite a bit of Oblivion modding, and here's what I think about how your suggestions can be done (if they release the CS):

1. Making skills matter again
Relatively easy. A quest script that checks if you've leveled, and gives you twice as many skill points as you actually spent just on your tagged skills, making them rise faster than others. Perhaps it can even be baked into the default levelup script.

But just so you know, skill points have ALWAYS been abundant in Fallout, even with the Gifted trait you'd have most of your skills maxed out at level 20. Taking that away from the game is straying too far from the original in my opinion. If you feel you have too many skill points, try playing with IN 5 or lower. Oh, and what's with the "again" word in that suggestion? Skills matter a LOT more in FO3 than they did in FO2/FO1, where at least 5 of the skills were completely useless.


2. Perks every other level
Also easy. You basically need to modify the levelup script so that it only gives you the perk screen every other level, which should take about 30 seconds with the CS. I don't feel that this is necessary, but there you go.

3. Removing stuff from the game
Good luck against the Behemoth downtown, then ;) seriously, how can you not dig the Fat man? If you want to remove it from the game, sell it and never pick one up. But hey, have you played FO2? Now what kind of game would that be without the Bridgekeeper's Robes or the Red Ryder LE BB Gun? Silly equipment is nothing new.

4. Food/drink system and less healing from water sources
There are numerous food/drink/sleep mods already out for Oblivion, they're not very hard to make. The first problem would be to differentiate between food and drink, as they are both classified as potions (hello oblivion) to the game. What could be done is to give each of these potions either a "food" script effect or a "drink" script effect (though this might incur the infamous "Script Effect Added" message spam that we all hated in oblivion until the Script Extender came), that increments a global variable that is handled by a quest script. This counter then goes down, say, every 4 hours(depending on your EN perhaps? that would be cool), and with it go your stats. Eventually you die or something. You can have a counter for food, a counter for drink and one for sleep, and each of them incur stat penalties if they drop too low, and the periodic message "You are hungry/tired/thirsty". Sound good?

As for drinking fom sinks/johns/rivers, sure, probably just a bit of spell editing. If I had to guess, I'd say those things are all reskinned shrines/runestones/altars from Oblivion that bestow some spell effect on you, in which case you only need to edit this effect. And the "drink" option on the rivers/puddles is probably a huge, flat, invisible shrine that's placed on the water surface, in which case it's easy to mod. The Leadbelly perk probably tells the sink/john/river script: "don't use the regular spell effect, use the less-radiation-spell effect." At least this is how I imagine it's done.

I fear none of this can be done without the CS.


EDIT:
Guys, removing waiting from the game simply cannot be done, as anyone with a human level of self-discipline will just type "set timescale to 5000" in the console and watch time fly by. The default level is 30, I believe, so a minute in real life is 30 in-game. You can set it to 15 or 10 or whatever you like, I prefer 10.
 
great ideas here, and one i'd like to mention - altho im not sure if it's possible, is adding a division between karma and reputation.

for example stealing, sure it'd give you a negative karma but that's more of your personal values while reputation would be for the town/city/faction.
 
Not sure if I'm the only one who had an issue with this, but.. Invisible Walls. Anyone else find them completely annoying and ruining the sense of freedom in the game? I'm referring, of course, to such things as when you're in the city's ruins, and you see a huge pile of rubble - a pile which, if crossed, would allow me to make a very noticeable shortcut on my route towards certain locations - and you proceed to 'climb' (jump) up it. After a few attempts and well-aimed leaps, you finally make it! You're the king of the hill, almost quite literally, and the entire expanse lies waiting just ahead of y- Wait, what? There seems to be some kind of.. unseen intervention keeping me from advancing across what would otherwise be a wide open space..!
 
Tend to agree across the board with this topic. I want to have to eat and drink. The only issue I have is, everyone on the planet would be dead. Since you get a few rads each time you eat youd be dead in a month or two. There isn't enough Rad-x in the world for such large populations to exist. Which means sources of clean food must exist. That glaring fact pissed me off to no end.

How prey tell is it ok I would die and the Npc's dont..

Oh and as for the Fatboy, very very real technology actually. Research was done during the 1950's into a whole bunch of mini-nuke applications. Mostly shoulder or cannon launched. Some experiments were done on grenade sized nuke. Albeit only in theoretical research. Mostly they used Hafnium. Which mean, yup fatboy stays. Now as for the Rocket launcher.. hehehe, sorry that stays to. I have actually seen devices which are portable which propel things such as dishes so fast they can go through a typical plywood wall. Let alone someones uprotected torso. Damage done would need to be realistic though. I mean come on, a teddy tossed at 250 mph wont do much more then knock the wind out of you.
 
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