I love fallout, I have been such a huge fan since I first discovered Fallout 1. I have not had any complaints throughout the entire series,(other than the game freezing from FO1 through FONV, I HATE GAME FREEZING!!) However, all these years of playing fallout an idea has been brewing somewhere in the back of my mind, and here on this particular post is a place for me to hash out that idea, and hopefully get some feedback from other super fans.
To get right to the point, if there was one critique that I could come up with for the fallout franchise, is this. I think, we should have a fallout game that is more primitive, more realistic, more about post apocalyptic survival. Here are some examples of what I am thinking. 1. Make it harder to find weapons. I know this doesnt sound very fun, but imagine starting the game by finding a forked stick, hunting a squirrel and making leather, and finding a good rock, to fashion a tomahawk bashing weapon, AND BEING STOKED TO HAVE IT. In other words, in my imagining, you would start out, just out of the vault or whatever starting scenario there is, and it takes you a while to scavenge the parts for your tomahawk. You might not run into any enemies at all, maybe 1 molerat, and you have to fight him bare handed, or maybe with a rock. AND HE IS TOUGH. Then you skin him and make some leather. Maybe you find a broken shard of glass, to shave and whittle a sharp stick. You get my meaning, very primitive, but I believe more realistic, and more satisfying in the end. 2. This concept is something like the crafting/survival system of New Vegas, except the whole game is more centralized around this. If you think about it a post apocalyptic life WOULD BE centered around survival/crafting. I thought it would be really cool, to be more involved in the crafting instead of just finding a recipe, the needed items, and then whipping it together on a bench. Instead what if you could customize your weapons on your own. What if you found a baseball bat, a chunk of steel scrap, some hardware and a hand drill. Then you could drill holes in the bat and the steel, anywhere you want, and attach the steel to the bat in any manner you want, and create your own axe type weapon. Im sure with the current badass game systems this could be done, and a corresponding physics table could be incorporated, so that depending on the weight size and shape of the items used, you would get a corresponding damage table. So that in theory, if the right shaped and weighted chunk of metal, and placed it in the right place on the bat, you could potentially craft a really effective weapon, or a piece of crap, it all depends on your real crafting abilities.
3. The survival/crafting part of New Vegas I felt was a really great, fun improvement, but wasnt important enough to make a difference in the game. The only time that it was, was playing hardcore mode, and crafting the mass filtered water. If we could take that a few steps further. Fallout 4 should be mandatory hardcore mode. And finding food, water, and shelter, should be #1. Thats not to say that raiders and mutants wont play a part, I just think that every encounter should be a life and death boss battle, like it really would be. So there might be a few easy radroach, molerat fights here and there, but generally the first part of the game would be establishing your survival. It would be a scavanger hunt, finding a shard of glass for a knife, using that bent tin can as a water boiling pot, disassembling that wrecked tricycle and using parts for weapons, tools, or shelter. 3. Now that you have a oil drum/rockfort junkpile shelter. A primitive tomahawk basher stick, and some squirrel jerky, now you start exploring around your area. Scavenging, scouting, keeping an eye and ear out for enemies, because you DO NOT want to fight anything you dont have to. The surrounging landscape is harsh and desolate, but amazing and mysterious. You explore a little, you find a few odds and ends you think you might be able to use. And in the distance you see a figure, it looks humanoid. You look through your shard of glass and get a slight magnification, it looks like a ghoul eating a dead rat. You cant have a dangerous ghoul hanging around your new base of operations. So you must plan and strategize on how to fight him with your tomahawk. Every battle should be a life and death situation, and you should plan and decide the best way to go about it and survive. 4. Now dont get me wrong all this doesnt mean there wont be guns and lasers. But we should work up to that, Its too easy and ruins everything if you get a laser pistol at level 9. It should take a long time, for you or your enemy to find anything like this. This is madmax man!!!,, If you have a shotgun and two crappy shells, YOU ARE STOKED!!! So the first third of the game is all hand to hand combat, throwing rocks, kife fighting, building traps, building shelter, creating survival gear, building armor, strapping a scavenged piece of a tire to your shoulder, strapping a stop sign to your chest, scavenging, utilizing. Thenas you build your character up, gaining perks, solidifying your hold on your chunk of the wasteland, you find an old can of black powder. You know the basics, so you know how to make a primitive grenade out of, say a tin can or some other stuff you have collected. Now you have a couple grenades, and they should do REAL grenade damage. A nine millimeter bullet should kill someone. You should not be able to pump some guy full of lead and still have him chase you. Bullets should count, and they should be hard to come by. 5. Ive played fallout so many times its not funny, and by level 10 you got guns and ammo enough to spare, and now the game isnt really about survival, its just another FPS. That I guess is my point, the first hour or so of fallout 1,2,3 and so on are the best, because you are fighting to survive, with what little you can scavenge, and then the quickly turn into just another first person shooter, you fight the same raiders and radscorps over and over and over, and get the same treasure over and over. Don't get me wrong I still love fallout, and I do not discount the atmosphere as a big part of the game, its awesome. My point is the atmosphere should play a bigger role, and the fighting grinding less. Exploring the wasteland should be the main point, exploring vast mysterious beautiful wastes, scavenging and fighting for your survival, using your wits, solving problems, and yes fighting raiders, molerats, even deathclaws. But they should be epic, hair raising, nail biting battles. And finding another person in an apocalypse should be infrequent to. If you find a friendly out in the wastes, having and ally, and perhaps a trading partner, should be a GODSEND. You should be so happy to see another living person who isnt trying to kill you, that you dont want to leave them. Its a harsh world and another human ally should be hard to come by. How about this, you find a friend, and trade with them, and they have the recipe for gun powder, and you can then go mine the salt pitre and sulphur, just like mining in alot of other games, and make charcoal from your camp fire, and now you can craft gunpowder!!! Wouldnt that be so much more satisfying and realistic than finding 500 rounds of bullets at level 4?!?! SURVIVAL MAN!!! 6. Some examples of gameplay dynamics might be like this. First of all radiation is everywhere, so EVERYBODY suffers from radiation sickness, enemies included, and therefore suffer from stat penalties. But if you spend your time scaving for say, mushrooms that counter the negative effects of radiation, then you have a real leg up in combat. Maybe you dont have as good of weapons, but you have more hitpoints and move faster, better perception, better endurance.. OR maybe you spend all your time scaving and making armor and weapons, so you end up better in this respect. Maybe you are better and sneaking and can therefore venture farther without being ambushed, and scav more and better items, can trade with the guys thats way across the map. I think there could be so many different ways to play a game like this.
So in conclusion we take the Fallout universe, we combine the beauty and fun of exploration of games like journey and shadow of the collosus, and many others with beautiful open world landscapes. Combine that with a vastly more custom and creative weapon/armor/survival crafting system, cuz lets face it everybody loves collecting and item crafting but we always want more control and variety. Combine all this with the format of a game like shadow of the collossus where, the only battles are epic boss battles. We get to keep the same format with perks and S.P.E.C.I.A.L., its still fallout, its still technically a FPS, but its waaaaaay more realistic, this is REAL POST APOCALYPTIC SURVIVAL. I think this could be really fun and an innovative new game all around. A few post scripts,.. I always enjoyed the turn based strategy of fallout 1 and 2, and i know we are all beyond that now, VATS is cool, but its not the same, if there was some option to bring back that turn based action point style game that would be neat, totally not necessary, but it would be neat. Secondly, this may be asking too much, but I think the maps need to be sooo much bigger. Maybe its impossible, but the maps need to be at least 10 times bigger than fallout 3 and new vegas. Maybe the game systems cannot accomodate that much memory, but my question is this, what if you had several set locations that were the same. Like towns and caverns and whatnot, but all the land inbetween was just randomly generated, no need for hard drive space, just vast randomly generated deserts in between. Places to scav and fight, explore, but dont need to be saved on the hard drive. I dont know, i just felt another more realistic way to do things would be to make it a REAL journey, to travel from one town to the next. LIke make it actually take a good days travel, in real time, to make it to another town. As I said this could be asking way to much, but it might be possible, and I think would fit with my imagining of a more realistic wasteland.
To get right to the point, if there was one critique that I could come up with for the fallout franchise, is this. I think, we should have a fallout game that is more primitive, more realistic, more about post apocalyptic survival. Here are some examples of what I am thinking. 1. Make it harder to find weapons. I know this doesnt sound very fun, but imagine starting the game by finding a forked stick, hunting a squirrel and making leather, and finding a good rock, to fashion a tomahawk bashing weapon, AND BEING STOKED TO HAVE IT. In other words, in my imagining, you would start out, just out of the vault or whatever starting scenario there is, and it takes you a while to scavenge the parts for your tomahawk. You might not run into any enemies at all, maybe 1 molerat, and you have to fight him bare handed, or maybe with a rock. AND HE IS TOUGH. Then you skin him and make some leather. Maybe you find a broken shard of glass, to shave and whittle a sharp stick. You get my meaning, very primitive, but I believe more realistic, and more satisfying in the end. 2. This concept is something like the crafting/survival system of New Vegas, except the whole game is more centralized around this. If you think about it a post apocalyptic life WOULD BE centered around survival/crafting. I thought it would be really cool, to be more involved in the crafting instead of just finding a recipe, the needed items, and then whipping it together on a bench. Instead what if you could customize your weapons on your own. What if you found a baseball bat, a chunk of steel scrap, some hardware and a hand drill. Then you could drill holes in the bat and the steel, anywhere you want, and attach the steel to the bat in any manner you want, and create your own axe type weapon. Im sure with the current badass game systems this could be done, and a corresponding physics table could be incorporated, so that depending on the weight size and shape of the items used, you would get a corresponding damage table. So that in theory, if the right shaped and weighted chunk of metal, and placed it in the right place on the bat, you could potentially craft a really effective weapon, or a piece of crap, it all depends on your real crafting abilities.
3. The survival/crafting part of New Vegas I felt was a really great, fun improvement, but wasnt important enough to make a difference in the game. The only time that it was, was playing hardcore mode, and crafting the mass filtered water. If we could take that a few steps further. Fallout 4 should be mandatory hardcore mode. And finding food, water, and shelter, should be #1. Thats not to say that raiders and mutants wont play a part, I just think that every encounter should be a life and death boss battle, like it really would be. So there might be a few easy radroach, molerat fights here and there, but generally the first part of the game would be establishing your survival. It would be a scavanger hunt, finding a shard of glass for a knife, using that bent tin can as a water boiling pot, disassembling that wrecked tricycle and using parts for weapons, tools, or shelter. 3. Now that you have a oil drum/rockfort junkpile shelter. A primitive tomahawk basher stick, and some squirrel jerky, now you start exploring around your area. Scavenging, scouting, keeping an eye and ear out for enemies, because you DO NOT want to fight anything you dont have to. The surrounging landscape is harsh and desolate, but amazing and mysterious. You explore a little, you find a few odds and ends you think you might be able to use. And in the distance you see a figure, it looks humanoid. You look through your shard of glass and get a slight magnification, it looks like a ghoul eating a dead rat. You cant have a dangerous ghoul hanging around your new base of operations. So you must plan and strategize on how to fight him with your tomahawk. Every battle should be a life and death situation, and you should plan and decide the best way to go about it and survive. 4. Now dont get me wrong all this doesnt mean there wont be guns and lasers. But we should work up to that, Its too easy and ruins everything if you get a laser pistol at level 9. It should take a long time, for you or your enemy to find anything like this. This is madmax man!!!,, If you have a shotgun and two crappy shells, YOU ARE STOKED!!! So the first third of the game is all hand to hand combat, throwing rocks, kife fighting, building traps, building shelter, creating survival gear, building armor, strapping a scavenged piece of a tire to your shoulder, strapping a stop sign to your chest, scavenging, utilizing. Thenas you build your character up, gaining perks, solidifying your hold on your chunk of the wasteland, you find an old can of black powder. You know the basics, so you know how to make a primitive grenade out of, say a tin can or some other stuff you have collected. Now you have a couple grenades, and they should do REAL grenade damage. A nine millimeter bullet should kill someone. You should not be able to pump some guy full of lead and still have him chase you. Bullets should count, and they should be hard to come by. 5. Ive played fallout so many times its not funny, and by level 10 you got guns and ammo enough to spare, and now the game isnt really about survival, its just another FPS. That I guess is my point, the first hour or so of fallout 1,2,3 and so on are the best, because you are fighting to survive, with what little you can scavenge, and then the quickly turn into just another first person shooter, you fight the same raiders and radscorps over and over and over, and get the same treasure over and over. Don't get me wrong I still love fallout, and I do not discount the atmosphere as a big part of the game, its awesome. My point is the atmosphere should play a bigger role, and the fighting grinding less. Exploring the wasteland should be the main point, exploring vast mysterious beautiful wastes, scavenging and fighting for your survival, using your wits, solving problems, and yes fighting raiders, molerats, even deathclaws. But they should be epic, hair raising, nail biting battles. And finding another person in an apocalypse should be infrequent to. If you find a friendly out in the wastes, having and ally, and perhaps a trading partner, should be a GODSEND. You should be so happy to see another living person who isnt trying to kill you, that you dont want to leave them. Its a harsh world and another human ally should be hard to come by. How about this, you find a friend, and trade with them, and they have the recipe for gun powder, and you can then go mine the salt pitre and sulphur, just like mining in alot of other games, and make charcoal from your camp fire, and now you can craft gunpowder!!! Wouldnt that be so much more satisfying and realistic than finding 500 rounds of bullets at level 4?!?! SURVIVAL MAN!!! 6. Some examples of gameplay dynamics might be like this. First of all radiation is everywhere, so EVERYBODY suffers from radiation sickness, enemies included, and therefore suffer from stat penalties. But if you spend your time scaving for say, mushrooms that counter the negative effects of radiation, then you have a real leg up in combat. Maybe you dont have as good of weapons, but you have more hitpoints and move faster, better perception, better endurance.. OR maybe you spend all your time scaving and making armor and weapons, so you end up better in this respect. Maybe you are better and sneaking and can therefore venture farther without being ambushed, and scav more and better items, can trade with the guys thats way across the map. I think there could be so many different ways to play a game like this.
So in conclusion we take the Fallout universe, we combine the beauty and fun of exploration of games like journey and shadow of the collosus, and many others with beautiful open world landscapes. Combine that with a vastly more custom and creative weapon/armor/survival crafting system, cuz lets face it everybody loves collecting and item crafting but we always want more control and variety. Combine all this with the format of a game like shadow of the collossus where, the only battles are epic boss battles. We get to keep the same format with perks and S.P.E.C.I.A.L., its still fallout, its still technically a FPS, but its waaaaaay more realistic, this is REAL POST APOCALYPTIC SURVIVAL. I think this could be really fun and an innovative new game all around. A few post scripts,.. I always enjoyed the turn based strategy of fallout 1 and 2, and i know we are all beyond that now, VATS is cool, but its not the same, if there was some option to bring back that turn based action point style game that would be neat, totally not necessary, but it would be neat. Secondly, this may be asking too much, but I think the maps need to be sooo much bigger. Maybe its impossible, but the maps need to be at least 10 times bigger than fallout 3 and new vegas. Maybe the game systems cannot accomodate that much memory, but my question is this, what if you had several set locations that were the same. Like towns and caverns and whatnot, but all the land inbetween was just randomly generated, no need for hard drive space, just vast randomly generated deserts in between. Places to scav and fight, explore, but dont need to be saved on the hard drive. I dont know, i just felt another more realistic way to do things would be to make it a REAL journey, to travel from one town to the next. LIke make it actually take a good days travel, in real time, to make it to another town. As I said this could be asking way to much, but it might be possible, and I think would fit with my imagining of a more realistic wasteland.
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