KillerBee256
Still Mildly Glowing
Yes but you get so many 9mm pistols and varmint rifles from enemies that even with a low repair skill you can get those guns in rather good condition rather quickly.Walpknut said:
Fallout: New Vegas developers posts round-up
- Thread starter WorstUsernameEver
- Start date
Still Mildly Glowing
Jesse Heinig
First time out of the vault
It was not an Fo1 "design goal."
Sigh.
Sigh.
PegasusOrgans
First time out of the vault
Walpknut said:
I never tag melee and I murder every being in that shithole. C'mon, you must be a post 2000 RPG gamer. We old schoolers don't get fazed by nothing less than Wizardry 4.
Jesse Heinig said:
I am curious, what was the design goal then?
PegasusOrgans
First time out of the vault
Jesse Heinig said:
Why would it be wrong if it WAS?
I don't get what was wrong with Fallout 1.
Early-ish RPGs punished newbies. You just
started playing, WE'LL KILL YOU. Ok, Imma
learn from my experiences and choose guns
next time.
PegasusOrgans said:
Nothing. He's just saying it's not. And unlike us, and unlike JE Sawyer, he worked on it.
I do kind of wonder why it ended up this way if it wasn't a design goal though. How did the guys imagine the combat progression would work?
Having played just about any other game, or with a little common sense, you could figure there wouldn't be laser pistols and gatling guns littered outside the vault.
Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
PegasusOrgans said:
pffftthe last part was a joek right? I didn't tag melee nor did I used melee weapons, I taged unarmed and I wanted to go just using unarmed, I had my guns in the inventory, I just decided to only use Unarmed weapons, once I got the Bladed Gauntlet I just started tearin everythign a new ass. Before that boxing tape and gloves were shit.
Or if you were refering to my experience in the begining of FO2 well I may just have incredibly shity luck (and not the stat) my attacks missed all the time, and well my character was build with speech and guns in mind, I still convinced the guy at the end to just let me go.
9/10 Ians prefer automatic firearms.
Energy weapons(plasma specifically) did have quite a punch to them in the first two games. Can't say I wasn't a glutton for .223 and Gauss rifle headshot knockouts, though.
After they hit the ground:
"Go for the eyes, Boo!"
Energy weapons(plasma specifically) did have quite a punch to them in the first two games. Can't say I wasn't a glutton for .223 and Gauss rifle headshot knockouts, though.
After they hit the ground:
"Go for the eyes, Boo!"
Faceless Stranger
Board Drifter
Turbo Plasma Rifle aimed at the eyes was almost guaranteed to turn the enemy into a pile of goo. Hence why I always tagged Small Guns, Energy Weapons, and Speech. This way I was pretty much set for the entire game combat-wise.
I miss knockdowns that don't send the enemy lightly floating to the ground like a piece of paper.
UncannyGarlic
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
In Fallout, I seem to remember Small Guns being on pretty even footing (power wise) with Big Guns but that might simply be because the Gatling Gun hit too many non-targets. In Fallout 2, Small Guns were great until the end with the Gauss Rifle.Ausir said:
I'm with Sawyer in not liking how combat skills worked in the first two games but a single Guns skill might have been better than how New Vegas did it. I haven't played it so I can't say for sure but he still ended up with two combat skills, even if one had some non-combat uses, presumably to make up for it's combat shortcomings.
I still say that Alternity has the best modern/post-modern RPG system...
Jesse Heinig
First time out of the vault
It's not my goal to take shots at JE Sawyer, and I don't have his email address anyway, so I'll just give a bit more detail on the specifics rather than making blanket argumentative statements. 
When Fallout was converted over to the SPECIAL system, Chris Taylor and a lot of the other team principals had to rebuild the weapon systems from scratch. Chris worked up the systems for damage thresholds, AP, and so on, and many people on the team contributed their ideas on the use of various weapons.
The initial design goal -- as I recall it; Chris T. might have something different to say about it -- was that each weapon skill group had its own rewards. If you tagged Small Guns, you had an edge right out the Vault at the outset, because you could certainly kill those Giant Rats and Mole Rats much more quickly. If you tagged Big Guns or Energy Weapons, you were taking the trade-off of a slow start in exchange for a long-term payoff. Remember, this was '96-'97, so there was still some debate about whether all builds should be equally viable or whether some builds had specific payoffs that might give you other hurdles (for instance, if you tagged Lockpicking, Gambling, and Outdoorsman, you were probably setting yourself up for a very difficult game with a few shining moments of payoff).
As we approached the end of the dev cycle, it became apparent that some weapon classes were just not keeping up. My stock testing character was an Unarmed/Speech/Science build, and obviously I just couldn't keep up with the endgame encounters while totally unarmed. This sort of testing triggered the creation of "unarmed weapons" such as the brass knuckles, spiked knuckles, and eventually the power fist. This was intended to let the character have an advancement track that would keep up with the enemy power curve. Its success is debatable; clearly when you're fighting centaurs and nightkin, even using the power fist is often a very tough row to hoe, and you rely on a lot of critical hits. Of course, unless you take the right perks, your crits are not guaranteed to do a lot of extra damage, so you may find yourself saving and reloading a lot!
Small Guns had several weapons that were certainly more viable for your endgame play (sniper rifle, .223 pistol) but obviously it wouldn't match up to a lot of energy weapons (turbo plasma rifle) or big guns (gatling gun, rocket launcher if you're feeling saucy). You were getting an immediate payoff for tagging Small Guns but this trade-off would haunt you later unless you slugged away a lot of skill points into skills that you weren't going to be using right off the bat.
I'll admit, the first time I played Fallout 3 and a mercenary dropped a laser pistol right outside of Vault 101, I was pretty surprised. I wasn't expecting all weapon classes to have representatives that ranged from the low end to the high end, thereby giving each weapon category a full scope of playability. It's an interesting design decision, and given the size and scope of games today, probably a better one -- the player doesn't become handicapped by a skill choice, but rather has the option to use his/her chosen skills and sometimes will discover that those skill choices provide extra special bonuses (if you happen to have a weapon that's very good against a particular enemy, for instance). This is harder to do if the player tags no combat skills, but hey, in that case the player ostensibly knows what he or she is getting into . . .
Anyway, that's all that I meant. The weapon skills in Fallout 1 were not designed to force you to spend a bunch of points on Small Guns, then have it become obsolete and force you to spend points on Energy Weapons. Rather, the choice was whether you wanted an immediate payoff or a later payoff. (Whether this actually succeeded in its design is a matter of interpretation by the player. I know that using Unarmed Combat in the endgame got pretty tedious for me.) In modern game design I'd say it's better if whatever your skill choices, you get SOME kind of payoff at each stage of the game, so that you have a more uniformly positive gameplay experience.
When Fallout was converted over to the SPECIAL system, Chris Taylor and a lot of the other team principals had to rebuild the weapon systems from scratch. Chris worked up the systems for damage thresholds, AP, and so on, and many people on the team contributed their ideas on the use of various weapons.
The initial design goal -- as I recall it; Chris T. might have something different to say about it -- was that each weapon skill group had its own rewards. If you tagged Small Guns, you had an edge right out the Vault at the outset, because you could certainly kill those Giant Rats and Mole Rats much more quickly. If you tagged Big Guns or Energy Weapons, you were taking the trade-off of a slow start in exchange for a long-term payoff. Remember, this was '96-'97, so there was still some debate about whether all builds should be equally viable or whether some builds had specific payoffs that might give you other hurdles (for instance, if you tagged Lockpicking, Gambling, and Outdoorsman, you were probably setting yourself up for a very difficult game with a few shining moments of payoff).
As we approached the end of the dev cycle, it became apparent that some weapon classes were just not keeping up. My stock testing character was an Unarmed/Speech/Science build, and obviously I just couldn't keep up with the endgame encounters while totally unarmed. This sort of testing triggered the creation of "unarmed weapons" such as the brass knuckles, spiked knuckles, and eventually the power fist. This was intended to let the character have an advancement track that would keep up with the enemy power curve. Its success is debatable; clearly when you're fighting centaurs and nightkin, even using the power fist is often a very tough row to hoe, and you rely on a lot of critical hits. Of course, unless you take the right perks, your crits are not guaranteed to do a lot of extra damage, so you may find yourself saving and reloading a lot!
Small Guns had several weapons that were certainly more viable for your endgame play (sniper rifle, .223 pistol) but obviously it wouldn't match up to a lot of energy weapons (turbo plasma rifle) or big guns (gatling gun, rocket launcher if you're feeling saucy). You were getting an immediate payoff for tagging Small Guns but this trade-off would haunt you later unless you slugged away a lot of skill points into skills that you weren't going to be using right off the bat.
I'll admit, the first time I played Fallout 3 and a mercenary dropped a laser pistol right outside of Vault 101, I was pretty surprised. I wasn't expecting all weapon classes to have representatives that ranged from the low end to the high end, thereby giving each weapon category a full scope of playability. It's an interesting design decision, and given the size and scope of games today, probably a better one -- the player doesn't become handicapped by a skill choice, but rather has the option to use his/her chosen skills and sometimes will discover that those skill choices provide extra special bonuses (if you happen to have a weapon that's very good against a particular enemy, for instance). This is harder to do if the player tags no combat skills, but hey, in that case the player ostensibly knows what he or she is getting into . . .
Anyway, that's all that I meant. The weapon skills in Fallout 1 were not designed to force you to spend a bunch of points on Small Guns, then have it become obsolete and force you to spend points on Energy Weapons. Rather, the choice was whether you wanted an immediate payoff or a later payoff. (Whether this actually succeeded in its design is a matter of interpretation by the player. I know that using Unarmed Combat in the endgame got pretty tedious for me.) In modern game design I'd say it's better if whatever your skill choices, you get SOME kind of payoff at each stage of the game, so that you have a more uniformly positive gameplay experience.
Thanks for the longer explanation, Jesse. I always thought it was meaned to be like that and to be honest, I like it much more this way.... Though I can pretty much understand it, if someone doesn't like the way and thinks it's better to have a more varied tier of guns in every weapon category in every stage of the game.
First we wanted to go the "Fallout 1/2-way" with FOnline: 2238 too. By now I think that it's a fail and doesn't work in a MMO. Just like many other singleplayer things don't work in a multiplayer game.
I always thought it was meaned to be like that and to be honest, I like it much more this way.... Though I can pretty much understand it, if someone doesn't like the way and thinks it's better to have a more varied tier of guns in every weapon category in every stage of the game.First we wanted to go the "Fallout 1/2-way" with FOnline: 2238 too. By now I think that it's a fail and doesn't work in a MMO. Just like many other singleplayer things don't work in a multiplayer game.
Jesse Heinig
First time out of the vault
Ausir said:
As a technical designer, Scotty mostly worked on putting the maps together. Everyone was encouraged to contribute to perks and weapons during the design process, though; the changeover from the old license to the SPECIAL system was on a short timetable, so we wanted as much input as possible. I vaguely remember Feargus putting up a board in one of the hallways with a listing of various weapons, just for general tracking purposes. I also recall brainstorming for perks, some of which were, in retrospect, probably not great ideas. "Empathy" was an interesting idea, but in practice it's not very useful and it added a substantial amount of work because every single line of dialog needed a color tag. Mea culpa. Still, I proposed it because until that point every single perk was just a bonus to skills or combat stats. Naturally, we managed to move away from that design and start adding more perks with curious benefits or role-playing modifiers, things like "Mysterious Stranger" and "Mutate!".
Anyway, back at the topic at hand. Design-wise, sure, some weapons would become obsolete, but I think the notion was that you would replace a given weapon (10mm pistol) with a later more powerful weapon of the same skill group (sniper rifle), but that the improvement curve would be less spectacular for using Small Guns or Melee than for starting with Energy Weapons or Big Guns (and thus starting with nothing and going to some major damage output). Making an entire skill obsolete was not, to me at least, one of the goals. I mean, why would you want to punish the player for his or her choice of skills and skill point expenditures?
So, as Walter Cronkite would say, "That's the way it was."
EDIT: I suppose that it's remotely possible that Chris Taylor had skill obsolescence as a design goal, but if so, it was never communicated to me in that form.
Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
tekhedd said:
But then is the obvious question, is that if there aren't any energy weapons or Big guns in the tribal village or inside Vault 13 how in the fuck did the character get any skill with them? Why would you be able to tag those skills if the character didn't have any expertise with them at all?