Fallout with Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky on YouTube

Squadcar said:
From that video, I see some of what you're saying. But simple systems can be better but it's really dependent. His view on player skill vs character skill is a good one in my opinion. Like in the modern Fallout games, if you aim at something and know you hit it, it feels bad to not hit it. That's just how our brains work and probably should work!

If you're going to give players that much control over their aim, you have to let it be player skill. I know RPGs are more liking to character skills as they should be but that's something you have to sacrifice if you control the shooting. Morrowind feels weird when you first play it (at least in a modern sense) because when you HIT the enemy with your sword and you miss it feels really weird and wrong. I prefer the character skill for RPGs but in first person it doesn't feel as good as it should especially at the beginning of the game.

And simple doesn't always mean easier. It just means it's not complex. But I do agree that he seems to favor some streamlining in some ways I'm not sure how I feel about it until I see it in practice. Could be better could be worse. I guess we'll have to see.

Just got to the random vs feeling random part, the feeling random part has been in practice for awhile. I think they had to implement it in Destiny because people were never getting loot after too many runs of the same boss. If it feels random but rewarding, it's good.
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IMO, the original Deus Ex already nailed this. Melee weapon skill only affected damage output, but ranged skills changed the size of your crosshair.

I love seeing these guys talk about the game, but man it drove me crazy when he walked right past the body at the beginning without searching it. Then when they were trying to switch weapons I was practically shouting at the screen. "Ohmigod, just push the red button!"
 
This is why I no longer deify game developers. None of them know how to even play the games they had a part in making. None of them. MCA, Sawyer, Cain, Fargo - false prophets.
 
TorontRayne said:
None of them know how to even play the games they had a part in making.
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I mean it's not an uncommon things with arts and entertainment from what I've seen. There was one actor from a movie who was asked if he thought the movie was as bad as everyone said it was. He said he hadn't seen it, but he had seen the house it built for him.

I think the issue is multifaceted. PC games in the 90s were nothing like today. You could sell games that were more artistically driven (from my perspective as now it's indie titles that are like this). Higher ups seemed to allow more risk than they do now too. Innovation wasn't necessarily encouraged but it wasn't as discouraged. Also, sometimes people just hit the right strokes when creating things. Sometimes its the way the team and the spirit of that time all fell in line. It's too complex to just dismiss or credit things like this without knowing all the gears that made it run.

That's how I kinda feel about it at least. I could explain it more elegantly and well thought out but I don't think many people give enough of a shit to hear it lol.
 
hag said:
I watched part of the stream. Seeing them fumble around with the UI and miss obvious things really got my dander up. I get that games are pretty streamlined nowadays but gosh. It was like watching my grandparents try to play. If you've ever had to teach an elderly person how to open a new tab in Internet Explorer then you might understand. No intuition whatsoever. Hate to say it but it was kind of a disillusioning experience, they seemed bored with it all. The whole thing got me wondering if a game like Fallout would even be possible today.

That said, it was great to learn some new Fallout trivia.
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I don't think this is a streamlining thing. I think it's just Tim being clueless and not paying attention. You could see Leonard trying to tell him what to do at points. As developers, I guess they would be nitpicky about everything, but Fallout's UI is not complicated. It's certainly a much easier game to understand than Pillars of Eternity. But who knows, maybe the problem is these people don't see it that way. If they try to fix too many non-problems in older designs, maybe they end up with something more "modern", but clunky and obtuse at the same time.
 
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Why would anybody expect game's creators to be fans of their own stuff? I'm actually glad that they suck at it. Otherwise it would be like the most masturbatory thing imaginable. It's like watching a movie with director's commentary. It can be the most important movie of your life, but all they see is mistakes and what could have been done better. Try watching any John Carpenter's movie with his commentaries. The guy made The Thing, for God's sake, arguably the greatest sci-fi/horror movie ever, but he's very matter-of-fact about it on the commentary. Like "Yeah, you just point a camera at stuff and say "Action", who cares."
 
Jabberwok said:
Fallout's UI is not complicated.
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Maybe it isn't when you have the manual at hand, but its nearly impossible to complete the game for the first time without looking for answers online. Especially if Fallout is the first isometric rpg you play. This game does not hold your hand. I remember struggling as hell when I first started playing the game, and I nearly gave up, like many other people have. I think its Fallout's extreme difficulty that kept bringing me back to it. For me the extreme harshness of the game's mechanics and UI reflected the harshness of the world it was depicting. I felt like I was there, struggling to survive in an unforgiving post-nuclear wasteland. Alone, without anyone to guide me, comfort me throughout my journey.
I never felt more immersed in any piece of fiction than in Fallout.
 
Paladin Hank said:
Maybe it isn't when you have the manual at hand, but its nearly impossible to complete the game for the first time without looking for answers online.
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You don't need to look for answers online when it is about the UI... The game itself tells you.

The game shows you a UI tutorial image if you press F1:
Jn4ZqLs.png
 
Paladin Hank said:
Maybe it isn't when you have the manual at hand, but its nearly impossible to complete the game for the first time without looking for answers online. Especially if Fallout is the first isometric rpg you play. This game does not hold your hand. I remember struggling as hell when I first started playing the game, and I nearly gave up, like many other people have. I think its Fallout's extreme difficulty that kept bringing me back to it. For me the extreme harshness of the game's mechanics and UI reflected the harshness of the world it was depicting. I felt like I was there, struggling to survive in an unforgiving post-nuclear wasteland. Alone, without anyone to guide me, comfort me throughout my journey.
I never felt more immersed in any piece of fiction than in Fallout.
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Hmm, I mean the gameplay is harsh in that you can certainly die quickly, I guess. I don't think the mechanics themselves are difficult to understand. Especially compared to any of the Infinity Engine games, which seemed to almost require a background in D&D to understand. Knowing how much damage my weapon can do, and what my to-hit chance is is pretty simple in Fallout.

As to just the usability of the UI, that can certainly be chalked up to the change from physical copies of games to digital. I think some people (not you, obviously, since you mentioned it) forget that every game came with a manual back then. Since that's not the case anymore, things that would have been explained there have migrated to being put in tooltips or in-game tutorials. Which doesn't necessarily mean a game is easier to understand. It just means the explanations have moved from the paper to the computer screen. In fact, more tooltips and explanations usually means a less intuitive interface.
 
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Paladin Hank said:
Maybe it isn't when you have the manual at hand, but its nearly impossible to complete the game for the first time without looking for answers online. Especially if Fallout is the first isometric rpg you play. This game does not hold your hand.
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i think fallout's ui and mechanics are one of the simplest out there. fallout was actually my first rpg game and i played it when i was 8, i think. i still struggle with most old crpgs i play today but fallout wasn't hard to grasp at all (and note, in my country it didn't come with a huge fancy manual ;-)). the only problem was to figure out how rare certain items are and what types of enemies and obstacles lay ahead but that's the case in most rpgs
 
F1 doesn't tell you about command mode (vertical list of icons of possible actions) though, funnily enough I couldn't find any explanation on FO2 manual either.

fo2cmdmenu.png
 
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I am old enough to remember that it was common for software back in the day to use F1 to open a help screen...

It was like, the standard for what the F1 key did.

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nkchan16 said:
F1 doesn't tell you about command mode (vertical list of icons of possible actions) though, funnily enough I couldn't find any explanation on FO2 manual either.
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Well, it tells you how to get the Command Cursor and explains what each action icon means.
It explains it in more depth in the manuals (both Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 manuals).
 
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Risewild said:
Well, it tells you how to get the Command Cursor and explains what each action icon means...
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Yes, but not how to get those actions as a menu as in the image above. You need to press and hold the LMB while command cursor is shown. Otherwise, how would you even use items in your inventory multiple times? Or activate (explosives) or drop them.

As an example, Tim could press and hold the LMB on the elevator shaft and get the command menu and then choose "use item from inventory" command and then click on the rope in order to attach the rope to the elevator shaft. Which is much easier than equipping the rope.

Also they should have used the same method to "examine" the rocks.
 
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nkchan16 said:
Yes, but not how to get those actions as a menu as in the image above. You need to press and hold the LMB while command cursor is shown. Otherwise, how would you even use items in your inventory multiple times? Or activate (explosives) or drop them.
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For that you would have to read the manual or be lucky while randomly trying to click on an item to drag it in your inventory or something like that. I guess. :lol:
 
Risewild said:
For that you would have to read the manual or be lucky while randomly trying to click on an item to drag it in your inventory or something like that. I guess. :lol:
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I couldn't find anything about that on the manual, maybe you should give it a try. The manual I'm talking about is the one comes with the GOG version (of Fallout 2). I can't check what the original US version had right now.
 
Jabberwok said:
Hmm, I mean the gameplay is harsh in that you can certainly die quickly, I guess. I don't think the mechanics themselves are difficult to understand. Especially compared to any of the Infinity Engine games, which seemed to almost require a background in D&D to understand. Knowing how much damage my weapon can do, and what my to-hit chance is is pretty simple in Fallout.

As to just the usability of the UI, that can certainly be chalked up to the change from physical copies of games to digital. I think some people (not you, obviously, since you mentioned it) forget that every game came with a manual back then. Since that's not the case anymore, things that would have been explained there have migrated to being put in tooltips or in-game tutorials. Which doesn't necessarily mean a game is easier to understand. It just means the explanations have moved from the paper to the computer screen. In fact, more tooltips and explanations usually means a less intuitive interface.
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I agree. Now that I'm familiar with isometric rpgs I never have any issues but about a year ago when I played Fallout for the first time I was completely lost for a while. Granted it was my first true roleplaying experience so I wasn't used to a game not holding my hand (for example no quest markers, all that). I was a very different player back then haha. The point is mastering Fallout's unintuitive ui and game system was a stepping stone for me and was my introduction to roleplaying.

mef said:
i think fallout's ui and mechanics are one of the simplest out there. fallout was actually my first rpg game and i played it when i was 8, i think. i still struggle with most old crpgs i play today but fallout wasn't hard to grasp at all (and note, in my country it didn't come with a huge fancy manual ;-)). the only problem was to figure out how rare certain items are and what types of enemies and obstacles lay ahead but that's the case in most rpgs
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Wow I must be mentally deficient then because I played the game for the first time at the age of 16 last year ;p Somehow I find it hard to believe you didn't struggle in the least, especially at the beginning of the game. I'm not saying I sucked at the game forever, it just took me a while to stop dying all the time. And also while I agree that Fallout's system isn't the most difficult to understand, it still remains for me one of the most complex in computer rpgs.

Risewild said:
You don't need to look for answers online when it is about the UI... The game itself tells you.
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Yeah I realised that was a thing when I was about 20 hours in lel
 
nkchan16 said:
I couldn't find anything about that on the manual, maybe you should give it a try. The manual I'm talking about is the one comes with the GOG version (of Fallout 2). I can't check what the original US version had right now.
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Sure:
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That's from the PDF Manuals from my GOG games. Which are scans of the original book manuals.
 
I think Fallout's UI only seems clunky to people now-a-days because people are used to games telling you how to operate them in-game. There might be a help section or a manual but back in the day you kinda wanted to look at that stuff before playing and nearly every game I remember playing before PS2's time era had manuals/help sections of some sort.
 
Fallout's UI was pretty decent for its time, so was its graphics, in fact it was one of the best looking 2D RPGs at the time. The controls are also just fine. You can play the game with your mouse alone and if you want to speed things up a bit, it has full set of keyboard shortcuts.
 
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