Kotaku studied Fallout, Physics and Beer

Brother None

Brother None

This ghoul has seen it all
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Kotaku has an editorialesque on the WG stat in Fallout 3.<blockquote>What bothered me about Fallout was not so much that the heavy weapons, like a Flamer, weighed only "15." Maybe they're made from futuristic lightweight metal. No, it's more that a pair of freaking TWEEZERS was equivalent in weight to a motorcycle helmet. It's not even that the WG figure represents a total encumbrance factor – that either the item's size or fragility makes it difficult to carry - because a pool cue has the same WG figure: 1.

So I chatted up Todd Howard of Bethesda Softworks, Fallout 3's game director, about this. First off, is "WG" equivalent to anything?

"Not really," Todd said. "It's sort of close to pounds, but we intentionally don't really say what it is. It actually started based on the weights we used for The Elder Scrolls, which most people don't know are the also-amorphous ‘stones.'"

OK, fine. If they didn't peg WG to something, I will. And I'm going to base it on the weight of beer. A bottle in Fallout is 1 WG. In real life, a bottle of beer, depending on how stout it is, will weigh roughly three-quarters of a pound when you figure in the glass. By figuring my total burden as it relates to at least one item in my possession, I could start imagining how large a load I was carrying around.

But what I couldn't measure is ammo, meds and chems, which have no weight value - and I wasn't going down to the local needle exchange to weigh whatever approximates a Jet syringe. Why didn't Bethesda give them a weight? Because in the game, these are very valuable items. Why wouldn't an RPG, which is more based in realism and more dependent on choice-making than other genres, also require players to be more conscientious about what they're carrying?

"In regards to ammo and money, it's just too granular a decision for the player, if they had weight," Todd said. "You don't want to make that a choice for the player; he already has to manage so much in his inventory and you need things he can find that are an instant win - ammo, money, drugs, etc, things that help keep him alive and playing. It would just bog the game down too much to find ammo and be thinking, ‘Do I want to pick up two of these bullets or the whole stack?' We felt that decision should be on [which] weapons to carry, not what ammo."</blockquote>Thanks rehevkor.
 
It would just bog the game down too much to find ammo and be thinking, ‘Do I want to pick up two of these bullets or the whole stack?' We felt that decision should be on [which] weapons to carry, not what ammo."
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Yup, that's why no one enjoyed previous Fallouts.
 
I think ammo weight added a significant inventory management aspect to Fallout 2, and balanced out the miniguns and Bozar with the insane amount of weight lugging around enough ammo cost.

Regardless of the fact that no one cares that the physics aren't right in a game, this piece was pretty funny to read.
 
This was a move away from realism that I was totally cool with. Ammo weight management was one of the more annoying Fallout elements for me, and led to me exploiting NPC inventories (which broke realism anyways). I was happy to not have to worry about it in FO3.
 
What management? If you don't carry thousands of guns with you, there is no problem with the ammo. At least I never got any problems. Just throw away the junk you don't need anyway and thats it.

In Fallout 3 you carry around everything. I've got every gun in my inventory because of the ammo- I found a lot ammo, but never very much for one single gun and there are so much battles in the game that you don't have any other choice if you don't want to go melee. (As example, 200 shotgun shells are gone very fast in Fallout 3 while you can live with that a more or less long time in Fallout 1 and 2)
 
Lexx said:
What management? If you don't carry thousands of guns with you, there is no problem with the ammo. At least I never got any problems. Just throw away the junk you don't need anyway and thats it.
..
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But now exactly that is not the kind of thing that will work in Fallout 3 (or Oblivion for that matter) if you consider all the kind of junk the people carry around from a small forke to the head of some old female (acording to Emil ...), pumpinks and garden gnomes or what ever else they can grab and fit up their "home" with ... as like those kind of things add anything to the actual game.

Its interesting to see how many fans of Bethesda care more about the way how a "forke" is modeled in the game as realisticaly as possible and you have lots of dishes in the houses that you can pick up instead to worry about if the characters you encouter feeling anything like human and have a personality. Typical Sandbox games how it seems ...

Lexx said:
In Fallout 3 you carry around everything. I've got every gun in my inventory because of the ammo- I found a lot ammo, but never very much for one single gun and there are so much battles in the game that you don't have any other choice if you don't want to go melee. (As example, 200 shotgun shells are gone very fast in Fallout 3 while you can live with that a more or less long time in Fallout 1 and 2)
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Yeah which is particularly extremly fun for sniper characters with sniper rifles that become almost useless after 20 shoots or so ... I mean how could feel people fine with such things and how not see that in the testing. It really always killed for me at least the immersion that the game forced you always to search for some merchant you gave some extra money so he could repair your weapon to 90% (as all othes only can maybe to 50% ...) pretty frustrating after some time.
 
That quote could read "It would just bog the game down too much to think" and you'd get the core philosophy. Of all things...ammo weight is seen as complex. So players end up like walking ammo dumps.
 
Lexx said:
What management? If you don't carry thousands of guns with you, there is no problem with the ammo. At least I never got any problems. Just throw away the junk you don't need anyway and thats it.
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400 rounds of .223 FMJ for the Bozar are pretty damned heavy, and don't last that long. Micro Fusion Cells are very heavy too, and basically any ammo in large quantities (like what you'd need for a minigun) takes up a lot of weight.
 
How revealing.

So having to choose between meds and ammo, gold and guns, is too much of a bother? Thanks for making your intended audience clear once more.
 
The physics of the previous games weren't realistic either.

There really isn't much to whine about here, except for the ammo perhaps. But weren't StimPacks weightless in the originals as well (or am I making things up now)?
 
The first time through, I didn't mind not having to worry about it since I was playing more for the story and discovery aspects (such as they are) than the gameplay. Same with the previous games - I appreciated being able to carry 100 stimpacks with no penalty.

But when replaying, I wish I would have to take the weight into account.
 
Sander said:
I think ammo weight added a significant inventory management aspect to Fallout 2, and balanced out the miniguns and Bozar with the insane amount of weight lugging around enough ammo cost.
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but once you were at Bozars and Miniguns, it really didn't matter anymore. especially the Bozar.

carry the Bozar + .223 pistol + Red Ryder LE and you're set for the game.
 
Bethesda needs to decide what type of game they want to make so they can decide how to deal with inventories. Where they are with Fallout 3 and TES inventories is a place where they just need to get rid of limited inventory capacity since you can already carry around so much crap it doesn't matter. In most games, limited inventory space is there to limit how much/quickly the player can loot and when that is it's only purpose, it's probably a bad mechanic (turns a game from fun to work). There are a few games in which limited inventory space makes sense and is done well, STALKER comes to mind. These games have limited enough ammo (which has weight) and inventory space that the player can only carry a backup weapon or two or use the space for loot (which isn't really worth selling for time reasons). This restriction is there to make the player think and make legitimate choices and works well (like FPSes which limit the player to two guns). Ammo should not have even been included in Fallout 3 because it fails to serve a purpose (either limiting weapon use, making the player make choices about what weapon to use [like STALKER], or both) because it's weightless (thus doesn't force the player to make choices about weapons) and because of the large quantities you get of almost all of it coupled with the durability system. The durability system could have and should have replaced the usual function of ammo in Fallout 3 which is limiting how much the player can use any weapon (the designer only probably cares about a few, in this case the MIRV and the Fatman).
 
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