Loot area and Wholesale trade

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DirtyDreamDesigner

Venerable Relic of the Wastes
Moderator
How about this; Remember the Raider camp in FO2 where you could pickup lots of weapons and stuff? How about, after finishing your killing spree in an area such as that you approach your car, click on the trunk and get the "loot area" option which opens up two inventory screens: one is your car trunk and the other the whole area. You simply select what you want and drag it to your car. Of course the game would notify you if there were some locked or otherwise unavailable containers. (Maybe this should be handled like a perk or a learned perk (like gecko skinning) and would require having a car and at least one member in your party). You would then drive to the nearest town and talk to a merchant there and in the dialogue have the option of offering all your stuff, including all in your trunk, as "wholesale". What do you think?
 
While you're at it, just add in the "innovative feature" that will not only fight for you, but converse for you as well.

This works for strategy games, but not for games that will undoubtedly have some scripting problems or development headaches arise from having to work in such a system. You will have to check for where the PC can or can't go, and also a number of other environmental aspects.

At that point, what's the point of playing the game? How would hidden items be treated? Trapped areas? Etc. It might make it easy, but it wouldn't be doing favors for the overall design or the likelihood that the game will ever be released.
 
"It might make it easy, but it wouldn't be doing favors for the overall design or the likelihood that the game will ever be released."

Ah, hell, in that case they should just make a level for doom that kind of looks like fallout! It would guarantee a release and wouldn't be to hard on the poor Bethesda people.
 
I'd rather that NPCs pick up loot by themselves as in Arcanum, maybe taking it one step further and have them loot bodies and containers as well. Especially if they were coded to look for certain items depending on their nature i.e. Cassidy would head straight for the booze. I think that would add another level to making them independant characters not just pack mules.
 
requiem_for_a_starfury said:
I'd rather that NPCs pick up loot by themselves as in Arcanum, maybe taking it one step further and have them loot bodies and containers as well. Especially if they were coded to look for certain items depending on their nature i.e. Cassidy would head straight for the booze. I think that would add another level to making them independant characters not just pack mules.
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That just blew my mind...submit that to someone important now!

Sincerely,
The Vault Dweller
 
I actually liked the idea in a way, but I agree with Rosh for the most part that you can't take all the work out of it. I'd either like to see a way to highlight everything "actionable" in the room (ala Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal), or, what I think might be even better, is an option to loot "the ground", which will treat the entire ground as a container, letting you pick up the six pistols from six different hexes without clicking on each one even though you could realistically reach them while standing in more or less the same place. This would not (and in fact should not) give you access to a hidden container (like the "Highlight-all" feature would). There are pros and cons of each system, but I think that there should be some way to do it, since Fallout's system allowed for items to very easily be lost simply be being behind something the player couldn't penetrate with his "See-through" aura.

The idea, though, of looting containers, bodies, and everything else, from a centralized location, is preposterous. It seems reasonable, though, to say that you could loot the floor of a room while standing in it. I wouldn't apply it to outdoor areas, though.
 
hello... this is "role playing" ... If you could find a bot in the game that automatically picked up loot for you, that would make more sense...

But having a hand of god that reaches all over a map for you is just stupid, come on... be creative
 
Basically the area inventory screen from JA2 in other words, were you could pick up (and put down) everything on a map that your character has spotted without having to run around. Anything in a locked room that you could still see (through a window) would show up on the inventory screen but you wouldn't be able to access it without going and unlocking the door. Any items in containers or undiscovered wouldn't show up at all.

It was very useful in JA2 especially for switching items around between your mercs but I'm not sure I'd like to see it in FO3. I'd rather with it being a PA game and all, have a lot less stuff for you to loot in the first place. Therefore you wouldn't need a management screen.
 
Even so much scope as Requiem described is a bit broad. I think small and medium rooms could have a "floor" inventory to simplify cases of "There's a screwdriver over there, a pistol over there, and a vacuum tube over there, and, ooh, look, a hat!" You can see it all anyway, and pick it up in a couple steps, so there's no reason for mindless clicking. The "scoopbot" code shouldn't let you look in containers, locked rooms, bodies, or anyplace you wouldn't have access too. There is reason, however, for the player to decide what containers to rifle through, what bodies to search, what doors to unlock, and so on, because these are gaming elements with actual impact on what you're doing. Opening containers could set off traps, sound alarms, alert possessive critters, and whatnot.

I'm still not entirely convinced on the idea, though, even as I describe how I'd make it work. My real problems go back to the sheer awfulness of how fallout handled items on the ground; there was no way to poke through a "pile" but to lift up each consecutive item, which sucked, especially if the top item was a 50 pound suit of powered armor and you had nowhere to put it in your inventory. Sometimes I'd end up with two or thee piles of shit on the ground just trying to sort it all out.
 
Sounds like what you really want is to treat piles of loot as a container, so if you see a pile and click on it an inventory pops up and you can choose what you want to take from the pile.

Didn't Torment have that feature? Been such a long time since I played it.
 
That would work fine, but I'd also like to get around the problems of having loot disappear behind the car, under floors, bloodstains, other loot, exit grids, scenery, and corpses; or be lost when a critter runs offscreen only to be cut down from fire from my NPCs. I'm not sure if there's a graceful solution to that last item, however. Anyway, If an "Area looting" system were implemented, I'm afraid that it would either be too broad and simplifying, or too artificially limiting.
 
I think you have a good idea...

I hated having to loot bodies, I use to kill enemies, and then run away so that when i killed someone else their body wouldnt preventing from looting another body...

I think it would be nice that if you tried to pick up an item.. and there were several items stacked on top of each other on one section of a grid, that you could load a screen that showed all the items on that part of the grid.

I dont think this would be very hard to do
 
Lord 342 said:
but I'd also like to get around the problems of having loot disappear behind the car, under floors, bloodstains, other loot, exit grids, scenery, and corpses;
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That would all depend on how they implement the graphics. I can't really see them doing anything other than 3D, with moveable camera, in today's market which would eliminate some of those problems. I just hope they make the default camera angle the same or similar to Fallout.

MethidParadox said:
I hated having to loot bodies, I use to kill enemies, and then run away so that when i killed someone else their body wouldnt preventing from looting another body...
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Didn't you ever use the little arrows under the picture of the body you were looting to change to the next body?
 
Looting the floor by itself, or even the ground, it would still not take into account the effects of traps or if there is something aggro in the area. Leaving that to the point when everything is killed makes it a "completionist" task, and dispels the feeling that there might still be danger around. Conquering an area may work for strategy games like JA2, and the area inventory screen works for equipping multiple characters, but in a full-scale CRPG it would be a bit troublesome to include with other aspects already in Fallout.

So, then I have to direct attention towards Spiderweb Software, particularly Avernum and Geneforge. The 'g' hotkey, for getting items in a projected radius around your character, would alleviate a lot of the pixel-hunting problem. Containers wouldn't really need to be changed. It still leaves the hidden, trapped, locked, or otherwise obscured items there for the character to dig through on their own.
 
Roshambo said:
Looting the floor by itself, or even the ground, it would still not take into account the effects of traps or if there is something aggro in the area. Leaving that to the point when everything is killed makes it a "completionist" task, and dispels the feeling that there might still be danger around. Conquering an area may work for strategy games like JA2, and the area inventory screen works for equipping multiple characters, but in a full-scale CRPG it would be a bit troublesome to include with other aspects already in Fallout.
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I don't think that's so.

Think of it as the same thing as clicking on a single body.

When you click the body, your character moves towards the body and beings looting that body.

Well, here, you would have the same thing. Except, you could hold a certain hotkey and drag a select box over the area you want to loot.

The character then walks between the bodies you selected and tries to loot both of them. If the character cannot reach both bodies from the position he is in, you will get the message:
"Cannot reach both bodies at once"

Chests, lockers, etc won't be included since they may be locked or may have traps.

But if it's just bodies, any trap around the bodies you will walk onto whiel you walk towards the center of the bodies you selected.
 
Anyways Rosh raises some decent enough points; I forgot about floor traps and the more I think about it the more I think I'd simply rather handle it differently to alleviate the problems with the current fallout engine and looting the ground for objects. Perhaps the ability to treat just one hex at a time as a container (Like Baldur's Gate II did, but in a fashion that doesn't suck, to put it bluntly. BGII had at least as many looting/inventory woes as FOII) and thereby be able to interact meaningfully between your inventory and the ground.
 
Okay, "loot area" has its pros and cons (as I said it could be a perk and you wouldn't have to use it unless you wanted to) but what do you think of the wholesale trade idea?
 
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