Salvage/Wear and Tear

fillmore

First time out of the vault
In Fallout 2 I think an even bigger problem than the overabundance of ammunition (well, basically everything was overabundant, it was rediculous the total value of stuff just laying around to be taken) was the huge wealth that was to be had from picking up all the guns lying around after mopping up some baddies.

A pet peeve of mine was that you would kill all these people who were obviously wearing armour, yet there was never any armour to loot from their dead bodies (I guess they saw that this would be over the top afa breaking the economy goes).

A couple of solutions that would help fix the economy as well as make skills like repair and science more useful is to have weapon/armour degradation (seems like gun maintenance/cleaning kits would be scarce) and tie that in with skills/combinations of skills.

For example your armour would degrade over time (even faster if you take damage) and would need to be repaired with materials from salvaged armour (perhaps some animal skins as well). And if you salvage enough armour you can make a complete suit of it (like if you only have leather, but kill a few guys with metal armour you could make a full suit of metal armour out of the salvaged pieces). How much armour you salvage and how much salvaged material is needed to repair your suit/make a new suit would depend upon your repair skill, or a combination of repair/science in the case of more advanced armour types, and could require certain tools as well.

With weapons you would use your repair skill (possibly in conjunction with your science or weapon skill depending upon the weapon) as a modifier to the chance of any given salvaged weapon being useable (so if I wipe out 6 guys with shotguns I may get 6 shotguns, or I may get no shotguns but alot of parts that I may or may not be able to make a complete working shotgun from, depending upon my repair skill), as well as a modifier to the rate at which your weapons degrade (and if you happen to come across a gun cleaning kit that would help too). High tech weapons would need science as well as repair, and more advanced weapons could have a modifier to your repair skill (so that a CAWS has a big -modifier to your repair skill while a regular shotgun wouldn't)

I know much of this is kind of arbitrary or doesn't make much sense (why would the shotguns people were shooting you with suddenly not work when their owners die?) but I think something of this sort is needed to keep the economy from getting broken. Amunition can be made valuable by scarcity because it gets "used up", but no amount of scarcity of weapons/armour will prevent rampant inflation unless there is some mechanism by which these resources can also be "used up" (well, unless there can only ever be 1 combat shotgun in the whole game, but that would kinda suk).

I think this should also apply to HtH weapons of better than minimum calibre (e.g. spears, daggers, and brass knuckles would not require repair, but sharpened spears, spiked knuckles and combat knives would, as well as all the high tech stuff like rippers and power fists).
 
I totally agree with you, there should be armor/weapon degradation and you should also be able to add your upgrades. BUT I don't want Fo3 to become Arcanum...
 
The devs have said that repair and science will both have more uses in F3, so hopefully this will be part of it. It always annoyed me as well that sometimes you could loot armor and weapons and sometimes you couldn't - even if they are broken/damaged beyond repair, I'd still rather see them in the guys inventory than have them vanish into thin air.

I don't really like the idea of armor naturally degradating though - it seems like it would just get frustrating if you didn't have a super repair character. If it's going to degrade I think it should be from damage only.
 
Yes, but Montez... If it gets too much like that. It would become like Arcanum or Ultima Online. However I did like the place where you repaired your PA in Fo1. There should be some of it, but not the the extent where :

Revolver : Pieces to complete, chamber, trigger, and hammer.

But I'd like to see some of it. Too much would ruin the Fallout feel of it, and would make it seem like a Post-Apoc Industrial Building Game.
 
I agree - just enough to enhance it, not so much that you're paying more attention to items than to the rest of the game.
 
I agree - just enough to enhance it, not so much that you're paying more attention to items than to the rest of the game.

Thats why playing tech characters in Arcanum was so annoying. The sheer variety of miscellaneous bullshit you had to carry around to get your stuff to happen.
 
i remember spending 9/10ths of the game looking for some dwarven steel to make that armor, and I could never find it.
 
I spent 9/10ths of my first game trying to get my gunslinger to a high enough level that he could actually go into combat without passing out and/or dying, never mind actually building things. I had to put Arcanum away for a few months after that cause I was so disconnected from every other part of the game I couldn't enjoy it anymore.
 
what I ended doing was cheating myself all the tradeskills (building/tech) and enjoy the rest.
 
Well, I have never played Arcanum, and I certainly wouldn't want it to be too complicated or detailed, and there are some aspects which are a bit distasteful, but I think something is needed to prevent the economy from breaking. Fallout 2 was just so bad that way, even fairly early in the mid game you are overflowing with all kinds of pistols and shotguns and such.

Another thing that would be nice is for critical failures to cause weapons to break and such, so that you would have a reason to carry a backup or two.

It might also be interesting to have weapons as targets, so I could hit and damage his rocket launcher before he fires it, or I could aim at his spear and if I hit break it or knock it out of his hand.

I wouldn't want any kind of elaborate crafting system (though a simple one would be ok), nor a system that would make people with high repair way richer than anyone else (requiring tools that themselves need to be maintained could help with that, though that may be complicating things too much), just some basic ways for there to be reasons to keep an extra weapon/armour or two, and to prevent taking out a group of armed people from being an instant cash jackpot, while giving a bit of a bonus for people with high repair and/or science (or at least to having one as an NPC follower).
 
No... I don't quite agree... some people think its a BIG hassle to lug around sets of armor and or guns if you arent going to use them. Although I agree that I had the Bowzar and t3h C0mb4t arm0rz mark too before I even finished den/klamath in Fo2. So... it does need some improving about that.

They could make weapons useful, like to trade in for a certain amount of ammo from the AMOO MAISTER!
 
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