Role-Player
A Smooth-Skin
Even with the prospect of Fallout 3 still not being in development (or being in the very beginnings), i thought i'd create a thread discussing the reasons why SPECIAL wouldn't work very well under realtime. Honestly, i know very few instances where it causes inconveniences or problems; i do not know the full extent of the problems, but would like to bring this up and discuss it with people who know them, so we could enumerate a fair amount of them; maybe the thread can generate enough good points so it becomes a stickied thread, or a reference for Bethesda (this, assuming the developers manage to take some medication for their headaches and resume reading the site).
Let's start by assuming Fallout is transposed into a first-person, realtime model.
If you're playing a game as a first-person shooter, then what happens to a character's agility? The character isn't in control, the player is. And in this case, it's useless, because you have the player's agility controlling it. If you're playing a game as a first-person shooter, then what happens to a character's Perception? Again, it's useless, because you have the player's own perception determining wheter he hits things or no. When you play any other first-person shooter, like Quake, you hit things because you aim yourself, not because the character has an 'X' value in a skill that determines his chances to hit. And if you have this happening, what happens to those two attributes? They become useless. At that point, it should be noticeable that if it goes the FPS route, its no longer SPECIAL, it's SECIL.
If you go outside character attributes, then you also have skills. What happens to your weapon skills in an FPS? Weapon handling skills in an FPS are handled by the player; again, not by the character. Small Weapons, Heavy Weapons, Energy Weapons - all working based on the player's skill to effectively use weapons, specially with Perception out of the picture.
You could try to make it like Deus Ex. You could have the character need to upgrade his weapon skills to better use them... but there was a reason why they were removed, it's because they removed the immediacy of real time, first person combat. FPSers are usually about twitch reflexes. If you have a system ruled by players' skill (FPS), and you try to place barriers to the players' skill (ie, the need to increase skills to use things), then like i've stated above, it crumbles, because the system combines two very different systems.
Even if you simply place it in realtime but do not change the PoV, again, this causes problems. What happens to things like Sequence and Action Points? In realtime, there is no place for a sequence, because everything is happening simultaneously. And action points are basically gone as well. Combat also ends up being hectic and will risk requiring the addition of pausing. Which begs the question: if it requires pausing, then why not just include turns and give the players options to speed up the process trough elements like, say, speed sliders and concurrent turns?
Now, the above was taken from a recent convo between me and AlanC9 at the Obsidian boards. My point is very streamlined (honestly i have no patience to expand on the matter, given current circumstances and the fact that i've written too much about this in the past and at one point it gets tiresome), but i think presents a few of the problems with the change.
If anyone wants to present more points as to why SPECIAL should not go realtime, post them. Hell, if you think it should go, post those points as well. I'm interested in knowing the full extent of the problems, along with any theories on how it might work.
Of further note, i have created the same thread at the Codex, also to gather some opinions. For those interested, i suggest reading that thread as it has some good points.
Let's start by assuming Fallout is transposed into a first-person, realtime model.
If you're playing a game as a first-person shooter, then what happens to a character's agility? The character isn't in control, the player is. And in this case, it's useless, because you have the player's agility controlling it. If you're playing a game as a first-person shooter, then what happens to a character's Perception? Again, it's useless, because you have the player's own perception determining wheter he hits things or no. When you play any other first-person shooter, like Quake, you hit things because you aim yourself, not because the character has an 'X' value in a skill that determines his chances to hit. And if you have this happening, what happens to those two attributes? They become useless. At that point, it should be noticeable that if it goes the FPS route, its no longer SPECIAL, it's SECIL.
If you go outside character attributes, then you also have skills. What happens to your weapon skills in an FPS? Weapon handling skills in an FPS are handled by the player; again, not by the character. Small Weapons, Heavy Weapons, Energy Weapons - all working based on the player's skill to effectively use weapons, specially with Perception out of the picture.
You could try to make it like Deus Ex. You could have the character need to upgrade his weapon skills to better use them... but there was a reason why they were removed, it's because they removed the immediacy of real time, first person combat. FPSers are usually about twitch reflexes. If you have a system ruled by players' skill (FPS), and you try to place barriers to the players' skill (ie, the need to increase skills to use things), then like i've stated above, it crumbles, because the system combines two very different systems.
Even if you simply place it in realtime but do not change the PoV, again, this causes problems. What happens to things like Sequence and Action Points? In realtime, there is no place for a sequence, because everything is happening simultaneously. And action points are basically gone as well. Combat also ends up being hectic and will risk requiring the addition of pausing. Which begs the question: if it requires pausing, then why not just include turns and give the players options to speed up the process trough elements like, say, speed sliders and concurrent turns?
Now, the above was taken from a recent convo between me and AlanC9 at the Obsidian boards. My point is very streamlined (honestly i have no patience to expand on the matter, given current circumstances and the fact that i've written too much about this in the past and at one point it gets tiresome), but i think presents a few of the problems with the change.
If anyone wants to present more points as to why SPECIAL should not go realtime, post them. Hell, if you think it should go, post those points as well. I'm interested in knowing the full extent of the problems, along with any theories on how it might work.
Of further note, i have created the same thread at the Codex, also to gather some opinions. For those interested, i suggest reading that thread as it has some good points.
