Yeah, I really like that, but a part of me also realizes you cant IRL self train yourself to be a master swordsman, so I feel there is still room for some kind of system where you upgrade your skills via a trainer of some sort, and I dont mean pay 5000 caps and now you do 10% more damage either. The need to find a master and do whatever shenanigans they demand of you is the quest and part of the roleplay.
Yeah, I really like that, but a part of me also realizes you cant IRL self train yourself to be a master swordsman, so I feel there is still room for some kind of system where you upgrade your skills via a trainer of some sort, and I dont mean pay 5000 caps and now you do 10% more damage either. The need to find a master and do whatever shenanigans they demand of you is the quest and part of the roleplay.
The_Citzen
It Wandered In From the Wastes
Yeah I think this might be the reason for it, but I must say that I like the fact you kind of have to go "out off the way" to engage in combat constantly, different from Fallout 3 or 4 that minutes after you get out of the vault you are already being tasked to murder entire bands of raiders, this also removes a lot of the sense of progression from those games...
The_Citzen
It Wandered In From the Wastes
While you can definetly become very good or maybe even a master "by yourself" and by learning from practice in many skills I do find weird that there is no trainer or even the option to allow your characters to spar with eachother. I get that they done that for balancing purposes, but it gets really annoying on the endgame when you get new characters and has to train them all the way up to the standards of your party.
My "ultimate" RPG system would be one that is entirely via exploration and questing, no clicking buttons in a stats page at all and no levels or experience, no "skills get better as you use them". You got better at shotguns because you found a guy who is trained to use them and he taught you, you got better at repairing shit because you found a gunsmith who taught you, etc That makes things a bit more real if say you intervened in a family being ganged up on. The guy is a blacksmith ( non racist comment ) He gives you a whetstone tells you " Sharpen your knife sonny boy " So yer do. His wife shows you how to cut reeds to make a carrying sack. The kid asks what is Pythagoros Theorum ?erm erm then you fuck off. Na joking aside Oblivion failed big time IMO. if you just stooped and walked about the sneak stat would rise If you ran bunny hopping your athletics shot up but you would only raise a level if you slept.
The reason I went on about FO1/2 perks and skills is because ive never understood where this "amazing" system of yesteryear is that people feel we have gotten away from. I don't get it at all.
Do you use a stock character or create in Fallout 1 2 ? If you create say a sharpshooter the points you allocate to special is way different than if you want to create a thief/ lockpicker sneak. If you create a brainbox who has high science repair then so on .. I just think as Fallout went to FPS you could find way too many say Mentats, Buffout etc.
and perks did not matter as much. It just gave the illusion of loads of choice.
The reason I went on about FO1/2 perks and skills is because ive never understood where this "amazing" system of yesteryear is that people feel we have gotten away from. I don't get it at all.
Do you use a stock character or create in Fallout 1 2 ? If you create say a sharpshooter the points you allocate to special is way different than if you want to create a thief/ lockpicker sneak. If you create a brainbox who has high science repair then so on .. I just think as Fallout went to FPS you could find way too many say Mentats, Buffout etc.
and perks did not matter as much. It just gave the illusion of loads of choice.
Your post is kinda just one big mash so I'm not sure about it. In Fallout 1/2 I always made my character and its generally always the same unless its a stupid build or I want to some how Gimp my character. 5-8-6-2-8-10-8//Gifted, Bloodymess//Small Guns, Melee, Speech. You can do most runs with that setup. I generally only change it up if I want to do a stupid playthrough or if I want all the companions at once (which I never do), or I just want to Gimp myself on purpose for some reason. I am currently doing a melee jinxed build which is the same except I tagged lockpicking instead of guns.
I feel new vegas is the best game in the series that gives you the widest range of starting options. Theres quite a diverse of viable ways to start the game.
Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
Vic, Cassidy and Goris are all memorable and they don't have a talking head.
Nope. Maybe the shooting, but the Melee and Unarmed is fucking trash in FO4 compared to New Vegas and New Vegas doesn't even have stellar melee and unarmed combat.
No, unifying it accomplished nothing in Fallout besides taking away all roleplaying elements.
Except they didn't put any perk checks until Far Harbor.
ALso there is no argument to Skills being better than perks because they were never a mutually exclusive thing, they worked together. THat's the point.
Half the Perks in Fallout 4 are trash and you are forced to take them for other perks or to even have anything to spend them on. YOu seem to think that Fallout is a game about just making your gun do more damage, which really shows the damage Bethesda has done to the series. Skills and perks in Fallout let you granularily build a character to your own liking, dialogue choices reflected both and SPECIAL nwo all they are is a dashboard of generic powerups like Farcry or the terrible system of CBP2077. Leveling up is less rewarding in FO4 and 76 because they reduced it to making you do slightly more damage on one thing at a time.
Last edited:
OK, That post did fuckup as I tried to answer different bits of posts and it did mash .First time I played F2 years ago I just used stock character Narg. Fallout 3 sets your character up as you know. It was only say the last 2 years I bothered to create and think ahead only in the F2 mods Resurrection , Nevada and Olympus I never knew what was a good set up. Playing Vegas years ago I realised lots in speech was needed nearer to the end. I think tag is a great perk. All of a sudden you are able to double up in points. I think bloody mess is a bit of a waste unless you just enjoy a gorefest. I thought from options you could make things bloody. People play as they please. I enjoyed the hacking in 3 lol. Me son looked at me strange as he just saw 3 as a shooter.
The_Citzen
It Wandered In From the Wastes
My main problem with the classic Fallouts skill systems is how much Agility is important, Im not a big fan of the fact that most builds to be good need at least a decent agility stat, idk how I would do it different but in the way it is agility is a bit too important and ends up taking a bit of the variety from most of my builds. Fallout 2 also has a problem that comes from the fact that they didn't adapted some skills very well from Fallout 1, especially those that rely on the time mechanic.
But I must say something quite controversial now, IMO Fallout NV (and also FO3) skill systems are quite overrated and don't work all that well. First how there are some SPECIAL skills that are absolutely unnecessary and are pretty much free points (mainly charisma, but by far the worst part of that skill system lies on the combat skills, there is very little reason to invest on them unless you are going to use VATS constantly or going for a more min-max type of build.
The reason why I think that about the combat is due to the first person nature of the game, if you have a good aim, or just a bit of skill you can pretty much go through the entire game using certain guns that you technically don't have enough skill to use. I still remember very clearly how my character at the end of the battle of the hoover damm ran out of ammo and had to switch to a melee weapon. Even tho I had almost no points on Strenght and melee combat I managed to perform very well and suceed all the combat encounters there, this goes completely against the nature of the classic games that not having a skill meant that your character literally didn't knew how to properly use that weapon type, it would be almost akin to giving a gun to someone that don't got a clue about how that works, the person is more likely to shoot itself than the target.
Also I don't like how speech and skillchecks are extremelly "op", but this is more due to the fact that you can see exactly what is a check or not and how the game does not allow you to pick the wrong option.
But I must say something quite controversial now, IMO Fallout NV (and also FO3) skill systems are quite overrated and don't work all that well. First how there are some SPECIAL skills that are absolutely unnecessary and are pretty much free points (mainly charisma, but by far the worst part of that skill system lies on the combat skills, there is very little reason to invest on them unless you are going to use VATS constantly or going for a more min-max type of build.
The reason why I think that about the combat is due to the first person nature of the game, if you have a good aim, or just a bit of skill you can pretty much go through the entire game using certain guns that you technically don't have enough skill to use. I still remember very clearly how my character at the end of the battle of the hoover damm ran out of ammo and had to switch to a melee weapon. Even tho I had almost no points on Strenght and melee combat I managed to perform very well and suceed all the combat encounters there, this goes completely against the nature of the classic games that not having a skill meant that your character literally didn't knew how to properly use that weapon type, it would be almost akin to giving a gun to someone that don't got a clue about how that works, the person is more likely to shoot itself than the target.
Also I don't like how speech and skillchecks are extremelly "op", but this is more due to the fact that you can see exactly what is a check or not and how the game does not allow you to pick the wrong option.
Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
The idea that Speech is "Op" is dumb. Speech and other non combat skills should have active and noticeable uses because otherwise they end up just being a beging for caps option in dialogue like in FO4 and not an alternate way to handle quests.
Norzan
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
This applies to Fallout 4 as well, so i don't know why you are singling out Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
This is just an inherent problem with FPSers tacking on RPG elements into their gameplay. New Vegas would have been a much better game if it was isometric turn based like the originals since the gameplay style in those games fits RPG gameplay much better.
Last edited:
None of those 3 characters are memorable to me and I've played the game a dozen times. I don't even remember who Goris is.
As for the melee, I like it in Fo4 primarily because of blitz. Melee in the 3D Fallout games is basically trash without blitz because you just die before you close the distance or you play as a junkie taking all of the drugs for buffs. And for myself in particular I feel its required to mod the games to make guns actually deadly, which puts melee in an even weaker state. You could say its my fault for making it such that getting shot in the face actually kills you, but the idea that guns have to be weak to make melee viable is nonsense to me.
Skills are not a "roleplay" element. Having/not having skills has nothing to do with your ability to roleplay, you just suck at roleplaying. People roleplay in Minecraft (a game with no character system). Even in Tabletop, some of the best roleplay I have ever seen is with EXTREMELY brief mechanics, often only 3 skills with between 1 and 3 levels (thinking of the roleplay Jesse Cox ran, Oddballs.) and thats it, thats the whole system.
Fo4 not having perk checks doesn't change the fact that perk checks can stand in for skill checks.
"...and you are forced to take them for other perks" False.
"Granularly build your character" in other words, you can build your character in a more tedious way than just getting a perk that gives you 25% more damage; you can level up 3 times and boost your damage 25% with 1% intervals.
Level ups are less rewarding? Literally the only level ups that matter in Fallout 1/2 are the ones that give you perk points. The rest of the levels are so irrelevant that nobody even brings them up when it comes to character building. You still get boring level ups where you only do slightly more damage, you just have to click more times to get through those screens.
Last edited:
I typically tell people to avoid speech in New Vegas, the bulk of the game can be bypassed with speech checks, and you just flat out miss large chunks of the game. I would argue it is bad in NV, but not because it isnt useful, because its too useful. You might as well play a visual novel if you're just going to skip all of the gameplay with speech checks.
Norzan
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
How is that not a roleplay element? How is having a high medic skill and thus playing a medic character not roleplaying?
They literally do because those are the things that tell the characteristics of your character. Those are the things that allow your character to influence the world, meaning roleplaying.
That's not roleplaying, that's larping. A game that doesn't react to how you go about in a world doesn't allow roleplaying.
Yes, because that's better than a system that tells the characteristics of your characters and allows perks to do interesting things instead of wasting perks slots on dumb damage increases. And also doesn't cause immense overlap between builds because a lot of them don't have to pick the same exact perks to avoid not being able to do much damage.
The huge difference is that you can choose to not increase your damage in a level where you get a perk and instead increase something else and get a perk that increases your killing speed. That can't happen in a system like in Fallout 4's because you are always forced to take damage increased perks at all times to not get behind in damage. Even just skipping one level means the enemies have gotten a boost in health and defense while your damage stayed the same.
It also helps that the scaling in the original Fallout games is not shit. So you are not further forced to pick damage boosts to not fall behind.
If you play poorly. I have done melee builds in New Vegas and i have had no problem closing the distance.
All of these arguments sound incredibly similar to that terrible Manyatruenerd's video on Fallout 4, but maybe that's just me.
Last edited:
Speech is gameplay. Not every character is going to want to kill everything to do a quest. Not everyone enjoys combat either.
Also, just because you invest in speech, doesn't mean you have to use all the speech options. What speech does is give you the freedom to choose when and where to use it. I can invest in speech and still do any quest I want that can be avoided by using speech.
It's the player's choice, it's not a mandatory thing. It doesn't lock you out of anything you don't want to.
The thing about having different skills is that you can mix and match, making the character you want to make. You can make a character just for combat, or one that never fights, or anything in between, and that is one of the things every RPG should offer.
I always play melee or unarmed characters in all fallout games and I pretty much never use drugs. Melee and Unarmed are OP in all fallout games besides Fallout 4. In FO4 it sucks and it's one of the many reasons FO4 bores me to death.
Also here's a first look into the character's customization of Starfield:
Last edited:
The_Citzen
It Wandered In From the Wastes
You're right, Fo4 also has the same issue, but different from 3/NV Fallout 4 fully embraces the fps aspects, and while this toned down a lot the rpg systems, the one present in the game fits way better the fps style of the game, Fo4 skills sometimes feel more closer to Borderlands than the previous games, while it is bad for something related it was good for the gameplay aspects of it at least in my opinion.
Not saying that Fallout 3/NV are worse than 4 (tbh Fo3 is way worse than 4...), but they are 2 games that while I come back to replay every now and them, it is never because of the "engaging gameplay" or "in depht character building".
Norzan
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
It's still FPS gameplay that hardly makes use of your character skills. So it's a game with the same mediocre gameplay of the previous two FPS entries while being barren in roleplaying elements.
Maybe that's just me, but that makes Fallout 4 sound much worse than either the other two (even though i think both Fallout 3 and 4 suck for the same reasons and also different reasons).
Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
You haven't actually played "the game" I am guessing. Can you tell me without wiki checking where Goris is from?
Last edited:
Norzan
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
Yeah, not finding the literal talking deathclaw (one of the more controversial aspects of Fallout 2) memorable raises some suspicions.
Playing some games that i found somewhat forgettable during my first playthrough a few more times after that playthrough made it much easier to remember because i became more acquainted with them. So to play a game dozens of times and still not remember some characters is definitely odd, specially when they can be recruited as companions.
Playing some games that i found somewhat forgettable during my first playthrough a few more times after that playthrough made it much easier to remember because i became more acquainted with them. So to play a game dozens of times and still not remember some characters is definitely odd, specially when they can be recruited as companions.
Last edited:
Eumesmopo
Learned to love the bomb
So, the first gameplay trailer for Starfield is out:
...And it looks just like every other popular space game you have already played in the past 15 years. All of the Fallout 4 spiel is added in there for good measure (base building, weapon and ship customization, generic raider faction to provide endless "bad guys" for the player to shoot at). The camera being creepily locked at NPC faces during dialogue is already giving me PTSD flashbacks from The Outer Worlds.
Not all of it is bad to be honest, I do like the weapon and ship customization bits and the visuals and aesthetics are genuinely beautiful (it's leagues above The Outer Worlds on that regard), and at least they didn't include any cliché humanoid aliens (yet). It might be a reasonably enjoyable game if the story doesn't get so dumb it makes one want to smash his head against a desk.
PS: Is shooting at rocks for resource gathering really going to be a feature on the final thing? I feel like sleeping just from thinking about it.
...And it looks just like every other popular space game you have already played in the past 15 years. All of the Fallout 4 spiel is added in there for good measure (base building, weapon and ship customization, generic raider faction to provide endless "bad guys" for the player to shoot at). The camera being creepily locked at NPC faces during dialogue is already giving me PTSD flashbacks from The Outer Worlds.
Not all of it is bad to be honest, I do like the weapon and ship customization bits and the visuals and aesthetics are genuinely beautiful (it's leagues above The Outer Worlds on that regard), and at least they didn't include any cliché humanoid aliens (yet). It might be a reasonably enjoyable game if the story doesn't get so dumb it makes one want to smash his head against a desk.
PS: Is shooting at rocks for resource gathering really going to be a feature on the final thing? I feel like sleeping just from thinking about it.
The_Citzen
It Wandered In From the Wastes
At least in my experience it ended up making more difference, the only notable difference that I recall from my sniper build in Fallout NV was that I could hit things very well with VATS, but outside of it there was little to no impact, even when I used guns that my strenght was bellow the requirement I could perform very well. In Fallout 4 I could perform very well with everything too, sometimes even more than in NV, but when I invested in perks related to the guns I was using the impact felt way more noticeable, again it was something like Borderlands, any character performs very well with every gun, but by investing into some skills you can really make some of them noticeably stronger.
While that system doesn't fit well into an cRPG that was what Fallout used to aim for, I do think the combat system was improved by it, my problem with the system from 3 and NV is that it tries to be an middle ground between the crpg system from the classic ones to the full on "looter shooter" one from Fallout 4, while it is great because it ends up pleasing everyone there was nothing that really stand out there, it didn't managed to be an good fps (at least in my case I would always use VATS whenever was possible as the gunplay wasn't that satisfying) but also didn't translated too well how meaninful some of your skills end up being in the turn based combat.
This is only my opinion about how I felt playing it, I must admit that it could be a little biased because I really like some of the aspects of Fallout 4, especially the ones related to crafting and settlement systems, I just think that the way Bethesda manages to do the moment to moment gameplay and the exploration aspects better than most devs, sadly this feels like come at cost of a very mediocre and unremarkable writing and quest design. Overall I really like Fallout 4, even considering that storywise it is almost like a fan fiction.