» Sat May 29, 2010 11:41 am Note: These aren’t all original, but it’s everything I could come up with that I think would change gameplay for the better. My background is military, currently I’m a historian and a philosophy major, which makes me twice as unemployable as anyone else. How do you beg a company to let you write RPG stories for them? I loved Fallout III, so a wish list like this is not meant to whine about anything, but to show genuine appreciation for the talent and work that went into a great game.
Anyway, these are wishes, if not for FO:NV, then for any other future game along this line. FO: Resource Wars or Fallout IV, don’t hesitate to call.
Better graphics. I think this is a no brainer, but the graphics seem to be outdated, particularly in animation. Think about the difference it made in Borderlands when they switched the graphics.
Environment changes. Show both the heat and the cold, as both extremes operate in deserts. Make layered regular clothing which changes how you endure in the heat. E.g. European knights had a hard time in the Crusades because the armor heated up rapidly and they would often be too far out from supply lines. European war horses were bred for strength in head-on collisions wearing heavy armor, while Middle Eastern war horses were light and designed for archery. Middle Eastern warriors would lure the Crusaders far out and wear them down. Point being, wearing 45 pound power armor into the desert should cause quick dehydration and heat penalties. Wearing no clothing in the desert at 20 degrees should cause frostbite, (limb crippling) and health damage over time. Bleached bones of carcasses, sunlight reflections, mirages, and other such lighting effects would be great in this line.
For that matter, I would really like it if NPCs reacted to what you are wearing. If you have a rare, nice business-suit, it makes sense for people to be nice to you, just like the real world. It would be even better if you could add useless accessories like high-value watches, necklaces, rings, earrings, etc. Realistically, you can’t be seen in the high roller area if you’re wearing t-shirt and flip-flops. Casinos have an image to uphold.
Tattoos would also be nice, with the same caveats. Some people should react good, some should react poorly. Just like the real world. Maybe even make it Fallout specific, the ink is irradiated at most places, only certain high value places have non-irradiated ink that will not permanently raise your levels while you are out. (Of course, this Fallout not being hit by the nukes may have less of this, but there will be sequels.)
Improved AI. Okay, so this is a military tactic, but it’s a minor peeve in games, particularly “Splinter Cell: Conviction.” When you suspect that there is someone in a room you are about to enter, you clear it one of two ways:
Solo. “Slice the pie.” Move as far away from a sharp corner as you can so as you turn the corner, you can see clearly without having to make a hard left or a sharp right. In Splinter Cell, people will go to investigate and walk as close to the wall as possible, making it easy to instantly kill them. No one in the military does that. Also enemies never throw a grenade when they suspect someone is there, at the very least, military typically uses flash bangs or detonated charges on doors if they suspect someone nasty is lurking about. I don't see raiders and supermutants really that worried about possible friendly fire.
With Friends: MOUT it. (Military Operations on Urban Terrain.) The first person takes a hard left or right, depending upon room size and where door is relative to the wall, the next person moves straight forward, the next person moves diagonally, and the final person secures the exit. Why? Well, if the first person moves straight ahead, then someone waiting in the corner could blast the entire team as they move in. The first two have a huge field of fire, the third guy provides overlapping fields of fire, and the final guy secures the exit so no one can throw a grenade in the room and take out an entire squad.
No more charging head first into machine guns. They should strafe for cover, slice the pie, move in coordinated targets, flank you, crawl, do 3-5 second rushes, etc.
Environmental effects like rain, snow, cloudy days with less heat damage, etc.
Factions amongst ghouls and supermutants. Fallout 3 gives supermutants and ghouls a monolithic interpretation, I like the FI and FII models where supermutants and ghouls were not one coherent group, but several factions fighting it out, like everyone else.
Different ghoul breeds and supermutants. In FOIII, the reason might be that the FEV was required to breed supermutants, and this would only create one look to them. Okay. But FO:NV says that there are second-generation supermutants, which means that there should be genetic diversity. Some light-skinned, some dark-skinned, etc.
Change the way the world looks based upon what glasses you have on or if you are wearing helmets.
Weaponry: Make the bullets in a clip match what is actually true of the real life guns counterpart. Unless you want to make customizable clips like banana clips, stripper clips, and extended clips. Also, paintable guns, because people who play games are vain. Any customized weapons should be re-namable as well.
Goggles and binoculars. Okay, I see that one fallout pre-order pack comes with binoculars, but it would be a shame to have it for just the pre-order pack. What about thermal-vision goggles? Night-vision goggles? Enemies equipped with them, so your sneak would be irrelevant to a thermal-vision goggle wearer, or a night-vision goggle enemy would be able to have the same stats as if you were in broad daylight no matter where you were.
Zoom on scopes. Another pet peeve, scopes in the real world come in a large variety of flavors. Some of them are designed to be used with both eyes open, which is what spec. ops people prefer because you can keep your field of vision. ACOG scopes are a prime example. Some are designed for sniper only use, heavy zoom. Customizable scopes should change how the world is seen and what stats a weapon has.
Mountable sniping. For both you and enemies, a tripod to set up a shot from with the downside of it costing inventory weight, but giving increased stability.
Repair types: Another peeve. I understand repairs if the initial condition of a gun is bad, but once a gun is repaired, it pretty much stays that way for the next five million shots unless you plan on going scuba-diving with your rifles. Instead, use a generic gun cleaning kit that would affect how rifles perform, certain rifles, (M16) tend to require a lot of cleaning or they double-feed, jam, and don’t perform well, rather than requiring a player to find the exact right type of weapon to fix his current one. So there would be a two-tiered system, one being the repair condition of the weapon, the other one being the cleaned condition which a regular old cleaning kit could handle without scouring the wasteland for a new weapon.
Customizable armor. Name of the game is custom-custom-custom. The greater control a player has of the character, the more involved they feel. Change the colors, logos, etc. Putting the NCR emblem on an item can make you more factional to them while you wear it, worse with Caesar’s legions, etc.
Customizable housing like furniture, being able to re-arrange stuff, chose color schemes, etc. Custom-custom-custom.
Fat people. They should survive the apocolypse, unless zombies come. In which case, Cardio and the Double-Tap must be mentioned for reference sake. (See “Zombieland.”)
Tall people and small people; not children. Everyone was about the same height and weight. That seems highly unrealistic no matter what happens to the World.
Let’s keep going with this though. In societies where food is hard to come by, fat people are respected. It shows power and wealth. So if you choose a “fat” build, you gain charisma but lose an agility point. If you choose a muscular build, you gain strength, but lose endurance (more muscle = more blood and oxygen.) Both have a negative effect of making you have to eat more to maintain the build.
Drugs and addiction. Let’s really look at drugs. A drug like mentats should be a stimulant similar to cocaine or a more modern day stimulant like Aterol. There’s a reason college kids abuse it, it helps you think more clearly. Same reason Sherlock Holmes in the book shot cocaine, it helped him think. Well, what are teh downsides to that? It’s a stimulant, you can’t sleep. You shouldn’t be able to wait or sleep for 12 hours, just like someone who is really using drugs. A drug like Jet is equivalent to something like meth, which should make you jittery. So, how to come down? The same way real drug users do, by drinking alcohol or taking drugs designed to make you come down. This increases your chances of getting addicted, you either have to wait around, (but you can’t actually wait), for 12 hours, or you will have to drink or use other drugs to come down, increasing the likelihood of an addiction.
Keep going though. If you become addicted once, it becomes easier to become addicted in the future. The more often you use a drug, the more it takes to get the same effect for the same duration. Add in a “withdrawal” period for like 3 hours where after the effect is worn off, you have slightly lower stats and add in something like drift on the weapons. Make it a quest where you have to attend the Church of Atom’s Atomic Addicts Anonymous (AA2) after meeting a fellow addict.
Power combos for melee: I see that they’ve added in a special attack, but I think special combos should be unlocked as well for players with high AP and high melee/unarmed. Which brings me to:
Special weapons perks. So if you use a certain type of weapon a lot, you get a perk associated with that weapon. It makes sense that if you use the assault rifle for 400 kills, you’re probably going to be pretty good with an assault rifle, but that won’t translate to being a good mini-gun shooter. If you use baseball bats, this could unlock special combos (see above) or unlock extra damage, greater crit %, etc. This could be really creative, maybe have certain weapon masters you need to do quests for to get leveled up in it.
Melee weapon leveling. If a baseball blocks a super sledge, either the bat should break OR certain weapons shouldn’t be blockable. Blocking a super sledge is as realistic as blocking a bullet a toothpick.
VATS cancel button. It’s very annoying when you pick an attack and realize you can’t hit the person you’re aiming at and your character keeps mindlessly shooting at the person. There needs to be a cancel button to preserve AP when this happens.
Food, drinks, and stimpacks. First, these shouldn’t be instant. The player should have to actually eat them, meaning during a firefight, they can’t just go to their Pip-boy and use them, they would have to actually take cover and apply the pack, with animation.
Along with that, these should be capped for a time period. Drinking five canteens of water would make you vomit rather than feel better.
Integration with the XBOX’s saved music, and PS3 if it has it, (my PS3 broke in about 13 months, and Sony wouldn’t play for it. They lost a customer). Okay, so we all got tired of listening to the same four songs, even though I get they were ironic because they were all WWII fallout songs. But it’s highly unrealistic because technology for war is on pace with civilian technology, what people call “slush” benefits. The internet was made for national security, Thomas Edison intended the phonograph to record great speeches not play music, space travel brought us special memory foam beds, etc. In other words, with all this super technology out there, yes, videos, games, and music would have been saved. Some of it may ruin the retro feel, but if there was a quest to recover the “hidden” music files of a former vault dweller to play on a special radio station, that would be cool. If you could import music files from the other radio stations to mix and match, most players would be infinitely happy. Our catch words, like sales is “Location, location, location” it’s “custom, custom, custom.”
Fix the algorithm on the rifles and other guns. If someone is two feet away, you should not be missing with a gun. Not ever.
More realistic fights: In unarmed and melee, people can duck (the “super sledge” problem mentioned before), slip, weave, bob, etc. during a fight, both NPC and PC. While I always think rolling is stupid, (no one in the military rolls, particularly if you have a rifle on your back, you would crush your own spine), you should be able to do 3-5 second rushes to avoid sniper fire, crawl, etc. And why can’t you use cover in the game?
Auto-aim: Not the ridiculous version of it in let’s say “Red Dead Redemption” where you can shoot things you have no idea about, but you can already auto-aim by using VATS and then canceling. Why not make an official version of it. It’s auto-off on hardcoe mode and you can’t use it if an enemy is crawling.
Unique weapon combos with penalties: You can use a pistol and a high powered flashlight to disorient an attacker, with a minor penalty to VATS accuracy. A pistol and a knife, etc. And please no two pistol attacks, there isn’t a shooter in the whole world that shoots like that, it’s just too inaccurate.
Stealth-kill special weapons when you get high enough. Mafia themed? Why not a some good old piano wire, or an icepick through the eardrums, (reduces bleeding and clean-up). A knife throat slit kill, with people at lower melee levels screwing it up by tilting the head back, (they’ll make a hideous sounding shriek if you slit their throats like this, cutting the windpipe too high will leave the vocal cords intact, and they will take a while to die while violently thrashing and screaming), pros know to push the neck forward and slit the carotid arteries when they’re exposed by pushing the head forward.
Head and arm decaps are in the same boat, they’re just not realistic. Realistically, the gore takes a while to build up as the body bleeds out. Flash burns if the person is shot close range, and steam from the body if they’re shot in the desert at night when it’s cold. (You really want realism?)
Get sick if you stay out too long in the rain or cold. Or just randomly, there was something in fallout III where they said like, “Your poison resistance, rad resistance, and damage resistance have improved”, but I never remember being poisoned. Why not have sickness resistance, based upon survival skill and endurance?
Become your own faction. Recruit local toughs, give them weapons, pay them a certain rate (which determines how good your men will be), and run casinos, hotels, or towns. You can be a dictator and have revolts, or be a good guy and the townspeople will give you discounts and other benefits. CUSTOM!
Tagging a building: So when you’re running around a large place searching every nook and cranny, you will know which rooms you’ve already been in and which ones you haven’t. Use arrows to point or door markers to tag you have already been in there before. This is particularly useful in rooms with multiple floors.
Romance options: Of course, my grandest idea is to have a two-tiered quest. In the first part, it would be similar to if you had to live the life of FO:III’s Dad, trying to build Eden and ultimately failing with the project, marrying a girl and moving into the Vault to raise a child. That would be part I, and the choices you made with this character with your wife choice and your own perk/skill combos would give your child their own hereditary traits by default, which could then be customized by a new set. The game would end with your marriage as well, that would transfer traits onto your child for the next game. All of that may be too much, but at least the option should be around.
XP Cap near the end of a deep exploration: Like many other people have noted, they hit the level cap too soon. I was still exploring when I hit 30 without doing any of the extension quests. This makes you feel a bit cheated, try to make it so the level cap hits when the player is near the end of a deep exploration.
