I'd like lockpicking in Fallout 4 to be like the this:

- Success is determined by skill so that you can try to pick any lock from very easy to very hard and NO minigame involved. It would work like repairing (reference to my first post in this thread at page 1); lock level - skill (if the skill is under the lock level) = percentual number that is taken from the skill. If the skill surpasses lock level, the chances are purely skillbased with maximum chance of success being 95%.

- The lockpicking would be animated so that you either see your characters hands doing the job (FP view) or seeing your character from behind (TP view). You would have the ability to turn your head (or the camera) some ways left or right to see if someone is coming - so the game doesn't pause during the picking.

- Picking locks would take a certain amount of time depending on your skill and level of the lock. When attempting, there would be a timebar similiar to what Vampire - The Masquerade: Bloodlines had. Skill would give bonuses to the time it takes to pick a lock so that you don't get bonuses to picking hard locks before your skill surpasses maximum level of normal locks.

- Each lock would have a certain amount of tries before (if you keep failing) the lock jams for a certain amount of time (preferably at least for some weeks, so that your attempts at just waiting at the lock for it to become unjammed would be a tedious job). Moreover locks would have a complexity stat (similiar to my idea of repairing in page 1) that would determine a chance for a critical failure that would immediately jam the lock despite if it was you first attempt.

This would also fit for hacking if it will be implemented in the same way as it is in F3.

Also, NO minigames. If they have to be there, let them be gambling games.

:thumbsup:


Two things I'd say here... First... what you describe for lock picking ~is a minigame
and you describe it very much as it was was done in SSI's Hillsfar ~Which is exactly how I'd want it, if it HAD to be other than simply a skill check and your PC picks the lock or not (which is preferable to me in a stat based RPG).

Hillsfar had lock pick sets with about 10 different double sided picks in them and the locks had from between 3 and [possibly] 10 tumblers. The player had a lit fuse as a timer, and once they started to pick it they were committed to it. You had to match the correct tool for the tumbler and get all tumblers open before time ran out. Not exactly accurate to how locks work, but it was challenging, and you could at times break the only pick that would let you pick the lock, and if that happened, you needed a new set.

Its funny, but Oblivion's Lock Pick game had great untapped potential IMO.

The tumblers could have been made to react to "real time" picking, and need actually be picked in real time. Lock pick skill could have affected just how much of the lock was visible to the player (depicting visual understanding of the lock's inner workings); In practice that could allow players to pick the lock blind (or fail), or develop the PC's lock pick skill and avail themselves of the PC's intimate knowledge of how the lock worked (by being shown in detail what was going on inside it).

Secondly... As for no minigames, I was truly disappointed that I never found an Arena clone installed on a computer console anywhere in the game.
I don't mind as many mingames as they want, just so long as most are completely optional, and not a main activity ~Like speechcraft in Oblivion.

Well, yes. It is a minigame of sorts, but not in the same sense as Fallout 3s or Oblivions (Your idea of Oblivions lockpicking sounds good, btw).

I don't remember ever playing Hillsfar, though the name sounds somewhat familiar for some reason. What was it about?

Hey, it worked in Fallout 2.

(To be fair, we are discussing something that none of us actually have any control over. The hypothetical Fallout 4 we're talking about is going to be made by a team of people who are already going to be in no shortage of their own ideas - the odds are pretty slim that any of these threads are going to be useful to anyone but ourselves, as a little bit of fun.) A couple points, though:

I don't think anyone is throwing words around on purpose with the assumption that no one else is going to comprehend them. Especially talking about procedural design in videogames - which has been kind of a buzzword for the current generation of games (and already in use in games like GTA IV, Star Wars: Force Unleashed, etc - and considering that procedurally-generated maps have been around since Diablo, Civilization, and even going back to ASCII, Rogue-like games.) Not to mention that this is the internet, where Wikipedia (or any other number of reference sites) are just a click away.

Another thing worth repeating (once again,) is that procedural doesn't in any way mean "empty." Look at Diablo, Hellgate: London, etc. Plenty going on in those games. Or Spore, for example, which uses procedurally-generated terrain for all of their planets - and I don't think anyone's ever complained about those having any lack of character. There's plenty of examples right there of procredurally-generated content that doesn't come off as feeling "generic," or lacking a hand-touched quality. So why would doing the same thing (on a smaller level, even) in Fallout 4 be the one exception?

EDIT: Why would anyone actually be asking for nothing but miles of bleak emptiness that you're forced to walk through? What I'm thinking of, you wouldn't even be able to distinguish the procedural "in-between" areas from any other part of the map. You wouldn't even be able to tell the difference from walking between a set-piece cell and a procedurally-generated one. It would just look the same as the rest of the game, and likely even incorporate a lot of the same pieces (levels in Fallout 3 just being mainly composed of lots of different interchangeable puzzle pieces to begin with...)

Ancient game.

It allowed you to import and export characters from earlier Gold Box games (Curse and Pool IIRC), and let them explore the city of Hillsfar, (gain XP), then export them back. The entire game was little minigames like Archery, horse jumping, arena combat, theft, etc... I liked it, but it doesn't hold a candle to any other Gold Box game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsfar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Box

**Here (ugly graphics and all) is the lock pick screen for a 7 tumbler lock.
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/Tough-lock.jpg

1. More of a struggle - by this i mean in FO3 it didnt seem so much of a distressing struggle to cross the wasteland even on the harder difficulties mayeb at night it become even more dangerous
2. Money - more difficult to find money i was loaded in F03 and had nothing to spend it on.
3. Joinable factions - some people like having friendlies to fall back on when times get tough

That's pretty much the same thing IMO. Everything being to similar ends up repetitive and feeling empty. :shrug: If you have fifty cities in the game all looking similar but hardly anything worth of interest in them then wants the point of having 50 cities that end up feeling dead when you can just have one or two cities very well done?



Granted procedural generation can be done well but that's something Bethesda stopped doing a while ago. Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and there expansions and DLC combined don't even equal 1% of Daggerfall's size if memory serves me right (I haven't played the game since 1997). I would like to have a larger world map like three or four times but nothing excessive where if you were traveling on foot it would take you a week (real time) to go from one side of the map to the other, I personally just view that as pointless.

I don't think anyone is saying that Bethesda should replace the quest hubs with procedurally generated content...it's the stuff in between that we're talking about

Yeah, We're talking about they way the Fallout originals did the map. the "cities" are al set pieces while the vast land between them is procedurally generated. With special encounters also being set pieces. you would have the choice to "fast travel" with the overland map, or choose to "Walk" the same distance "in game" through the procedurally generated content. With various random bits that would be generated right in there to find.

Have you never seen a block of 50's or 60's houses, where every house for blocks is basically the same house? (made from the same blueprints, possibly by the same contractors). Procedural need not mean duplicates though. The generation could draw on a set of 20 or 30 (or 150) structures or cement foundations with a few remnant walls still standing, or a clever method to generate random buildings wall by wall.
FO3 as shipped reuses several of the same houses all over the place, (and there is nothing wrong with that).

I wouldn't
I'd quite prefer the hidden Random encounters and Special encounters actually be findable out in the middle of nowhere; but there should always be the option to "Overland Map travel" to your destination.
(I think "Fast Travel might be misleading, as it in no way means what you have in FO3 or Oblivion in this context).


:thumbsup:

Row houses are one thing though it's expected they'd be pretty similiar.



Which then would leave us with a bunch of buildings...just there. Fallout 3 already felt to much like racoon city with all the boarded up buildings with no real reason to be boarded up.



To a point however when exploring it tends to all look the same after a while. Granted it does make sense but I would've liked more different types of houses and buildings with a few different types of interiors.



I'll put it this way I'd rather they did one city on real scale without all the stupid boarding up buildings (there was no T virus outbreak afterall) where you could go through buildings crawl around rumble and have unique encounters while exploring interiors vs. out in the middle of nowhere. I'd guess I'd rather have the city feel more like a city, I'm thinking more of an escape from new york feel than say a wild west feel with the encounters out in the middle of nowhere which I could care less about. What I'd like might not be true to the series but it's what I'd prefer. :shrug:

What you want is not mutually exclusive. The dev that would make the procedural code is not likely going to be the dev that makes the areas like houses and shopping malls. Once that code works, the areas surrounding your city are cheap and infinite. As for 'true to the series', Fallout had several cities, and quite the distance from each other. I think they did a decent job on DC (minus the ammo crates), and could have done five more just like it somewhere else.
[ *feels dev dagger eyes on back of neck ]

Consider FO2... Where you have New Reno as a self contained quest hub with links to Redding and Vault City, and NCR. In FO3 a city like New Reno could have been done full scale, as 12 city blocks, having the exact same content that New Reno has.

Any of the locations in FO2 could have been extrapolated into FO3 areas and been just as functional in 3D, with a little farther to walk from building to building. Now I'm not suggesting plagiarism and copying FO2, just that... in FO3 you could have had content along the same lines... and had several large settlements spread across three states, and retained the interplay between them, had the gameplay we already have in FO3, and have the procedural wastes in between. Now the wastes I'm talking about would be very like the overland encounter scenes from Fallout 1 & 2 (and skip-able so long as you don't have an encounter while fast traveling; If you do ~that's where you show up and the fight begins; or trade, or dehydration, or a godzilla foot ).

Biggest point should be that SPECIAL encounters should have higher odds if you're actually exploring real time rather than Fast Traveling (which presumably represents your PC walking or running from point A to B, and paying little attention to anything while doing it ~Though the PC's Outdoorsman skill should have a noticeable effect on that).

Really, are you sure about that? Walking through the city I would see obviously different stores with different names and with obviously different layouts just looking on the outside I can also see where the poor sections were and where the rich sections were. The city would feel different and have interesting locations and everything doesn't come off as being completely homogeneous? Because I don't think you can do that at least not in the foreseeable future. Granted I could be wrong here but I haven't seen a true example of a city that felt realistic yet in a game. I don't care so much about the city being infinite per say but having the huge amount of detail that is in a city. Yes that's asking for a lot but I'd prefer that vs. say 30 different DC's you can go to.

These are my rambling suggestions:

I would focus more on the RPG elements, but particularly side characters. They're not developed into characters at all, and really, most other NPCs outside dear old Dad aren't even memorable in Fallout III. So when you get an NPC, you get associated side quests with that NPC, find out who they were, where they came from, etc. Some of them, considering that being a legitimate [censored] for hire must be a small market niche' in the Wastelands, will have grievances with each other. You recruit one, you can't hire the other later, unless you kill the one you originally hired. If the guy you hired has people who want to assassinate him, you'll get that as well.

Give a more subtle gradient to the karma factoring. Maintaining neutrality is damn near impossible in FOIII, you're either eating babies for breakfast or a saint walking the Earth. Along with that, change how entire towns and people react to you. Get banned from certain areas if you're karma is too low or too high. Be ineligible for certain missions. It doesn't make sense to be hired as a hitman when you're the exalted savior of the wasteland. I liked the various perks in FOII that affected how people reacted to you, like working for the mob, doing porm, etc. For that matter, #III struck me as bowderlized, there are heads flying off everywhere and blood splattered sidewalks, but none of the other stuff that gave number II its more intimate appeal.

I'm not sure what all this talk is about insanely large outside World maps is. Unless you're some weird breed of roleplayers I'm not familiar with, I generally find walking amongst generically the same looking backdrops over and over and over and over again searching for something very annoying, see "Two Worlds". The upgrades and customization ideas are good, I think that the repair option should feature increased ability to customize weapons. Why only have one gun with a silencer? Along those lines, I think that the Wasteland should change itself depending on what you do. Yeah, you got the occasional slave or wastelander thanking you for the Lincoln Memorial or the Wasteland Survival Guide, but really ramp it up. You side with good, the city's become cleaner and you don't get pickpocketed, but guards scan you for guns, stolen items, drugs, etc. Let the vendors only buy or sell vendor-specific items unless you have a high enough charisma.

And throw in some other bones with it. I get that the reason radio stations played the same thing over and over was because the records were lost. Well, what lone wanderer would be best suited to go digging out records and finding them? Leveling up, change what options are available in firefights. The shooter elements of FOIII were not good minus VATS. Give the ability to take cover at a certain gun level, kneeling gives extra precision.

Another thing to ratchet up is ghoul hatred. If a city is filled with ghouls, you can't sleep there, (smells too bad). Doctors can't heal you, (no human patients to work with), radiation levels are high, (why would they get rid of rads?), and vendors charge more. Gives you a reason to do the evil but helpful thing of either FEV poisoning it or joining a ghoul elimination society and taking them out. In other words, there's a lot of great side quests and fun stuff to do, but the character-development area needs to be upped more in terms of general NPCs, how your choices affect how people treat you, etc. What I'd really like to see if any developer is that ambitious is you play a main character through, get choices for various areas on what to do there, (if anything), then your guy is assassinated or dies heroically, or whatever befits his personal choices. Then, your child picks up the action, and it locks you with certain perks at a level you begin from again, like level 15, based upon what your main character picked and who you marry. The cities will have new people in them, and what choices Dad/Mom made change how that future World will look.

Just to comment on this one thing...

I was really disappointed that after fixing someplace in FO3 like Big Town or Arefu that my efforts meant nothing. The towns (!) showed no evidence of any gained prosperity. While I was piling up dead bad guys, more would spawn to replace them, but in the end they all just served as targets in a well drawn shooting gallery. All I can figure is the DC wasteland must have a border fence controlled by the evil elements who let their kind in, but no true immigrants.

Since the wasteland settlements seem to function just fine with only a handful of people, how come no new ones are created? Since it seems possible, though inexplicable, that tiny groups form and don't join up with the larger settlements or band together, I'd like to see a new ramshackle, thrown together place emerge where I'd cleaned out the raider presence. Then I'd feel as if my character had actually done something to help the world.

Indeed, If they can call girdershade a "town" you might as well have a few wandering wastelanders move into a random building and call it "the squat"! *yay for Vault 15 referances*

I don't think the idea is to generate any of the cities. You'd have your "set-piece" areas that make up the bulk of the game; and then some areas in between those that would be procedurally-generated. Probably worth mentioning that this could free up the devs to spend more time on those important areas, without having to worry over hand-crafting every square inch of the entire game map. (Especially when, realistically - it's not like anyone would have noticed if when you walked out of megaton and headed out West a bit, if it were procedurally-generated as opposed to hand-crafted. And keep in mind, either way it's still just a bunch of pre-made "blocks" fit together. Literally the only difference between the two is that in one you have a human who could be doing something more important making sure there's no excessive clipping - and in the other, you just let the computer do all the grunt work.)

Personally, I don't think there's any real need to try and cover as much area as Fallout 2, here. I'm just thinking of something a bit bigger than Fallout 3 - along with a nifty way to connect some of the DLC (potentially - assuming that occasionally new DLC might be geographically close to the core game...)

As far as taking away the boards from all of the doors of the buildings in the game - that's something you could do procedurally, as well. It worked with limited success in Hellgate: London, but I'm sure you could get it to work. And again - Fallout 3 is built up of various small "pieces," anyway (for example, if you're walking down a hallway inside a Vault; it's put together by linking a limited selection of pre-made "hallway" pieces. A computer could put those together using an algorithm - especially if we're dealing with limited areas like the inside of a residential house, etc. Or areas of limited consequence, like if you were just dying to see what was inside of that particular building, but it didn't serve any really important role in-game.)

After all, if you're doing (some, not all) of the outside areas linking the important cells - you could use the same philosophy with the inside. You'd be able to enter literally any building in the game, and all the devs would have to do is place one of the building tiles down.

And again - regardless of how you're designing the game, and putting it together - you're still only connecting together different pre-made pieces from a limited selection. The GECK is a lot of fun to play with, it reminds me of putting a model together. It's not like you're hand-crafting every square inch of game; you're just repeating similar pieces in different ways. The game's going to either be repetitive, or not - it really has little to do with whether or not the entire game world is "hand-crafted."

I've already stated several times that I would like a bigger game world also I just don't want it to become repitive as hell. As far as DLC goes with Bethesda usually we go outside of the regular game map anyway...I'm not really sure what your talking about here to be honest. Unless the DLC changes the core game like broken steel or adds to the core game like Knights of the Nine everything else tends to be on a seperate map.



True but I would prefer some more unique locations vs. pure computer generated area. Fallout 3 is already a little to repitive for my taste now and in an earlier post I commented about stores being different to each other and different sections of the city being different. Which isn't the case in Fallout 3, they reuse things constantly in the game while I can't blame them for this it does get old fast for me. Yes I know I'm coming off as a hypocrite here with wanting to enter every building that isn't destroyed and yet complain about interiors ending up looking the same. :shrug: Still it's what I would like to see happen.



I would say that a game world being handcrafted with unique locations is less reptitive than one with the same locations done a tad differently. :shrug:

-Agree

I'm working on a really big Fallout: London idea. Was wondering that when it was finished whether I could post it here...

Also, in terms of computer generated places, I'd like to see random small villages appearing depending on your actions. Just a few shacks or tents, randomly built, a few settlers, maybe a trader. More travellers would also help make the world more realistic.

I don't particularly agree with the whole 'rebuilding' as you play idea. The point of the wasteland is to feel barren and empty. Sure you might 'save the world' but you aren't repopulating it overnight. You shouldn't have lots of people migrate in because there aren't people to migrate. The ones who have survived have had 200 years to find each other and make small settlements. Killing a few mutants isn't going to cause a small town to transform into a metropolis.

You seem to be honestly missing the point of the suggestion.
[Re-read nu_clear_day's posts, they have the right idea.]

As a better example, imagine the FO2 world map, and imagine if FO3 had one like it; Now imagine in FO3 that you stand at the vault and check your map, and you click to travel back to DC, you then appear in front of DC (or you could have walked all the way there from the vault). It could be the same for Rivet city, click there on the overland map and you appear in front of Rivet city (or you could walk all the way there).

Now... Imagine that Rivet City is in a wrecked shipyard on the coast of Virginia Beach. You could still click its location in the overland map and still appear at Rivet City (~or you could walk all the way there!).

The point is that the in-between distance is procedural wasteland full of wrecked suburbs, warehouse districts, train yards, flat wastes, impact craters, dried up river beds, and the ruins of long lost townships (that may or may not just be the building foundations). All along the trek there are dangers, and you can find raiders, and animal threats; But honestly I'd prefer an uncrowded wasteland.

The idea is that you could fast travel [to Rivet City], and 2/3 of the way there, the game may decide that you have an encounter, then puts you on the map 2/3 of the way there. (for a fight or merchant, or some other strangeness); From there you could again Fast travel to Rivet City and appear there (if there were no other encounters).

The neat part is that the lands between distant "set piece" locations (like Rivet City) would be plausibly filled in, and there would be no predicting Special encounters, and no online walkthroughs for the procedural content ~none of which need actually be the exact same train yard, same row of houses, same nut in the sniper's nest, same group of raiders for the tenth time.

The other neat part is that there could be both procedural, and hand tuned areas that are only findable in the procedural wasteland (think Dunwich building, and/or a used car lot with a nut salesman living in a shack).

*Speaking of vehicles... Imagine building http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/bike.jpg with a schematic and riding to Rivet City in real time (or just appearing there in hours instead of days).

Some neat ideas.

See above.

Agreed. :thumbsup:

Hm, I wonder if anyone from the team over at Bethesda are reading these and taking notes

"Ooo, we should have that!"

They could take any ideas from me, I don't care, just as long as I know my idea was the one they chose.

Bleh. Beth should use any number of the Lore-geeks here to write more letters and notes we could find littered around the wasteland. I find them rather amusing. I found one where some neighbor threatens the next door mum with reporting her son to the authoraties because he dresses up as a chinese commando or something. I found that rather amusing. Also the Vault tec letters of admission into 101 and the plentifull letters of dismissing applications to vaults are quite nifty in my book even if they dont do anything in particular. They just add to the ambiance of the game.

Make a contest and have the top ten contributions be in game. It would be fun and the beth writers wouldn't have so much work

That be a sweet idea.
Yeah but what do we know, we just buy those games they make...