Fallout 4: Speculation & Suggestions
Thread #5
This topic is for ideas and suggestions for Fallout 4 so that we can keep all the discussion in one thread. Other very general idea/suggestion topics for a future Fallout game will either be closed, or moved to this one.

This thread should be used to discuss items you'd like to see in a future game, gameplay tweaks, quest ideas, things you hope are not in the next game and so on. If you want to discuss major issues, use a separate topic - such as the discussion about adding multi-player or co-op play, which already has a thread. Please search first to see if there is an active/recent thread on a particular topic.

Previous Threads

http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=978480
http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=995631
http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1010129
http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1023429

Ok, I got bored and wrote a wall of text on along which lines I would like some aspects of Fallout 4 to be made. There is a lot of text and typos and possibly some inconsistencies and overlooked things (due to my not too perfect english and too much caffeine), but I think the ideas are pretty clear. Whether or not all the following would actually work in the game, is beyond me, but at least to me it sounds decent on paper.

So, here goes for TL;DR


Map and Travelling:

A return to the classic worldmap system. The actual FPP/TPP playground World would be roughly about 1.5-2x the size of Fallout 3; and the area is divided into 7-10 smaller sections which vary in size and content and are scattered on the worldmap. General gameplay in those would be about the same as in F3, run around and do local quests. No teleportation fast travel, since the places aren't that big.

Outdoorsmanskill is reintroduced and works similiarly to Fallout 1&2 with the difference that nonhostile encounters are always avoidable should the player so decide (to decrease the amount of loadscreens).

The worldmap itself is zoned in couple of ways:
- The farther away from the starting position, the harder the enemies and vice versa; but there is still a chance to encounter harder enemies on starting grounds and vice versa.
- The map is zoned into territories, which each have their set of unique enemies as well as a few commonones that can be found on every zone.

Each zone has about 5-7 small maps for random/special encounters, which are either hostile or nonhostile.

The visitable locations on map would be as follows: A settlement - with explorable wasteland around it to provide smaller sidequest and exploring. Or just a visitable location like a majorsized building, militarybase, factory etc. They could even include two settlements, but in general all towns would be much bigger than those in Fallout 3.

Each settlement has its own set of architecture (not too different from other settlements, but so that one can tell the difference), clothing and mindsets. These are small things, but they can add a lot to the game. At least some visual variety.

Entering worldmap from a node would happen through the edges of the map. In Fallout 3 you get a popup message that "you cannot go further that way" - now it would be like this: "e) enter worldmap".

To not have to always run to the edge of a map, pressing (for example) the mousewheel would open up a minimenu (similiar to Operation flashpoint and Arma) beside the cursor that would have various commands (this will be referenced a couple of times again if you keep reading), one of them being "Enter worldmap", which could not be used during combat or if there are enemies nearby. However, escaping combat through the edge of the map would be possible.



Repairing:

Repairing happens with repairkits, that repair 10-20 points/use; or by gunsmiths in towns/caravans. The kits would have 5 uses each and their weight would be dependant on how much uses they have left. Success of repairing is dependant on repairskill (a diceroll happens). They would not be too common or cheap.

One would now be able to repair guns and armor beyond his/her skill, but after the guns/armors condition is above the skill, the amount going above is turned into percentages that is taken away from the skill. IE: skill = 30 and rifles condition = 80. Condition - skill = 50. 50% of skill (30) is 15. So trying to repair a weapon in condition of 80 with a repairskill of 30 would lower the skill to 15. This is not necesserely realistic, but it is assuming that the more shiny the condition gets, the more difficult it would be to repair it further.

Guns and armor would also have a complexity stat, which is a number of percetages that tells the chance of critical failure if an attempt to repair fails. Critical failure, instead of repairing the gun, has a reverse effect. The number would be from 1 to 10 if a trait doesn't raise it (yes bring the traits back).

So now you no longer need a duplicate to repair, but you would be able to sacrifice a duplicate in order to boost the amount of repairing a bit if you wanted to, but of course you would loose the gun and the money it is worth.

There would also be a possibility to repair broken robots or computers or what ever could be repaired, by pointing the target opening minimenu (explained partly in the map & traveling section) and selecting repair.



Healing & drugs:

Stimpak usage would be animated, so no more smashing a quick key for dozens stims in few seconds. More over stims now would always heal the same amount (no skill effect in there), but they would come in two variations: stimpaks and superstimpaks. Both of which would be rare and expensive and superstims much more that ordinary stims.

The player would have a tolerance meter which would measure how much the player can medicate him self before overdosing. Overdosing would cause an instant loss of health according to how much the limit is surpassed and would also cause some visual distortions and statloss. The effect would last for a while and the time would be depending on endurance and doctor skill. The tolerance meter slowly lowers itself after the medication is done, and the magnitude it is filled is dependant on the drug used (powerful drugs - like Jet and superstims for example - obviously fill it more quickly). Using food as a healer would not affect the tolerance meter, but food would have a heal-over-time effect.

Doctorskill would be reintroduced and so would be manual healing. Manual healing would be similiar to Fallout 1 & 2 (only a few uses/24hours - they would take few hours to be completed - success is determined by skill), and couldn't be used in combat or when enemies are nearby. Healing cripples wouldn't be possible with stims or sleeping, but would require manual healing and the ability to heal cripples would be enabled via a perk (with proper skill and stat requirements), otherwise a doctor is a must see.

Manual healing would be entered by the minimenu, which would also have the "heal other" option to heal a companion or other alive being.

Healing through sleeping would work similiarly to Fallout 1 & 2.

Addiction would need a doctor. And radiation needs a doctor or radaway (which would be rare and expensive).



Gunplay & VATS (should it be implemented):

Skills would now have much heaver effect on waivewring than what it is in F3. Really hard with low skill, as imo it is supposed to be. In addition, the players stance, movement and weapons recoil also would affect it.

The normal (according to skill) situation would be standing still and aiming through iron sights (yes, iron sights). Crouching would give a small bonus to accuracy and going prone would give a big bonus. The tradeoff with going prone and being accurate would be extremely slow moving and turning, and it would take its time for the player to get up and ready the weapon again. Firing from the hip would cause bigger waivering. Movement would also give a hit to accuracy -- the faster you move, the bigger the waivering. Recoil would throw the aim off a bit, especially while bursting.

Guns would do generally more damage and the damagestats would be static. IE: Huntingrifle - dmg 11-20, like in Fallout 1&2.

In vats you would now have an option to choose a firing mode. Rapid fire - a hastily aimed rapid shooting towards the target; or aimed shots, which would be the opposite of rapid fire.

Rapid fire would lower the accuracy a bit and you could only target a foe as a whole; and it would spend less actionpoints, while aimed shots would cost more and calculate the accuracy without minuses.

One could now choose a stance. Standing, crouching and prone as in realtime play. The bonuses and hits would be similiar to those in realtime. Changing stance in vats would cost actionpoints.

Going prone in vats would force you to choose a firing sector (so that the player doesn't spin like a dreidel in all directions while being the most accurate he can). Prone position would also be the most expensive stance to move to and fire from.

There would be a possibility to use simpaks in vats (at a cost), and also some basic evading moves like rolling a bit left or right (this would affect accuracy inside vats, should the player choose to fire after rolling).


...and they all lived happily ever after until someone nuked them. The end.

I'd love that stuff.
~But FO3 strives to reduce complexity

Im not going to come on here and knock FO3 like ive seen other people do, as its one of the best games i have ever played! for the next installment, To be quite honest, all id like to see is more customisation options! for instance,

instead of having unique weapons (which just seem to have bigger clips and slightly more damage), taking the standard weapons, and making them "unique" in your own way, maybe using the junk you find to make a silencer, or making and attaching a grenade launcher to your assault rifle, or maybe using all the old wepons you find, instead of just using them to repair you old ones, combine them to make unique varients, like you see in other games where wepons have flame, launcher or shotgun attachments. Even changing the colour of weapons! The list is endless, i know, but for the creative player like myself, would add countless hours of gameplay trying out different combinations and designing your own favorites!

being able to change the style and colour of chosen apparel with a clothing editor. maybe being able to reinforce armor and adding bits to it for a unique look! instead of just having set clothing items.

All PC's, X-box's and PS3's have internal hard drives now, so how about the introduction of a custom radio station where players can use the music off their hard drive to play in game? (i understand this may not be favourable to some people as it may change the feel of the game) but this IS just a suggestions page......

I liked the use of skill books in FO3, Maybe they could expand on that. Maybe, when reading skill books, there are some books that let you create weapons, or medicines instead of just adding to your skills,

I wouldn't mind seeing that, so long as the construction is PC skill based and the percentage chance of critical failure is kept hidden from the player.

It's clear Bethesda isn't familiar with balancing games that are based on experience gaining & spending skill points. I would personally love Fallout 4 having a "learn by doing" system similar to TES or even better, Betrayal at Krondor.

I always liked the fact that Fallout let you hold points in reserve and keep playing. Call it a cheat if you must, but I'd hold about 5 in reserve for whatever skill needed boosting in the near future. If he just couldn't pick a lock, I'd bump it a bit, if he needed Gambling raised, I'd bump that instead ~or steel, or doctor, or... whatever skill needed a bump.

That was a peeve in FO3... Forcing the player to spend all skill points, and all AP's when in VATS. It would not have been hard to drop the players DR when they were low on AP's and allow them not to spend them all if they chose (keeping some of their DR in the process).

Perhaps something like that could be worked into FO4. Fallout is about trade offs ~only Perks were total bonus.

This didn't work well in Oblivion, because if you leveled up (using Fallout3's equivilent) Barter and other non-violent skills, you would be outclassed easily by enemies.

Besides there probably would be enough machines to hack to level up to 100 to hack the tougher machines.

One suggestion, EQUAL support on all release platforms...

That's the point of role-playing. If you level up only non-combat skills, you're not supposed to be succesful in combat and rather run away from enemies. You're not supposed to be good in *everything*.

I may have touched on this in the other thread, but if you are going to have perks every level they should work differently.

Instead of perks boosting stat X and Y, have perks open up options belonging to a skill.
For example with enough medicine skill you can choose a perk that allows you to heal limbs (instead of using stims or a doctor skill).
With the above suggested return of the outdoorsmans skill add one which allows you to collect meat from what you kill and follow up(s) that allow you to cook said meat into more beneficial food.
Unarmed skills would have perk that would allow certain technique's to be used, for example a disarm perk.

If Fallout 4 follows the practice of Fallout 3 that kept the style and game-play of 1 and 2, it will be another great achievement and be all we would want. Basically expanding Fallout 3 and adding some more and varied content.

Fallout 3 was totally in keeping with the Fallout series style and game-play, in keeping with both Fallout 1 and Fallout 2.

Fallout 2 had many changes from Fallout 1, such as armour could no longer be looted from dead enemies. Fallout 3 went back to how it was in Fallout 1 allowing looting of armour (a big source of income), also Fallout 3 kept some of the many changes that Fallout 2 made.

As you can see, changes or refinements can and do occur between each game of a series, and each game is still a valid part of the series by keeping the overall style and game-play the same. Fallout 3 did just that, keeping in tune with the rest of the series, taking the best of the previous, tweaking and enhancing it into the best Fallout so far.

So that is the way to go.

for like 43323324234th time

PLEASE DONT DO IT IN NEW YORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


do it somewhere else instead :>

Only if level scaling stays as it is. If you have a world that's largely static in terms of level (with some small amount of randomness and unexpected challenge), then it doesn't matter what you improve upon. Not much levels with you, so your choice to level non-combat skills first won't put your character in a permanent quagmire.

Vehicles.

All Beth has to do is pick a place with appropriate terrain and slap-bang we can have a motorcycle!

From what I've heard of FO3, the quests are very black and white with only two possible outcomes: good/evil. Very few sidequests, and the violence was just comical, unlike FO2 where violence in the death animations/anyone could die was very fun.

Plus, the Power Armor and it's advanced versions were always the best armor you could get, and it was always rare/darn impossible to get at all.

There's a lot of deviations in FO3 from the original 2.

Just a thought... I'm not sure about Beth adding too many new features, for one reason - the modding community ends up doing it. Reading through this thread, there are many ideas that have already been implemented in FO3 using mods, and I'm wondering - if Beth sees this, perhaps they'll stick with providing basic features, and open up the code a bit more (which gets done anyway by scruggs and his team, but to give 'em a headstart), thereby giving the modding community more freedom to implement what people want? Saves a heck of a lot of time and effort on PR

Not saying it's not likely, but really what's a game really worth if they expect quite a number of people to mod their product.

I figure if they look at a number of mods out there now they should already be thinking about implementing aspects of them.
Things like the weapon mod kits and balance and (level)pacing changing mod, should make it clear what aspects the community would like to see.

EDIT: Then again, the number of sixist mods out there, well I hope they don't take those to heart.

If by keeping with the gameplay, you mean that you can talk to npcs and shoot nasty creatures, then yes... fallout 3 totally is keeping with its predecessors.

Generally the game (F4) should take a step backwards from the road of simplification and lean more towards Fallout 1 and 2 instead towards oblivion (and this could even be done without moving too far from Bethesdas current design philosophy - bar the simplification).

I think that has been touched on before, but to add my two cents to this. The trouble with the levelling system like this isn't that a character who hasn't spent points on combat skills isn't going to be a death-dealing machine. It's that the enemies get progressively tougher depending on your level, regardless of where you've spent those points. So enemies that are balanced to provide a decent challenge for a high-level character who focused entirely on weapon skills are going to be inordinately tough for someone who spread out a bit more than that. Sure, you shouldn't expect to be able to do everything with any character (though Fallout 3 is hardly a good example of something like that in the first place...) But you ought to have at least a fighting chance even if you didn't pool all your points into combat skills, (which is the problem I started running into in Oblivion with my thief character - didn't spend enough time levelling up my close combat stuff and I never really caught up with the difficulty curve later on in the game...)

Anyway, I've said it before; but I'm still not convinced that a hypothetical Fallout 4 wouldn't be better off just doing away with skill levels pretty much altogether.

Well that's your opinion of course, not a fact - and not an opinion everyone shares, at that.



You never could loot armor from enemies in FO1 either.


Great post by UnDeCafIndeed, agree with all points :goodjob:

Indeed, I also don't know how it's keeping with the style and gameplay whe nboth the style and gameplay of FO3 is completely opposie of the originals. Iwould definately like to see a return to the character and combat mechanics work into FO4.

Not all NYC is Manhattan you know.

I think for songs, FO4 should have "What A Wonderful World", by Louis Armstro ng because it fits with the ironic theme caused by the music. Honestly, I feel FO4 will play like FO3, and turn-based play will only come back if they decide to make a handheld version.

Isn't that exactly the thing about a thief though? They're supposed to be sneaky & avoid all combat (that's why they don't have any close-combat skills as major)... if they're forced into single combat, they're usually toast (compar with Garrett from Thief).

Anyway, I did everything in Oblivion on level 2. It's much more immersive when all bandits/marauders stay in fur/iron armor instead of scurrying about in glass or daedric (lol) armor.

I would like to see the followers work even better than what my mod Phalanx does for Fallout 3, and for up to 5 to be able to be taken, and for the player character to remain properly balanced for the game in that event. The followers must use weapons that the player gives them, not having default weapons like FO3, and they should use them the way Phalanx forces them to right now. This means:

#1 determiner is if the follower has that weapon skill to begin with. Follower needs to be ineligible to use weapons for which they do not have the corresponding skill type. This is important, it forces the player to arrange his weapons meaningfully and intelligently on the follower. If there are no eligible weapons on the follower, the follower should showcase the problem in some way.

#2 determiner is distance to the target. This is critical to the player for ammo management and conservation.

#3 determiner only really comes into play if more than one weapon is present that matches that distance class. The choice would be hardcoded to select what the player would judge to be the "better" weapon among the selection that the follower has. This is where a DPS judgement could perhaps come into play.

#4 situation - if there's no distance-appropriate weapon on the follower, let the system default to #3 above - - player's fault at that point if the follower wastes ammo.

Followers must be stimmable by the player in combat and their weapons skills must be queryable.

Looking at how unmodified Fallout 3 works - - - it's necessary to cause some sort of control over followers to where they will not get super far away from the player when the player himself has not run away from the followers. Phalanx does this through giving the player a group-at-once command that cause followers to switch to a travel package and run back to the player. Fallout 4 might be able to handle this issue more gracefully.

Because of the way the game autosaves constantly and auto-reloads upon player death, something needs to be thought up to where when a follower dies, it's not like the game completely ignores it in comparison. This is because if followers are done right, and a player builds a character that is meant to work with them, each and every follower IS in fact essential to that game. Fallout 2 achieved this by giving the player exactly the same degree of 'essentialness' as the player. I'm not saying this is the correct solution for Fallout 4, but it should be understood that this must be handled right.

Melee-only non-bosslike followers should have their self-preservation AI working and tuned properly (such as Dogmeat / think Obedient Dogmeat mod). A super mutant who was configured to be good at unarmed however is a different story, and can be intentionally reckless if you so choose (heh).