» Fri Jul 17, 2009 11:30 am 
I have been reading this forum for the past day now and have seen a few good points. But now I have came to a point where I am more confused than when I first started, all be it with a few idea’s of my own that I wish to share with you all. Mainly about the combat system that seems to me to be the hard one to workout.
One thing that has not been made clear in this forum as far as I can see is what kind of game FOOL is going to be. Is it going to be a top down MMO, a third person or a first person MMO. Is it even going to be an RPG or a Real time shooter? I don’t know so all I can really do is speculate on the way I feel it will go. So given the platform Earthrise is on, I don’t think I would be too wrong in thinking that they will make Fallout a third person MMO with real time elements all be it highly restrained.
People have mentioned about the combat system and how will it work, suggesting a fully real time methods amongst others. I feel that this would not work given how Planetside was literally so lag filled even with all their high-end servers that they designed the game so that you could stand still and take about 60 rounds to the head before you would die. So the game just ended up a simple whoever has the highest level/more players wins scenario, tactics and skill of play or even luck had nothing to do with the game, something I feel goes against what fallout stands for. I feel that the best way from every angle I can see would be to follow the tradition of Fallout and make the battles very tactical all be it in a real time world.
The problem I can see from this is, how on earth do you make something real-time highly tactical? You can’t just freeze everyone on the map, level or section every time something or someone is attacked. That would not only be highly distracting but very inefficient use of every players time. The way I feel it should be done, if at all possible is by creating something that I would term a “localized time bubble”. Something that traps each instance of each small battle frozen in it's own time. The rest of the world goes on like normal around this bubble, but inside it things are frozen in a tactical face off that you and many friends and or enemies can battle in.
Now how I feel the player should encounter this bubble is in much the same way you would a battle anyway, if you get noticed by the enemy, you and your fellow players are pitted in this time bubble to attack as the game designers see fit. If you sneak up on the enemy without it or them noticing you then you get to manually start the bubble yourself, allowing first attack and or surprise first attack. The way I feel this should work with other players too is that you and your squad should be as one, getting in to the same battles as each other, with the ability to enable if you wished third party entry in to your bubble, this could be disabled and enabled as the player sees fit of course.
The bubble it’s self I see as something that is visible that the player and maybe all other close players can see. A visible border rather than a visible bubble would look better showing a boarder from where either other players can enter if you and they wish and you can flee to if needed to escape the battle and run for the hills.
This is the main part of my idea and if you are bored you can stop reading now, following are just more thoughts on how I can imagine the battles working. But if you have managed to get this far, then I must thank you for reading
In the time bubble I can imagine battles going as such, NPC’s and enemies will of course be instant, but players and your teams will have say a number which would not be too far from 10 seconds (could be adjustable slightly by player or group, for slower or handicapped players), maybe even longer on the first turn to set up all your weapons if needed and to set your targets up. You should have a personal amount of action points that like in the past Fallout games allows you to either move around with what I feel should be an action point bar that slowly lower as you move (rather than moving blocks of space) and fire as many times as you can with the points left.
In my opinion I believe this way will serve to maintain the historic feel of the Fallout’s of past while enabling the game world to become real time for all players. Not only will this make this game differ from all the other MMO games out there, in that you can freeze time in battles. But will also allow the players that did not like the frantic icon mashing of the likes of World of Warcraft to enjoy this game a lot more. I feel that it will also be extremely friendly for new and slower players to get in to. And could also allow the elimination of the sink or swim aspect for the games user base and could potentially eliminate the tedium that the extremely easy first enemy’s bring, after all, when has the start of any MMO’s you have played to date been extremely enjoyable? I feel that an MMO should just be as fun in the first moments as it is in the end game.
After all if you blow the players socks off at the start of a game, then it is all the more easy to keep them off, rather than struggling to get them off later after the player has grown accustomed to them. "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
