I can go along with this... however, one of the Fallout (1) main design goals (originally) was to to be the best implementation of GURPS that they could manage on a computer. This plays a large part of why it is the way that it is (even though they lost the license, and it has nothing to do with GURPS anymore).


In context, where would this information have come from? In the very least [I think that] this idea should be reversed, and have the PC's skill at the task provide the extra bonus, and the player's success provide just the lowest tier of access. I still don't like it though :shrug:... (What if the minigame was like the intermission games in Street fighter, say the player was expected to tap their "V" and "M" keys to build up power for their PC's karate chop on a log or something? The PC is either an expert that should need no help, or a novice that should never succeed even with it. :shrug:).

Good post. Once again.

I'm kinda on the same boat with Stubs about being opinionated towards no minigames. I just like the aspect of things being unpredictable (to a degree). And, if using FO3 and Oblivion and their autoattempt buttons as an example, the minigames just were way too easy for it to feel like a sensible choice to press the autoattempt button.

I just haven't met a minigame that is enjoyable and unintrusive and non-repetitive (gambling minigames aside). Risen had a simplistic and fairly good try, though, that wasn't completely about playerskill. It wasn't the best possible thing, but it had potential.

I loves me some minigames. Awr that.

That makes sense. I believe that's roughly how Fallout 3 did it, as well (at least, it seemed like I was getting fewer "wrong" words to choose from in the hacking minigame, the more skill points I had above the threshold.) I'm also with you, at least in the sense that I don't think I've yet to see an RPG to something like this "right," thus far. What I had in mind (without getting too bogged down in details) was something a little more interconnected than that - where if you're going to pass that skill roll, you're going to "win" the minigame regardless. The "difficulty" being relative to your character's skill vs the difficulty of the task. But wherein at the same time, your own player skill helps to determine degree of success, or secondary values related to the task.

All that, of course, is sort of what I'd throw out there as what I'd like to see in an RPG, if we were to have minigames at all. I'm kind of the philosophy in my own armchair videogame designer role, that if you're going to have an element in the game at all, that it be not only properly integrated into the game - but also be equally integral to the overall design. If an element is only there for "immersion," then I don't think you're getting full value out of it - especially something (like lockpicking and hacking) that you're going to be doing a whole lot of throughout the course of the game. If you're just going to "slap something on," then the game's probably going to be better off without it.

And that's kind of where I'm at with the Fallout 3 minigames. I like them better than some of the other minigame examples to be found in other RPGs (Mass Effect and Fable 2 being - I found - underwhelming in that area.) But I still don't think we've stumbled across the ideal solution to this approach. I have yet to see an example of a task-based minigame in an RPG that I could really get behind (unless we're talking about the hacking segments in Shadowrun for the Genesis, if you want to call that a minigame.) But that doesn't mean that I wouldn't rule out the potential for a hypothetical system wherein character skill still takes precedence over player skill, while still allowing a large degree of interaction...

Which begs the question, should there be a large amount of interaction? I would say no, unless it is handled such that said interaction does not trump the character's skill. Otherwise, it is easy to run into the current situation where player skill is paramount and the only reason to increase one's skill at picking/hacking in FO3 is to be permitted to even try certain locks/comps at all. The latter item is something I would do away with completely, as it adds absolutely nothing and makes 24/25 points feel like a total waste since they do not matter at all for all intents and purposes.

Were it up to me, picking/hacking would be entirely based on the character's skills and even at the maximum possible level of skill you could still fail and potentially lock yourself out of whatever it is you are trying to break into. The player would still have control over the outcome, it simply would not be via direct action but rather by whether or not the player decided to increase the character's relevant skills to the point where there would be at least a reasonable chance of success. This system has the advantage of being much more flexible as well as allowing for the design of security measures meant to be difficult even for a character who is a master at it, since you don't need a preset amount of skill to attempt a lock/comp and thus can have difficulty ratings of 120, 150, or even higher.

As for the player feeling 'detached' as result, perhaps what is needed are animations that show the character working on the lock or comp while the skill check is being made. Of course, the actual check takes place nearly instantaneously which doesn't leave much time for the character's avatar to fiddle with the item in question, so I can see where this might feel a bit 'tacked on' if not handled carefully. I would also posit that the player feeling 'detached' is not a fault of a character skill-based system per se, but rather with the presentation thereof- in Fallout 1 and 2 success/failure was entirely character-based (save for bad placement of explosives if trying to blow down a door) but you got to see the character's sprite fiddling around with the item in question which at least gave the appearance of direct interaction therewith despite being almost totally 'hands off' during the actual process. If, on the other hand, the character just stands there like a lump, it can certainly feel like you're not doing anything even though you actually are despite not being able to see it directly.

It's something of a tricky question, since in this day of 3D graphics many people want to be directly involved in their characters' activities but at the same time player skill must take a back seat to character skill in order for character skill to actually matter, even if it means taking direct control of the outcome literally out of the player's hands.

Hes got a point, FONV will not truly be a RPG its an Action Adventure Roleplaying Game with many FPS characteristics.

AARPGFPSC

Or whatever acronym works best.

AWESOME would be a suiting acronym :3

Amazing
Wasteland
Emulation
Software
Of
Massive
Epicness

?

The lockpicking in Fallout 3 was an inconvenience.
The hacking was obnoxious and nothing more than a guessing game.
In all honesty I never want to see them in a Fallout title ever again.

hmm or

Awesome
Wasteland
Exploration
Software
Offering
Epicness

The lockpicking I didn't mind but the hacking ended up just being a guessing game and on harder terminals I would be stuck there for ages logging in and out to work out which it was

The addition of gambling doesn't really interest me as I'm not the gambling type and doubt someone just barely getting by would be willing to part with the small, precious currency they had (well, at least my character wouldn't)

So I'm pretty indifferent

There's an easy approach to hacking that takes all challenge out of pretty much any difficulty of console. Problem is that it requires that you write down all options, anolyze them to find out which one has the most in common with all the other options, and then when you click it, you can potentially eliminate a ton of options if it's failing. Then out of the remaining options, again pick the one which has the most letters in common with the other options, and again eliminate the impossible options. At this point there's probably only 1 or 2 options left. Click the one with the most common denominators again and if necessary, search for dud removals / retries in the console output.

It takes a while to do this by hand but you can also find online hacking tools or even an offline spreadsheet at the FO3nexus. By then you simply have to write down all the options in whatever tool you're using and then it will do the boring word anolysis work.

Still feels rather more like a chore than as a funny part of a game, at least to me. Haven't tried failing one yet, it simply takes an annoying amount of time. Same thing with lockpicking, truth be told. Much faster game but still guaranteed success. I've got some 60+ pins at this point in the game and usually they don't break. At this point, my character has hacked 43 computers and picked 145 locks and none of it was all that challenging. VH locks are annoying as they push your pin out of position and require insane angle accuracy, but it's still just a matter of patient probing and careful attention to pin angle. A good mouse isn't hurting either.


Pardon me for being blunt, but IMHO you're grasping a bit. A puzzle game is one where the player constantly has to solve puzzles. A few simple minigames repeated ad nauseam does not turn a game into a puzzler.

An adventure game is indeed about exploration but it's also about living through a fairly predetermined adventure. The developer tells a story and you have to pick the right options to live through to the end of said story.

Action games have a focus on presenting a lot of player-controlled action with possibly very little regard for player options or story telling. The important part tends to be some form of combat. Any game where 90% of your time is spent killing something that isn't you through personal controntations can reasonably be said to be action games. That's the complaint some people have against Neverwinter Nights, for instance. You simply run around, kill hordes of monsters, and every now and again there's a quest item that you need to bring to the right NPC, but beyond that you're really just running about, killing stuff.

A strategy game is one that focuses on your decision of what approach to take to destroy the enemy. Fliers or tanks or light infantry or a mix, and if so, what kind of mix? What targets will you attack? Rush early or go in with overwhelming force later?

RPGs are about pretending to be your player character. About defining who said character is and then acting accordingly. Is he a thug? Is he a bit psychopathic? Is he overly empathetic to the plight of others, to the point where he's downright gullible? Does he prefer controntations up front and personal or at a distance, through a good scope? Does size matter, or is it how you use what you have rather than how large what you have is? Are mines a useful tool to take out enemies or are they an immoral tool of total war that has spilled so much innocent blood that only a complete ass would consider using them for anything other than blowing people's pants off?

Questions galore and all somewhat relevant to determine what kind of person your character happens to be. What connects the player and the PC isn't that the player is doing some of the PC's tasks, it's that the PC is getting to pretend to be the PC within the context of the RPG. It's not that you get to do more stuff for the PC, it's that you get to be the PC altogether. You doing stuff for the PC actually ruins this immersion because you're supposed to see the PC as yourself. You and the PC are supposed to be one. It sounds silly, I know, but it's fairly addictive in practice.

There was recently a somewhat harsly worded "what is your faction" poll topic on FO3 general. The role-play is what provided that tone. The "enclaver bastards" in that topic were pretending to be actual post-war "patriots" whereas the other side was generally pretending to be post-war wastelanders with enough historical education to see through Eden's and Autumn's rhetoric and desire more than the Enclave offered. In other words, normal people like you and me having a fun time pretending to be someone we're really not, working from the perspective of our given roles rather than from the perspective of ourselves as individuals. That's roleplaying and a game that supports that sort of immersion is a roleplaying game.

don′t see why we can′t just pluck the characters eyes and put them in our own sockets, there perspective, our involvement.

This begs the question ~again... 'Why have a character at all; why name the PC, and why bother having any skills if the player can bypass them (a lock, say via minigame)?

As far as I am concerned* substitution is not the point of an RPG. (Minigames like the lockpick game promote player substitution / and subversion of the PC.) :shrug:


****Edit: But just to clarify things. I have nothing against minigames in the right context. For games that don't offer a PC to develop, minigames are great; but minigames in RPG's (IMO) should have no overlap with the PC aptitudes.

It's more like a repeatable side quest :mellow:
Like this quest:http://http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Murphy%27s_Bombing_Run
It's not purely repeatable, but you can give him Sugar Bombs you found every time you see one for caps.

By the way,
Nice idea, i agree with you :tops:

well I like it...old isometric RPG always had the issue in the end you felt like a partial observer, you where hovering over a bunch of dudes, moving them with a invisible hand.


That′s why I became insta fan of TES after my first hour playing Oblivion...not only could I create a character, but I could slip directly into his/her shoes, swing every sword swing and cast every spells, it was like being me and being someone else at the same time, no other RPG after that (well besides Fallout 3) have been better in my eyes.

We can, but that still doesn't justify why your skill is being used to determine the character's abilities with respect to hacking, lockpicking, or what have you. I can live with the shooter-elements and highly player controlled combat where character skills merely affect damage, wobbling, and to some extent spread, since Morrowind proved that missing 20 times in a row at point blank range against a mostly stationary target would frustrate a great many people, but outside of combat? If you want to be involved then let's make it a lockpicking simulation and remove any character lockpick skill entirely. You'll then have to grow the skill of pockpicking yourself.

Let's remove any character hacking skill entirely and have you do it like it's done in reality. Don't know how? Tough luck for you. You wanted to be involved and get the character's perspective, that's exactly what you'd be getting.

Playing a minigame generally doesn't offer you any actual perspective on the task you're accomplishing. Being able to write down 14 options that are 11 letters long each and anolysing them is easy (if slow) but that surely doesn't make me a master hacker. I wouldn't personally know the first thing about hacking a computer. As such, I'm glad that I'm not doing it personally, but rather my player character (who has studied the topic extensively) is doing it. That makes perfect sense to me and I'd be fine seeing some animation play to represent that my PC is hacking or lockpicking or whatever, but I really don't see why I should time and again play some minigame that doesn't have a thing to do with actual hacking in order to let my character use her skills that are in any case way superior to mine.

Nothing wrong with that... Though I should say that in several RPG's that detachment is intentional (and in my case its a preference).

I'll pass you a link to a real favorite of mine, that you might really like (a lot). It plays a bit like Oblivion with a harder edge for stats and skills (though it's world is much smaller, and entirely indoors ~but this makes sense in the game).

Spell casting is actually done by moving the hand; Alchemy is done by grinding up components and mixing them in an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alembic. Its a great game (and absurdly cheap at the moment). Zenimax just bought this company I believe. This game will surprise you, and it does a good job of putting the player in the shoes of the PC. http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/arx_fatalis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-sTHtNah80

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWsSmV2m-fw

***Edit: There are even undocumented spells that you can experiment to discover, possibly undocumented alchemy too.

I have mixed feelings about the hacking mini-game in FO3. If there was one thing about being able to raise most skills to 100% by level 30 in FO3 it's this, hacking is SO much easier when your Science is at 100%. I've only tried it on one character build but it does make a world of difference from say 50% where I usually keep it.

But yeah, hacking is kind of a pain and I rely more on luck than anything else because determining the right combo in your head can get boring sometimes...

As for the other mini games such as lock-picking, I didn't mind it so much. The only locks that were a real nuisance to me were the very hard locks, mostly because the tolerances for when the lockpick would break was really tight, and you really had to focus to make sure you got it right, but that required a bit more hand-eye skill than is normally required for an RPG. Listening for the clicks and getting vibration feedback from the PS3 dualshock controller also helps.

Still, I like FO3's lock picking system better than say Oblivion's, it just seemed more intuitive.

As to whether these mini games will get ported to FONV, personally I wouldn't mind if they do, since I'm pretty used to working with them in FO3, though it will probably be a bit more of a challenge since you won't be able to max your peripheral skills as much in FONV, I will probably not go higher than 50% or 75% in either Science or Lockpick and I'm hoping that skill mags will give a high enough boost to get me past the "Very Hard" locks and terminals...