In Fallout 2, IIRC, the enemies were zoned so that the end-game area contained the most powerful enemies. The mainquest drove you through the zones so that if you followed the tips the game got harder on the way accordingly. You could of course go straight there from the beginning and even survive, but in battles you were butchered without a chance. I think there was no levelscaling whatsoever, so you were required to level up and get stronger in order survive in battles unlike F3 where the MQ areas are scaled to the player. (I may remember wrong, so someone with better knowledge correct me)

Imo the best way would be, like you said, somewhat similiar to what OOO did to Oblivion, harsh world where one really has to pay attention to what he does and where he goes. Scrap the levelscaling.

More over, there should be more options in the difficulty menu. Letting people tailor the game to best suit their desires. Advanced skillset and casual, normal healing procedures and advanced ones, difficultysetting affects the amount of enemies and gives hit to starting skills and stuff like that. A lot of work and balancing, but if they should succeed the result could well be good.

The old Fallouts were actually somewhat like what Fallout 3 did. Like UnDeCafIndeed said - they were levelled by zone, so that if you wandered into the wrong area, you'd find things were pretty tough, but once you'd levelled up enough you could walk right through certain areas without a scratch. I generally prefer this sort of thing over the "everything levels with you" thing they did in Oblivion. Because when it's done that way, I never feel like I'm getting ahead.

In Oblivion, for example, I tried being a thief-type, going for long-range sneak attacks as often as possible. But it never proved that effective of a tactic, because no matter how much I raised my Bow skill, or how awesome my bow and arrows got, I still couldn't make more than the occasional one-hit kill. (Which is the entire point of spending the extra time staying hidden and lurking through dungeons.) And since I was focusing so much on those skills, it took me a really long time to increase my melee skills enough to the point where I was able to deal with the enemies that I had barely damaged with my bow and had to deal with in a more convential way (which was most of the time, unless I could get myself up to a location where they couldn't reach me - a la the Arena...)

But like I said, for me it's less about the challenge, and more about just feeling like I'm always advancing. Fallout 3, for instance, even on the hardest difficulty level I didn't find I died any more often than on Normal - it just took me longer to get through the enemies. (And before people start defending it - I am aware that Fallout 1 and 2 were guilty of this to the same extent, as well. Though those games were more unforgiving in general - I died a lot on normal; and I died a lot on hard, as well.)

To bring this a little bit more on topic - what I liked about Fallout 2 was that there was really no need for a level cap (I think it was like 99 or something - basically you were never going to hit a brick wall.) And skills went up to 300. It's worth noting that these are just numbers. What I liked about Fallout 2 wasn't that my character could be 3 times better at Small Guns than I could in Fallout 3, but that I always had areas I could keep improving on.

The easiest fix I can see to the level cap problem you have in Fallout 3, would simply be to triple the skill cap. That way there's always skills I can spend points on. And it offers even more customizability, as well. If I wanted to have 100 in every skill, being a jack of all trades, I could do that. And if I wanted to be more focused in a few areas, I would be free to do that, as well. Plus, you wouldn't have to worry about the level cap at all - especially if like in Fallout 1 and 2, skills past 100 cost double points.

That's the main problem I found I had in Fallout 3. The first time through, I wasn't thinking ahead at all. I figured those Skill Boost Perks were something that would come in really useful, so I picked a bunch of those in the beginning of the game - as well as the Perks that increased my skill points. I was still in "old Fallout" mode, and was trying to make a very specialized character that made up for a lack of combat ability with the supplementary skills. But by level 20, I had run out of options. I had long since maxed out the skills I actually used, and was putting points into skills like Big Guns, which I never once used. I just needed to put those points somewhere.

My second time through, I actually had to min/max more than I normally would, just so that I didn't end up with a min/maxed character at the end. Sure, I had an 8 in INT, and I raised it up to 9 and then just by exploring found the Bobblehead without really looking for it. But I was roleplaying an Intelligent character - a lower INT wouldn't have made sense. (Besides, it would have ruled out my coming across the INT speech options, which was sort of the whole point in the first place.)

It didn't "ruin" the game, and I still had fun both times, but it's still not what I would have thought as ideal.

To emphasize, though. I think that simply raising the skill cap would give more options. The level cap is really just there because after a certain level you're guaranteed to run out of places to spend skill points. With higher skill caps, the level cap becomes irrelevant. And this seems to be a common complaint about Fallout 3 - people like gaining levels. And I doubt most of them want more levels just so that they can max out that last skill. It's simply that advancement in itself is a fun part of an RPG. It's the "carrot" that leads you through the game. You partake in side missions for their own sake, but also for the extra encouragement of getting some reward for your troubles. It's not the only reason, but it's a reason, in and of itself. And 300 in Small Guns need not be so completely overpowered, either. Again, it's just numbers. 300 could mean whatever you want it to mean - you just have to rebalance the game to take those extra skill levels into account. Not to mention that the work required to get a full 300 in a skill probably ought to be rewarded by making you needlessly deadly with that skill...

Hey the difficulty in higher character levels is absolutely on topic in a thread about character development
That's pretty much the whole point: how to maintain a consistent amount of challenge throughout the game with the highest possible variety of character builds.



Oblivion’s greatest ‘sin’ as I see it, is that introduced a large amount of limitations in a series which’s main appeal was that it rejects limits as used in most RPGs (i.e. every ES game I have has a characteristic example on the intro in the manual: the fact that, unlike most other RPGs, if you so wish, you can play a mage wearing heavy armor – in Oblivion they added spellcasting penalties for characters that wear heavy armor, thus making their most unique feature much less relevant)
+ Absolute level-scaling is just the ‘lazy’ solution to the problem – in that extend it’s just pointless and uninteresting.
Nevertheless the ES philosophy of character development is completely different than Fallout’s and they shouldn’t be ‘mixed’ (and I say that even though I definitely am a fan of it)



That could be ideal, but how likely is it that the game will be designed in such a way as to be able to support the various results but maintaining a similar level of challenge for all? – I mean look how FO2 was: If you get your weapon skill up to 300 ignoring most of the rest then you will breeze through the hardest parts of the game, whereas if you get your science skill up to 300 then you get an extra inconsequential message from a terminal at the end of the game!

Ultimately to use successfully such a system where all skills are treated as ‘equal’, it is necessary to adjust the game to the skills so as for all of them to be as crucial. i.e. if I am to raise science in 300 then I need to have the choice to use it to overcome every possible situation in the game… well… if not every one, then at least the vast majority of them.
Still most 'versatile' problems usually allow 2 potential ways to solve them:
1. the violent way, where you just shoot anything you need until you get to your goal (use of 1 fighting skill)
2. the non-violent way, which may require a combination of non-fighting skills such as speech, science, sneak, lockpicking etc. depending on the situation.
And that pretty much tells me that ‘all skills are equal but some skills are more equal than the rest’. That is true for any RPG I’ve played – yet in some of them, that ‘inequality’ is successfully reflected on the skill system.

Yet being as democratic as I am (:D) I hope the problem will be eventually overcome by creating a dynamic world that will allow unforeseen, imaginative solutions to its problems. But as I don’t see that happening too soon, I’d rather see a skill system more ‘aware’ of the potentials of the world it’s going to be used in. (I think Morrowind came closest to giving an illusion of such a world, yet it was hardly dynamic – it just had enough to do so you wouldn’t easily feel that you were missing out on anything)



Edit: btw... Hey abnaxus? Syberia is amazing!!

Besides skills like science or lockpicking, your firepower is almost the same over all the game. What is worse is the ridiculous big amount of skills points the vanilla game awards each level. With BS level 30, you end with almost all skills at 100.

Didn't Morrowind also penalize your magic ability for wearing heavy armor? It's been quite some time since I've played, but I seem to remember thinking that's why shoulder were so cool...

Yeah, I know what you mean. That was the old Fallout's problem, as well - there was a clear benefit to raising up skills like Small Guns, etc; and very little point for doing so with the supplementary skills. To the extent that my first time through Fallout 2 playing as a Science-y character, I thought a Science of 100 would serve me perfectly well for depicting me as a master scientist, only to find out that what I really needed was something closer to 120-something or so. (Which was around the time that I discovered Character Editors... ) The real "fail" with that game was not that there was a use for Science, etc skills over 100 - but that they suprised you with it. It looks like there's no point in bringing it past a certain level; and then suddenly there is.

I agree with your idea about unforeseen solutions, etc.

Anyway, it's one thing to have a ruleset that allows more customization and options without imposing a brick wall to halt character advancement. It's another entirely to successfully figure out what to do with those skills. That's kind of why I like the "everything's a Perk or Trait," idea, actually. Because you could not only have a set number of "Perk/Trait Levels" to correspond to the relative skill levels in the original system, but you could also add supplementary Perks associated with those skills. Ones that don't necessarily make you more likely to succeed at a given task, but help you with it's completion or make you more efficient at it. Like if, for example, Repairing items required various amounts of scavenged materials - there could not only be "Repair 1-4" Perks, but also ones that cut down on the amount of resources you need, or make you more likely to find those resources in the first place. So you might not be terribly good at Repairing, but you're able to do it more often or waste more material because you're always good at finding stuff.

Really, I think one thing I'd like to see is just making those supplementary skills more involved. I'm not saying to bring in the "Influence" mini-game for Speech encounters. But a dialogue tree is sort of a mini-game to begin with, after all. When you get right down to it, combat in an RPG is basically a mini-game as well; with the meta-game being what you do in between all this stuff. And combat in Fallout 3 (and 1 and 2) is pretty involved. If Repairing, placing traps, healing, hacking, and talking where as involved as the shooting aspect; then that would go a long way towards balancing out their usefulness, as well.

No. In Morrowind the difference is one could fail casting a spell.


With minor additions one can already do much - for science, for example a 'time limit' to hack computers could be added and/or make it impossible to simply exit the mini-game and retry if you fail 4 of your 5 attempts... or attempting to repair a weapon with a low skill level should be able to render the weapon useless if one 'fails'. Or trying to disarm an explosive and having it blow up in your hands with low explosives skill.

Skills as they are now are handled exactly the same as in Oblivion, with the difference that there are 'thresholds' one needs to reach in skill level... I think one should be able to attempt anything at any level, but with large possibility to fail if one does so (and possibly with dire consequences too).

That's what I was thinking, too. I'm not fond of those "thresholds," for one - it sort of goes against the point of having a skill level as opposed to proficiency points. And it wouldn't take much, like you said, to add in some more functionality to existing skill interactions. You know what I'd kind of like to see is occasionally having to Repair a terminal to get it working, and then using Science to try and reconstruct it's database.

I understand that, (though to comment on your specific example I'd note that the time-limit is more of an 'action' element - since the chance of succeeding depends on player skill as well, thus I'd rather that wouldn't happen )
+ The penalty for failure (and as severe as rendering the weapon useless) is a pretty sensitive matter -- failure just begs you to reload, and the temptation might be too great sometimes. For that reason I'd rather I'd just get a tiny bonus for for low skill.

In fact I think that such penalties for failure would be more inconvenient than anything else - example: if I really want to open a lock, and my lockpicking skill is such that I have low chance of succeeding and high chance of jamming the lock forever, and if I am determined to not reload but live with the consequences, then I would just leave it alone until later in the game when I will have increased my skill enough to guarantee success. That might sound like a sensible approach but it would result in no-fun backtracking - and I might just find that there's really nothing of interest behind that lock... which would be frustrating.

(btw I thought the default-take-20-outside-of-combat as used in Neverwinter Nights was a brilliant idea - if there's any chance of success then you succeed at first attempt so as to avoid repeating an action over and over and/or reloading - critical failures with penalties may only happen within combat where it would be far less likely to be tempted to reload and more likely to decide to take a risk)


The main difference with Oblivion, that I noticed, is that FO3 won't even let you try if your skill isn't at high enough -- I suppose that the purpose of that was to avoid situation such as opening a very hard lock with minimal lockpicking skill just because you could beat the minigame. Essentially that's another 'lazy' solution as it makes the minigames in FO3 obsolete and pointless... yet the way it was handled in Oblivion was also insufficient, I think, since it makes the skills obsolete and pointless instead! I don't think there could be a successful 'middle ground' solution here... a different approach is required: either have a minigame and no skill check (action aproach) - or have a skill check and no minigame (RPG aproach). (ultimately I prefer the Oblivion way as it combines player and character skill - while FO3 is first character skill then player skill... too separate - but it ends up taking way too much time wich is dull)

Not sure what you mean here... who would try to pick a lock within combat?

I don't remember NWN, but in NWN 2 one didn't automatically roll a 20 when picking a lock or disarming a trap outside combat, so repeating actions did happen - as well as setting off traps upon failure.

Heh... You won't pick a lock inside combat of course - It means that any roll of dice, for any task, outside combat resulted always in a natural 20 - inside combat chance worked as chance is expected to work. since dice rolls happen all the time in such games - picking locks, chance to hit etc. - it means that if you couldn't pick a lock, or translate a text (lore) etc. while not in combat, in the first attempt, then you couldn't do it at all... no reason to waste time trying again - within combat however, if you failed to hit an enemy, or say, lay a trap for the enemy who comes towards you, you could possibly succeed if you tried again (the dice rolls results displaying on the screen could help you figure out your chances)
I haven't yet decided to play NWN2 so I don't really know if Obsidian changed that but that's definitely how NWN1 worked (at least for most of the time - maybe some actions, like stealing, where exceptions I don't remember)