Fallout 3: RPGCodex Predictions (Updated)

dagorkan · Feb 23, 2007

OK, I thought this is something all you Bethesda haters could get into which is actually constructive. Please keep your venom/rabidity in check just for a while and post serious, predictions only. Not just 'combat will suck' but more specific things eg they'll get rid of aimed shots, all weapons will be the same, no knockdown etc.

Then maybe somebody can do a compilation, Newspost: "Official RPGCodex predictions". That way when the game comes out the Codex can say 'told you so!' Or not.

Some predictions to get the ball rolling: (copied from here - I agree with them - except they get increasingly rabid toward the end, bad examples but I'm too lazy to cut them out)

- You'll be able to join every faction most likely, even if you belong to a completely opposed one or you shouldn't normally be able to join them. Basically mutants in the Brotherhood of Steel, and being able to join both the NCR and Brotherhood with the same character.

- Somehow you will invariably become the leader of a faction after being their errand boy for about a week or so.

- A scientist who joins a faction will probably be given the same missions as any other character and will be unable to progress unless they complete that mission. Because it makes so much sense to send a diplomat to clear out a radscorpion infestation...

- Quests will no longer have multiple, varied methods of completion, instead being only solvable by killing something (like in Oblivion). [multiple quest solutions out]

- Perception will be rendered useless because aiming will be dependant on the player's twitch skills. [they will cut the 'P' - and maybe others - out of SPECIAL]

- Many of the skills will probably be "consolidated."

- Radiation will be used to explain magic being used in the Fallout setting.

- There will no longer be any variance to killing your enemy. They will simply stop moving and drop to the ground.

- There will be the choice of mutant and ghoul at character creation [don't agree with this]

- Lockpicking will now take five times longer and when your done all you'll get is a pocket fluff. [will be a lockpicking 'game' (reflexes), illogical loot]

- Bethesda's lack of stepping on the toes of the ESRB will abolish Mentants, Psycho, Buffout, and all forms of booze...Nuka-Cola will still be allowed but instead of being addictive it'll make you belch, which fits Bethesda's humor.

- Vulgarity will be replaced with made up words.

- The blood aspect will be removed, so that critical aimed shot to the arm will be a groan followed by a collapse.

- After Bethesda's accomplishment of making the rocks in Fallout 3 more "real" they forget to add a actual story....in haste they write ten minutes of dialogue and hire an actor that somebody in their staff has a hard-on for.

- Children will no longer exist in Fallout 3 as NPC's are too busy staring at walls or having the same boring conservations with each other or walking in and out of shops for no apparent reason. [won't be children for 'moral' reasons]

- Bethesda will boast it's accomplishments in teaser vids, then when the game comes out none of it is to bee seen. [hype and content won't match]

- Bethesda's assumption that every video gamer has had the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy will now makes quests even easier! Yes indeed, now your Pip-Boy will have a handy-dandy compass that will point you straight to it....and if that wasn't enough the NPC's will have each and every detail down to the letter! [pipboy redesigned, stuff like fast travel, quest pointers etc]

- Lots of NPCs that have no reason to exist, and nothing interesting to say. In fact there will be so many of these characters that talking to anybody at all will be pointless as there will be a 99.9% chance this will be the case. Thus you play the whole game not talking to anyone, and miss out on the few quests there are.

- Massive loading times everytime you enter a house or even just another room in a house [due to grafixes]

- Any skill system that is dependent on use of the skill and not experience points from quests. The farce in Oblivion of disintegrating your armour just to repair/ letting yourself get beat up just so you can heal yourself/ fixing your controller to run into a wall overnight while you sleep all just to gain skills, rather than by actually playing the game.

- The game levels up with you (enemy difficulty, loot etc), which ends up in a farce where you try and avoid gaining experience as the extra difficulty just is not worth the extra skill points. Thus ultimately undermining the real motivation and ultimately fun of an RPG game.

- Every city will allow you to buy a car, but you'll be unable to attack while inside your vechicle, and there'll be a fast travel option anyway.

- Armoured cars will be cut from the game, then released a week after the game comes out, and will cost about $2. [there will be 'premium addons']

- Most of the skills will be cut from the game. Those that remain will either be irrelevant due to player skill (ie. aiming), or there'll be an item that makes the skill redundant (ie. an unbreakable lockpick).

- Successful use of your skills will now be determined by mindless minigames, especially during conversations. [won't be dialog trees, will be eg bribe/seduce option regardless of context]

- Player dialogue will consist of listening to an NPC crap on, then repeating a single word that the NPC said back to him, allowing the NPC to continue crapping on. Other dialogue options incluse "Rumours" and "Goodbye". [ie dumbed down]

- Players won't want to sell half of their weapons, because no merchant will carry enough money to be of any use.

- At higher levels, every bandit you meet will be wearing Advanced Power Armour Mk. II, yet still only demand 100 caps from you. [level scaling]

- At the end of the game, civilisation as you know it will collapse, every friendly NPC will die, and you won't get to fight the game's villain.

- Humans, mutants, ghouls and robots will all be playable races. Aside from the ocassional, randomised greeting to a member of your race and a few stat differences, all of the races play in exactly the same way. Nothing in the game is race-exclusive.

Some of my own:

1/ Facegen type thing in character generation which will only produce weirdo faces.

Reason: letting a computer program instead of artists generate faces is easier. Also aesthetic 'total customization' is now a central part of whole immersive roleplaying. If they didn't a lot of people would criticize them. FaceGen is a well-known brand.

2/ Weapon skills reorganized in a bad way. Eg Big guns, Small guns and Energy weapons merged.

Reason: less complexity, 'casual' gamers have complained of RPGs where they don't know how to spend their CPs.

3/ First person view everywhere (except world map maybe)

Reason: immersion again. There will probably be an alternative 3rd person Gothic-style view but the game will be designed for FP use. Also it will be necessary to aim guns properly since combat will be at least partly twitch-based.

4/ Realtime combat

Bethesda has never done a TB game that I know of. There is a widely held belief that that guns and TB don't mix. Also, TB slows down a game a lot which most gamers would have a problem with. All of Bethesda's games are designed to be 'jump in, jump out', and combat is kept short and 'actiony'.

5/ 'Continuous world' - you can travel everywhere in the same perspective (probably FP).

It's been a design principle for a decade. With MMOs being so popular and taking over the RPG market people expect that kind of thing. Also Bethesda's reputation is mostly based on the 'freeform', go anywhere/do anything ethos. Even if there's no reason to visit most of the thousands of square kilometers of desert they'll put them in for 'make your own story' types. Go out into the wasteland and fight hundreds of random encounters, add the actual content/plot-reasons in your head.

Lord Chambers · Feb 24, 2007

This is a really good thought exercise. It's easy to spout some quips from thread to thread without ever asking yourself if you really believe things will turn out that way. "Oblivion with guns" for instance.

1. At the moment I agree that the world is likely to be continuous. I think Bethesda prizes exploration too much to have a separate travel screen and random encounters like in Fallout. I doubt the world will be infested like Oblivion, where you can't jump over a log without falling over a dungeon, but I do think the setting lends itself to having weird/cool stuff out in the wastes and off the maps, like raider camps, city ruins, and abandoned vaults. I believe that they will likely try to take on the geographic span of the game, that is, hundreds of miles of Southern California, instead of the comparatively claustrophobic Cyrodiil, but at the moment I don't see how they'll fill in all that space, since I believe they'll let you First Person foot it across. Maybe you get a humm-vee or something.

2. Combat will be realtime. However, you will have a wide aiming recital that represents your accuracy. This way players will aim with their own skill, but your actual ability to hit will be determined with player skill. The visible wideness of the recital is important to prevent frustration like apparently players felt when "hitting" things with their swords in Morrowind. They need to understand and see why they miss. I doubt that your firearm skills will determine damage as they do in Oblivion, though melee weapon skills will. Since there isn't an easy visual means for conveying why you miss in first person melee, the developers probably won't let you.

3. Your view will be first-person.

4. The plot will consist not of a single quest like to recover a chip or GECK, but to make something of yourself in the post-apocalyptic world. There will be no strong, unifying, central narrative. You will have post-apoc-equivalent guilds to join, quests(missions) to take, and ranks to rise. Interestingly, the post-apoc setting justifies the kind of go-anywhere, kill-stuff-for-loot gameplay than a medieval fantasy world. And since Bethesda "knows what [they're] good at" they'll stick to that formula, rather than go a more Bioware route.

The things I question are whether you will have NPC companions. If combat is realtime, will you have any means of controlling them, such as giving them a strategy before combat? If it is phased then I bet it will be like Mass Effect, where you're able to switch control to another character and plot his actions, then resume play. But since I think combat will be straight-forward realtime, perhaps they'll make the horrendous decision to not let you pick up party members. Instead, they'll probably let you have NPC companions, but implement their AI so horribly as to render them nothing more than useless bullet shields or sources of humor. They will be so dumb and useless in combat that boards will be filled with criticism of the terrible AI. "Ian keeps trying to knife the deathclaws why?!11" "Sally keeps hitting me with her throwing knives." "Dog keeps humping my leg lol." Oops, did my cynicism slip out?

Sovy Kurosei · Feb 24, 2007

The number of skills for Fallout will very likely be reduced. Here is what I am guessing they will be like:

Small guns, big guns and energy weapons will be consilidated into one gun skill. Melee will absorb the unarmed skill. Throwing will be removed altogether. First aid and doctor will become one skill, probably called first aid or medic. Sneak and steal will probably be merged into one skill. Lockpicking will remain. Traps skill will be removed. Science and Repair will both be removed. Speech will be merged with the barter skill. Gambling will be removed. Outdoorsman will probably be renamed to something else. The total amount of skills will be seven. The attributes that govern the remaining skills would be:

Strength - Melee
Perception - Guns
Endurance - Outdoorsmanship (or whatever its new name would be) or some kind of MacGuyver skill.
Charisma - Speech
Intellect - Medic
Agility - Sneak
Luck - Lockpicking

If Bethesda is going to include additional races they will probably have: Humans, mutants and ghouls. Possibly robots and deathclaws and the reason for the latter is to not disappoint their furry fanbase.

Ah, yeah. That is just my guess that I pulled out of my ass.

User was nabbed fit · Feb 24, 2007

- Perception will be rendered useless because aiming will be dependant on the player's twitch skills. [they will cut the 'P' - and maybe others - out of SPECIAL]

Personally, I think Perception will be kept in, and that it'll effect how accurate you are.

Here are my thoughts for the other skills (just guesses):

Strength.
Will be in: carry weight, attack bonuses in mÃªlÃ©e and unarmed combat.
Won't be in: determining if you can intimidate someone in dialog with a specific reply. Determining whether you can move certain objects (for example, rocks blocking your path to a door), like you could in Fallout (sometimes you had to use dynamite if you didn't have enough Strength).

Perception:
Will be in: accuracy modifier.
Won't be in: determining if you can notice certain details about people or objects (and then being able to follow up on those things either through an action or through dialog).

Endurance:
Will be in: max HP, HP gain per level, how long you can run/sprint for.
Won't be in: anything determining whether your character can do something or not. Example: in F2, you had to have a minimum amount of Strength AND Endurance to beat a certain Super Mutant in arm wrestling.

Charisma:
Will be in: initial reactions, party member limit.
Won't be in: whether the opposite sex likes you more or less depending on your level in this.

Intelligence:
Will be in: skill points per level, certain dialog options (if dialog options will be present, haha).
Won't be in: determining if you can get certain quests or not (Beth will want you to be able to do all the quests), determining if you can accomplish a certain action or not (see previous).

Agility:
Will be in: how fast you can move, how high you can jump.
Won't be in: chances enemy has to hit you.

Luck:
Will be in: chance of critical hits.
Won't be in: determining whether your character manages to pull something off or not. Example: in Fallout 2, you had to have a high amount of Luck to pass the citizenship test in Vault City.

Edit: again, this is just my opinion/feeling, but I don't think that Bethesda will actually be doing any cutting/merging of skills in Fallout 3. Merging maybe, but nothing drastic, I think.

dagorkan · Feb 24, 2007

Yeah I don't think they'll have just seven skills. Also I agree they'll try to do a compromise between twitch gaming and roleplaying with an aiming reticule.

Another prediction:

6/ Oblivion 'cinematic'-type dialog system. You see people talking (in real time) and it's in the same view as the ordinary exploration/combat with a few speech options to click on at the bottom. Or maybe it will be in 3rd person mode (so you see both yourself and your partner talking). Voice acting will of course be in. So it won't be like Morrowind or Fallout where a new interface opened up.

I'm sure they'll take out level scaling given how big an issue it's been in their official fanbase.

Diogo Ribeiro · Feb 24, 2007

Deathclaw hookers.

kingcomrade · Feb 24, 2007

There will be mostly real-world weapons rather than fictional weapons, a la Fallout 2. There will be no justification for the damage the weapons do. It will be Pistol +1, Pistol +2, Pistol+3, and so on.

Deathclaw Hookers

Texas Red · Feb 24, 2007

Your character will have special magickal/parapsychological powers that will be explained with some radiation exposure accident.

Stalagmite · Feb 24, 2007

I can't predict a damn thing because we have very little info on the game.

Who knows what Bethesda will pull out of their ass, there is a possiblity that it might be a damn fine game (although O's success is definately not helping us any).

My mind draws blanks because we have VERY little info on the game and it is NOT an Elder Scrolls game.

Castanova · Feb 24, 2007

It will be titled "STALKER"

dagorkan · Feb 24, 2007

The idea is to be able to predict based on how Bethesda works and the direction the game industry is going in. It's not just wild guesses.

Eg we know turnbased is out, isometric is out (it just wouldn't be possible, and IGN, Gamespot would not know how to take it. If they accept it that means they have to revise all their propaganda against TB/Iso and admit there was something about Arcanum, Fallout etc and compare them to modern RPGs). We know cinematic dialog because that's what all the 'competitors' are doing, 'continuous world' is a pretty solid guess because every retard out there seems to think it = IMMERSHUN etc. Pretty sure the chargen/stats/skills will be dumbed down because people complain about 'too much math' in existing ARPGs.

But what else can we know?

Nutcracker · Feb 24, 2007

Facegen is the biggest waste of time and money. I got pissed off before i even started the game because it took me half an hour to make a character who didnt look like he had downs syndrome. Not to mention the general retardness of the way the NPC's look, especially the emperor. And yeah i fucking hated that gay "zoom up to their ugly face" thing whenever i had a conversation. So yeah, throw that in too.

serch · Feb 24, 2007

You`ll have to go jumping everywhere with that fucking stupid level-up system.

DarkUnderlord · Feb 24, 2007

Combat will suck.

Stalagmite · Feb 24, 2007

dagorkan said:
The idea is to be able to predict based on how Bethesda works and the direction the game industry is going in. It's not just wild guesses.

Well if that's the case, all we could possibly predict is, you guessed it, Oblivion with guns. What else is there to say?

JarlFrank · Feb 24, 2007

You will get the features of "Auto-travel-to-questgoal" which brings up a window everytime you start a quest, asking you "Do you want to go to the quest goal? Yes/No" and if you click yes, it teleports you to it.

If you die three times in a row because the enemy is too hard, there comes the "Auto-enemy-vanquisher" which asks you "It seems that this enemy is too hard for you. Do you want to kill him? Yes/No" and if you klick yes, the enemy just dies in a bloody mess. After that, there comes a window saying "Well done, brave warrior!" so the kiddies feel like it was their accomplishment, and not that of the Auto-Enemy-Vanquisher.

Lumpy · Feb 24, 2007

"- A scientist who joins a faction will probably be given the same missions as any other character and will be unable to progress unless they complete that mission. Because it makes so much sense to send a diplomat to clear out a radscorpion infestation... "
Yes, definitely stupid. Good thing Fallout 1 wasn't like that.

hiciacit · Feb 24, 2007

Re: Fallout 3: RPGCodex Predictions

dagorkan said:
- There will no longer be any variance to killing your enemy. They will simply stop moving and drop to the ground.

NO!!! They will have ragdolls!

Delirious Nomad · Feb 24, 2007

But is it safe to say it will be released at all ? Or do you see a chance of Bethesda coming up in a year telling they have to ice the project ?
I'd still prefer a shitty to a non-released Fallout 3.
It'd be hard to live without turn based combat and an isometric perspective, but the worst you can do to a RPG is making opponents level with you.

Vault Dweller · Feb 24, 2007

Delirious Nomad said:
I'd still prefer a shitty to a non-released Fallout 3.

Then you won't be disappointed.

Delirious Nomad · Feb 24, 2007

Yeah, I know, but the Interplay/Black Isle/Troika days are gone.

Vault Dweller · Feb 24, 2007

Really? Where?

gromit · Feb 24, 2007

dagorkan said:
admit there was something about Arcanum, Fallout etc

Didn't you get the memo? It's now hip to miss BIS and Troika, even if you just confuse them both for Bioware.

Zomg · Feb 24, 2007

Don't get too aggressive with the lol predictions. It was pretty neat that the Codex gestalt was aggressively correct in its interpretation of pre-Oblivion hype, and there were a lot of people that had become so vaporlocked with hypethusiasm that the cognitive dissonance in their actual experience flipped them over into Codex Stockholm Syndrome.

Severian Silk · Feb 24, 2007

Oh noes! Teh lolz will ruin teh Codex!

Fallout 3: RPGCodex Predictions (Updated)

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