MatSpikeYinsen Posted April 30 Posted April 30 (edited) Playing this game nearly nonstop for two straight years, both by myself and "backseat gaming" with my disabled aunt who has few other uses for her time, has given me a number of ideas for how to expand and fix up the game. I have no technical skills to make my own mods, but maybe someone who's good at the programming and less good at the creative idea brainstorming could help me bring this vision to life. If not, though, well it's a fun project to just make a list of things I'd like to see, regardless of how unlikely it is I'll ever see them. These ideas are loosely sorted by how much work I think they'd be to implement (changing the sale price of an item is probably quite easy for anyone who knows anything, I'd imagine, while adding a completely new character to the game would require tons of effort, if it wasn't altogether impossible, even if you went without things like hiring a voice actor to record their lines). I will add ideas here as I think of them, and also refine ideas to be more detailed and the like. In no particular order: * Items fired from the Rock-It Launcher will do various amounts and types of damage depending on their shape and composition, with most notably the Iron doing far and away the most damage due to its weight; edged and pointy objects also hit harder and may pierce armor. Glass objects do extra damage but are less likely to survive the impact and be recoverable. Contrary to the game dialog suggesting teddy bears as an option, these are either removed or do significantly reduced damage (after all they're soft). The option of firing weightless Pre-War Money is likely removed, but if it remains present, it is virtually guaranteed to be destroyed after hitting or missing its target, as the stacked bills scatter to the four winds; other items that should be especially durable have better chances of surviving, and/or take more time to disappear, while flimsy things like Coffee Mugs and Clipboards are more likely to shatter and take less time to despawn. * The Metal Cooking Pan doubles as a low-grade melee weapon, like the Rolling Pin. Both of these do double damage in the hands of a female character, and quadruple damage if she wears a Pre-War Casual or Springwear costume at the time. Yes this is both jokey and dated, no I don't care. * Bloatfly attacks do continuous poison damage second only to a radscorpion's, making them not a nuisance but a sigificant threat (as a result they give slightly more XP, but mostly they're just being made less irrelevant). * Radscorpions are confirmed to be baby Giant Radscorpions, and when you find a nest of one Giant and several regulars, they generally don't aggro unless you get too close. * All vendors pay different prices for different types of items depending on their specialization as a merchant, and even due to personal preferences. One person loves Brahmin Steak and hates Blamco Mac'n'Cheese, paying 7 for the former but 3 for the latter; another person is addicted to the Mac'n'Cheese and will buy it for 10, but loathes Crunchy Mutfruit so much they refuse to purchase it at all. Dialogue options, sometimes gated by inquiry into subjects they mention, with or without Speech and Charisma checks, can reveal these preferences when they are not obvious from simply transacting with the merchant. * Various melee and unarmed weapons have various special properties that make them useful apart from their straightforward damage value, weight, and AP cost to use in VATs. The kitchen Knife is still pretty useless, and the Shishkebab is still the best one in the game by far excluding uniques, but the range between contains a few more viable options that you might have reason for actually using in combat once in a while, outside of simply finding them when not otherwise armed. For instance, the Tire Iron can be used to trip an opponent and make them fall down, while the Nail Board might cause infected wounds that generate continual poison damage for as much as an hour after the target successfully flees combat. * A "throw weapon" option is added to the game, allowing not only knives and other small weapons but also objects such as Baseballs and Scissors to be hurled at an opponent. While usually not as damaging as actual weapons, these extra options could come in handy in a pinch. Logic dictates which items do or do not work for this, but avoiding duplication of Rock-It-Launcher functions is a priority. * After completing both Those and The Superhuman Gambit, the wandering AntAgonizer can be directed to Dr. Lesko's shack in Grayditch, and then talking to both of them can convince them both to depart for Shalebridge and resume the studies of the deceased Ant Researcher. Both characters also might randomly appear in other ant-centric locations, such as the Corvega factory, with the excuse that they're out doing studies related to their interests. * Adds game mode "people watcher"; select any game file to load in this mode instead of normal gameplay, and that character is transported from the save file's location (even if fast travel would be disallowed due to enemies or overburden) to a chair or bench in a nearby town, where numerous NPCs are likely to happen by and engage each other in conversation, giving you some nice background audio while doing other things IRL, and optimizing your chances of hearing little snippets of lore in various idle dialogues, without interrupting normal flow of gameplay. Certain constantly-repeated lines that you're probably sick of hearing, such as the kids in Lamplight saying "Watch it!" just because you're close to them, are suppressed, allowing more infrequent lines to occur as normal randomization dictates. Distant sounds may also be amplified, and certain environmental noises suppressed; enemies, if they exist at all, are never hostile in this mode, and NPCs may comment on their presence in a few cases (eg Tenpenny citizens complaining about their new ghoul neighbors, if the loaded save happens to be after arranging the truce and before it collapses, could also apply to a random Feral Ghoul that happens to wander into the courtyard, where they would otherwise be shot at by security). This mode would require a lot of tweaking, by modder and by player, and the resulting saves could be added to a gallery with a different file format, so as not to alter the original file, possibly even allowing G.E.C.K.-style environment editing with a "dumbed down" user-friendly interface. That's just a start, I have a lot more of these kinds of suggestions. Edited May 8 by MatSpikeYinsen
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