Fallout NV: Survival Mode

[t3hf4ll0ut]

Since Fallout 3, I always thought of the "wasteland" pretty forgiving. I could walk around with my big bad guns and kill pretty much anything that tried to bother me. Hell, I'd even get bored and go kill super mutants with my hands. I always thought something was missing. Then I saw the movie The Road. I'm sure some of you have seen it. I thought, "What if Fallout was like this?".

 

 

Weapons:

 

I began thinking about the weapons in Fallout. Think about it. If there was a NUCLEAR DISASTER, how many weapons would really be available?? How would wastelanders such as fiends and khan's get a hold of so much functional weaponry?? So what if you finally reach level 15+, you have enough caps gathered to buy a beat up .32 pistol & some ammo. That .32 pistol makes you lord of the jungle because very very few people would be rich enough to own a hand gun.

 

Every time you pull out your gun fiends drop their weapons, surrender, and run in fear of being shot because their rusty pipes and junk knives are no match for your devastating .32 revolver. One shot to the back is all it takes to drop a fiend on it's anus. But ammo doesn't come cheap either. Because just like the weapons, it's scarce. So 1,000 caps for a single 6-bullet box of .32 ammo will really make you think of who you should use your mighty pistol on.

 

Now Energy Weapons? Energy Weapons are so rare that most people don't even believe the fact that they exist. Only very, very few people would have an Energy Weapon.

 

 

Quests, Food, & Time:

 

In Hardcore mode, I thought that the "Needs" were a bit unbalanced and very odd because I would find myself eating 6-7 brahmin steaks before being barely full. Drinking 6+ bottles of purified water to quench my thirst. But I also realized that food was literally everywhere. Even in places where you normally wouldn't find food. So what if food was scarce? And very few vendors sold it for an exaggerated price. Your survival depends on food. Not the power of your arsenal.

 

If a realistic "Needs" system was implemented it would need to be based off the regular 24-hour day. But could be shortened to 12-hours but you might find yourself eating and drinking quite a bit more like in the vanilla.

 

Quests. Seem impossible with these odds huh? That's why the pay and reward for completing a single quest will be so rewarding that you might not need to go back out and scavenge for food for a day or two.

 

 

NPCs:

 

After meeting Tom ( I think that was his name? ) the man with the star bottle cap necklace, it made me wonder, "What if there were more encounters like this?". After playing through the game multiple times, I've only found that and a few more encounters. Now, in a radiated wasteland, people tend to go a bit crazy. So how many strange people do you think you'd find wandering around the wastes? Certainly more than what we were presented with.

 

 

Conclusion:

 

Now... these are just ideas. I'm an amateur modder, but I'm sure I could complete this if I put enough time and effort into it. Now, the only thing I want from this forum is a few ideas I could implement. So... any ideas?

[AveTruetoCaesar]

Well, I'm here to tell you why the idea clashes with the fallout story.

 

1) It's been 200 years after the war, not 10. A lot of the guns are manufactured now. Also, only a couple Nukes hit the Vegas region, so it didn't take as much damage.

2) For food, like I said, it's been 200 years, not 10. They have farms now, they have people who hunt and sell food. Pre-war food should be rare, but it does make sense that there would be a lot of food.

3) The reason the Fiends are well-armed is because they raided a vault, plus they raid caravans and NCR military patrols.

4) Radiation doesn't make people crazy, it slowly kills you. An irradiated place is no more likely to have crazies than a normal place.

 

So, yeah, I don't think the idea makes much sense given the story.

[drakeelvin]

One thing is for sure the entire economy of New Vegas isn't all that well thought out. It is obvious just from the fact that you can often tradeskill items and the end result is worth LESS than the component parts, despite that fact that you also require some degree of skill and toolset to work, that the whole economy is just thrown together haphazzardly. There are also some items you can make that earn a profit, however.

 

Changing an item cost is pretty trivial in a mod, however, to do so on a wide scale means a lot of work (item edits) and a lot of potential conflicts with other mods since plugins don't merge changes when they load, they just overwrite what is there.

 

One person did a mod for survivalists that changes the values of all resources and finished products for tradeskills so that a final product is is always worth at least as much or more as the parts. To my mind such a scheme should also factor in skill difficulty to the final price.

 

A similar issue exists for survivalists in that skill requirements for many things don't make a lot of sense. Some simple steaks require 25 survival and others 50 or more? And IMO making poison and explosives should require the highest skill (to avoid winning a Darwin Award) but the whole list just seems pretty random. 50 survival can make a Bighorner Steak but you only need 30 to concoct a deadly poison. And the benefits of many low survival foods are as good or better than foods that require much more survival to prepare. It's just rather silly.

 

The necklace guy you are referring to Thomas, yeah, him and Jaclyn go together as part of that blue star cap sequence. There are mods that add stuff like that to the game and they seem to be very popular. And some mods add more sophisticated NPC questlines where it encompass a longer story.

 

Check the top files lists (most downloaded, most voted for, etc) you'll find some of these.

[Rossum]

I always found the bottlecaps economy to be the worst part of the Fallout economy. A civilization that can manufacture guns and ammo but not ridged bits of metal?

 

I think it would make much more sense to have bullets or bullet casings be the main currency. If casings are the main currency then people would save their casings more and those casings would gravitate towards big market places where they would go to weapons dealers or people who can reload them.

 

Say that a 5.56 bullet has a value of 1 and a 5.56 casing has a value of one quarter that. People would associate bullets with money and would probably prefer to just trade that bullet to a merchant for food or whatnot instead of hunting with it (unless they regularly use guns). Using bullet casings would work as well since you can give someone a case without worrying about them shooting you with it.

 

All the bullet casings would get picked up and gravitate (via economics) to whoever can reload them and thus increase their value.

 

It would be nice if all bullets were unaffected by barter (like a currency) and the casings have value (albeit smaller) and were likewise unaffected by barter. That way, you could go to a merchant and unload all your empty casings and get full ammo in return, doesn't matter if the casings you give them match the ammo you get back because they all have set values. Then behind the scenes the merchants would go trade bullet casings for loaded ammo (or whatever) until the cases travel to someone who can load them.

 

If bullets were the standard form of currency then it would make more sense for the NCR to print paper money, since its assumed that you can convert bullets into cash which could later be used to get food or bullets or whatever without worrying about people robbing you to get the bullets in your pocket.

[t3hf4ll0ut]

I'm not really sure you can change the currency. Maybe with a ton of scripting you could completely redo the barter/purchasing system, but that's a little drastic.

But if I do go through with this the currency will be drastically changed. Nuka Colas will be about 70-75% more scarce than usual and caps will be harder to earn. Weapons, Food, and Clothing will also be much more expensive. Which means when you find a few caps on a dead body it's way more rewarding. It really makes you think about how you should preserve your money.

 

Regarding the people talking about Lore.

If it's too dangerous for a person to be out in the open during a nuclear war and houses are still destroyed and vaults are destroyed, what makes you think weapons would be perfectly fine? Like I said, it's not like I'm removing weapons from the game. It just makes them way more scarce. You have more of a 2-5% chance of finding a firearm wielding NPC. Rather than a bunch of wastelanders running around toting missile launchers and grenade launchers and hunting rifles.

 

About the main quest. The plan of this is to make you focus so much on survival (KEYWORD OF THIS MOD: SURVIVAL) that quests, especially the main quest, will be the last thing on your mind.

Edited March 26, 2011 by t3hf4ll0ut

[Rossum]

About a bullet currency, I'm not saying you would have to change every mention of caps or anything. A quick fix would just make ammo nondependant on barter and give shell casings a value.

 

If guns are rare (which they would be in this case) then they would be valuable and powerful groups would want to hoard them for themselves while ensuring they've got plenty of ammo. If the guys with guns can control land then they can tax people for protection and get food and water, then they give food and water to anyone who gives them ammo or weapons. So a lot of wasteland scavengers might be searching for bullets, not because they could use them mind you,but because they can trade them for food and water.

 

I suspect that the wasteland would have a lot fewer caps or other useless currencies around and more cases of food, water, herbs, or medicine being used instead. When you loot someones corpse, they could have bottles of water or bits of cooked meat on them instead of caps.

 

Actually... caps might make sense as long as bottles were being distributed as well. People would collect all the glass bottles they can find, have them filled up with pure water, sell them, and ask for the empty bottles and caps back.Heck, bottles can be filled with prickly pear cactus juice as well as looking for a lake.

 

Here's a link to a list of tradable goods post-apocolypse. I suspect that things like caps or money would be rather rare on most bandits or wastelanders but they would have other goods like food, water, booze, medicine, ammo (even if they don't have a gun themselves), and addictive chems.

 

Scrap metal would likely be rare as well and I think most of the cars you see laying around would have been stripped and cut up for their metal. Things like animal parts would be common (ant meat, radscorpion venom, ant nector could be an addictive drug being sold in the wastes) and all those harvestable plants would be being harvested by wastelanders. I can imagine a lot of people going around picking Xander rootsand broc flowers to make healing powder with. The powder and/or flowers and roots would be either used by the person or traded for other stuff.

 

Cave Fungus would be a BIG trade product. Ceasaers Legion has it, which I suspect is what they use to fight radiation instead of RadAway... the fact that the little lamplight cave fungus feeds off of human flesh might be connected to the Legions brutal tactics. In a world full of radiation and savages if there was a way to grow cave fungus to cure radiation that uses human flesh then there could be a morally ambiguous but popular trade where dead bodies have their flesh harvested and sent to the caves to get fungus, the fungus is grown and then traded for all sorts of stuff or more human flesh. The advantage of cave fungus over RadAway is that it can be produced without rare and expensive pre-war technology. So I'm thinking that a lot of the pre-war medicine would be rare while herbal remedies would be more popular.

 

Finally, while guns might be rare, things like throwing spears should be more popular since they can be manufactured by primitive societies. Raiders with throwing spears should be more popular and often acompanied with poisons to make them more effective (poisons and poison ingrediants could also be regularly harvested). Spears should also be able to be reused after they are thrown. Bows, arrows, crossbows, and slings would also make sense instead of guns.

 

Of course, the NCR has manufacturing facilities and such so it ould be that while most wastelanders and outlaws are running around with spears and cave fungus that NCR got its manufacturing base worked up so it can bring in guns. This would give them a pretty good advantage over everyone else even if supply lines were tough to maintain (raiders making frequent strikes against NCR targets to steal their guns and ammo).

[drakeelvin]

Well it seems in one regard, Caesar's Legion has the money thing figured out better than any other group because they mint coins of different values (probably made from scrap metal) and some of the coins vary in value all the way up to at least 100 caps, maybe more. Coins make far more sense than paper because coins are durable, and coins make more sense than bottle caps because high value coins means you don't have to lug around thousands or tens of thousands with you.

 

The absence of a banking system is also very odd especially for a large society like NCR. They have rancher barons and extensive trade networks but no banking system to help with commerce.

[AveTruetoCaesar]

I always found the bottlecaps economy to be the worst part of the Fallout economy. A civilization that can manufacture guns and ammo but not ridged bits of metal?

This goes back to the original Fallout. Because caps where so common, and the technology to duplicate them had been lost to the ages, making counterfeiting almost impossible, made them perfect money. But in Fallout 2, they became worthless because of NCR gold-dollars.

 

 

If bullets were the standard form of currency then it would make more sense for the NCR to print paper money, since its assumed that you can convert bullets into cash which could later be used to get food or bullets or whatever without worrying about people robbing you to get the bullets in your pocket.

It actually makes sense why the NCR have Greenbacks. In the NCR home front, they probably use the paper money as the official currency. However, because New Vegas is based in the Mojave, a region full of independent towns, tribes and gangs, they wouldn't have as much use for the NCR money. As well, most of the NCR money is either on NCR troops, or NCR citizens vacationing in New Vegas.

 

Regarding the people talking about Lore.

If it's too dangerous for a person to be out in the open during a nuclear war and houses are still destroyed and vaults are destroyed, what makes you think weapons would be perfectly fine? Like I said, it's not like I'm removing weapons from the game. It just makes them way more scarce. You have more of a 2-5% chance of finding a firearm wielding NPC. Rather than a bunch of wastelanders running around toting missile launchers and grenade launchers and hunting rifles.

 

I'm not saying that they'd be in perfect condition, but they'd be reparable. Most of the guns you see have tape, nails, wiring sticking out, and other such stuff. They're not in perfect condition, but they can be used.

And you rarely find Wastelanders with big-guns. Most of the wastelanders are either unarmed, or are carrying a small arm. The only ones who are heavily armed are usually the military factions. Hell, most of the minor raider groups are armed with shitty-weapons.

 

About the main quest. The plan of this is to make you focus so much on survival (KEYWORD OF THIS MOD: SURVIVAL) that quests, especially the main quest, will be the last thing on your mind.

But, and most people will agree with me, the quests are the best part. Do you think most people want to spend all day collecting 1500 caps just to buy a crappy-pistol?

 

If guns are rare (which they would be in this case) then they would be valuable and powerful groups would want to hoard them for themselves while ensuring they've got plenty of ammo. If the guys with guns can control land then they can tax people for protection and get food and water, then they give food and water to anyone who gives them ammo or weapons. So a lot of wasteland scavengers might be searching for bullets, not because they could use them mind you,but because they can trade them for food and water.

So, what would the point of using guns be, when bullets are money? It actually makes sense in Metro 2033 because it's the pre-war bullets that are the money, not all bullets.

 

 

Scrap metal would likely be rare as well and I think most of the cars you see laying around would have been stripped and cut up for their metal.

But, most things in the Fallout universe are made of either Glass or Metal. This would have meant that building would have been destroyed just to get to the steel frames.

 

Finally, while guns might be rare, things like throwing spears should be more popular since they can be manufactured by primitive societies. Raiders with throwing spears should be more popular and often acompanied with poisons to make them more effective (poisons and poison ingrediants could also be regularly harvested). Spears should also be able to be reused after they are thrown. Bows, arrows, crossbows, and slings would also make sense instead of guns.

Sure, I wouldn't mind Crossbows and bows in game. But I would mind if I HAD TO RELY ON THEM! I like the big guns in Fallout, and most people do to. I wouldn't feel to good if I was just throwing spears at people for the freaking game.

 

The absence of a banking system is also very odd especially for a large society like NCR. They have rancher barons and extensive trade networks but no banking system to help with commerce.

Back in California, they probably have banks. But given the New Vegas area is multiple independent towns and factions, it's a little harder to bank.

[t3hf4ll0ut]

Snip

 

You're trying to speak for everyone here. I never said I was going to rid of the quests. You'll just spend more time trying to survive the wastes rather than conquer the wastes by completing everyones quests and earning a bunch of money. And to answer your question...

 

Do you think most people want to spend all day collecting 1500 caps just to buy a crappy-pistol?

 

Yes. I do anyways. It makes obtaining a gun much more rewarding. When I first started New Vegas, I started out with a 9mm pistol, a caravan shotgun, some fine leather armor, a 9mm sub machine gun, and a laser pistol. So immediately I could of taken over Goodsprings with ease. In Vanilla, I had the wasteland in the palm of my hand. In this mod, I will attempt to do the very opposite.

 

EDIT: And I feel as if we're arguing about this. If nobody wants to play this mod, fair enough, but this is mostly out of my own personal motivation anyways. ^-^

Edited March 27, 2011 by t3hf4ll0ut

[AveTruetoCaesar]

Snip

 

You're trying to speak for everyone here. I never said I was going to rid of the quests. You'll just spend more time trying to survive the wastes rather than conquer the wastes by completing everyones quests and earning a bunch of money.

But, I like doing everybody's quests and earning money...

Do you think most people want to spend all day collecting 1500 caps just to buy a crappy-pistol?

 

Yes. I do anyways. It makes obtaining a gun much more rewarding. When I first started New Vegas, I started out with a 9mm pistol, a caravan shotgun, some fine leather armor, a 9mm sub machine gun, and a laser pistol. So immediately I could of taken over Goodsprings with ease. In Vanilla, I had the wasteland in the palm of my hand. In this mod, I will attempt to do the very opposite.

 

EDIT: And I feel as if we're arguing about this. If nobody wants to play this mod, fair enough, but this is mostly out of my own personal motivation anyways. ^-^

But, why?