Fallout 4 Overhaul (Planning stages)

[TimeLadyKatie]

My only bit of advice is this: the more modular this is the more useful. A lot of these tweaks are fantastic, but if I want to keep my followers essential allowing me to disable that one function of the mod and keep the rest running is how an overhaul can become the definitive overhaul. Similarly, if the restrictions on training SPECIAL are too easy/hard for a player, some MCM options to configure that are valuable. Project NEVADA is a good example of this.

[Athanasa]

Going to cross-post this all over the place, because I'm a) lazy, and b) finally got my thoughts neatly set out. This is mostly survival / realism / roleplay based, though.

 

 

Basic Survival

Eat, Drink, Sleep

Eating, Hunger

As in Fallout: New Vegas, eating both heals you and reduces your hunger. However, as in New Vegas, certain foods can increase your thirst levels. Stored pre-war foods are particularly high in sugars, salts, and are typically dried anyway - eating these increases your thirst far faster than eating 'fresh' foods. Fresh foods, on the other hand, are often hydration-neutral. Hunger is not affected by SPECIAL score, as biology is biology.

Satiated: No penalties

Slightly Hungry: No penalty, but you are aware you are hungry. Stomach grumbles.

Medium Hunger: Reduced AP, fatigue increases a bit faster. Stomach grumbles.

Very Hungry: Reduced AP, reduced AP regen, reduced strength and endurance, scope swing (low blood sugar), further increased fatigue, stomach cramps. Stomach grumbles, yawning, pain.

Starving: All of the above. Decreased agility, decreased aim, extra fast increase in fatigue, stomach cramps. Increased chance to contract diseases. Stomach grumbles, yawning, groaning, pain, blackouts.

Death: Death by starvation would occur by exhausted collapse/blackout (due to fatigue) which the Sole Survivor never wakes from. Each time the screen goes dark in a blackout, the player doesn't know if they will wake up again. (Add a random chance to die on blackout after X number of blackouts, or increasing per blackout?)

Scrounger: You find more food. (Assuming the mod reduces food)

 

Drinking, Dehydration

As mentioned before, some foods would increase your thirst. However, some foods would decrease thirst - fruits and soups being obvious examples. In humans, thirst kicks in long before hunger. However, the early symptoms of dehydration irritability) can't really be portrayed in the game. SPECIAL does not affect dehydration and thirst.

Thirsty: No penalties, but you are aware you are hungry. Dry mouth.

Mildly Dehydrated: Headaches, especially after repeated jumping. Reduced AP, reduced AP regen.

Dehydrated: Increased fatigue, reduced apatite, lowered agility, strength and perception Yawning, groaning, nausea.

Very Dehydrated: Occasional blackouts, confusion, reduced mental clarity, reduced Exp gain Yawning, groaning, nausea, occasional, "Huh?", blackouts.

Death: Same as starvation.

 

Sleep, Fatigue (Endurance)

For an 'ultra realism' experience, sleep should be almost a 'cumulative' effect; if you go for a week in the game with only 3 hours sleep every night, you won't be able to keep tiredness at bay with micro-naps and drugs. Higher endurance means your fatigue meter has a slower 'filling' rate.

Sleepy: You're sleepy. A bed would be really nice. Yawning

Very Sleepy: You aren't as chipper as normal. Intelligence and perception take a penalty. Increased time to scope weapons. Yawning

Sleep Deprivation: Caused by not enough sleep over a long period of time. Reduced stats across the board, increased hunger. Yawning, groaning.

Too Tired: The Sole Survivor collapses on the spot and sleeps. Hopefully nothing eats them during this time.

Chems: Various chems can temporarily reduce the affects of fatigue, but the Survivor still needs to sleep. Perks increasing duration of chems also affect this.

 

 

Advanced Survival

Illnesses and Diseases (Endurance, Intellect)

Like in Skyrim, sickness can be picked up from the local wildlife or sleeping in lice infested raider beds. This can range from the common cold (probably caused by lack of sleep, food, drink and radiation sickness) to more dangerous diseases that require medical attention... which I can't think of right now.

Ideally, the player might not be told what they are sick with. Instead, they might be hinted at via symptoms. Taking the Medic perk might allow you to identify your illness.

Common Cold: Starts with a dry nose / sore throat. Advances to a heavy head (reduced perception) and aching neck, before going on to a nose full of snot (reduced AP and AP regen) and coughing. Coughing also triggers screen blur / pain effects, making it disrupting. The symptoms lessen over time, and can be treated with chems until it passes on its own.

Endurance: Increases your resistance to sickness.

Intellect: Increases your chance to identify sickness.

Medic: You can identify basic diseases (increasing with ranks). Max rank, you can identify everything.

 

Food Poisoning (Endurance, Luck, Perception)

Unsurprisingly, not everything from 200 years ago is good to eat. And sometimes you just didn't cook that Mirelurk right. Oh well. You're in for a day of agonising stomach cramps and rapidly increasing thirst and hunger as your body ejects everything you've eaten in the last 12 hours. Maybe add water purification tablets - these don't remove rads from water, but they reduce the chance of getting sick. Dogmeat can smell if food isn't good to eat and let you know. Maybe Codsworth has a similar ability, given he's a housekeeper.

Effects: Pain, increased thirst, increased hunger, reduced endurance and strength. Groaning, pain, stomach grumbles

Endurance: Decreases duration of poisoning and likelihood of being poisoned.

Luck: Decreases the chance that food is bad.

Perception: Increases your chance of identifying bad food.

Lead Belly: Greatly reduces the chance of food poisoning. Max rank makes you immune.

 

Night-time Ambushes (Luck)

Adventuring alone is dangerous. Luckily, if you have a companion you are less likely to be murdered in your sleep. Some companions make better night-watchers than others. Eg: Nick Valentine, Dogmeat, Codsworth, Curie due to not needing sleep or (in Dogmeat's case) having sharp senses. Having one of these companions reduces the chance of ambushes occurring and increases the warning you get if they DO happen.

Ambushed, No Companions, Sleep Deprived / Bad Luck: T hey're almost on top of you when you wake up.

Ambushed, No Companion / Failed Watch: You awake with the enemies close to wherever you're sleeping.

Ambushed, Successful Watch: You are woken up without the attackers knowing you're there and have time to prepare.

Ambushed, No Companions, Mysterious Stranger: Whoever he is, it was nice of him to warn you about the horde of feral ghouls.

 

Radiation Sickness

I love raney's idea for this, having a hidden stat. As radiation sickness affects cell division in humans, it would make sense that increasing radiation sickness reduced your ability to heal yourself. This would affect stim-packs, food and even sleep. It may also result in an increased chance to trigger food poisoning and give increased vulnerabilities to diseases.

Effects: Reduced healing from everything, increasing with hidden radiation stat. Decreased immune system.

 

Wounds

Healing wounds requires rest or a doctor. Until they are healed, they will cause you pain. Maybe there's a potential for wounds to become infected. Finally, a use for antiseptic!

 

Poisons, Traps

Another use for chems, perhaps. Although potentially out of the scope of a mod like this, I'm throwing this idea in anyway. Some places may have traps which poison you (I can see raiders having barbed tripwires coated in nastiness), or triggered release of sedative gasses as traps. Tying into the immersive warnings, your only warning of this would be that your character starts yawning and the screen starts going a bit dark - time to quickly take some Jet!

 

 

'Immersive' Warnings and Symptoms

To be a truly game-improving mod it needs to warn players of negative affects to their characters in ways that don't break immersion, and ideally even improve said immersion. As raney puts it...

Other hardcore mods I've played always make it a point to penalize immediately after hunger reaches a certain point. Sure, there's a warning stage, and when you hear it you think "Oh great, I'm hungry again. Time to eat, again." I'd like to handle it in a way that's more subtle. First and foremost, the time it takes for these effects to set in is longer. Long enough that you can feel safe exploring around for an hour at a time without having to worry."

To do this, players can be warned through visual and audio cues (and messages where other methods are not appropriate). ARK manages this rather well, although it tends to have the issue of, "you're starving to death again" fairly frequently, resulting in eating 500 berries a day. Another game (well, mod) that manages this well is the ACE mod for ARMA2. Both alert you to your status through changes to your field of view or audio. And, of course, there is the wonderful Frostfall for Skyrim. I feel that players should be able to know when they're hungry or thirsty, without having to check their Pip-boy. I hated having to check my spell effects in Skyrim - eventually I just uninstalled mods as I found them immersion breaking.

 

Anyway, I mentioned lots of stuff earlier in grey text. Those are references to ideas for symptom manifestations as listed here.

 

Pain

Visual: Taking from ACE, pain was shown as a 'white glow' around the edges of the screen. The opacity and how far the white glow reached into the screen depended on how bad the pain was. This also means that the player might be able to notice if something is getting worse, if the pain 'flare' gets steadily bigger over time (e.g. bloatfly parasites). However, a healing wound might have a reducing 'pain flare' over time. Mechanically, this basically functions as a screen overlay with adjusted opacity.

Potentially combining with this (although this may cause performance hits) could be a 'blurring' of vision during pain.

Audio: Less frequent than the 'white glow' effect, our character might make various pained noises. This doesn't always have to be a groan or moan - low level pain could be indicated by the sound of someone hissing through clenched teeth. A suitable reaction for a horrible headache, but generally you don't groan/moan out loud unless it's really bad. Greater amounts of pain might result in groans and moans.

 

Illness / Nausea

Audio: Sounds of shivering. Subdued groans.

Visual: Blurred screen. Occasional brightening of screen (increased gamma), darkening of screen (decreased gamma).

 

Blackouts, Disorientation

Blackouts: The screen goes dark for the player, starting at the edges and fading into black. The character collapses into the wounded animation. A few moments later the screen brightens and the character gets up again. If the character has companions, they may be standing nearby looking concerned. In the case of Dogmeat, it's time for doggy kisses!

Disorientation: The screen goes dark / white for a moment. The player regains visibility to find their character standing a little further from where they were, or facing a random direction. This is intended to mimic micro-sleeps, or moments where the character has moved but been so fatigued they don't remember moving.

 

Death by Collapse

After the screen goes completely black from blackout, a message appears on the blank, black screen informing the player of their death to starvation / thirst / illness / raiders during their sleep.

 

Others

Audio: Yawning, stomach grumbles / gurgles

Edited December 12, 2015 by Athanasa

[TeamBacon]

>Int has nothing to do with moral, but risks and rewards.

 

I made a big post about this awhile ago. Moral dilemas presented in games are often contrved scenarios that succumb to the either/or fallacy. "Either you save this one guy and kill a bunch of people, or kill a bunch of people but save this one guy, nothing else!" It bugs me when I, the player, can think of a much better solution that doesn't involve going down that road. My argument is that, if my character is smart enough, he/she should be able to come up with alternative solutions to certain problems. I'm not saying get rid of moral ambiguity, just those really cheap moments that fail to make me feel any remorse at all, because of how the game forces them on you.

 

I like this, have the player actually use their critical thinking skills to make a better outcome as opposed to just choosing between 2 bad outcomes.

 

Though oddly enough, I actually find that in my own writing I am using perception checks at a higher frequency than any other. I guess that might be because I am currently at the murder mystery section of my plot and have a lot of need for being able to spot relevant clues while you go through the dialogue.

 

I also use a lot of intelligence checks, one particular will be a perk specific check for the medic perk. I use a fair amount of charisma checks, but not as many as the perception and intelligence. I've only used luck once, I have a plan to use strength a few times but haven't written that far yet.

 

Agility will get its fair share assuming I get the ability to interrupt in dialogue working. Doesn't seem like it should be too hard now that dialogue is all done in real time, but until we get the creation kit that is all speculation on my part. People with high agility will be able to think quicker and come to a conclusion before some long winded npc spells everything out the long way, so I want you to be able to interrupt and say, 'Oh, so you want me to blah blah blah, got it' and cut to the chase as opposed to listening to the long winded npc.

 

I find endurance to be totally useless as a SPECIAL check (what used to be referred to as a skill check) which doesn't bother me one bit, because only cowards ramp up their endurance in a Fallout game. (and then complain that the game is too easy)

 

 

 

But anyways, that being said, I personally only think this is applicable to new mods and not something I would expect to see someone doing for the vanilla dialogue and such. Trying to do this on a large scale with vanilla dialogue would be too hit or miss in my opinion, too much controversy on what should or shouldn't be changed. As much as I would like to tell Kells that I am not going to go kill my friends just because he is afraid they might 'someday' be a 'minimal' threat to him, I don't think I would download a mod that included so many large changes to the way the game actually moved forward.

 

Also, if someone did it in a way that had to scrap the existing voice acting, I wouldn't even consider downloading it. It would have to be done withing the confines of the npc and character dialogue available to edit.

 

 

 

Anyways, as far as what you were saying about the perk overhaul, I disagree with all of it honestly. I think it works the way it is right now and changing it to make the game less fun would not encourage me to download you mod. I personally think any overhaul mod should leave the perks alone other than very minor changes to some individual perks.

 

Just my personal opinion since you were asking for opinions, but make the mod you want to make, you can't make everyone happy.

 

I never download overhaul mods anyways, just thought I would share the opinions of someone outside of your target audience.

[Athanasa]

Agility will get its fair share assuming I get the ability to interrupt in dialogue working. Doesn't seem like it should be too hard now that dialogue is all done in real time, but until we get the creation kit that is all speculation on my part. People with high agility will be able to think quicker and come to a conclusion before some long winded npc spells everything out the long way, so I want you to be able to interrupt and say, 'Oh, so you want me to blah blah blah, got it' and cut to the chase as opposed to listening to the long winded npc.

 

That... doesn't feel like the right definition of agility to me. Agility is sense of balance, coordination, manual dexterity. It's purely physical. Dumb-as-bricks professional footballers have buckets of agility and endurance, but intellect was clearly their dump-stat. What you've described is intelligence.

 

Climbing a rock-face would be Agility and Strength. Agility would define your flexibility - the range of weird poses you can pull to reach hand-holds, and how well you hold onto those hand-holds. Strength is what is needed to actually lift yourself using those holds, and carry a backpack with food and water.

 

People could be thick as porridge and think like a slug, but still have high Agility. They're really, REALLY good at the fine stuff they do... they just can't really learn or improvise.

[RS13]

I second TimeLady's point about making this modular. Along similar lines, I'd suggest not tying the new endurance perks into a needs system, because I think a lot of people actively hate having to micromanage needs and tying them in means either making the needs system not optional or making them useless to people with no interest in a needs system.

[TeamBacon]

 

Agility will get its fair share assuming I get the ability to interrupt in dialogue working. Doesn't seem like it should be too hard now that dialogue is all done in real time, but until we get the creation kit that is all speculation on my part. People with high agility will be able to think quicker and come to a conclusion before some long winded npc spells everything out the long way, so I want you to be able to interrupt and say, 'Oh, so you want me to blah blah blah, got it' and cut to the chase as opposed to listening to the long winded npc.

 

That... doesn't feel like the right definition of agility to me. Agility is sense of balance, coordination, manual dexterity. It's purely physical. Dumb-as-bricks professional footballers have buckets of agility and endurance, but intellect was clearly their dump-stat. What you've described is intelligence.

 

Climbing a rock-face would be Agility and Strength. Agility would define your flexibility - the range of weird poses you can pull to reach hand-holds, and how well you hold onto those hand-holds. Strength is what is needed to actually lift yourself using those holds, and carry a backpack with food and water.

 

People could be thick as porridge and think like a slug, but still have high Agility. They're really, REALLY good at the fine stuff they do... they just can't really learn or improvise.

 

 

You do have a point, though I think you might be going to the opposite extreme as what I was saying.

 

I should not reward players with high perception and agility if they are below a certain level of intelligence. So I think I should have the check be more along the lines of 'If Intelligence is greater than 5 and Agility is greater than 6' or 'If Charisma is greater than 4 and Perception is greater than 7'.

 

Having every 'SPECIAL' check capped by a certain value of either Charisma or Intelligence totally makes sense to me. Don't want to reward players for making dumb characters, do we? They get their rewards when it comes to combat, not dialogue.

 

 

 

But I still think that agility has to do with more than just physical quickness, and that there is a difference between someone who is smart and someone who is both smart and fast.

 

If someone has a smart character who is also a quick ninja, why shouldn't I reward them from time to time for their quickness.

 

I personally think endurance is the only SPECIAL trait worth throwing out of dialogue checks.

 

 

 

I only use things like Strength for when the character needs to free an npc from below a heavy pile a rubble. I guess I could use a combination of strength with a charisma cap to allow them to convince someone they are strong enough to protect them and keep them safe. I will have to play with that idea a bit in my writing.

[raney]

Modularity is key. Don't know if there's going to be anything along the lines of an MCM for FO4, but a mod like this would definitely have a high level of options to choose from.

 

Hm...good point about not having need-based perks for Endurance. That does mean we'd have to come up with a whole bunch of other perks to take their place.

 

THe intelligence thing is mostly my criticism of modern narratives. I'd love to see this kind of consideration given in the game, but FO4 is what it is. I'd never go through the trouble of changing the base game for something like this, but hopefully this kind of feature gets used in say, other games/big mods developed with the FO4 engine. Pretty much anything that's made with more than 4 dialogue options in mind.

[TeamBacon]

 

 

THe intelligence thing is mostly my criticism of modern narratives. I'd love to see this kind of consideration given in the game, but FO4 is what it is. I'd never go through the trouble of changing the base game for something like this, but hopefully this kind of feature gets used in say, other games/big mods developed with the FO4 engine. Pretty much anything that's made with more than 4 dialogue options in mind.

 

I personally love the system they use in Fallout 4 for the dialogue, though I have so many ideas running through my head on how I can implement it in a better way. It just seems like a solid base that wasn't ever pushed past level one.

 

I want to add interrupt features where you can use your intelligence to stop someone mid sentence and correct their false logic. I want to add features where you can subtly signal your companion to take up a tactical position when you see a conversation is going south, and then maybe using charisma to distract the enemy while your companion gets into place. But I also want to have instances when it is a bad idea to use a speech check. I don't like that you pretty much don't have to think when you see a check come onto the screen, because you know that is the best possible options. I want there to be instances where the player chooses to use a 'SPECIAL' check at the wrong time and it has negative consequences.

 

Though, I guess I should put the disclaimer that I am more of a Bioware/Mass Effect fan than I am of either Bethesda or Black Isles/Obsidian. Any step the franchise takes away from Fallout 1 and 2 and toward more of a Mass Effect 2 and 3 look is progress in my personal opinion. So hate me if you must.

 

But anyways, this is all far beyond the scope of an overhaul mod, and I agree that it isn't something I would like to see changed in the vanilla game. Just figured I would respond by letting you know that I liked you initial idea and that it has helped me think of some new stuff to add to the way I write dialogue inside my mod. But, I will shut up now since I am getting off topic.

 

Thanks for helping me with my mod.

[Toxification]

I completely agree with everything you wrote regarding perk leveling and distribution. How I'd personally implement it would look something along the lines of:

 

1) Your number of points in a given SPECIAL attribute is determined by the base amount of points assigned to the SPECIAL perk in question, multiplied by your level.

So let's say that I have 5 base points in strength and I'm level 10, the number of special points in Strength would be 10 x 5 = 50. Obviously all of the pre-existing numbers would need to be revamped, but hey. I'd also like to see a base offset of maybe 20 or 30 so that you don't get 10 times more powerful on the road from level 1 to 10.

You would be able to have 0 base points in any given attribute.

Reasoning: In my head this encourages - Role Playing, as you can't modify your character's base attributes heavily throughout the game, you start as a stupid savant, you can't end the game as a genius. It increases the benefits you receive from leveling up, but the scaling isn't mental and can be easily modified. This also integrates nicely into the system I've devised for acquiring perks, which I'm about to get into.

 

2) Your ability acquire any given perk is based on the number of SPECIAL points you have in that specific attribute. So gunslinger level 1 may be available at 30 points in perception, while level 2 may be available at 50 points in perception.

Reasoning: For starters, Role Playing is encouraged, and hopefully in game immersion is increased. Why does it make sense that someone who was a technical genius before the war needs to be explicitly level 25 before he can build certain weapon modifications, while someone with the minimum amount of intelligence can do so at level 25 as well? It doesn't. At the same time the person would need to spend a decent amount of time in the wasteland before they learned about much of the surrounding technology - hence higher level perks. Additionally it encourages balance in the mindset that I think you had, where just getting one SPECIAL level completely unlocks a line of perks, as you can put an upper limit of 120 on a perk line, which makes it blatantly impossible to reach without at least 2 base points in whatever that attribute is. It's powerful but still quite simple.

 

3) You had something in mind with respect to diminishing returns, I agree with this, Though how I'd personally go about implementing it would be something along the lines of decreasing the number of perks that became available at higher levels, along with decreasing the benefits from higher stats, for instance taking your perception from 500 to 1000 might only increase your accuracy by 10% and unlock 1 or 2 perks, while increasing it from 250 to 500 might increase accuracy by 15-20% and unlock 3 or 4 perks. This might encourage increasing the base SPECIAL cap to something like 20 or 30.

 

I'll give a concrete example, let's assume there is a base offset of 25 to your level multiplier - we'll call it that. I'll do a quick spec of 3 perception perks.

Pickpocket Current (Per >= 1):

Rank 1 - No level requirement

Rank 2 - Level 6

Rank 3 - Level 17

Rank 4 - Level 30

 

Pickpocket Revised:

Rank 1 - Requires 15 perception points

Rank 2 - Requires 60 perception points

Rank 3 - Requires 110 perception points

Rank 4 - Requires 180 perception points

 

Rifleman Current (Per >= 2):

Rank 1 - No level requirement

Rank 2 - Level 9

Rank 3 - level 18

Rank 4 - level 31

Rank 5 - level 46

 

Rifleman Revised:

Rank 1 - Requires 30 perception

Rank 2 - Requires 100 perception

Rank 3 - Requires 160 perception

Rank 4 - Requires 220 perception

Rank 5 - Requires 270 perception

 

Awareness Current (Per >= 3):

Rank 1 = No level requirement

 

Awareness Revised:

Rank 1 - Requires 55 perception.

 

So if I have 3 perception,

At level 1, I will have access to pickpocket, as 3 x (1 + 15) = 48.

At level 5 I will have access to level 2 of pickpocket as 3 x ( 5 + 15) = 60.

however I then must reach level 22 before I gain access to pickpocket level 3, and I must be level 45 to reach pickpocket level 4.

 

On the other hand if I only have a single base point in perception, life gets a lot harder. Level 1 becomes available at level 1, but level 2 becomes available at level 45, rank 3 is basically unfeasible, requiring level 95. Finally if I have 10 perception at the start of the game, I immediately have access to pickpocket levels 1, 2 and 3 as 10 x (15 + 1) = 160, which doesn't seem unreasonable in my mind, as, if your perception is 10, it makes sense that you'd be an amazing pickpocket. From a balance perspective this works out fine, as you aren't going to be able to do much of anything with my other perk lines, as they're all going to be relatively weak. Though tweaks to the current perks are in order as they're kinda awful.

 

SPECIAL Revised

Conceptually, and based off most of the mechanics in the game, the mechanics are there for all of the different special attributes, which actually frustrates me far too much.

Strength

1) Less recoil from weapons with higher strength. I'd personally vote for the amount of recoil you receive from weapons to be divided by (strength + 2 * level), meaning if you have 6 strength, you receive half the recoil that someone with 2 strength receives. This implements a soft cap on weapons with respect to strength and level, if the recoil is too high, using the weapon is simply going to be unfeasible. You could even implement a mechanic, in which, if the recoil is too high, the weapon blatantly flies out of your hands.

2) The higher your strength, the more damage your melee weapons do.

3) Your carry weight would be based on your base strength, I'm considering logarithmic formulas for this so that it increases with level, the current model is 150*ln(strength/50 + e), which gives a starting carry weight of 166 at level 1 for people with 1 strength, and puts them at 207 carry weight at level 50, whereas 10 strength has a starting carry weight of 266 at level 1 and 413 at level 50.

 

Perception

1) Increased perception increases accuracy with all weapons, period. I like the formula for carry weight, so I'm going to steal it for perception, with your accuracy being multiplied by ln(per/50 + e)

2) The difficulty of picking locks and stealing decreases with increased perception, not significantly, mind you.

 

Endurance

1) Increases the time you can go between eating, proportional to (5 + base endurance), but consequently increases the amount you need to eat to feel full. This basically means you don't need to carry so much food and can eat when you get back to town. Would also increase the amount of time you need to go between sleeping and how long the rewards from sleeping would last, but you'd need to sleep longer to refill your "sleep" meter.

2) Increases your max health based on your base endurance, uses the same pre-existing formula.

3) Increases your total AP.

 

Charisma

I've honestly got no ideas. I'm not happy with the rewards from this perk tree line, but I don't know how to improve upon it.

 

Intelligence

1) Increases your available sensory points - more on this later.

2) Increases the amount of experience you receive. Not a huge fan but whatever.

3) Increases your capacity to hack terminals similar to lock pick mechanics.

 

Agility

1) Increases your sprint speed. Unsure how much from a balance perspective.

2) Increases how well you can sneak, probably use the same logarithmic formula as before

3) Increases how quickly you can reload and the speed of melee attacks

 

Luck

1) Increases your critical chance by your base luck, so 10 luck yields a 10% increased crit chance

Mechanics Changes

I'll preface this by saying that I hate the current state of V.A.T.S, it isn't super useful, unless you're an absolutely horrible shot. It's far to range dependent, but at the same time doesn't take into account how difficult it is to hit the target in question. For instance any of the insects in the game are quite difficult to hit and I miss 4 out of 5 shots, V.A.T.S will hit every single one. On the other hand, if I'm doing some long ranged hunting, V.A.T.S will have an accuracy of 5% while the shots are pretty much guaranteed on my end.

 

So I'd like to introduce a mechanic, it would ideally be toggleable, much like sneaking and holding your breath in scopes. This would be a sensory mode in which you gather information, the usefulness of this mechanic would vary heavily based on perks in your perception tree. With select perception perks you'd be able to do things like see enemy positions based off of sound, possibly even infrared, tripwires and traps would glow, get night vision, view enemy weaknesses, see select loot. I know this is well within the capacity of the engine, as there were shouts in skyrim that could do something very similar. The amount of time you could spend in this mode would depend on your intelligence, as staying in the mode too long provides sensory overload and is mentally exhausting. You could integrate a perk that would slow time into the sensory mode.

 

Perks

Design mentality - perks should augment the character in general, as well as make sense given the trait line that they are in. Why would increased agility make my pistols do more damage? I have no idea. I also strongly dislike blatant damage increases to weapon types. It blatantly imbalances the game and makes any weapon that doesn't have a damage buff significantly less viable in comparison to the buffed weapon. To emphasize this point, I will point out what I have observed in my game playthrough thusfar. I personally enjoy playing a long distance character that relies on stealth to kill things. So obviously I chose to use rifles. At this point I have 4 points in Rifleman, which increases my rifle damage by 80% and gives my rifle 25% armor penetration and a chance to cripple limbs. There is almost no reason to use shotguns, pistols or automatic weapons, as my non-automatic rifles blatantly do more damage per second and far range and are generally more viable against different enemies. The only reason I ever use my 10mm pistol is due to the fact that I have this enormous surplus of 10mm ammo and .308 ammo is expensive as hell. I'd like players to not feel pigeon holed into using a specific weapon, and instead receive general buffs that lend themselves towards specific playstyles, and have the different weapons lend themselves to those different playstyles.

 

Perception

The perks in perception should reward precision, along with helping to provide data about the environment to the player in any way possible.

 

Locksmith: No change from current

 

Use Your Eyes:

Rank 1 - In sensory mode, dead bodies and loot glow

Rank 2 - In sensory mode, tripwires and traps glow

 

Mutant Senses:

Rank 1-4 - Moving enemies are detectable in sensory mode when they are moving, allows you to essentially see enemies through walls, radius increases with levels

Rank 5 - Your eyes have mutated to the point where you can detect infrared light in sensory mode and you can see enemies any enemies with a heat signature

 

Headhunter:

Increases damage done on headshots by 15..30..45%. 3 Ranks

 

Concentrated Fire:

Repeated assaults on the same body part yield wear down your target, causing different effects based on the body part. Repeated head shots yield stunning effects, repeated body shots yield decreased armor, limb shots provide a significantly greater chance of crippling the target.

 

Awareness:

Sensory mode will highlight the targets limb to which you will do the most damage with your current weapon. This is likely very difficult to implement, the current V.A.T.S version may be better.

 

Agility Perks

The perks in the agility trait line revolve around dexterity, and being able to move quickly and quietly, in one way or another. Speed is the crucial variable here. One of the mechanics that I'd like implemented would be that enemies have a harder time hitting a moving target, I'm not sure to what degree this currently exists, but as it stands, I don't think it's that prominent, this mechanic is actually quite important for a few of the agility perks.

Gunslinger - Decreases how long it takes to reload, and allows you to sprint at 20 - 40 - 60 - 80 -100% speed while reloading.

Chameleon - Increases recoil recovery significantly while standing still, makes you harder to detect while standing still and not shooting

Moving Target - Increases movement speed while aiming, based on the weight of the weapon and your strength. For instance, aiming with a pistol should not hinder your movement speed if you have max ranks in this perk. Whereas it will only increase your movement speed while using the minigun a decent amount. Although if you have max strength and very high agility, I'd like the ability to allow you to move quite quickly with most heavy weapons. It also allows you to move unhindered while swinging melee weapons - again based on your strength and number of perks.

Sneak - No changes, ability will probably need to get nerfed at least a little.

Overdrive - While in sensory mode, time is slowed by 15 - 30 - 50%

Sharpshooter - Increases recoil recovery time

Mister Sandman - Can kill sleeping targets instantly, sneak damage increased to 1.8, 2.1, 2.4 x weapon damage, every consecutive sneak attack on a single target extends the sneak attack window based off of the amount of noise generated by the weapon.

Unknown, Unknown, Unknown - No clue about these last 3 perks.

Edited December 28, 2015 by Toxification

[Toxification]

>Int has nothing to do with moral, but risks and rewards.

 

I made a big post about this awhile ago. Moral dilemas presented in games are often contrved scenarios that succumb to the either/or fallacy. "Either you save this one guy and kill a bunch of people, or kill a bunch of people but save this one guy, nothing else!" It bugs me when I, the player, can think of a much better solution that doesn't involve going down that road. My argument is that, if my character is smart enough, he/she should be able to come up with alternative solutions to certain problems. I'm not saying get rid of moral ambiguity, just those really cheap moments that fail to make me feel any remorse at all, because of how the game forces them on you.

 

>A guy walking to you with a big hammer and getting close should make you scared and run away for example, disarm guns when attacked with a melee weapon, break limps faster ( it makes sense.) or a slow effect with blunt weapons to make fighting ghouls easier, maybe guarding with a weapon will block ammo better.

 

I like this. I think the disarm feature is already in the game, but not increased limb damage (with melee anyway).

One of the things I've thought about would be to give the player 2 perk points every level, where you can spend one on wasteland survival stuff, and the other you are forced to spend on combat. I personally find that this would require to separate and distinct perk trees. However this creating a separate perk tree seems quite inevitable at the moment, so maybe it's not such a bad thing. Although the current perk system would have to be expanded to introduce explicit survival attributes to all the different attribute lines.