[WIP] Fallout 4 Realism

[raney]

I don't have time to work on mods at the moment, but here are some ideas I jotted down a bit ago (Before I had a real understanding of how the perk system felt in-game).

 

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/3381275-fallout-4-overhaul-planning-stages/

[raney]

(I *swear* I edited my last post, but apparently I made a new one instad. My bad!)

 

Some other ideas I've had since then (Some might be repeats!)

 

COMPANIONS:

-Additional followers can travel with you (Based on charisma or charisma perk).

- You can specifically tell a follower to take items back to a settlement of your choosing. This isn't kind of like dismissing them, but giving them a separate role. After sending them off using this new method, they'll leave, and all of the items they have (that aren't equipped) will go into that settlement's workbench. What would make this even better is if they come back to you afterwards. (So maybe a Charisma perk could be done relating to this).

 

MEDICINE:

New types of healing items in the game, and changes to existing:

Stimpak: Much less common now. Does not heal injuries (Unless you want to rig up a system like Fallout New Vegas's). Takes longer to heal over time (modifiable with perk).

Lite Stimpak: Where you would normally find regular stimpaks, you now find these. Functions as fast as a vanilla stimpak, but only for a tiny bit of health. Using too much at once can make you sick (but not in a way that makes combat impossible).

Super Stimpak: Must be very rare. Making these would require a combination of very rare materials as well. Basically acts like a Stimpak would in Vanilla.

Doctor's Bag: Less common than lite stimpaks, but not quite as rare as the new stimpaks. Functions only to restore broken limbs (Reverts limb health to maybe 1 or so, the rest you have to get from sleeping or using a stimpak on limb New Vegas style). Maybe medicine perk will allow to also heal limb damage to a certain extent.

Refreshing Beverage: Same effect, but maybe longer time for recovery. Requires the regular (now rare) Stimpak instead of Lite Stimpak to create.

 

Without a medicine perk, you can't use a Doctor's Bag to restore limb condition on your own. If you go to a doctor, they can restore your limbs for a price--but if you have a doctor's bag, they'll do it for free (Either way, they'll completely or significantly restore limb health). That way, there's still a benefit to going to them (You don't have to waste additional healing items to restore your limb condition to full).

 

If I get more ideas I'll share them. If you want to incorporate any of my other ideas go ahead, since I was always planning for someone else to utilize these anyway.

Edited December 5, 2015 by raney

[Athanasa]

Going to cross-post this from here, 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

[DoritoMan]

That's a lot of suggestions, and I like a lot of them. The only problem is, there is already a lot of stuff that will be added as is. While they're not all super hard to program, it'll still take time to do, especially since I am between other projects. I still do plan on adding a lot of the suggestions that have been posted, I'm just warning saying the more stuff that will be added, the more time it'll take for me to release something.

 

I actually recently came up with the idea for immersive warnings. I'm hoping, to make it more immersive, I can find some audio files in the game that will allow the character to state to themselves that they are hungry. The same would apply to other effects.

[Athanasa]

That's a lot of suggestions, and I like a lot of them. The only problem is, there is already a lot of stuff that will be added as is. While they're not all super hard to program, it'll still take time to do, especially since I am between other projects. I still do plan on adding a lot of the suggestions that have been posted, I'm just warning saying the more stuff that will be added, the more time it'll take for me to release something.

 

I actually recently came up with the idea for immersive warnings. I'm hoping, to make it more immersive, I can find some audio files in the game that will allow the character to state to themselves that they are hungry. The same would apply to other effects.

 

I'm just dumping stuff down as it pops into my head, to be honest: I don't expect anything to make it into mods, but maybe it'll spark off ideas for other people? I'm not a scripter / modder, and I don't have the time to learn either. Hence the brain-dump.

Edited December 13, 2015 by Athanasa

[DoritoMan]

Yeah I understand what you mean. The things I listed are the things I believe I will be able to do with my current knowledge in CK and coding. It's just that time is something difficult for me to come by.