let's talk about game balance and mods... A NEW WORLD OF DIRECTION!

[tartarsauce2]

or more particularly, I'm going to yell at you over it - note this is MOSTLY about weapons, but armours obviously tie into this, the main focus of my reasoning for this is about experience, different kinds of experiences - a mac-11 sprayer should wastoid raiders but not tankotrons, while a hunting rifle should do some damage - but as low tech, not as much as a good assault rifle even if per hit it does more etc etc etc
but scaling shouldn't be so insane that it goes full JRPG in FPS format (level 1 vs 100 in WoW terms)
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and the feeling, should be that you go from basically low level gangwarrior/survivor peasant/civilian with a weapon, like in a cop show with a magnum or a mac-11 or a glock, into a mercenary/guard type with a bit more in the way of rifles but heavily risk averse, into a veteran soldier with long guns and access to some better explosives and lasers into a hunter of the abyss creatures which starts looking at heavy weaponry, into god warrior of the wastelands with the best the best the best of all things (tiers 1-5) basically

and each of these tiers should have a significantly different feeling. while at the same time different playstyles should exist at each of the tiers, in fact, one should say that gameplay should be about the same with minor differences at tier 1, starting to branch but due to necessity from lacking your favourite bullets you have to use this or that at tier 2, into being able to decide what you primarily use with backups at tier 3, into mostly choosing what you like at tier 4 for maximum effect because you need to into you could practically just buddha palm your enemies at tier 5 but so can your opponents (all weapons are insanely deadly, and/or the rest of the world has taken to swarming you because you've got a deadly reputation) - war of the commonwealth I'm looking at you for this one

ANYWAYS.... long story short, damage thresh-hold is missing from fallout 4, in lieu of it we get a putty playdough bullet sponging, I noticed a while ago that there's real drawbacks to having a completely untiered, scalar or scaling or whatever system, where nothing makes a difference -
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if level added to no attributes, this makes gameplay fairly "interesting" in a sense, and perks add the only additions to capabilities and stats aside from just getting better weapons and armour - there's a few mods that do things like this or similar to this, brutality being one of the notables

A New Dawn takes a different approach, retouching different values for various types of monsters and touching up player damage every so often to lighten the damage sponging
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damage thresh-hold adds complexity to this, but I like it, it makes things really interesting, I don't want my glock 20 to shred a synth eradicator in X-01 power armour (LZ institute mod)
but if it's allowed to get out of hand, then it's a bit crazy and makes things impossible

on the other hand, a lot of weapons give some interestingly crazy damage scaling values, the "real world guns" typically the assault rifles are real brutal powerhouses, while the vanilla guns are basically lame and token existences, but it wouldn't be cool to just leave everything the same, because there's a number of assault rifles and aside from handling they aren't that different, plus they all use 5.56 and I like different ammo having uses

the problem I think lies in the fact that weapon mods (the modifications like receivers, not the ESP files) mix up balance that could otherwise be reasonably easily put into place with a mind towards each weapon having its own niche and not being just automatically meh'd (METAL ARMOR SYNDROME), and these aren't necessarily calculated with the possibilities in mind, this isn't the fault of the mod authors, there's SO many possibilties when you're not just dealing with 20-40 weapons but all their receivers and stocks as well

to that end, I was thinking there should be like, a 5 weapons tier system, and the lower tier should be objectively worse than the higher tier, but only in some unique fashion, and a lower tier weapon with particular characteristics could be superior to an individual player of a certain build than a "better weapon" - we need to make weapon specialization count beyond just "hrrrrrr +20% damage perk for this"

I haven't come up with a plan on how to do this, but lately it seems the weapons mods have stabilized a bit, so I think it'll be easier to pull off without a new weapon mod coming along and throwing everything off balance again

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STARTING POINT FOR THIS
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doombased weapons
skibs weapons
wasteland ordnance
a new dawn
(brutality you gave me some ideas but I do want some scaling tbh a bit more)
thorgosh's perks
M-14 and other single weapon packs, NCR ranger (not the guys' who does a bunch of mods like B-90 but the one with the sniper rifle) nor anti-tank rifle
DAMAGE THRESH-HOLD PATCHER AND RESOURCE
AWKR MEDIA
and armorsmith extended
and some other stuff (like LOADS of ammo)

note that it's not that I haven't looked at or wanted the other ones, it's just that I haven't even finished the game due to making things so unstable when I try to add things like an idiot
I haven't even touched CBBE or ENB's yet because I don't dare, and this is just the beginning of my thinking about these things
I haven't touched other ammunition mods yet either (actually I touched an ammo mod that looked like it had the workings of a framework better than LOADS system earlier before the CK came out but it seems like it wasn't developed further - JHP and AP modified DR values to achieve its effects and that looked neat and I want to visit this when the rest of the system is fixed up and stable), again, because I'm still just trying to get a single decent playthrough with a skeleton mapped out of what I'm going for, not because I hate your mod or anything

btw it's this mod, alternate ammo by trainwiz, at the time his system seemed like a better framework while LOADS had good ideas but LOADS has since, worked better, and new "real ammo types" stuff has come out
the JHP and rusty nails thing were pretty neat
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/11846/?

I ignored this one but it seems pretty comprehensive actually... hmm... I got confused looking at it, but now that I played FO3... hmm. almost can understand it

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/8588/?

 

ONCE THE ESSENCE OF THESE ALL HAVE BEEN CAPTURED, A BRAVE NEW WORLD AWAITS.
also arbitration combat overhaul, seriously, because combat behaviours matter

Edited August 11, 2016 by tartarsauce2

[radiumskull]

Sounds like you should really just design your own game. Good luck!

[tartarsauce2]

NO. :ninja:
but to be honest I've been mentally considering different variations and plotting along doing them, I think this is the 4th incarnation of mods that I've done and it's the most successful, I'm enjoying multiple mods, previously mods had been coming out at a rate that consolidation was almost impossible to keep up with, so I understand what End of Line (wait until after all the DLC's out etc) means to actually trying to do this now, whereas previously I didn't
THAT SAID. I'm basically trying to use fallout modding as a warmup for game design because I have no formal schooling, I admit it

it looks like better locational damage is already doing a lot of what I was thinking about, I didn't realize that, but it's a bit haphazard I think, or incomplete given what I'm talking about, of course I'm not saying they've done only a little or that it's not enough, what I mean is that it's not the entirety, but I think maybe, after looking at oblivion, fallout 3 and skyrim mods, stability is better and then eventually most of the must-haves will be settled, compilations made with creator permissions etc, and I simply didn't recognize this because I was pretty much brand new to this whole process when I first started thinking about this and had zero clue of this process

I think I'm talking about total overhaul mods or something, and a few together into the canonical "must haves" for the community, I've got an idea or a few for worldspace/quest stuff, but I've settled on finishing the damn game before I try anything serious myself, this 4th incarnation of trying seems to be the one mod setup (and I've added like 10-15 new mods since I started but they're not total gamechangers just nice additions), I'm not playing bleh vanilla and I'm not crashing every 5 minutes, which is wonderful, almost made it as far as I had when I played vanilla during the first obsessional phase before the putty playdough damage scaling got to me really bad
:^) I'll be doing the dirty work after I've had a looksee through the game at large though, including higher levels, I mean yes, I wanna play the game, but I also want all the nuance, started over like 15 times now and gotten to diamond city, wasn't satisfied, but now I am enough to play through at any rate, and am just noting little things here and there

the trick is to bring them together, the issue is *not* one of individual mod's problems, but rather, and this has been solved a few times in other situations regarding FO4 mods, lack of working together to bring the stuff together in a cohesive balanced experience to rise above the blob problems of nothing mattering, it's an odd issue, no difference per level would be a bit boring, pure multiplier based scaling has the same problem essentially, but sheer RPG'ing makes some of the lower level cool guns irrelevant, and things trundle along at quite a fast pace, it lacks FO3's guns falling apart so that lower level guns have a use as backups, but it also has way more weapon types and inter-usability than skyrim's weapon systems

so a lot of cool guns and stuff find themselves obsolete and purely downgrades relative to each other, plus the focus on gameplay disincentivizes focusing on those stats and character builds, this is a differentiation I was thinking of looking into creating, someone made a morrowind class system in skyrim recently, I think they were seeing the same thing to a degree in skyrim :smile:

I know that fallout 4 is a lot more forgiving of class differentiation, but I think making guns and weapons specialization being much more of a focus would be useful, this could be done by changing the perks into a de-facto skills system with levelling giving a lot more in the way of perk points, similar to FO1-2's skills system, and embedding perks themselves into certain levels
an example would be heavy weapons, perhaps character speed reduction from heavy weapons is at, oh I don't know, 40-50% naturally, but every 15 ranks of heavy weapons reduces the penalty by 5% so that at 90 skill, or 99 skill (the last 1 counts as 100 if that's a technical issue) then you get a 10-20% speed reduction at top rank
this has the advantage of also letting you get say, 1% damage, 1% reload speed or 1% range increases at every other perk level, alternating etc
range, lower max spread of the bullets (cone of spread potential) and initial accuracy also could be influenced (or you could have a few bonuses inter-mingle, you wouldn't just pick a perk just for an instant huge boost, but be able to allocate your points based on what's convenient'ish in a sense, like the original 4 fallout games - while once in a while you'd get a really nice boost

this mod tries to address the issue without that for instance, so there's definitely a demand for improving the perk system
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/14997/?

I noticed that a few people have made their own specific setups, one of them just removed the minigames for hacking and lockpicking entirely - but made lockpick usage dependent on the difficulty of the lockpick (4 lockpicks for an expert lock, 3 for a master etc or is it the other way around) - marelo's overhaul, note that this guy has touched on MANY aspects of gameplay, the guy went out of his way to personally change multiple elements of the game for himself, and is just releasing it to others to take it or leave it as they wish too
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/13144/

the reason I haven't pushed this is I heard perks can actually stack up and have to be continually counted (multiple ranks of it or something) so that it wears at the game's memory, but if this isn't true then this is easily a potential way to deal with the problems, just requires some work, one of the biggest drawbacks about fallout 4 is precisely that the perks are so easy to max out effectively so that the game's effective character ceiling is relatively low, and only matter really initially
this kind of system would allow a more drawn out, and interesting way to go about things, to keep player specialization mattering more for longer, even though it would also get max'd out eventually

then, game level scaling would have to be addressed on the matter, not so much extra hp all the time for no reason etc
modded items could approach as the top tiers of gear later on, so that there'd be a more natural experience of going through the wasteland in one's journey to become a god of the wasteland

Edited August 12, 2016 by tartarsauce2