Anyone for a trip to mars?

[devinpatterson]

sorry guys, been slammed with the joyous frantic chaos of the season. I'll check in and try to contribute/pull my weight, shortly

[devinpatterson]

Put it in another thread but should here as well, The Project Nevada "faceplate/visor/eyepieces get visible damage" effect from the headpiece options would be great to use with the suits for this, and they seem to welcome folks to add patches to make their armor compatible to that.

Yes that method is important for our 1st person players, and visible damage on teh whole suits for our 3rd person players. But we'll also have some basic built in warning systems for any of the more advanced suits as well. For example, the more advanced armors (environmental suits and the power armor) will state that "structal integrity has reached XX%" at various levels of the armors health. In addition 1st person players will have some HUD elements showing suit damage.

 

Since the suits *are* your life, itt's a easy way to re-balance teh character and make him/her have to once again earn their combat prowess/level up by acquiring progressively more powerful armors.

 

Later in the mod, the higher end suits have more than enough health to take the whole worry/concern about the suit, out of the equation. Standard military power armors range from 1k to 2k health, and there will be even more powerful power armor variants, repair kits & repair stations. Primarily, so that the mod doesn't get tedious and the play mechanic isn't over used. But the early parts of the DLC will be challenging regardless of your PC's abilities and we want to give the player a easy ways to monitor the only thing that is standing between them and certain death.

[devinpatterson]

Ohh yeah that's a great one! Playing through it (again) at the moment after just finishing all the official DLC. The apes are in their own facility though, not the Dome itself. *heh*

The author was kind enough to give me permission to use the apes. While primarily I'll use them in "The Burrows" mod (where all the escaped intelligent test animals from teh glow have formed a small society), it can work just as well here since I imagine there's a fair amount of both animal testing and prisoner testing (Chinese), for research purposes.

 

I guess that brings up another point that is germane for dome city, the noble savages (and their morlocks counterparts), the enclave military faction, surviving outcasts and (too a much lesser extant) the clones.

 

Initially I wanted to give the impression of the whole mars mod as one giant tomb, dead for centuries (well more akin to a fantasy world's tomb, full of undead, sealed long ago and forgotten). Not a living soul left on the planet, but all too many echos of the dead still active (mostly in the form of bots). As Presper moves through the mod he "wakes up" various Sh*tstorms as he passes, leaving them for the player to deal with in his wake (and of course the ultimate end game problem wherein even after Presper is defeated/neutralized the mainframe makes it clear that nothing exits mars....nothing). I figured this would be good for two reasons. One it would allow a realistic plotline where Presper is able to move through the facilities relatively unmolested in the areas he has knowledge off, ( ie not in teh alien arhcelogical ruins) and two it would sort of reinforce the idea that no one, not a living soul escaped Mars. The whole red planet was one big graveyard.

 

As we started hashing out ideas I strayed from that theme because all of us had such great concepts and plot hooks with various living factions (dome city, savages, enclave spec forces, clones etc). It's hard not to love some of the ideas we came up with and get wrapped up in them. But I wonder if it might be a better choice to return to that more desolate theme, at least for the first revision of the mod. It would mean a much more manageable project for me and it wouldn't preclude all the living factions. The clones are in a vault proper, so no problem having them, as long as they were never allowed to exit (previous to the players arrival). But they might be cut from the first revision (or reduced) just because they are potentially, a huge amount of work. The bio weapons research center could still have active (and hungry) bio-weapons in a somewhat balanced ecosystem of terribly efficient predators. We would still have our crazy but lovable Mark III or Mark IV robobrain with it's/his/their wonderful schitzophrenic nature. The semi frozen spec ops in teh cryo research center are a big plot line, so they may not be in revision 1 or may be reduced in scope.

 

The other living factions, like dome city, the noble savages/morlocks, the enclave faction and the lone/small bands of ghoul survivors would be later down the road. Because of that I don't want to slow down their story boarding or plot lines (I'd like to have them well hashed out before starting on the later revisions of hte mod), but I'd propose they make their appearance later on in a later revision of the mod.

 

What do you guys think, what's your opinion on that proposal?

[devinpatterson]

After all the Sherry's probably wouldn't accept the player right off, now would they?

No, they probably aren't the most altruistic bunch in general. I was thinking they would be genetically manufactured human simulants (ala blade runner) and used (well actually planned) for the same purpose of planetary colonization as Roy and his fun loving band of merry killers. They have a loyalty to each other (deemed necessary for group cohesion during colonization), but if they are like Roy they don't have any problem killing humans to get what they want. My justification for that is that they have personality defects from their template (original Sherry) in teh same way as Roy did (sociopath, highly driven, lack of fear) and it wasn't considered a priority to have protective features (or they didn't have time to implement them) since they aren't going to run into any other humans while colonizing a alien planet.

 

But they do see the courier as a very important means to an end, so s/he has some leverage in that area.

 

I wasn't sure though if the vault should be an experiment gone wrong or a experiment gone right. As an experiment done right, this would be a planned test for decades, to see if they could work/function and live together as clones in close proximitey for generations (since terraforming, building bases and otherwise establishing a colony would take a long time). But regardless of the best planning and materials, things break down and the gene cloning machinery is producing less and less viable clones and more and more defects with those that survive.

 

As an experiment gone wrong, it was a gene cloning and testing center. Everything from the synthesis of artificial DNA to advanced combat and technical training-spanning every aspect of the simulants life cycle, took place in this facility. Test runs resulting in pushing the clones to their limits (and generating a copious amount of corpses), would generate valuable information on their attributes (how long they can withstand pure vacume before perishing, how much blood loss and remain conscious, combat effectiveness with multiple limb loss, the ability to finish mechanical tests while dying of massive radiation poisoning etc etc). When the S hit the fan, they were able to override the security precautions and kill or imprison their handlers. At this point the mainframe considered them a credible threat of spreading alien FEV contamination and sealed the facility permanently (or at least to the best of it's abilities/resources). They are extremely intelligent, adaptable and trained to deal with this kind of scenario (artificial habitat), so they developed a sort of "society" as best they could with what limited resources they have/had available. But no matter how good they are, things break down and the gene cloning machinery is producing less and less viable clones and more and more defects with those that survive.

 

So yeah either way they'r just a whole lot of fun waiting to happen.

 

They are a sort of side mission with the reward of a possible companion(s) so the player has a bit of added muscle. But more than that, they tie into a lot of the mars themes and fallout lore, so they are good story material. They are also a pandora's box dilemma. The player might need them to defeat Presper, but once out Presper's threat may pale in comparison to the clones.

 

What about having Terminator-esque cyborg survivors? Or maybe a few Enclave execs who ended up on the planet as a last-ditch scenario?

Yeah I hadn't really given much thought to cyborgs other than the brain bot type.

[devinpatterson]

One point for the two settlements also creates a wonderful idea for an optional ending for the Sherrys: Getting the two settlements to work and live together. Of course that would involve removing the generations built xenophobia and subconscious belief that anyone not one of them isn't a "real person", and probably convincing/destroying/reprogramming the mainframe.

True, much like Roy they probably will kill anyone that threatens their survival and resources are survivial. So they may not be keen on splitting it. But in the last few minutes of Roy's life, he spared Decker and had a change of heart.

[devinpatterson]

Or it could end up like Tenpenny tower. With the Sherrys killing everyone. :tongue:

That was by far the best FO3 quest ending- just because you, the great PC, manage to finagle two groups into cooperating doesn't mean they'll stay that way... it really made the characters involved "come alive" and emphasized that no, you are not a god who can force people to change overnight.

Yeah I suspect that would be the outcome of any interaction they have with humans that are less than they'r equal, barring some amazing and unlikely jury rigging by the player....but it's possible they could learn, even if it is far fetched.

[devinpatterson]

Also we should utilize van buren's sleeper technology (cyro) and we can have the original Sherry in teh complex. A sort of mother/demi-goddess to clones. The player may be able to recover/awaken her.

[greenknightfury]

I can definitely see what we have envisioned here split into a primary mod/DLC of your initial idea, with the rest of it only being unlocked by the players stopping Presper and Presper's reactivating things to try to complete his plans. After you defeat him it tells you that the control panels indicate several other facilities of the complex are still active, and they just become accessible as you complete them, perhaps through tunnel/Vault-like hallways, or the remains of them for the collapsed ones (you could make it connect to caverns or just have the player have to climb to the surface).

[TrooperScooperMKII]

Also we should utilize van buren's sleeper technology (cyro) and we can have the original Sherry in teh complex. A sort of mother/demi-goddess to clones. The player may be able to recover/awaken her.

She should be the potential Sherry companion- more interesting as a character (probably less sociopathic, though definitely deranged/extremely depressed and far from sane) plus the "you broke me out of the vault" thing means that there's a lot more wiggle room for the Courier to influence her character arc.

 

I can definitely see what we have envisioned here split into a primary mod/DLC of your initial idea, with the rest of it only being unlocked by the players stopping Presper and Presper's reactivating things to try to complete his plans. After you defeat him it tells you that the control panels indicate several other facilities of the complex are still active, and they just become accessible as you complete them, perhaps through tunnel/Vault-like hallways, or the remains of them for the collapsed ones (you could make it connect to caverns or just have the player have to climb to the surface).

IIRC aren't we going with an earth-based "military VR simulation of Martian colonial collapse" as a/the mod preview? In which case a lot of the developments (e.g. the people) can be handwaved, and massive changes to the worldspace justified.

But yes the desolate, predator filled ecological wasteland as the first part released does seem like the best option.