Wasteland Salvation - A Death Alternative

[Athanasa]

This project sounds great. It sounds like the sort of thing that could become a key mod for a lot of players. I totally get where you're coming from in your opening description - there's something about dying in Bethesda games that really bothers me and feels very jarring, which is not so much the case in, say, an Assassin's Creed game.

 

Thanks! That's hopefully the idea. And in having it, it'll allow people to go for 'harsher' mods which make the game more deadly.

 

And yes, the deaths are terrible. Any current AAA game does deaths better. I think the main culprit is that it suddenly changes the camera with no sensible transition at all.

 

(Might be worth trying to make a different mod that just changes the death camera to something less jarring?)

Edited December 3, 2016 by Athanasa

[Athanasa]

Slight update: I've been poking around in Creation Kit and learning things. So far it's a case of learning audio and imagespace filters. As "babby's first mods" I'm hoping to make two mods to learn stuff for WSalv:

 

 

Pestilence - Sickness and Disease

More diseases / illnesses for survival mode. Because, let's face it, 4 of the 5 current diseases are lacklustre. The 5th affect, infection, is just a DoT. With Pestilence I aim to create a few more varied and 'interactive' diseases or illness effects. What do I mean by interractive? I mean that they directly affect how you see your game and how your character controls occasionally. My character's got a parasite? Big deal. My vision suddenly goes blurry and my aim gets shot to s*** in a firefight? That's scary.

 

Aim: To create a collection of symptoms, which can be activated on their own or together to simulate various negative conditions, and occur in varying intensities. This would also actually allow you to teat the symptoms (rather than the underlying disease) in Survival mode until you can find a doctor. Pain issues? Painkillers or (if extreme or you have nothing else) MedX. Chances are some of the other drugs would fix it too. Antibiotics? They don't fix everything. Theoretically it would serve as a 'framework' for other mod creators to plug affects into.

 

• Headaches (Periodic screen blur and trouble focusing)

• Pain (Periodic or continual loss of saturation, pained noises, blurred edges of screen, scope sway. Potentially interrupts sleep.)

• Limb/Bodypart Pain (Temporary 'crippled' type status of the limb. Stomach cramps? Temporary torso crippled effect. Migraine? Temporary head cripple.)

• Tinnitis (Periodic muffling of sound with generic ear ringing noises. Don't stand near explosions, kids.)

• Light Sensitivity (Messes with bloom and light filters.)

• D&V (Not going to animate you puking your guts out, but sudden gains of 'hunger' and thirst. Some of that Wasteland food is so rotten it's sapient enough to escape from your stomach.)

• High Temperature (Increased dehydration rate, likely to occur with other things.)

• Fevered (More than "a slight fever" - colour goes weird, between over-saturated and under-saturated.)

• Chest Infections (Full of snot, coughing up crap. Decreased AP regen, coughing, some screen effects when coughing.)

• Shivering (Shivering noises, increased scope sway, occasional screen shake.)

 

Example Scenario: You have a meal of dubious meat and nasty water. You get D&V, puking and pooping your way through the next five hours, occasionally slowing down to just clutch at your stomach and regret everything in your life up until this point. This goes hand in hand with painful stomach cramps. This dehydrates you, makes you hungry, and generally makes you feel generally crap. You can't sleep, and keep being awoken by pain. The next day you're running a slight temperature, dehydrating you further. You're tired, hungry, thirsty and miserable. You now have a headache. The bright morning light hurts your eyes. It's like the worlds worst morning after, except it isn't stopping. Your fever gets worse, you're sweating buckets and the world's starting to feel slightly weird. You're starting to shiver. You're going through water at a ridiculous rate, and having to top up from ponds is just making it all so much worse. You're not entirely sure you aren't playing Oregon Trail at this point. Luckily you manage to limp to a nearby settlement with clean water and beds, powered by caffiene, painkillers, buffout

 

Immersive Dying

ERMARGERD SO IMMERSIVE. Jump on the bandwagon! But in all seriousness, throwing buzzwords around like confetti, the current 'death' system in Fallout 4 is the most unimmersive thing ever. You died! Let's go into third person, spin the camera away, and show how terrible our ragdoll physics are! Other AAA games have their deaths sorted out. Hell, indie games handle deaths better.

1) Don't drag the player out of first person.

2) Let them die, damnit! Enough with the spaghetti ragdolls.

3) Fade the screen to black like your character actually fading away into death.

4) Potentially: Instant cut to black if you die by catastrophic dismemberment.

Edited December 25, 2016 by Athanasa

[antistar]

Just wanted to say that I've been interested in mods like this (Wasteland Salvation plus the others you just mentioned there) for FO4 for quite a while, and I like the sound of what you're going for. Good luck with it.

As a suggestion for another potential death alternative: being captured? For example:

- Chucked into a cage by super mutants, in order to eat you later. Gives you a chance to loot some bobby pins from nearby flesh bags, pick the lock, maybe find your gear stashed semi-nearby and then escape.
- Chucked into a cage by raiders, in order to... probably also eat you later. Gives you a chance to loot some bobby pins from nearby expired prisoners, pick the lock, etc, etc.
- Put into some kind of military/police lock-up by robots as a captured prisoner. Gives you a chance to loot some bobby pins from nearby expired prisoners, etc, etc.


Also, I sometimes note down the random mod/feature ideas I get, and I've been doing it for FO4 for probably years now; since before the game was announced. So I've got some notes relating to sickness/wounds/treatment/etc I'll copy-paste in here, in case it helps. Feel free to use/adapt/ignore/etc any of it. This really is just a straight copy-paste and most of it was written before the game was announced, so it may not be all that useful:

Diseases and Injuries
- END makes you increasingly less likely to get sick, with 10 meaning you never get sick?
- Disease can worsen (3 stages?) if not treated, depending on various things; fatigue, hunger, medical skill, etc.
- 'Points' (percentage?) towards worsening/improving in between stages.
- Flesh Wound
--- Chance when critically hit?
--- May become infected unless disinfectant used on it.
--- Might be redundant with limbs getting crippled; just do this stuff there (below) instead?
- Infection
--- Cured by antibiotics. Penicillin?
--- If crippled limb goes untreated for certain time (the idea being that using doctor's bag includes antiseptic). Chance increases over time, modified by END, nutrition, hydration(?), fatigue, etc.
--- Chance of infection when treating crippled limbs, less likely with better Medicine skill.
--- Chance every x minutes when limb health is lower than y%. Greater chance with lower limb health. Again modified by END, etc.
- Tetanus
--- Chance when using dirty needles?
--- Chance when critically hit by piercing/slashing weapons?
--- Chance when treating crippled limbs, less likely with better Medicine skill?
- Common cold
--- Chance when near human enemies? How to detect that though?
--- Chance when (critically?) hit by melee human enemy? (Just because you're close to them.)
--- Can sneeze/cough; detection event. Use normal sneeze/cough sfx except when sneaking; use suppressed one then (slightly quieter/smaller radius?)
--- Dehydrate and tire faster.
--- Some stat penalties; STR and END?
- Influenza
--- Can worsen into pneumonia or bronchitis - or just the more general "chest infection"?
- Hernia
--- Caused by carrying far too much.
--- Treated by surgery(?), wearing bandage truss for a while? (See splints, etc below.)

Medical treatment
- Body part condition can't be healed by stimpaks.
--- Requires splints/bandages (see below)
--- OR requires something like Super-Stimpak or Hydra? Powerful drug with high resource requirement to craft, plus side-effects/addiction chance.
--- Heals slowly over time if over certain condition (e.g. 50%), or heals more slowly the lower the condition (and 0 at 0%).
--- Or (player?) body part health max is doubled, but if it goes below 50%, it will slowly decrease without splints/bandages (plus cause some penalties).
- Equippable splints/bandages for each body part with visual representation; need to be equipped for a cumulative time to remove crippled effect (and increase limb condition healing speed?), but are encumbering in different ways.
--- Splints crafted from wood and cloth, bandages just from cloth.
--- Leg splints: slower movement, AGI penalty.
--- Arm splints: slower melee, reduced ranged accuracy. AGI penalty. Increased recoil?
--- Head compression bandage(?): PER penalty, vignette effect in upper left corner of screen?
--- Torso compression bandage(?): Reduced AP regen speed.
--- Can't be equipped/unequipped in combat, takes time to do as well.
--- Use Synth armour models for arm and leg "braces"?
--- Power armour mods for each body section that add benefits of splints/bandages without the penalties?
- Doctor's Bag
--- Non-consumable; craft it then carry as a tool.
--- Consumes antiseptic, cloth to heal crippled limb/body part.
--- Alternatively; smaller, disposable kit so as to not have to worry about "ammo" for doctor's bag. Uses valuable components to make, to balance against splints.
- Stimpaks
--- Using a stimpak returns an empty syringe (dirty).
--- Empty syringe (dirty) must be sterilised before being used to craft meds. (Might be useable for meds beside stimpaks.)
--- Crafting an empty syringe (steel, glass?) gives a dirty one, to avoid breakdown/craft exploit.

 

 

Ha - it even mentions the Medicine skill. So it was before we knew they were canning those.