Ideas

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I know, there are many cons against the below ideas, but i think some realism should be discarded for the fun.

Invincibility

This is an old problem, player with decent armor cannot be harmed. This change the monsters from a dangerous enemy to an annoying obstacle. Risks should never be gone. It would be a nice change if some percent of damage could bypass the armor anyway, until someone figure out a good solution.

Item resistance

The item damage resist calculation is easy and simple, but it has its shortcoming. High resist items almost never damaged, which makes them just a perfect items forever. Item quality value should be change to a hit point value, calculated from the matters of the item. This would make every item vulnerable on a long run. Also items should be wear out from use. Repair should more difficult - or less successful - on an item which need a high level of skill to create. I really miss the constant repairing like in the Fallout games.

Fire

Nerf fire damage. Nobody dies from it, only the zombies and they are already pathetic.

Damage

Many monsters have a difficult time to kill the character while others can easily kill them. I think monsters should be wear down the character, damage should be low and healing should be slow or difficult. It would require more planning on a long run as the problems add up, but also permit more mistakes in a short time. Don’t starve use similar solution, most creature can’t kill you outright (well, a basic armor doesn’t harm), but health wearing down on long run without healing items.

High damage

A high damaging attack should be change to a normal and a rare special attacks. Normal “High damaging attacks” should be a low damaging but armor penetrating attacks, so they will be challenging even for an armored character, but still not deadly. Special attack should be high damaging, but evadable.

Weak special attacks

I love special attacks, they make the game interesting, but they are too frequent and not punishing enough. Most of them are just a minor setback for a short time. They should be rarer but more dangerous. I would like to see a much rarer but cripplingly painful poison bite, maybe for a full day.

Early warning

There should be a warning before the special attack and there should be a way to evade that. If the player failed to evade it, it should be an automatic success for the special attack. A hulk smashing attack or a zombie bite would be defeated if the player steps away from the monster. Chicken walker grenade attack should be “slow targeting”, player should see the slowly moving laser point, so constant moving would defeat the special attack. The games come to my mind with similar features are the Doom the roguelike and the Don’t starve.

Levelling

I loved the game because it was a levelless game. But the constant “new power item” problems forced the developers to “evolve” the monsters, so they can challenge the player character. I think this is a wrong direction, because it has no ending, there would be always a new power item, which would need a new monster for the challenge. Less damage from the monster attacks, more meaningful special attacks and not full damage stopping armors would make a constant challenge.

Abundance of items

Abundance of items is very helpful at the beginning of the game, but items should be gone with time. Bring back acid rain with an early warning message or just make weak, item consuming monsters (acid blobs, item chewing monkeyman, aimlessly wandering, building destroying, item stomping, neutral golems, anything) everywhere. As time goes, new places should be less chance to spawn items as the monsters already eat them. I know it is forced and silly, but i think self sufficiency is a major part of the game, and it is currently defeated by the large amount of free items.

NPC

Change wandering npcs into some kind of strange, intelligent cthulhuish aliens until their code is finished.

2

[quote=“latogato, post:1, topic:10296”]I know, there are many cons against the below ideas, but i think some realism should be discarded for the fun.

Item resistance

The item damage resist calculation is easy and simple, but it has its shortcoming. High resist items almost never damaged, which makes them just a perfect items forever. Item quality value should be change to a hit point value, calculated from the matters of the item. This would make every item vulnerable on a long run. Also items should be wear out from use. Repair should more difficult - or less successful - on an item which need a high level of skill to create. I really miss the constant repairing like in the Fallout games.[/quote]

there are cons to everything you said, but this one is pure blasphemy. Have you ever played the original fallout and the even better fallout 2? They had no item destruction whatsoever. Every "fallout’ that has come later is, sadly, just a pale shadow of the original.

3

[quote=“Dlightfull, post:2, topic:10296”][quote=“latogato, post:1, topic:10296”]I know, there are many cons against the below ideas, but i think some realism should be discarded for the fun.

Item resistance

The item damage resist calculation is easy and simple, but it has its shortcoming. High resist items almost never damaged, which makes them just a perfect items forever. Item quality value should be change to a hit point value, calculated from the matters of the item. This would make every item vulnerable on a long run. Also items should be wear out from use. Repair should more difficult - or less successful - on an item which need a high level of skill to create. I really miss the constant repairing like in the Fallout games.[/quote]

there are cons to everything you said, but this one is pure blasphemy. Have you ever played the original fallout and the even better fallout 2? They had no item destruction whatsoever. Every "fallout’ that has come later is, sadly, just a pale shadow of the original.[/quote]

I’m more interested in this idea (repair difficulty) if nothing else. Also, isn’t modding aspects of the recent Fallout games viable?

4

[quote=“latogato, post:1, topic:10296”]High damage

A high damaging attack should be change to a normal and a rare special attacks. Normal “High damaging attacks” should be a low damaging but armor penetrating attacks, so they will be challenging even for an armored character, but still not deadly. Special attack should be high damaging, but evadable.[/quote]

Not sure what do you mean here.

You mean more attacks like the predator’s impale and hulk smash?

What are the “normal high damaging attacks”?

[quote=“latogato, post:1, topic:10296”]Item resistance

The item damage resist calculation is easy and simple, but it has its shortcoming. High resist items almost never damaged, which makes them just a perfect items forever. Item quality value should be change to a hit point value, calculated from the matters of the item. This would make every item vulnerable on a long run. Also items should be wear out from use. Repair should more difficult - or less successful - on an item which need a high level of skill to create. I really miss the constant repairing like in the Fallout games.[/quote]

Repair difficulty scaling with production difficulty (with factory-made items being treated as lvl 10) could work.

All items wearing from use sounds like a giant annoyance without much mechanical effect, though. Especially in the case of crafting items.

5

I’m a proud owner of the first two fallout games. :slight_smile: But the first fallout games are looting games, not a crafting ones. IMHO, in a crafting game item degradation should be mandatory to keep up the challenge, this force the player to make plans and take risks. Don’t starve is an excellent example of this.

Also Fallout 1 is a good example about the good damage system with serious problems. There was no full damage stopping armors except maybe the power armor, which protected it’s wearer even from the high damaging weapons, except when a critical hit bypass it and kill the charater outright. While the damage resistance and treshold system was very good, random criticals like this totally ruined it. Of course i loved to shot my enemies on the eyes with a plasma rifle. :slight_smile:

6

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:4, topic:10296”]You mean more attacks like the predator’s impale and hulk smash?
What are the “normal high damaging attacks”?[/quote]
Normal high damage attacks are the normal attack of the “monsters with high damage”. They should be change to a low damage attack with armor penetration. Special attack would be a special attack with their original damage. So the normal attack would wear off the character, but the special attack would hurt them seriously if the player is careless. But maybe it is redundant, because many monsters have special attacks already.

I would like to see something like this in the game.

Maybe you are right, there are already charges for some crafting items, which is similar to this.

7
Invincibility ------------- This is an old problem, player with decent armor cannot be harmed. This change the monsters from a dangerous enemy to an annoying obstacle. Risks should never be gone. It would be a nice change if some percent of damage could bypass the armor anyway, until someone figure out a good solution.
This hasn't been a problem since all the different acid zombies were added and brutes got a throw attack.
8

No no no no no no no no no no no please God no no no no no no no no no no nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. I can handle FUN but fun is a no-go-zone.

9

[quote=“latogato, post:1, topic:10296”]Fire

Nerf fire damage. Nobody dies from it, only the zombies and they are already pathetic.[/quote]
I’ve died countless times from bad applications of the flamethrower. Not exactly what you are talking about, but I think that it is a very reasonable approximation of what might happen to you in real life. Which is a design goal for this game.

Have you ever tried to kill a triffid queen using fire? This kills me a lot when it decides to just run at me and a forest springs up around me, trapping me in my own inferno.

Also it’s the only sane response to the fungal infestations making the world a bad place for cars.

[quote=“latogato, post:1, topic:10296”]Abundance of items

Abundance of items is very helpful at the beginning of the game, but items should be gone with time. Bring back acid rain with an early warning message or just make weak, item consuming monsters (acid blobs, item chewing monkeyman, aimlessly wandering, building destroying, item stomping, neutral golems, anything) everywhere. As time goes, new places should be less chance to spawn items as the monsters already eat them. I know it is forced and silly, but i think self sufficiency is a major part of the game, and it is currently defeated by the large amount of free items.[/quote]
I think that this is a case of all or nothing. The acid rain cannot possibly be bad enough to destroy most items, because if it was, every living thing would already be dead. We live in between a very small range of pH balances, which, if upset to that degree, would result in nearly everything dying.

Also, I like going around and scavenging. I make year long trips in the game to visit distant lands and steal everything that my car can hold.

More to the point, I don’t want to be competing with crappy item destroying monsters. They are spawned there, so they’ll win in their attempts to get to the item before the player. I am however, a fan of magpies, why not have some monsters that run around taking items back to their nests? That at leasts allows the player to potentially find those items again.

As for item quality, I think that might be okay. For a player with decent skills, it is remarkably easy to fix nearly anything that they come across. I think that more to the point, it might be fun to have additional levels of reinforced. Nah. I don’t think that it works very well in this game. There aren’t any merchants to appreciate the fact that your survivor’s backpack is of masterwork quality. :slight_smile:

I think that the argument that factory made is the best quality is silly. They work on reproducible production, they want consistent quality, not the best. The best is often made with techniques that aren’t easy to automate in production. They also don’t guarantee that the design is competent. I’ve bought many a factory made product that was bad just because the design was inherently bad to begin with.

My point is that given a standard design, the quality of production only helps to a certain point. This point can’t be exceeded without changing the design. That being said, there is also a philosophy in design that focuses on expedience, that it can be put together by someone without a lot of experience and expected to function well.

This results in rudimentary products like this which is a reasonable way to measure radiation without having to come up with components that would be unlikely to find in your home.

Theoretically, this is plausible for many of the sort of things that we produce in game. I know that it’s fairly easy to make backpack like storage items out of sticks alone. This is a case of sophistication versus the ability to produce from limited resources.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make with this is that a frame of sticks isn’t something that you would normally refer to as a backpack, therefore I would argue that a frame of sticks isn’t a low quality backpack, it’s a frame of sticks, with a different use case, weight, durability etc.

Also we should have field-expedient Kearny fallout meters in game. I know that they aren’t as rapid or precise as normal geiger counters, but they are sufficient to tell if that place you’re standing is radioactive enough to be concerned.

10

plasma? Gauss rifle all the way, mmm, i loved them juicy crits with gauss rifle.

11

[quote=“latogato, post:5, topic:10296”]I’m a proud owner of the first two fallout games. :slight_smile: But the first fallout games are looting games, not a crafting ones. IMHO, in a crafting game item degradation should be mandatory to keep up the challenge, this force the player to make plans and take risks. Don’t starve is an excellent example of this.

Also Fallout 1 is a good example about the good damage system with serious problems. There was no full damage stopping armors except maybe the power armor, which protected it’s wearer even from the high damaging weapons, except when a critical hit bypass it and kill the charater outright. While the damage resistance and treshold system was very good, random criticals like this totally ruined it. Of course i loved to shot my enemies on the eyes with a plasma rifle. :)[/quote]

I don t see a problem at all. Its the same in cataclysm.
The strong armors protect from most attacks. But theres some enemies that can bypass even the pa deff and outright kill you. What we need is better armor/attack value balance so wearing cloth doesn t negate zombie attacks etc.

Enemies always doing damage regardless of armor is a bad idea. It makes no sense that i would be wounded by a mundane zombies bite if i wear say platemail.
Id rather wait for a good solution instead of implementing a bad solution that might god forbid be expanded on.

12

[quote=“jaked122, post:9, topic:10296”]Have you ever tried to kill a triffid queen using fire? This kills me a lot when it decides to just run at me and a forest springs up around me, trapping me in my own inferno.

Also it’s the only sane response to the fungal infestations making the world a bad place for cars.[/quote]
While flamethowers are fun, they are too dangerous to their users, i prefer molotovs and grenade launchers.

I love scavenging too, but it is too easy. There should be a game mechanic which makes items more rare. Or maybe they should be just harder to get. There are already strong monsters at places with good items, but… i really don’t know. I miss the feeling of achievement when i get an item. Now if the item grabbing is too risky i just go to the next house. In the Don’t starve and Project Zomboid, getting an item is an archievement and it has a meaning.

I think it is a good idea. Ants, blobs and some new generic city monsters should steal items.

I think the problem is we can repair slightly damaged items without resources. While it is not realistic, it would make repair harder if we need a material for every repair.

While we can’t get enough item customization, in the current state of the game, this just make items like armors more powerful and they are already too good.

Because it is about the repair, “quality” here means the repair difficulty, not a better item.

I think there are already too many items in the game, most of them are never used. They should be for some reason to be in the game, like a rough one next to an ordinary one. I think Kearny meters should be in the game, but many others are just cluttering the game without a real use.

13

We definitely need more FUN in this game.

[quote=“SteelBlueWolf, post:7, topic:10296”]

Invincibility

This hasn’t been a problem since all the different acid zombies were added and brutes got a throw attack.[/quote]
It is a problem, acid Zs and brutes just workarounds to lessen this problem.

[quote=“Valpo, post:11, topic:10296”]I don t see a problem at all. Its the same in cataclysm.
The strong armors protect from most attacks. But theres some enemies that can bypass even the pa deff and outright kill you. What we need is better armor/attack value balance so wearing cloth doesn t negate zombie attacks etc.[/quote]
Fallout was a level game, you became more powerful with every level, you got more hit points to survive. There was level zones, you had to get more levels and equipments to survive them. Also you had the magical reload feature, which solved every error.

But in a levelless game like cdda this game mechanic is the worst solution! You can fight with every monsters everywhere, but the current damage and damage resist system makes the weak monsters insignificant and the powerful ones still can kill you without a warning. This is boring and unnecessary punishing. There should be a middle ground, where weak monsters are still a small threat and powerful ones are survivable.

While armor and attack value balance would help this, this issue is unanswered for a long time and the only reflections to this problem are more powerful monsters and items.

[quote=“Valpo, post:11, topic:10296”]Enemies always doing damage regardless of armor is a bad idea. It makes no sense that i would be wounded by a mundane zombies bite if i wear say platemail.
Id rather wait for a good solution instead of implementing a bad solution that might god forbid be expanded on.[/quote]
But invincibility against them is a worse idea. Really, what is the challenge in killing countless zombies or bears when they can’t scratch the character? Nothing, it is boring as hell. It should be like in the Aliens games with a marine. You are powerful but vulnerable. You should solve the problems, not your armor.