Hi! I finished a playthrough with Redux 1.2 (I remembered FO:T the other day and wanted to replay it, saw the mod and decided to plug it in); Thank you for the effort, I had a ton of fun and your work is really appreciated. Now mixed: good and bad.
- Slow rifles, fast pistols:
SO MUCH YES. This was the one basically sold me on the mod and kept me entertained until the very end.
Sniper rifles were in bad need of some kind of nerf, I think we here all agree with that, and I think +1 AP was exactly the right choice At the same previously unusable pistols now have their place and even allow for gunslinger type characters, which is awesome.
My character constantly carried around about 3 different guns swapping them around based on the next upcoming situation for the best range, damage, and speed. I think I could've even run a pure pistol dueler type hero with high AG and average PE, or a pure sniper with high Pe and average AG, and I'd have been fine.
[I'll try not to interrupt myself all the time, but I must ask:
what decides from the engine's POV who shoots first, if 2 entities have already detected each other? Sometimes I could move out of cover and still fire first. Is it related to animation time and is AG (AP) or PE (Sequence) actually calculated?]
I'd love to see this variety manifest in other weapon types as well, eg. "Throwing" offering a choice between long range (spears), high damage, and AoE (grenades), etc. ...but more on that later.
And yes, I exploited the heck out of 1 AP pistols by the end, but that did not make long range weapons any less useful: I'd gladly take their slowness drawback because I needed the long distance to survive, and I only whipped out my 1 AP Plasma Pistol when a single enemy came up close. (And when I did not put it away in return for a different long range + mid range & damage combination, like the Plasma Rifle + Gauss Rifle.)
- Upping the damage (say, by x1.5) I feel was in general a good idea. It makes you utilize your whole squad; it makes you take EN more seriously; it encourages turn based play for the boss fights; it makes firearms or deathclaws look as deadly as we imagine them; drugs and healing items have to get with a frequency that reflects their avaliability more closely. It also takes away from the importance of AG for every type of character (because it makes it more important what you can achieve in a single hit than what you can get by constant repeated blows), opening up room for more non maxed AG builds (say, martial artists that prefer LK, EN or ST).
Overalll all sorts of stuff that helps the game.
Status effects from enemy attacks seemed more common (I got Poisoned and Irradiated on Cheyenne Mountain almost constantly) and that was great too. It gave meaning to those Antidotes and Radaways I was carrying around, and there was just enough of it to make me slightly worried if I will run out before the Calculator's lair.
- Some changes and additions, like the Reaver leader rescue mission & the switch to scripted paths, were truly perfectly executed.
Now I must talk about the bad:
- the recruit pool sucks - way more now than before:
What we are supposed to be trying to enforce is a version that encourages team play over solo play (which was a constant trap in the original if you neglected CH and missed good recruits, because the difference in skill was JUST THAT GREAT. You're not gonna let a recruit fire a weapon if another recruit can fire it and have 2x the likelihood to hit something.)
Redux actually made this even more important, because higher damage kills any unprepared recruit much faster, which is equivalent to a game over since you're not goona let anybody die.
So it is more important than ever that every character can, if not reach, but at least get close to the level of your minmaxed superman main character. So what do we get.
What you get is you tearing your hair out because on all of the first rank what you get is trash.
Anything you could ask for: characters who Tagged the 3 worst skills, characters with self-defeating Traits,
and it is as if the creator made it a rule that low rank should be = all attributes low, so you won't get to see a single 8 attribute or higher for a long time.
Even if you run a 10 CH character and jump to Squire rank immediately, it is still offering you the same mutants, which kinda defeates focusing a character on that stat in the first place.
The strange thing is that the original FO:T actually handled early recruits pretty well: sure, overall
but they were gravitating towards certain builds, like a wannabe shooter did have 5+ ST, 8+ PE, and 6+ AG and Small Guns tagged. Even if they annoyed you with wasted perks, misspent skill points, or a single missing key attribute or tag skill, they were all overall immediately usable in battle or just one perk or two away (one "Tag!" here, a Mutate!:Gifted/Fast Shot or Gain there) from turning into something valuable.
And they all offered some small benefit or quirk that made picking who you wanted to mold into a team member a challenge: a usable 2nd Tag skill (eg. Rebecca offering Lockpick as soon as your new player begins to realize that they'll need somebody with it on the long run), a rare high attribute, or simply better point distribution, which made them equally good options to consider for your group.
It was only on higher ranks that the misspent traits, perks and skill points started shoving their effect, which meant that you were generally better off with a party you've raised yourself even if later recruits had better starting attributes, which made CH focus meaningless after the first few levels.
So what we -I - expected were just recruits with better builds on higher levels, and maybe some extra options for the type of races that only had very few representatives before (deathclaw, dog, robot...) but which you've always longed to play as, as better built characters.
What Redux seems to have done is not fixing the 2nd issue but even removing the 1st part of the pool.
On my 3rd mission I literally had no usable person to fill my empty 6th slot.
These guys aren't even worthy of carrying around for free exp.
The part of the game that should've been about strategic team building, as well as cooperative fighting has been completely removed.
The only halfway decent recruit in the entire game is the goddamn Resident Evil expy.
What made you commit this travesty?
- Junk, junk everywhere:
So every player starts the game with a bunch of condoms and porn mags in their inventory...Ha, ha. Well THAT was a mood killer, nice of you to blow away the post apoc military recruit atmosphere I was trying to relive there.
Dog tags. Yeah, nice touch, except they are on EVERY character. Doing NOTHING, just taking up space in the inventory 'cause what we want from this game is surely even MORE inventory management.
A tribal trader offers dozens of goods for sale, except none of them does anything, so why are they there? To show people that such nice sprites exist?
I'm not gonna wait until the "Wishlist" suggestion but will put this suggestion right here:
these goodies could have been made meaningful.
One is if they were ultra rare. So a completionist players could've collected them just for the sake of unlocking an imaginary achievement.
The 2nd is if they were treasure items. I noticed that in some parts of the game objects that do nothing but which you can sell later have appeared.
That seems nice since the carrying 100 rifles for sale part of the game was one nobody probably enjoyed (shooting up the town, then spending an equal amount of time distributing the loot among your recruits so that nobody's encumbered, so that you have money for more ammo and a new advanced rifle).
One approach to fixing that -not neccessarily the best one- would have been to reuce the sell (not the buy) value of loot, and instead offer either money for missions OR - here's where they come into the picture- placing "treasures" on the maps you can acquire from defeated bosses or on key mission spots. So a neckackle from the Beastlord leader, a dogtag collected from the top paladin's corpse (heck, maybe BOS would even pay you for retrieving the dog tags from any dead BOS soldier), a pipe from a tribal side quest which you can all sell to the right person for tons of money could have worked. IF you are set on putting them into the game.
But you know - MicroForté has been reasonably good about conservation of detail. If there is any element in the game that demands your time (even the damn Kerr the Merchant), it is likely to become important later. I'm not sure I'm buying into the "pointless extra stuff" philosophy. Wouldn't have stood out in FO 1-2, does so in FOT.
- Most of the extra content is meh:
Maybe I'm just nitpicking, but most of the new character descriptions, NPC conversations etc., I did not find them in line with the usual sarcastic FO tone. They seem to take themelves a bit too seriously.
Many I found difficult to buy within the setting, like an overabundance of spies. I know these were added in an effort to give more bg information about the different factions, but with Ma Baker/the raider spy I already had my "fill" on that angle, and I seriously doubt if the BOS short-staffed as it is can afford to send initiates with insufficient training on missions of questionable direct benefit like this.
One possible suggestion to help with this:
Make all of the spies Inquisitors and use them as an introduction to extra material on this. Mentioned frequenty in the game text, they seem to be busy with just this kind of stuff (military intelligence), and could potentially be fleshed out more in added material.
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I'd also like to deliver a wishlist.
First of all (seeing the Redux fix patch thread) I wonder if it was possible to separate different aspects of the Redux patch. They'd still belong to one project, but a player could add just the ones they want: 1. bug fixes, 2. story expansions, 3. weaponry changes, etc.
Maybe this is not possible because of file overlaps, but it'd help those would-be players who don't try the whole mod because of only one part of it (say, the difficulty or the changed weapon graphics).
Now on to my list of requests/suggestions:
- Variety for throwables, melee weapons...
You did a great jon on guns and unarmed attacks so I wonder if these could be brought up to speed too.
Melee weapons are easy, one just ups the damage with the STR requirement and tries to keep up with the Unarmed attack progression.
(Have there been armor piercing, poison, etc. melee weapons? Sorry if I missed them.)
I have a particular request for throwables: please increase the maximum range to 35 (for the best throwables).
Max range for throwing in FO is calculated from STx3. Ergo, if the max range is 15 for grenades, then a 5 ST (or 3 ST and Heave Ho! perk) gives one all they'll ever need. This is NOT good. I WOULD like seeing heroic ST characters reach good ranges with spears, etc. and monstrous strenght launch objects to impressive distances. They'd still not threaten the range of sniper rifles or take away the importance of maxed ST from melee, if that's how people prefer it - but good ST for a thrower WOULD have proper significance. Also, it'd make room to create more AoE/damage/range/speed variety among throwable objects, like it was added for firearms.
- Better map finds/random encounters:
I was running a 10 LK character and STILL did not have a single "positive" encounter. In FO1 top LK pretty much guaranteed that you'd get bonus events.
I'd much prefer it if events tied to location would appear as green circles on the map (this'd give back importance to the "Scout" perk), and another type of random event could happen anywhere with regularity regulated by LK.
I don't know if this is prevented by the game engine or is possible.
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I'll probably make a thread for lore and bonus story suggestion stuff, and another for recruit suggestions...how about that? :p
Keep up the good work, and thanks for the fun times!
When you got back to base, you'd just report them as KIA, and since the player-character's squad is supposed to be some kind of hotshots in the organization no one would question you about it.