The “Perfect” Post Apocalyptic RPG

 Before I continue I just need to state for the record that I am a fallout (originals) fanboi. In my opinion Fallout 1/2 are the pinnacle of post apocalyptic cRPGs, actually probably the pinnacle of cRPGs in general, I can’t think of a single cRPG I’ve played through more times that the fallout games. Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, are probably second on my list. In the last decade there hasn’t been a single game that has even come close to removing them from the top spots on the list of my all time favorite games.

So I’ve been thinking a bit about some of the recent games I’ve played and all the things that I liked and I found lacking in them. So I’m gonna outline what I feel the games did right and what they did wrong. Then I’m gonna give a basic description of what I feel would make my perfect post apocalyptic (gonna refer to it as PA from now on) RPG.

Let’s start with the classics:

Fallout 1/2

What They Did Right

Um, pretty much everything… haha, okay typical fanboi comment aside, what made those games that great? One thing stands out above everything else, the writing! Yes the setting design and the art style was amazing as well but it got outshined by the quality of the writing. The depth of characters, the locations, the back stories, the quests, the little jokes thrown in randomly, all these things fleshed out the game. Ironically the weakest story in both games was the main plot. I played those games just for the dialogues and the characters. The only other game that came close to the depth of the world and the dialogue was Baldur’s Gate 2.

Let me just go on a little bit of a rant now, to a large extent during the time period that the games were made, gaming was still a small exclusive past time. Most gamers of that period were male, and older, and usually a little geeky. There was no massive casual gaming culture as we knew , the console age was just starting and PC games were still in large, the smart gamers choice. I kinda feel that this contributed greatly to the depth of writing present in the original fallout games, when there was more focus on that sort of thing, and much less focus on large explosions, instant action and shiny graphics in games. Storylines were appreciated and dialogue sequences weren’t skipped just to get to the next level of killing hordes of nazi/aliens/etc. I miss those days, but maybe that’s just me.

Let’s move onto the combat and character systems in Fallout, the combat was a slow strategic affair, more a kin to a game of chess rather than a quake deathmatch. That again was indicative of the times, turn based combat was pretty common in games at the time and so no one complained. I personally loved the slower more thoughtful approach to combat. It made battles all the more epic since at the end you felt like you had not only outgunned your opponents but out thought them as well.

The character system was the now familiar SPECIAL system, which was based if I recall correctly on the GURPS system. I’m not gonna go into detail about the system, but it was basically a standard DnD style character attributes system. In addition to the character stats you had a list of skills, ranging from combat skills to dialogue skills, and perks. Anyone that’s played fallout3 will be familiar with both these. I really preferred the more open approach to character development found here in comparison to the rigid DnD character systems that pigeonholed your character from the start.

Another excellent design feature in the fallout games was the option to not fight! You could make it through a massive part of the game without firing a shot. This allowed me to replay the game several times with entirely different experiences. I played as a standard gunfighter character that just slaughtered everyone, then I played as a smooth talker, and realized how much additional depth the game had, and how much content I had missed out on by just gunning my way through everything. The level design was also excellent, there was no repetition between areas, you never got bored exploring. Items were also pretty scarce and so you had a sense of achievement when scavenging. There were tons of different weapons, different ammo types, different armors, etc.

The enemies were varied and tough, at no point did I feel like a god prancing through the world invulnerable, there was always some brotherhood of steel paladin or some super mutant to cut me back down to size.

What They Did Wrong

I honestly can’t really think of anything to complain about here. There were several glitches with quests not working properly and other miscellaneous bugs but those are not design problems. Design wise I can’t think of anything that could have been better. So

I’ve fanboi’d myself out so let’s move onto the best modern PA games: Fallout 3 and STALKER, seeing as we’re in a fallout mood we’ll start with fallout 3.

Fallout 3

What They Did Right

Their world design on the surface is excellent, wandering out in the DC wasteland from a first person viewpoint was excellent. I found the experience quite immersive. The various locations were quite well designed as well but there was some pretty major problems in regards to the world when you look at it in a little more depth, but I’ll get to that. The first person view and the graphics were again quite good and really help immerse the player in the environment, I found the combat system fun (it had some problems) for the most part, and really didn’t mind the VATS add on, it was fun blowing off parts in slow motion.

What They Did Wrong

(WARNING: bethesda fans should stop reading now)

When will bethesda realize that p&p RPG systems DONOT work well in first person? The obviously didn’t learn the lesson from morrowind or oblivion. Why bother giving the player the illusion of aim, when it had no effect on damage. How many times was the player stormed in oblivion by an enemy with 6 arrows sticking out his face? Seriously, it just shatters any immersion the player has with the game. The same happens in FO3, it didn’t matter if you shot someone in the face or in the foot, emptying a clip into an enemies face at close range only to have them still come at you is just stupid! Having a PnP character system in a realtime FPS game is stupid, what is it used for? just calculating whether you hit and how much damage you did? Uh, that’s what aim and distance is for, seeing as its already an FPS and chances are they already do an intersection test to see whether they should run a weapon hit check. Shooting a monster at point blank range and not hitting is ridiculous, and just ruins that sense of immersion once again.

The locations in the game while well designed from the outside lacked any sort of depth, a settlement with 6 people in it? seriously? Even megaton with its masses of people (read 20) only had 3 or 4 worth talking to. Just like every other recent bethesda game, there was a massive lack of depth. The levels were repetitive, if I had to see another sewer / subway I was going to scream. They just made a shallow simple hack and slash game and called it fallout. Yeh, it was fun for a while, until I ran through my bazilionth tunnel.

Also there were some consistency issues I had with the game, they’d be destroyed building and cars everywhere, the aftermath of a nuclear attack, and yet all the cars energy packs seem to have made it out okay, even though the cars themselves were destroyed. Also the addition of the nuke launcher?! Seriously?! I cna only think both those items were added in for the console “instant gratification” players take like “lotsa splosions!”. Weapons were not varied enough, and also items were everywhere, I don’t think I ever ran out of stimpacks or ammo. Obviously in a desolate wasteland, every single fridge or box will have tons of ammo and stuff in it, since no-one would bother looting (sarcasm!). Power armor was strewn everywhere, you never struggled for weapons or armor. Then they threw in a half baked recipe system that never really worked, the items you made were mediocre at best and you never really needed them anyways, again another stupid left over from oblivion.

The enemies were ridiculously easy to kill, supermutants going down with something ridiculous like three shots from a hunting rifle. I think by around level 14, nothing in the game could touch me, I’d maxed out my gun skills, my speech skills, my repair skills, and was busy maxing out my energy weapons skills. The quests were simple and linear, no back stories, no depth: “fetch me 30 nuka cola bottles”, why? because the NPC collects them of course. Why would I even give a damn? The moral choices were clear as night and day with the exceptions of the ghouls and tenpenny tower (kudos on that one guys). The characters were shallow and uninteresting. Trying to talk your way through things was pointless, it always boiled down to a fight. I honestly got bored 3/4 of the way through and didn’t bother finishing it.

The game can be simply described as a PA hack and slash, they might as well have foregone the quests entirely and just gone the diablo route. All in all it was a fun, simple, flashy, repetitive game without any sort of depth.

STALKER: SOC and CS

What they did right

 (I do realize stalker is not an RPG but it had a lot of RPGesque elements)

No stupid character system to calculate hits and so on, these guys were smart enough to realize that FPS and hit checks don’t work so well. You shoot a guy in the head he goes down, shoot him in the body, you’ll need to shoot him again.

Amazing environment, beautifully done, I don’t think any game has managed to capture that sense of desolation and abandonment as well as STALKER did.

 Excellent weapon range and customization options, excellent item range and artifact options. Pretty much every aspect in regards to weapons and items in the game was excellent. Items were scarce, health packs were pretty rare, various ammo types were extremely rare, artifacts were obviously rare, basically everything you carried, you had worked hard to acquire.

 The enemies were tough from the start till the end, you never once felt overpowering and untouchable.

What They Did Wrong

Infinite enemies, that was the one thing that pissed me off about both games, you’d killed everything in an area leave, come back literally 3 minutes later and the area would be repopulated with enemies. It just made the game annoying especially when travelling across multiple areas, you’d have geared up at a vendor, then by the time you got to your objective you’d be at half health with no health packs and no ammo.

CS introduce a broken faction system, which was interesting if it had worked! I should put this in the things they did right but since it never really worked I have no idea what it was supposed to do.

Terrible incomprehensible storyline and endings, I finished both games and really have no idea what the hell was going on. I had to go read the damn wikipedia page to get an idea of the storyline I had just played. I’ll put it down to a poor translation from russian to english. The game had so much potential for storytelling, tons of stalkers huddled around camp fires that could tell you rumors or interesting stories. They made use of it once or twice but not enough. The quests were all just fetch quests. Simple task / reward affairs, again so much potential especially in regards to the faction system. I really felt that having quests to go weaken enemy factions strongholds would have been excellent, so much potential for inter faction politics. Instead they made a open world FPS till you reached a certain point, where you couldn’t go back and followed a per defined route to an end mission that left you entirely unsatisfied. It’s like being led to a candy store through a rough ghetto, only to go inside and be given a stick of celery.

So now we come to my perfect PA RPG

My personal perfect PA RPG

Okay, so after lots of thinking, I actually think STALKER is an excellent base for a great PA RPG, but with some heavy modifications. Let’s just take stalker as a based and fallout’ify it a bit This is not going to be a full design doc, that I’m working on in my spare time but rather an idea of the things that I think would make a great game.

The World

The world present in stalker was excellent, it was well designed but severely underused. There were so many areas that could have been excellent little sub plot triggers or quest locations. Like the pump house in Clear Sky, great location, well modeled and designed and absolutely no reason to be there.

The world should be just like the stalker world, open and varying, there was next to no repetition across areas in stalker, unlike in the “seen one subway tunnel seen em all” fallout 3.

The Gameplay

Fallout 3 made me see that FPS is an excellent format for a PA game, you want to be able to feel that sense of destruction, emptiness, hopelessness that would be present in such a world, where fallout 1/2 portrayed that feeling through the rich writing, fallout 3 out did them in that regard with the magnificent vistas of destruction (pity that was all there practically was, an outside image).

In regards to the character system, I don’t think that a strict pen and paper style character system has any place in a first person game, it’s too restrictive and like I mentioned tends to destroy some of that sense of immersion. I’d suggest a system of skills, where you can increase the skills with each level. I’d also suggest reducing the number of skills to the bare minimum:  light weapons, heavy weapons, first aid, repair, speech, electronics.

I’d suggest health to remain the same as when the player starts out, so that the game is equipment based more so that stat based. I’d like to struggle to acquire my equipment and know that without it I’m pretty much as vulnerable as at the start of the game.

The combat system should also be a bit modified, I think that in additions to the skills there should be a proficiency list of all the weapons in the game. When you first find a weapon you should not have any skill in using it, an M4 is nothing like an AK so the assumption made in most games so far is that it is. I’d suggest introducing a system similar to that in dungeon siege 2, where the more you use a weapon type like an M4 the more proficient you get in using it. Start off with a massive crosshair and insane recoil and slowly reduce both these with use.

The weapons skills should affect the learning rate of each weapon. This game mechanic will further tie you to certain weapons and make the game inventory centric.

Characters shouldn’t be able to master all the weapons in the game, and so it should give them incentive to replay with different load outs. I’d also suggest various levels of specialization (beginner, intermediate, expert, marksman, etc) with each weapon, so once you cross over into a new level you unlock a special function like automatic fire, or three round burst, or allows you to use different ammo type…

The Weapons, Armor and Items

The range available in stalker was excellent, and the upgrade/customization system present in Clear Sky was the best I’ve seen in any game to date. I’d say keep a similar range of weapons. Perhaps add in some more ammo types and armors. Add in helmets and add helmet customizations. Perhaps even add extras like pants, boots etc, which affect things like stealth, stamina, etc… This adds the option for random generation of items (diablo style).

Players like customization, and the game should provide them to create entirely custom characters and loadouts. Have character skills affect the efficacy of items, good first aid gives you more health from health packs, better repair better repairs items, pretty much the way the fallout games handled the link between skills and items.

The Enemies

Enemies should be like the player, and their difficulty should depend on their equipment and skill sets as well, ie. a tough enemy must have high end armor and be at the max weapon level with a good quality customized weapon while an easy enemy must be wearing light armor and still be figuring out which end of the gun the bullets come out of.

At no point should the player feel invincible or fragile, obviously with better equipment, the weaker enemies will pose no challenge. The player must also be rewarded for good aim, and as such feel that he can take down tougher enemies if gets the right shots in. Getting a lucky shot in always feels so rewarding. Perhaps add the VATS system in as well just for some spice, calculate the chance to hit based on distance and weapon skill.  

The Storyline / Quests

Now the most important part of any RPG is the story, the characters and the quest. I’d suggest making it a very open “main” plot, something like the player’s brother needs money for an operation and the player entered the zone to raise the cash. Something that is a goal to work towards but that doesn’t restrict the player from the start. The game should be all about exploring the game world, learning about all the characters, the back stories, the politics. The player should be able to leave a lasting effect on the world. Having an ending like fallout’s with a slideshow of all the areas you visiting and how your actions affected them would be amazing.

The game should be like a long TV action series,  lots of character, lots of dialogue, lots of action.

Try to avoid stupid things like simple fetch quests, make them a little bit more elaborate, it will take a bit of thought, but that’s what you’re paying your game designers/writers for.  Make it interesting, make the choices have consequences, ie, “if you do a job for boss a, against boss b, boss b’s thugs might rob you of your belongings” etc… I think that multi part elaborate quests are what should be done rather than simple boring task. I recently finished GTA4 and towards the end of the game, I didn’t even bother watching the cut scenes, cause they boiled down to 4-5minute speeches to tell you to go to “point x” and kill “person y”.  Keep things interesting.

The game shouldn’t be about instant gratification, it should be a game where the player sits down and can’t stop playing for hours. I hate it when I sit down with a game and after an hour I’m about to throw my keyboard out the window when I’ve been given my 45th go to the other side of the map and kill/fetch something quest (ie STALKER, far cry 2, GTA 4).

Conclusion

This rant got to be super long and I apologize, It isn’t as detailed as I’d like it to be but if it was it would take another 15 or more pages and I doubt you’d want to read that much. I hope that people would agree with some of the things I’ve said or might even have better ideas. The comment box is just below, please use it