Today's short lived character followed a slightly different, and in most ways better, trajectory than his two predecessors. Having spent some time with the combat mechanics, I decided that the key was a high Agility, so I put 4 points into that, dropped my Strength to 3, then After the cave wandering and rat shooting, I started treking around via overland map once more. This time however I do so slowly, poking along one square at a time (query, why does the zone map use hexes, but the overland a grid?).
Taking Fri's suggestion, I stop at a villige, exchange five words with some dude named Seth, and end up in a dark cave filled with scorpions the size of a lawnmower, but much less useful for yardwork. They are good at dropping my hitpoints however, although I prove slightly more adept at killing them. Things are going very well, I've killed all but 2 or 3 of the scorpions by the sophisticated and ancient gaming technique of shooting them, then walking away. They can still get an attack in on me, but they can't double attack and by moving a few hexes every turn I can draw my current opponent away from any others, and so keep myself from being double teamed. Indeed things are going quite well, and then the game crashes when I'm trying to drop a knife I no longer need. Lovely. And I'd forgotten to save.
By this point I'd spent enough time dealing with the unintuitive interface and right clicking to toggle between movement mode, combat mode, and one I call 'look at stuff mode' that it actually makes some sense now. I'd also figured out how to make targeted attacks, and that the line of green dots across the top of the selected item panel are my AP. There are some idiosyncracies of the combat system that still escape me. Chief among these is the following; I have 9 AP and make an unaimed attack with the pistol, which takes 5 AP. This leaves me with 4 AP, or enough to move 4 hexes. However if I only move 3 hexes, my turn automatically ends, even though I have an AP left. What's the point of an AP system if it pulls stuff like this? I get so many AP a turn, I should get to spend them all, damnit!
I continue to find the interface a complete pain in the ass. Take the line of green dots representing AP. It's hard to do a snap count this way, and the color for a used AP is way too close to that of one I've not yet spent. Given that this is a stat I need to use quite literally every single combat turn, I find this inexcusable. A box labeled 'AP: 3/8' or something similar would be infinitely more usable, in line with cRPG convention from time immamorial, and generally not suck so much. The toggle for moving from one hand to another is similarly obscure, and indeed is something I stumbled on completely by chance. Thankfully I stumbled on it again fairly soon afterwords so I could switch back to my pistol. Still, I think I'll soldier on a bit more with this project.
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4 comments:
Much better layout, and I hope you don't give up, because really, the first few hour of your first few playthrough is going to be annoying. This is really an old game.
Agility is really the key for combat, though for a good and fulfilling game we do need high int and charisma, as every crpg veteran know. Eventhough I don't remember about can't move with all of your AP, spare AP have their uses. I think they increase your AC.
What's with the formatting anyway? I'm curious on why it's so chaotic, good in one article, bad in another.
Oh, and this character might be kinda screwed a bit because... some weapon have minimum strength requirement. You won't be able to use some of the better guns without a powered armor.
On the formating, it's mostly because the first two days I originally typed up single space in a Word document, then pasted over. For some reason I don't begin to fathom, the Blogger software doesn't interpret Word's newline character as being a new line, ergo the smooshed together look. Day 3 does not suffer from this at all since I wrote it here, rather than pasting it over.
I'm not giving up yet by any means. Getting the crap kicked out of me by a new game is rather part of the process, and Fallout is doing a very good job of it, I must say. I confess to being a bit discouraged by today's failure, since it wasn't due to any screw-ups on my part, but rather the dumb game crashing, just when I was finally getting somewhere too.
Yeah, i sympathize with you, it is hard to play old games, epically if they are ones that were hailed as "amazing" in there time, but are just clunky now. Daggerfall was my example. Still, i've never played Fall out, so i really do like that your still playing the game, as this is an interesting experience for me.
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