It's a critical that made me fall in love with that game. I was duelling Garl to get Tandi back, and was NOT winning. I decided to go dirty and aimed a kick at his groin. Critical success! He went down groaning, so I just kicked him to death, won the duel, stole his armour. Coming from JRPGs this level of reactivity blew my mind!
This happened to me in Fallout 2. I decided to fight one of the martial arts guys in San Fran, with a character who only had ~80 points in unarmed. He whoops my ass for his entire turn, and on my first punch, I land a critical hit to the head that essentially gives him brain damage and he’s unconscious for the rest of the fight.
Some critical hits are borderline supernatural, like killing a deathclaw with a bare knuckle punch or penetrating power armor with a karate chop - but it's a lot of fun to play as unarmed specialist.
@@BuzzKirill3D There definitely were a lot of redundant or flat out useless skills in both games. Unarmed could and should have been folded into melee. Not to mention doctor just being flat out superior to first aid for both combat recovery and, more importantly, quest/XP purposes.
@@thenotoriousamp8336 I think, there was missed opportunity. Multiple skills should have had effect on same abilities/actions. For example, both unarmed and melee buffs fists and knifes but to different extent that is unique to each weapon.
Once you have a critical success there's a second roll (that Tim just mentioned in this video), the table that you're rolling on depends on the creature type and body part. If I'm not mistaken you can't even get the highest results on that second table without a bonus (such as Better Criticals), but the highest result for the head location was Instant Death. So if you roll that result, damage/HP aren't even considered.. the target is simply killed from the wound! Getting it from a barehanded strike is of course very satisfying :D
@twerkingbollocks6661 I've gotten a few of those before, hits for no damage instantly killing the target! Are there particular enemies where this will cause bugs?
As someone that has no knowledge of coding, outside of broad understanding how things work, these videos are fascinating, especially since they're about one my favorite series.
Was it difficult for the artists to deform and break the mesh of the 3d model for the gory animations? Like an exploding head or arm being turned into a stump
I don't know what the exact process for this was on Fallout, but based on my personal experience with prerendered sprites, when it comes to complex effects, it's generally easier to just paint them on the renders in a 2D image editor (more often than not renders require post-processing anyway). Alternatively, if you need to morph your model from one shape to another, you can usually just switch between multiple different models and no one will notice at this resolution.
Very good question my friend, I thought about this a lot, too... and why can't we have awesome animations like that in current games? - probably because Fallout only had a limited number of creature models, who didn't have swappable armor/helmet/ etc... which modern games do
Nice trick keeping floats of fixed increments as ints. I really like how game programmers think when coding efficiently. Feel free to share similar tips and tricks around code and resource efficiency. Especially tricks you had to do back in the day where resources were significantly more constrained. Also I would love to hear your thoughts on experience/leveling progression design (how XP is gained, how it is spent, progression restrictions etc). Your games have adopted a variety of approaches so I'm curious to where you stand today and what you've learned. Thanks again for yet another great video!
Tim, my intuition tells me that Arcanum functions in a very similar fashion. I'd love if you could highlight any differences or lessons you learned along the way. Thanks for everything!
I think the Jinxed trait added a lot to High Luck based builds. How often people around me would misfire or trip while my 10 Luck helped balance it out for me really added to that fun feeling of playing an absurdly lucky person more than just me scoring more crits ever would.
I loved the crit system during gameplay. Some of it made no sense but it still added to humor if nothing else - "you critically hit super mutant in the eye for 0 damage, causing extreme pain" and the like. Or getting a great hit with a super sledge and the target slides all the way off the screen! :D
Kind of cheating because its a different genre but the worse critical hits I have seen in a game was Team Fortress 2. It tries to pass off its critical hits as being 100% random and for new players to be able to win some fights or make a push but random critical were designed and coded so the more damage you do in the last 12 seconds the higher your critical hit rate was, making good players or classes that naturally do high damage win even more. Then you got the fact that melee hits have an increased critical hit chance also which is fine until you realize it also scales with damage done in the last 12 seconds and it makes a class that is supposed to be weak to close range actually be a threat. If critical hits were truly random it would be better.
I also quite like the crit system from Fallout 4, and wish more straight tactical action games went with this over randomness. It creates interesting considerations, usually it's just about maximizing the average multiplier while being consistent enough, but now the flipside of that is valuable outside of reseting attempts until you get lucky. Holding onto crits for the big guys can also still create a level of unpredictability if you don't know exactly what's coming, an additional option is to let a player bank a number of crits for later use. It's pretty far from what crits typically are when it comes to flavor, maybe make it a frenzy system or anything else more appropriate, but I think it's a great alternative mechanically. There's a number of games I'd like to just switch to this, keep everything as is, the math works out the same. 5% crit chance becomes a 5% buildup to the ''crit'' bar instead, it just becomes deterministic at the input level and creates choices. I should note we become stronger overal if we use it well and waste less dmg/are short on dmg when it matters less frequently, may wanna adjust for that.
Yo I gotta play Fallout again! 😂 I definitely need to do it differently from how I have done it before though. I don’t think I ever messed with luck much but maybe I will roll a character that has like an 8 luck?
Hello Mr. Cain and fellow watchers (Cainites? Or, is that too Vampire? xD), I had a question that is tangentially related. I seem to remember when I first played Fallout I believe you could use burst weapons to automatically hit in an amusing way. I would need to go back and test again, but the way I remember it was if there was a group of npcs (I tended to use groups of enemies), you would target an enemy that had a zero chance to hit and if you fired a burst weapon all the bullets would hit a target near the original target. In early game that usually mean a smg could one shot, one kill a raider at distance. That is how I remember it. I do clearly remember being amused at a raider would explode from missing a target I had no chance of hitting xD Oh, and the question. Could you go into how the mechanics of missing a target and other targets getting hit as a result? Thank you for the wonderful video!
True. In vanilla game, burst work in a quirky way. Bullets get split into 3 lines, one to each side of the target, and one to the target. But because of weird integer math, sometimes you get more bullets to the right (yes, always to the right...). Especially bad for 8 bullet bursts. You get 2 bullets to the target and 4 to the right... This was fixed with sfall though. And if you're interested, I did a mod that changes this bullet distribution to differ between weapons.
Someone coming to a dev and stating "you are wrong" without any proofs sounds very unprofessional. But I guess having no criticals at the beginning of the game made it more player friendly and lowered the entry level bar a bit which is something devs often do these days. Smart!
Ooooooh that would explain why Finesse felt so underwhelming... but didn't Jinx work just fine? I'm pretty sure I remember the rats hurting themselves. I remember that you can finish the game almost immediately if you take a Finesse+Perception10/Luck10 with a desert eagle and shoot things in the eyes, dealing 100+ damage per hits. And in fallout2 lategame you could stack all the critical bonuses with a perception10 sniper rifle and deal the instakill eye crit "the brain gained a new aeration hole" or whatever which was 300+ damage on every shot from accross the map.
Uhm what about insta kill? I remember having a blast using the bbgun to kill people in power armor with critical hits of 0dmg. Or perhaps this was only a FO2 implementation? 🤔 Btw one of my first combat experiences with Fallout was a critical miss that left me blinded for hours, I think i got my character fixed in junktown, so funny 😂.
Hi Tim! I'm endlessly fascinated by your note keeping abilities) how did you guys ever manage to keep these things relevant/up-do-date? Was there a process in place? How did you deal with pushback (in case there was any)?
Was the cancelation of criticals during the first game day applicable in all cases? Maybe it wasn't disabled in you chose the jinxed trait? I have this memory of fighting those rats in the cave outside the vault with a jinxed character and failing critically and having my weapon destroyed. Am I misremembering it?
In fallout 2 i was roaming the enclave oil rig in the vault suit with no weapons. A guard wearing enclave armor caught me and said “Hey!!! How did you get out?” My character was a brawler and heavy handed. I punched the guard wearing the enclave power armor in the eye for 2 points of damage and it killed him. What a game
I wonder how real hit chance works, because throughout the Fallout games, 95% always seems to be max, but even with that chance shown, you can fail multiple times in a row. I suspect some hidden chances lowering the real one sometimes, like enemy stats, armor, night time etc. It also happened a lot in Morrowind, but that is a different thing. Still I started noticing these things in games since then.
With all due respect to the original combat gameplay inspired by board games. But just for fun I modified engine to have 95% critical chance to have more realistic combats. It makes combats with simple mobs more faster and much more dangerous with mid/high level enemies. In spite of more dynamic it makes combats not balanced well.
I thought this video was going to be about your criticisms of the final Fallout 1 product and/or Fallout franchise. Would that be a video topic you'd be interested in doing?
I don't know if this has been asked before but do you think fallout would have been greenlit today? My assumption is that modern games take so much time and effort to make compared to in the 90s that a group of people making a side project instead of focusing on the next major release would be told to knock it off before they got much work done
Fallout video awesome! Critical rebalance was the main reason i did my balance mod for f2. My balance mod for f1 could not edit the f1 criticals but i used what someone made to mod weapons so that burst weapons dont do 0 damage vs a lot of heavily armored enemies and then 150 dmg with a crit. I remember learning the tables for f2 and having a lot of fun making them as i like em.
Good morning Mr. Cain, I have been watching your uploads almost daily and have really enjoyed your stories and insight on game development, leadership and life. I hope that you continue to upload these and keep sharing yourself with us. Thank you very much sir!
This is brilliant :) the channel seem to grow. People seem to like this honest and simple approach to vlogging, from someone who knows a lot about the industry.
If I remember correctly, it depends on game difficulty. It might have been self-inflicted effect after a critical failure on your part if you were not playing on Hard. In fact, if I am right, it might have been the only way to break your hand without playing on Hard or trying to arm-wrestle a super-mutant in Broken Hills.
Hi Tim, I'm replying to the completely wrong video for this, but since it's recent I hope you will see it. In your Fallout cut content video you mention that you don't like talking animals in the setting; I won't challenge the point about the S'Lanter, but I did want to say that to me the talking Deathclaws in Fallout 2 represent the futility of war as the series' theme. I like them because if Deathclaws were created as a weapon of war, the idea that they could diverge and become intelligent, studious, and peaceful is compelling. More so than the Super Mutants, who aren't bred only for war but for replacing Humanity in other ways too. I know you didn't work on the talking Deathclaws, but just wanted to give some input on it. Thanks for all you've done! You have inspired us all.
Hmm, this is a good design idea: Make sure the player gets a critical success before getting a critical failure - basically, disable the failures until success=1. This kind of stuff is actually pretty common in video game design, the devs often add all sorts of little things to help the player, without the player's knowledge, especially when starting out, but not only then. Stuff like a form of damage resistance when close to zero hit points, or the enemies start missing more, and so on.
Do you still have access to the random number generator code? I would be interested in seeing a multi-billion sample distribution analysis, because to this day FO2 is the only game I've played where I get back to back 20+ fails at like 40% marked hit chance. It seems even worse than FO. Hmm, I wonder if I can just decompile it and run my own. I don't get similar hit streaks at 60%, or at very least I don't _recognize_ that I get those streaks. Raw randomness is hard to absorb psychologically.
You can find the exact algorithm used, at least in FO2 (don't know if it's different from FO1, likely not). The community has dissected this game over the years...
Well as a dedicated critical fiend who has played this game multiple times this is pretty cool, thanks for sharing. It didn't actually answer a question I've had about the system though, and last I checked there wasn't really any documentation on it. Is there some critical success modifier associated with called shots? I can only speak anecdotally and I've never crunched the numbers or anything but the rate of crits I've seen targeting the head and eyes is far higher than this breakdown would suggest. This is with 10 luck and finesse, admittedly but it still seemed much more frequent than even that would suggest. I figured there was some variable I'm not aware of but maybe it's just some sort of cognitive bias/anomalous luck, I don't know. All I do know is blowing people in half with a single shot rules and I love this game.
(I can still remember how messed up characters would get on crit. Then again, I think I tended to choose bloody mess during my early games...) Not sure how easy this would be to figure out, but I've seen some arguments about the versions of Fallout that are out there. Like GOG used to have one version but had to change to another, and I've seen some say that there's an alternate version with a few changes for different markets. Sorry if you've already talked about this but does this sound familiar at all? Also wondering if you've had the chance to look at the Fallout Bible thing that was included with older versions of the game and compare notes, as it were.
Could you write formula for criticals? Or part of code? As for true randomness, in Colony Ship RPG we can choose either 1) true random - where rolling 1 a hundred times in a row is possible / 2) Lightly adjusted - the card deck method where numbers are drawn like cards from a deck, meaning you can't draw the same number twice until deck is reshuffled / 3) Heavily adjusted - where the number of consecutive misses in a row is based on THC (to hit chance) but it of course applies to enemies too.
Tim, speaking about Luck, could you talk more about random encounters while travelling? Especially, about special random encounters with aliens and whales? I loved it so much when i first got an alien blaster! But i never really knew how they work so i just was running 10 luck character with many points in Outdoorsman skill. Who suggested them?
I still remember playing FO2, and Vic critically failing so bad, he shot himself in the eyes. I chuckled a bit at that one. Also read a story on a forum once about a guy who was in a desperate situation during an encounter, so he went to fire a machine gun his character didn't have the strength to wield. Upon firing, it broke both of his character's arms, but he scored a crit and shredded the enemy. There is certainly something to be said for a game that allows for such emergent gameplay that the stories write themselves.
Hey Tim, absolutely loving these behind-the-scenes videos on the making of the Fallout games. I wanted to ask, because I've seen this sentiment repeated often online, what do you think it is about the series that has enabled the games to become such popular "Comfort Games" ? I've logged thousands of hours across the series from 1-3 & NV, and though I know the games like the back of my hand by now, I still love immersing myself in them in my spare time. Considering the subject matter of the games is so bleak at times, do you reckon the escapism of the worlds is the culprit behind the comfort factor, or is there just some special sauce in the setting/themes that hits that sweet spot for so many people? Anyway, I'll look forward to more content like this. Be well!
There were also insta-kill critical successes, regardless of the damage output. The description clearly state the death and the opponent died, even if it was a no damage critical. Also, I wonder how much Jinxed modified critical failures.
i think of all your videos i’ve watched 90% of the time im looking at that spinning orb and since i watch videos in x2 speed its moving even faster lol
VATS and criticals calculators were great. Nowdays it is possible to implement much more complicated calculations that would model world better, but I wonder if it would sill be fun to play. Who am I kidding, it would be great. I remember myself thinking about how fun it would have been to play Fallout with calculations that take into account projectile velocity, energy, material, AOE to armor surface distribution, weak spot distribution, armor HP at specific point, armor rigidity, energy of projectile after it penetrated... It doesn't have to be like in real life (in real life you eighter done or unharmed). But having same level of complexity would have been great. Sadly nobody does it.
I learn a lot from gaming wizards like Tim Cain, nice to know more facts about gaming history, also, please, make Arcanum sequel happen, we need more original settings and histories. I loved and hated how some critical failures destroyed my weapons, btw.
Hey, so I just beat The Outer Worlds for the first time and on SN difficulty. I had the game since day one. I always play games with no post-game content on the hardest difficulty for fun. So I dropped the game for a few due to the loading screens. Yes, I died a lot but the loading screens and double loading killed me more than the game. So a few days ago I started all over again with the same difficulty settings. Anyway, after finishing the game I want to say that I enjoyed it. I enjoyed that the game was surprisingly short but the play-through was very involved. I loved everything from gunplay to wordplay, I was even delighted with the platforming. It was fun understanding how to be capable in this game and it wasn't a chore to become stronger, but a lot of fun learning how to use everything the game gave me to become stronger. I normally don't like games that don't have other means of transportation other than your feet and fast travel, but these maps aren't bad to traverse. The maps are small and aren't filled with nothing, every hill brought me either foes, someone's woes, or more loot to tow. Most times all 3. I liked how you make the run/ walk speed perks rewarding to have and not be something I barely notice. I applaud your stats systems as well. They were very well thought out. I felt like my build setup was crucial for both how I wanted to play, how I needed to play, and how situations required me to get an understanding of what was going on before I made a move. I enjoyed the companion system, both in battles and in the open world. Learning how to make them more capable and how they can make me more capable was one of my favorite parts of the game. It was frustrating in the beginning but man was it rewarding to see them be able to clean house. I went from me babysitting them to having them watch my back. We became a hit squad. The only thing that annoyed me was the loading screens. Funnily, since games give players infinite lives, the loading screens are a proper punishment for being bad or playing poorly, so meh. The quests were fulfilling to beat. I was always intrigued to play the next one. They didn't feel like "go hear and do this" but I felt involved with the game's story instead of simply collecting things or pressing buttons. There was one fetch quest you had in the game that gave a great reward for doing so. It's the one with the nice outfit if you know what I mean. I thought I'd be happy when I finally get it over with, but when I got the outfit, I was really sad about the outcome. Like actually sad. It stopped me from seeing the board as greedy incompetent corporate clowns and see them as the threat they are. The enemies were difficult in the best way. They were not bullet sponges. I have to see what worked on them. 1 goon's weapons could drop my whole team in 10 seconds for example a lot of games have elemental damage but it significantly doesn't change how every battle is played, but this game had me checking my stats and playing with different damage modifiers, armor modifiers, and understanding how consumables worked. 3 armed goons could take 10secs or over a minute depending on my crew's weapon setup. Great game, can't wait to hear you talk about it, and im excited to play OW2.
It's my birthday! Your the second video I chose to open, because your channel is the best one I discovered all year! Thank you for your good advice, stories, and an awesome time. I've been playing fallout 2 again now the past two weeks. That game is almost just as good as the day I got my first copy. I usually played with characters with high critical because it was almost realistic how you could kill people with one bullet like in real life. Nowadays I like to put things into outdoorsman skill which is almost as important if you don't want to die constantly if your exploring down south for power armor immediately! I was inspired by lucky boy, and I created a super luck person in fallout 2 but halfway through I realized gambling should not have been the skill to choose tho. My dream was a super lucky character with high agility that couldn't be hit yet killed all with one hit. It is so fun playing fallout 2 over and over attempting it with different types of characters. 30 years later I still play it!
Who came up with a groin shot? Whoever it was he deserves a raise.
I don’t remember. One day we just decided to go nuts.
@@CainOnGames lol
@@CainOnGames and another brilliant stroke was seeing an enemy get hit and slide away depending how hard they were hit
Ouch to the pun, sounds like a Scotty addition
@@Lbf5677 that sucks. Makes the super sledge useless for a melee character.
It's a critical that made me fall in love with that game. I was duelling Garl to get Tandi back, and was NOT winning. I decided to go dirty and aimed a kick at his groin. Critical success! He went down groaning, so I just kicked him to death, won the duel, stole his armour. Coming from JRPGs this level of reactivity blew my mind!
This happened to me in Fallout 2. I decided to fight one of the martial arts guys in San Fran, with a character who only had ~80 points in unarmed. He whoops my ass for his entire turn, and on my first punch, I land a critical hit to the head that essentially gives him brain damage and he’s unconscious for the rest of the fight.
Some critical hits are borderline supernatural, like killing a deathclaw with a bare knuckle punch or penetrating power armor with a karate chop - but it's a lot of fun to play as unarmed specialist.
Unfortunately you can't become an ultimate unarmed badass in F1, only F2
@@BuzzKirill3D There definitely were a lot of redundant or flat out useless skills in both games. Unarmed could and should have been folded into melee. Not to mention doctor just being flat out superior to first aid for both combat recovery and, more importantly, quest/XP purposes.
@@thenotoriousamp8336 I think, there was missed opportunity. Multiple skills should have had effect on same abilities/actions. For example, both unarmed and melee buffs fists and knifes but to different extent that is unique to each weapon.
Once you have a critical success there's a second roll (that Tim just mentioned in this video), the table that you're rolling on depends on the creature type and body part.
If I'm not mistaken you can't even get the highest results on that second table without a bonus (such as Better Criticals), but the highest result for the head location was Instant Death.
So if you roll that result, damage/HP aren't even considered.. the target is simply killed from the wound!
Getting it from a barehanded strike is of course very satisfying :D
@twerkingbollocks6661 I've gotten a few of those before, hits for no damage instantly killing the target!
Are there particular enemies where this will cause bugs?
As someone that has no knowledge of coding, outside of broad understanding how things work, these videos are fascinating, especially since they're about one my favorite series.
Was it difficult for the artists to deform and break the mesh of the 3d model for the gory animations?
Like an exploding head or arm being turned into a stump
I’ll ask Leon, but I can tell you that it was really easy for me to ask them to do it.
@@CainOnGames thanks,
I had a go at 3d modelling, in my limited experience the bullet holes and half a torso could be difficult for me.
I don't know what the exact process for this was on Fallout, but based on my personal experience with prerendered sprites, when it comes to complex effects, it's generally easier to just paint them on the renders in a 2D image editor (more often than not renders require post-processing anyway). Alternatively, if you need to morph your model from one shape to another, you can usually just switch between multiple different models and no one will notice at this resolution.
Very good question my friend, I thought about this a lot, too... and why can't we have awesome animations like that in current games? - probably because Fallout only had a limited number of creature models, who didn't have swappable armor/helmet/ etc... which modern games do
@@CainOnGamesSpeaking of which, are the 3d models used to make the fallout sprites still around somewhere online?
Nice trick keeping floats of fixed increments as ints. I really like how game programmers think when coding efficiently. Feel free to share similar tips and tricks around code and resource efficiency. Especially tricks you had to do back in the day where resources were significantly more constrained.
Also I would love to hear your thoughts on experience/leveling progression design (how XP is gained, how it is spent, progression restrictions etc). Your games have adopted a variety of approaches so I'm curious to where you stand today and what you've learned.
Thanks again for yet another great video!
Tim, my intuition tells me that Arcanum functions in a very similar fashion. I'd love if you could highlight any differences or lessons you learned along the way. Thanks for everything!
I appreciate these talks, It's great getting insight on these games even years later
I think the Jinxed trait added a lot to High Luck based builds. How often people around me would misfire or trip while my 10 Luck helped balance it out for me really added to that fun feeling of playing an absurdly lucky person more than just me scoring more crits ever would.
Luck doesn't effect Jinxed. It's a flat 50% chance of critical failure on any failure.
I loved the crit system during gameplay. Some of it made no sense but it still added to humor if nothing else - "you critically hit super mutant in the eye for 0 damage, causing extreme pain" and the like. Or getting a great hit with a super sledge and the target slides all the way off the screen! :D
The ego of people. They couldn't imagine that they would a critical fail this early in the game, so it must have been a bug... So weird.
Kind of cheating because its a different genre but the worse critical hits I have seen in a game was Team Fortress 2. It tries to pass off its critical hits as being 100% random and for new players to be able to win some fights or make a push but random critical were designed and coded so the more damage you do in the last 12 seconds the higher your critical hit rate was, making good players or classes that naturally do high damage win even more. Then you got the fact that melee hits have an increased critical hit chance also which is fine until you realize it also scales with damage done in the last 12 seconds and it makes a class that is supposed to be weak to close range actually be a threat. If critical hits were truly random it would be better.
Tim Cain, the man, the myth, the legend. I love your work.
I also quite like the crit system from Fallout 4, and wish more straight tactical action games went with this over randomness. It creates interesting considerations, usually it's just about maximizing the average multiplier while being consistent enough, but now the flipside of that is valuable outside of reseting attempts until you get lucky. Holding onto crits for the big guys can also still create a level of unpredictability if you don't know exactly what's coming, an additional option is to let a player bank a number of crits for later use. It's pretty far from what crits typically are when it comes to flavor, maybe make it a frenzy system or anything else more appropriate, but I think it's a great alternative mechanically.
There's a number of games I'd like to just switch to this, keep everything as is, the math works out the same. 5% crit chance becomes a 5% buildup to the ''crit'' bar instead, it just becomes deterministic at the input level and creates choices. I should note we become stronger overal if we use it well and waste less dmg/are short on dmg when it matters less frequently, may wanna adjust for that.
How did some of the perks / traits fit into this? Misfortune for example
*You were critically hit for no damage*
Awww, it's not about Fallout negative reviews. Criticals (and failures) are also good ;D
Those are critics, not criticals.
Yo I gotta play Fallout again! 😂 I definitely need to do it differently from how I have done it before though. I don’t think I ever messed with luck much but maybe I will roll a character that has like an 8 luck?
Hello Mr. Cain and fellow watchers (Cainites? Or, is that too Vampire? xD), I had a question that is tangentially related. I seem to remember when I first played Fallout I believe you could use burst weapons to automatically hit in an amusing way.
I would need to go back and test again, but the way I remember it was if there was a group of npcs (I tended to use groups of enemies), you would target an enemy that had a zero chance to hit and if you fired a burst weapon all the bullets would hit a target near the original target. In early game that usually mean a smg could one shot, one kill a raider at distance.
That is how I remember it. I do clearly remember being amused at a raider would explode from missing a target I had no chance of hitting xD Oh, and the question. Could you go into how the mechanics of missing a target and other targets getting hit as a result?
Thank you for the wonderful video!
True. In vanilla game, burst work in a quirky way. Bullets get split into 3 lines, one to each side of the target, and one to the target. But because of weird integer math, sometimes you get more bullets to the right (yes, always to the right...). Especially bad for 8 bullet bursts. You get 2 bullets to the target and 4 to the right... This was fixed with sfall though. And if you're interested, I did a mod that changes this bullet distribution to differ between weapons.
@@phobos2077_ Thanks for the information! And sure, what is the mod you made?
Someone coming to a dev and stating "you are wrong" without any proofs sounds very unprofessional. But I guess having no criticals at the beginning of the game made it more player friendly and lowered the entry level bar a bit which is something devs often do these days. Smart!
Rad scorpion appear
Character shoot gun
Critical Miss
Rad scorpion attack
Very effective
Character die
My. First playtrougth in Fallout
Ooooooh that would explain why Finesse felt so underwhelming... but didn't Jinx work just fine? I'm pretty sure I remember the rats hurting themselves.
I remember that you can finish the game almost immediately if you take a Finesse+Perception10/Luck10 with a desert eagle and shoot things in the eyes, dealing 100+ damage per hits. And in fallout2 lategame you could stack all the critical bonuses with a perception10 sniper rifle and deal the instakill eye crit "the brain gained a new aeration hole" or whatever which was 300+ damage on every shot from accross the map.
Uhm what about insta kill? I remember having a blast using the bbgun to kill people in power armor with critical hits of 0dmg. Or perhaps this was only a FO2 implementation? 🤔 Btw one of my first combat experiences with Fallout was a critical miss that left me blinded for hours, I think i got my character fixed in junktown, so funny 😂.
Hi Tim! I'm endlessly fascinated by your note keeping abilities) how did you guys ever manage to keep these things relevant/up-do-date? Was there a process in place? How did you deal with pushback (in case there was any)?
Was the cancelation of criticals during the first game day applicable in all cases? Maybe it wasn't disabled in you chose the jinxed trait?
I have this memory of fighting those rats in the cave outside the vault with a jinxed character and failing critically and having my weapon destroyed. Am I misremembering it?
In fallout 2 i was roaming the enclave oil rig in the vault suit with no weapons. A guard wearing enclave armor caught me and said “Hey!!! How did you get out?”
My character was a brawler and heavy handed. I punched the guard wearing the enclave power armor in the eye for 2 points of damage and it killed him.
What a game
Did targeting eyes in Fallout contribute to Minsc's quote? I picked Fallout some days ago and whenever I go for the eyes I summon Boo out loud IRL.
I wonder how real hit chance works, because throughout the Fallout games, 95% always seems to be max, but even with that chance shown, you can fail multiple times in a row. I suspect some hidden chances lowering the real one sometimes, like enemy stats, armor, night time etc.
It also happened a lot in Morrowind, but that is a different thing. Still I started noticing these things in games since then.
What is that spinning globe behind you? I have one that is similar but it is just a static LED globe with random LED effects. Thank you.
With all due respect to the original combat gameplay inspired by board games. But just for fun I modified engine to have 95% critical chance to have more realistic combats. It makes combats with simple mobs more faster and much more dangerous with mid/high level enemies. In spite of more dynamic it makes combats not balanced well.
saw a video on reddit where an npc critically failed, lost their turn, got knocked out and their gun exploded. was hilarious.
I thought this video was going to be about your criticisms of the final Fallout 1 product and/or Fallout franchise. Would that be a video topic you'd be interested in doing?
Luck is not a factor in critical failures... - Thats bullcrap and you know it!...in this way...
ohh
I don't know if this has been asked before but do you think fallout would have been greenlit today? My assumption is that modern games take so much time and effort to make compared to in the 90s that a group of people making a side project instead of focusing on the next major release would be told to knock it off before they got much work done
Hi Tim!, I just had a question?. How would someone get started in the game developing industry ?.
Fallout video awesome! Critical rebalance was the main reason i did my balance mod for f2. My balance mod for f1 could not edit the f1 criticals but i used what someone made to mod weapons so that burst weapons dont do 0 damage vs a lot of heavily armored enemies and then 150 dmg with a crit.
I remember learning the tables for f2 and having a lot of fun making them as i like em.
Is there any game you want to make but haven't had the chance to yet? Like how Todd Howard always wanted to do starfield
Hello Tim im wondering how long you guys are making Fallout game?
Good morning Mr. Cain, I have been watching your uploads almost daily and have really enjoyed your stories and insight on game development, leadership and life. I hope that you continue to upload these and keep sharing yourself with us. Thank you very much sir!
I miss pretending to be the master in voice training class talking to Rod the tribal.
Your videos are critical hits!
This is brilliant :) the channel seem to grow. People seem to like this honest and simple approach to vlogging, from someone who knows a lot about the industry.
Fun fact: The overseer in his minigun chair is immortal.
I been enjoying playing the outer worlds.
Attention to details like these makes the difference between a good game and a great game.
I will say implementing the vats was brilliant
It was all a Master plan.
First, haha. Thanks for all your time, Tim!
I went down one step and stumbled,and did a critical fail today.
I ve been playing Fallout 2 alot and only once got "broken hand" for my character and had to use Load save
If I remember correctly, it depends on game difficulty. It might have been self-inflicted effect after a critical failure on your part if you were not playing on Hard. In fact, if I am right, it might have been the only way to break your hand without playing on Hard or trying to arm-wrestle a super-mutant in Broken Hills.
Hi Tim,
I'm replying to the completely wrong video for this, but since it's recent I hope you will see it. In your Fallout cut content video you mention that you don't like talking animals in the setting; I won't challenge the point about the S'Lanter, but I did want to say that to me the talking Deathclaws in Fallout 2 represent the futility of war as the series' theme. I like them because if Deathclaws were created as a weapon of war, the idea that they could diverge and become intelligent, studious, and peaceful is compelling. More so than the Super Mutants, who aren't bred only for war but for replacing Humanity in other ways too. I know you didn't work on the talking Deathclaws, but just wanted to give some input on it. Thanks for all you've done! You have inspired us all.
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Hmm, this is a good design idea:
Make sure the player gets a critical success before getting a critical failure - basically, disable the failures until success=1.
This kind of stuff is actually pretty common in video game design, the devs often add all sorts of little things to help the player, without the player's knowledge, especially when starting out, but not only then.
Stuff like a form of damage resistance when close to zero hit points, or the enemies start missing more, and so on.
Do you still have access to the random number generator code? I would be interested in seeing a multi-billion sample distribution analysis, because to this day FO2 is the only game I've played where I get back to back 20+ fails at like 40% marked hit chance. It seems even worse than FO. Hmm, I wonder if I can just decompile it and run my own. I don't get similar hit streaks at 60%, or at very least I don't _recognize_ that I get those streaks. Raw randomness is hard to absorb psychologically.
I don't have the code, but we used a linear congruential generator from the book Numerical Recipes in C.
You can find the exact algorithm used, at least in FO2 (don't know if it's different from FO1, likely not). The community has dissected this game over the years...
@@CainOnGames I love a lot of your games, I really hope you get a chance to take another swing at Fallout some time (if you want to).
Well as a dedicated critical fiend who has played this game multiple times this is pretty cool, thanks for sharing. It didn't actually answer a question I've had about the system though, and last I checked there wasn't really any documentation on it. Is there some critical success modifier associated with called shots? I can only speak anecdotally and I've never crunched the numbers or anything but the rate of crits I've seen targeting the head and eyes is far higher than this breakdown would suggest. This is with 10 luck and finesse, admittedly but it still seemed much more frequent than even that would suggest. I figured there was some variable I'm not aware of but maybe it's just some sort of cognitive bias/anomalous luck, I don't know. All I do know is blowing people in half with a single shot rules and I love this game.
(I can still remember how messed up characters would get on crit. Then again, I think I tended to choose bloody mess during my early games...)
Not sure how easy this would be to figure out, but I've seen some arguments about the versions of Fallout that are out there. Like GOG used to have one version but had to change to another, and I've seen some say that there's an alternate version with a few changes for different markets. Sorry if you've already talked about this but does this sound familiar at all?
Also wondering if you've had the chance to look at the Fallout Bible thing that was included with older versions of the game and compare notes, as it were.
Could you write formula for criticals? Or part of code? As for true randomness, in Colony Ship RPG we can choose either 1) true random - where rolling 1 a hundred times in a row is possible / 2) Lightly adjusted - the card deck method where numbers are drawn like cards from a deck, meaning you can't draw the same number twice until deck is reshuffled / 3) Heavily adjusted - where the number of consecutive misses in a row is based on THC (to hit chance) but it of course applies to enemies too.
Tim, speaking about Luck, could you talk more about random encounters while travelling? Especially, about special random encounters with aliens and whales? I loved it so much when i first got an alien blaster! But i never really knew how they work so i just was running 10 luck character with many points in Outdoorsman skill. Who suggested them?
I still remember playing FO2, and Vic critically failing so bad, he shot himself in the eyes. I chuckled a bit at that one.
Also read a story on a forum once about a guy who was in a desperate situation during an encounter, so he went to fire a machine gun his character didn't have the strength to wield. Upon firing, it broke both of his character's arms, but he scored a crit and shredded the enemy. There is certainly something to be said for a game that allows for such emergent gameplay that the stories write themselves.
wooooo another Tim Cain video!!!!
Hey Tim, absolutely loving these behind-the-scenes videos on the making of the Fallout games. I wanted to ask, because I've seen this sentiment repeated often online, what do you think it is about the series that has enabled the games to become such popular "Comfort Games" ?
I've logged thousands of hours across the series from 1-3 & NV, and though I know the games like the back of my hand by now, I still love immersing myself in them in my spare time. Considering the subject matter of the games is so bleak at times, do you reckon the escapism of the worlds is the culprit behind the comfort factor, or is there just some special sauce in the setting/themes that hits that sweet spot for so many people?
Anyway, I'll look forward to more content like this. Be well!
Hi Tim, how do fire geckos in Fallout 2 breathe fire and whose idea was it to put them there in the first place?
There were also insta-kill critical successes, regardless of the damage output. The description clearly state the death and the opponent died, even if it was a no damage critical.
Also, I wonder how much Jinxed modified critical failures.
i think of all your videos i’ve watched 90% of the time im looking at that spinning orb and since i watch videos in x2 speed its moving even faster lol
VATS and criticals calculators were great. Nowdays it is possible to implement much more complicated calculations that would model world better, but I wonder if it would sill be fun to play.
Who am I kidding, it would be great. I remember myself thinking about how fun it would have been to play Fallout with calculations that take into account projectile velocity, energy, material, AOE to armor surface distribution, weak spot distribution, armor HP at specific point, armor rigidity, energy of projectile after it penetrated...
It doesn't have to be like in real life (in real life you eighter done or unharmed). But having same level of complexity would have been great. Sadly nobody does it.
You are a gift, and I'm constantly looking forward to the next video since I discovered that you have a UA-cam channel. 💜
Came up in my recommended yesterday and I’ve been binging since 😭🙏 love learning lore from behind the scenes of my all time favourite franchise
Can you talk about criticisms you got from your final products and how they made you feel and how you delt with them?
We all criticaly need critical information about your works. Criticaly thank you.
These insights are awesome. Sharing this history is awesome, thank you so much for sharing with us.
love watching tim in a happy place talking about whatever comes to mind
Are there any secret effects based on the player attributes?
I’ll never forget dance to the rhythm of lead 😊
It was actually called "dancing autofire" in the scripts released in 2003.
Your a Hero!
I learn a lot from gaming wizards like Tim Cain, nice to know more facts about gaming history, also, please, make Arcanum sequel happen, we need more original settings and histories. I loved and hated how some critical failures destroyed my weapons, btw.
Hey, so I just beat The Outer Worlds for the first time and on SN difficulty. I had the game since day one. I always play games with no post-game content on the hardest difficulty for fun. So I dropped the game for a few due to the loading screens. Yes, I died a lot but the loading screens and double loading killed me more than the game. So a few days ago I started all over again with the same difficulty settings. Anyway, after finishing the game I want to say that I enjoyed it.
I enjoyed that the game was surprisingly short but the play-through was very involved.
I loved everything from gunplay to wordplay, I was even delighted with the platforming. It was fun understanding how to be capable in this game and it wasn't a chore to become stronger, but a lot of fun learning how to use everything the game gave me to become stronger.
I normally don't like games that don't have other means of transportation other than your feet and fast travel, but these maps aren't bad to traverse. The maps are small and aren't filled with nothing, every hill brought me either foes, someone's woes, or more loot to tow. Most times all 3. I liked how you make the run/ walk speed perks rewarding to have and not be something I barely notice. I applaud your stats systems as well. They were very well thought out. I felt like my build setup was crucial for both how I wanted to play, how I needed to play, and how situations required me to get an understanding of what was going on before I made a move.
I enjoyed the companion system, both in battles and in the open world. Learning how to make them more capable and how they can make me more capable was one of my favorite parts of the game. It was frustrating in the beginning but man was it rewarding to see them be able to clean house. I went from me babysitting them to having them watch my back. We became a hit squad.
The only thing that annoyed me was the loading screens. Funnily, since games give players infinite lives, the loading screens are a proper punishment for being bad or playing poorly, so meh.
The quests were fulfilling to beat. I was always intrigued to play the next one. They didn't feel like "go hear and do this" but I felt involved with the game's story instead of simply collecting things or pressing buttons. There was one fetch quest you had in the game that gave a great reward for doing so. It's the one with the nice outfit if you know what I mean. I thought I'd be happy when I finally get it over with, but when I got the outfit, I was really sad about the outcome. Like actually sad. It stopped me from seeing the board as greedy incompetent corporate clowns and see them as the threat they are.
The enemies were difficult in the best way. They were not bullet sponges. I have to see what worked on them. 1 goon's weapons could drop my whole team in 10 seconds for example a lot of games have elemental damage but it significantly doesn't change how every battle is played, but this game had me checking my stats and playing with different damage modifiers, armor modifiers, and understanding how consumables worked. 3 armed goons could take 10secs or over a minute depending on my crew's weapon setup.
Great game, can't wait to hear you talk about it, and im excited to play OW2.
It's my birthday! Your the second video I chose to open, because your channel is the best one I discovered all year! Thank you for your good advice, stories, and an awesome time. I've been playing fallout 2 again now the past two weeks. That game is almost just as good as the day I got my first copy. I usually played with characters with high critical because it was almost realistic how you could kill people with one bullet like in real life. Nowadays I like to put things into outdoorsman skill which is almost as important if you don't want to die constantly if your exploring down south for power armor immediately! I was inspired by lucky boy, and I created a super luck person in fallout 2 but halfway through I realized gambling should not have been the skill to choose tho. My dream was a super lucky character with high agility that couldn't be hit yet killed all with one hit. It is so fun playing fallout 2 over and over attempting it with different types of characters. 30 years later I still play it!