Why was Fallout one of the few RPGs to integrate Adventure game elements?

[rusty_shackleford]

In section 4, page 8 of the Fallout manual you can find a detailed reference to what Fallout refers to as the "Action Cursor". Anyone familiar with adventure games will instantly realize what this is: a list of verbs, further extended by the 'use item' and 'use skill' verb. I'm not sure anyone would refer to Fallout as an "Adventure/RPG" hybrid(Is it really a hybrid? I consider RPGs to inherently be part adventure game), and(with its quite similar but bigger sibling) is frequently cited as one of the best RPGs ever created.

Fallout is, of course, not the only notable example: we also have the QFG series. And ATOM is(to the best of my knowledge) the only Fallout-like to actually copy this from Fallout. But... It seems a bit natural, does it not? For our avatar to interact with the world using an adventure game style interface that's backed by their RPG statistic representation?

At roughly the same time as Fallout, there was another RPG that released which was the complete opposite of Fallout: Diablo. Seek and destroy play, little interaction with characters or environment. Very nice atmosphere, though.
Perhaps I'm answering my own question here in stating that games like Diablo are just much simpler to design & implement than a game that allows you freeform interaction with the environment. Diablo(and its sequel) had a profound impact on how RPGs were designed going forth, arguably one of the main reasons "slower" RPGs that aren't simply hack and slash active-time combat were seen as dead by publishers.

It is a bit sad that the (false) era of kickstarter revivals did not actually see any interest in actual Fallout-style games.
What are your thoughts on why actual Fallout-style games essentially died with Fallout(2) despite its popularity & success?

I suppose to some degree this has also been fulfilled by what is now referred to as "Immersive sim", that uses a different way to interact with the world, but allows similar wide-ranging interactions.

[wndrbr]

I'm gonna shill for Fallout Nevada for a bit. Nevada (and Sonora, to a lesser extent) really squeezes everything out of Fallout 2 systems with its intricate quest design and adventure elements. Every skill is useful, including the non-combat ones (finally a reason to pick Good Natured trait). You can use your doctor skills to help the sick and the wounded, you can use gambling to solve quests, there's always some environmental stuff lying around that can be repaired or researched. Even pickpocket is useful.

One of the more impressive Nevada sidequests was the one where you had to bring back stolen supplies to an indian medicine man. The supplies now belong to a raider, who refuses to give them away, but offers you to try to win them in a game of cards instead. The problem is that the raider has a very high gambling skill, and beating him in a game of cards is next to impossible... unless you use pickpocket to steal his marked deck, and replace it with an unmarked one. Once he's robbed of his marked deck, his gambling skill becomes severely reduced, allowing you to easily pass the skillcheck.

What are your thoughts on why actual Fallout-style games essentially died with Fallout(2) despite its popularity & success?

you answered in your own post - making environment highly interactable is difficult and time-consuming, so why bother when you can just make a combat-focused game where you hack mobs and loot their corpses. And yes, immersive sims basically took this niche of highly interactive "semi-adventurous" games.

[gerey]

Also because, and this applies to im sims, most people will only play a game once, and of those the majority won't even bother finishing the game.

So for developers to "waste" resources making highly interactable environments and a multitude of paths that most people will not see will feel like a misuse of resources. Only those truly committed to such a principle of game design will go through with it.

Additionally, I imagine that going for what Wunder here describes can and will lead to issues of players coming up with a (logical) solution that the developer's didn't think of, realizing it's not possible to make use of it in the game, and ending feeling frustrated, or players being confronted with instances of moon logic, or missing a link in the sequence and being unable to continue with the quest. It's very easy to screw up such an approach, either by the game not doing a good-enough job of teaching players what they can and can't do in the game, or by obfuscating the solution, by making the next step illogical etc.

The quest described above is great, but I can imagine most vanilla Fallout players missed out on that solution because pickpocketing wasn't particularly useful in the originals, so they had no reason to invest in the skill in Nevada.

Ultimately, most developers, even those that may be interest in designing such a game, will likely give up when they realize that not only do they have to avoid all the common pitfalls of the adventure genre, but also account for skill-checks, non-linearity, different builds, open-world etc.

[wndrbr]

From what I understood, Space Wreck is one of such games.

[Gastrick]

I remember there being puzzles in the first Dungeon Master game that you had to solve. Those are adventure game staples.

Most adventure games don't let the player sneak or use any of the skills that are in Fallout. They're limited to picking up and using items, opening doors, and talking to people.

[aeternalis]

It's not quite as fully realized, but I feel like Betrayal at Krondor had some adventure elements with its overworld, the moredhel chests and trap puzzles, and the dialogue keywords. Certainly, exploration and interacting with what you discovered was a huge focus, and several chapters could expand drastically depending on where you chose to go although you didn't change the main plot. Underrated game IMO and way ahead of its time (1993!)

[Tweed]

Wasteland did similar, though with no cursor. You often had multiple ways of handling things, pick the lock on a door, force it with brute strength, force it with a tool, or blow the damn thing off its hinges. Bluff your way past areas you shouldn't be in yet, or do it "legit", or gun everyone down and backdoor your way into the plot. Hell, you could even attack the Guardian Citadel early if you REALLY wanted to and knew how and by doing so you could completely skip Darwin. The only completely worthless skill was combat shooting.

[ERYFKRAD]

Also because, and this applies to im sims, most people will only play a game once, and of those the majority won't even bother finishing the game.

So for developers to "waste" resources making highly interactable environments and a multitude of paths that most people will not see will feel like a misuse of resources. Only those truly committed to such a principle of game design will go through with it.

Additionally, I imagine that going for what Wunder here describes can and will lead to issues of players coming up with a (logical) solution that the developer's didn't think of, realizing it's not possible to make use of it in the game, and ending feeling frustrated, or players being confronted with instances of moon logic, or missing a link in the sequence and being unable to continue with the quest. It's very easy to screw up such an approach, either by the game not doing a good-enough job of teaching players what they can and can't do in the game, or by obfuscating the solution, by making the next step illogical etc.

The quest described above is great, but I can imagine most vanilla Fallout players missed out on that solution because pickpocketing wasn't particularly useful in the originals, so they had no reason to invest in the skill in Nevada.

Ultimately, most developers, even those that may be interest in designing such a game, will likely give up when they realize that not only do they have to avoid all the common pitfalls of the adventure genre, but also account for skill-checks, non-linearity, different builds, open-world etc.

Just another argument in favour of making games more dependent on interaction between systems than scripted instances.

[rusty_shackleford]

Also because, and this applies to im sims, most people will only play a game once, and of those the majority won't even bother finishing the game.

So for developers to "waste" resources making highly interactable environments and a multitude of paths that most people will not see will feel like a misuse of resources. Only those truly committed to such a principle of game design will go through with it.

Additionally, I imagine that going for what Wunder here describes can and will lead to issues of players coming up with a (logical) solution that the developer's didn't think of, realizing it's not possible to make use of it in the game, and ending feeling frustrated, or players being confronted with instances of moon logic, or missing a link in the sequence and being unable to continue with the quest. It's very easy to screw up such an approach, either by the game not doing a good-enough job of teaching players what they can and can't do in the game, or by obfuscating the solution, by making the next step illogical etc.

The quest described above is great, but I can imagine most vanilla Fallout players missed out on that solution because pickpocketing wasn't particularly useful in the originals, so they had no reason to invest in the skill in Nevada.

Ultimately, most developers, even those that may be interest in designing such a game, will likely give up when they realize that not only do they have to avoid all the common pitfalls of the adventure genre, but also account for skill-checks, non-linearity, different builds, open-world etc.

Just another argument in favour of making games more dependent on interaction between systems than scripted instances.

There's an area early in Encased where your path is barred by a small obstacle, and there's exactly one way to get past it. You can't blow it up, you can't just move it out of the way, you must climb over it... using some skill or somesuch I did not have.

Are there any examples of systems-based design that make use of RPG skills?

[ERYFKRAD]

Also because, and this applies to im sims, most people will only play a game once, and of those the majority won't even bother finishing the game.

So for developers to "waste" resources making highly interactable environments and a multitude of paths that most people will not see will feel like a misuse of resources. Only those truly committed to such a principle of game design will go through with it.

Additionally, I imagine that going for what Wunder here describes can and will lead to issues of players coming up with a (logical) solution that the developer's didn't think of, realizing it's not possible to make use of it in the game, and ending feeling frustrated, or players being confronted with instances of moon logic, or missing a link in the sequence and being unable to continue with the quest. It's very easy to screw up such an approach, either by the game not doing a good-enough job of teaching players what they can and can't do in the game, or by obfuscating the solution, by making the next step illogical etc.

The quest described above is great, but I can imagine most vanilla Fallout players missed out on that solution because pickpocketing wasn't particularly useful in the originals, so they had no reason to invest in the skill in Nevada.

Ultimately, most developers, even those that may be interest in designing such a game, will likely give up when they realize that not only do they have to avoid all the common pitfalls of the adventure genre, but also account for skill-checks, non-linearity, different builds, open-world etc.

Just another argument in favour of making games more dependent on interaction between systems than scripted instances.

There's an area early in Encased where your path is barred by a small obstacle, and there's exactly one way to get past it. You can't blow it up, you can't just move it out of the way, you must climb over it... using some skill or somesuch I did not have.

Are there any examples of systems-based design that make use of RPG skills?

As far as I ken with respect to Rpgs that follow a plot, none springs to mind. Stuff like roguelikes and plotless rpgs like mount and blade likely use it more often than not.

[rusty_shackleford]

Stuff like roguelikes

I suppose the question is what 'systems-based' even is. Some of the most reactive roguelikes(e.g., Nethack) just have a ton of situational conditions handled, not unlike what @wndrbr was posting. The source code is an interesting read.

[WhiteShark]

I suppose the question is what 'systems-based' even is. Some of the most reactive roguelikes(e.g., Nethack) just have a ton of situational conditions handled, not unlike what @wndrbr was posting. The source code is an interesting read.

Dwarf Fortress is systems-based, i.e., it simulates how things work at a granular level and outcomes arise organically. Nethack is stagecraft, as you describe, but sufficiently advanced stagecraft is near-indistinguishable from magic simulation. Simulation is hard to do so most games don't, or only for a couple sub-systems at most.

[WhiteShark]

Speech skills can't really be properly simulated unless live AI dialogue takes off because you would need to account for the whole scale of hostile to friendly, including every step in between, as well as reputation and other factors in NPC dialogue. You can't do that without generating the dialogue on the spot, and anything less is technically stagecraft.

Environment-interaction skills are much more feasible but require the designers to take a more imsim approach to the game. Deus Ex had the swimming skill. Not exactly a skill, but I noticed in Dark Messiah that the size of an object I could pick up with Telekinesis was tied to how much mana I had available to expend on it. This was obviously stagecraft, the objects divided into a few discrete sizes, but that wouldn't be hard to turn into a simulation instead with granular object sizes and an MP cost based on a simple formula.

[rusty_shackleford]

Perhaps a better term for the distinction would be bottom-up vs top-down simulation. Bottom-up using the building blocks to work towards the desired effect, top-down using the desired effect and working backwards.
I'm not convinced either one is better, but top-down likely has a more negative stigma because it's easier to slap it on a game as an afterthought rather than build the game around it.

[WhiteShark]

Perhaps a better term for the distinction would be bottom-up vs top-down simulation. Bottom-up using the building blocks to work towards the desired effect, top-down using the desired effect and working backwards.
I'm not convinced either one is better, but top-down likely has a more negative stigma because it's easier to slap it on a game as an afterthought rather than build the game around it.

If it's bottom-up, you're building the game around it by definition. The problem with top-down is that you must manually account for every scenario and if you fail to do so it is jarring to the player. Here's a good summary of simulation vs stagecraft (or emulation, as this description puts it):

Simulations Vs Emulation

A simulation is actually trying to represent the way a system works with consistent rules that are universally applicable. An emulated event is not as likely to be predictable to the experienced player (unless he has played through the area), since it is not repeatable under laws or operating parameters within the context of the game. Once the player learns the rules, events in simulated systems can be predicted.

Example 01: In the (heavy-emulation) game NOLF, there is a combat encounter that allows the player to fight and kill sharks with a speargun. Later in the game, the player is trapped on a (retracting) bridge above a shark tank. If the player enters the water and attempts to kill the shark with his speargun, the shark is unaffected. (To get past the shark, the player must have earlier knocked a guard into the water–the shark will then attack the guard, allowing the player to move past.)

Example 02: In the game System Shock 2, one player reported (on the web) a combat encounter that is the result of the game’s simulated environment. The player-character was out of ammo and fleeing a hostile mutant. The PC ran into a room and was attacked by a turret. The PC hid in a corner, protected from the turret fire, trying to decide what to do. The mutant moved closer, searching for the PC. The PC then used his telekinetic psi ability to pull an explosive barrel toward him from the other side of the room. As the barrel passed through the stream of turret fire, it exploded, destroying the turret and killing the mutant.

That whole article is very good, I recommend it. The way I see it, the defining features of simulationism are granularity and consistency. On the consistency side, if you can climb one rock, you should be able to climb another of the same size and incline. If you can blow up one door, you should be able to blow up another of the same material and thickness. On the granularity side, things like original XCOM's bullet trajectory and tracking instead of a binary hit/miss.

[rusty_shackleford]

If it's bottom-up, you're building the game around it by definition. The problem with top-down is that you must manually account for every scenario and if you fail to do so it is jarring to the player. Here's a good summary of simulation vs stagecraft (or emulation, as this description puts it):

But my argument is that the game still works even if you don't account for every situation. Yes, it might feel 'broken', but a simulation game just doesn't work without the building blocks required to express the features.
I don't think either is necessarily more complex, just that one version gets used more because it's easier to partially implement.

How many truly simulationist games are there? ...Not very many at all. Even games that claim to be dwarf fortress "clones" are just shallow copies of certain feature sets. 'Simulationist' games very rarely actually feel like games and much more like experiments or demos.

Long term, I remain convinced that the future lies in simulationist approaches.

What is his definition of "Long term"?
Nethack, a purely emulation(using his own terms) approach, is far more interactive/reactive/what-have-you than many games that are highly praised for being "simulationist".
The author clearly had a bias when writing the article to favor one approach over the other.

And quite honestly, the line is far more blurred than he makes it out to be.

An example of stagecraft: in NiftyWorld there’s a locked door that can have its lock either picked or it can be bashed down. It is, however, the ONLY door in the entire game that has those qualities, because it’s stagecraft. It’s a special case, created because some quest demanded it. It is not generalized to other doors, other locks, other objects made of wood, because it’s the equivalent of a special-case prop.

In a simulationist world, you’d try to abstract the qualities of doors and make sure that all doors could be lockpicked or bashed.

If you asked someone where Fallout falls on 'stagecraft' vs 'simulationist', they'd probably say Stagecraft.
But all wooden doors in Fallout can be blown up.

Ah, Fallout must be simulationist then!

During the radscorp cave quest, your character may(depending on stats) notice a structural weakness in the cave. The cave wall can be blown up, caving the radscorps in. This is the only cave wall in the game that can be blown up this way.
And I see nothing wrong with this.

Creating entire systems just to facilitate something like being able to blow up a cave wall(for a single quest!) is how you get a game that is never released and eventually canceled. Or even worse, they have the technology and now you get a bunch of quests that just happen to be solvable by blowing up walls — wouldn't want all that effort to go to waste.


[Also, there's some humor there somewhere in the fact that the author's blog is now used to shill NFTs and meta-verse garbage. But this seems to be the fate of anyone involved with the Ultima games.]

[WhiteShark]

I don't think either is necessarily more complex, just that one version gets used more because it's easier to partially implement.

Doesn't that mean exactly that one is less complex? Unless what you mean is that the stagecraft could be implemented so comprehensively that it appears to be simulation, in which case yes, it's not necessarily less complex.

What is his definition of "Long term"?

Probably what he really means is 'ideally'.

And quite honestly, the line is far more blurred than he makes it out to be.
[...]
If you asked someone where Fallout falls on 'stagecraft' vs 'simulationist', they'd probably say Stagecraft.
But all wooden doors in Fallout can be blown up.

Ah, Fallout must be simulationist then!

During the radscorp cave quest, your character may(depending on stats) notice a structural weakness in the cave. The cave wall can be blown up, caving the radscorps in. This is the only cave wall in the game that can be blown up this way.

Well, it's like I said earlier: games generally only take the simulationist approach for a couple of subsystems at most because it's harder to implement. Obviously there's a mix.

Creating entire systems just to facilitate something like being able to blow up a cave wall(for a single quest!) is how you get a game that is never released and eventually canceled. Or even worse, they have the technology and now you get a bunch of quests that just happen to be solvable by blowing up walls — wouldn't want all that effort to go to waste.

Sure, practical concerns make pure simulationist games nearly impossible. I agree with the article, though, that simulationism is better in principle. I feel the same way about tabletop. The system is supposed to be the rules governing a fantasy world. In that sense RPGs are fundamentally simulations, and the further they stray from that, the less RPG they are. How close you can come to that ideal and how much you have to fake it in practice is the question.

[rusty_shackleford]

Doesn't that mean exactly that one is less complex? Unless what you mean is that the stagecraft could be implemented so comprehensively that it appears to be simulation, in which case yes, it's not necessarily less complex.

They're both complex(perhaps to an incomparable degree) when fully implemented. The 'stagecraft' approach, however, does not require a full implementation. Much like the radscorp quest I pointed out, there was no underlying system for blowing up cave walls.

Nethack was not always so complex, it started out simple and grew from there. That is the strength of the so-called 'stagecraft' approach: it can be done incrementally.
I am fairly certain that at least a few modern games like ATOM have done this, because the foresight in some areas felt uncanny to not be a response to a request made then patched in.

And to be more on topic with the OP: I think, to some degree, many of the complaints about adventure games have become outdated as video games have become malleable products. Complaints about 'moon logic' or solutions you expected to work would at worst fall on deaf ears, and at best make it into the sequel. Now you can see suggestions crop up in the patch next week. The main barrier at this point remains the developer's iron grasp on the source code(& data) of their programs — Just look at all the inventive mods created for Bethesda games.

[revenant]

Fallout's UI/build reactivity in the dialogue was lifted from Dark Sun pretty much verbatim.