Fallout: New Vegas gameplay video, contest

[recombined]

The combat still looks like a chaotic bethesda-style mess. If this were just turn-based I think that the rest would work itself out. Hell, maybe in some parallel universe the franchise saw better days...

 

[smber2cnma]

I'm sure I'm in the minority here (after all bloody mess was included even in the isometric Fallouts) but I just don't appreciate the exploding heads, severed limbs, etc...at all. I Fallout 2, I remember seeing it and kinda laughing, it was like seeing Warhammer 40K figures blowing each other up, but now that its more of a shooter 3D environment - I just don't like it.

Seeing the head explode in the video (okay in every single video released) gives me 2 impressions. 1nd - it's anti-immersive. Sure a rocket, a mine, or a mini-gun could tear people up like that (and I'm more okay with those, w/o the slow motion), but little hand guns or even rifles doing it is plain dumb. A shotgun wouldn't even do that unless it were placed directly against the opponents skull. 2nd - it seems juvenile. I feel like its a dynamic that's made to appeal to 15 year-old boys or that part of us that still reacts like one.

 

[ManWithNoName]

Thats not completly true. A .32 bullet can take off a head
(but rarly) and I'm guessing almost any gun/bullet could take a babies head off but thats werid to think about. And if thats a .44 pistol well then I guess you've never heard the quote:

"this is a .44 magnum the most powerful handgun in the world and can blow you head clean off"

But the amount of times that a head comes off in this game is silly and why for my final shot on people I usually shoot them in the chest. Its what I call a clean kill no mess to clean up.

 

[Grey_Ghost]

I'm sure I'm in the minority here (after all bloody mess was included even in the isometric Fallouts) but I just don't appreciate the exploding heads, severed limbs, etc...at all.

Yeah, I don't care much for it myself. Bloody Mess was an option in Fallout 1 & 2. While it was good for a laugh initially, I just tired of it after a while. Most of the other death animations were way more satisfying visually as well as aurally.

 

[your evil twin]

In Fallout 3, if a killing shot is a limb or the head, there is a 50% chance it will be severed. If it does not fly off, then the game does a check for the limb exploding, which again has a 50% chance. Thus you've got a 75% chance that some kind of dismemberment will happen.

At low levels when you have bad aiming skills that's not too over-the-top, as your chances to hit someone's head is quite low, and thus it is nice to get a gory reward when such a shot is succesful and it is a kill shot. But at high levels, when you have a 95% chance to hit, it gets a bit over the top.

Some weapons are set to slice-off only, and some are set to explode only, and thus have just a 50% chance of some sort of dismemberment happening.

There are a couple of Fallout 3 mods that allow you to increase or decrease these percentages. Decreasing each chance to 25% works nicely. Annoyingly, you can't change the percent chance of dismemberment on a per-weapon basis, they are global values.

One thing I tried was modding most weapons to be explode only, and lowering the chance to 25%. The only weapons that still had a chance to sever were lasers and bladed weapons, and I upped that percentage to 75%. While I can't have my good old classic Fallout laser torso-slice, at least I can have lots of severed legs and decapitations!