Fun Stuff > CLIKC
Fallout: New Vegas
a pack of wolves:
--- Quote from: KvP on 04 Jan 2010, 11:13 ---What I know is only that the guns / armor system is being overhauled to DT (Damage Threshold) over DR (Damage Resistance)
--- End quote ---
What's the difference between the two?
KvP:
Fallouts 1 and 2 used a system with armor having both resistance and threshold, with many different kinds of damage (normal, fire, plasma, explosive etc.) so that armors had certain strengths and weaknesses (for example, metal armor protected well against laser weapons, but not against fire). Fallout 3 scrapped different sorts of damage and the threshold system in favor of a flat resistance system, which made armor explicitly linear in progression (there was no advantage to wearing leather armor when you had a metal suit, aside from weight concerns)
In the original games, damage threshold is a certain amount of damage that is soaked up outright by armor, and it tends to be a low number, generally in the 1-3 range, depending. Damage resistance then deflected a percentage of remaining damage. Basically it works in sequence. Say you hit somebody with a spear and it does 10 HP of raw damage. Their armor has a DR/DT of 25/2. Damage Threshold protects against 2 hit points, so damage is reduced to 8. Then Damage Resistance removes 25% of that 8 points, so instead of taking 10 damage you take 6. I'm pretty sure that's how it works, anyway. I've thrown the question to Josh, he might elaborate. He loves talking about this stuff.
The problem with this was that the variable benefits of different armors was largely imperceptible to the player, up until the point where you got Power Armor, which had such high DR/DT it effectively broke the system. Combat in the later parts of the original Fallouts was almost completely made up of "who can get a massive critical first".
Alex C:
Yeah, damage threshold also had the unfortunate side effect of making AP ammo rather useless, which was both hilarious and stupidly unintuitive. Armor Penetrating ammo generally had a lower damage multiplier than other types of ammo you could acquire, but it would ignore a chunk of your target's damage resistance. Unfortunately, AP ammo had no effect on Damage Threshold, so it was a classic catch-22. If they had enough armor to make their Damage Resistance worth worrying about, they also likely had enough Damage Threshold that the AP ammo would just get your attack absorbed almost entirely. So, like KVP said, you were often just better off using normal ammo and hoping you get a crit.
a pack of wolves:
Ah, I see. Thanks. It'd be rather nice to see different armours having weaknesses to particular weapons so long as it was balanced, by the end of Fallout 3 my tactics were basically the same for everything I encountered and that would force a bit more variety. What do you guys reckon the chances of that returning are?
KvP:
Not much, really. I have yet to see an RPG in which your late-game character is not overpowered to the point where it interferes with the spirit of the game. Fallout has that problem, D&D has that problem. I doubt even someone like Josh, whose job it is to think about functional systems design, could do much against it. Especially in something like Fallout, where Power Armor is so iconic. The best loot in the game is right there on the cover.
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