Theoretical mod idea

H

Hkelukka

First time out of the vault
I'll say off the bat that there is no way I'll actually do this, but its an idea I've been throwing around and I'd like to discuss it in the hope, that it will somehow help someone with a mod they are working on, give ideas, or possibly somehow improve something somewhere.

Now that that is out of the way.

An idea for a FO2 mod I had:

It is based on the very early days of the FO universe, just after the bombs and the radiation and the FEV. Perhaps as little as 2 years after. The idea is of a midwestern survival nut that goes underground and runs out of stuff sometime after 2 years. He has a family that is with him underground and once stuff starts running out he has to start bringing supplies in from the outside world.

The idea is that instead of having many small settlements as in FO and FO2, there is maybe 1-2 settlements and the rest is wasteland, infights, new mutations that die out by FO and so on. And what the player does is firstly bring stuff to his family, then slowly start to gather up survivors, or go into hiding again. With the overall goal of trying to keep his family alive, with many specific things such as.

"Child developed pneumonia in the cold cave. Wife wants to bring child outside for fresh air and warmth." And if you just send them outside there is a high but random risk that they will die, and the more supplies you gather for them and the faster you are the higher the probablity the child will survive.

And there will be a very large random event database from which the game will select what happens to the family. The game ends if your family dies (similar to FO2 arroyo). The game ends in a victory if you die of either old age, succesfully found and defend a large settlement, move away from the cave to join another settlement, or so on.

So, in essence, it would be about the very early days after the nuclear war, trying to scrounge up medicine, food, ammo, clothing, wood, nails, tools, trusted friends and so on. Many of the events would be hidden and related to how you deal with people in the world. So that if you tell someone that your family is in hiding they might follow you and attack your family after you leave them, they might help you, but you really cant know which they will do since the trigger for it is hidden from the player.



So, in short, the idea would be trying to gather what is neccesary to maintain both yourself and your family after a nuclear holocaust.
 
I don't want to be an adbot or something, but you may click in the picture of my signature, as this the scenario you described is very similar to what I am doing. ;) Ofcourse it's not entirely the same, for example I don't focus on the family you described and it's not in the Midwest, rather in Illinois/Michigan, but you may like it.

Ofcourse, I'd love to see if others could grab the very idea you posted here and make something on their own. I like the scenario.
 
No no, dont worry about it, I want this thread to have people linking to content, if they have something related.

I actually thought of making it as a single map with transition boundaries similar to New Reno but much much larger. So that you can not go to any kind of world map. That every time you travel in one direction you have to travel back the same distance. And that there are three "counters" that reset + events. Counters being sleep, eat, drink. And the events would be stuff like antibiotics, antipsychotics, sleeping pills and so on.
 
The idea is pretty much what Dead State is about, except that it's set in a zombie apocalypse and not in the Fallout world.
 
Keep in mind, this is just a preliminary timeline/backdrop/idea. I have no plans to actually build a game around this concept, but its something I’ve been playing with, here is a short story about it.

“When the great war came to our land, we were fortunate, for we were small. Beyond the notice of the great we were never attacked, but in the fires that raged, we too were scorched.

In the early years, the old government did all that it could, but it too was overwhelmed and we were left to fend for ourselves. First we ran out of fuel, then food, slowly we had nothing left.

Ours was a small island, without oil for our ships there was nothing left for us, and then trade slowed down, and stopped. Eventually we were left with too many mouths, too little food to go around. And in our hunger and our fear, we descended on one another. In the final moments of our madness, many were burnt to cinders by the flames of nuclear devastation.”

The idea is that Iceland was left relatively untouched by the major wars, having almost nothing worth trading besides fish. And the fishing industry was devastated by the global oil wars. They were reduced to using sailed fishing boats, and eventually it wasn’t enough to feed the population. Starvation set in and people started to kill each other in civil unrest. It didn’t last long as they were relatively able to maintain order. Then the nuclear war came and the Keflavik NATO airbase as well as Reykjavik was hit by very low yield nuclear bombs.

The game would take place in about 2150-2200. The trade and caravan routes, irrigation, cattle, farming and so on are picking up across Europe again. But Iceland has so little to trade to anyone that they are left seriously behind. One of the only sources of income and trade is salvaging Keflavik, which for gameplay purposes was actually a huge secret military vault filled with all kinds of weird things. Where most people who enter end up dying somewhere inside. Think of “Glow” from Fallout 1, except much much larger.

Most of the people of Iceland know about technology so there are no silly people in loincloths. The winters are mild by modern standards but still harsh, anything less than a brick house and you die of exposure. One of the main sources of trade is fish and specifically whale blubber, and it is mainly traded to European small trading ships for wood, wool and other low end goods. Guns are present but rare and most people fight with spears or knifes.

The people in general are desperate, hungry and in need of a hero. Against this backdrop, the player enters in one of the trading caravans, running away from his pursuers back in the mainland. And as the story unwinds the player sees a real change in the world. Buildings are built or repaired, and people slowly dress better and enjoy a higher quality of life. The game culminates in a showdown between the player and the pursuers.

Notable areas would be:

Trading port/Capital.

Mining activity for several metals in a single site, such as aluminum.

Reykjavik ruins.

Keflavik ruins.

Central glacier, used to gather pure water as well as hiding and to preserve food.

and a few other minor places.

And the notable difference between various other stories is that you get to see the area visibly changes by your actions. The difficulty with this is that it would require extensive mapping and coding to look at every possible combination of characters, events and backdrops. So that when you start the capital is a rundown tent village with a few winter buildings for shelters and when you end it might be something like NCR in fallout 2. So it would involve hundreds of permutations of maps and characters. A lot of work but would be interesting. The whole timeline would perhaps be around 10 years from start to end. Time would progress a lot faster but that would be so that you can see people grow old and die and the settlement actually prosper.

Anyway, that’s one idea I’ve had. Not doable by me but still, its an idea.
 
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