Off Topic Productions

Given the amount of suggestions/requests/balance topics, and gameplay confusion/questions popping up in the bug topics I felt a topic like this might be necessary. Your categories are as follows:

1: Suggestions. Mostly small balance related stuff I guess, but just to keep the conversation interesting feel free to include fanciful random stuff like: "I wish punching Mercedes' door counted as knocking."

2: Gameplay help. If you aren't sure if it's a bug maybe post here before the patch topic/tech support forum.

3: General questions, mostly just anything that doesn't already have a topic and doesn't seem big enough to make a new one.

4:Whatever you want, because we all know how quickly topics on OTP go offtopic


Soooo yeah.... Just to get the ball rolling I'll repost this:

Fist suggestions:

Stun gloves are very very helpful right now, and with them where they all now there's really no reason to upgrade fists beyond trained. I was thinking leave them as they are and just require advanced or master level to use them (They're certainly more technical and advanced than lethal gloves...)

EMP Gloves: right now the are really rather underpowered. They only effect bots and most of them will riddle you with bullets long before you ever succeed in disabling the bot. (except Mill bots, but come on! you get behind those with ANYTHING and they're gonna die.) Three possible suggestions I have:
1: take a page from Shifter's electrical discharge aug, make it work on alarm panels, turrets, cameras; yuki even got it to work on laser trip wires(Apparently it needed a small "spark" visual effect as like a radius).
2: up the emp damage so that it can disable bots in fewer hits (currently takes like 4-5 for small sec bots, and 7-10 for the bigger ones)
3: Lower the skill requirement to advanced or maybe even trained.

I like your fist suggestions, I'll talk to the coders about it.

Also: Stickeh'd.

I agree with the fist suggestion. Stun gloves are way overpowered. There's almost no reason to use a prod or baton if you can get the best of both worlds (stun effect + no ammo) for a measly 900 skills points.

My suggestions:

Environmental Resistance
Since hazard zones in TNM are practically non-existent, I think ER could use an overhaul to make it more useful. I forgot if it was Shifter or Smoke's mod, but in a certain mod ER gave you resistance to greasel and alien attacks. The problem with that of course is that it would make the final level a cake walk. You also don't want it to become an automatic choice over Aqua Lung, but I can't think of a suitable tweak that would make it as good.

Alt-fire mode for Katanas
Let's say you want to please Kashue but want to be a badass agent at the same time. Boxers get to use the stun gloves, pistol users get the blow darts, rifle users get the PHAT rifle rice bag mode, but melee fighters are stuck with the old prod and baton? The low tech weapon class clearly needs a big brother to compete with the other non-lethal options. The good news is there's a real technique used in katana sword fighting specifically for non-lethal combat.

mineuchi - Striking with the back of the sword
http://www.toyama-ryu.com/dictionary_m.htm

Basically you flip the blade over and strike with the side that doesn't cut. The heroes often use it in samurai movies as they aren't supposed to murder the bad guys. Watch them flip the katana over in these videos.
@0:16 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auP-JQc0INY
@1:18 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSTcKnLhAeo
What do you think of adding a non-lethal fire mode for katanas? It'd be amazing to have the flip animation when you switch between modes , but I could live with it simply acting as a juiced up baton.

The baton is actually a devastating weapon in its own right. It's just that most people use it wrong..

correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the environmental resistance aug decreases the damage from tranquilizers, gas, and radiation (including alien spit)?

Walking time can be such a chore. For example, I had massacred all of the Llama's, including beefman. Took the goat side and got up to the bit where you take the quest from DT and Athena saying to wipe them out. Thing is, the quest only finished when I had to go back to the temple, THEN go back to claim my reward. So in effect, I hiked to Goat City, to Goat Temple, back down, through goat city, through downtown, into the temple then out, through back downtown, back into goat city and all the way up to the top floor of the goat temple.


The only gripe I have with this fantastic mod. As for the record, I ghosted the whole way there and back.

Seeing as lollerskates are considered useless and everyone hates the walking... I think there should be a lot more lollerskates placed in the game, or a vending machine that sells them for 5 credits near every important building . Not really, but it seems to be the only quick solution besides cheating. Most of the time I just run around with level 4 speed aug and whenever I get low on energy I'll use allenergy.( provided there are no enemies nearby and I could easily walk to a repair bot with no fuss)

Also, yes Environmental resistance protects against radiation, and poision including grays/greasels. Is it just me though, or is there a glitch with TNM where the "##% absorbed" message doesn't display? I saw it sometimes when using a enviro suit in TNM but not with any of the augs.

I'm sorry but we're entirely aware of the too-much-walking problem, but there's no reasonable way to fix it. We did our best to alleviate the problem during development, for example by cutting out approximately 30% of the Downtown map, but there's not much else we can do short of recreating the Corporate and Downtown maps from scratch and doing some major restructuring on certain other maps (particularly Goat City).

We thought about implementing a taxi system during beta, but while the maps are too damn big to walk around in, they're unfortunately too small to properly support a taxi system >_<

JC_Helios wrote:Seeing as lollerskates are considered useless and everyone hates the walking... I think there should be a lot more lollerskates placed in the game, or a vending machine that sells them for 5 credits near every important building . Not really, but it seems to be the only quick solution besides cheating.

I've suggested elsewhere that if the skates could be switched on and off they'd be really useful. I guess that won't happen in an official release though since it takes away the joke element. Still I wish they were a bit more maneuverable.

Voodoo portals were a nice idea to but the way they're placed doesn't seem to cut down much of the walking you do, which I think is primarily between PDX/WC, Goat City, and Raving's. If portals near PartyZone and the Downtown diner were placed closer to Raving's and the entrance to Goat City, they'd be more useful.

JC_Helios wrote:Is it just me though, or is there a glitch with TNM where the "##% absorbed" message doesn't display? I saw it sometimes when using a enviro suit in TNM but not with any of the augs.

Ah maybe that's why I thought it wasn't working. I don't think the % absorbed shows up in Ballistic Protection either.

Yeah I think there should be double the amount of portals

1 near sols, another near the marketplace, by the weaponshop, and where the one near the partyzone is fine, the one in the slums is also fine, but maybe another near the abandoned clinic (slums is quite small though, so maybe only one is needed)

Hi,

regarding the "large maps" discussion I would like to suggest a "Toggle Move Forward" key binding like in Oblivion, if the engine supports that.

Another suggestion would be the ability to pull the character up middle sized crates/ledges like in Thief (I don't remember the proper word for this action), without having to stack and jump. But that might cause level design problems, I know, because the player might be able to reach areas he isn't supposed to.
Thanks, people!

Mep_histo wrote:Another suggestion would be the ability to pull the character up middle sized crates/ledges like in Thief (I don't remember the proper word for this action), without having to stack and jump. But that might cause level design problems, I know, because the player might be able to reach areas he isn't supposed to.

I incorporated a system like that in my mod, but only with specific ledges - if you can do it with every ledge it would make the game way easier, albeit probably more fun as well.

You can actually do that in TNM with specific ledges. For example you can crawl out through the hatches in the ship in the Downtown canals that way. But they are very, very specific ledges

What about the automatic forward moving? That would be quite useful ...

I'll talk to the programmers about it.