Hardcore Mechanics Part 3: Repair Pony

Dragmaister -

When we first read about Fallout 4 not including a repair system, many on the Design Team were a little annoyed. Repairing played an important role at providing a variety in weapon and armor stats, a reason to not always use the "best" weapon, and an use for all those random weapons you found.

However, it wasn’t until after we sat down and thought about it that we realised it also forces players to carry loot they may not otherwise want, and it can be rather tedious to continually repair your equipment. So in order to cater to the both sides of the argument, we decided to simply make it a Hardcore mechanic that can be enabled or disabled, depending on the player's reference. Because of this the Fallout’s method seemed pointlessly simplistic, so we wanted to give it our own twist...

Condition

Every weapon and armor in the game has a level of condition (CND), expressed as a number, that is used to represent the durability of the weapon.

Each time a weapon is fired the condition of that weapon goes down, and when a weapons condition hits 0%, the weapon is classified as ‘broken’. An exception to this rule is unarmed weapons, which do not have a condition and never need to be repaired. A broken a weapon can’t be equipped, and if a player’s or NPC’s weapon hits 0% while equipped, it will be forcibly unequipped. For the player if their weapon is unequipped due to their weapon breaking, the next weapon in their quick-select is equipped automatically. If no weapon is available in the quick-select, the player’s bare hooves are equipped (Unarmed). For NPCs if their weapon is unequipped due to the weapon breaking, they will equip the next best weapon in their inventory. If no weapon is available in their inventory, they equip their bare hooves (Unarmed).

The armor condition goes down each time it receives a hit, and when it hits 0%, that armor is classified as ‘broken’ and is unequipped. The armor can not be re-equipped until it has been repaired to minimum condition of 1%.

The starting CND of all weapons/armor, except unique, will be randomized, with a minimum of 15%, meaning the player will rarely find two instances of the same weapon with the identical CND. Unique weapons and armor will always have full CND when first found.

There are multiple classes of weapons (Pistols, Rifles, etc), and weapon type is used to refer to identical weapons (10mm Pistol, .44 Magnum, etc). Each weapon type is divided to multiple parts, and weapons of the same class can have differences in terms of individual part CND; for example 10mm Barrel and .44 Barrel have different amount of maximum CND.

A weapon’s overall CND is simply the sum of all individual part CNDs. The weapon’s overall CND is simply the sum of all individual part CNDs, same with the max CND. Overall CND of a weapon affects the damage, and each individual part affects different attribute of the weapon. If an individual part is damaged below 75% CND, the attribute affected by that part receives an increasing penalty, but the weapon will still continue to function. A broken (0% CND) part will cause a large penalty, but will not prevent the weapon from being used so long as the overall CND of the weapon is at least 1%.

Repairing

Repairing a weapon requires either another weapon of same type, or a spare part. If the player uses a different weapon type(eg. 10mm to repair a .44) within the same weapon class (pistol, rifle, etc.), they will get a penalty on the total CND gained from repairing. This penalty can be negated by getting the Jury Rigging perk Rank 1. The player won’t be able to use weapons of differing weapon classes to fix their weapons, unless they get Jury Rigging perk Rank 2. With that perk, using weapons of differing classes is possible, for example repairing a pistol with a rifle, but is subject to 50% penalty.

Players will be able to select any number of parts when it comes to repairing the weapon. Whichever part(s) the player selects are the parts that are repaired. The more parts the player selects to use in the repair, the more the overall effectiveness of the repair is reduced. The Mechanics skill level of the player will affect how much of the parts CND is usable.

If using a spare part to repair, only the respective part can be repaired and the spare part is consumed on use. However, this will generally give much bigger CND boost than if using a part directly from another weapon. There will be 3 types of spare parts; Junk Part, Spare Part, and Pristine Part. Junk Part is the most commonly found and provides 15% CND, Spare Part is uncommon and provides 30% CND, and Pristine Part is the rarest, but will always fully fix the part of the weapon it is used on (100% CND).

Weapon parts:

Receiver / Cylinder / Battery

  • Chance for a reloading jam is increased.

Barrel

  • Accuracy is decreased.
  • Change of a firing jam is increased 1
  • Chance of weapon ‘sputtering4’ increases 3

Mouth Grip / Trigger

  • Fire rate is decreased
  • Chance of firing jam is increased.
  • Attack speed is decreased. 2

Frame

  • Muzzle climb is increased.
  • Change of reloading jam is increased 1

Blade/Head 2

  • Damage is decreased
  • Chance to inflict status effects is decreased (Bleeding etc.)

Guard 2

  • Blocking effectiveness is decreased
  • Parrying sweet spot is decreased

Nozzle 3

  • Range is decreased.

Pipes 3

  • Fuel consumption is increased.

1 Single Shot Weapons
2 Melee Weapons
3 Flamers

4 Sputtering means there is a delay in the flamers stream

Game Design Document

Click here to get a link straight to this week's GDD discussion post with more equations and examples!