I always had been of the opinion that it wouldn't actually take all that much effort to use the maps and dialogues of good old 2238 and the FOnline engine in order to create a Fallout 2-esque COOP (or singleplayer) game, in a slightly more modern guise. Now it's time to see if I was right or if I'm grossly understating the amount of effort this requires. In any case, here are a couple of bullet points to summarize this project.
- This is designed for singleplayer or co-op play, not as an mmo (though I probably wont go out of my way to prevent it). It will be hosted individually.
- As the name suggests, while it does use 2238 maps and dialogues, it is based on the Ashes of Phoenix sdk and will feature its gameplay.
- As such, this project does not necessarily aim to accurately recreate Fallout 2. However, before any new stuff is added, the goal is to recreate all the quests and interactions from
both Fallouts as a baseline. Aside from more weapons added, it will try to stay in canon.
- Due to the changes in character design, combat mechanics and items, it should prove a much more challenging game. No free APA from navarro and
no Turnbased (sorry), only real-time.
Within the next weeks, I will go into more detail about the features I plan to integrate, especially for those who are not too familiar with AoP.
I have started a public Trello to communicate the progress on the game and, for the most part, to help myself in organizing the workload.
https://trello.com/b/uu44VXjg/ashes-of-californiaThis is a personal side project of mine and does not include the whole NoNameYet Team, though I will be relying on their help. It also does not mean that AoP is dead. Contrary to popular belief, it is actively being developed and will see game-changing updates
soon.
Any help is welcome, especially in the Quest and Dialogue departments. I will try to handle this project in a transparent way but while I'm generally all for community projects and teamwork and such, I am primarily doing this for the fun of developing a creative work and because of my belief that a Co-op, non-pvp fallout game is long overdue. I can see that many will disagree with my choice of not supporting TB and using AoP in the first place, and with those major points already being predetermined, I can hardly declare it a community project.
However, the more contributions this project receives, the more content of the questy type will end up in this project. At this point I can not estimate the amount of effort required until a release candidate has been produced, but hopefully the next days and weeks on trello will tell us.
Having started this project practically today, I will first be merging the 2238 maps and dialogues into AoP and eliminate inconsistencies and incompatibilities, to establish a baseline (there will be no actual AoP maps or factions). As posted on the trello, the following steps will be to gradually bring back Fallout content that was unfit for an MMO and thus cut, followed by an overhaul of the gameplay balance, fixing issues in the base game like way too low HP on enemies in Fallout 1 or the meaninglessness of money once you got past Vault city in Fallout 2.
I will be available almost daily on irc://irc.forestnet.org/AshesOfPhoenix and can be reached easily on
http://fonline-aop.net/forum/index.php 