GMS Station Vault

[SagaDC]

Minor Spoilers ahead. Proceed at your own risk.

This popped up in a separate thread, but I figured it was worth getting it's own topic. A minor point of criticism, but the risk/reward ratio in the optional Burrower Caverns is way off. The foes there are quite possibly the deadliest in the game, next to the Mutants in Junkyard, and the rewards offered are very minimal.

After fighting their way through wave after wave of Burrowers, the player is rewarded with a single lootable corpse (for me, it had mediocre equipment) and a few Burrower parts (looks like a 15-20% drop rate on those?). Definitely not worth the ammunition, explosives, health hypos, and psi-boosters that I had to burn through to clear the place out.

If the intent is to teach the player that its not worth exploring every area, then its working as intended. Otherwise, there should probably be a bit more loot hidden in there somewhere.

[Elhazzared]

Indeed my problem isn't even how hard it is but rather the risk reward situation as you have read in many other posts out there.

You are fully aware it's a scary place that people avoid with more fear than hell itself.

But you are also made aware that there is valuable stuff down there. It is why the mission was to go there and get it in the first place but at the end there is nothing worth whatsoever.

Still, Styg did said he was going to consider adding levels after the burrower hive so in the future we might see past the hive the continuation of the GMS complext and the wonderous secrets it holds.

[SagaDC]

I don't know if making that area more expansive is really the right answer. Given that it's an area that will only ever be seen by players who have invested in the Persuasion skill, it seems a little silly to focus more attention on making it a more interesting or extensive area. It's probably safe to say that only one out of every five or so players will ever even see the inside of the Burrower-infested vault.

Then again, if there were more ways to access the vault, then I wouldn't mind seeing the area within being expanded. Perhaps the player could barter for access to the vault, or use pickpocket to steal the key away from the guard carrying it.

But the simplest solution, in my eyes, would just be to bump the 'reward' side of the Risk:Reward formula up a bit.

[Elhazzared]

True but I belive you don't need much. I tried bumping it to 10 and asking for the keycard and apparently that was enough.

[Kaerius]

Given that it's an area that will only ever be seen by players who have invested in the Persuasion skill

Wrong... after Gorky brushes you off and denies you the keycard, you can talk to Quinton, who will chew out Gorky, who will then grudgingly give you the keycard.

[SagaDC]

Given that it's an area that will only ever be seen by players who have invested in the Persuasion skill

Wrong... after Gorky brushes you off and denies you the keycard, you can talk to Quinton, who will chew out Gorky, who will then grudgingly give you the keycard.

Really? I never tried that.

Well then, I wouldn't mind seeing that optional area get some expanded content. I stand by my original suggestion, though, which is to re-evaluate the risk:reward ratio. If there's going to be more content added to the GMS Vault, then part of that added content should be some loot that's actually worth fighting your way through a horde of Burrowers for.

[Elhazzared]

I strongly disagree here. Gorsky knows that they were keeping valuable stuff down there. It wasn't so valuable for them not to abandon it when things beggan to go south, but it was still valuable enough for Gorsky to want to go in there and get it.

It is also explain that that place is a vault and there is no vault, there is only a burrower hive.

It is also known that who discovered that place was a burrower's hive was one of the guys from omega station which had gone in there (probably to check the vault for something) and found that along with the cave having colapsed a wall for them to move in (as well as for the raider's attack) it colapsed probably a passage for a burrowers hive which would explain why it's there in the first place. Still the vault shouldn't be unreachable. The guy had closed the door to the vault so the burrowers would remain in there and didn't tell the others so they weren't afraid and had to leave.

So for me the conclusion is simple. Yes, there is now a burrower hive between you and the vault but past the hive there should be a vault with loot.

As for whether or not there should be a correlation between dificulty and loot. Quite frankly I could say that just because something is a bit harder than other things it doesn't means the loot should be that much better, say, if you're fighting 5 hard enemies against fighting 4 hard enemies. Maybe there is no necessity for the 5 enemies to have better loots, they may even have lesser quallity though more quantity. However to walk into the hardest content in the game and come back with nothing to show makes a player feel frustated and cheated of their time. So there should be some correlation between difficulty and reward.

[Elhazzared]

I don't really mean a vault fallout style. I mean what the word vault usually impliest. A very secure room which holds up the most valuable stuff. Kinda the difference between a storage room and a vault, vaults are bigger, they are much better protected and they have the really valuable stuff inside.

I wouldn't think it would be logical the burrowers just dug into the vault simply because if burrowers could dig through the external walls, they could just dig through the walls and infest the rest of the place. The doors would effectivelly be of no use against them.

Rulling out that they could not have dug to it then the next logical step would be to assume that what what opened up the passage for them was the most recent earthquake.

Now that initial room you see when you open the doors is very same, so small in fact that even the storages on the second floor are incredibly bigger so that wouldn't at very least feel like a vault. More like a secure room before the vault. The vault would be then accessible throuh stairs or a passage and I've always assume that passage to be stairs because there is no colapsed walls around it, it looks perfectly like a continuation of the facility for all purposes (yes, with lovelly burrower eggs all around since they decided they didn't liked the decoration).

Since the next map is the hive however then what I'd logicly assume is that somewhere along the line the earthquake colapsed the passage and opened a new one into a burrowers hive, now the logical next step I'd think here is that either this whole place is indeed a hive but a player would be rewarded by later on having a passage into anotehr colapsed walls directly into the vault or that this is actually the vault, only that the initial part of of, almost with all the walls had colapsed but up ahead the scenary would start to change to that of a vault with valuables. Neither is currently the case but we may yet see that change.

Lastly while yes you are told get away from there cause hell is a nicer place than that. You are also lead to belive there is valuable stuff down there... it's kinda like saying. Look, if you go in there you're probably not going to come back... But if you do somehow managed to survive, then you might have just hit the jackpot.

Its not that i don't understand your reasoning Epeli, I just fundamentaly disagree with it... Which is fine cause I love these nerdy discussions

[Idioticus]

No one ever said there was anything valuable in the vault, and even if there was, why would you enter the hive?


If there was something valuable in the vault it's
a) equipment
b) food
c) chemical/biological in containers

If it's equipment or containers, why would the burrowers take it? It'd still be in the vault and there'd be absolutely no risk for you to grab it.
If it's food, it's probably eaten/rotten by now and you wouldn't want to take that anyway.

What could be valuable is a boss fight with the hive queen (or similar big bug) that drops something Quinton would really want. Because having the vault itself have anything valuable wouldn't make the player do anything.

I understand Styg's going to expand the hive, it's a shame though, that the burrowers aren't similar to ants or termites because the bigger burrowers lay eggs (though this can be explained that they just carry them around). However, if there was to be a queen, I hope we don't fight it because queens can't do much other than lay eggs once they start doing that, and instead we'd fight the "royal guard" which in this case could be a pair of really big armored bugs, that are the only ones that drops some heavy duty carapace surpassing tungsten in toughness.

[Elhazzared]

As I said earlier Idioticus. That place after the doors open is not the vault, it's more like a pre-room to the vault. The room is incredibly small to actually be a vault and the passage to the hive indicates that it's not a hole in the wall but a corridor or a stairway to the vault itself.

Alo yes it is said there is valuable stuff, both directly and implicitly. In the first place you're toldd that you're going there to grab some stuff that was left there when it was abandoned (I'm not sure of the words Gorsky used exactly but pretty much it's said there). Now implicitly let's look at things from this angle. The station's resources are streached thin. You have almost every guard and people working on the colapsed tunel. You have only a few to guard the other passage, and the lower rail passage is guarded by one guy and a sentry. there is also only one guy to guard the cave's passage that gives access to the junkyard... And that is how thinly streached your station's forces are and then they are going to send armed people which by all right should be helping guarding the base when their military is this thinly streached, to search the GMS for stuff. This implies they know there is very valuable stuff there which would be of great need to the station which would make it very valuable.

[Styg]

I think you guys are making too big of a deal out of this. As Epeli said, not every area needs to satisfy some risk:reward ratio, and don't forget you also get lots of XP for killing burrowers.

And just to clear up some things: that room IS the vault. The reason Gorsky thought something valuable is hidden there is because of all the precautions Omega took to seal it up and protect against hacking, but it turns out they did this for other reasons (burrowers).

As I said, I might be expanding it further in order to connect it with the rest of the Lower Underrail caves and beyond.

[Elhazzared]

I belive they do Styg cause otherwise what happens is. First time someone spends hours and hours just trying to get in there and kill everything. After that they will feel immensly frustated and cheated of all the time and hard work they put towards dealing with it. The XP you get is nice, but it's not even worth one level and quite frankly if you're not a psiker, then it's not worth by any streach of the imagination with the amount of money you're going to be throwing at them in the form of grenades and bullets. From there on that place is just gonna be ignored and then it might as well not exist in the first place... This is why risk/reward is necessary. Now you don't need to make the highest risk always give the best stuff. Sometimes it even makes sense that a less risky stuff gives better rewards so long as you make the whole thing make sense. but high risk should always have high reward otherwise there is no incentive to do it in the first place which just makes it pointless to even have it in the first place.

For a vault, that room is incredibly small, vaults that are soposed to keep stuff safe, like real vaults are not just big, they are huge! They need to have the required space to store anything inside be it big or small and also large quantities of whatever... Those blast doors (as I like to call them) where already in place before the burrowers because they wouldn't have the time to build them as they showed up, this much is obvious so the place was already very secure before the burrowers showed up which means again, the vault existed, only that it never was much of a vault in the first place. The only thing that could be said for is all the anti-hacking precautions taken by Omega as a later adition.

Now I did spoke of it but I will again. From a logic point of view there wouldn't be a way for the burrowers to ding in through the walls. It that was possible then why would a door stop them? They's just dig through the walls again and infestate the whole base and no station would ever be secure against them as nothing could be done to stop them from diging in. it is more logic to assume that the recent earthquake was what broke the wall and allowed for the burrowers to move in.

[Eliasfrost]

Since the area isn't finished, perhaps the connection from the burrower area to the rest of the lower Underrail could serve as a part of a quest. Like, you need to go through the burrower area to access another sealed off area, or something like that, to not make it absolutely pointless but make it considerably more reasonable to enter the area. I remember that ExtraCredits talked about something similar in their latest video, 'negative possibility space', though that focuses more on accidental access to an area that is normally not meant to be reachable. Though it applies to lot of stuff, like this. If the player gets into the area (a difficuly area I might add) but ultimately don't find anything useful or rewarding, it will probably feel like a rip-off.

Though I agree that there should be places that are pointless but also accessible, but to crank the diff to 11 and not get anything for the effort of going through it seems like an odd use of such areas, usually they are accessed through unconventional means such as map geometry errors but to have an area like that with conventional game mechanics can be seen as a designed challenge rather than just a negative space that have been taken advantage of by the designer.

But I'm not going to go all speculative on this since it's not finished, those are just my two cents on the current situation.