New Mod Release: "iVATS"

After a couple of decades of doing creative work, one thing I've learned - and relearned, and relearned - is that only time ultimately can judge a project. 

Popularity is cruel illusion: what everyone loves today may fizzle and vanish very quickly, and the idea that everyone hated at first may age surprisingly well and earn a dedicated fan base over the long term. You just never know.

Time is your true audience, patience the only real process.

Which brings me to Immersive VATS.  So back around 2013, I wrote this little mod for Fallout: New Vegas based on what I thought was an interesting idea: limit VATS availability to energy weapons and power armor helmets. If you didn't have one of them, or if you did and they weren't powered/loaded, your VATS would simply not work.

I thought it was a logical premise, especially in a game like New Vegas, where many or most of your guns are conventional ballistic weapons. How exactly is this computer-assisted targeting doodad supposed to work, anyway? 

According to Bethesda, VATS is purely a feature of the Pipboy - no implants, no targeting sights, no sensing circuitry - meaning that you are meant to point your homemade pipe rifle at something, look down at your crude 2077 version of an iPhone, move things around a bit to try and line up your shot, and somehow this process is supposed to improve your survival odds in a dangerous Wasteland situation.

Yeah. Let's just face it: VATS makes no sense.

So I wrote "Immersive VATS", which simply established that VATS was a networked system that required a Pipboy as the targeting computer, but also needed a sophisticated sensor circuit in the weapon (or a working power armor helmet). This would be generally limited to ranged energy weapons and the like. I found it kind of fun to play, because it generally restricted assisted targeting to a weapon class that had somewhat limited utility.

And man.. did I hear feedback on it. People hated it. 

One guy called it a troll. Another guy tried at length to convince me that according to canon Fallout lore, the Pipboy was surgically grafted onto the Courier's arm and that the Courier was a cyborg (not even close). Mostly though, people were just pissed off that I would suggest taking away, even conditionally, their precious autoaimbot. Even though no one was forcing them to download it. They hated that it even existed.

Immersive VATS was easily the most controversial - frankly, the only controversial - Fallout mod I've ever written. I decided that obviously my own sense of the community interest was off base with this one, so I shelved Immersive VATS and moved on to other things.

I moved on to Fallout 4, and one day in 2017, someone approached me out of the blue about porting Immersive VATS to FO4. I was surprised anyone liked it, so I said sure, knock yourself out. He ported a very basic version that he called "VATS - Now Immersive", and insanely enough, suddenly people were actually interested in the idea.

So. Recently I've been noticing people using "VATS - Now Immersive" in gameplay videos. The author is long gone from the scene. And I'm even starting to hear from people who played the FNV version and liked it. I'm starting a new video series playing FROST and PANPC and wanted to mess with VATS again, so I pried open the code and immediately realized that it was time to rewrite the thing. And rewrite it the way I wanted to do it in the first place. It took almost ten years for it to find an audience.

The resulting mod, iVATS, is now available on the GreslinGames Discord. It has full MCM support, is very lightweight (much easier on script overhead than the 2017 port), and Just Works. It also now has a feature I had in the FNV original but that never made it into the port: VATS signal disruption due to radiation and electrical attacks.  

So if you're looking for something new to try in an immersive survival build, and think that perhaps - just perhaps - you can stand to reconsider the absurdity of VATS, iVATS is available for download now on GreslinGames.