User blog:ElessarTheOnly/PRM Weapon Pack considered harmful

Just recently finished another play-through of v1.4007, with the PRM Weapon Pack 2.65 and the all.spawn v3 from ModDB installed.

The PRM Weapon Pack I did activate because I love the USAS-12. And guess what, in the whole game I didn't see any of those. Not for loot from an NPC, not for sale from Arnie.

The all.spawn I did install because I wanted to see if it fixes the problems with Numbnutz' Find improved "TRs 301" mission.

During the play-through I noted lots of strange behaviour. The UI had some changed content, stash coordinates were given more randomly, stashes contained different items, NPCs didn't appear where they were supposed to, and so on. It struck me kind of funny, because in my last play-through with PRM Weapon Pack 2.14 I hadn't noticed any major changes beside those plethora of new items.

The first major disappointment came when I encountered the Controller in Wild Territory. This one was so strong that his aura killed you before you could even reach him (on Master level, Bandit jacket, no psy-stones). It took me tons of F1 to get him. The same happened again in the Brain vat, with three of them in a confined space. One of them wanted to exit through the staircase door, so I used F1s gain. Unfortunately the grenades also killed the poor Stalker on the other side of the massive locked steel door, flushing my reputation down the gutter.

The first real showstopper came when Kolovrat also changed into a Controller. I died from his aura before I could even see clear enough to aim. So, I broke the mission and shot him instead of handing over the missing weapon, leaving an unfinished task on the board. And, BTW, Nimble didn't accept it, so one more cancelled task as the devs have decided to disable the spawn menu.

That was the time when I started to dig deeper into the PRM Weapon Pack and learned that I don't like it anymore.

Who needs all this new crap?
Tons of new weapons, new scopes, silencers, ammunition, you name it. Yes, some are really cool (did I mention I like the USAS-12?), but overall it is just eye candy.

WTF does a "Weapon Pack" need an all.spawn?
To my great surprise I learned that the PRM Weapon Pack 2.65 also comes with an all.spawn, while 2.14 didn't. The all.spawn file (please correct me if I am wrong) is the file defining the placement of "fixed" items, NPCs, anomalies and so on on start of a new game. I assume the devs did so because they changed some of the spawns, like the missing weapon in Bloodsucker village now is a wpn_obokan_m28 instead of a wpn_lr300_m2. This means that in the gamefiles the mission for Nimble must also be recoded to expect a wpn_obokan_m28 instead of a wpn_lr300_m2.

My problem now was that I also installed the all.spawn v3 from ModDB. As I did that by putting it into the gamedata folder, it overruled the all.spawn from the PRM Weapon Pack. Maybe most of my observations are due to this mismatch, but definitely all my observations of Placements are for the gutter (otherwise the pages would have contained some more entries for the higher levels by now).

This will also be a problem with some other popular extension also including an all.spawn, most prominently the Storyline changes v1.03. As the devs have AFAIK not thought of a mechanism to prioritize the activated mods, it is not determinable which all.spawn (and other files) will be used.

The Weapon Pack that wants to be a v1.4008
From a "moderately big and fairly well balanced weapon pack" I would expect changes to the weapon definitions, maybe also to accessories like ammo, scopes and silencers (though, as I already said, nobody needs those). Maybe some more changes to the trader and the update config so that you have chances to trade and upgrade the new weapons.

But when you look at the extracted PRM Weapon Pack 2.65 you will also see changes to the mutant definitions (like making the Controller invulnerable), blowout shelters, gulags, tons of scripts, UI,...

Let's for example take the stashes. If you compare the treasure_manager.ltx from the PRM with the vanilla version, it is completely different. Items, conditions and the giving factions have changed for all stashes but Made a run for it.

Even worse, if you compare the treasure_manager.ltx from the PRM 2.65 with that from the current PRM 2.78, around thirty stashes have changed their content - again.

What are those changes doing in a weapon pack? I don't know who the devs of the PRM Weapon Pack are, but either they are from the original dev team and want to place some last changes ("1.4007 will be the final version of L.A.") or they are some folks that just want to spread their view of how L.A. should be by piggybacking non-weapon related changes to a weapon mod.

My conclusion
Conclusion: I like some aspects of the PRM Weapon Pack, but as it seriously fubars the game without bringing any real value I can only recommend not to activate it.