Doesn't FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS deserve its own thread?

obsidian fallout 3, ya lemme just open my wallet and get all my cash out for that *reaches in, pulls hand back out and its my middle finger*

I'm all over this, fuck the haters.

i'd like for this to rule, really enjoyed Fallout 3, but got a feeling this is gonna be a dud.

I'm in. Never bought any of the DLC for F3 so am ready for more post-apocalypse.

can we delete this thread and start a new one so that when Princess TamTam is dead and gone in a few days' time we won't have to put up with this tedious reminder for the next however many months?

The fact that so many fans of FO3 are talking shit on this makes me hopeful.

Not certain why you're being so cruel, Roberto. This is a place for discussion, not flaming.

I don't understand why you're HOPING that this will suck.

Sorry, I meant that it made me hopeful it would be a good game.

i'm actually gonna wait a bit on it and watch this thread

I have it in my hands. I'll give you first impressions when I get a chance to put a few hours in.

Supposedly its mad buggy, making it the true successor to fallout 2.

Eurogamer likes it, for what that's worth. The main thing they single out as a problem is companion AI that is- how to put this delicately- wicked retarded.

sounds like they mistakenly got a beta of fallout: new boston

so the consensus seems to be: pretty sweet as a Fallout 3 expansion pack, engine's showing its age, buggy as hell.

sounds like a slog that i don't need to spend 50 - 100 hours of my life on

yeah, think i'll be waiting for this to get patched and to come down in price.

Bought this and am installing it now. A few preliminary thoughts:

I loved the first Fallout, liked Fallout 2, and disliked Fallout 3. FO3 falls short of being what I'd call a 'bad' game, but it's not a good one. The Gamebryo engine is a mess and has no business being used for an AAA title, and as a consequence it's an extremely ugly puke-green game with awful animations and the same bugs that plagued Oblivion (eg., NPCs sliding through environments). It's extremely uninvolving as an RPG, with badly implemented quests, bad voice acting, bad writing, and a host of bad design decisions that mean it doesn't succeed as a shooter either, such as hard-coded weapon accuracy, bad AI (enemies that stand perfectly still and trade gunfire with you like it's a swordfight) and increasing 'difficulty' by pumping up enemy health. Exploration is interesting, but it's not a sustaining game mechanic. It's (wait for it) Oblivion with guns.

tldr: the NMA crowd was right

The worthless Gamebryo engine will limit how awesome F:NV can be, but I've been looking forward to New Vegas because it promises to be better as an RPG and better as a shooter. When Chris Avellone & co. fail, it's usually at least a noble failure. So yeah, that's my take on it. I'll be back with impressions after I've played it some.

with so many exciting and wrong opinions about FO3 i just can't wait to hear what you're wrong about on FNV too

Do you work for Bethesda or something? You don't think it's legitimate and completely factual to say that Fallout 3 had bad animations, ugly characters, bad voice acting, bad AI and bad gunplay?

And is the sniping necessary when I'm going out of my way to patiently articulate my point of view on the game?

very excited to start this

I think many of the animations/AI in fallout were not so good, the color palette was regrettable, most of the voice acting/character design was okay by me
gunplay was really secondary to the RPG elements which was the VATS love it or hate it conundrum
i could see where it could grind against you but the sheer oblivion DEPTH of the game outweighed technical faults for me.
that said, i dunno if i need to play the same game again with a new background.

I think what made me sad about FO3 was that my fps instincts kicked in once I got a decent gun and enough ammo and I never touched VAT again.

ha, that never happened for me

Has anyone tried hardcore mode yet?

Only a few minutes in

My first playthrough is going to be on normal. I'll do a later one on hardcore. I got a few hours in and haven't left the first location. So far so good - no bugs yet, it feels like the load times are shorter, and there are weapon and item crafting tables outside so you don't have to go in the store. Looks like I'll soon be having my first big encounter.

these geckos can suck my dick

anyone know how if there's a level cap in this one?

i bloody love fallout 3, at first I HATED it because the gameplay was unfamiliar to me. Now it's virtually one of my all time favourites. The only problem with it I found was that I couldn't just load it up for a quick go, I needed to reserve a full evening for it - and so I've still not completed it.

Am holding out for NV, I'm going to finish F3 first. At least the bugs should be fixed by then.

haha turned off hardcore already

Played some more and the only problem I've seen is a couple of "micro pauses" when you get close to a new populated area; it's a stutter as it draws in for maybe 1/2 second.

Otherwise this is great! And I think tougher on normal than F3 was.

bugs so far:

i've been trapped in hillsides
had various npcs get trapped in hills and the ground
npcs freezing / unable to be shot
occasionally the game will slow down after the killing montage

annoying

coming back in 3 years after the fan patches make this playable

Jeff, for reference whatcha playing it on? I have a choice of PS3 or 360 when it comes out here in the UK on Friday. I expect it'll be buggy no matter what though.

I don't pay much attention to people saying the engine is showing it's age, as it wasn't that long ago I finished playing FO3 and its expansions. It's not suddenly going to sicken me.

I'm looking forward to it, even if it is basically just an expansion pack.

I've played just over 6 hours on the PS3 and have seen none of the bugs jeff lists. Just the micro-stutter pausing thing I mentioned.

I basically had to force myself to stop playing and go to sleep last night. It's very good so far - this is the 'real' Fallout 3 for me. The bugs are there (mostly just crashes), but people are making too big a deal about it because lol Obsidian - every new game has bugs, whatever.

Playing on PC btw.

My copy came in yesterday. I haven't played it yet, but super excited.

i'm playing it on the 360. definitely not making too big a deal about it. i've never played a game that was so consistently buggy. i had a few bugs during fallout 3 but they were well spread out over the 100 hours or so I spent on that game. it's a very different experience when the bugs are condensed into like three hours.

i thought s.o.p. with these games is to wait a couple months until the patches get rolled out.

i only remember running into one bug/crash in fallout 3, but it had been out for a looong time by then. also was pretty impressed that i only ran into one in red dead redemption.

Got another hour in - none of these bugs yet on PS3. However, even though it autosaves all the time it does not seem to do so after you level up. Basically threw away that extra playtime and my two toughest encounters by thinking it had saved.

didnt fallout 2 never get patched by interplay and you had to use a fan patch to play the game 100%

no, FO2 at launch was buggy but very playable, and it did get a couple patches later. you're thinking of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, which was pretty ridiculous

I have a ton to say about this game, but right now I'll just say that I was fully on-board when I walked into Nipton and the fucking Necropolis music from Fallout 1 started playing. Also, fucking JOHNNY GUITAR.

is it the same general old-style music? like f3? if not, i might not be happy about that.

Man, everyday I want to play this and everyday something comes up. At this point I may have to lock myself in my livingroom over the weekend and play an insane 48 hour marathon session.

There is the same old timey music like fallout 3 but seems like theres even less of it. Whoever made the last fallout3 comp that they linked to here should make another one. Loved it.

I played for a bit last night. I kinda think I screwed my character a little bit SPECIAL wise. I didnt know which stats were good so all I did was boost intelligence and agility a little bit. Are there bobbleheads in this one? I picked the glasses perk to get a permabonus in perception.. seemed like the others ones were shitty.

It's not the same old timey music - it's country-western and 50s/60s lounge music, as opposed to the 40s pop standards from FO3. I think the music is a lot better this time around, tho yeah the song selection is still limited. With FO3 it felt like they just said "hey its fallout we need some old timey garbage to throw in here" but at least now it's thematically appropriate - country stuff for the wild west theme, Dean Martin for the Vegas strip, etc.

This game just has so much more personality crammed into every nook & cranny. It's like when they were making FO3 they worked so hard on building this huge world that they forgot to work on reasons to compel you to explore and enjoy it. There's actual humor in this game! The funny kind! Primm Slim beats any character from FO3.

No bobbleheads, but it does give you a chance to re-do your build before you leave the first town.

lol

http://i.imgur.com/1E3Sp.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKIkw3LIoQ

major burn by RPS:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/10/21/wot-i-think-fallout-new-vegas/

Am I too huge a fallout nerd that I hear 'omg it sucks so hard but if you love fallout have another spoonfull of shit' and I say 'yes please'?

But something Bethesda were very aware of when they turned Fallout into a first-person game is that the wasteland is potentially quite a boring setting for the player to be set free in. I mean, you think wasteland, you think deserts, charred ruins and grumpy survivors wearing faded, drab clothes.

So, Bethesda went to great lengths to infuse their D.C. wasteland with colour. It was populated by kooky, occasionally even cartoonish characters- it’s no accident that super mutants and the Brotherhood of Steel featured so prominently. Then you had the independant towns, which were all built in or around visually striking setpieces, and Bethesda even built a labyrinth out of the subway system. Whatever direction you walked in Fallout 3, you felt confident you’d find something interesting.

this guy's a fucking dipshit lmao

This is basically turning out as I'd expected - diehard FO3 lovers (a group i will dub 'idiot fucktards') are down on NV, while REAL fans of fallout 1/2 see this as the rightful heir to the fallout legacy, which is what it is.

http://i55.tinypic.com/2dqosv8.gif

you need to get a grip

I have a grip... on this excellent game! 10/10!

great gif

Princess TamTam is cankles?

is anyone playing with the Wacky Kooky Wasteland trait or whatever..

http://i55.tinypic.com/25k4ck4.jpg

nice.

i actually still gotta play FO3, but if you're saying this is closer in spirit to the originals i'm still intrigued

lol @ "Lord Death"

reviews are all over the place. not in the rating, but in the reasons. but everyone is saying it's buggy as hell.

wow that RPS review just hit all the possibilities i was worried about. looks like ill be waiting for the price drop then

even ppl who like say it's more like Oblivion, which is not really a good sight imo

this is the most damning part of the GI review, but i've seen others that seem to say the opposite (or at least that the generally higher level of scripting makes it more fun):

Now, the bad news. I was never once blown away by a single moment. Sure, I laughed when I ran into a cross-dressing super mutant, and thought to myself “what have I done?” when I deployed an orbital laser directly above an NCR military base – but none of the missions or battles stand out as memorable. Most of the action and plot points are enjoyable, but I never once said "Wow. That was great." By comparison, this is a stark contrast to Fallout 3, a game that I felt delivered big moments all the way through.

That's an interesting point, except the only 'big moment' in FO3 for me was Liberty Prime. I'm not far enough into the game to say either way, but it hasn't really mattered yet because I'm having so much fun doing stuff like breaking down ammo into casings, powder and primer and reconstituting it into other kinds of ammunition to notice the dearth of big moments.

jjj, that RPS review is just... grotesquely stupid and wrong. I can't even read a sentence like this as anything but a troll:

So, Bethesda went to great lengths to infuse their D.C. wasteland with colour.

Yes, one color: sewage green. I just can't wrap my head around the idea that NV is less colorful... nobody I know who's playing it right now would agree at all. YMMV but I'd recommend at least reading some other reviews besides that one.

Also I love this choice excerpt:

There is just nothing interesting about them, except for the fact that they all pronounce Caesar “Kai-zar”, a mystery I never got to the bottom of.

you mean like in real life, retard? They even reference it in-game, about how they take their creepy cosplay to the extreme by using the antiquated pronunciation.

No bugs, still lovin' it (almost 10 hours in), playing with Wacky Kooky Wasteland but haven't seen anything kooky or wacky - just radscorpions, ghouls, molerats and the like. I'm enjoying it more than F3 at the beginning, and the humor seems less LOOK! FAN SERVICE FUNNY! than Fallout 3.

I really liked Fallout 3, too. It's just a fun apocalypse to play around in.

Wacky Kooky Wasteland

vas ist das?

there's a trait in character creation you can take that increases the number of 'wacky' Fallout 2-style pop culture referencing encounters you find in the wasteland - stuff like finding some skeletons named Owen & Beru, internet meme references and that kind of stuff. Turning it into a thing you can turn on or off seems like a good decision, since that stuff can rub people the wrong way.

also: just realized that Mr. New Vegas is Wayne Newton

it's just called 'Wild Wasteland' btw

I did find Owen & Beru! I didn't realize that was because I had that trait. It made me laugh because they really looked to be in the right poses and burnt just so. Tasteless and awesome moment.

i see. if i get around to this i will not be selecting that stupid option then. knowing that they built in a content-changing humor on/off switch when bugs apparently went unfixed is not filling me with anticipation. it speak of a dis-unified development team and bad leadership, imo, but others have played and i haven't yet so eh

i don't remember if the humor in FO3 was fan-servicey, but i don't remember any of it being especially funny either...

xps

I still haven't played NV yet but F1&2 were notoriously buggy- not crash-buggy but easily disturbed gameworld buggy (esp w stuff like hour long combat rounds as every bum in the game takes a turn running away from you) plus Bethesda is famous for buggy shit (going back to daggerfall!), so bugs aren't a huge shock.

goole the 'see a bunch of crazy shit' perk has been in the game since fallout 2 when it was called explorer - 'Higher chance of finding special places and people in random encounters '

huh. i've only played FO3 tbh. didn't know it had a history!

star wars jokes are not really my thing tho

goole rides for Star Trek

I didnt activate the crazy shit this time around, but I will the second playthrough just to see whats out there.

fallout 2 has some Famous Star Trek Humor in it actually, and a lot of fans tend to downgrade the game for its excesses in that area. negative fan reaction is prob a big reason why it was made optional in NV. and yeah, im saving it for the 2nd playthrough

i see. if i get around to this i will not be selecting that stupid option then. knowing that they built in a content-changing humor on/off switch when bugs apparently went unfixed is not filling me with anticipation. it speak of a dis-unified development team and bad leadership, imo, but others have played and i haven't yet so eh

i don't remember if the humor in FO3 was fan-servicey, but i don't remember any of it being especially funny either...

xps

― goole, Thursday, October 21, 2010 3:35 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

ha, well, 2 things:

i. obsidian
ii. bug-fixing is a complicated problem solving process that is never truly finished; inserting some wacky monkey cheese jokes probably didn't take up a lot of dev time

personally yeah it's a little annoying but c'mon... we all grew up in the age of patches, this is de rigueur for a brand new PC game! none of it is gamebreaking (so far), it's just crashes and stuff.

(esp w stuff like hour long combat rounds as every bum in the game takes a turn running away from you)

haha yes

ugh

I swear I spent half the game time in FO2 in New Reno because every time you started a fight anywhere near the casinos, 50 homeless dudes would spend most of the time running back and forth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOt4ToY0CdU&feature=player_embedded

oh hell no

how is the combat in NV? also can you RUN?

i loved FO3 at first but soon got sick to death of VATS - can NV be played as a fps? deep down im hoping it'll turn out to be kinda like the Stalker series, with all the great side missions and great unforgiving combat system.

Im not sure how a combo of Borderlands and Fallout would go down but that seems to be the kind of VATS-less fps style I could see happening.

combat's wayyy better imo - the true iron sights are a great addition, and because of that i've barely touched VATS so far. sneaking and sniping is my tactic of choice. enemies are still bullet sponges (im playing on very hard btw) which is unfortunate because I really prefer shooters where one well-placed headshot = a kill no matter what. the ammo variety is great, AP bullets actually work, and the new guns are all awesome and make bethesda's weapons look retarded (it's really jarring when you equip say the 10 mm pistol and it's this weird clunky made up gun that doesnt fit in with anything else), reload animations are sick nasty too.

also the combat is pretty unforgiving - giant radscorps are like sherman tanks, and my friend (playing on same settings) who's gotten farther than me says the deathclaws are pretty much unkillable (yesss)

i love how far they went with the Roman detail wrt the Legion... if you listen to Mr. Vegas Radio or whatever he'll have a news story about a Legion commander ordering the decimation of his unit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)

thanks ptt, if this game can be played purely as a shooter that sounds great. i take it there's no run key though? shame as that always bugged the hell out of me on FO3

what do you mean by run key?

like sprinting?

like sprinting?

Whoops!

only thing close to sprint is moving without your weapon drawn.. its a little bit faster

soooo finally loaded this up, started playing, got about 45 minutes in and got my first freeze. rather than torture myself i'm going to just wait for the patch

the enemies in this one can strike from pretty far away. it's kind of annoying to be running away from someone who is like 15 feet away and tagging you with a knife.

i hope they're at least throwing the knife?

no.

oh thats not good

bugs so far today: got stuck between two crates that were seemingly stacked right next to each other. guess not. and then one where my fire button stopped working and my weapon would only fire when i exited out my pip boy menu. had a really fun vats experience where i just watched a gecko run at me in slow motion for a minute while my gun did nothing.

I havent had many bugs to report so far.. Only minor things. The more signifcant ones usually involve enemies doing dumb shit which allows me to kill them so Im not too mad at it...

I'm embarrassed to admit that like a fallout-crack fiend, despite being disgusted by the early crashes, I still played about 4 hours of this last night. I got down to Primm and cleared that shit out (took a couple reloads tho, I'm not in love with my character build atm). It's very familiar to F3, especially wrt the types of items you find lying around. I'm playing on hardcore which is actually kinda hard (gotta remember to tote around purified water and food) and led to one of my cooler Fallout experiences. Someone got a critical head shot on me while I was in the middle of clearing Primm and since stimpacks don't heal critical damage on hardcore I basically continued to fight with my head in poor condition (since I didn't want to run away and see a doctor). Every few minutes the screen went all blurry and shaky and static came up, which was a really cool way of indicating trauma and reminded me of the malaria mechanics in Far Cry 2. It's hard killing gangers when you can barely see the screen or aim your gun.

bought this :)

also, there's a patch already for this. not looked into it so i don't know which bugs its supposed to fix

yeah I just installed an update on xbox. its definitely out for pc..

Yeah, I always hope that when the gamemakers get interviewed that someone asks them straight out how easy it is to get under the hood and start fixing shit upon release. It's like, yeah, we all know it's going to be buggy when it comes out, we know your track record, but how easily can we get in there to start rewiring it?

I say yeah a lot.

the loading screes are starting to get on my fucking nerves...

otoh I just ran into a character from FO2!

yeah i wish they had shorter ones for shorter loading periods. maybe with different facts? or maybe it would be nice to be able to cycle through the facts instead of being forced to watch just one (or two when it is being glitchy)?

isn't it just the case that gamebryo as an engine is fundamentally flawed and even with the best will in the world probably couldn't be successfully bug tested at this point? this game was always going to be buggy as all hell, as was FO3. I know it's a bit lame and apologist but you kinda just have to accept that :/

I read that the hardcore requirements for drinking , healing etc differ depending on difficulty. is it possible to specify the difficulty of the 'hardcoreness' separate from the difficulty of the enemies? I don't like the idea of bullet sponge super mutants so would rather play on normal but at the same time I don't want to be able to go weeks without sleeping or drinking

was watching my mate play this last night. Is it the case that reading books now is only a temporary skill hike?

Magazines are a temporary bump; books are still permanent.

seems kinda silly that hardcore mode cripples you so realistically and effectively wrt injuries and weight and yet you can still "fast travel"

thank god for that. this gameworld is enormous

isn't it just the case that gamebryo as an engine is fundamentally flawed and even with the best will in the world probably couldn't be successfully bug tested at this point? this game was always going to be buggy as all hell, as was FO3. I know it's a bit lame and apologist but you kinda just have to accept that :/

― posting for godot (cozen), Saturday, October 23, 2010 6:18 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

This is very true. It's a remarkably bad engine in too many ways to count.

I cleared my cache this morning and it seems to help a little bit.. Maybe it was the beer I was drinking last night that made me want to punch my tv during all the load screens.

been playing today. one thing that strikes me is how much more spread out the map is, think i prefer f3 map.

i'm liking it though, it feels a heck of a lot easier so far and i'm kinda wishing i chose hardcore mode. i don't remember getting so much weaponry so early on in f3, also i'm managed to repair 3 weapons to 100% already - i don't quite understand how that should be possible?

fucking geckos

Sad that theres craps tables in the game but you cant actually play them. Roulette is so boring.

i enjoyed playing caravan but made a ton of money and it turns out that that can't buy happiness.

Hade my first hard freeze in the prison. Shot a dude, wouldn't let me shoot him again. Hard to hard reboot the PS3. Otherwise, I'm enjoying it except deathclaws are a bitch.

played loads today, done dozens of quests, but i've yet to come across any weapon parts to mod my guns with. ?

There's a night scope for the varmint gun for sale in the first town.

yeah thats not surprising is it - me missing something so obvious right at the start

(thanks)

I missed it at first - they aren't listed with the weapons but in misc. or something. Not a helpful place to put them.

so I just got this for my birthday. I haven't even finished Fallout 3 yet.

Casinos off the strip are true to life and offer shitty blackjack payouts - and if you destroy the house at blackjack you get asked to leave

ditto peter, i'm flipping back and forth between the two at the moment.

yeah I decided I'm just gonna play New Vegas as a completely different type of character from the one I have in FO3 and just play both concurrently

The only difference in my character is that i've not been all that arsed about karma in NV, stealing pretty much whatever i desired and if it was safe to do so.

NV sounds like a game where having shady-to-bad karma might be fun.

my character in NV is all about personal gain, basically my services will go to the highest bidder always and no freebies for anyone

whereas in FO3 I am a good guy (though a bit of a kleptomaniac)

I'm playing hardcore mode. It's not really that tough so far, we'll see when my resources dwindle further. One fight gave me problems so far, took like 10 tries.

I've had a couple freezes and a corrupt auto-save. Seen some coyotes stuck in the ground and some other animal stuck motionless on the road. Overall a bit of letdown as it's like a more buggy fallout 3. Also seems lacking in the great underground tunnels fo3 has.

seems kinda silly that hardcore mode cripples you so realistically and effectively wrt injuries and weight and yet you can still "fast travel"

You can even walk/run as fast as a gimp, you just limp at equal speed. I do think you're more vulnerable in those areas if crippled though.

Also not a big fan of CRAFTING. So far it is completely unnecessary and just a pain to manage 8000 different ingredients.

My character is a black lesbian obv.

about to start playing this tonight, any tips on those stats it makes you set up at the start? luck, intelligence, strength etc. or does it not make much difference, should i just go in blind?

I recommend high intelligence. Skill points run off INT and you'll want lots of those. Other than that I think you can make almost any build work.

so far not enough hacking either. I like when you can turn peoples turrets and robots against them. but there has been zero of that.

cheers mordy!

Yeah, I'd say INT is the biggest one, and after that you'd probably want everything else to be pretty balanced. Otherwise, I think this game does a better job than any of the other Fallouts at making just about any build a viable one - looking at all the interesting new perks really made me think about all the ways you could play through this game.

I got myself a pimp boy 3 billion. y'all jealous of my solid gold hardware.

Just got this to go along with being laid off again yesterday(after a whole 2.5 days of working a new gig).

Yeah, we're going to need another Ilxor playlist again if possible.

Been playing this along with Stalker, and i enjoy being a persuasive sniper. Heavy on the talky, heavy on the blasty from three hundred meters, etc.

been playing tonight, but not felt i've accomplished much apart from finding locations.

lots and lots of weapons, all seem pretty useless against any of the big guys though.

Depressing as it is, i do enjoy these environments more than your trad fantasy/Oblivion style genres

buy me a copy and I'll make you a playlist

If i was still employed, i would. i got laid off yesterday. Again.

fuck yeah i forgot, sorry
what's the tenor of this thing? what sort of music does it run on?

40s/50s country western and dean martin.

Guh I passed this without resolving the whole vegas power struggle/chip issue which is kinda why the main character gets dealt with at the beginning of the game! Woops. Guess Ill play through again. lol.

lol.

do i need to collect the ncp dollars? are they worth anything at some point?

Can trade them for chips instead of using caps, Legion money too. Not sure what else they do yet.

not getting much enjoyment out of this. the combat is so unsatisfying compared to similar games (and by this i mainly mean stalker). i know i keep whinging about no sprint button but jeez it's agonizing how slowly your guy moves across this mass of desert. a truly amazing game would combine this kind of plot with the combat mechanism of stalker, cut out 50% of the waffly dialogue and soup up the clunky control system (jumping is awful).

Just some random thoughts:

I'm about 45 hours in, and right now I'm willing to say this is as good as or better than Fallout 2.

I think this might have the most balanced skill system of any Fallout game. They made it much harder to minmax, but without actually weakening the skills. Repair's a great example - it's not the you-must-raise-this-to-survive skill that it was in Fallout 3, but the reward for getting it high is actually better (perks like Jury Rigging). There aren't really dump stats (well, Survival seems pretty lame, but it's still a prereq for some cool perks), and I've found myself thinking about wanting to replay the game so I can try different builds and playstyles (instead of just wanting to replay it so I can try different story paths or w/e) (though I definitely want to do it for that reason too!)

Heavy on the talky, heavy on the blasty from three hundred meters, etc.

― Jaw dropping, thong dropping monster (kingfish), Thursday, October 28, 2010 6:58 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Yeah, same. When I first played FO3 I was crestfallen to see that my heavy investment in Speech ended up being pretty useless, but it's much more powerful in this game, which is in the tradition of Fallout 1/2. I also love sneaking around the wasteland and sniping shit, it's much more immersive and fun with the addition of the iron sights. I wish targeted melee attacks in VATS were in the cards, but it's still fun whipping out a baseball bat or golf club and whaling on shit every once in a while.

Note about blackjack: it's pretty much an ATM when your Luck is 7 or higher.

Ice-T loves the game: http://twitter.com/FINALLEVEL/status/28896649513

My biggest complaint would be a couple of broken quests (monorail) and the fact that some quests aren't official quests (ie. no entries in your quest log or even your misc notes). Haven't crashed in a long time.

There's a ton of gay people in this game.

I hear you about the combat NI, though I disagree about the dialogue - it's an RPG! The amount of personality packed into this game is one of the biggest things it has going for it. For a while I was tempted to compare it (as an FPS-RPG) to Deus Ex, but really the emphasis is so much stronger on the RPG side of things that I'm not comfortable comparing them.

this has crashed loads for me lately, 3 times today. (pc)

Have you fiddled with the settings? I dialed down the AA and AF and I've been running smooth since then.

yeah, i took those down too. I'll try reducing more, i'm currently running it on max apart from the aa.

I basically won the final showdown with 100 speech and no shots fired. Its kind of overpowered in a way but towards the end I didnt want to schlep all over the map and using speech avoided alot of running around.

I started a new build this morning with a ton of strength and endurance. Gonna go melee/unarmed, barter and survival on hardcore for shits. Gonna be evil as hell too.

It's been freezing on me on the PS3 of late - I get about an hour or so of playtime before it just stops completely and the PS3 needs a hard reboot. Frustrating, because I'm enjoying this quite a bit.

Might be a blessing in disguise if you dont lose any progress. Ive noticed load times get significantly longer if you play an hour, hour and a half. If you reboot its not as brutal.

this is on xbox btw

I'm saving all the damn time because I lost about an hour of wandering at one point and it pissed me off.

haha he's posting about this all day: http://twitter.com/#!/FINALLEVEL

also, found out there's already two mods that add radio stations:

http://www.ripten.com/2010/10/24/five-essential-pc-mods-for-fallout-new-vegas/

http://newvegasnexus.com/downloads/cat.php?id=88

http://newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34999

here's the playlist they're using, to get an idea of the flavors:

Benny Goodman - Wolverine Blues
Big Joe Turner - Rock The Joint Boogie
Billie Holiday - It's A Sin To Tell A Lie
Billie Holiday - My Mother's Son In Law
Billie Holiday - Sugar
Billie Holiday - Too Good To Be True
Bing Crosby - Cheek To Cheek
Bing Crosby - I Kiss Your . . . .
Bing Crosby - I`ve Got A Pocket Ful Of Dreams
Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters - A Hundred And Sixty Acres
Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters - Is You Is Or Is You Ain't Ma Baby
Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters - Life Is So Peculiar
Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters - Quicksilver
Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters - South America Take It Away
Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters - South Rampart Street Parade
Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters - The 3 Caballeros
Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters - Weddin' Day
Bing Crosby & Xavier Cugat - Rumba Conga Samba Merengue
Glenn Miller - Baby Me
Glenn Miller - Be Happy
Glenn Miller - Over The Rainbow
Jesse Stafford Orch - Shine
Josephine Baker - Blue Skies
Louis Armstrong - Go Down Moses
Louis Armstrong - Someday You'll Be Sorry
Louis Armstrong - The Peanut Vendor
Muggsy Spanier & His Ragtimers - Alice Blue Gown
Paul Weston - Freedom Train
Vera Lynn - A Star Fell Out Of Heaven
Vera Lynn - We`lll Meet Again

here's the vanilla playlist from the game:

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Fallout:_New_Vegas_songs

I'm amused b/c they include the same song Jessica Rabbit performed

So like 45 to 55 or so?

but with a swingin vegas vibe too huh

Okay Kingfish, just for you.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9YORRSTP

Please bear in mind I haven't played the game, so I'm just trying to imagine if this would work with FO3. I'm listening to the mix now and I like it.

Features:
The Master Keys - I Don't Mind the Rain (Unreleased, radio)
Charles Brown - It Ain't Gonna Be Like That
Nat King Cole - Nature Boy
Son House - Low Down Dirty Blues
Dizzy Gillespie - Oop Pop A Da
Jack McVea - Open the Door Richard
The Stanley Brothers - Death Is Only a Dream
The Big Three Trio (Willie Dixon) - I Ain't Gonna Be Your Monkey Man
The DixieAires - Joe Louis Is a Fightin' Man
John Lee Hooker - Crawling King Snake
Amos Milburn - Bad Bad Whiskey
The Big Three Trio - Signifying Monkey
Redd Stewart - Brother Drop Dead Boogie
The Dominoes with Clyde McPhatter - The Bells
Earl Hooker - Sweet Black Angel
Eddie Boyd - Third Degree
June Christy with The Stan Kenton Orchestra - Everything Happens to Me
Howlin' Wolf - Evil
Junior Wells - Somebody Hoodooed The Hoodoo Man
Little Walter - Mellow Down Easy
Lambert Hendricks and Ross - Standin' On the Corner, Whistlin' at the Pretty Girls
Little Richard - Slippin and Slidin' Peepin' and Hidin' (Piano/Drum Demo)
The Starlight Gospel Singers - I Got a Right To the Tree of Life
The Weavers - Sixteen Tons
Bobby Blue Bland - You Got Bad Intentions
Bo Diddley - Hey! Bo Diddley!
Chuck Berry - Maybelline
Eddie Banks and The Five Dreamers - Sugar Diabetes
Elvis Presley - Blue Moon
Patience and Prudence - Tonight You Belong to Me

more dirty blues, gospel and rock oriented than what the game comes with.
That mod soundtrack sounds great; shame it don't seem console compatible.

heh, just noticed we both went with blue moon, but i went with elvis and they went with frankie

lemme know how she plays

thx forks, gonna give this a play tomorrow for sure!

Sweet! Thanks! Now to figure out how to integrate as a straight channel.

Or just play it off of the laptop at the same time, i guess.

Just found the xp glitch in a Camp Golf convo.

Exploiting xp glitchs doesn't feel like cheating; you've beaten the game at its own system, and now it's time to take the rewards.

some of the feelings i get from this game are too real and not fun enough lol. one mission had me lure some guy in front of a sniper. but i got told off for having no evidence. it was quite funny to see the guys head explode as i talked to him, but i felt really shitty when i was told off by the sniper guy.

need to level up before i go lurking into areas with deathclaws, they're sons a bitches but at least i got my egg!

ok wtf, and some possible spoiler talk re the Repcon hq building (the museum)

i managed to access a terminal in there which took my facial information to allow me access to level 1, which was fine and all the robots thought i was authorised. Then on that floor i did the terminal thing again, and it said my facial info was now approved for level 2 but the robot on the next floor just won't have it.

I didn't see that problem - had to hack a terminal on the second floor to get clearance there. Any chance you just misread it, or skipped to the top floor?

when they say level 1 clearance, do they mean floor 1 or ground floor?

ground floor I think. If you go up stairs you need different clearance.

yeah, i got two clearances. i'll check what it says on the doors.

plus side, did lots today and managed to not have one crash. i turned some more settings down, but i put it back in hdr mode and not bloom which i had on previously.

Ste, apparently this REALLY helps out with fps issues:

http://newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34778

Haven't tried it myself yet.

ooh ta. i'll check that out later

there's no terminal for floor 3. You have to sneak it. I did it with a Stealthboy. Also, there's an extra-hard terminal up there, so i guess I'll be coming back for this place.

As for the "blasting in the head" scene, keep looking around for evidence. Talk to No-Bark and he clues you in to what's actually going on.

Some of the mission design is awesome; I really like how they figured how out to make a quest from just being a bouncer.

All games need more drinkin', chemin', slavin', and whorin'.

And Primm Slimm.

when they say level 1 clearance, do they mean floor 1 or ground floor?

lol britishes?

there's no terminal for floor 3. You have to sneak it. I did it with a Stealthboy. Also, there's an extra-hard terminal up there, so i guess I'll be coming back for this place.

There are other ways to do it; say, a pulse grenade and a pass in a suitcase.

i think vault 22 is the highlight of the game so far. wish there was more like that and less run around and talk to people about their butthurt problems.

Haven't made it there yet - my highlight was the ghouls with the rockets. Vault 34 sucked.

internal structures seem massive in this one, need to make a map for some of these buildings.

loving this game now i'm free of crashes!

xp ha yes great mission the ghouls with rockets, again i think i completed it the wrong way though what with discovering a navigation control panel just as i was about to launch them. hmm.

Vault 34 is a massive pain in the ass, but the reward at the end is stellar. The ghouls on the bottom floor have been the hardest enemies in the game for me so far... harder than Nightkin or Deathclaws.

Just as an aside, I think this game will be remembered as one of the most progressive AAA titles ever wrt its treatment of gay characters.

and robosexuals

Fisto!

Gave up, bought this on Steam last night, going to try to get some playtime in later today.

We should mention for all PC players that you really should mod the hell out of the game. Makes for a far more entertaining experience.

Tho I still to find the Oblivion-style mod that replaced the moon with an under-construction Death Star.

(crossposting this here from the employment thread, since it fits) I just got back from an interview today, and they want me to start tomorrow, so forks you might get that copy just yet

(knock on wood)

Getting the kooky spacesuit in the ghoul rocket site was fun. I think i'm missing something or a joke with the navigation controls. What was the point of correcting it?

I don't think there's a joke - just an XP bonus for helping them land closer to their goal.

By the ay I'm having to shelve this unless I hear there's a freeze/crash fix. I've had two real crashes, where the system reboots itself, and tons of hard freezes that cause me to manually reboot the PS3. Can't get more then 20 minutes of playtime before I'm restarting. It's a shame - I was enjoying it more than Fallout 3.

Probably jinxed it with all my trouble free talk up thread.

Is it just me, or is Normal mode pretty darn easy when it comes to combat at the beginning of the game? I might have to flip it to Hard, although I usually save that for replays.

I started playing two days ago and I've gone around and picked up a few quests but not finished that many. I've gotten as far as the ghouls in the factory and will have to take care of this Nightkin issue when I go back to the game.

The best thing I've lucked into so far was that I leveled before rescuing the Deputy at Bison Steve's, so the gang leader there had an incinerator. My current strategy for difficult guys out in the wasteland is to shoot them, run around until the fire goes out, and shoot them again. Repeat until dead and crispy.

yes it's really easy at the start, it does get harder though (I've found anyway). Although that might be me not having any better weapons right now, and not levelling up quick enough.

crashing again. may end up just getting this for 360, as pc driver issues are doing my nut in.

I am not playing this game but I thought I would say that the Forks mix is delightful.

http://i.imgur.com/nTs9y.jpg

Oh Dear God, I just met the Lonesome Stranger and got him a job. the reward is more entertaining than I could have planned, and yet more proof of how much more fun this game is than FO3.

thnx poly

Vault 11! New highpoint.

And yes, I tried again - I just love the game despite being only able to play in 20 minute chunks. 20 minutes, save, quit, reload, repeat.

same

got day off tomorrow, looks like fishing is cancelled. might get to play this for a big session.

That sucks about your console port being so jacked up. I've had some bugs on the PC version, but the most annoying one was EDe going missing during the bomber run.

EZ and Ste, what system u on?

PC

ah ok. i'm working on the assumption that the xbox port will be the most fucked up of the 3...

I would doubt that, considering PS3 would have the least shared codebase with the PC

yes it's really easy at the start, it does get harder though (I've found anyway).

― F-Unit (Ste), Tuesday, November 2, 2010 10:17 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

yeah, this is how it was on 3 too. very uneven. I did vault 34 last night and it was rough on normal. by the end I was massively addicted and irradiated. fun!

hardcore is still not that hard btw. very easy to steal supplies.

I like that the vaults are a little more maze like too. can be annoying but adds a little atmosphere if you have to know where to go.

I'm on the PS3. Worse lookups are in towns with lots of people. I'm prolonging my play sessions by wandering all over the place instead of doing Vegas stuff. Of course, bazillions of cazadores seem to cause issues too.

the vegas stuff kinda sucks imo.

I'm wandering around northeast of Vegas and having a blast. Actual quests are overrated.

done a lot of wandering and definitely think the map is better on F3, just seems way too much desert of nothing on this one. On F3 I found even on the bare areas the scenery was still really interesting.

but liking the internal structures probably a bit better on this one.

some of the quests i enjoy. the vault + flamethrower one, frinstance, except for the very last thing you had to do when pissed me off so i went to gamefaqs

wandering around the H&H factory has given me a new display name

Haha!

some of the voicework in the game is great, even if the voices cast are, shall we say, true-to-form. Kris Kristofferson and Felicia Day, for example.

Yep. Most of the v/o is a huge step up. It reminds me of how impressed I was by the presentation of the first Fallout... it was really cool that whenever you had a talking head convo, you knew you'd get some great voiceover from people like Clancy Brown, Ron Perlman, Keith David, Frank Welker, Richard Moll, etc. I took a break from the game this week, but I'm playing again today. I just got to Jacobstown, and lemme just say that I'm glad mutants have personality again instead of just being bellowing hulks.

found the chainsaw! it's ON, now!

http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/fallout-new-vegas-time-lapse-video?size=hd

Okay, now i have power armor and the biggest sniper rifle in the game. This should work.

Comprehensive 360 on the way apparently

Patch*

ok humble pie time, i'm actually loving this game now. reminded me why i got so into FO3 - and then got real sick of it once i levelled up to the top and found it all far too easy. (possibly my own fault as i started the point lookout dlc early in the game, found it incredibly hard then once i got back to the main game it all seemed too easy. not to mention how i overused the paralysing palm perk but anyway..)

getting on pretty well with the NCR now, wondering if to go to nelson and blow away the legion like they want me to, or if to hang fire on that and see if i can buddy up to the legion in case they have any decent missions. anyone here done this yet?

currently knocking the crap out of the legions

don't think it was meant to, but this totally sold me on getting new vegas:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2435-Fallout-New-Vegas

Except for the constant freezing it's great.

By the way, I reached level 30 before setting foot on the strip and the even more prevalent crashes have finally killed it for me. I've decided to save the actual story for a playthrough once they've patched the freezing thing.

NOTE: the "Pew Pew" gun is awesome. Especially if you have the meltdown perk. Just don't use it in close quarters like I did; crippled both my legs and knocked ED-E and Boone unconscious.

When you encounter the kid relating the historic mural at Nellis AFB in a bit completely nicked from "Beyond Thunderdome," I thought was suspiciously specific as to the date when the B29 was ditched in Lake Mead. So I went a-hunting, and found this:

http://indepthconsulting.com/B29/B29Lost.htm

The Story of Lake Mead's B-29

...All five aboard got out before the plane sank, escaping in two life rafts. About 12 minutes after ditching, the B-29 disappeared beneath the surface, not to be seen again for over 53 years...

http://indepthconsulting.com/Images/B29/Sonar201.jpg

I thought _he_ was, rather

He glitched out on me - started the story and stopped after about 30 seconds. Can't talk to him anymore.

man is that shit not patched yet?

Not on console. Hope to see some fixes by Christmas.

And hope it's better than EA's FIFA patch which didn't seem to do half of what they said and a tenth of what they originally promised.

http://www.ripten.com/2010/10/22/fallout-online-plans-to-launch-in-the-second-half-of-2012/

it's comin'

I just had a weird vision of it being the Van Buren engine, or at least a facsimile, with a ton of other people crawling the wastes.

And since it's MMO, you have to have a lot of character variation, so maybe some people are deathclaws.

pretty much stopped playing this for some reason, might be due to bad company 2 addiction rearing its head.

crashes have put me off admittedly, tempted to just wait and get it on 360 when price drops enough.

(that's under the basis that it won't crash as much on 360 !!)

I've been playing on PC and made the mistake of slogging around an empty Vault 11. Booooring. Reading about what happened in these places is neat, but without any cool loot, I am out of there.

Vault 11 is the best thing in the game! You crazy.

It is pretty cool, I was just having trouble finding my way to the basement and it was getting late at night.

I had all sorts of problems navigating the radioactive vault so I totally understand.

only crashed once tonight, but jeez there's a helluva lot of other bugs too. in the heat of huge battles, half the time it wouldn't call up my pip boy, very frustrating.

and the ai of your companions, fuck man it's lame.

somehow still enjoying it lol, for me tho it's just nowhere near as good as 3

I've had the opposite experience. Boone seems to have a decent AI, I've had only one crash, and the game is a lot more whimsical, IMO. I'm kind of concerned by the fact it seems like I've got all kinds of sweet gear already and I'm only at level 10, but I'lll chalk it up to my successful early raid on the Powder Gangers.

Had to ditch out on Vault 11 for now, though. The uh, friends, in the room below the overseer's office were a little too welcoming. I'll go back when I have more plasma gear and armor.

Also, is it just me or are caps pretty plentiful? Kind of guessing I'll need them when I get around to going near NV?

Boone + ED-e turn you into a death squad.

Caps are plentiful, until you start needing to spend them on expensive shit. Depends on your play style I guess.

i just don't like the way the companions constantly stand in the way in battle.

i got Rex instead. Also i got his head sorted out but I've since found the brain of a better dog. Can I get it transplanted a second time? oh, hang on, i think i remembered that the doc might be dead. will check. Will ED still be available if i go back to where he returned?

i've come across loads of companions, are all the others rub?

also, i'm carrying a lot of fiends 'heads'. not sure what for, but it's satisfying to see it crunch off their body.

Incinerator is awesome.

ED should still be available. His actual attacks aren't super useful but his perk makes enemies pop up on the compass from really far away. Very useful for a sniper build.

ah so i'm screwed to get Boone as a companion? i had him nail the wrong guy in front of the dino. now he won't talk to me. dammit!

Anyone know what the ghoul or nightskin companions are like? might ditch veronica for one of those.

also, fuck those flying Cadava or whatever they're called yellow and blue fucking fuckers.

pretty much stopped playing this

obv this was an absolute whopping fib

Do you folks generally complete quests as you get them, or do you collect a few quests and complete them at your leisure? I've noticed I'll tend to get a little bit into a quest and then realize that I'd rather go get more experience or wait until I have more toys to complete them. On the other hand, it seems like characters can't wait to tell you where new locations are in this game, so I have been doing a lot of exploring.

I've been wandering around Black Mountain. Is this place just the mother lode of caps and weapons, or what?

at first i was knocking the quests out like they were going out of fashion, now i've racked up a half dozen that i can't do for whatever reasons.

happy to wander about right now.

and yeah, just done black mountain. serious score.

my friend said this about boone: "when you're travelling with him, it's like HE'S the main character, you're the companion." he's one helluva tough guy to have by your side. travelling through the mountains past those wasp bastards would be impossible without him.

one of my favourite moments of the game was me and boone spending about an hour blowing away the mother and alpha male deathclaws and their clan in that mining pit. avoided it for so long as i'd heard deathclaws were pretty much unkillable this time round but boone + missiles + incinerator + my cunning technique of running up a mine chute squealing like a girl soon sorted them out.

im up to about level 24 now, only just entered the strip and i can sense the old FO3 syndrome of it getting too easy starting to kick in. been doing a bunch of no-risk 'wander about and chat to people' missions in camp mclarran and freeside and it's all getting a bit zzzz. the xbox loading times between locations is frustrating as hell too.

I might need to tweak my graphics settings because dudes are firing at me and I can't even see them! Similarly, Boone shoots at guys a loooong way away. He's a hell of a sniper, even with bad guns.

I can't believe there's a plasma rifle at the Powder Gangers hq

I dont want to get all captain internet geek pissy pants, but you'd think bethesda/oblivion would announce the release of the patch to fix the damn game before they announced new dlc for the xbox..

great session on this tonight, caved and spent the cash to get into the strip and all of a sudden i have a dozen extra quests. And then in turn even more quests. Completed lots of them, am burned out now. phew.

is it actually possible to use the flight sim machines at the helis base?

The VR flight machines are locked out in this version. Future DLC perhaps?

On my 2nd play-thru now, this time as a blue-haired anime chick melee-type. I'm using throwing knives this time round, and it's awesome.

The latest PC patch(mixed with the Compiled Community patch) has improved to where more quest triggers and whatnot are working better.

so do i buy this today for $40 y/n

y

Yes. By the end of the year they might even make it playable without wanting to punch a wall.

see now that is worrisome

is xbox version more/less fucked than the rest, or about the same?

I'm on PS3 and it's hit or miss. Sometimes I can go two hours of playtime (or even 12 hours when I first started) before a freeze, or I can go 4 minutes. It also sometimes freezes on the first loading screen. Totally buggy.

HOWEVER, when I can play I love the damn thing. I really liked Fallout 3, but this is so much closer to what I want from a Fallout game. It's not just the setting but the feel that seems true to the spirit of the first two games.

All that said, I've put it aside for now and won't play more until/unless the patch hits.

^^all that, same on pc too.

I'm on PC and I've mostly just had problems with crashes, and not so many of them after I fiddled with the settings. YMMV.

And I still think you should buy it for $40. Won't find it cheaper for quite some time and IF they do fix it in the next few weeks as they've hinted at you'll be all set.

I'm running it on PC and it runs okay enough to play. Well enough to purchase, at least.

Done and done

Now if only I had time to actually sit down and play it

Drink enough beer, lad, and you'll find all the time you need.

On a related note, I'm disappointed that throwing knives ricochet offa helmets. If I aim at you face, I'm expecting to see dropforged steel sticking into yo sinus cavity, not harmlessly twanging off yer motorcycle helmet into the sagebrush.

alternating between the pardcast-a-thon and fallout new vegas. loving this game but the desert just feels so empty...

loving this game but the desert just feels so empty...

this this this. And why i'm inclined to repeat how I prefer F3 because of this. The map just seems a bit bare. F3 map felt tighter, far more interesting.

but still, it's great even despite the crashing. I can get long sessions out of it though, most of the time if it crashes it will crash in the first five minutes. Thank god for auto save - if i'd had to restart at checkpoints my feelings on the game would be different

so...this is kind of dull so far. no crashes tho!

hoping that theyre still kinda tutorialing me here in the first few towns - digging that theyres already been more story side stat tests so far (repair/science/speech/etc) than in the whole last game.

i won on hardcore last night. overall it was good but flawed. the occasional bits of weirdness made me wish there was a lot more. for all the Obsidian vs Bethesda talk, it felt very much like a gigantic expansion to fallout 3.

I've gotten a little annoyed by the large fences around everything and different entrances/exits to some areas, but overall, it's less irritating on this than FO3. The capital city wasteland was irritating in that you *had* to have gone through the right subway stations -- if you tried walking across the terrain, you'd get blocked off eventually.

I think part of why the desert seems so sprawling is that they didn't include as many sections of the map that you can't get to.

Yeah, I like being able to trundle off in pretty much any direction I choose, barring mountain ranges and deathclaws in the way...

Ok characters are def better and the quests in general are more interesting than the first one, I think it's just kind of a sloooow starter.

Yeah, the initial trip to Vegas is a haul

so....is it just me or is this really easy? basically its just me, boone, and ed-e out in the desert pwning peeps without mercy - it seems like companions are doing all the heavy lifting tho because i am basically rolling w/ a speech/lockpick/science/98 pound weakling build.

graphics are also totally fucked a lot of the time, shitloads of floating trees and horrific awful pop up shit going on. holes in the canyon walls, patches of dirt that you have to jump out of, and so on. worse than fallout 3 for sure.

anybody buddy up w/ceasars legion? might prompt a second playthrough since i am currently vilified w/ everybody but the NCR.

oh and - is there a level cap this time around?

also black mountain radio with best friend tabitha and rhonda alone shows that the sense of humor in this game is about 1000% better than FO3. actual lols!

level cap is 30.

I think Boone and ED-E makes it a bit too easy, combat wise. Try some of the other companions - they're all pretty different, and change how you play.

I didn't buddy up w/caesar but might give it a go once the game is patched. If you're feeling it's too easy, try swimming over to Caesar's side of the river. Rumor is it's tough over there (I haven't tried).

I haven't completed the game so I don't know if it's related to a later quest, but has anyone killed everyone in Caesar's camp for the hell of it?

compared to f3, it's a heckuva lot easier. love both games though.

boone is ez mode for sure. i brought him in only when i got annoyed with a fight. I started again as a tough guy out to beat the hell out of everyone i.e. killing the doc who first revives you. frackin cylon.

Wow when this crashes on xbox it crashes hardcore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szvFN6P9slg&feature=player_embedded

has anyone killed everyone in Caesar's camp for the hell of it?

I did. If you're going to do that, I recommend going in while you're still neutral with the Legion and assassinating Caesar first. I did it the opposite way and had a really tough time trying to kill Caesar last. You get set upon immediately by a half a dozen legionnaires at close quarters when you enter his tent while hostile, and it's a total pain in the ass.

ok so i swapped out boone for veronica (the secret BOS lady) and loaded her up with power armor and the incinerator and she pretty much pwns just as hard as he did. this is tempting fate i know but ive only had 2 full crashes so far and ive put in a lot of time. still havent been to the strip because im worried about kinda triggering the endgame but theres still just shit tons of world out there to bash through.

deathclaws are a motherfucker in this game, im pretty much just dodging that valley w/shit tons of them for now - actually not sure ill ever level up enough to really take them on considering the character build i have.

oh yeah and also the peeps that banged on this for not having enough wow moments compared to FO3 are just straight up stupid, they might be smaller scale but shit like the planetarium in the reppcon building or basically the entire ghoul launch quest are great great moments. i am officially off the fence now and willing to say that this is the better game of the two, esp the writing. plus the multi faction thing gives me way more reason to play through it again than the old good/evil from game one.

also dont waste a perk on "wild wasteland" imo - i think ive gotten it to trigger uh 3 times so far? each of which was fairly boring.

oh yeah and also the peeps that banged on this for not having enough wow moments compared to FO3 are just straight up stupid, they might be smaller scale but shit like the planetarium in the reppcon building or basically the entire ghoul launch quest are great great moments. i am officially off the fence now and willing to say that this is the better game of the two, esp the writing. plus the multi faction thing gives me way more reason to play through it again than the old good/evil from game one.

― O_o-O_0-o_O (jjjusten), Thursday, December 9, 2010 1:17 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark

:D

yeah, deathclaws are brutal. i still haven't beaten the game and i have 100+ hours logged, the amount of side content is nuts.

what happens during the wild wasteland perk?

i strongly recommend getting a shit ton of missiles and stealthboys, get boone along for the ride and go to that valley and take out all the deathclaws. took a big chunk of the day to demolish but damn if it wasn't the most enjoyable part of the entire game.

good plan to go through the wasteland quests before entering the strip, but once you do prepare yourself for a boring challenge-free slog with very few decent fights or puzzles (im assuming you'll have top notch locksmith/hacking skills by then), and a fuckload of loading screens. still, great game and i enjoyed the ending a lot. probably better than fo3 yeah, but still flawed. the creators badly need to to find a way to keep it challenging from level 18 or so onwards. age-old problem that applies to majority of games, i know i know

should put this in the lols thread but..

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-12-10-massive-fallout-nv-patch-out-now

check out the quest list. I think thats all of them.

i'll likely go buy this tonight with that fix.

Got to play about 90 minutes post-patch before it hard froze on a loading screen. Also had lots of microfreezes that in the past would have been lock ups. So it's better, but I had a quest not appear on my list until after I got another one and a couple of wild screen tears as dead stuff fell through the geometry and were stretched in multiple directions into vector oblivion.

So it is better, but still a bit fucked.

what did you expect, a game that actually works properly?

Another freezish - this time the never-ending load screen from hell. After 5 minutes I just killed the thing.

Starting over in the hopes maybe there was something wack about my previous saves.

If anyone hasn't got this yet, Amazon are selling it for £22 in the UK at the moment.

Playing this game like a fiend again. Made an evil character to do new missions yet I found myself last night doing the same old goody two shoes missions! Maybe I just cant stop myself from murdering all the fiends in vault 3.

haha yeah i just chatted my way into vault 3 and negotiated the "peaceful" option, but then was so fucking irked by the motor runner dude that i head shot him anyway.

ok so the only really frustrating glitch i keep experiencing is that every so often when ed-e is with me NCR dudes will just flip out for no reason and start whaling on him which has led to like 5 irritating restarts i didnt really feel like dealing with.

well that and getting stuck in the rubble pile on the tarmack behind camp whatever and having to fast travel to get out of it, thus creating a situation where i would have to backtrack through the whole concourse at which point i basically said fuck it.

I played 2.5 hours two nights ago before I realized I took on an aspect of a legion mission that made me public enemy #1 with NCR that resulted in me getting attacked everywhere I went. lol?

ED-E started attacking the Boomers' doctor for no particular reason one day! I have never had the NCR become hostile to him, but there are definitely a few weird glitches occasionally.

Still working on my first playthrough. I want to do all the NCR missions I can before continuing with Yes Man, since the game warned me that the NCR will catch on that I am not in their court. I think I'm down toward the end, so I'll probably bum around the wasteland a while before making any more NCR/Vegas moves.

I feel kind of proud that I killed all the Omerta bosses, even the dude I was working with. Due to an entertaining glitch, you can just start shooting away at him after you jointly kill the other two, and he doesn't even really fire back.

ps3 version on the way from amazon

btw even 98 pound weakling can melee pwn with the chainsaw u get for killing motoguzzi fiend dude. its way more fun than it should be tbh

Is there any loot in that execution chamber room of the one vault? You know, the one where you can watch a video about how noble your sacrifice is and then the robots try to laser you to death.

I'd also like to say how awesome it is I made $14k off of SNOW GLOBES

the fact that i have no idea what either of the last 2 posts are about makes me so happy about how lolhueg this game is.

i was going to ask if anyone ever found any reason to go into the underwater room in vault 3. seems weird to give me just that one opportunity to drown

I haven't gone back there yet, but SPOILER HINT:

There is a quest if you keep going along with the Boomers where eventually you get a gadget that lets you breathe underwater.

the obsidian guys went crazy with submerged vault corridors.

I have like 24k in moneys right now but jack shit to spend it on since I dont use guns or have companions.

So my winter break is coming up. Is it safe to play this thing yet or is it still buggy as hell?

I have had few issues, playing on PC. ymmv.

my 360 copy has only had a couple of glitches, so id say go for it. unless the occassional slight lag when wandering the wasteland will make you CONTROLLER SMASH ANGRYYWYY like some reviewers seem to have been.

this is gonna be my winter break ps3 THING unless DC Universe turns out to be fucking amazing

I have the 360 version and I have had the game crash on me once. I have been noticing some obnoxious shit with companions recently tho.. Like the damn robot dog disappearing for a couple hours then just mysteriously showing up when I try to get into the strip. Also cant seem to trigger Veronica training me on the new hand to hand move when I give her a pretty dress even tho I did it earlier on a random playthrough I had to quit because I broke the game..

didnt realize how retarded this sounds when I typed it

Also cant seem to trigger Veronica training me on the new hand to hand move when I give her a pretty dress

there is one spot in a train tunnel right in front of a door where you fall through the world. I tried to jump it like 10 times.

I'm kind of pissed off that companions seem to stay in the lobby of the Lucky 38 whenever you go in and leave. Guys, I own this place now! You can follow me anywhere.

Yes Man is so great.

yes man owns, and i was delighted when i realized he was voiced by dave foley

I know, right? The entire scene with him explaining the Mark 2 weapons is beautiful.

ok so to save other people the same problem, magazine bonuses do not stack, which i learned by reading the repair one 3 times to boost up to fix that stupid food processor in camp mckillan or whatever. harummph.

also anyone sprung for the dead mans hand DLC yet? still way to early in the game for it atm but curious to say the least.

don't try any weapon mods on unique weapons btw. crash city.

I kind of burnt out playing my tough guy who kills everyone. Its like using a cheat code where its fun for about 2 minutes then the game is ruined.

still loving this game but:

A) no one in the entire world will ever get excited about the stupid survivalist thing
B) some of the fixit quests are a little badly designed ie "here is a broken food processor, and here is the list of 74 pices of junk you need to fix it. no, we will not keep track of this for you, so i hope you have a pen and paper handy"
C) some of the quests are pretty counter-intuitive, ive had to gamefaq a couple which always sucks.

that being said roaming the tight vault passages fuckin peeps up with a chainsaw is like the best shit ever

just got just cause 2 and am gonna put this on hold while i play that instead.
Good idea? Y or N

hahah check yer email for my opinions on that

the one thing i will say is that the controls are so second nature at this point in FOIII/NV that I can kinda put it down and pick it right back up without any relearning curve, so it lends itself to split sessions thx to that (unlike dead space which i finally just restarted because all my instinct memory on that was shot after letting it lay for like a month.)

Gah loadtimes on my 360 are getting intolerable - little worried I am headed for another corrupted save file.

Can't you just save your data on a usb drive or something?

I got tired of wandering around and doing clean-up quests so I beat this thing a couple weeks back. It was pretty decent!

i was watching some youtube guy and he says that the 360 version doesn't free up memory/or storage for this game. so the more you play it the longer the load times are. you have to delete a load of shit to get it working again apparently.

Completed this on Sunday. Thoroughly enjoyable, especially the stupid survivalist thing.

Hardcore + Normal not quite hard enough, over too quickly for someone used to Elder Scrolls games, some infuriating quest bugs that had me running to the wiki which is NAGL. In general though, much less buggy than I expected and only CTD'd about every 10 hours of gameplay, which is totally liveable IMHO.

Looking forward to a 2nd run through with mods up to the hilt, then getting into the GECK myself. Lots of ideas I'm excited about developing, once work backs off a little.

xpost: certainly when I've played it for 3+hours straight it's really noticeable that the load times are getting ridic, but I just make a new save, turn off and back on, and the load times are back to their usual, "spritely" 10-20 seconds - had the misfortune of seeing how quickly everything loads on my brothers PC before sitting through xbox load times :(

ha:

http://img573.imageshack.us/img573/5396/9780373303014.jpg

started playing this after submitting C&P vote, now 35 hours in. just took out the Mother Deathclaw in the cave, holy shit was that tough. Veronica is my best buddy. think this has crashed more than FO3 though :/

am totally stuck in the brotherhood. where is the fricking comms terminal it keeps asking me to hook up veronica with? i've looked everywhere.

deathclaws pretty much kill me instantly. what's the trick?

Archimedis II imo

well i'm at lvl 30 & they are still tough. either send in Veronica to distract & pound them with missiles or use terrain & pick them off with sniper rifle. Think that comms is in a shack near Gibsons Scrapyard?

i started playing this again after taking a couple months off - game's so huge, still havent finished

aaarggh so its not actually in the brotherhood base like it led me to believe? ffffffs

I decided last week that I'd quickly run through the main storyline so that I at least could have finished the game once. That was 20 hours ago of gameplay and I've only just gotten to Hoover Dam.

i've got to get around to the damn hoovering too

(here all week etc)

i told myself that i'd finish f3 before i started this one, never happened. so i at least need to finish f3 before i finish NV.

and then i need to finish red dead, and shift, and mass effect2, and lbg2, and buy gran turismo and ...

i did the speed-ahead-to-the-ending thing w/FO3, but mostly just cuz i was sick of the game

i've took my time with f3 because i was so impressed by it, and trying to see as much as i can that the game can offer. interuptions from other games helping this task.

The slow progress with NV is just plain lack of interest.

For the first time in a game, I'm tempted to buy the strategy guide book (both games) for completion sakes.

when i was a teenager i did that for JRPGs, which always seem designed with the strategy guide in mind

But... there's a wiki for that!

i love this game despite it still crashing at least every 2 hours for me. btw guaranteed funtimes = rolling through the wasteland w/rex and lily.

this game is so ridiculously full of content, i must be 60-70 hours in and ive got like 20 unfinished quests and several vaults to get through and im still finding weird caves and other random shit.

still pissed that i was dumb enough to do the weird wasteland perk which has shown up now a whopping 4 times i think.

has anyone on this thread collected the requisite number of star bottle caps to do that quest?

yeah i did

I completed it. Had way more star caps than I needed by the time I got around to it.

I really recommend it - the "reward" is great.

im right on the brink w/the star caps - also equipping lily with the unique supersledge called "oh boy!' or whatever makes her a boone level death machine. its ridiculous.

how do i not trigger the endgame btw (if that can be expressed w/o spoilers) im assuming it is house/yes man related? or do i have to stay away from hoover dam in general?

House/Yes Man is one way of getting there. You're going to have to mess with him, but there's still a ways left at the Dam.

Ok so after hitting my limit with freezes and lockups I did the stupid both bumper plus x boot trick and it seems to actually work

i've kind of just skimmed this thread cuz i want to avoid spoilers, but how do you guys think this ranks against Fallout 3?

My vote is better

Bought this used for $30.

Played it three days in a row after work and finally put it away tonight, despite not being close to done, because I have no idea how you can play Bethesda games in moderation i.e. without losing your job and mind.

I got so pulled into the game I'd come home at 7Pm and wouldn't turn it off until 2AM or so. I just cant do videogames like this any more*

*still getting L.A. Noire tho

I decided last week that I'd quickly run through the main storyline so that I at least could have finished the game once. That was 20 hours ago of gameplay and I've only just gotten to Hoover Dam.

I put in 13 hours prob and only was getting to the Strip. I thought you could plow through the main story, kinda like in Fallout 3, but it's overwhelming.

I vote better than FO3. Funnier. More fallout-y. Iron sights. Better dialogue.

Oh, it's terrific, I just can't afford to give this the time right now.

Definitely better than Fallout 3 on content. Way buggier though.

i liked the environment of FNV better than FO3, it was better looking and just more varied and interesting. but definitely more care and detail went into populating that environment in FO3. if you wanted to just roam, FO3 was way more rewarding. the random scripted encounters were a fun element that they abandoned too. i did like pretty much every change they made to gameplay and character development in FNV. on balance tho, having been through both of them pretty thoroughly, i enjoyed FO3 more. i knew after my first playthrough that i would want to put it on again to find some cool nuggets i missed, but there's no similar compulsion with FNV. and yeah, towards the end FNV nearly drove me up the fucking wall with crashes.

yeh i'd agree with that, i like just wandering about & discovering new places, and things seem better scripted/more interesting in FO3 - in NV it just seems like i'm discovering caves, blasting everything in the cave & getting some sort of weapon near the back of the cave as a reward.

I vote better than FO3. Funnier. More fallout-y. Iron sights. Better dialogue.

― Crazed Mister Handy (kingfish), Saturday, February 12, 2011 2:17 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah, this

though yeah the exploration in FO3 is a lot better - feels more like a rewarding game mechanic than in FNV. I just think NV is a better RPG.

deathclaws pretty much kill me instantly. what's the trick?

― F-Unit (Ste), Wednesday, February 9, 2011 6:01 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark

if anyone's still having trouble, I recommend the Pew Pew with Max Charge ammo (important). give Boone an anti-materiel rifle with AP ammo. and keep some C-4 on hand for really tough encounters - I used some on the Legendary Deathclaw. C-4's a very limited resource because of how powerful it is, but you can use it to easily game many encounters.

ok just bought this, haven't played it at all yet, really nervous about the instability (xbox here)

so, qns: does loading it to HD have any noticeable effect?

and, what the hell is the " stupid both bumper plus x boot trick"?? sounds like an urban myth!

just beat the game. one thing NV definitely has over F3 is that, like F2 + F1 (and unlike F3), the ending made me all weepy.

i picked the No Gods, No Masters ending. not sure if i have the patience to replay it for one of the the other endings (tho i am curious about the Legion questline)

http://i.imgur.com/f1nmX.jpg

Best glitch ever?

woah

http://i52.tinypic.com/mijg1y.jpg

haha, but i see a jet plane

then u should join the boomers

I have to admit, in every Fallout game, there's at least one town where I decide the residents are creeps and I kill them all. Caesar's Legion was such an easy choice in this one.

i'm really loving this so far! i'm trying not to go in a hurry. it seems like the landscape is a little more linear... it's harder to wander, maybe? i mean, of course you can wander, but there are a lot of places that are designed to be off-limits to low-level people (the deathclaw area, the irradiated ghoul town, etc)

i really like all the crafting, even if it's fiddly and frustrating at first. the ammo is a little more 'realistic' than FO3. i kind of hope you eventually get an owned house with the work benches and a campfire but i kind of doubt that'll happen

seems like the locations, factions and story branches are better thought out too. i like that there are a lot of different groups and subgroups, i love shit like that. the legion is such a cool idea too, what a great enemy

Did you guys wander across the river to the east? Don't do so until you're higher level, then go and have fun. There's a large group of deathclaws around a dead guy with power armor.

It's not even that the deathclaw area is off-limits to low-level ppl so much as they want to direct you through a particular path to get to New Vegas (thru Novak, presumably so you can follow the storyline properly and get exposed to the Legion nice and early) and if you could just cut north you'd avoid all of that. It's not like there's anything super interesting in the deathclaw area imho.

I think you're thinking of the western deathclaw area near the mines?

I'm thinking about that area that runs north of Goodsprings Cemetery, where you can cut through that ghost town full of bandits and basically major short-cut into NV.

sloan is what i'm talking about

Yup, there is a completely different deathclaw area on the east side of the river, north of the main Legion camp and south of the end-game camp.

It's unmarked on the map, though.

there are also a lot more places where the landscape is unclimbable/impassable. roads and breaks in the mountains are a lot more impt to your progress. i think this is good!

I went nuts a few times trying to find the "correct" paths to places, though.

jacobstown a particular pain in the ass to get to

I think it was the Khans' camp for me.

Wandering thru an actual forest was a nice change of pace in this game, says me who lives in a city surrounded by mountains and carved out of tree stumps.

it makes me wonder what you could do with a game set in more of a snowy, forested area, like Michigan or parts of Eastern Washington

this Caravan game is iiinteresting but not really well thought out imo. took a look at a few strategies online, and it's really easy to win with few simple moves.

sort of cool/sort of odd that all your different kinds of "money" are biddable in the game at full value even if your barter is low. i think the first time i had some NCR money in my inventory that's where i got it, and i didn't know that's where it came from!

speaking of which, different kinds of money! such a cool idea. i'm really impressed by this game so far in just about every way. kind of buggy though innit.

definitely felt more buggy then FO3.

oh it is

played caravan a few times and won often, but i didnt really bother much because once again, i never ever need to buy anything so i have like 8000 caps and nothing to do with them at this point

actually wait i said that oddly, i won caravan every time i played it so it wasnt really any fun

i played caravan enough to get the 'played 5 games' achievement and then forgot about it. i watched a tutorial and still didnt understand that shit.

i have 80,000 caps and im 150 hours into this and im still not close to finished ._.

Wow. I'm just at 35 hours, and contemplating taking it to the ending now, but mostly just because I've got so many games I still need to play, and I feel like I've got my £20 from New Vegas.

Just downloaded Dead Money. Now, to start over with mods, or just play the DLC?

just another post to say i am totally into this!!! it's super engrossing, and way more interesting in the details than FO3. i'm just really impressed. i mean, yeah, the scripting and the engine are stretched a little bit past the breaking point but i think it's worth it.

the moral ambiguity is much more at the heart of things: the NCR are clearly 'better' than the Legion but, you know, not too much. and there are all the other groups that aren't really a party to that at all, or have their own motivations that might line up or not. so well done. the stories and recent history are incorporated really well too i think, with certain people here and there telling their version of the story. FO3 looks really unimaginative in retrospect. everything is more political instead of just about 'saving the world' or whatever, without too much cheap cynicism.

i really like that there are pockets of creatures that aren't level-scaled. going somewhere the first time is still exciting. i'm at level 17 or something and i still creep around deathclaws. i haven't been down into a vault and i haven't even been into vegas proper yet! so much to do...

also i'm really impressed with how many cross-currents and common actors there are in all the quests. FO3 was basically, go here, do the main thing, do the side stuff, that's it. this is more web-like, and people who give you a quest are often involved in a different one, maybe as an antagonist. several 'hot spots' have a bunch of interlocking things to do. it just makes it feel like a real and conflicted society and not just, hey, have a quest

i'm trying to remember what people didn't like about it? there were some reviewers that compared it unfavorably to 3, seems nuts to me right now

I didn't notice Dead Money finally came out for PC. Is it any good?

whats good: atmosphere/characters. the environment is cramped and unforgiving which fits the story well (on hardcore at least).
bad: game crashed after the opening cut scene, welcome back to fallout! not remotely an open environment. only one type of "monster" so far. your npc companions won't stfu.

i'm trying to remember what people didn't like about it? there were some reviewers that compared it unfavorably to 3, seems nuts to me right now

― goole, Thursday, March 3, 2011 3:50 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

i think those must've been people whose first exposure to the series was FO3 - personally I always have a tough time with sequels to games that I love, where it's hard to judge them on their own terms because they do things differently from a game where i was like 'this just got everything right' - Fallout 3 is a bad RPG and Fallout NV is a good RPG (i feel like the former is indisputable even if you love FO3), but I tend to wonder if the people who hated NV hated it because a good RPG isn't what they *wanted* from a new Fallout game.

anyway i agree w/everything you've said goole - i wanna add that I think Arcade's an amazing character & the most interesting companion of the Fallout series. i love this cut exchange that was gonna be in the game after meeting Caesar:

Arcade: "What a load of Brahmin shit! Can you believe that guy?"

Player (Option 1; requires INT 8): "I don't think either of us can fully understand what he and the tribes have gone through."
Arcade: "A fair point, but from the perspective of someone west of the Colorado, the man is clearly out of his mind. Maybe he didn't intend for things to wind up this way, but that doesn't mean he needs to perpetuate this bizarre anachronistic myth. And it doesn't mean that we should sit by and nod our heads at every absurd faux-Roman casus belli he can dream up. He's a tyrant. The bad kind. And there's no way we're letting him take Hoover Dam."

Player (Option 2): "Who, Caesar?"
Arcade: "Of course, Caesar! You can hardly even hold his men responsible, given how they're practically raised to worship him as a living deity. What's the point of surviving the war? Why did the founders of the Followers crawl their way out of vaults to bring knowledge back to the wasteland? So we could act like the last two thousand years didn't happen? Play dress up so we can fight ancient wars all over again? No way is he getting away with this. I'm not letting it happen. You're not letting it happen."

Player (Option 3): "He seemed pretty smart to me."
Arcade: "Being "smart" doesn't matter if you're insane. Everything makes sense to Caesar because he's twisted everything to his world view. He's Caesar reincarnated, the NCR is the corrupt Roman senate. I wouldn't be surprised if he thought the Colorado River were the new Rubicon. He abdicates responsibility to a myth of historical inevitability. But he's not Caesar. This isn't Rome. And he isn't going to get away with this."

Player (Option 4): "He's a madman. What did you expect?"
Arcade: "Well, yeah! Right. What did I expect? The man's a megalomaniac. He acts like this is some pre-ordained cycle we're returning to. Of all the people who could learn from our past mistakes, he goes and throws all of our knowledge off of a cliff. Instead of trying to learn from the past, he re-creates it, runs back over the same old barren ground."

and JE Sawyer had some interesting things to say about his character arc (arcade spoilers ahead):

Arcade's conflict is about his identity. He is torn between a sense of loyalty and tradition to his father and adoptive family and a desire to be independent, self-made. He feels caught between generations and cultures and isn't sure who he should be or how, if at all, to use the "legacy" (material and otherwise) left to him by his father.

Arcade's endings are intended to reflect that no one is damaged more by reality than the idealist. He does his best to be practical and rational, but there is a strong idealist streak in him/the Followers in general. In some of Arcade's "best" endings (meaning, the circumstances he thought he wanted), he is still somewhat disappointed by how things turned out. In his "worst" endings, he can wind up bitterly disillusioned, brutally murdered, crucified, casually executed and discarded in a ditch, or even defiantly suicidal.

Arguably the worst ending is the one in which Arcade is given to Caesar as an enslaved doctor. The existence is so unbearable to him that he does what the historical Cato the Younger did at Utica: rather than give Caesar satisfaction, he disembowels himself. Like Cato, Arcade cannot live in a world where everything he tried to resist has come to pass.

I should just buy a ps3 huh

I've played a few hours of this and loved it, sometimes I miss playing video games

If I buy a system which one should I get

PC

http://i28.tinypic.com/symgrc.jpg

the last time I pc gamed was when I played bf1942

still really loving this game dudes!!

but damn if some of the quests aren't buggy as hell. like, annoying, progress-stopping fucked. i looked up the veronica quest (who am i kidding, i'm looking up every damn thing) and wow, it's really bad. almost none of what is supposed to happen happened for me!

seems extra unfair that the companion quests seem the most screwy since those are often the most rewarding as far as dialogue and acting. unless you're on pc and can console command your way into it

the only memorably bugged out quest for me was the monorail one. i've been giving this a break again... i'm never gonna finish this game

i'm considering d/ling sierra madre just to bump the level limit!

everytime i see this thread pop up it makes me feel guilty for stopping playing this game.

lol danny trejo!

ok i'm going to riff on something super nerdy and pointless, but sometimes the character design system in this game really bugs me (it does in most games). you ought to be more free to pick what you want, basically.

you can't increase your SPECIAL stats after character creation, but there is a perk you can get that does; you get perks every other level, so we can say 1 pt of SPECIAL is worth 2 'levelings' worth of perk improvements

you get 10-15 skill pts every level-up, depending on your INT, there is also a Tag! perk that gets you 15 into 1 skill. so there's a rough skill-to-perk equivalence too.

so, designers, why aren't these values transferable? why don't they just let you buy what you want out of a shared pool of points? like, you get 20 or 30 points every level-up, if you want to buy a pt of SPECIAL worth 30, or a perk worth 10 or 20, or put all of it into skills, why not?

really don't get why games don't do this. free the player imo!!

Isn't there a maximum number of times you can buy that perk, though? So you can't just keep getting it and max our your character.

nah you can get Intensive Training as many times as you want. in FO2 you could only do it once per SPECIAL stat.

i dont really understand goole's complaint or what part of it he feels restricted by

dead money dlc dropped to 400 xbox fake dollars today only.

drudgesiren.gif

oh cool

i shd answer tam tam at some pt maybe

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Fallout:_New_Vegas_voice_actors

lol holy crap i didn't recognize any of these people. i mean, the famous people. except for danny trejo. and kris kristofferson.

makes you wonder why they even paid them to do it if you cant even tell..

well, it's all pretty high quality even if i couldn't! the yes man character was pretty entertaining w/o me figuring out it's dave foley

i really enjoyed william sadler as victor

I actually like the NCR. One of the themes in the game is that these fucked-up little communities are somehow viable in their own way and submitting them to bureaucratic/managerial structures AGAIN negates the opportunity for exploring different modes of organizing groups of people that we haven't tried before...

But I rarely see anything much worth preserving. Sometimes this is more of a design/programming/AI thing, though. I felt like blowing away everyone in Primm... what a shitty way to start a game. You walk into an abandoned casino and there's a bunch of people just staring blankly or walking into walls. "Please mister, protect our town." What town? You idiots, your town is an abandoned casino. Go find something to do. Sigh, Fallout.

I had put this down for two months but came back to it today and just had a horribly confusing session (is this a bug? is this related to my "reputation"?) for the Ultra Luxe casino mission or whatever. Deeply, deeply broken. But I can see what they were trying to do and god damn if the idea wasn't cool... e.g. doing an episode that's like an Agatha Christie novel, similar to that part in the last game where you go into that creepy VR simulation of a 1950s American town. As spectacular as Red Dead was overall there were no missions where they even ATTEMPTED something like that.

I love ghouls. Their voices are so funny. There's a homeless ghoul in Freeside or whatever and you pay him a bottle cap and he gives you a clue. Today I just sat there feeding him money just to listen to his funny voice. I love it when there's a whole town of them.

I wonder if this honest hearts dlc is going to be similar to the fallout 3 update that raised the level cap and continued the game past the finale.. Im more inclined to buy stuff like this rather than standalone stuff like dead money..

i have heard that none of the dlc's will extend the story past the end

Mods do! Which is why I will only ever play Bethsoft games on the PC.

?? what is there to do after the main storyline? just run around and shoot shit, or are the miscellaneous quests still open or something.

At the moment just pick up any random quests you haven't done, and of course play through any new stuff you've dl'ed. So far there aren't many decent size new player-made quests but I'm keeping my eye out - I'll post here when I find one. It's taking modders a lot longer to create new quests than in the old days because everyone's pitching for high quality voice acting now.

I have a question: I can only have one human companion at a time, but does that mean I can, say, leave Boone in my hotel room, go pick up somebody else, adventure around with them for a bit and then drop them off and trade back for Boone?

yes.

dead money: fuckin hard!

Sweet! I started another playthrough but I'm going really slow & hardly any time to play. It's tempting to open up my 1st char & just hit Dead Money.

They're recommending you be at least level 17 before you hit that shit.

Watched a video review and it looks cool and unique.

I'm so into this again. What a big generous game. So much to do it's overwhelming. Today I finally just broke down and threw all my casings and ammunition components on the ground. I realized I'd never figure out how it worked to make ammunition so I decided to cut my losses on this whole area of the game. Making food? Don't really care either. But this is a seriously, seriously big game. Fallout 3 is not this big at all at all.

Official patch out for this now.

what's it do? i hear tell of weapon tweaks...

Oops I jumped the gun a bit there. It seems it's not out yet, but on the way next couple of weeks. According to Midlife Gamer, it targets optimisations and stability improvements, is currently in certification all platforms, fixed a lot of the crashes and lockups, and brings weapon balance tweaks and other requested fixes.

they nerfed the Brush Gun with that big patch! those FUCKERS!

yeah and the sniper rifle has been amped up? i think? there's a limb damage and crit chance bonus which i don't think was there before. the unique sniper rifle is now in fact better than the generic (it wasn't, lol).

pretty funny that this has been out for like 18mos and they're doing weapon tweaks, good god

see if you were playing on ps3 you wouldn't have this problem

no, you would have notably different problems instead

BOOM! Right there!

eh i'm kinda a guns realist, i think it'd be cool if the varmint rifle and NCR service rifle did about the same (p high) damage, cos, like, they would.

and the 'assault carbine' shooting 5mm? what is that, even? that's the only thing that reminded me of F3, which had some ridiculous ammo/gun/damage combinations. a .32 round in a hunting rifle? so dumb.

it's not like there isn't a valid gameplay reason for it though - too many different types of ammo can be overwhelming, so every type of ammo has to be usable by multiple weapons. i think they hit the sweet spot between high attn to detail and game balance, tho clearly the most anal types will never be pleased (stares @ u)

I really don't want too much gun realism in my video games, and I don't understand the desire for it at all.

haha i know WHY the variances are the way they are! there have to be low-level and high-level weapons.

games ought to have enough realism in there to allow you to feel involved; but at a certain point if you're getting bent out of shape about variations from ahem irl ballistics, yeah, it's your fault *sulks*

I really don't want too much gun realism in my video games, and I don't understand the desire for it at all.

― Mordy, Friday, May 13, 2011 12:44 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

well im sympathetic to goole's POV too - it just kinda depends on the game. one thing is that real guns are just generally more interesting than fake ones (as fallout 3 demonstrated with its clunky 'original' crapfests). attention to detail sucks u into the gameworld. new vegas puts a lot of thought into the variety of cowboy weapons & ammo which i think is really cool.

yeah, for sure. i just don't want to get to the point where it's like, "this chamber doesn't seem authentic," "the caliber doesn't seem real enough," "the head explosion graphics aren't quite realistic yet," like you start wandering down this path and pretty soon you're asking for more accurate killing simulators. i don't mind if it's a little cartoony (or in Fallout's case, a balance).

pretty soon you're asking for more accurate killing simulators.

shit yeah i am~

hey

i beat this

lol

i went with the NCR ending (surprisingly posi)

without spoiling anything, Legate Lanius is fukken badass

im gonna go back to an older save and play out the Yes Man and House endings, then contemplate another playthrough as a Legion bro

nice dude.

just moved my pc into my lounge, which means i'll be on it more. Have been contemplating restarting from scratch on this mainly because i effed up the sniper companion. And also because i cannot remember anything that i've done already anyway.

so, honest hearts then?

i'll probably get it in a couple days

xpost not remembering what I've done already is a big issue. I'm now a month or more from my last New Vegas sessiom and what keeps me from playing this a lot is how confused I am when I pick it up again.

so, honest hearts. i haven't played this game in a long while but i did get it.

it's ok! just as an environment, it's kind of a nice change, a mountainous state park with rivers instead of desert. as a series of challenges it felt a little simpler and more brief than Dead Money.

but as a story, it was way cooler, it fills in a lot of backstory about the legion and caesar's young life as a mormon and the whole bit. plus there's a lot of explicit christianity involved which is a significant games taboo broken, iirc. the "burned man" was well voice-acted.

so that's that, cool if you're into the story, not any great shakes as an add-on in itself.

So much better than Dead Money, imo.

yeah, that one was just ok too. i guess i appreciated that it was hard, but there wasn't much to grab me other than that. your weapons are weak, the enemies are tough, the air hurts you, you can't buy anything. the story wasn't that compelling, either the pre-war casino thing or the elijah dude.

What I'm too old-fashioned to understand is how DLC fits into a gaming experience. Are they designed so that you play through the main story and then play the DLC? If I'm just plodding along through the game, what happens if I install one of these? Or, do the extra weapons and such get somehow integrated into the main game, and then you just play the actual DLC campaign whenever? Is it possible to be too powerful by the time you get to a DLC and end up, like, being too strong for it?

DLC for games like this confuse me too and I think that's why despite loving F:NV, or F3, or even RDR, I never downloaded any of the DLC for them.

Seems to integrate to some degree at least. I had some code for DLC for Red Dead Redemption for golden guns which operated as soon as I'd downloaded & installed it.

I just realized my Fallout characters have been really stupid in the last two games because I... haven't understood how to make them. I stumbled on a thread somewhere and all these gamer dudes are talking about "character builds" and I sort of understood that you have to pick a theme and stick to it.

Before I had just been putting skill points into things here and there. A little Melee would be nice, oh better put some in Medicine because I'm falling behind on that. Also I think my SPECIAL point allocation has been similarly clueless.

So my character now is a kind of grey-haired old guy, so I took some out of perception and endurance to put in intelligence (he's wise) and took Four Eyes and Small Frame. He's old! He needs glasses!

Tagged skills are Guns, Speech, Lockpicking. Three of the best. For some reason I'm also really good at Repair, but I don't think that was intentional.

Started play. I'm roaming around with some very basic weapons: the 9mm you start with (but perfectly repaired) and a single-shotgun (which I hated the last time I played this game... the iPod Shuffle of weaponry, I thought). This is great though, I ran into one of my first Jackal gangs and took their leader's head off on my first shot. Everyone else tried to take off. I subsequently dealt hell to those losers who hang out in Bison Steve. Things are looking up.

I actually want to avoid the NCR because there's so many boring missions and that stupid airport terminal base that's so cavernously boring to walk around in. I think I'm just going to skip that part.

haha

restarted this after buying the extra two DLCs on Steam. Need to remember which mods I had installed on my old copy. Need more radio stations. I wonder if anybody has posted any streaming Fallout-y online music stations.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Old_World_Blues

comes out tomorrow it seems

Playing as a Philo Beddo-style black chick boxer w/ knucks right now. The VATS-assisted punching anims are fun.

Forks, did you ever pick this up?

i did and i never got into it? started a new job right about when i got it and couldn't find the time to devote. PLUS i bought it on ps3 stupidly when i played fallout on 360 so the controls never quite felt right. Someday...

a ha. I'd recommend hitting it up during the next Steam sale for PC. Modding the shit out of this improves it immensely.

I'm trying to find a proper dog mod. At least one guy has created a mod where you can add corgis to the game.

I feel the need to run any song on a custom playlist thru a normalizer and processor that strips some of the fidelity out. I like the tunes on where when it sounds like they're playing old 78s thru radios lost in time. Weird ghostly stuff that somehow survived and came from a different time, preferably kinda obscure so that I can't connect my own memories of the song with its use in-game.

Like, hearing Tom Petty on here wouldn't work. This is an escapist universe that Diverged from our own sometime around the Korean War. I want the reflected after-echoes of post-war/midcentury American transmissions.

I wonder if a UK/Euro Fallout would work. Would there be more Quartermass jokes?

Have you played S.T.A.L.K.E.R.?

Yup. Been a while, tho.

This is a good selection, and all the tunes are available in mono .oggs, too:

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35984

Haha the fact that I even know what a mono ogg is means I'm statistically much more likely to play Fallout games.

Bought an upgraded video card just to play this on 60 fps with the settings cranked

I have been playing through New Vegas and I'm at about 30 hours. On a whim, though, I put in Fallout 3 and loaded my last saved game, 50 hours. I hadn't actually finished it, but it turns out I was 30 minutes from completing the game so I ended up doing so.

Differences I now note/remember:

--At this point in Fallout 3, my quest dial, or whatever, is totally dark. I've completed everything I've been given. Definitely missing areas of the game, but on this playthrough it just hasn't come up. In New Vegas my quest dial is still full of incomplete crappy things I can't be bothered to do, things I simply can't do because they're broken or too abstract, things I've somehow fucked up due to my "reputation", and things I'm not likely to do because I can't be certain it won't fuck me up.

--Fallout 3 is actually visually the superior game. I couldn't believe it. Even generic corridor sequences somehow look better. When I loaded my game I was about to escape from the Enclave and coming out into that DC Wasteland after only having played New Vegas for months was like... Holy shit, New Vegas is ugly. Fallout 3 seems more detailed somehow. How much of a letdown was The Strip itself? A big letdown.

--Now that I remember, I rolled mainly with a Railway Rifle and a Shishkebab. The sense of achievement at having made my own weapons was fucking cool, but the guns in New Vegas ARE really cool. At this point I basically load New Vegas to shoot various guns at people, hopefully modify them, and find many other cooler guns. Great guns. Great shotguns, more than one scoped rifle, loads of grades of handguns and their ammo... oh man. I don't fuck with explosives or energy in New Vegas. In Fallout 3 I sort of had to, and maybe it was rewarding for having done so.

--The targeting sights in New Vegas help me shoot a lot. I'm not a "shooter" person and found strafing Super Mutants in the DC Wasteland sort of at the limit of my actual "gaming" ability.

--Load times are worse in New Vegas (PS3).

--The story in Fallout 3 was clear what I could do to further it. In New Vegas I'm basically at the point where all these impossible, boring, or unclear objectives have to crystallize in order for me not to have to spend my time on the boring shit that's still lit up in my quest dial. I'll be fucked if I'll ever do that REPCONN facility again and I hope those ghouls fucking die.

--Companions are like... everywhere in New Vegas. People just turn up and offer. I never had a companion in Fallout 3 until the very end and then I thought it was kind of a special offer. Nothing was cooler than wandering around DC Wasteland for the first time and being completely ill-equipped, irradiated, and very lonely. Now I've got a bunch of sidekicks cracking jokes about card games or something.

--The map in New Vegas is rigged. You start out and you can't go a certain way because you'll get slaughtered by cazadores or deathclaws. So you have to follow the least interesting sequence of quests ever just to get around the map. Later, you can't go a certain way unless you want to hang with cazadores or deathclaws. Pretty sure my progress right now is being impeded by me not being interested in fighting boring hard monsters (not "fun" hard monsters). In Fallout 3 I was pretty sure I could get where I was going if I was careful, learned the terrain, and had enough ammo. There were tough bros in that game, but not annoying tough.

latest DLC is now 25% off on Steam.

Old World Blues is entertaining. More of the same, really, but a bit more charm and a lot of great items.

The voice-acting of your friends in the Sink is REALLY uneven. While I find the scientists all done well, half of the Sink characters are just...off. I liked the auto-doc and the CIU, ones like the toaster and muggy are wrong. Tonally off, both in writing and voice.

Tho "Blind Diode Jefferson" is just awesome as a joke name.

I actually like how the map in NV is set-up. I think it's an awesome way to do an immersive tutorial and intro to the world w/out the kludgey tutorial bits. Hell, you can even skip Sunny's part.

I like that there's the delayed payoff of actually getting to the city, and even you do, there's still 3/4 of the game left.

I'm kinda curious how stable the mods are to play FO3 inside the NV engine.

Uh how would that work, would it just be regular FO3 with iron sights and dehydration?

Possibly

Hop on it, kids; FONV is onsale for $15 today, all three DLC are 7.50 each on Steam.

Might pick up FO3:GOTY for only $22.50, too.

The writing and the voice-work on Dead Money are great. The survival horror aspect and repeated textures of the town, not so much.

Nice that you finally get a B.A.R, tho. Odd how it doesn't show up in Honest Hearts, tho, from what the main character of that one mentions.

Also, this shit is way Bioshock-y

and kinda inscrutable how they led with THIS as the first DLC

namechange

Finally beat Dead Money last night. Great writing, fucking annoyingly brutal gameplay.

Deadlock/Running Man collars suck. Made it out of the vault with 4 gold bars, tho.

Both fallouts now on super sale on Steam.

Chris Avellone is posting links to SA on his twitter feed, resulting in the discovering of this fan-art:

http://i.imgur.com/DrykP.jpg

Where's Veronica? Or did the lesbian fisting gag mean she was unsuitable. There are some weird people in here. I don't recognize some of them.

i liked Old World Blues but i skipped through a lot of the dialogue ruthlessly. labored nerd humor is not my thing ("why u playing fallout then" heh)

OCD character-build types take note -- the "book depository" robot thing in your room potentially changes the whole game. you can print up skill books for next to nothing, where previously the game had a handful scattered around the whole gameworld.

Yeah, but you can only make one of each skill book, right? +4 teach stat is a limited effect

oh i only tried it once! i thought you could just keep doing it.

Trying to get the Cinematech mod to work, b/c I want 35mm film grain in this thing.

Christ, Steam says I've played this at least 118 hours already.

Ugh, I think I'm burning out. 140+ hours in on this character, and the last dlc ain't even out yet.

I did install the "orgasm" mod that patches the lack of sound bug during the humping fade-to-black scenes. My blue-haired bespectacled black chick character will fuck her way across the wasteland or die trying, sexdroid or no sexdroid.

your pursuits are noble

http://askarcade.tumblr.com/

kind of loving dead money atm. all the peeps talking about blowing through it in 2 hours are FULL OF SHIT btw. i am a pretty seasoned FO3/NV player and man lemme tell u, u gonna die a bunch of times, esp if you are a compulsive gotta find everything dude like me.

I didn't like the village part of dead money; too many bear traps for my limbs, too few building textures.

I'm waiting for Lonesome Road to hit, and am playing FO3 in the meantime. Bethesda is posting little 60-sec "holotape" mp3s to their blog of Ulysses' diary.

yeah the bear traps were pretty goddamn ridic, i just started into the casino so maybe i am particularly into it right now because getting out of the villa and all the ghost people was such a goddamn relief.

i will prob also go back to FO3 for a bit after i finish this, never did the pitt although i own it and should prob go ahead and suffer through mothership zeta one of these days

Mothership zeta is one note, but has some interesting ideas. Quite short, too.

The best part is probably the audio logs you find.

I just began Point Lookout yesterday; you can see how some bits were tested out for FONV there.

i really really liked point lookout

Point Lookout was the most standalone of the FO3 addons for sure

http://www.bethblog.com/index.php/2011/08/25/lonesome-road-coming-september-20th-couriers-stash-and-gun-runners-arsenal-one-week-later/

o i didn't see this part:

Gun Runners’ Arsenal (Xbox LIVE for 320 Microsoft points, PlayStation Network and Steam for $3.99) increases the range of unique weapons,weapon mods, ammo types and recipes waiting to be uncovered in the vast Mojave Wasteland.

Among the unqiue weapons added are the Bozar, an all-powerful 5.56mm Light Machine Gun, the Smitty Special, an overwhelming variant of the Plasma Caster, the MFC Cluster mine, the Esther, a unique Mini Nuke Launcher, and the ridiculous Nuka Breaker – a new melee weapon made from a Nuka-Cola neon sign. In total Gun Runners’ Arsenal adds 27 new weapons, 40 new weapon modifications for existing weapons, 18 new new recipes, and 29 new ammo types — including the 12 Ga. Dragon’s Breath, Hive Missiles, and 25mm/40mm Plasma Grenades. Finally, Gun Runners’ Arsenal also adds more than 20 all-new challenges to the Mojave Wasteland.

i get a little annoyed at how many weapons are "omg kewl" instead of just effective, but maybe i'm not really in the spirit of the game

wait by 20 new challenges, do they just mean shit like "bash 50 dudes in the noggin w/ the Nuka Breaker" or something actually interesting

Usually, yeah. I do the challenges if I get perks or stat bumps

Beat PL tonight, sorta. FONV could use more tripping sequences, and Lovecrafty bits

Love the Bozar in FO2 :D

the bozar is the greatest fallout weapon ever. super pumped for this

Kinda disappointed that there's not more narrative dlcs announced. The writing on each one one has been great, and the voicework on HH/OWB is _fantastic_.

http://cdnstatic.bethsoft.com/bethblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/FONV-Lonesome-Road-Screenshot-3.jpg

boss fight!

Possibly. You got yer unlaunched nuclear ICBM there too, giving it the vibe of a Bond film climax.

However, this is Fallout, and one of the great things I love about the series is that you can talk your way thru it. It requires far more skill to create ending drama thru well-written dialogue than just bashing each other with shovels, but Avellone & co can probly pull it off. We'll see.

Playing thru Operation Anchorage. Interesting as backstory, Bleah as gameplay

the boss-fight-through-dialogue thing worked well when it was revealing to THE MASTER that you'd uncovered information implying his race of ethnic-cleansing supermen were genetically infertile and less well when it was just telling malcolm mcdowell his plan was evil until he decided you were right and blew himself up

oblivion with guns

New Vegas really is a lot more fun and not in downer in tone. Actual green things are there, you get the idea that the world is moving on(even in the midst of a NCR/legion war), the writing is far better(deeper + funnier).

There's far more kookiness that is the flavor of Fallout; The game ain't a straight post-apoc story(Stalker handles that). There's always been a zany 50's/pre-JFK/"Science!" post-war vibe to it all. Goodie and Art Deco and Streamline Moderne.

http://www.bethblog.com/index.php/2011/09/14/watch-the-lonesome-road-trailer/

looks pretty cool, interested to see what the story turns out to be

finally out

Cute. A streaming web/iphone music site:

http://galaxynewsradio.info

Three Dog clips get dropped in from time. I wonder if we can donate music there to vary up the playlist.

i went back to this and it's the best game bethesda's ever released, which is a mean thing to say i know. (new vegas > morrowind > fallout 3 > daggerfall > oblivion > not gonna bluff i've never played arena). bad facial animation and clunky shooting mechanics and maddening robot conversations between NPCs aside, i love their engine (their one engine, the one they've basically been refining since 1994). they should always get other companies to do their writing.

also muuuuuuuuuuuuuch better-deployed celebrity voice actors. dave foley! lt. rawls!

i love their engine

dont troll me bro!

the worst thing about gamebryo is that bethesda could be using id tech 5, instead of dragging the same horrorshow out of the attic and touching it up for game after game. modified gamebryo should be considered one of the most chilling phrases in gaming

new vegas IS fallout 3 afaic, and "fallout 3" was just some shitty fan mod set on the east coast. enabling obsidian to make the real fallout 3 is the only thing of value bethesda's done since morrowind.

lol, u are the morbz of rpgs. fallout 3 is your obama. which, if we are going to stick with political leaders, probably puts gamebryo somewhere between ceausescu and pol pot, which is fair.

haha, at least i waited until i played the game to write it off! and anyway morbs was right about obama wasnt he??

i was thinking purely of not missing a chance to beat the drum, but you make a good point, morbz at least has the excuse of being right.

oh hey, this is the thread where i welcomed you to ilg

comin up on a year m8 :')

bad facial animation...and maddening robot conversations between NPCs

Want to be excited for Skyrim but as far as I can tell, this is the stuff they still haven't fixed. :/

i am still managing to be kind of excited by skyrim, considering i never played more than an hour of morrowind and hated the living bejeezus out of oblivion

aaanyway, lonesome road is really good! i'm liking it so far anyway.

my only (meta) complaint is, do all their dlcs have to be 'deal with sententious gravelly-voiced npc given to pained expressions of gloomy moralizing'

skyrim looks dope idc what anyone says

bad facial animation...and maddening robot conversations between NPCs

Want to be excited for Skyrim but as far as I can tell, this is the stuff they still haven't fixed. :/

― JimD, Saturday, October 1, 2011 12:41 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

last i heard you could move around during conversations with npc and they can move around and do shit too.

i mean, that alone sold me on it.

(j/k)

nps still do the talking over each other thing though, according to a thing I just read in Edge. Plus the character models still just look kinda rong, in the way they have in all these games. But yeah, can't honestly claim this stuff is killing my excitement, the Skyrim environments still look amazing and that's basically what matters to me in an rpg (plus WOOLLY FUCKING MAMMOTHS yo).

can't be worse than battlespire

revisited normal NV tonight just to test my gfx card, and got hooked again.

Then I got to that point again where suddenly there were hundreds of outstanding quests and so i saved, for when i next play it in a couple of months only to forget all the plots.

if I'm thinking about the part you're talking about, you don't really have hundreds of outstanding quests. a bunch of those quests are mutually exclusive paths

Yeah, an upgraded card and finally switching to an LED monitor was what got me back into it again. Plus it was earlier this summer and OWB was just coming out, and I love the "SCIENCE!" weirdness that the game excels at.

This is why I don't like FO3 as much; it was lacking some of the tone/vibe/humor/what have you. While FO didn't have quite the same level of zaniness that FO2 did, it was still there. FO3 just wasn't enough in that direction, tho it had plenty other good design bits.

Maybe that's ultimately what FO is about; taking your mad max/boy & his dog post-apoc landscape and deliberately grafting it to and expressing it thru post-war 50's/midcentury americana kitsch. The balance of naive idealism & optimism coupled with paranoia that was Eisenhower/JFK America. What kind of historic kitsch era could you take from the UK or the Continent that would make it as memorable or as distinctive in this setting? Canada could work, as even in the game it was annexed by the Divergent America.

I kinda wish one of these games would be set in northern climes; the mountainous bits of FONV showed that you could do it( a little). Could you do wasteland post-apoc in forest & snow, or would it all turn into Siberia? Does Siberia even have any forests?

xp it was just after i'd done the yes man, and opened up more mr house missions. finished veronicas brotherhood area, even though a very strange moment when i thought i wasn't going to be able to leave the brotherhood underground base alive. Now I'm doing stuff involving looking for a platinum chip.

and omg great moment when i discovered that the laser rifle is freaking awesome for one shot kills on those annoying fish monsters from a distance. Must have wiped out a dozen of them for mucho xp.

and what's with the ED mission, where it says that he has some hidden recording. I was pretty sure i found the recording but it doesn't seem to accept it in the quest list.

Also, I'm trying to find a master list of sources for the games. These guys drew on a lot of pop from the last 60 years. Film + novels. Hell, I even bought an out-of-print copy of Zelazny's "Damnation Alley" b/c Avellone mentioned that as the source for "Lonesome Road".

I've read Earth Abides & Canticle for Leibowitz years ago directly b/c they were sourced for FO1/2.

although from what it's telling me I'm thinking of sacking the yes man, so i don't suddenly become wanted by all the factions

the ED-E quest is like the Arcade quest; having him tag along in your group when you talk to people will eventually unlock enough bits of his/its backstory that a better idea of what to next emerges.

ah right, so it's dialogue from someone else. gotcha

also i didn't actually get a new card, just had problems with updating the driver. got it sorted and was testing all my games. opened up NV and just couldn't stop playing, which was I'm really glad quite frankly. Love these games.

which was I'm really glad.

eurgh lol

also i think what veered me into playing today was after the cycle ride i took in the countryside, and came across an old WW2 runway overgrown with trees and stuff, and loads of rubble around it.

whoa. did you bring your camera?

Also, I just realized that I've had FONV-related screen names for an entire year now

i didn't but it's a difficult place to photo, basically just a huge flat area of concrete, with trees and grass and rubble. I tried taking pictures last year when i went but you just couldn't tell it was what it was. if you follow. That might just be down to my amateur camera skills.

maan i goosed up in this game today. played for like six hours this afternoon.

Reached the final sections before I knew what was going on, seems I took a wrong decision somewhere, ruined mankinds chances or something, thus failed a shit load of missions and all of a sudden I'm hunted down like a dog by Caesers legion. Got through the Dam, reached the legion boss and just absolutely no chance my guns are crap.

So replaying the second to last save point and going around the map trying to xp max out.

This game is truly awesome though. I've not even touched the gambling parts yet, I zip into the strip and out again to pick up or complete missions.

I really want to play it again, and maybe focus my attention on what's happening in the casino's. What are all the random cards that I keep finding? Do they let me cheat in blackjack?

oh man really

sorry, had to get my lol-noob reaction in

those cards are for playing 'caravan', the card game made up for this game. people around the map will play you for money. the shop owner and primm and the quartermaster at camp forlorn hope (?) are two that spring to mind

i really wish i'd plumped for speech, from what i've seen in YT playthroughs..

"Hey we're gonna blow that shit up and no fucker better stand in our way!!"
"SPEECH 60 - Please don't blow it up"
"SUCCEEDED - I guess you're right, me and my army are going home"

Yeah I beat the legions super boss by telling him to go away. Winner was me.

I am the jerk who gets pretty good speech AND high weapons skills and tromps around until my character is nearly maxed out. I think I talked my way into and out of Caesar's camp, and then went back later to kill everyone in it. Can't remember how I defeated the dude at the dam, though.

with skill books and dlcs you can max every skill

i hit that superbranching point in this where you have like 30 open quests 3 months ago and the completist in me panicked and i havent played it since.

also i always max my speech in these games - if nothing else you get a lot more storyline from NPCs imo

i have spent the last week going all in on supercompleting fallout 3, but i suppose that should go on the fallout 3 thread huh

i got to the point where i had done every single thing except the four endings. so i'm bashing through those. i've done the yes man and house endings, really curious about the legion ending.

Yes Man is awesome

I think I just ended it the one way, but should replay sometime. The lure of being in charge of my own destiny and having Dave Foley as a sidekick was impossible to resist

that was the one i gravitated toward, personally, on my first playthrough.

update! i've done 3 out of 4 endings. gonna blast through and do the pro-legion ending sometime soon, which i'm really curious about, as the NCR, house and yes man final sequences are functionally very similar. extra curious to see how the game accounts for the choices i've made along the way, mostly goody-two-shoes anti-legion.

i played through as an evil sociopath whose plan was to manipulate everyone in a callous quest to gain absolute personal control of the mojave, but i fucked up and ended up having to blow up hoover dam and rule over a useless patch of desert with low tourism projections. serves me right i guess! i just restarted as a humble wasteland doctor who knows how to use his fists. (if he has to.) (which it turns out he does.)

gonna be a total selfless followers-of-the-apocalypse-aiding activist this time, if only to get on JULIE FARKAS' good side. julie farkas, it's not your fiery compassion or your lab coat or your mohawk, it's all three.

lol

welp, you've all got your faces deep in some skyrimming, but i finally finished all four endings to this! i gather there's a variation on the legion ending where caesar is dead and the legate is running things, but oh well.

the yes man ending was still the most suited to me personally. the ncr ending is fairly straightforward and involves more required killing than yes man, interesting enough. the house ending is identical procedurally to yes man but you do it for a sick asshole instead of yourself.

the caesar ending sequence is entertaining and the most unique. there's a set of dialogues where caesar explains basic hegelianism to you. i'm sure there are a few ways to play the assassination (lol spoilers). instead of a climactic one-on-one battle, it ends with a climactic... crawl through a trapped-up office.

great game.

nice

you've all got your faces deep in some skyrimming

one last thing about this. the geography kind of bugged me. look at a map, between southern california and arizona is... not las vegas! that's farther to the north.

which is fine, but wouldn't there be a big ongoing border war along the colorado river? idk, i don't remember anybody in the game talking about fighting happening anywhere else.

i intended to also play through the end of FONV but, skyrim has happened

my humble wasteland doctor took kind of a dark turn round about the time he plunged a chainsaw into mr. house's emaciated chest

i just bought this. now if only i could also buy an extra week of my life

only allowing myself to play when i have done everything else i need to do on a particular day -- ha ha yeah right

this is pretty good

i like that it starts with a narrative impetus that isn't 'you're leaving the vault / the village for the first time ever -- now deal with the big scary world'. although getting outside for the first time and picking up radio messages and looking at random preserved suburban buildings in fo3 was kind of cool. (was the idea in fo1's world map that nuclear devastation had rendered the area entirely desert and there were no structures left? it's kind of an interesting shift in policy)(i think this is maybe why i found fo3 more amenable than the 'classic' fallout games) -- but it's nice that the general status quo (post-nuclear war, kookiness) is taken for granted. it has a very low-key start. i think i'm okay with that; in my ~30 hours in fo3 i only got around to following the urgent epic type quest in the last ~2 of them and soon gave up, because i don't care about liam neeson, sorry liam neeson

actually enjoying the emptier map -- one of the problems with fo3's map was that it made very little cohesive sense as a collection of communities; the areas were presumably designed independently and then dropped on a washington road guide. -- like, where you start in new vegas they tell you what trade route it's on. admittedly i have only walked to one other location so far so this may grow old / the map may turn out to be more of a miscellany than it seems once i've actually been to the places they tell you about -- but we'll see

I think the map works pretty well in FNV. People have complained that it's too restrictive as well as sparse compared to FO3, in that you are much more restricted viz. where you can stay alive at low levels, but I love how easy it is to get into real danger and I think the more guided exploration fits well with a game that it supposed to have a stronger narrative drive.

I'm enjoying skysims but the desert is still calling me back... and I'd swap Lydia for Veronica in a heartbeat.

if you dump all your points into a combat build couldn't you just shoot your way north? maybe i should test this

decided i was going to be an engineering sciencey type but regretting not putting more than 6 or 7 points into charisma. (it's the biggest flaw of the way the fallout series has worked that the ideal built is p much always 'generically smart')(speaks a lot to the kind of player they're trying to flatter)

it occurred to me that roll-to-hit bothers me way less in this than it did in mass effect when i played that. probably because as a brain-damaged schlub firing a worn-out rifle it makes more sense that i might miss sometimes than as a future soldierish type person.

Maybe? Report back, if you do test it? I'd be interested to know if it breaks the storyline experience.

ha, i just noticed this on the fallout thread:

spent most of this week playing this semi-obsessively btw. started obeying several fictional hard mode rules that exist only in my head, like not being able to pause the game and heal in the middle of combat, and not being able to repair weapons in situations where i would be likely to be interrupted. i was considering having to have my character eat on the regular but i think the food distribution in the game is too broken for it; also i thought "but what about refrigeration and spoilage?" and realised it was definitely a step too far

― thomp, Monday, July 13, 2009 5:44 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well.

<3 hardcore mode.

http://i.imgur.com/DuwUM.png

holy shit that blows in so many ways

Yes, it seems really odd to judge it on critical approval rather than revenue.

I guess the fact that it was so buggy for a lot of people knocked a few points off the score.

no fucking way

Beth really stiffed them. This makes me sad in more ways than one.

whoa that is next gen stupid. this is why metacritic should be burned to the ground imo.

i actually saw that and went out to gamestop to buy a copy for my ps3

then i realized, fuck, they're not gonna see any of this

hard to get great reviews without any playtesting

man that's crazy

what was the cancelled next-gen?

should note i never actually bought a copy for ps3

should note and then ask: does anyone have this for ps3? are there patches? i imagine there's a slowdown glitch a la skyrim, no?

Nobody seems to know much about the cancelled project; it was called "North Carolina", that's about it.

finally finishing this, in the end game at the moment. in true fashion its been buggy as hell right here at the end - freezes, vanishing companions, quests not triggering when they should, etc

i think w/ a lot of these games even if bug fixes have come down the pipe, some errors stay resident in your save games.

certainly true of older skyrim stuff i've pulled up recently. sucks!

There's an island of disk space somewhere with all my useless Fallout 2 saved games

Ok so I will officially say that the ncr ending is pretty much super boring

I loved this game, but I will say that I was puzzled over the rasta-dude's motivations in the last DLC. Having your sidekick droid develop a personality was pretty cool, tho.

Steam tells me I played this for 170+ hours.

Is any of the DLC apart from Old World Blues worth the points?

the 2nd one. the one set in Zion Natl Park. Beautiful scenery and you meet interesting characters.

Thanks!

Altho, the first one has a frustrating opening, it is kinda interesting and you get my favorite blaster rifle from the game, one that fires holo-cubes

I saw this for under 20 dollars new at Gamestop last week and almost picked it up. Still haven't come close to finishing FO3, though. Something about FO3 really frustrated me. I think it was just the constant wandering around without really knowing what to do. Also, I kept walking into areas too advanced for me to deal with at that moment. I need a structured experience apparently.

got this for xmas. already snared deep into it. god i love these games.

Be sure to load up on mods & corrections. Helps the game out, I found.

Also playlists/music packs

i got it for xbox360, so am hoping all corrections are in place - have not had a freeze or crash or anything so far (knocks on wood). already 15 hours in, just cleared out the rocket factory.

can i say again, GOD i love these games.

shocked it hasn't hit the Steam sale yet, i'm probably gonna pull this trigger this time

ick, vault 34.

Been off work sick for the last four days so, with nothing better to do, I broke the seal on the copy I've had for a few weeks and I've ploughed 25 hours into it already.

I really liked Fallout 3, but I'm enjoying this more. I prefer the slightly lighter tone, but what's impressed me most is the sense that my actions are having an effect on the world. Can't wait to get back to it and get Rex a new brain...

that's what happens when people with a past in the franchise get involved, I think

I think I'll be playing with this character for a long while yet but at this stage I can definitely see myself going back to see how siding with different factions affects the way things play out. I'm almost glad for a chest infection - it's been a long time since I've had the opportunity to sink satisfying chunks of time into an RPG.

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2013/01/10/sounds-legit-three-dog-teases-fallout-4/

ick, vault 34.

hardest part of the game, probably.

the best vault is 11, though. omg. i was kinda stunned by the generosity and confidence of design in vault 11's being unnecessary and unsignposted.

the one with the plants can go fuck itself though.

am barely reading this thread cos i don't wanna spoiler myself, but am glad to see vault 34 is as tough as it gets. found myself regularly getting entirely lost and not knowing what to do next, and those ghouls were tough to kill (but not if you have boone and the eye robot with you). that said, i need to buy some rad-x and rad-away now.

just bade boone farewell and signed cass up to my team, to keep things interesting. gonna travel with veronica for a while too, to experience all of the characters - is that the right way to do it? or should i save these different companions for different runs through the game? might well attempt it one more time as a Bad Dude, as I always play as a white knight-ish through the first time.

Vault 34 is a massive pain in the ass, but the reward at the end is stellar.

what was the reward, cankles? i fear i may have missed it...

uhhh I think you get the All-American in the armory at the end. which is a decent semi-auto scoped unique rifle but probably not 'stellar' as i said at the time. maybe theres some other stuff i forgot about

Aha - I think I may have sold that? Or not found it. I just wanted to get out by the end!

it's easy to miss the armory in there, actually, but without it the whole quest is outrageously unremunerative. (aside of course from its best reward, which is never having to go in there again.)

no problem with getting all the companions on a single playthrough; i think you get an "achievement" for it, actually. all the companions have associated quests, tho, and some (cass, rex) are more obvious than others (boone, arcade), and several of them are triggered by having specific experiences with the companion present, so it's possible to lock yourself out of them without knowing it (by having the triggering experiences while they're not there), so the most relaxing attitude to have is probably a noncompletist one. f:nv's much less of a do-everything-with-one-character game than f3 (where basically the only serious mutually exclusive choices are the megaton thing at the beginning and "push this button or that button" at the end); i had a lot of fun imagining personalities for different characters and taking them on different paths depending. (my favorite character might actually have been my legion one, who for the first half of the game was also my ncr one -- did all the ncr-soldier quests i'd skipped in previous playthroughs and then after much inner agony betrayed them.) i replayed this game like five times, i think. i never replayed f3 once.

sorry, so the point was, def hang out with all the characters, but don't expect to exhaust them on one playthrough, unless you look them up in the wiki and do it really clinically.

it is possible to do p much everything (except the obvious mutually exclusive stuff) but you have to look everything up and plan things out in advance. i usually do this on a second playthrough. and given how buggy these games are, a lot of a first, tbph

iirc boone, the nerdy underground woman and arcade have a half-dozen potential plot trigger moments but you only need to hit a couple of them.

er i guess dlh said just that