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D.O.G.O.G.B.Y.N. posted:The tribals are supposed to be "Victorian-era African stereotypes"? Color me surprised. Spot on on giving examples of some of the things in Fallout 2 that really screw up the setting, anyway. Unfortunately, they're the definitive factor that influences the Fallout setting for some people, like Bethesda. (fortunately, Obsidian knows the real deal) New Vegas feels like a straight up sequel to Fallout 2 and it shares a lot of the things that FO2 had over FO3. It's basically New Reno: The Game. RagnarokAngel posted:Did Fallout 3 even have tribals? I don't recall.
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Jan 9, 2012 08:03
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The problem with Fallout 3's story is that it's just not a good story at all. Dad is the central character and he's this bland paragon of goodness. It's got buckets of shallow allusions sprayed everywhere that don't really work (Squire Maxson and The Once and Future King for instance) but its main theme is really clumsily handled and isn't reflected well in quest design outside of the main quest. It was atmospheric as gently caress, and I think the Capital Wasteland was better designed than the Mojave in terms of atmosphere and exploration, but the actual stuff the world was populated with was really shallow and perfunctory.
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Jan 9, 2012 09:07
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gyrobot posted:Deducted logic, I tend to do that in my spare time, and it is pretty much the only way Littleton will care about such contracts. When someone like GUVMENT got poo poo tons of caps and weapons. Someone will take the contract. I thought that Littlehorn was supposed to be the Anti-Christ.
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Jan 10, 2012 09:05
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Big_Daddy_Fabio posted:So I'm replaying the game, and I got to the 188 trade station, and I realized I forgot about the forecaster. Does he have any special significance? I mean I know there are no quests associated with him, but are his prediction skills a reference to something? It's kind of a continuity thing, I guess? In Fallout 1, the Master experimented on humans to enhance their psychic abilities. It didn't really work that great, but the most successful experiments, the Psykers, wore Psychic Inhibitor braces on their heads. Getting ahold of one was one way of getting past the hallway leading up to the Master. The Forecaster's 'medicine' is a Psychic Inhibitor. I dunno if there's any more to the reference than that.
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Jan 14, 2012 00:31
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BAILOUT MCQUACK! posted:There isn't anything in their inventories though. Just the base weapons and armor that you can't take from them. If there is a console command to check their inventories including those items I will happily use it to check. The console command is showinventory. You have to have them selected though, either by clicking on them with the console open (which can be more difficult than it sounds) or using the prid command. If you have anything on them, you should empty their inventories first because the list can quickly overflow the number of lines that are displayed. if they do have stuff on them you need to take off, the code is removeitem followed by the item code and the quantity. So like, removeitem XXY 1 or something. The itemcode you need should show up in the console when you use showinventory.
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Jan 16, 2012 23:48
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redmercer posted:It's not even close! It's not even close to being close. About the only thing they really have in common is the snappy writing; and even that's in a completely different style. gently caress, Dead Money comes closer in that it's sort of based on a gimmick and you're fighting against a real pain in the rear end who you have to take orders from for the greater portion of the game. You don't think that the testing segments are pretty portal-ish? Particularly the cyberdog/nightstalker course?
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Jan 19, 2012 19:44
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TooManyUzukis posted:Alright, I need some help, as this is driving me crazy. I'm trying to play through New Vegas again, but the game runs at an unplayable FPS. I've played it before on this machine and it ran perfectly. I just finished ME3 with barely a hitch. What the hell is making this game so terribly unplayable? I've got no mods installed. It ran fine for a minute or two then...bam. 2 FPS. Consistently. Do you have a lot of saves? If I'm remembering right, stability and performance issues can be caused by having a lot of saves.
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Mar 17, 2012 21:22
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Niggard of Oz posted:So far everywhere I've been has been a ghost town. This is something they added in a patch? They reduced the number of characters in the world because of memory and stability problems that, if I remember right, had to do with DLC on the consoles or something.
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Apr 5, 2012 02:09
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Fibby Boy posted:Is there a character guide or something for fallout? I'm pretty goddamn tired of dying to a radscorpion or a pack of mantis's before making it to vault 15. Tag at least one weapon skill. Small Guns is probably your best bet because Big Guns and Energy Weapons are late-game skills so you should not tag them but should dump one or two points in every level. Charisma is pretty useless, although its derived skills (barter and speech) are among the most useful. Speech especially. Agility is pretty awesome because of what it means for action points. Trait-wise, Gifted is good, but not as good as it first looks. Small Frame is good but you can't be a hoarder. In combat, if you have spare action points, use them to move. Supposedly the penalty on a to-hit roll against you when you move is way higher than the armor bonus you get for unused points. Don't grind for experience. You don't need to and it'll get you killed. Quests are way better for gaining XP. Run away whenever things get too hectic. If you have a high Agility, you will generally make it to the exit grid before your enemies kill you. And... that's it really. Oh, and combat's way less tedious if you turn combat speed up to max.
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Apr 7, 2012 07:57
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Stroth posted:Pretty sure that's a joke about how it used to be a tourist town before the war. Is it? Vegas is still a tourist town in the game, only without things like airplanes, so everyone from NCR is basically coming on foot. Plus Novac's right on one of the two main routes to Vegas. The one that doesn't have fiends and deathclaws.
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Apr 12, 2012 04:58
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Captain Oblivious posted:Haha I guess you missed the part where Obsidian loving hates the talking Deathclaws. They were all slaughtered, which isn't really a retcon because it's really, really hard to avoid that happening.
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Apr 12, 2012 05:23
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Defiance Industries posted:You can only avoid it by not getting their ending at all, right? Their happy ending is bugged and was never fixed.
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Apr 12, 2012 05:34
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Merry Magpie posted:Foot? NCR has a trainline running directly to the Strip. I thought the only working train in the game was the monorail from McCarran to the Strip, which is reserved for VIPs and soldiers.
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Apr 12, 2012 06:06
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Captain Oblivious posted:The problem is in the context of how and why it was done, it's nothing more than narrative laziness. Yes, the Enclave having pockets on the east coast is plausible. The Brotherhood of Steel less so in light of how they were founded, but an organization LIKE them? Sure. It could have been done with some actual investigation of the topic. I don't think that it was laziness. It's more that they needed to make a choice and just didn't. They wanted to make a Fallout game, and to have all the things that make the setting unique. That means The Brotherhood, Super Mutants, The Enclave, Vaults, Deathclaws, etc, etc. But they also wanted a fresh start so that they could do their own thing without contradicting or messing with the first two games. It's not laziness so much as indecision, and that indecision can probably be pretty severe when you're a big enough fan to stuff in all those homages.
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Apr 20, 2012 04:51
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MrL_JaKiri posted:I can because gently caress "good business". I agree. It's really annoying, and it's a really common defense of Bioware and Bethesda games. People seem to think that instead of being real things that you can discuss and point to, good writing and unique aesthetics are magical unicorns that got eaten by a goblin named market forces because people didn't chant their names enough while clapping. The fact that it's "good business" doesn't change the fact that it's bad aesthetics or bad narrative design. We don't play video games because we admire the business acumen of the publishers. We play them because we enjoy the content created by the developers.
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Apr 21, 2012 05:37
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vyelkin posted:Yeah but that's exactly the point. We're in the minority. The majority of gamers prefer two lines of voice-acted crap than five paragraphs of well-written plot. "We don't play video games because we admire the business acumen of the publishers. We play them because we enjoy the content created by the developers" is exactly right, but if 5% of your fanbase play and enjoy your games for one reason and the other 95% play and enjoy them for another reason then it makes more sense for the publisher to appeal to them. And what you end up with is big companies like Bioware and Bethesda making that, and smaller niche companies like Obsidian making the games we want, which is exactly how the nature of the free market would predict a situation like that ending up. The reason Skyrim is popular is absolutely not mutually exclusive with the reasons for New Vegas's relatively cultish popularity (the strong thematic roots, good quest design, reactivity, etc). We're not comparing Mass Effect to Pathologic. We're comparing mainstream American games. New Vegas has those qualities and it had an abbreviated dev cycle and it was built on technology no one involved other than that one oblivion modder had a ton of experience with. I don't see how a game that doesn't have those limitations gets off. It's not even as if New Vegas came from some tiny indie publisher or out of eastern Europe.
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Apr 21, 2012 06:06
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Anime Schoolgirl posted:A pretty amazingly terrible formspring user has posted some questions on ropekid's formspring page: The guy's apparently an American army lifer, so to be honest I think some engrained sexism is to be expected. Not to paint all service members with the same brush, but didn't the US armed forces only recently decide to stop kicking out women who were raped on the grounds that bitches be crazy? e: What I mean is, the guy seems hung up on the idea that the NCR should reflect the American armed forces, even though they're really messed up in terms of their internal culture. Republican Vampire fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Apr 29, 2012 |
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Apr 29, 2012 01:45
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:Don't know. I was a U.S. paratrooper and I don't think military has anything to do with it. I just think the guy's a sheltered dickhead. Or a troll... Him trolling isn't necessarily inconsistent with him holding those views though. He could just be a snide sheltered douche about it. Like I said, I don't wanna paint everyone with the same brush. The American military, any military, draws a really diverse swath of people. But the guy's military service is the only thing mentioned in his profile, his profile pic is (presumably) him all kitted out, and the problems with the military's internal culture seem to have some bearing on his answers. For instance, he takes the lack of female Army Rangers as evidence that there would be no NCR Army rangers even though, like Rope Kid said, there are other underlying reasons.
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Apr 29, 2012 01:59
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I think the Legion would've gotten a fairer shake if Obsidian had had the time/resources to do post-Hoover material. The dialogue tree that was left in the game suggests that the NCR Military wants the Courier to take the medal and gently caress off and that banal evil wins out as the dominant tone of their occupation. Also it's kind of weird to trash Caesar for his plan relying on a hokey idea of historical determinism when every Fallout game opens with an evocation of hokey historical determinism.
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May 9, 2012 08:58
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Rookersh posted:If you talk to the troopers, and listen to people, you realize that they are not overextended by choice, the Dam was a bit further then their original slow pace of expansion, but the Rangers found it, and they realized control of it would be important, so they moved far past their boundaries. With what happened at the Divide, the army is in fact split in half, with the majority of it stuck back in the NCR lands, and only small amounts able to make it past as a time. So the only reason they haven't conquered Primm, or totally rolled over the Legion, and had the situation in hand with the roads defended? It's because of in game limitation magic, not because the NCR in it's current state couldn't handle those things. quote:The other big one is that Kimball is a moron, and that the Brahmin Barons are to powerful. Again though, this is easily healed by time, with the Dam operational again, farming will likely start a huge industry boom, and without control over the food, the Barons will lose almost all their influence. As for Kimball, he's fairly old by ingame standards, and not everyone is a Tandi in terms of living forever. And yeah, he might get replaced by someone worse, but this is a fledgling democracy, they'll eventually put in rules to limit terms, or to limit lobbying, and get past these issues. quote:Production and infrastructure are an entirely different beast I guess. As you said, most of the at home stuff is controlled by the Gun Runners/Van Graffs, neither of which fall under the NCR, which works for now, but can't work in the longterm. I'd have to imagine though that the NCR will eventually get their hands on Houses facilities, and even without that control of the Dam will help give them a huge boost to infrastructure work if they choose to take it, so it's not like the option isn't available to them. In the end the NCR is doomed because it's a neo-imperial state that is following the same trajectory as real life empires. At some point the resources necessary to expand and maintain their infrastructure will exceed the value of doing so, and they'll go decadent and eventually collapse. Arguably this has already happened, if you listen to people like Hanlon.
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May 9, 2012 19:35
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Fintilgin posted:But... but... but... ~TAXES~ Caesar tells you that you can kill the Boomers, for instance, if that's more expedient, but it's not the first resort. Acts of terrorism and assassination are involved in legion quests, but against people they're at war with. The NCR military brass go straight to murder with the Khans (who they've oppressed and abused for decades) and the Brotherhood. You lose rep for brokering a treaty. The NCR puts on a pretty face, and their use of coerced labour is a lot less galling, but Colonel Moore's more bloodthirsty than Vulpes Inculta.
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May 10, 2012 00:38
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LividLiquid posted:That still blows my mind. Yes Man sounds nothing like Dave Foley. Really? He seems like a stock Dave Foley character. All pleasant as gently caress to conceal a deep abyss of madness.
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May 10, 2012 05:30
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Wolfsheim posted:I still wildly speculate about what post-ending gameplay would look like. I mean, the main towns and the Strip proper could be so wildly different that most quests just wouldn't be available anymore or would have to be nearly entirely rewritten. Same with a huge amount of the incidental dialogue, like in Primm and such (where, in the end, the town is either prospering or dead as poo poo, but being lorded over by like six different possible groups/individuals). I know what you mean. It's especially tempting to fantasize because the recorded post-hoover dialogue is pretty awesome and seems designed to sort of contextualize the ending slides.
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May 10, 2012 06:17
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Wolfsheim posted:Oh man, I didn't even know this poo poo existed. Links? It's just one dialogue with Colonel Moore thehumandignity posted:Uh. Vulpes massacres a town for no reason. The people of Nipton were planning on betraying their clients, NCR soldiers and Powder Gangers, to the Legion. The majority of people you see in the town as victims are Powder Gangers, who kill outsiders and take their stuff. That doesn't excuse killing them all for propaganda purposes, but Moore wants the Courier to kill two communities of murky-to-bad people. Vulpes only kills one. As for the Khans aren't raiders in New Vegas, and I might be misremembering, but they aren't really raiders in Fallout 2 either. In that game the hero is hired to go to the Khans' ancestral home and massacre all of them so that NCR can salvage the technology there. So I Don't think it's inappropriate to say the NCR are the bad guys in that situation. Seriously the worst thing the Khans have ever done onscreen is kidnap Tandi. That's pretty small potatoes. Republican Vampire fucked around with this message at 07:05 on May 10, 2012 |
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May 10, 2012 07:03
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CommissarMega posted:They were raiders in FO2, you just don't see them raid. They also extort the squatters around the Vault. That said, the NCR's hatred for them, especially now that FO2's events have long since ended, is a little overmuch. Fair enough. For what it's worth, NCR runs what amounts to a terror campaign in that game (They pay Bishop to pay raiders to harass and attack vault city), so it's not like their hands are clean.
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May 10, 2012 07:10
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Zore posted:Its the issue of multiple writers rearing its head I'm guessing, and you're right that the Legion does not universally practice those atrocities in game.x Also it'd help if there were legion civilians on the Strip, in Freeside, etc. It's implied, what with the Families having and using Legion money. It also would've allowed for more barkstrings. As it is, like, 90% of them are NCR Civilians being super bloodthirsty.
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May 10, 2012 18:32
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Saoshyant posted:No, that isn't what's implied. What's implied is that there are a lot of merchants happily making a profit in Legion territory to the point the Strip accepts their money. There are no legionaries on the Strip; that would go against everything Caesar tried to condition the tribals to be. That's why I said Legion Civilians, not Legionaries. We know they exist because we see one of them (Dale Barton) in the game and people like Cass talk about them existing as subjects of, but separate from, the Legion. It's kind hard to talk about because the legion doesn't really have a name for people outside of it but in its territory. Legion refers to the slave army itself, and I'm pretty sure they're not Profligates since Barton's in Caesar's camp and Profligates aren't allowed inside.
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May 11, 2012 00:05
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Caufman posted:I do not understand how people buy Caesar's philosophy. His synthesis would not improve the Wasteland at all. NCR needs to be less militaristic, less expansionary, less hierarchical, and more humane. It certainly does not need more rape, more slavery, or more brutality. To make a better wasteland, NCR needs to move away from Legion philosophies, not towards it. If the NCR doesn't expand it will probably collapse because it's facing a water crisis and because it's an advanced economy it relies on agriculture. Also the rape, slavery and brutality, in theory, would erode once Caesar took over. He specifically says something about the legion's values transitioning from brutal slavery to public service once they were moderated by the more senatorial culture of the NCR, or something of that kidney. Again, it's not entirely convincing, but neither is anyone else. I mean House is basically a spergy manchild who isn't even going to be the first to post-war space, and independent Vegas is reliant on people like the Followers who aren't remotely set up to take on a leadership role, let alone to do so in a sudden vacuum. You have to pick the side you think is least wrong. Republican Vampire fucked around with this message at 04:52 on May 11, 2012 |
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May 11, 2012 03:27
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Ungrateful Dead posted:I still rather enjoy FO3 after New Vegas, even if it does make a mockery of the Fallout canon. It's not just your proximity to DC that makes you feel this way. Making big, interesting, enticing worlds is where Bethesda excels in terms of design. It's just that the stuff you find there tends to be pretty repetitive (Skyrim's dragon-claw locks, The numerous skeletons surrounded by drugs in FO3) and shallowly designed (any quest structure from Skyrim all the way back to morrowind) . They have a real strength for world design and it's a genuine shame that they don't measure up in other areas.
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May 13, 2012 07:28
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redmercer posted:Big help for Dead Money: You don't have to use anything in particular to take limbs off downed Ghost People. Ammo might be tight, but it's worth the one or two rounds versus all the loving around with re-equipping. Is it really loving around to bind a melee weapon to 3 and just attack a 'dead' ghost person's leg once or twice?
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May 17, 2012 19:44
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Merry Magpie posted:Yes. The big glowing emitters. Activate or shoot them to eliminate the holograms. And they're almost all in the same room as the holograms they control, aren't they? I thought dead money was bastard-hard and utterly unforgiving until I turned on subtitles though. Maybe my ears suck but I found it difficult to pick up on radios until things got really dire without subtitles on.
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May 18, 2012 00:32
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Roobanguy posted:You learn it in OWB. It's not really addressed that well in the game though, since it's leftovers from VB. The only real trace of them I found in OWB was Christine's COS Sniper Rifle. Basically, according to Avellone, they're a small faction of hardliners within the Brotherhood who believe that the various chapters have drifted too far from the Brotherhood's initial mission. They believe that their duty is to ferret out and fight corruption, including megalomaniacs like Elijah.
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May 18, 2012 05:33
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I didn't find Lonesome Road that bad because what Ulysses describes is basically a Fetch Quest that turns out to have huge effects on the community where it happened, and what's more Fallout than that? The Courier legit doesn't remember it because he or she does so much poo poo like that already, So the player not being attached to it makes sense. For the Courier, it was Tuesday. And that really gets to the heart of what the Courier is. You go around the wasteland doing odd jobs and being this agent of powers that are greater than yourself. You do a lot of things, a lot of which aren't memorable, but they turn out to change the course of the war and of the history of the whole Southwest.
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May 20, 2012 03:41
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I'd be kind of worried about House as a long-term leader for a couple reasons. The biggest though is that if you look at the area he actually controls there's a decent amount of hosed up stuff and human misery. The only real law is that you don't gently caress with House, and he can be incredibly vindictive in enforcing that. Look at what happens to the Kings for the relatively minor slight of not beating up NCR Squatters anymore. I'm also skeptical of his long term economic success because his economy is basically parasitic. He just drains capital out of the NCR, which is why he doesn't want to alienate them too much, but the NCR's economy being shaky, on the verge of depression, etc is a point that gets hammered away at a lot.
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May 24, 2012 18:30
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I thought it was pretty well established that massacring the kings was all down to them coming to a Truce with NCR and that pissing House off, despite House having never told them not to do it.
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May 25, 2012 01:17
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Eiba posted:That's true. There's one ending like that. Yeah but the point is that if you stop them from attacking the squatters he kills them for something small and ultimately meaningless since remaining on good terms with the NCR is a core part of his plan. He might make a big thing about being above revenge, but he's pretty capricious and petty in practice.
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May 25, 2012 05:56
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I think it's unfair to dismiss anything a character does that disagrees with your idea of him that way. Especially when talking about hypothetical questions like whether or not he'd make a good ruler post-game.
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May 25, 2012 06:13
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Wolfsheim posted:Yeah, like easily dispose of those pesky groups (the Khans, the Kings, the Followers) that oppose them in some way. The moral center of the NCR is probably Hsu, since he's such a good person that he even beats himself up for endangering his men in front of the Courier. Then again, it's sort of telling that the sole piece of post-hoover material I've seen involves Hsu being totally marginalized in favor of the bloodthirsty Moore.
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May 28, 2012 09:52
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The hate for fallout 3 is rooted in the fact that it shits its pants when it comes to writing, quest design, etc. It's got some great atmosphere but the quests are really primitive and the story is, well, it's bad and so utterly counter to what makes a good video game story that it got a DLC dedicated to changing the utterly loving terrible ending. There are some questionable decisions when it comes to things like systems but mostly I think it's down to the story and quest design. An RPG kind of lives or dies on those, hence there being a huge crowd that'll forgive the core gameplay in Alpha Protocol being very flawed because it excels in those areas.
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Jun 8, 2012 07:01
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Lord Lambeth posted:Aren't pip-boys bleeding edge technology, only given to those from a vault? PipBoys don't use Transistors. They use hyper-miniaturized vacuum tubes. You can see 'em in Fallout 1 and 2. They're super bleeding edge and House invented them. Dude probably would've invented something functionally similar or identical to the internet without microprocessors if the war hadn't happened.
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Sep 30, 2012 05:02
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