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So I'm nearing the end of my third playthrough and this has been my favourite one yet. In Fallout 3 I stuck with shooting people in VATS, and did the same thing the first two times through New Vegas. This time, I figured that since Old World Blues and Dead Money are best played with melee weapons I'd go melee/unarmed, and it's an absolute blast. I sliced the Powder Gangers to pieces with a machete when they tried to take over Goodsprings, and on my way to Mojave Outpost I casually punched a few Radscorpions to death at like level 5. I also gave myself 9 Luck, so I cleaned out Benny's casino before I ever met him, and then went into Dead Money with Them's Good Eatin' and Fortune Finder, which made it humiliatingly easy. I didn't run to the Sierra Madre when it opened, I swam there leisurely through a sea of morphine. Anyway, much as I'm loving this build I'm already thinking about the next one I want to try, a laser-obsessed nerd who takes every perk which makes him more like a cool robot (Implant GRX, Adamantium Skeleton, etc. He'll loving love Big Mountain). Laser weapons are pretty much all useless peashooters, so I'm wondering if anyone has some good advice for a laser character. I'm thinking I'll need high Luck for lots of critical hits.
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Nov 14, 2012 07:19
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 17:03 |
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I actually prefer to play Honest Hearts first, as it has the least connection to the others. Really, Joshua mentions Ulysses briefly (not even by name, that I can remember) and that's it. Then in Dead Money you hear a bit more about Ulysses and Big MT, and Lonesome Road gets a bit of foreshadowing (also, Lonesome Road/Dead Money ending spoilers how did "the battle at the Divide" become so legendary that some random super mutant in the middle of nowhere heard about it? It's just you and Ulysses alone in a room, pretty much. Eh whatever, it's cool enough to get a pass.). Then in Old World Blues there are callbacks to Dead Money and forwards to Lonesome Road, and then LR bookends things nicely with the ability to use Ulysses's time with the White Legs to convince him to abort the nukes. I do kind of wish the DLCs didn't assume you played them in release order, though given the sales figures of DLCs it makes sense, as the vast majority of people who played all four DLCs will have played them when they were released, and gone through them exactly once.
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Nov 15, 2012 21:24
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I did OWB first when I got the Ultimate Edition and you're right, it really does foreshadow DM really well. I pretty much only do it after DM now because I like it better. Also because I'm a horrible continuity nerd, and the "just one more DLC to go!" line in OWB's ending bugs me.
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Nov 15, 2012 22:38
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I guess I just have a hard time seeing Fallout right after the bombs as a fun and Fallouty experience. Mutated animals would take a few years to show up, surely? You wouldn't just have, say, Seattle flooded with radscorpions and yao guai right away, and it'd take a while for all the scared and desperate people to coalesce into the tribes and factions that make New Vegas so compelling. Although maybe you could see the beginnings of several tribes as the game goes on, and deciding which one you ally with and help to become the dominant power could be the endgame. You'd have your might-makes-right Legion type, your hippie Followers Of The Apocalypse type, your let's-rebuild-America NCR/Enclave type, etc. Apart from that though, a Right After The Bombs game sounds kind of like Fallout 3 without all the settlements and mutated animals. Which may just betray my lack of creativity. Also I just got reminded of another thing I loved in New Vegas: in my first playthrough I quickly got attached to the Followers and wished there was an option to join them and hand them the keys to Independent Vegas at the end. It wasn't until my second playthrough that I discovered that, although I can't hand them Vegas I CAN join them! They gave me a special Followers white coat with their logo on it and everything! That coat has no defense rating and I've maxed out the skills it boosts already, but I wear it everywhere because it's a symbol of my Followers membership and the Followers are my peeps.
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Nov 16, 2012 02:58
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Skyrim's story was pretty bland but the game itself kept me occupied and interested for over 100 hours because there was a huge variety of stuff to do. I spent about the same time I'd spend playing the entirety of vanilla New Vegas just crafting, pickpocketing, making potions and selling stuff until I maxed out all the non-combat skills and was rich as gently caress. Also while it doesn't have anything as complex as New Vegas's factions I killed a bunch of orcs early on and locked myself out of any orc quests, including the one which the wiki tells me would have given me the best looking warhammer in the game as a reward. As warhammers were my character's weapon of choice, I felt the hell out of that little bit of choice and consequence.
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Nov 17, 2012 15:32
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Does completing main Story quests affect factions other than the big two? I'm up to the last NCR quest and the Khans now consider me a Wild Child even though I haven't said boo to them since I did Oh My Papa 30+ hours ago. I was already mixed with them (Merciful Thug I think?) because I killed the sniper at Bitter Springs, which I assume is why I couldn't buy weapons from them, but do you take a reputation hit from them for helping the NCR? It makes sense that you would, but in this game you never know what's just a bug.
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Nov 17, 2012 23:27
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I love that the line for refusing that quest is "I'm not a delivery boy!"
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Nov 19, 2012 23:25
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Plus if your aim is to tear Fallout 3 down to make New Vegas look better, picking on F3's stability is soooo not the way to go. New Vegas may well be the best game ever made, but I've never had a play session of any significant length that wasn't punctuated by crashes and (not or! And!) eternal loading screens that never end. Once I had to abandon a character I spent 12 hours with because my faction reputation reset entirely out of nowhere and the NCR shot me on sight and I couldn't make them stop. Hell, this thread has several posts PER PAGE of people who are unable to get the game to work for no obvious reason. You have to do Raul's quest before going to McCarran or you can never finish it. You may never even get a chance to START Veronica's quest. Etc.
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Nov 22, 2012 18:30
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"Just a little to the left, Todd Howard. Come on, Todd Howard, just hold still."
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Nov 24, 2012 16:03
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Taking control of the vault and blocking it up happened around the time when House was basically inviting three savage tribes to run his casinos (two of which ended up plotting against him) and the potentially hostile NCR was marching into town. He probably didn't want to risk any of them getting their hands on what is basically a self-sufficient fortress right in the middle of his territory.
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Nov 26, 2012 05:56
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Is Lily's quest known for being bugged? I've followed the directions on the wiki and been walking around with her for ages and the recording just isn't playing. I remember it taking a while to kick in before, but not this long. Do you have to keep her as a companion for a certain amount of time without fast travelling or sonething?
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Nov 27, 2012 04:13
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But I think Crocker disappears from the game if you fail Don't Tread On The Bear, and you've failed that by the time you find out about the tumour. Edit: I have to try that Fort trick! Does it assume you met House and went into the Tops, or is the game adaptable enough to just roll with you finding the Fort before you've been to Vegas? Probably not, but that would be severely impressive. I liked how it reacted to the Omertas quest, where I was supposed to get rid of Nero and Big Sal and put Cachino in charge. I got Nero and Big Sal to shoot at each other, Cachino shot at them both, Big Sal survived long enough to kill Cachino and then I stepped in and finished Sal off. I was sure the game would tell me I failed because Cachino died, but it just went "hmm, seems legit, quest complete." 2house2fly fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Dec 1, 2012 |
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Dec 1, 2012 22:32
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The game itself has a go at you if you side with the Legion and have good karma. You can practically hear the narrator saying "really?" As for rationalising it, a good Courier could be taken in by Caesar's sales pitch. On the other hand, an evil Courier could be convinced that the NCR is too big to fail and will take over this area eventually, so it'd be better to help them out and be seen as a good guy, rather than hindering them and potentially provoking their wrath.
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Dec 3, 2012 06:40
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Typical Pubbie posted:e: I thought the Khans were pretty damned reprehensible. They supply the Fiends with drugs. The Fiends in turn massacre people like the inhabitants of Vault 3.
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Dec 3, 2012 17:40
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Vault 19? Yeah, that's a different group of Gangers who've been holed up in the vault all this time, so they aren't affected by Ganger Rep. Though if you help them it will raise your Powder Ganger Rep to Mixed, which is nice. Shame I'd killed every other Powder Ganger in the Wasteland by the time I found them...
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Dec 3, 2012 18:00
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No, use speech to make Beagle help you take out the raiders! He will get instantly killed. In my last game his naked corpse spawned inside the Vikki & Vance casino, which was embarrassing. Also, have NCR take over the town and then side with any other faction at the end. If you get a good rep in Novac, Cliff Briscoe will give you a discount. If you completed Boone's first quest you can tell Cliff you killed that person and ask if you can still have a discount. Yes, you still can get a discount! It doesn't really change anything but it's a delightfully assholish dialogue option. Activate Archimedes, fry the NCR. Go see Crocker and get forgiven. Then fry the president.
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Dec 4, 2012 05:34
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I think you can do that with the guy in Searchlight as well, who won't leave his house until you're killed all the radscorpions.
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Dec 4, 2012 15:49
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Yes, you can (and should!) turn them on at any time. The starting weapons from the Courier's Stash are pretty nice if you're a novice, but you'll find better weapons in the game a few hours after starting, so there's no real need to bother with it. The Gun Runners' Arsenal has some very powerful weapons, but they're very expensive to balance it out, and usually require mods (also expensive) to unlock their Full Power. The story expansions have some pretty high-level weapons and armour in them, but certainly nothing game-breaking.
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Dec 5, 2012 23:31
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Before I loaded the page I read "tumbleweed enemies" and was thinking of the Spriggans from Skyrim. Something like that would have been a fun OWB enemy. "Wegenetically modified the MIGHTY TREE to be controlled by a HUMBLE HUMAN BRAIN!" Their weapons would be flamethrowers and they would be found in the metalworks, where they would occasionally burst into flame. Ranger Chauncey is something I would have loved to see, as well as the super mutant prostitute. Although super mutants have no sexual organs, so how would that no stop don't ask don't even think about it
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Dec 8, 2012 23:08
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It is indeed. Also: my wife is playing the game NCR all the way, and when I told her the securitrons don't matter in the NCR path she figured she'd just blow up the ones at the Fort for Caesar. She did, and then went back and told Yes Man. His reaction was the funniest thing I've ever heard in this game, or maybe any game
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Dec 9, 2012 03:37
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If you talk to Benny right before Hoover Dam everything will happen pretty much as normal, though I'd guess his dialogue is a little different if House is dead. Also if you talk to Yes Man right after you could probably turn in all the Wild Card quests at once. Edit: that's a bit of a missed opportunity, thinking about it. The NCR path could have had Benny trying to get into the Lucky 38 after House's death, getting captured by securitrons or something, since House is the main obstacle to him taking over Vegas. Though I actually like that it's entirely possible to complete the game without ever reclaiming the package you lost or catching up with the man who shot you. 2house2fly fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Dec 10, 2012 |
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Dec 10, 2012 03:12
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I've done one vanilla playthrough, one playthrough with the DLC and one playthrough where I know everything pretty much and can do everything that I finally know for sure I'm allowed to(like keeping Dean sweet in Dead Money only to burn him to ashes with the holorifle after his revelation. It is SO nice to know I don't have to let that rear end in a top hat live). I THINK I'm ready now to put the game down for a good long time, but I thought that after the second playthrough too and a month or so later I was back in the saddle. Might be the best game I've ever played. It'll certainly make it hard to go back to Skyrim for the Dragonborn DLC.
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Dec 11, 2012 02:35
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achillesforever6 posted:Dean is awesome and I let him live every playthrough
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Dec 11, 2012 04:47
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I'd say the amount of experience in the game is pretty close to the amount required to reach the level cap, which I'm grateful for because my interest just drains when I stop getting experience. I got frustrated when I hit level 20 in Fallout 3 because I hadn't even touched huge chunks of the.map yet and there was so much more to explore, but I just couldn't be bothered and went straight for the endgame. In New Vegas I took the Skilled perk and went into the DLCs at about level 30, by which time I'd done almost everything in the main game, North Vegas, Westside, The Thorn,the whole shebang. The DLCs all gave me about 5 levels each and I hit level 50 as soon as I exited the last one, satisfied and ready to take on the finale. I think even without Skilled there's not much more than 35 levels' worth in the main game, excluding combat encounters. That reminds me, I know you guys hate how the game gets too easy and characters too homogeneous as you approach level 50, but I loved that after 80 hours of wrecking poo poo with Melee/Unarmed I could pump points into another skill for a few levels and become an energy weapons expert. The Holorifle is an absolutely gorgeous gun and all through Lonesome Road and the final main quest I just kept going into VATS so I could watch myself firing the gorgeous gun.
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Dec 12, 2012 23:15
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If Dead Money is pissing you off take the perks Fortune Finder and Them's Good Eatin' and also the perk that's like Fortune Finder but for ammo if you really don't want to use melee weapons. The Sierra Madre chips which the vending machines use for crafting are affected by Fortune Finder so you'll be swimming in them after a few minutes, and Them's Good Eatin' pretty much guarantees you a load of free food items. I think that only comes with Old World Blues, so be sure to download and install Old World Blues. Anyway, those perks make the whole thing much easier and defeat the point of the expansion as much as exploiting the engine to steal all the loot at the end.
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Dec 17, 2012 13:41
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It was in this thread I think where discussion of Lonesome Road finally got me to see the light about it. The Divide is basically a stand-in for/Chris Avellone's criticism of open world games like New Vegas and Skyrim, where you do a bunch of fetch quests to get money or experience and then move on and forget about them. That random farmer you killed for the Dark Brotherhood, who was he? What are the implications of his death? You the player don't care, you just did it to advance the Dark Brotherhood questline. I don't think it's necessarily woven into the narrative very well, but I love an RPG writer taking that attitude towards RPG quests. Kind of like how people in Dead Money keep talking about how the Pip-Boy dulls your mind.
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Dec 18, 2012 18:44
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Ulysses saw the Courier coming and going from the Divide and assumed it was the Courier's home from the effort they seemed to be putting into the place. I think he's also trying to convince himself that the Courier had more of an attachment to it than they did, because that'd make it easier for him to feel like they should be punished.
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Dec 18, 2012 21:27
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Eh, I wanted my Courier to remain a blank slate, to be honest. I'm a little annoyed that Lonesome Road gives you as much backstory as it does, since it locks your character into having spent 3 years or so couriering for the NCR.
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Dec 19, 2012 00:01
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It would have helped if the Divide came up more outside of the DLCs, I think Cass and Nash get like one line each about "wow, sure does suck in the Divide" and that's it. Chief Hanlon could have had a conversation option about it, since he's dropping foreshadowing for Honest Hearts anyway and the state of the Divide turns out to be pretty important to the NCR's situation in the Mojave. Having conversations about it would also give the player a bit of an opportunity to have a preconceived idea of the Divide in their head before finding out why it sucks so much. Of course the backstory probably wasn't worked out at that time, and they couldn't very well ask a bunch of voice actors back to record new dialogue. Still, in LR it was a crucial route east, the NCR and Legion both knew about and fought over it, and it's close enough to the Mojave that you can listen to the Vegas radio station. It's jarring that nobody seems to care about it.
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Dec 19, 2012 01:02
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Falls Down Stairs posted:If I recall correctly, the Divide is the only DLC area mentioned in the vanilla game at all, actually. All non-Lonesome Road DLC foreshadowing included in the base game is restricted to mentions of characters you'll meet rather than places to visit. Edit: about Ulysses, my first thought when it turned out he was after revenge was "well that's dumb, it clearly wasn't my fault, dimwit" and then it occurred to me that of course it isn't my fault, but he's got nobody else to blame. Whoever turned the drat thing on at the Divide died in the Calamity, and it was sent there in the first place by some random NCR bureaucrat. The Courier isn't responsible but the destruction of the Divide devastated Ulysses, and it's human nature when you're hurt to want to strike back. Except he has nobody left to strike back against, because it was a stupid, tragic accident. He feels like someone has to answer for it though, so why not the Courier who delivered it. I guess that makes him pathetic, but I've faced down plenty of badasses and genius schemers. Ulysses is that rare villain I feel sorry for, and I love that about him. It also clears up a lot of weird stuff about him: he didn't kill you because deep down he knows he has no reason to. He had you bring ED-E to him even though he could have done that himself because he wants to make you hate him, so he can justify killing you in self-defense, or maybe so you can kill him and put him out of his misery. 2house2fly fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Dec 19, 2012 |
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Dec 19, 2012 02:17
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Withdrawal Plans posted:My only real problem with LR is being forced to launch the missile that creates the Courier's Mile, The game does such a great job of letting the player choose a path everywhere else, but there you must perform that action in order to continue. And there's no information given about what pushing that button will do. Just felt wrong - why can't my character choose not to do it? You are given information about what pushing the button will do. If you try to open the silo door before pressing it a pop-up appears telling you that the base is on lockdown until the missile is launched, and you need to launch the missile to end the lockdown and open the door. It's launch the missile or turn back; those are your options. If you just pressed the button immediately when you found it because it's what the quest marker is pointing at then you're doing what Ulysses expected you would do. Though Ithink the followup dialogue options are all "I didn't know" rather than "it was the only way forward and gee I'm sorry that the destroyed city has now been destroyed a little more, bite me"
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Dec 19, 2012 17:06
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You got a bathtub in your presidential suite, don't ya?
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Dec 20, 2012 23:18
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I've started replaying 3 and I think they did a decent enough job justifying the state of the place. The old woman in Megaton mentions that there were intense dust storms which sound a bit like the Divide from New Vegas, and which seem to have only eased off in the last few decades, and Megaton was founded because it was in a crater and sheltered from the storms, around the same time as Fallout 1 was taking place in the West. Rivet City is probably pretty well protected from harsh weather as well, and those are the two main settlements in the game. The rest of the wasteland is full of mutated animals and people that were tough enough to survive the weather, which would naturally discourage people from settling in new areas, but there are some- Republic of Dave, Andale, etc- which could be seen as a sort of precursor to the tribes of New Vegas: communities based around some weird misreading of history or crock of poo poo made up out of whole cloth. It's not on New Vegas's level of course, but they thought a bit about the world building at least, enough to make me fine with the level of civilisation and settlement in the game. I guess I'll see how much ridiculous poo poo turns up that flies in the face of that as I go through the story. So far I'm annoyed that the Outcasts are the ones who have repainted all their armour and redone the whole structure of their society. They should be the ones calling themselves the Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood you end up joining should be calling themselves Outcasts and calling their bosses Protector instead of Elder or whatever. I guess they did it the way they did because they figured Fallout players would want to join the Brotherhood more than the "Outcasts".
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Dec 22, 2012 06:28
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The NCR has also started manufacturing power armour, which was one of the reasons for their war with the Brotherhood.
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Dec 23, 2012 00:37
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Good God people this is entertainment, who even cares what's "official" canon? They're video games, not the second law of thermodynamics. You don't like Fallout 3? Just go from F2 to New Vegas and pretend it never happened. Same with the Star Wars prequels, The Thing 2, Mass Effect 3's Omega DLC, and that new season of Arrested Development if it sucks.
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Dec 24, 2012 04:13
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Knuc If U Buck posted:I feel like I'm banging my head against a brick wall here. So what you are trying to tell me, is that because some dudes in business suits opportunistically purchased the intellectual property of the creators of Fallout, they then get to decide what is canon in that universe?
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Dec 24, 2012 05:15
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Yeah, second time I played Lonesome Road I took a load of mines with me and saved up a ton of satchel charges during the DLC, and then in the final room Ulysses waited patiently while I went around laying mines on every available surface. When the final battle kicked off there was a glorious cacophony of explosions. I never used mines before or after that, but God bless them anyway.
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Dec 25, 2012 08:41
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The only canon I care about in Fallout is plasma canons.
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Dec 28, 2012 00:15
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I've never seen or read The Phantom Of The Opera before(though in my defense I have read Maskerade by Terry Pratchett) and I was surprised to find out from my wife that it's about a grossly disfigured but well-dressed man who hides out in the opera house he helped build and improves the voice of a young woman named Christine. I wonder what other literary references I'm missing out on in this video game due to my lack of culture.
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Dec 31, 2012 08:57
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 17:03 |
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That's just Avellone breaking the fourth wall at you. Ulysses does the same thing in Lonesome Road. "In case you, my hated enemy, managed to talk me out of my act of conviction, here is a friendly message."
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Jan 2, 2013 21:48
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