f13.net

So, let's kick things off. Don't want to take explorer at level 20? You don't have to, here's a map with nothing highlighted. You can thank me later when you're a ninja. Spoilered due to size.


Any questions about quests or anything? Also, I suppose, if we find bobblehead locations, we should post them here, etc. Let's spoiler storyline and quest stuff though.

Why is DC such a sewermetro-addled hellhole? And has the guy that designed it been fired yet?

Well, the guy that designed DC has been dead for a while now. If you haven't been there, yes, it is a sewermetro-addled hellhole.

Oh, you mean Fallout 3.

Its realistic?

I could live with the damn things simply being there, but they had to go and put a giant pile of rubble conspicuously between every other goddamn building, forcing you to run countless sewer levels to get anywhere.

That's the "Game" part  :awesome_for_real:

It does get annoying. This game screams for a climb skill. But I invariably find much more ammo when I'm forced to look in every conceivable corner for everything.

Invisible collision is the hardest enemy in the game. At least (at least!) when you've discovered the stations you can just fast-travel from then on. And metro is just that one corner-ish of the map.

Anyone get some weird-ass apparel? I confiscated Robot Button Gwinnett's powdered wig and Lincoln's stovepipe (I need a monocle). The dress-up in this game is awesome. I am a raging homo who melts people with plasma.

Do you use a regular plasma Rifle or AN-32s or whatever it that droid was called? Because one is far better than the others. :awesome_for_real:

Plasma Rifle? How do I get me one of those? I got some cool Powered Armored but don't have the skill to wear them yet and am not sure I want to. So far the only time I've died in the game is when I got missile'd directly, but that was me being dumb. And I'm only level 5 so I don't know how much harder fights become. I've got a good array of weapons from the pistol which I've got about 62 skill in even now, a Minigun with a crapload of 5mm rounds, Hunting Rifle and the Combat Shotgun (and assorted other things including the melee weapon from Ant lady). So far I've been able to keep everything repaired from drops, but there I don't know if it's because I've avoided wasting ammo on moles and dogs and that stuff.

All in all I like the accountability of almost every decision in the game including how you dress.

Last night was eventful. I decided to finish up the main quest up until I could wear power armor after I did some unique climbing in a tunnel. I ended up with 2 full sets of Tesla Armor which I'm not sure you're supposed to have. Then I went to Paradise Falls and bought a slave. I didn't have enough money left after buying ammo all over the damn place, and I'm not quite ready to kill all the people there so I'm saving up to go back and buy the three children. You can't kill children in this game, but you can own them. Here's me and my whore accomplice in Tesla Armor.

I can't get my character to stay facing the camera on purpose! 

Why do you know everything?

That early on, I don't know. It does show up near the end when they start whipping out the gatling lasers. Which, by the way, can RUIN you in seconds.

Did anyone figure out the puzzle in the Museum of American HistoryTechnology?

There's a puzzle in the Museum of American History?

Heh. Pan around with middle mouse or whatever you have it tied to, and then hit tilde, it'll remove the gui and pause all the action on teh screen (tilde is console).

Fixed it above, but I meant the Museum of Technology.

There's a puzzle in the Museum of Technology?  :why_so_serious:

I'm guessing you're talking about the skyroom thingie?

(Ignoring the spoiler tag since the title has spoilers)


If you examine one of the first terminals you come across, there's a note in there about a guy named Prime who hacked some terminals to leave parts of an access code for his buddy to access a weapons storage locker area.  You then will find three terminals with options 001, 002, and 003 where you choose the correct number to advance that part of the code.  Once you have all three correct codes chosen, any of the hacked terminals will give you an access code to a safe with the key in it.  You can either quick save and choose each option until you get the right one, or, if I recall correctly, you choose the prime numbers.  You can also later find Prime at the meeting spot he mentions and get a decent amount of ammo. 

You'll also see references to their ongoing Imax type theater shows they had in the museum, including one about colonoscopies. 

Anyone know where the Tricycle shit is to turn in the Nuke Cola Clear Formula?

Anyone else find the crashed UFO west of Greener Pastures dump site?  Very cool.  My radio picks up a distress icon and I spend a few minutes scoping out the terrain until I see what looks like a crashed plane.  The damn thing's giving off 2 radiation per second, but there's an alien blaster there that has a damage rating of 56.  I'm leery of using it, though, because I'm fairly sure I'm not going to find any more ammo for it.

Does it use ammo or does it automatically recharge?

Also, just from your description, that sounds like the premise of the D&D campaign Barrier Peaks (which I never played but loved the idea of scavenging sci-fi with my caster-type).

No, it uses ammo.  I know this because that ammo is scattered all around the body.  Actually, the alien is wearing a pretty keen 50's style spacesuit.  I wanted desperately to scavenge it, but the corpse itself isn't searchable.   :crying_panda:

Alright, when you find Oasis (and I suggest you do), there are 4 options. Only spoiling the reward - and all 3 seem to be neutral results, here they are so you don't have to dick around (the dialogue is all crap, basically):


Edited the spoiler for more exact shit.

If you're evil, and at this point the game is giving me no real reason to be good - go loot the Outcast Fort - For Independence - there's a shitload of alien blaster ammo in the basement - you need a 100 in lockpicking to get there.

I was just a little ways southwest of Oasis when something blew up overhead. A couple seconds of searching around and I found 20 or so alien power cells and some blastery looking weapon called Firelance, or something like that. 80 damage. I'm guessing the alien blasters use the same ammo? I haven't found any more, so I just chucked the damn thing in one of my lockers.

Going to be taking my time with this one.

Melee is terrible, just like in Oblivion. Going to be going with Energy. Got my first Laser Pistols earlier, and melted a guy's face. It was sweet.

Abe Lincoln was a BADASS!   :ye_gods:

Hit up the second floor of the history museum for his repeating rifle.  It's basically like the hunting rifle, but it uses .44 ammo, and you can shoot 15 times before reloading.  This is my new go-to weapon.  I'm currently eradicating a group of slavers who wanted to buy it.

From my cold, dead hands!

(http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44543000/jpg/_44543795_charlton_heston_nra466ap.jpg)

This shit is slow going:

Also, lol:

You must have just not seen the shot, Straz.  The same thing happened to me the first time, so I reloaded and just killed him before he could draw.  No repercussions towards me, and I'm just ducky with the sheriff.

Am I wrong, or does Burke work for the Enclave?  'Cause that's kind of the vibe I got off of him.

Re:  Burke

He mentioned that but it doesn't mean it's even remotely true.

Yea, same happened to me. And something like 12 game days later, the sheriff is still lying dead outside of Moriarity's  :awesome_for_real: I didn't think to reload back then.

In general, I always find that when I get into the mode of try-something/oops/reload I generally end up quiting. Too much like God-mode to be interesting. But the story, side-quests and world are so interesting here that even if I do that (like I did through Minefield), it's only a temporary thing. Maybe I should have picked up Oblivion after all...

Re: Continuing after the main storyline is done. Nope, no way no how. Game ends, closing scene depending on good/evil/neutral, and 2 other choice you make. I think much like Oblivion, the main plot is the weakest part of the game, and interferes with the sandbox/exploration/serial killing aspects.

And trying to play 'neutral' is a fuckton harder than good or evil, with lesser rewards from what I've seen.

Well, the sheriff was not dead on the ground afterwards. I think if you activate the event in this fashion, Simms Has to die. Killing Burke on your own is a different story I guess.

Hmm, I killed Burke and afterwards Simms thanked me and told me he obviously isn't as fast as he used to be. I shot at him after Simms turned away but before Burke drew his weapon. He turned around and nearly killed me instead of shooting the Sheriff.

Nah, you can kill Burke after Simms talks to him and still have the Sheriff live, just pop VATS as soon as he stops talking, don't even wait for Burke to pull the weapon.

This is the spoiler thread. Why are we using spoiler tags?

Anyway, if you take the option of helping the ghouls overrun Tenpenny (You get a ghoul mask out of this that lets you walk by the crazy ghouls) Burke is no where to be found. They never explain what happens to him.

Because people might be looking for a specific spoiler.  There's a lot one might want an answer about, but not want to completely ruin the surprises.

If you didn't kill Burker for his hat (tee-hee), he'll show up in Tenpenny's Suite eventually. You can kill him then without repercussion from ghouls. Lying, Congressional Style will respawn on the desk when he shows up as well.

I hit VATS before his weapon was even fully drawn..

Oh well. I got the house either way.

Whelp just finished up. Fun game, defiantly worth my monies.

But WTF, GAME OVER MAN? I want to keep playing bitches! Just ending the game right there was stupid.

Lastly gotta love the plot devices. Brought Fawkes AND Charon to the end and they both feed me BS lines about it being my job to go press the button.

YOU'RE FUCKING RAD IMMUNE YOU CUNTS!

Just send the hero chick in, she whines, but you get to live. Game still ends though.

But that's the thing, it would actually be nice to see Lyon's reaction to his girl dying. Don't see how one can even TRY to guilt-trip a chap that just lost his father, but yeah, they dropped the ball with Fawkes and Charon. If you're gonna put something that retarted in the game, should've just forced 101 to party with Lyon and leave your followers at the base.

Guessing the sequel will have Maxson (or whatever's the name of the brotherhood boy) all grown up and joining the brotherhood factions.

I've spent... I don't know, 35 hours on the game and the main quest is so uncompelling I'll probably never finish it. I just... couldn't care less. The only reason to do it would seem to be the ability to wear power armor, and even then, you have to dig through the cave at Olney to get the good power armor. /shrug

Where is The Family? I found the three areas around Arefu, I found the entrance to the tunnel, gave Sugar Bombs to the Ghouls after they asked me, found and went into the radioactive manhole, killled the two Mirelicks, disarmed booby traps, exited to Mreski Station, killed some Raider there, got jumped by more Mercs, etc etc.

No sign of the Family. I thought they'd be at Mreski but now I'm wondering if I missed some turnoff in the subway tunnels. Sure were enough Frag Mine and Bear traps down there.

Foooort Constantine :oh_i_see:

You were close.  Must have just taken a wrong turn, so I'd go back and just try to follow those traps like a trail of bread crumbs.

The other prototype armor doesn't yell at you like the soldier class in TF2. Or at least, I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

Oh.

Despite being very half-assed, it's also very worth it to go to the

Bottom left hand corner of the map. Can't miss it really, also not QUITE the bottom left hand corner. See my first post in this thread, to figure it out. Be sure to listen to all the recordings and investigate fully!

Ok cool thanks.

And even then you still don't need it, since Reilly's Rangers gives armor that's far better for combat than any other armor in the game. +1 luck, +5ap, up to -40something d.r., and methinks some small weapons skills.

Plus, the quest is interesting, and the follow up pays loads of caps.

Flaming barrels tend to be the "follow me" indicator in the tunnels as well.

Well I finished it. I was also surprised that the game just ended. I actually liked the ending.


I do wish it had been done a different way so we could continue to play in the sandbox. There were tons of places I didn't go to. All in all, I was very pleased with the game and it really did have a good Fallout vibe. Out of this and Fable I found this game much more satisfying. However why the fuck could I not get married, have sex, whore out my wife, etc?

My only complaints are 1) Hard to get early followers and 2) Hard to get early power armor training.

I'm considering going through the main quest to the Enclave part on my next playthrough and then just doing all the sidequests in my armor and with Fawkes following me around. Also, since the game ends, what kind of DLC will they do? More sidequests?

How much of the game did you guys explore? I probably saw maybe 50% of the game.

Question: what about this title wouldn't give a good "Fallout" feel? I've seen in some other places that while people like it, it isn't a Fallout title to them. Is this biased love to the original F3 title that never was? Or something more subtle?

Humor, lack thereof.

Personally I love the shit out of this game, but that is the only point that can be made against it.

I'm not sure what you mean.  Are you saying that the ONLY thing wrong with this game is the lack of humour?  No, you couldn't be saying that!  Right?

There is some humor, but it's well hidden. And a lot of the side things seem, well half-done. Like the Dunwich Building. Really neat, builds up, and then nothing.

And the fact that neutrals get no housing sucks. Helping the ghouls into Tenpenny tower does NOT get you a room there. And once you rig the bomb in Megaton to assplode you can't disarm it. Fuckers.

Plus, stealing gives a karma hit based on bottle cap value of the items it seems. Steal one stack of 463 bottle caps, go from 'Paragon of the Wastes' to 'Pirate of the Wastes'

Am I the only person playing a good-natured kleptomaniac? Do the good quests, but steal everything possible (well, everything worthwhile at least)?

You are not alone.

At first I didn't think much of not being able to shoot children.  Now I really want a mod which allows it.  Or at least lets me smack them.  Some of these kids need a heavy spanking with a power fist.  I'll happily take the karma hit, even on my angelic characters. 

"Ha ha!  I'm immune, so I can be an even bigger ass than the most scummy people you'll run into."  Sorry sweetheart, you are not so awesome you can mouth off to the lady in sparkling power armor who is carrying weapons which literally vaporize what they hit.  ><

Kind of immersion breaking.  Maybe if that section had been earlier in the plot, where you're fresh out of the vault, it might have worked better.

More or less what I'm doing.  Well, was doing.  I'm trying to finish up my first play through now.  My next character is going to be gods-knows-what personality.

It's subtle, but it is there, and it's mostly dark.  Often through your dialog choices.  I'm fine with that.  It's much better than accidentally crossing the line and turning it into a pop-culture love-fest.

If you want blatent humor, talk with Moira.

Moira humor I find nothing but annoying. The first funny moment I remember is the guy sitting in the back left corner of the GOAT test. "What did you put for number 10?" Had a chuckle there.

The rest of it seems like gallows humor at best, whether Two Dog, the caravans, or that guy running the harem northwest-ish from DNR.

Now that I get the context of the Super Mutants, they don't seem slapped on at all. So the only thing now bothering me is the population in these settlements. Three people does not a town make. None of the places I've visited so far seem to have a shread of hope surviving. The only hope they have is stragglers from the outside, and they're all roughly in that 20-60 bracket. I've seen two children so far, and both of them are in Megaton. I hope one of them doesn't turn out ghey ;-)

I'm only level 7 though, and really, it's only a critique because I feel like I should have one or something  :grin:

Dunno if it was related, but when playing through the first time, I found I could kill the little shits with Biwwy's Wazer once I got it. Had the mayor open the gate then blew his mouthy fucking head off.

I'm finding it funny enough. It is kind of eye opening (as someone who found Oblivion mediocre) just how great a game you get when you introduce guns.

I forgot to sign in to XBox Live for the PC copy of the game when I initially started, so I restarted, but going evil this time.  It's an act of will being a complete dick, because I know I'm turning down quests.  On the other hand, it looks like I'm on the good side of Tenpenny this time, so maybe I've just closed some doors and opened up other ones.

I hate starting over, though.  I was level 14 when I started a new character.

:heart:

Definitely trying this out!

On the topic of humor, the funniest thing I have fournd so far.

I still think they should have let you shoot people in the dick and eye.

Ninja edit: Also, if you go evil, be prepared for some annoying random vigilantes coming after you. At one point I was so evil I walked out of a building and was staring at 5 guys all aiming at my face. I walked back inside and sulked for a bit.

Does Talon Company come after you if you're evil?

Jericho, in Megaton, is recruitable. You just gotta have a high enough speech skill.

This happens when you're good too but it's the Talon company mercs. I even went to their HQ and killed everyone, including their leader. The only change was they were labeled "hitmen" but not mercs anymore.

I wish I could find the S.O.B. who gave them the contract.

I got the feeling you had to be evil to get him and I wasn't.

I keep forgetting to check my Karma, but I've given enough Purified Water to that guy outside of Megaton and freed enough Super Mutant prisoners you'd think I'd have a halo by now. But I've gotten attacked twice by Talon Company. Both times they've helped me repair armor and weapons, but they still cost me ammo. Ammo! This stuff ain't free!

And what got me to wondering: do you take a Karma hit for merely opening containers deemed red? Or do you only take a Karma hit if you take something from a red-cursor'd container?

And is there some other reason Talon would come after you? Both groups had what amounts to a work order to take me out. They didn't look like how Vault 101 folks would talk though so I'm wondering if it's Enclave. And therefore I'm wondering if being a goody-two-shoes makes just as much of a name myself in the Wastes as being a bad guy would too.

Fake edit: Thanks Riggs. Good to know that, yes, the game is just that deep. I too hope there's an answer there. For now I'm going Enclave.

You have to be totally evil to get Jericho. All of the followers are overpowered btw.

Anyway, deep? No. Fallout 3 isn't deep. I've logged somewhere around 40-45 hours on this thing, and deepness is simply not how I'd describe it. It does have breadth though.

Talon company will come at you if you're good or evil afaict.

You do? That's odd. I was good from the start and the dialogue choice still appeared >_>
Might have something to do with having 9 int 9 char.
----
Only for looting, opening is fine, provided no one sees you doing it.

I got the impression that Talon Company is thrown at you by Burke, since he says that there would be repercussions, after popping a cap in Lucas. Since Lucas is alive in my game, and Burke ended on a ditch, I assumed that he had told someone that he hired me, and then, when he didn't report back, people just found out what happened.

Also, Tenpenny isn't evil, he's just batshit insane. Quite a nice guy, even says that he never ordered blowing up Megaton, only that he thought it made the scenery ugly. Burke found a solution.
Tenpenny also doesn't hate ghouls. Heck, he even liked having them in the building, would serve as fresh targets if they tried anything.

The dialogue choices appeared and he says flat out that you're not evil enough.

I've been killing everyone I meet, after I get what I need from them.  I did most of the quests in Megaton, then went back and mowed everyone down.  Figure I'll blow it up when I get to Tenpenny.  Even killed the droid outside of it.  And the begger.  And the caravan people (after I sold a bunch of stuff to the guy, repaired what I needed repairing, then put a few bullets in him and took all my stuff/caps back  :drill: ).

Good fun, other than having to restart it every f00king time I leave a town or building because of a memory leak.

Oh, does anyone know how to bring Walter back?  He's completely disappeared from my game and I have like 100 pieces of scrap to give him.  I don't need it so much now, but I figure it'll be useful if he disappears in other play throughs since the roommie had troubles, too.

Yea, I was just talking to a buddy about that. I have no idea what happened to him. Something like 12-13 gamedays ago he just stopped showing up. Are the pipes that secure? Was SnakeCharmer's killing spree so wide he capped Walter in my game too?

There is a ghoul in the Underground or whatever they call it that takes scrap metal too.

He walks around some.  I've been turning scrap into him for a long time now.  Sometime it's hard to pin down when he's going to be loitering or actually DOING HIS DAMN JOB.

So I managed to finish Replicated Man but I was wondering if there was more to the Android Railroad or if in fact you can't find the place or people at all. I remember the chick who came up to me about it: Victoria Watts. But I haven't found her at all.

There are a bunch of places like Little Lamplight that I haven't investigated further because I was just exploring. Vault 87 is interesting.

Also, I am so not finding many Bobbleheads. But I took a high Int High Skill points playthrough so all my skills are practically 100 now.

Victoria Watts is in the upper level of the Market in Rivet City. After this quest she doesn't do anything except say you can't be seen talking to each other. This android underground sounds like awesome DLC material to me.

Go to gamefaqs. They have a list of bobblehead locations. I had most of them by my teens and picked up the last few after I got the explorer perk.

Any sort of consensus on what the best weapon types are, or pros/cons? Obviously Heavies will blow the piss out of everything, but what about small arms vs energy?

Going energy at the moment, just wondering if I'd be better off with small arms.


Some really cool moments in this game though, such as :


And damn, I am so tempted to go up to heavier armor, but I love the armored jumpsuit I have that is +5 Small Arms/Energy.

I just make it a point not to get hit in the first place. Reilly's Rangers Armor works great (repairable by getting Talon Company suits) for me.

Though Power Armor has the "cool" factor.

No, he is completely gone.  I've been in every building.  Lapped the city multiple times.  Waited in his shack in short intervals for five day spurts.  Vanished, like abducted by aliens.

You have to.

You HAVE to do the main quest.

Why? Two words: LIBERTY PRIME.

No, really. You have to. COMMUNISM IS A LIE!

Totally awesome spoiler video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxA-tUXzMrI


Burke puts a hit on you if you turn his offer to blow up Megaton down. He mentions as such when he leaves.

I don't see how that has to do with what I said. Talon Company came after me and I'm evil and blew up Megaton. It's possible, but unlikely that they only started coming after I killed Burke.

Towards the end I used the Terrible Shotgun, a massively damaging combat shotgun I got from killing a raider trader in Etton Mills or whatever it's called. Fully repaired it does something like 70ish damage a shot. This was my in-close weapon. I also used a laser rifle, then later a plasma rifle. I noticed that my range with them was long, in fact, I could get headshots in vats from a longer range than I could even with sniper guns, or so it felt to me. I noticed that when I critted with my laser rifle it was pretty much instant death.


To respond to the above spoiler.

Yeah, if it was Burke that sent Talon Company after me, I find it a bug that he was able to after I took his fucking head off for killing Simms.

If you're Evil the Regulators come after you. With nifty trenchcoats and energy weapons. And whereas energy weapons suck early in the game, with proper perks (50% crit bonus, sniper, more AP, commando, and VATS refills on VATS kill) you become an unstoppable 1-shot killer. Nothing like 5 headshot kills in one VATS, and still having full AP.

Also, the sat towers in the upper northwest? Control bases for launchable nukes. Which are still viable. I went from 'Paragon of Humanity' to totally evil in one click. On the down side, there seems to be more radiation on the map now, and Fawkes keeps telling me I'm evil.  :drill: That said, I'm pretty close to done until mods come out for the game.

So you were actually able to launch the nukes??

On Mr. Burke:

On the ending:

I highly recommend raiding the Outcast fort. They'll start coming after you when you do that also :)

Basically, you don't have to go to Tesla and Power Armor, it'll come to you.

Eh, it isn't a huge stretch to imagine that Tenpenny sent someone to investigate why Burke was M.I.A, and that chap asked around Megaton, thus learning the story and placing the hit.

Yep, from one of the sat towers (launch code on the ghoul scientist) and from Fort Constantine, but those were ICBM's so I'm not sure just who I nuked with those. Damnit, If I can't have a home in the game, I'll try to blow up everyone.

Damn, now I have to play it again!

If you check the computer again it says something about a launch error.

Same. There is a "Megaton Settler" that looks a bit like what I think Walter looked liked. And I've seen Leo Stahl skulking in the Water Treatment room. But no Walter.

Maybe the Vampires of Merisetti got him.

Speaking of which, I like those guys. Yea, sure, they drink blood and were cannibals. But that's what the emergent culture did in one of those asteroids-hitting-Earth books from Arthur C Clark (Hammer of God maybe?), and their reasoning made the same sense it did with The Family. Shows loyality but in a group of relatively honorable people. Of course, that only makes sense in a lawless land ;-)

Fort Constantine they may have gone off in the tubes, as the whole place rumbled and shook and lit up for a few minutes, but the silo ones launched. Blew the hell out of several Enclave outposts.

<edit>
Also, if you want to act evil, and stay good, take the lawbringer perk. Nuked Megaton while neutral and became the Scourge of Humanity? 43 finger turn-ins will fix it. Killed and Robbed everyone, then nuked Megaton, then killed everyone in Rivet city via a stack of stealth boys and putting plasma mines in their pants, then shot up and robbed all the wandering traders? 60 fingers covers it.

Mister Crowley quest turned into a funny adventure for my playthrough. I couldn't convince him to tell me where the Fort Constantine is, so I decided to turn the keys over to him. Then he started to make a move, a thought came over me, maybe I should follow him?

I did. For a good 15 minutes he walked from Underworld, tagging radscorpions, supermutants, enclave with me and Jericho backing him up. There was one point he ran out of ammo, stabbed an Raider with his switchblade and took the fallen Raider's Flamer,....and put it on. Hilarious. A long trek later, we reached Fort Constantine and I said good bye to the partnership with a sniper round to his head. Took the keys and went to loot the Fort. Good times. Except Jericho had to die along the way.  :awesome_for_real:

That's fucking awesome.

Yeah the coolest part was when he flamed a radscorpion to death and muttered 'Good enough' and pulled out a cigarette to smoke on his right hand.

I had my first hit squad try to gank me last night. I dropped a couple mines and tore off into a pack of dogs, jumped on an old car over a fence, dogs pathed back into the hit squad and started tearing them up while I lobbed grenades over the fence. I love emergent stuff, makes games so much more interesting.

About the Vault 101 adult quest:

So I found Dogmeat.  I'm too scared to bring him along with me on my treks.  Is he actually useful?  Is it a pain to keep him alive?  Or is his benefit mainly just "holy crap it's a dog named Dogmeat!!!"

I have not used him, but my brother says he kicks ass. Not a liability at all.

Yeah.

I blew away her old man, thinking I was helping her. She didn't want to have much to do with me after that.

I think it is a nod to the ending of Fallout 1.

I recall someone saying they messed up by not adding their offices to the game.  I just wanted y'all to know, they are there.  Exploring them now.

I also had a hit squad try to gank me as I came out of a subway. We chat, and I immediately leap into VATS and lob a grenade at their feet...Bloody Mess makes this tactic even more amusing.

Anyway, I must have done this battle at least 10 times...the first few because I tried to fight "conventionally," but as time went on, I tried to do it as perfectly as I could...

Because the thing is, if I take too long with the mercs, a horde of super mutants happen upon us, and that's No Good. About 8 of them.

So now I just finish up the merc trio fast with 2 nades, and look down into a small park to see the horde of mutants loitering around with a captive. I toss in 3 nades, and that mostly takes care of them, finishing them off with a few headshots from my laser rifle.

Heh, nades in VATS is BS; you can lob grenades WAY further than VATS will let you. And they're great because you can still do good damage with a low explosives rating.

And one last bit....ya gotta love dropping a nade at someone's feet, hear them say "OH FUCK!!1!" and watch as they fly into the air, legs separate from their body.

I have a screenshot of a Behemoth (the locked up one in the raider main city) flying about 20 feet in the air from a VATS sniper rifle shot to the head... Wtf?

BTW, if I'm evil, can I enter that raider city without getting shot at?

Question (still feckin waiting for the box): how game-changing is to play good or evil? I mean story and event wise, would you replay it just to experience the other path, or it's not that significant after all? Would you say you miss some cool stuff (not equip) by playing just one path?

hmmmm not much. slave or don't slave.
kill or protect. let them die or give them water.
side quests are like that.

If you're talking main quest. I don't think there's much choice till near the end.

As I've said before, Bethsoft isn't the best at "shades of gray."

I stumbled across that graveyard/church, captive inside. Nobody around. "Hmm," I think. So I free the captive, quicksave. Follow her to see if she goes anywhere interesting, she just runs around the area aimlessly. Quickload, head back to the church and loot it. I heard a boom outside. Walk back to the road and hear the opening whine of a chaingun (my first encounter with one). The super mutants had left the captive to go chase a pack of dags down the road. Oh shit...hightail back to the church and hold off against almost a dozen super mutants plus the brute holding the chaingun. Then a centaur comes up from behind, followed by a pack of dags. Used up almost all my ammo, but I wanted the damned chaingun :)

Bonus blowing up some kind of tanker or something killing a couple of them hiding behind it with a nice hollywood-style explosion.

This game may be a bit light on the rpg but definitely delivers regardless.

Yeah, use exploding cars to your advantage.  I learned that after being burned a few times by trying to use them as cover.

HAHA after the first fire fight I had with a super mutant I realized that cars and trucks are NOT cover to hide behind. It even talks about them in the manual as being extremly explosive and oh boy are they and the explosion is a bit radioactive as well.

It works in your favor sometimes too, though, if you're fast enough. I had a Super Mutant Master bearing down on me with a minigun as well as two brutes with nailboards. I was low on stims and pretty beat up, too much so to just slug it out with them. There was a bus in between them and me, so I ducked behind that. The Master obliged me by firing his minigun into it and it lit up. I ran straight back from it, so that they'd keep coming in a straight line at the bus to get at me. Sure enough, just as they get to the bus, BOOOOOM. Bye-bye Super Mutants.

There is just so much lovely shit like this in the game.

It's nifty finding emergent behavior in the NPCs. I was cutting down the Potomac, trying to find this sewer that had an alleged plethora of Mole Rats. En route, I came upon some raiders exchanging fire with super mutants across the river. The raiders finally noticed me, and I had to dispatch them. The super mutants were way too far across the river for me to do much good shooting them without wasting craploads of ammo.

So I started to walk away. And here comes a group of hunter NPCs. Combined, we took those muties down. It was pretty rad.

On the subject of random attacks by mercs or Regulators: According to the strat guide, you get jumped at random when you're either "very good" or "very evil." Apparently, being simply good, neutral or evil doesn't merit hassle from random attacks.

When hacking, look for brackets like this (fdsfds) [sdfsdsdf] {sdfsdfds} Any time you see them, move your mouse over it and it'll light up like a word, click it and it'll either remove a wrong word, or give you your 4 lives back while hacking.

Playing as good, I went genocidal on the slaver's camp, killed all the slavers, then melted their leader.  I leave his lady slaves along, I start scavenging when I hear a gun shot.  I turn around one of the lady slaves picked up his magnum and gunned down the other one.

I would very much like to know the motivations behind that.

I've been playing the game for a couple of days and one thing that's annoying me a bit is that there doesn't seem to be alternatives built in for solving quests. For instance, in Germantown, the door is locked and requires 100 lockpicking. And I couldn't find a fucking key. What's up with that? Right now I'm in Vault 117? and can't get through a door because my science skill isn't 75. This is the most un-fallout thing I've noticed in the game so far, as iirc in fallout there were multiple solutions to almost every quest and you never got locked out because of a skill too low. Time to use a cheat code to set my skill to the level they want I suppose.

Other than that I'm enjoying the hell out of the game. The faces on the npc's are the best I remember from any Bethesda game and they've got the atmosphere down, imo.

The Germantown door you can get to by going through the Police HQ from the inside. So far that seems pretty consistent to me: doors you *need* to get through, if they have a high lockpicking, that's just because getting in at that point is the shortcut, and the longer version involves having to go through enemies. I dunno, though--there are some 100+ lockpicking doors that I haven't gotten into in facilities where no quest seems involved.

I think they can at least add on the following options:
Explosives on doors / containers (may blow up some of the stuff inside) and FULL ALERT, can't sneak for 15 seconds etc.

In the initial zone, vault 101 its possible to unlock the letter that is your mother's favorite passage.   Has anyone managed to do this and if so does it have any impact on the rest of the game?

I managed to come back and do it.

Nothing special, I think it was 300 credits and some shitty item. I remember opening it and being like /snore.

It has a schematic in it. (Rock-It Launcher)

So, as I said, some shitty item? :P

You're doing it wrong.

First, build the Rock-It Launcher, then head to the teddy bear factory and load up.  If you aren't enjoying yourself afterwards, then you sir are an enemy of fun.

Shitty as in overall effectiveness?  Well, you got me there.

This.

Near Steward Square there's a group of Mutants against a group of Talon Mercs. So I decide to take advantage of their distraction with a missile launcher. They both unleash on me with red hot instant death :-) So next time I wait until they're right on top of each other (the Mercs were winning) and Fat Boy them.

I like that in this game AI actually behaves differently based on race, style and current weapon loadout. Most of them are only armed with one thing but occasionally you get some dual- or tri-spec Merc or Mutant. But by the time I notice they're switching weapons for situations, I just roll out the Missile Launcher and that is that...

nahh, shoot their weapons off with the AK. Did it many times with or without VATS. That's why I always save my AP for those missile launcher toting mercs / raiders. That or just grenade them.

Every weapon other than the small guns, laser pistol, and plasma rifle exist for entertainment purposed only anyways.  Same with half the stats.

I don't care if half the things are shitty from an effectiveness point of view.  I have fun with them. ;D

All I know is that I scavenge Nuka-Cola Quantum, turpentine, and Abraxo Cleaner whenever I find them (tin cans you can find anywhere).  Screw that woman who collects Nuka-Cola Quantum, I got Nuka grenades to make!

What ?  Dammit, I've been drinking that shit.

How do you people learn this crap ?

To be honest, I can't remember what quest I got the schematics for that grenade from...  Maybe the survival guide quest?  Anyway, it's like a frag grenade x5.  Pure awesome.

x5? Really?

Good thing I've been saving Quantum. I can find the turpentine and the cleaner easily enough. I really want those schematics.

That's the bottlecap mine.

There are a lot of things to learn... plenty I still haven't found in fact.  Any given individual could spend months if they didn't use a spoiler site.

Finally got 1000 achievement points and putting this baby to rest. Not even going to start over and see Megaton come up in a nuclear explosion.

For you guys who were wondering where walter the water plant guy got off to:

Occasionally when you wait or sleep, he glitches and takes a drop off of a platform he's walking on, falls to his death unnoticed by anyone (you included), and is gone forever.

Also, please note that the lady who gives you the android part and tells you to just hand it over and say the android is dead?

She is trying to rob you from being able to have one of the infinitely better options available as rewards in the quest. End of story.

If you chose that route you were denied either the Wired Reflexes perk, the best plasma rifle in the game, or both.

Bleh. Where the hell were you 18 hours ago!  :oh_i_see:

I feel better about the decision I made though. And I think I've puzzled out who the android is.

Incidentally, for some reason the only time I can find those Pepboy statue things is when I read about them here. And yet I can't help but stumble over damned holotape in the freakin' game. I know the backstories of almost everyone east of Megaton, but I didn't know about the +1 Int in Dr Li's office until here. I've got a wierd attention span...

I just bought me a flamethrowing robot. Good game.

HAD ENOUGH, COMMIE SCUM? COME BACK HERE AND LET ME ENJOY MAKING SOME BASTARD DIE FOR HIS COUNTRY

As Lum said, Liberty Prime is worth the weak end to the main plot.

I was thoroughly pissed off by the dillemia put to me at the end.

"Oh shit! One of us has to go in there. It has to be either you or me (me being Sentinel Lyons)."

I look through the options carefully and didn't see any option for RADIATION IMMUNE FAWKES WHO GOT THE G.E.C.K. FOR ME IN A SIMILAR SITUATION standing right next to me.

GG Bethesda.

Fret not, if you try talking to him he'll say right to your face that you're the one that should kamikaze for the win.
Same with Charon, who's a ghoul.

It's still a lame cop-out.  It's my character, I should be able to choose.  "No, I really don't want some post-humous credit for this.  I would like to see my dad's work come to fruition.  So go hit the fuckin' button.  I'll meet you outside where we can share a cool glass of river water."

Yeah, you can do both.  It felt so satifying to blast that bastard after he gave me the perk.

Heh, I took a bunch of rad x and the chamber was doing virtually no radiation damage to me.  I took my drugs, I should have been able to live.  I hate unavoidable situations in games.  The three times weakest moments in this game are when your dad dies, you get captured by the enclave and when you die.  Taking the game out of the player's hands when you put so much of it into the player's hands just feels wrong.

And yet, I find myself playing still.  Went back to an earlier save and am having fun just roaming the wastes.  I thought Fawkes would get old, but his quasi retard screams keep me infinitely amused.

Kicking on VATS to slow down his air-raid shortbus yelling is what dreams are made of. Unfortunately his being a big pile of stupid mutant shit and blocking doorways is not.

On my second playthrough I got to level 20 just wandering around doing new quests and I still haven't discovered everything. I thoroughly enjoyed buying Clover and having her shoot, chop and wisecrack through several hundred pounds of raider meat. Can't wait for official mod support, although a few I found at Fallout 3 Nexus make things better (centered third person cam, UI shrink, music swaps).

Also: mirelurks. Nomination for worst enemy since any other crab-like humanoid ever. The Kings and NukaLurks were okay. Fucking crab battle.

I like the Mirelurks.  Unfortunately, I've just been given a quest that basically says 'Hey, remember you shot all those Mirelurks to death ?  Can you go back to their Lair and Not Kill Them ?'

GG.


I have to say that after initial annoyance, I love this game.  Really.  I think they did a lot of things right.

By the sound of it, more Freeform and Infinite levels would have been better, but I like it a lot.

I have to say, I don't generally react emotionally to video game stories, but the tenpenny tower thing really made me blow my stack.  I kind of liked some of those characters in there, but I felt a little sorry for the ghouls and thought they were getting a raw deal, so instead of either murdering the ghouls or helping the ghouls break in and kill all the people, I got Tenpenny to agree to let the ghouls move in if the residents were okay with it, and then I went around getting the residents on-board my anti-discrimination bandwagon.

So the ghouls moved in with the normals, and I pat myself on the shoulder for being wasteland Jesus and move on along my merry way.

Sounds more like a bug.  I hope.

This. I find myself daydreaming about doing conversions of the first two games to this engine, and I thought I'd never ever want them any other way but turn-based. I thnk they'd hold up really well (and you could finally have non-retarded NPCs!)

Uhh, the vendors said they were leaving. They were the staunchest anti-ghoul people in the building and flat out said they wouldn't live with the ghouls. "Where will I live?" I remember the general store lady bemoaning. One of the non vendors you "convince" decides to move into Burke's old place :why_so_serious: and I believe the aristocrat couple just up and leaves

Don't worry, killing them prior to getting the quest doesn't count.

So I get to the National Archives for the Declaration of Independence side quest. I like that the computer terminal in the lobby asks you historically accurate questions while the guy in Rivet City is all wrong. The part I'm not liking so far though is escorting whats-her-name through the depths of the Archives.

For one, what is it were her barely-armored self running head first into lasers and flame throwing? She's eating my Stimpaks!

For another, now the b*tch is trapped in a room because her AI code is interacting with some bad guys on the opposite side of the wall, which I cannot get to anyway. I'm thinking of loading a prior save and just telling her to stay put.

Is the pet/partner AI pathing a recurring issue here? I'll plan ahead if so.

Also, now in the Archives I realize that at least in the lower depths, while I'm loaded for Bear it's the wrong type of Bear. Stupid robots. I've entirely ignored energy weapons to this point (level 11). Are lowered-powered ones more effective against robots than much-higher-powered (as in, max repaired) ballistic weapons? Or should I just stockpile pulse grenades and pulse mines and finish them off with ballistics?

I talked to everybody on the ground floor about that, and most of them said they were okay with letting the ghouls in.  The woman who the slavers wanted said she was moving upstairs to hide out in Burke's room so she wouldn't have to see the ghouls, the couple said they were going to leave the tower, and so did the other shopkeeper.  

Everyone else, the doctor, the cook, the drunk, the old couple, Dashwood, the security chief and Tenpenny were okay with letting the ghouls in.  The first time you visit after you tell Roy in the sewer that he can move in, the ghouls and the residents are all living in the tower.  If you return later, you find out that Roy killed all the humans. Does anyone know if killing Roy for Gustavo keeps you from getting the ghoul mask? Or can you loot it off Roy?  Does killing the ghouls get you evil karma?

I was particularly annoyed because there was a freeform quest I wanted to check out where you reunite Dashwood with Argyle (they're the people the radio play is about).  But I went ahead and finished the game last night.  Ending was underwhelming.  I wonder how they sell an expansion with that ending.  They will probably just stick quests onto new areas and charge for them over XBL.

Teammate AI in this game is not very good.  They will also eat up expensive ammo shooting roaches and flies, block doorways, and get stuck on geometry.  But you need them anyway for their carrying capacity.

If Sydney survives, she becomes a useful ammunition vendor later on.  If she dies, you can loot the unique SMG.  But you can get the SMG if she lives by finding the holotape from her father in the Statesman Hotel during the Reilly's Rangers mission and giving it to her. 

Having a good extra vendor in Underworld is fairly handy later on if you want to vendor a lot of the valuable junk that drops.  Even with a companion, you can't lug around a lot of power armor suits and big guns. 

I was pissed when I shot Burke in the face after taking the Fusion Controller he didn't have his key on him.

I agree with schild - doors should be destructible.

Damaged energy weapons are, much like any damaged weapon of any class, horrible.

Just stockpile pulse grenades and mines.


Ahm, teammates have infinite ammo, afaik.

I sure as hell never gave shotgun ammo to charon or gatling laser ammo to Fawkes, and when i gave him a gatling laser at the vault and forced him to equip, he shot that thing at everything without ever running on empty.

The GOAT test even has a response about using Cherry Bombs to blow a lock!

The shopkeeps will also move out if you raid their safes.  Mine packed up and left and I haven't done anything about the Ghouls yet.

Losing the vendors isn't the beef; the ghouls replace the shopkeepers.  My beef was that I put in a lot of extra effort going around on my diplomatic hero trip, trying to convince the Tenpenny residents that their ghoul-exclusion plan was bigoted and wrong.  Turns out, bigotry was right and ghouls are, in fact, a bunch of zombie assholes. 

I could have solved that quest much faster by just shooting Roy in the face and leaving his corpse in his goddamn sewer.

I don't think energy weapons have a bonus against robots, other than the pulse grenades and mines.  Robots just have high damage resistance.

You can make them turn on each other by sniping their combat inhibitors.


Fawkes seems to have unlimited ammo for his gatling laser.  Charon definitely used up my bullets.  On the plus side, though, his gear could be upgraded, and he didn't get caught on geometry as often.  You would think they would have put more thought into teammate pathing before they littered the ground with all that crap.

I don't know how Charon used up your bullets. Maybe they use them if you give them to them, but I never gave my teammates ammo and they just kept killing and killing. With guns.

Yeah, if you give your teammates stuff, they will use them, but they will never run out of the default stuff they use.  I haven't given Charon one single shell, but he's been happily blasting away with that shotgun for a while now.

I have no idea about the other companions you can get, but I've been loving Charon to pieces.  Yeah, the pathing sometimes sucks, but sometimes its actually pretty decent, and overall its not that big of a headache.  At least when he runs off to kill someone, he actually manages to do it, and doesn't instantly die, like Dogmeat.  He's a fucking death machine.

I'm curious as to how many companions there are in this game.  I know that Butch can end up in Rivet City sometimes.  There's also Fawkes, Jericho, and Dogmeat.  Any others I don't know about?

I used Fawkes and Charon.  Charon went with me into vault 87, disappeared after the forced plot event, and Fawkes was waiting to join up, so I took him.  After I got dragged off by the enclave, Charon decided to go back to drinking in Underworld. What a dick.

I dislike that, after Fawkes offers early in the plot to fetch the McGuffin out of a room saturated in high radiation, he doesn't step up at the end of the game.  Between the pair of them, it really makes you want to stuff the FEV into the purifier.

there's a wandering robot guy you can buy a Mr. Handy companion from, and you can also get Clover the whore in Paradise Falls if you are evil.

Will companions ever rubberband to your current location if you get too far ahead? I could leave Sydney in that room for all I care right now. Her combat skills just leach stimpacks from me anyway and so far the robots have only eaten a lot of my ammo, not deadified me. But for the future I want to know what to avoid or to expect with other companions.

If you tell them to wait, they will wait where you leave them.  If enemies spawn or patrol into that room while the companion is waiting, though, the companion will engage, and potentially die.

I wouldn't worry too much about the stimpacks though.  With a little bit of exploring and sidequesting, I finished the game with like 150 stimpacks in my inventory.

Wait, so you CAN get a robot from that wandering guy?  I don't care if it sucks, I want it.  That fucker told me that the robot wouldn't like me, so no dice on buying it.  Do you have to have bad karma to get that one or something?

And Litigator, forced events like that tend to deactivate your companions, but not permanently, you just have to talk to them afterwards and they will follow you again.

EDIT: clarification

What, you mean you didn't commit genocide to punish Fawkes for being a coward? I sure did. Then sent Power Armor Girl in to die for her country. The end scenes were a bit down on me.

Robot requirement is annoying. You have to have *neutral* karma.

Did anyone ever encounter Uncle Leo? I saw that person once then never saw him again.

I think he's just a random flavor encounter.

He was probably pissed because you didn't say hello to him.

I may just be a dumb fucking twit but do I have to PiPBoy every time I want to change weapons? I skimmed TFM and didn't see anything about hotkeys.

Assuming PC version, in the inventory screen hold down one of 1 through 8 and click the weapon you want to be in that hotkey.

I can't seem to get out of neutral karma. Stealing everything I want and accidentally doing good karma quests has kept me neutral throughout the game.

The robot and the dog have pathing issues. As soon as I jump over some rocks they are happily capering off over the roads until they catch up on the other side, no matter how far it is. The dog tends to die if I lose them like that for a long time but the robot just goes on killing everything until he can catch up.

I lost the robot close to the nuka cola factory, twenty minutes later I'm sneaking  up to a raider roadblock and suddenly I see it lit up with flames and plasma fire. It was my robot that was coming from the other side, wiping out the roadblock. I followed the path he took to reach me for a bit and it was littered with corpses.
Ain't nobody messing with the sergeant.

There are some things that bug me, partly because so much works right about the set-up, stories, quests, etc.

1. If you're going to make an open world where players can do almost anything when they want to do it, you need a flag for when an important quest pivot has been killed. I don't mind the quest being unavailable, but I want the world to know it's unavailable and for NPCs to know when someone important is dead. If you fink out Burke to Lucas, Burke kills Lucas and then you can kill Burke without the Megaton residents aggroing on you--but then no one in Megaton seems to know that it happened, from what I can see. I didn't keep playing in that branching version, so maybe later there's some consequences? I assassinated Tenpenny the first time I met him when I was playing a good character, and nobody in Tenpenny Towers knew it no matter how many times I went back, and this made it impossible to complete the Ghoul quest as a good character. I'm replaying as evil now and I'm never sure what's going to happen when I blow the shit out of a town in terms of quests and such (I didn't explore the full map on the first play-through, on purpose).

2. You can spend a lot of time trying to do things that apparently can't be done, and never be sure whether you're right when you come to the conclusion that it can't be done. When I got taken to the Enclave base, I was partnered up with a Brotherhood of Steel character who had joined me. I think I pretty much searched the whole base after I persuaded the President to destroy itself and never found her. I'd at least like to know what happened to her. Fawkes is outside the base waiting, after all. I also spent a lot of time trying to free Nathan: it would have been nice if there was a way to do that (maybe there was and I didn't find it).

3. The AI on companions is indeed pretty poor...I find I tend to park them somewhere for a while while I sneak around and headshot most bad guys, just because they get in the way too much. At least they'll go into sneak mode when you do. Dogmeat gets killed in almost any fight if I have him with me. On the other hand, running cross-country to Rivet City with your father after freeing him from Braun's VR was hilarious because the asshole kept attacking everything with a tire iron while being impossible to kill. "If that's the way it has to be", he says, attempting to solo a Deathclaw with a tire iron.

4. Just curious about being evil: do the Raiders in the wasteland ever start to say, "Hey, here comes a fellow badass" and not aggro on you? I assume that you can get into Evergreen Mills as a friendly--it seemed set-up for that as I prowled through it and killed everyone while playing a good character.

He died to a radscorpian when I tried to follow him.  Here I am in decent combat armor and bristling with weapons and dad decides to milk the radscorpian's venom in his vault suit.

It's weird though.  Enemy AI seems decent enough, but NPC AI is terrible.  Maybe it's because I either kill things quickly or because I'm trying to move about for the best tactics, but ugh.  I hate having NPCs with me.

Has anyone left the President alive and finished the game?

Did you try to loot the corpse? Fairly certain it would say "unconscious", since even a generous dosage of shotgun shells to the head didn't kill him. Heck, not even a Fat Man shot killed him. Yet he dies from a bit of radiation.

Curiously enough, i *think* it killed Doctor Li. And her helpers. And everyone in the Science lab.

Yeah, the father just goes "unconscious" after he heads for Rivet City. He can't be killed at that point, no matter what. Same as when you're leaving Vault 101 in the very beginning of the game: you can't kill Amada, Stanley or the robot no matter what.

Some plot points that frustrated me slightly:

Did anyone else assume that Dr. Li was a traitor working for the Enclave? I thought that was what all the weird hesitation and reluctance was about, and that "I need to rest" thing--that she'd called the Enclave in when the project was working.

I see why the Brotherhood is so hung up about the Enclave in the last act of the game, but it would have been nice to be able to tell someone, "Hey, by the way, I know where Super Mutants come from." Plus nobody even blinks about the fact that I've got a Super Mutant following me around when I come back to the Pentagon.

If you play good and disarm the Megaton bomb, Burke just disappears from Megaton. As far as I could tell, he doesn't return. That seems a waste of a good villain.

Equally, I was a bit surprised that I didn't get *some* kind of dialogue-tree showdown with the Enclave Colonel who was responsible for the death of my father at the very end. I just tossed a Nuka-Grenade on him and his escorts, bang, no more Colonel.

The whole last act (from releasing your father from Braun's VR onward) feels rushed and full of holes compared with the languid, careful pacing of the main quest in the early part of the game. 

Also, another bit of weirdness: did anyone else get their face and facial hair completely redone as a result of sitting in the VR in Vault 112? After I'd gotten out of Tranquility Lane and I stood my character up, I noticed that he had a new face from when he went in.

You can tell that to Lyons. He goes lolwut and thanks you.

There is.
You can even let him walk.

I was able to talk to him. As with most other "talk them down" encounters, they seem to capitulate rather suddenly (he did have a longer tree than most).  They should have fleshed out dialog trees a little more in a lot of instances during the main plot and certain quests.  I felt it was a little too easy to get a speech win and the speech win almost automatically meant a sudden conclusion.


Yep.  My feelings were "ohh shit, they're already wrapping this up aren't they?".  Just too fast and too rushed.  There could have been a lot more side activities instead of just skipping to the end like they did.

Ah, I should have tried talking to more people before letting them activate the robot.

Same with not throwing a grenade on the Colonel. That's my bad, I guess. It reminds me a little of Deus Ex in that respect, in a good way. You get so used to be not allowed to do things that cause the rollercoaster to roll off the track that when you're playing a game, you assume that being able to do something means that you're not missing out on some narrative or sequence that's tied to the main questline.

I really did expect that when I got back from captivity in the Enclave there would be a bit more pacing with side quests before you were allowed to launch the climax. Say, that I'd be asked to go out and find some part they needed for the robot, or something else of that sort.

I really do wonder what happened to Star Paladin Cross after we were captured by the Enclave. Again, maybe something I didn't explore enough of, and there was some reference around to her fate that I could have found.

 

NPCs in your group go back to their waiting-around-for-you spot after that. So if you had Charon, he'll be back in Underworld, Dogmeat is hanging around at Vault 101's entrance, etc. Presumably Star Paladin Cross is hanging around the Citadel somewhere.

Yeah, that's what I thought would be the case, but if she was there, I couldn't find her.

Reading through the bug list at the Fallout wiki, I see one of the bugs I encountered many times--that when you rescue the Brotherhood initiate who is trapped in the building with Super Mutants, then his commander sometimes shows up outside your Megaton house when you leave it and runs away from you. At a certain point in the game, that happened almost every time I left the house, and occasionally it would happen when I emerged out of a Metro to a new location. It made me wonder whether there was supposed to be some kind of ongoing content involving these two Brotherhood characters (the commander is Paladin Hoss, the initiate is named Pek), say that they would occasionally show up to help me out in a battle or something of the sort.

I had a weird bug on the main quest last night. Somehow in the process of rescuing the kids from Lamplight to gain access to Vault 87, my quest status got set *ahead* of where it was supposed to be, so I couldn't get the kids to open the gate for me, nor could I get Joseph to hack the back door terminal. I had to use the no clip console cheat to go through the gate to proceed.

Also a word of warning, if you want to fully explore and/or loot Raven Rock, do NOT talk the computer into self-destructing.  :ye_gods: I think I cost myself a bobblehead in there. Guess I will be doing a 2nd full runthrough! I was going to have to do one anyway, I finally figured out the Windows Live stuff but it doesn't retroactively give you achievements you already did. :(

She was in the lab when I went there to start the end game.  Just walking around, so I suppose she could wander.  She was still wearing the helmet I put on her, so she was relatively easy to pick out.

I never did see or find Joseph in either of my trips to Lamplight, actually. But Mayor McCheese or whatever his name is opened the gate for me.

It's not just that you can't talk the computer into self-destructing: I think if you pass into the War Room, you can't go back to some of the earlier parts of Raven Rock.

I had a lamplight bug too.  Princess clipped into the gate and got stuck and then, when the mayor tried to open it, it didn't open.

wait, my PC fallout should be giving me achievements? SHIT.

Yep, log in with your xbox live info. Welcome to the yet-another-full-playthrough club!

F3 is my first contact with Windows Live achievements. What do they do for me if I don't have an Xbox?

Nothing.
And if you do have an xbox?
Nothing.

You should be able to use the icons for achievements you earn as your player icon.  I don't know why they don't implement this, except that they probably want to sell people icons.

Oh come on, now.  Don't we all have that crazy achievement whore acquaintance (I won't go so far as to call them a friend) who cyber stalks you and constantly keeps you appraised of how many points they've got because it's the only thing they have in life besides a fat, unemployed spouse?

Just me, then?

(http://card.mygamercard.net/f13schild.png)

Circle of Doom?  :ye_gods:

I can understand being baited by the promisse of more KuF goodness, but CoD is a failure in everything but art direction.

I think for my 2nd playthrough I am going to push the main quest right to where you get power armor and the enclave show up all over the wasteland before I go exploring. I went a litttttle too far beyond that in my current one and cut off some opportunities (like most of Raven Rock) so I'm going to leave a bunch of stuff I haven't explored for the 2nd I think. The maximum wandering-the-wasteland-fun point seems to be once the Enclave shows up.

Is anyone else getting randomly attacked by the Brotherhood Outcasts? I didn't think I did anything to piss them off. Is it because now I'm wearing tech they want?

I haven't seen that.  I even 'stumbled' across some of their power armor and they like me.  I haven't been given access to the Brotherhood Citidel yet, so I don't know if that changes things.  Did you invade their fort?

Negative, I even sold them some guns at one point I think. I'm wondering if it is because I am buddies with the regular Brotherhood.

Maybe.  I should mention what the guy says if you talk to him while in possession of Outcast armor is darkly humorous.

After wandering around doing random stuff, I decided to increment the plot forward by going to GNR for the first time. Really nice change with the NPC's dialogue and fighting through the super mutants with a brotherhood unit.

Will I ruin any more plot if I do Rivet City stuff without moving the main plot forward from GNR?

I'm still level 10 on my first playthrough :) And I've been playing alot, in my view. You guys are nuts :)

Might as well do the main plot through Rivet City since it takes you there.

Going to Rivet City is a good thing to do. Just don't advance the plot beyond that: it accelerates pretty quickly into the final stuff if you don't make a conscious decision to stop, and if you're feeling really immersed, stopping at some of the points where you have to stop feels like walking out in the middle of a crisis--the first time you get to that stuff, it may be hard to stop when you need to.

I have found a rotted out barn that is a ways left as you leave vault 101 that has a few random encounters associated with it.  So far after loading and reloading I have seen the following:

1.  Temporary background radiation hits you as you enter the area, an Enclave member in Power armor is firing at something in the distance, a large explosion knocks him flat.  Scattered about the barn is 7-10 "ammo clips" of the alien power source for the alien blaster I presume.

2.  A person comes up to you and is using the survival guide you make to enrich themselves in the wasteland.  You have the option to tell them you made the guide which gives you money, or you can tell them that you know nothing about the guide an they give you a guide.

3.  A pack of animals attack you and you get a mininuke in the barn.

4.  Two wastelanders fire at something in the barn.  As you get closer  a deathclaw comes out.   If you kill the deathclaw before the deathclaw kills the wastelander, they tell you they are hunting for treasure and have found the "mire king's" treasure location.  They said after tangling with the deathclaw that they have no intention of fighting the mire lurk king for his treasure and give you the location.

5.  One Wastelander kills the other and when you talk to him, he tells you to move on.  There is a mininuke in the barn

6.  You pick up a chinese radio broadcast.  When you get to the barn there is a corpse on the ground with chinese gear on it.

7.  A guy with robots kills a pack of dogs/mole rats.

8.  An enclave eyebot floats in and there are two people in the barn that basically tell you to move on.  There is a mininuke in the barn.

9.  Three raiders emerge from the barn and fire at you, there is a mininuke in the barn.

Yeah, there's some nice randomization in the game. Even small encounters, I had one section where there was a pre-scripted bandit base that had a lookout with a rocket launcher that blew my legs off and a pack of feral dogs nommed my face. Just before that I had traded with some random guy and his dogs after helping him kill a robot. Reloaded, hiked back there and there was a standoff over some water between wastelanders and slaves. Reloaded just for fun and got jumped by talon mercs. I could almost hear the DM rolling the dice for the random encounter table, it was pretty cool.

I fact that people save and reload over and over boggles me, but I guess I just don't have that kind of time.  My best fun last night was waiting for Moira to wander upstairs, one-shotting the merc and then stealing everything on site. I had so much good Karma I was still good afterwards. It was like UO in the old days!  When Moira came back down, she was as friendly as ever.

What kind of time? It's an instant quicksave + almost instant quickload (instant after the first reload). You boggle easy.

He did it 9 times and explored the spawn enough to find the loot. 9 times! I am not faulting him I just would never even consider reloading a random encounter 9 times.

So was anyone else disappointed with the conversation with President Eden?

"Do this for me."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you're evil, and a machine, and you're wrong."
"Oh, well since you put it that way..." *self-destructs*

That was paraphrased, of course, but not at all exaggerated.  It really doesn't get more specific than that.  It would have been more convincing had you told him to 'divide by zero' or something equally trite.

For some reason I am still clinging on to the idea that maybe I have yet to find a ending to this game that doesn't actually END the game..

Why in the hellfuck does the game roll credits and actually end?
I want to know!

And the point in time that it ends too.. wtf.. over some water? Its not like the enclave would suddenly vanish had the water "fallen into the wrong hands"...
These guys got fucking mech suits and choppers with nearly unlimited dudes.. Its not exactly like turning the water purifier on would suddenly cause them to vanish.

And its odd to me that the entire plot device is not that we were fighting to turn the water on but rather WHO gets to do it!?
Your dad pretty much says OMFGPWND LOL as he dies just for the satisfaction that he kept them for doing the exact same thing that he intended to do only moments before?

And whats this shit with Fawks explaining how he is immune to radiation super hero++++ invulnerable omfgroflmao you-can-depend-on-me radiation man telling me that its my job to go and die in a room filled with radiation!!??

Another slight thing I noticed is that the enclave seem to be against mutants and such. However they have no problems with using them either. I suppose it kind of makes sense. Or for that matter we don't even really know if the deathclaw mutants even need to drink water per say..

IMHO I am just a little peeved that the main plot didn't end in the same vein as the ones in oblivion did. I like wandering the wasteland building my dude and exploring while I wait for them to release the construction set or an expansion. Well that and they also messed up on the pacing when it came to the ending sequences and how they were timed a bit. It caused the whole thing to feel anticlimactic because of how it was done.

The scripting during the last battles was a little canned for my taste too. Oh well, as they say, when a good game becomes Half Life....
Overall great game... but yeah...

I think I'd have been more satisfied at the end if there was a longer "Where are they now?" extension of the narratives based on your choices in some of the key side quests.

For example, as a good character, I spread the stuff on the tree heart that would cause Oasis to expand. I blew the shit out of slavers all over the map. I helped Reilly's Rangers. I killed enough Raiders to build a second Tenpenny Tower out of their corpses, including pretty much destroying Evergreen Mills. So...what happened because of all that? etc. That could be fun, to hear a story of the Capital Wastelands over the next twenty years that derives from the player's actions. You get a little sense of the possibilities if you go back to Tenpenny Towers after helping the Ghouls to move in peacefully, and discover that all the anti-Ghoul people were basically right.

But yeah, the climax itself also just feels kind of wrong. Fawkes' refusal to go in is just stupid...I'd rather it were based on something. Say he finds out you had the FEV virus and didn't tell him about it, and so he says something like, "We have worked together, but now I don't know to expect of you." Or a scripted event that has Fawkes seriously wounded and unable to go in, so somebody else has to do it. And yeah, it's also annoying that you can load up on Rad-X, put on your best anti-rad suit, and not have any problems staying alive until the code is entered and then blam, you're dead. It's not like the alien crash site, where it doesn't matter how much protective shit you're doing, you're not going to survive very long.

I see that as an acceptable playstyle. That's the great thing about more sandboxy-style games, the gameplay isn't always evident or what it's "supposed" to be.

Sometimes in Far Cry, I'd reload over and over just to try different ways of attacking enemy outposts, because it was so much fun and they reacted differently with all kinds of great unscripted action unfolding differently each time. To me, that's the hallmark of a truly good game.

Yes. It's so rare that at first you don't really believe you've got a game that does it right. So in Fallout 3 or Far Cry, I've done exactly this--reloaded some encounters just to discover that I can do them different ways, and that the outcomes are not inevitable. I attacked a big Talon Company fort in my first run through and got hammered by a missile launcher merc behind sandbags that I could quite nail quickly enough several times. So next time I circled around and tried hitting the fort from a high-ground ridge behind the fort. That worked pretty well but I still got pretty beat up. So then I just ran hard for the door into the underground of the fort and worked it from the inside out. I could have won (or died) in any of those styles, or more--there weren't any rails I had to ride on, no single strategy that was required, just a few basic core facts to consider (missile launcher, fairly concentrated group of mercs in the core surface area, underground that was accessible at several points).

This is what happened in the original games. You got a breakdown by city about what your actions did for that city. Whether you turned it into a wasteland or helped make it a paradise in the wasteland or even in between. I usually got the middle road endings because I'd forget to track down some mutant outpost and wipe them all out. In my first Fallout 3 playthrough I wiped out Everygreen Mills, every Super Mutant base I found and Paradise City and couldn't find any differences.

Yeah, that's what made me think that this was missing from this game. For something which so closely "got" the narrative appeal of Fallout 1, I was surprised that this one aspect of the finish was missing.

Console command codes for companions.I just cut and pasted this from Fallout Nexus. (http://www.fallout3nexus.com/) Just press tilde to get the console curser.Only worked for me if I did it while the game was running not from the menu screen.

IF YOU ALREADY HAVE DOGMEAT AS A COMPANION AND WOULD LIKE TO KEEP IT THAT WAY - open the console and type "setessential 0006a772 1" Dogmeat is now invincible. Don't shoot him or youre in trouble!


IF DOGMEAT HAS PREVIOUSLY DIED AND YOU'D LIKE HIM BACK AND INVINCIBLE - open the console and type "player.placeatme 0006a772 1" then while the console is still open, click on dogmeat to select him and type disable. This is important because he will spawn with errors if you dont do this. Now repeat the "player.placeatme 0006a772 1" and then type "setessential 0006a772 1" Voila! Dogmeat back and unable to die.

This will work with all companions and their codes are the following:

Fawkes: 0003D34E
Seargeant RL-3 : 00094867
Charon: 000156f6
Star Paladin Cross: 000156e5
Jericho: 00000a71
Sydney: 00003a22
Clover: 000156a2
Butch: 00027f65

Cool, thanks. Just met Charon last night.

You'll like him. He's an 'in your face' kinda guy.

And he's a hardy one, too.  The only thing he can't handle by himself is multiple deathclaws.  Other than that, when he goes off on his random vigilante sprees, as the companion AI is wont to do, instead of worrying, you can just smile quietly to yourself.  He even sneaks well.  If you are hidden, he will usually stay sneaked with you until you make the first move.

The scene after you first hire him is  :why_so_serious:.

Yase, Charon is awesome. And he doesn't require any kind of special karma bullshit, he'll work for anyone.

That said I have ended up replacing him with Fawkes. We'll see if I ever get tired of his voice stuff - so far it cracks me up every time. He sounds like Barney from the Simpsons gone horribly wrong.

Speaking of console codes, I hope everyone knows it's like Oblivion you can type save mygame and it will save your game named mygame. No more having to page through the random names it saves games under.

Eh, I always makes sure the thumbnail is descriptive of where I am and what I'm up to. Still, good to know.

A cross between Barney and Brak.

I finally finished my first full playthrough last night. It was kinda a letdown that, as mentioned above, they didn't do the Fallout 1/2 thing of narrating how your actions changed the wasteland. It seemed to be just a few areas of divergence, depending on your karma and what choices you made regarding the FEV vial and dying in the radiation killbox.

Compared to the Oblivion ending, it felt a lot less... epic. You got a huge dragon spewing particle effects everywhere and then a huge explosion and boom, world saved. In fallout, following Liberty Prime around was awesome because of his dialogue and eye lasers. Pretty epic! But then you walk inside, breaking out every bit of super-high-powered weaponry that you've been saving and... blow up 4 Enclave dudes. And then the Colonel. And that's it.

MOTHERFUCKER WHY DID I HOARD ALL THESE NUKA-GRENADES AND PLASMA GRENADES?

It's the antithesis of epic-osity.

More importantly, the Colonel, who's already dead, when your father killed him with radiation earlier.

SO MANY PLOT HOLES....   :tantrum:

Mine was even more retarded.

The first time he dies, I noclipped though the door to steal his shit (cool coat), and let him live when he came back.

So I'm finally far enough in to the main plot to take a look at this thread.

Have to ask, did anyone else find it retarded that Eden gives you this huge speil about his plan to rid the wasteland of mutation and all, and then you you pull out your Jedi Mindtrick Speech skill, and convince him to blow himself and all the Enclave up instead - with a single line of dialog.

Second problem with that whole thing - Eden wants me to poison the purifier to kill the muties, Colonel Autum thinks that's too extreme. I actually agree with Autum. So really, the whole point of the end game therefore, is me getting revenge on Autum for killing Dad? Cause really, who gives a shit who turns the damn machine on?

Oh, and I found my favorite new toy - the Waser Wifle.

Not only that, Autumn's goal mimicked your father's goal.  :uhrr:

I say that your father survived, hence why no corpse, and he'll be kicking bhramin in the inevitable xpac, where, y'know, hopefully bethsoft will bring someone from the original game to write the plot.

So if Autumn didn't die, and dad didn't die, why did I need to fry myself to turn the damn machine on?

That at least could be explained away if Eden was just feeding you lies about Autumn in order to get rid of the someone dangerous to his own position. The Enclave always wanted to exterminate all of the "mutated" life in order for America to be reclaimed by the Real Americans, so I don't think Autumn suddenly found his conscience. Some internal power struggle for which the player was a convenient tool seems more likely.

Although it still doesn't explain how he survived...

I don't think there's anymore explanation than 'poor writing' or perhaps 'We ran out of money to pay Liam for more voice work'

You didn't. You obviously sent the woman to her death, or, just like daddy and autumn, you survived, only you're now part super-mutant, part cyborg, part human, part ghoul, all awesome.  :why_so_serious:

Fun fact: Fawkes is a girl.  Enjoy your nightmares!

Is there any repercussion at all for killing Mr Tenpenny? I saved, killed  him, and the proceeded to walk around unmolested by guards but I don't want to mess up a major plot arc. I already got my money for exterminating the ghouls.

If you've already done that and blown up Megaton (or refused to), there's no point in leaving Tenpenny around. Those are the only two quests I've found associated with him, and murdering him doesn't seem to have any effect on the tower itself.

There is one quest that actually involves killing him, but it may be that you pick up the item you need from his corpse regardless of whether you have that quest yet or not.

You don't need any item from him. You need to shoot him in the head.

The slave escort quest has destroyed my will to play this game.

My god, it's awful. They wander around everywhere at the slowest pace, and I'm over near megaton somehow. I think they're totally lost. This buggy piece of shit quest just made me throw my hands up in frustration. Maybe I'll take a second look once this game is less shit.

You do know that you can teleport to.. i'm assuming little lamplight... and they'll follow you there instantly?

I just went off and did other stuff and came back in a couple of game days and they were already waiting for me at the Mall station. End-o-quest.

Yeah, whenever you have to escort anyone anywhere, do not actually do it.  Just fast travel.  That fucker Hannibal took me on a Grand Tour of the Wasteland, and I was lucky enough to have the alien crash during it, so while I was running around snapping up power cells, guess what magically appeared on Hannibal's hip? 

I tried fast traveling but he vanished and I couldn't find him anywhere. Maybe he was near the mall metro, I'll have to check it out. Maybe I'll just forget him for a while and come back later.

It took me a while to notice, but they all camp out about three blocks away waiting for you. You would run right by them if you came in from the station, but if you fast travel to the memorial, you miss them completely.

They take about half a day to get there, and they show up at the north station nearby.  They also stay there until you talk to them, so if you are waiting at the monument itself, you might not notice them.

I've been told that fast traveling during escort quests (the ones in which the escort isn't tied to you, as how your father is) essentially leaves the escort to his own wiles in the wilderness.

I've been doing the escort from the Temple of the Union to the Lincoln monument, and if I skip out on them, they never show up. After trying a few times, I found out there was an Enclave detachment far down the road which was trapping them up.

It's the slowest and worst escort quest in the entire game, and it doesn't even give you the courtesy of making the quest official by giving the people a compass icon to track. Goddamn these slaves

I've done that quest twice now by fast travelling.  Granted, both times I did it were before I triggered the Enclave, so maybe that becomes a problem.  Still, kill Enclave, then fast travel, then sleep at the memorial for a day or two and they'll show up at the metro exit.

I know you people already wrote it, but words couldn't prepare me how much bullshit the ending of the main quest was. I was taking less radiation than drinking from a toilet, and yet I sacrificed my life? If you want to kill the protagonist, fine. But at least make it believable. Jam the door and let him drown in the purified water, let him slip and break his neck when he turns around to do the Terrorist bump with Lyons, let him choke on his victory meal.

That almost ruined an otherwise great game for me. Instead I'll go evil and blow Megaton up now.

A good chunk of the dialogue and story is equally stupid. But ya, the ending of death by radiation when 60 mins previously they introduce a radiation immune henchmen is pretty bad.

I promised myself i wouldn't play this game for 6+ months so it was properly moded but i couldn't resist. Superior to Oblivion for certain but still contains many of its flaws. The biggest ones being "everyone can do everything" syndrome that i hate. No choice in character creation matters. No skills outside of 3 will have an actual impact on your game. And you can easily max each of those out at the same time. And the auto scaling world is still present if improved upon. I killed a 2 brute super mutants fresh from the vault at level 3-4 with a hunting rifle. They had a super sledge and a chain gun.

And at no point did i encounter any situation that was difficult to either avoid or outright destroy and i was playing it on the hardest difficulty (Slowly turning it up as i played)

Not to mention you can become almost invulnerable to radiation too through perks and chems.

On Escort Quests: i've done "Temple of Union" with fast travel, but did Dad escort from vault to rivet city all by feet (i didn't know i could fast travel lol).

On general difficulty level: i'm doing another character that only uses melee to try something different and explore the rest of the world...unluckily enough, even if he's named "Chuck Norris" and it's almost identical to him, you can't roundhouse-kick anyone in this game  :oh_i_see: And even more boring, you can't aim locations while in VATS with melee and hand weaponry...quit disappointing.

Still, a lot of stuff yet to discover. This game has some really surprising encounters.

The ghoul mask kinda trivializes the zombie building with the Cthulhu overtones (forget the name). Also, I think my wanderlust messed up another quest, since there seemed to be a lot of build up for almost no payoff. Cooler than a random dungeon, but I did have to wonder if there was any actual point to it.

I also find it ironic that the explorer perk is supposed to show you all the locations on the map. Wouldn't an explorer (like me) find them all by EXPLORING THE MAP? Odd.

Ghoul Mask? Still got some exploring to do it seems.

You might've already destroyed your chances to get it. It's the result of an alternate option during  the Tenpenny stuff.

Well, then I'm in luck. I avoided Tenpenny Tower and am just now making my way to the Ghouls. I don't trust them yet and weighing my options, the one I met makes their going into the tower sound like decoy plan to kill all inhabitants.

yeah, you know it's a sad day when you realize that you've alredy blowed up mr. Tenpenny's head, but you still want to try and help the poor ghouls guys.

A nice bug on this quest: after killing tenpenny, i've got friendly reaction from anyone on his tower. After killing the ghouls and coming back to tower, i've had 2 guards hostile: they see me, everyone turns hostile. But when i've sniped them being "hidden", everyone remembered how much they love me and remains friendly. :why_so_serious:

*EDIT for "blowed UP mr. tenpenny's head"

(http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k15/mprose/FO3/ScreenShot175-1.jpg)
Where are these gigantic ASSHOLES going?  :mob:

A mirelurk party?

We walked from the temple of the union alllll the way to Andale. Then trekked due east past the Brotherhood of Steel base to the area where the forcefields were set up around Project Purity. He milled about for a minute before returning to the BoS base and heading north. 3 of them plunged into the river and swam until Rivet City. The other 3 waited on the banks until the first 3 were out and then followed suit. The Brahmin took the overland route because he's not a jerk. At this point they entered the sewers, and my work was complete as that's much easier to clear out and control before they are in danger. From there it was smooth sailing to the Abraham Memorial. Thank God.

Now that it's over, it was all kind of cool. Probably the hardest part of the game for me so far because it was a different play style. I had to act as a scout and range ahead of where I reckoned the group would be headed, and clear it out of raiders, regulators, the Enclave, and Deathclaws. Sometimes when clearing out one group, I'd get the message informing me that the caravan had been annihilated to the man by an entirely different one. Frustrating at times but overall pretty cool. I had to reload so many times to save that suicidal dog, Four Score.

I've run the main storyline as far as what I suspect is almost the point of no return.

Some general comments:

 - The hellgate devs need to take a look at this game, Fallout 3  is the only game I've ever played that genuinely evokes the feel of a real city; Hellgate felt nothing like London, but this genuinely captures a lot of DC and Northeast Virginia. They only lose points for not making enough of the masonic heritage of Washington, which should have been an obvious resource for the Fallout story.

 - Why is it so hard to turn the good vs evil decision into a real challenge? We're in boy scouts vs baby-eaters territory - just like always.

 - The decision to allow Dogmeat to die (rather than simply fall unconcious) was made by a moron.

Trying to keep Dogmeat alive is a time-honored Fallout tradition. Heck, it may be the most Fallout-y thing about the game.

Heehee i don't even to think that much to make it more interesting for dogmeat lovers.
Just have the mutt get badly injured and incapacitated. Then you can either use stimpack on the poor mutt or carry it on one arm to the nearest doc while wielding a pistol.

Dogmeat was probably the worst part of the game for me. I've no connection with him and he serves no purpose to me, aside from giving a reason to break stealth to rescue his dumb ass when he charges into a room of supermutants or tries to solo a deathclaw.

I first made him unkillable and then simply sent him back to the Vault while I had fun. After a while, Charon got the stay-at-home treatment too.

I forgave Fallout 1 and 2 for having an absolute shit party system because they came out a decade+ ago. What is Bethesda's excuse?

It's like having an escort quest that never really ends.

Wow, ashrik.  You mean they actually do end up at the Lincoln Memorial if you follow them long enough?  After they took me waaay west of Vault 106 I just figured the script was broken and they would wander the wastes forever until I fast travelled to Lincoln.

Agree about Dogmeat.  I love dogs.  I love having 'companions' in RPGs, even if they sometimes need some shepherding.  But fuck if he wasn't anything but a burden.  I got no satisfaction from him at all.  I leave him at home with a bowl of strange meat in front of him, and otherwise ignore him.  At least Charon can aquit himself when he breaks your stealth and flies off the handle.

I haven't seen it mentioned much, but one of my favorite parts of this game is President Eden.  Liam Neeson phoned it in, but damn if Malcom McDowell doesn't sell every single line he utters.

"Of course I was elected.  Sweet America.  Of course."
"I'm John Henry Eden, President of the Enclave, President of America, President... of your heart."   :awesome_for_real:

You can run it all the way up to Take It Back! without a problem.  In fact, I think (save before because I'm not 100% sure) you can do everything up to entering the rotunda at the very end and you can still walk away.

That's right.

Dogmeat does have a 'special' use. If you kill him (or he gets killed) you free up the second companion slot. That way you can have both Fawkes and Charon as companions. I don't know if it works out with the other companions since I'm currently having a blast running around with these two.

I've already installed and used a mod to let you continue past the end of the game. Works pretty well as far as I can tell. Most of the Citidel is useless, because they are too busy cheering for you to go save the day to do anything else, but all the other areas seem to work.

I'm not sure if this only works with Charon, but Star Paladin Cross will join you even if you have him already.  No Dogmeat euthenasia required.

He will join you when you have Dogmeat, but will he join you after you have both Fawkes and Dogmeat as companions?

Sure, and then Danny Bonaducci joins and you unlock the psychedelic bus.

That's one achievement I wouldn't mind missing.

I'm not sure what permutations are possible, I haven't tested any, but I had Charon and a living Dogmeat as active companions and it still allowed me to pick up Cross.

On my first play-through Cross wouldn't join when I had Charon and Dogmeat with me even though I had max karma.   I can't test with my current run because this time I'm a completely evil bitch. :grin:

...I  :heart: this game so much!  The man who voice acts Jericho sounds exactly like my father, so it's like running around post-apocalyptic DC with a violent, foulmouthed version of my Dad.  I showed Mom when she visited and she cracked up giggling because Dad is a church deacon who never swears ever and Jericho really does sound just like him.

kERRA, I don't mind you staying, but get rid of that furry avatar. Not the place for that shit.

It's a cartoon avatar from google image search?  :headscratch:

I don't think a single soul here would disagree with me. That's furry fodder. No doubt about it.

OK, a GIS for 'furry fodder' was kinda weird.  I'll go get something else, but I still say that cartoon dog is cute  :-P

You wouldn't if I showed you cartoon dogs like that with the body of a horse and the cock of a giant mythical beast hidden in a tiny green thong while it was milking itself.

Just sayin.

That's ...quite an image.  :ye_gods:

On-topic, I could swear I saw someone say on an earlier page that the waser wifle can injure child NPCs, but clicking through I can't locate it.  If that's true I'm making a beeline for Lamplight.

Rattran said it. I never ended up at lamplight. I was too upset after finding out that I'd freed the child slaves instead of keeping them as slaves myself. I bought them with hard earned caps too. And by hard-earned, I mean murdering and thuggery.

Yep, me too.  I thought I'd get to send them to my Tenpenny suite to be housemaids.  It was up there on the wtf scale with when my character drank out of the toilet I activated.  I think I'll go settle the waser wifle question right now.

Test result:  No, the waser wifle does not wender children wifewess.   :sad:

Not without the right user mods, it won't

I played through as a walking messiah and even I wanted to slaughter the punks in Little Lamplight. 

I will be installing that mod when it becomes available. 

I am debating playing through while only using pistols.  That should make things interesting.

SMG, laser pistol and .44 should do you just fine but you better pump END for HPs, sneak and take the DR perk.

You can get boozed up, kill all the adults in the wasteland in a frenzied orgy of destruction, but you can't kill kids and no titties. Our society makes me chuckle. Freedom, indeed.

Can you smoke the cigarettes you find lying around?  I haven't tried, I know the animations are in the game, I've seen some of the NPC's do it.

Not sure, but at least it's gubmint-approved tobacco, not the demon weed  :oh_i_see:

There is a smoking 'emote' that you can activate with a console command, but it doesn't actually use any cigarettes.

Becoming an alcoholic (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Alcohol_Addiction) is actually a fairly positive thing in Fallout, at least once you've hit level 20.  Time to hit the vodka!

http://static.bethsoft.com/fo3/geck.zip

Save Arroyo.

Only once of the times I got the Wazer could I shoot the little bastards, so I'd chalked it up to a glitch.

Still was some of the best fun in the game. Right there with making nice with the inbred cannibal families.

Want.

(http://img360.imageshack.us/img360/3703/screen03bch0.jpg)

I haven't been able to reproduce it.  Then again I don't know if the invulnerable flag is set as a per NPC global or if it's inherent in the 'child' physical template.  Whatever it is, it's not related to the setpcyoung command.  Regardless of what integer I used the command just set the PC back to the 16-year-old hair/face and changed 'pain' exclamations to the kid version.  ..Which, weirdly, is the same actress making different grunt noises.

What the hell is that? Want too  :drill:

Just finished my first run through, sooner than I was expecting, bit annoyed that the main quest line locks you in with no warning really. In fact the whole main questline was kinda shite I thought. Seemed of such little consequence and the whole idea that
By the end I had the Xuanlong Assault Rifle, A3-21's Plasma Rifle, The Terrible Shotgun and Vengeance. Found myself using the plasma rifle and assault rifle the most and by the end it was just too easy, especially wearing Enclave Power Armour (preferred that to the unique ones because of the +STR) . Defintely putting it on "Very Hard" next run through, although that increases XP and I'm not sure I want to hit the level cap any faster  :oh_i_see:

I also played through as good, pretty much maxed karma most of the way through. Once I twigged which items had the highest caps:weight ratio I was never short of money or ammo so I felt no need to steal too much, apart from all the Nuka Cola Quantum I could get  :awesome_for_real:

They patched in Trophies on the PS3 half way through my run so I'm gonna have to do a 2nd run through to get all the early ones anyway, thought I'd try an evil character this time, although I always find that *really* hard in games. I'm far too much of a bleeding heart tbh. I was dying to have more questing related to the whole "Vault-Tec were evil bastards" thing. I actually got angry about the stuff I was finding the the Vaults... I can't turn it off even in a game ffs!  :uhrr:

Oh and followers? Fawkes rocks, balls to the rest  :grin:

Edit: post needs more smileys.  :why_so_serious: :pedobear: :inluv: :star: :roflcopter:

Looks cool, but the expansion sounds  :uhrr: to me.

I think I missed the named assault rifle. Did the Museum of Tech quest, but the body never showed up. I filed it under buggy, along with that guy from megaton (that you turn scrap metal into) disappearing. Moriarty hasn't been around for a few weeks, either.

That's a shame because it ended up being probably my favourite weapon. Decent damage, relatively fast rate of fire, cheap & plentiful ammo, easy to get Chinese Assault Rifles to repair it, good durability and not so overpowered that you insta-kill everything (hello A3-21's Plasma Rifle).

Plus I liked the noise it made  :drill:

She must be smarter on the PS3.  I went back to Charon in my PC 'good' game because any opening narrower than a standard doorway confused her into baffled meandering.

Yeah she struggled a bit with some of the geometry on the PS3, couldn't handle rocks and things at all, but she warps back to you when you get far enough away anyway. Plus she can carry a metric fuckton of loot  :grin:

I just started this.  It seems a little slow. 

Do you guys typically VATS or not when in combat?

It varies. At level 20, I hit heads 95% in VATS at medium range, but with the Lincoln it's just as easy to snipe in real time. You tend to need VATS more at early levels to conserve ammo. Later on you use it just for the convenience of quickly killing shit with headshots. Or blowing the backs of their skulls off from two feet away in slo-mo...

I'm still running around post main quest (yay mod) with my 1st character. Level 21 (yay another mod), and there are still a ton of locations I haven't visited. Just found a unique sledge called the Tenderizer and gave it to Cross.

Is there a chance you missed the body?  I ask because it doesn't really show up as a "body," more like a bunch of bloody bits, so it's easy to miss if you're looking for an actual corpse.

As to the mystery weapon, physically, it resembles a gauss rifle from Fallout 2, but that image makes it look more like an energy weapon, and they have stated in interviews that there will be a scoped energy weapon in Operation: Anchorage.

I finally decided to launch this sucker. I did a little research and boosted Intel and Luck pretty high.. Something like this:

STR 3
PER 6
END 4
CHA 6
INT 8
AGI 6
LCK 8


Apparently Charisma is "worthless", but I said fuck it anyways. I don't believe it.

Got derailed and saved my game in a fucked up spot. Kept on dying trying to get to Megaton, but finally made it...

Anyhow, it feels like Oblivion. I hope I'm wrong.

You're wrong.  It does seem like it very early on but it diverges quickly.  Str 3 though?  That might be a mistake, not for difficulty reasons, just the tediousness of going back to sell or put away stuff.

To be fair, it always FEELS like Oblivion.

The world is just 1000x more compelling. Which makes it worth playing. The gameplay, however, is mostly shit and the enemy variety is laughably bad.

I just got the MedTech prototype armor but it doesn't auto-heal me ever.  I have stimpacks and Med-x in inventory. I do like that it is only -1 AGI.

To anyone playing for the first time, DO NOT explore Casey's Garage until the story sends you to that area. I found it early and missed the entire Enclave storyline. Still having fun though.

Most effective weapon against Deathclaws:
[spoiler]Flamer - they only hit me 2x before they die. Gatling laser is very good too but ammo is scarce.[/spolier]

You have to drop to 25% health for the prototype medical armor to use a Med-X.

The note/instructions for the prototype armor say that this one can only do med-x. It doesn't use stims. They spoke of another armor that does stims, but it doesn't seem to be in the game.

I got down to three little bars of health, heartbeat pounding. Nothing. Maybe I didn't have Med-X then...

WORST SPOLIER EVAR

I don't carry Med-X because it's addictive. I found addiction to be a PITA.

Deathclaws: shoot their legs with the Lincoln, finish with assault rifle. Don't get hit! /spolier

Casey's garage: fuck! That's probably my biggest grip with the game. I hate when exploring fucks up the plotlines. That r dum. Not so tough to key a door to the quest so you can't ruin it.

Also, I went back looking for the stupid named chinese rifle again. I guess I missed a note that starts that side quest and when I did the computer hack quest, it shut down the side quest availability. Going through my note log, I found neither of the notes the wiki mentions. Ah, well.

Also: I think I fucked up the whole slaves from the temple of the union thing by fast travelling. Again: Ah, well. No way I was going to herd those assholes all the way through Washington to the memorial, ffs.

You can remove addictions in your med station at home, though.

Or so it tells me, I don't use anything but stimpacks either. And the pack rat that I am I had more than 300 when I was about to finish the main quest.

Which is odd because they have quest locked doors all over the place.

I was a total drug addict. Used them regularly, made a huge difference in hard fights. Think I got addicted like 100+ times  :drill:  Thank fuck for the home laboratory!

After fucking up one quest by exploring I played the rest of the game with the Fallout wiki (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_Wiki) open on the laptop beside me. Every time I found a new area I had a quick scan to see if there were any important quests there. Annoying, but solved the problem. Stupid design though, and so easy to fix.

Stray - I would *definitely* recommend higher STR. Picking up and selling junk and weapons is the best way to make money and being able to carry a fuckton of stuff before having to go sell is very handy. Also, I'd recommend high repair skill from the start. Collect weapons, repair them to ~50%, sell for profit. In fact you can even buy several cheap ass poor condition weapons from vendors, repair them and then sell them back for lots more than they cost you to begin with. Return rates drop above 50% though but by the time you can easily repair higher than that you probably won't be short of caps anyway.

... I can just teleport if I need to sell, and hold about 180 lbs. Seems good enough. I figured it all balances off anyhow, if I high decent charisma and high INT, I can just jack up bartering early on. I don't want to spend too many stat points on something that'll only really benefit  me in one way.

Don't plan on using heavy weapons and power armor with that build. I usually head out after selling+dumping weighing about 160 or so. And I don't even bring the fatboy or minigun along.

I run with an insane inventory:

Minigun
Fatboy (3 left. I ain't afraid to use 'em!)
Missile Launcher
ol Painless
Flamer
Terrible Shotgun
Laser Pistol x2
Laser Rifle x2
Gatling Laser
Med Power Armor
Repair suit

That plus meds puts me at 165 pounds. Then I start picking stuff up. STR is 5 + strong back perk = 250 capacity.  I gave up carrying 'nades and mines in favor of the heavy artillery.  Less than 5 STR will make life difficult.

I have spares of all these weapons in my lockers too. Thank god for instant travel.  At level 16 I am just now able to not pick up every assault rifle and hunting rifle I see.

When I'm going somewhere new. I run with the following:

Alien Blaster
Lincoln's Repeater
Blackhawk
Kneecapper
That Droid's Plasma Rifle
Med Power Suit
stimpacks.

I travel light and efficiently. Also, I try to find more than one of osmething, i.e. if I only fight one thing wearing power armor in an area, I won't even pick it up. Unrepaired things are worthless. I should say, at this point in my game though, I could probably go out with just Blackhawk, Occam's Razor, no stimpaks and naked and probably kill anything in my path.

Edit: The alien blaster is just to take care of giant radscorpions and heavily armored bots. Both of those are annoying enough for me to waste precious alien ammo.

I kind of planned on sneaking more and critting with guns. Probably won't even bother with other weapons. Hopefully it works out. I should get the sniper perk soon enough, and the high luck helps too.

If you can sneak well, the Terrible Shotgun will pretty much blow anything's head off in two shots - other than robots.

My normal loadout is:

Flamer
Assault Rifle
Combat Shotgun
Plasma Grenades (x5)
Lincoln's Repeater
Missile Launcher
Bottlecap Mines (x5)
Sniper Rifle

Enclave Power Armor
Enclave Power Helmet
Button's Wig
Roving Trader Outfit
Naughty Nightwear
Vault 101 Utility Jumpsuit

Might drop the sniper rifle, since it's a bitch to keep repaired. I was running low on .44 ammo for the Repeater and got used to carrying it. In areas with robots, I load up on Pulse nades and mines, of course. I'm Small Guns/Big Guns, crap for Energy skill, like 25.

Laser Pistol turns Ferals to ash in one or two shots. That never gets old.

Killing ferals is for pussies.

Just finished this puppy couple of nights ago. I was Gotterdamerung personified in heels. Of course, just about everyone would be at level 20.

Regardless, my standard loadout was brobdignagian.

To wit:

Vengeance. Blast Enclave choppers into glowing confetti--or anything else. Bitch to keep repaired, though. Not that it mattered, but too much is never enough.
Rocket launcher. For radscorps, bots, and anyone dumb enough to group up.
Fat man. Behemoths...and anyone dumb enough to group up at a distance. And deathclaws. Boom.
Terrible shotgun. For my version of Sicilian knifefights.
Plasma rifle. Eat it, Enclave.
Reservist's Rifle. Nothing says hello like a .30 bullet at 400yds. Especially useful for mirelurk hunting in the NW.
Usually 6-12 grenades. Plasma preferred, but anything would do.
2-4 mines. Plasma preferred. For pantsing people that annoy me and covering my back in buildings and vaults. And that deathclaw grotto...brrr...
Railway gun. Yeah, I know, but when you run into sewer gas it's nice not to blow yourself up. Not a huge deal, but still.

Reilly's Ranger armor. Best there is. I did use the T-whatthehellever powered armor briefly, but Reilly's was simply better overall...and I could wear sunglasses.

I didn't really use combat drugs in this game. In the other Fallouts, there were pretty much a necessity when the going got really ugly. Not so much here. I didn't like being addicited and making special trips to, umm, town to cure it.

I carried a lot of crap, but I had the strong back perk and some additional STR. Usual fighting weight was about 175lbs. I could keep rolling up to about 260. More time in the field and less time in shitholes like Megaton or Rivet City. I had a lot of boltholes with stashes around the map as well.

As far as weapons, I started out with small arms and eventually upgraded to (some) big guns at the end-game, basically:  combat knife/shishkhebab, SMG, assault rifle, shotgun, hunting/sniper rifle, grenades, stimpacks, and a laser pistol were my keybinds 1-8, in order.  And the reason for all these weapons was because you pick up all these different kinds of ammo as loot, and you run out of ammo if you just stick to 1 gun type.  Later I switched to flamer (for melee), and a minigun (full automatic fire) and missile launcher (for sniping), but with high skill levels I still did a lot of damage with a chinese rifle or a combat shotgun to use them regularly.

Since we're doing the weapon thing:

Protectron's gaze : default weapon in case of surprises
Terrible Shotgun : whenever I know there is going to be heads to explode at short range and I trust Cross and Dogmeat to not die.
Lincoln repeater or Waser Wifle : Sniper or stealth shit
Missle launcher : When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room, accept no substitutes (fat man is all very well, but the arc causes too many problems)

Nuka Grenades : If I can be bothered, but I have yet to come across a situation where it is really necessary, and only ever in conjunction with a stealth boy.

Flamer : The only thing I trust Paladin Cross to be useful with.

Everything else is pointless.

I hate the plasma rifle with a passion, it looks like shit.


As for armour, the ranger armour and the hat that Moira gives you  > all.

Terrible Shotgun (Head goes Boom)
Xuanlong Assault Rifle (Head goes Book for multiple enemies)
Lincoln Repeater  (Head goes Boom from a distance)
A21 Plasma Rifle (To Find the Corpses in dark areas)
5 Nuka Grenades (Oh Shit! Panic button. Not needed once, still waiting)
10 Pulse Grenades (Killer Robot Equilizer)

Evil game I will go for heavy weapons, just for giggles.


Fashionwise I go with the Ranger armor, sunglasses and a red Baseball cap.

The headshots in this game are silly as it is.. I hear there's a perk at level 6 that makes it worse..?

At level 12 to be exact. Sniper

Of course, if you take "Commando" at 8, "Finesse" at 10, "Better Criticals" at 16 and "Concentrated Fire" at 18 it will become beyond ridiculous. I basically look at somebody funny and their head explodes.

I don't want to know what happens if you take Grim Reapers Sprint as well. You should be able to kill a whole room without finishing the first VATS round...

Oh, I was thinking of the "Bloody Mess" perk. You mean to say it can even get worse? Hah

With the Bloody Mess perk, characters and creatures you kill will often explode into a red, gut-ridden, eyeball-strewn paste. Fun! Oh, and you'll do 5% extra damage with all weapons.

5%? Cute :)

Commando - While using a rifle (or similar two-handed weapon), your accuracy in V.A.T.S. is significantly increased.
Finesse - With the Finesse perk, you have a higher chance to score a critical hit on an opponent in combat, equivalent to 5 extra points of Luck.
Sniper - With the Sniper perk, your chance to hit an opponent's head in  V.A.T.S. is significantly increased.
Better Criticals - With the Better Criticals perk, you gain a 50% damage bonus every time a critical hit is scored on an opponent.
Concentrated Fire - With Concentrated Fire, your accuracy to hit any body part in V.A.T.S. increase slightly with each subsequent hit on that body part.
Grim Reapers Sprint - If you kill a target in V.A.T.S., all your Action Points are restored upon exiting V.A.T.S..

I don't have Bloody Mess, but Cyborg on the other hand

You've made permanent enhancements to your body! The Cyborg perk instantly adds +10% to your Damage, Poison, and Radiation Resistances, and 10 points to the Energy Weapons skill.

makes it even sicker.


And I didn't even try, I just went the "Rad Resistant Sniper" route.

Hey, I took all those! And the one that lets you sneak while running. And two 'stat booster' perks.

I can't help powergaming  :oh_i_see:

Playing a stealth/charisma build. Started with Str and End at 4.

Typicaly carry:
Riley's armor (best in the game, imo)
Simm's Hat
Turtleshell Shades - they look cool
Lesko's labcoat
the special vault utility suit
naughty nightwear

Named Plasma rifle
Waser Wifle
Lincoln's
Sniper Rifle
Silenced 10mm
as many bottlecap mines and nuka's as I can find
Chinese Assault rifle (hardly use it anymore)

I think my big guns is my lowest skill. I've yet to even try the Fat Man.

Sky - as to the Lincoln Memorial quest - fast travel back to the memorial, and then start walking towards the metro station. You'll find the whole lot of them hanging out on  a streetcorner waiting for you for the last month...

I did exactly that, although without Concentrated Fire. It was silly tbh. Whole room full of Enclave soldiers? No problem, that'll be six sets of power armour for me to collect and repair up, thanks  :drill:

Going to make it much harder on myself next time round, was waaaaaay too easy actually choosing decent perks.

Ok, I'll zip over and look. I hope they made some bread for their pimp while they were there!

Does anyone else get nauseated when watching that blur effect when you get wounded? Geez. Makes me feel just like my character.

I think I'm already getting a little sick playing in general though.. This must be my first real bout of gaming in awhile. Not used to it, I guess.

OK, Bloody Mess can't even be properly called a headshot. More like explode on impact.

Hmm, so why do I get such an awesome weapon as the Fat Man before I'm even level 8?

I accidentally ran into the Deathclaw lair, and was luckily enough to save before getting mauled. Second strategy was easy: The Fat Man.  :awesome_for_real:

So I have 4 Death Claws now. And leveled up too. Should I sell them? There's a crafted gauntlet I could make with them, but not sure I want to bother getting the schematic.

Not much ammo for that around. I think I found less than 20 mini-nukes in my entire first play-through.

There are only 80 mini nukes in the entire game.

Yes.  I solved that by making sure to not get shot in the head. ;D

Sheesh! Now someone tells me. ;) I never would have guessed that they'd be so limited, since I've had about a dozen so far.

I guess I've used 5 already then. 4 Deathclaws and some shitheads who were hired to kill me. Kind of worth it though, I guess. I got a END bobblehead out of it too.

Unrelated but.. does weapon damage start boosting up? How does it scale? Or does just the good stuff have +stats on them and shit? I don't have shit for gear.. but my dude sort of looks like the Green Hornet.

Weapon damage scales up with the weapon's state of repair and the character's skill in that weapon type.  So someone with a mostly-broken 10mm pistol and 10 in Small Arms won't do a fraction of the damage of someone with a fully-repaired pistol and 100 in Small Arms.

And you can find mini-nukes for sale on some of the weapon vendors, so they aren't finite.  Just keep checking the inventory of the weapon stores and you'll be able to get more nukes.  You won't care for the price, and they're still far from common, but you can get them.

At the upper end, the good weapons will do around 50 damage for rifles.

With the right skills you will actually do several multiples of the damage rating.

New favourite weapon of mine (crawling through the Ghoul sewers) - Railway Gun. It takes off almost every head with a clean shot. And if not it nails corpses to the wall.

Yes, I needed some gore after the Christmas celebrations. Sue me  :why_so_serious:

I forgot one apparel, it's also my favorite for ghouled-up sewers. The Ghoul Mask! Too bad you can't interact with them, though.
Thanks, they were still hanging out over there!

I've read that the Railway Gun has the potential to crash the game to the desktop (CTD), because the steam locomotive whistling sound it makes after each shot has a bug of some sort in the sound file.  It hasn't happened to me, but I've only used it a couple times.

As far as weapons, if your associated skill for the weapon is high, and especially if you get the critical hit bonus because your first shot is from hiding, all of them feel overpowered.  Trick I learned:  you can queue multiple opponents in VATS - queue up a headshot on the first enemy, then select the next enemy (A key for me, might be W by default) and queue up a headshot, then select the third and queue up a headshot, then execute.  Pow pow pow, dead dead dead.

Yeah, I try to do multiple targets.

My guns skill is already maxed out. I shoot from sneak as much as possible. My Luck is high, so Crit chance is boosted. I'll probably add a few more modifiers... I only have Commando atm. And Bloody Mess. Lol, I even took Lady Killer for the hell of it. I guess that counts a dmg modifier though.

Just haven't run into any interesting weapons yet.

Just to carry my rant over from the Mass Effect thread to something more Fallout specific: Anyone who says this is not Oblivion with guns is wrong. It's exactly that. Yes, the setting is better, but that's about it.

It doesn't even feel that much like Fallout either. About the only real nod to Fallout, besides the setting, is VATS. But that's a failure imo. It doesn't make the game all that tactical. Just makes it easy.

As for setting.. yeah, it's the Fallout setting. It lacks the content and characters of the originals though to make that setting feel similar though.  Really, just one random character in the originals can give me more laughs than all of the ones combined here. I don't know... something about how every Fallout character talked made them all come off like lunatics or something. And extremely sarcastic. Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys comes to mind. Heh.

They didn't even try to replicate that here. Everyone's so damn serious and dramatic. Like Oblivion.

You may have to look a bit deeper in Fallout 3 for the humor, but its there. On the whole, yes, its not the same as the other two games, but I got over that once I could accept that I was just not going to have that same experience again. Its nearly better that they just didn't try, because that would have been sadder, to try and fail rather than just take a different tack.


Mass Effect, by comparison, is entirely and completely non-humorous. It doesn't even try to be, so its not really a criticism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eeruIZ0T44

well, I stand corrected! Still, by comparison to F3, its a bit one dimensional.

On my evil run-through, I've just decided to screw the armor, so I have my killer wearing a bonnet and pre-war springwear, along with biker goggles. She looks pretty keen while blowing the heads off of townspeople who annoy her.

OK, there is a bit of understated humor sometimes. The "Package" (Naughty Nightwear) quest, for one. They really should have drawn that out though. Could have been a truly funny quest. The guy who ordered it was kind of funny too.. Living on the "ass end" of the Wasteland, merely because he was trying to score with the Nuka Cola girl. But they didn't expand upon it. It's really only funny because of my own imagination... Just thinking how fucking sad this dude's life is (and the Nuka Cola girl's life is pretty damn sad too), if he were a real person.


Harold makes a comeback too. Except.. umm.. He's actually more depressing than funny in this game. I appreciate the inclusion though.. And depressing is probably the only natural conclusion to his "problem", if you think about it. Hard to write it any other way. Heh

Who the hell needs even 20? My Fat Man is a fun diversion between saves and reloads!

The humor is buried, but you have to play the game long enough to find it.  Frankly I'm glad they didn't try too hard.  Else you end up with WoW's need for a pop-culture reference every five steps.  It's a good, solid game on its own (if you ignore much of the main plot).

Shiz, I do that, too. Anytime I need to reload I like to unload for a while. Upsets my fiancee when I start shooting everyone in town and laughing at the rag doll stuff. She can't quite get that it's all meaningless due to the reload, she thinks I'm evil for doing it. Ah, well. But I should tote the Experimental jobbie around (the named Fat Man, just got it xmas eve) for grins.

Playing this game is so much more fun without spoilers and finding stuff like the named Fat Man through gameplay. I'm /still/ on my first playthrough, and I've been playing it since a couple days after release.

As far as humor, the Vault with the Garys had me chuckling plenty. Gary? Gary! Ehh....Gary?

Eh, I don't want pop culture references either. I just want more cooky Fallout type of characters. It's part of what made the games unique. Everyone in the others was a bit more self-entertaining and resigned to death and sarcasm. When I say this one is a bit dramatic, I just kind of mean the general attitude/dialogue is typical "Save Me!! Wahhh!!" RPG fare. And Guards act morose like they do in Oblivion. You could place most of the dialogue here in any Fantasy RPG and it'd be right in place.

So I sold this shit, and now own LBP and MGS4, and all is right with the world. Fuck this game.  :oh_i_see:

Ah Bethesda, you almost got me this time.

A much, MUCH better game.

I figured if I'm going to stalk around and stealth, I might as well make it worth my time.


In retrospect, I might have been better off building a Big Guns/Melee character. At the very least, it would have been a little louder and more exciting.  :grin: [edit] probably more challenging too?

FIFY

Try doing a no-alert, no-kill run and tell me it's a movie.

Seriously, I hated MGS before MGS 4. Game is a fucking masterpiece. And anyone that calls it a movie and not a game does not like fun. Sorry.

Does this mean Stray is going to stop fagging up this thread?  :awesome_for_real:

Unpossible.

Heh, sorry guys. I was honestly trying to spark some discussion... not just bitching.

You could be right.  I'll go load up a Youtube of someone going that route and see how it is. :awesome_for_real:

Nah, your gripes are valid. I'm not even sure why I'm enjoying the game as much as I am. Just hits the right chords for some reason.

While I get your joke, it's not the same thing. There's no tension in watching SOMEONE ELSE do it.

Of course, that leads me to believe you haven't played MGS4 anyway. So, there's that.

I lack the requisite equipment and haven't had any interest in any of the series.  I'm trying to tease him through you, but you're all serious. :-P

I just find it hilarious that Stray traded Fallout 3 for MGS 4 because he wants something more interactive.  One of the best open ended RPGs for what's widely joked about as a movie with a little bit of gameplay for intermissions.  If it's more his thing, I'm happy he's happy.  But c'mon, that's great material he's giving us.

All of Bethesda's games come down to repeating the exact same tactics and gameplay, ad infinitum, in decent to well-crafted worlds.

Between Metal Gear Online and the main story, that game is, arguably, far more interactive.


What does that accomplish? If you had the requisite equipment and had played it, it would be more validated, but you know, when did you ever stoop to trolling?

Eh? It's hilarious that I'm playing Metal Gear? Jesus.

I have a novel idea. If you like Metal Gear Solid so much that you want to talk about it, make a thread about it. Schild, moderator that he is, could even take the posts which accidenty landed in other threads and move them there.

We have two threads about it. Don't you think it would've been more constructive to try to re-rail this one, wiseass?

First I try to get the official sanction by a moderator that derailing this thread is ok out of the way.

Then I can say important things like "Wee, that Ghoul mask is cool, but was it really a good Karma action to kick the bigots out of the tower to die?" again.

For the record, I never cared to talk about MGS much (and haven't). I made a passing comment about my stealthing character and finding a better game for that kind of thing.

MGS4 discussion is frustrating me at the moment because I can't find a UK supplier with it in stock for a sensible price  :mob:

If you are still playing Fallout 3 and never went into the Capitol Building, I HIGHLY recommend it. I love watching NPC factions fight each other while I snipe them with the Lincoln Repeater. If there was unlimited .44 ammo, I would carry nothing but this gun. OMFG the love!

That depends upon where you draw the line at trolling.

I've always liked to tease and be a little silly.  Even when I'm serious and right I'll do it.  There's no way you haven't seen that.  (Else I'm the Queen Troll and I'm so good even I didn't know it.)

But I guess if I'm being silly and you're being defensive about a game then it'd be trolling.  Just don't rename me to Chris Dane Owens, please.  I'll be good if I can avoid that terrible fate.

Eh? I have something like 3,000 .44 ammo. It becomes more common. Particularly on merchants and the traveling salesfolk.

One of my merchants, the one who sells armor, got assraped (body parts everywhere) by a pack of death claws just before I came wandering by.  I was wondering if he was going to respawn or is he done?

Done.

Do I need Tesla armor to repair Tesla armor? Probably moot since I am close to getting Reilly's.

I've been playing for two months now and have only hit 200 .44 ammo a couple times. Merchants never have the stuff, maybe once every few weeks game-time they'll have a dozen rounds. I even did the quest where you can invest in the travelling traders and their stock still sucks.

Yes, Tesla for Tesla. I don't use it because it lacks the +STR. I wish you could use it to repair Enclave armor, since it's similar. I wear Enclave because it's the main stuff I can find to repair with.

Thats why I love Reillys. It can be repaired with both Talon armor and normal Combat armor the merchants sell you. I would love the Tesla for the look, but I can't handle the repairs.

You're not listening (or looking) closely enough.  I am doing a lot of sneak-and-snipe with the silenced 10mm, and I caught two super-mutants having roughly the following conversation:

Super Mutant 1: "I was thinking, it hurt my head!  I was thinking, about from before.  I think I knew a woman.  Or maybe, I *was* a woman?  Arrgghhh, it hurts!"

Super Mutant 2: "You talk too much, like a stupid human!"

SM1: "I was through talking to you, anyway."

Fake Edit: Here's a YouTube clip of those two mutants (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXZAOtSSRLE).

--Dave

I was almost exclusively using a sniper rifle to pick super mutants off. Never got close enough to listen to them.

There were three or four conversations that got a good laugh out of me.  There is one quest where there is this drawn out (two minutes?) phone/radio conversation that was a riot (about collecting humans for food.)  I can't remember which quest it was though.

No I think this one's funnier.
(http://www.capitalwasteland.com/news/uploads/emil.jpg)
Good job Emil.  /facepalm

This is why Bethesda have difficulty improving beyond their sandbox game.

you know, I came into that post expecting some previously unseen and interesting reasoning behind that particular decision. I left that post slightly more cynical than I came in

Nice spoiler btw.  :oh_i_see:

Kidding! I don't give a shit.  :awesome_for_real:

Seriously though... I'm getting a Total Recall feel from that ending. Is that far off?

Feel free to post an ending with a spoiler tag.

That's truly pathetic. They just couldn't be arsed to give your followers dialogue specific to that quest. I'm deeply disappointed in that cavalier approach tbh. Fucktards.

Well at least they shipped a working game - even if the ending was weak. Bioware would have sacrificed gameplay for the story. Obsidian would have shipped it with no ending at all and left it to fanboys to figure out what was supposed to happen based on scrap files found on the DVD.

And.. Many others do complete their games. If they start copping an attitude like that, then they're not much better than some developer carelessly churning out the latest shitty movie based game. It tells me that they're not really inspired. There are games, and then there are games where the development team was so stoked about giving a goddamn amazing experience that they even denied free hookers to get it out the way they wanted. This is not the latter.

Personally, I'd have just made up an excuse for any companions to be elsewhere.

Heroes don't get away clean, the constant of narrative angst cannot just be ignored.

'Oh, you sent in the radiation immue mutant, or the ghoul who is already dying, well done'

Is not a suitably heroic ending.

It is in the Black Isle Fallout universe.
Fuck, they allowed you to plant a bomb in the presidente  :why_so_serious:

you know what was required right? somewhat who can withstand radiation and press buttanz.
it didn't have to kill anyone. Guess what? being a good guy can convince people to be a hero. Being a bad guy you pull out a gun and point it at someone else, 'Move it or lose it'. That's Role playing. That's what being Good/Evil is about. Not being stupid.

You had Sarah there if you are being evil.

Having the mutant go in and no harm being done is just a non-ending.

How is that evil in any way, shape or form? You already lost a father, you've already sacrificed far more than her, why should you also have to die?

Because she is (a) a girl, (b) a secondary character and (c) established as morally worth saving.

Sending Sarah in if you are good would be like Spock sending Uhura into the radiation chamber at the end of Wrath of Khan.

Or for that matter, it would be like Kirk ordering Spock in for no reason other than Kirk has a hot date that night and so can't be dead.

Sending Fawkes in would be like sending a red shirt.

a=Machism, b=irrelevance, and c=subjectivism, especially since, if you're playing good, you also are.
The bitch tries to GUILT TRIP you into going in. She's a complete prick, and you've proved beyond doubt that you do a far better job at helping the wastes than anyone in her little leet group ever could.

Sending Fawkes would be what anyone with half a brain would do. Also, aren't redshirts supposed to die?

(a) I'm a girl, too.
(b) As a primary character, I need to live.
(c) I saved her entire unit back at GNR.  They owe me a raincheck.

Also, "all the illogical send Fawkes/Charon/etc. in while hopped up on Rad-X and we can all go get a cool drink of water at the pub afterwards" reasons.  The story is just as rewarding if the hero lives.  Moreso to me since I value living over senseless deaths.

Hi,

 Fawkes & Charon ARE IMMUNE to radiation.

Good day

PLUS it would have let you carry on the game after finishing the main plot line! It's just incredibly shoddy and I think Stray said it best - uninspired.

(a) Yeah, but you're an afterthought, the writer plainly has a male character in mind, otherwise we wouldn't be trapped in a room with the cute spunky blonde archetype.
(b) Why?
(c) Fine if you are evil, but that isn't valid argument if you are the good protagonist.

Sending Charon/Fawkes in (or a random bystander) would be fine if this were not the climax of the story. And I agree that it is a shitty climax, I agree that it is made worse by contriving to have various radiation immune chaps in the room. But 'guy presses some buttons then strolls out for cheeseburger' is not an appropriate finish.

There's the real reason, and personally if I were the writer, I'd have had whichever companion you have put a radiation suit on if required, get locked in the purifier,  make Sarah your new companion, then have you charge off somewhere else for another final final battle.


But they didn't do that, the purifier is the climax, and given that they are going for the whole wrath of khan thing, it has to be you or Sarah.

It was a shitty climax with too many logical troubles anyway. I MYSELF was almost radiance resistant as well as doped up on anti rad medication. I could have made a picnic for half an hour before taking a little nap and then pressing the button.

They introduced their perks and items late in the game as well?

I would posit that if it's their shitty writing that gets one thinking the ending is stupid, we as consumers are correct in saying the allowed options are stupid.  Having circumstances forced on a character provides drama.  Having a character's actions forced (in one of the most open-ended RPGs at that) on the player is bad writing.

It's also something that could have been rewritten as a third option in about ten minutes.  Production time wouldn't have taken much longer, since they could still end the game there, which means about five more minutes of the voice actor's time to say everyone lived and the hero went down to the pub.

There's no justification for bad, forced endings.

Fortunately, on my first playthrough I was an evil character.  I hacked the terminal to Fawkes room and killed it with fire, I killed everyone in that wretched ghoul city including Charon, and I send in the Lyon girl instead of going myself.  No logical inconsistency that way.

Completely agree. I'm just saying that having Charon press the button would be even more shitty, and 'teh community' is whinging about the wrong thing.


And I guess this is the object lesson for us all. Bethesda can only write for pantomime villains, so you might as well roll with it.

/glueonmustache
/twirlsmustache

They did give your followers dialogue specific to that quest. That's the sad part - they chose to prevent followers from helping you out while providing no real reason for doing so.

There are actually mods that are adjusting quests, like you could in Oblivion.

Maybe there will be a better ending out there somewhere?

So, I just started playing this.  I think there's something wrong with me, because I'm not finding it all that great so far.  The stuff in the vault was kinda fun, but since then it seems like I'm just spending all my time wandering across an endless brown landscape and shooting orcs and giant bugs, pausing only to click through the occasional shitty dialogue tree.  I'm dissatisfied with how many precious bullets it takes me to kill the giant bugs, and it seems like there's a neverfuckingending supply of them, so I've been levelling up my gun skill exclusively, but I haven't noticed any corresponding increase in my killing power.  WTF?

I just now got to the radio tower thing and the guy wants me to fix an antenna or some shit.  How much further do I have to go?  Does it get any better?

I lasted till about level 14 feeling that way. Although damage should be easier (and even boring than it already is) than what you're experiencing. Are you using VATS at all?

Yes, but it takes something like twelve bullets to bring down the ogres, so if I want to use VATS I need to fire my three shots that it has the energy for and then run around kiting him while it charges up.  Really fucking annoying.  It seems like it's easier to just aim manually and boom headshot.

sneak attack combo of grenade & landmines are quite effective too.

30ish explosive skills are good enough for me.

Damage is as much the weapon as the skill. If you're popping a mutie with a 9mm, you're doing it wrong. Pull out the magnum, the sniper rifle, whatever you have that has a huge damage rating and shoot them in the head.

Alternately, explosives. If you're really desperate, set up a bottlecap mine and lure them over it. No more mutie.

That said, if you're not having fun exploring the big brown outdoors and shooting things, it's pretty much over for you. The storyline is short and not terribly good; it serves mostly to forcibly funnel you from the big brown outdoors into the small grey indoors.

Are you keeping your weapons repaired?
Some here missed that bit.

Yup, keeping 'em all repaired.  So far the best gun I've got is the hunting rifle that some of the orcs carry, followed by the pistol I left the vault with.  I'd get something better if it were in any way obvious where to go to get it.

Yeah, the combat difficulty curve is all broken to hell.

Level 1-5 : Easy
Level 6-11 : Difficult and irritating
Level 12-17 : Kotor Easy
Level 18-20 : Tiresome again


After you do the antenna thing, you get to slog south again, but after that you are out of he city, and at least you don't get caught in stupid city dead ends and unintuitive mazes with invisible walls all over the damn place.


For the best hunting rifle you want the Lincoln Repeater which is lying around in the museum of history. You'll get a laser rifle before long, which is as good as the hunting rifle. That and a combat shotgun will suffice for 99% of regular combat, you should also have a fat man by now for extreme situations (though I stopped even carrying that around because I never used it - Giant Crab syndrome (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/231-Mercenaries-2)).

If you need it, I'd use the Fat Man early and not worry about ammo for it. It doesn't do you any good if you don't use it.

Later on, I'd consider going without it. At 100% repair and 100 big gun skill, the thing is a friggin' menace. 1700 damage with a relatively short range makes it touchy as hell to use. At these levels, the rocket launcher is more than good enough. So use it early and use it often.

My favorite weapon is still the Reservist's Rifle. It was hell keeping it in good repair, but sniping stuff was great fun. And it wasn't just sniping. I recall Dave of Republic of Dave fame meeting his (well-deserved) end about 6" off the muzzle. Oh, for a bayonet...

You're doing it wrong, 15+ should be 'Godlike Brainblaster of DOOM' Unless you're putting all your skills into Bargaining and Ice Dancing, you should be a combat god by 15.

Seriously, did you read the post you are replying to?

The only reason this game seemed remotely difficult is because Fable 2 came out around the same time. Fallout 3 would be one of the easiest games ever if Fable 2 had never come out. As such, it just ends up middling in difficulty because Fable 2 lowered the bar so damned much.

It was an easy game. I never really came very close to dying, despite a "where angels fear to tread" attitude.

The original two games were much, much, more difficult and VERY unforgiving. Enemies got crits, too, you know...

Regardless, I had a blast, but it wasn't a strain making it though the game.

Totally so. I was planning to replay the game with bad karma, after finishing it rather quickly with good karma. I had a new level 4 char, but I found that I can absolutely not be bothered by it anymore. There surely are quiet a lot of things I haven't discovered yet and they might all be very interesting ... but I see those things merely as many steps of preparing myself for a quick rush of the storyline, which I already finished. I have already proven to myself that I can get anywhere and finish every location if I wanted to (maxed enough important skills, big pile of high dmg weapons, even bigger stash of ammo and stimpacks, good armor, etc) so there is no challenge in it anymore. And I'm the kind of player that would be characterized as an 'explorer' in mmorpgs.

You can also sneak up on people, if your sneak is high enough, and stick a frag down their pants. This instakills afaik.

Flamethrowers are really good early on.  I stumbled across one at the start of my last game and it made a huge difference.  I'd hide around a corner to make the enemies close then *FWOOSH*!  That was enough to get me to Rivet City by level 4.

The minigun is pretty win.  Shame there are never enough bullets for it.

I've found that the orcs and ogres die a lot faster when I skip the VATS bullshit, aim manually, and shoot them in the head until they die.  That discovery has helped quite a bit.

I found VATS to be useful primarily in CQB, particularly for room-entry situations indoors. Since it more-or-less stops time, you can usually pop two or three guys instantly, depending on your load-out.

The iron sights are king outdoors or at long range, once you have enough weapon skill to reduce scatter.

The Gatling Laser you get near the end is pretty pimp.

I'm tempted to load the game up so I can go get this bad boy. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-079ko59LQ)

Okay, the auto-save system is complete bullshit.  I managed to get myself in a state where my auto-save put me in a room full of gun-toting ghouls who all wanted to kill me (unbeknownst to me, turning down a quest can apparently cause an entire city to instantly aggro on you).  It really needs to keep more than one save state at a time so you can go back to the earlier one if your current one is fucked up.  Blah.

Yikes. 90% of the time I save the game, it's in a new save file, because I'm constantly scared of ruining my character or my game by some previously-unknown-yes-all-important choice.

I'm not even used to having to explicitly save my game these days.  Because most games made in the last, oh, ten years, have quicksave/autosave/checkpoint systems that don't fuck you in the ear.

Really?  The first feature I look for in just about any game is the quick save key.  I don't like redoing things from even 5 minutes ago.

Well, I don't think you could rightly say that it was the nature of FO3's autosave system that fucked you, as something similar could be found in any game that allows you to autosave and get into I'm Fucked! mode

Was it in Underworld that you got in trouble? When I told a questgiver I was going to keep all the keys and treasure for myself he attacked me and when I defended myself the entire city went crazy on me.

That's the one, Reg.  Except I didn't even defend myself, because I figured if I did the whole city would aggro on me.  As it turns out, they aggro on you anyway.   :awesome_for_real:  And as soon as I walked out of his bar, my one and only autosave got overwritten, and my last "real" save was a few hours ago that I have no desire to repeat.

I might be able to get out of it by bringing up the pipboy every few steps to stimpack myself up.  Or I could just uninstall.

Ashrik, the thing I find obnoxious about this is that most games I've played in recent memory that would allow you to get into I'm Fucked! mode keep more than one autosave.  Vampire: Bloodlines comes to mind since it's the same sort of FPS/RPG that Fallout is, and offers similar opportunities to fuck yourself by running out of important stuff while low on health, or pissing off key NPCs, BUT: it keeps something like twenty autosaves for you, which gives you very ample time to correct your mistake.

Hotkeys?

I just killed him, his guard and then everyone was still cool with me.  Town responses can be somewhat buggy.  :|

Couldn't you just go back in and maybe use a stealth boy to get out or just sprint to the exit?  It's not a big place.

Can you name another game that has multiple autosaves?  I don't remember any off hand. It seems like you're getting upset over a pretty common feature I see, and I don't know why any rational gamer would rely on an autosave system.  They seem to be rather arbitrary by nature.

 :-P

I found that the game became much, much more fun when I turned down the difficulty to a point where my guns actually hurt. The quest with the fire ants ("Those!") had almost made me quit the game in disgust. The combat is never that fun anyway, the scavenging and exploring more so.

About explicitly saving your game... I don't play many games to be honest but not doing this is asking for frustration, in pretty much every RPG I've ever played. I pile up hundreds of saves if the game allows for it (which FO3 does.)

Really late edit: Schpelling.

Oh hey that's a good idea. If the difficulty slider is as effective as it was in Oblivion setting it all the way down to maximum easy mode should let you escape easily. Plus, I've read elsewhere that in most towns if you stay away for a few days they forget they were mad at you so you can go back.

The easiest setting is "very easy", quite literally. I play on easy, which is easy enough to be able to kill atleast one mob with a full pool of AP. Thing is, some mobs (like deathclaws) are still really fucken dangerous if you don't have a combat-oriented character.

Half-Life 2 and all its spawn keep a fairly healthy bank of autosaves IIRC.  The games I've played in recent memory that only have one autosave are all ones that are designed not to let you fuck yourself with that one autosave (e.g. Overlord and Mirror's Edge).

I might have just happened to play nothing but games that do this well and gotten spoiled, but at this point I sort of expect a game to recognize when I've just done something I don't want to do over, and make sure I don't have any reason to have to repeat it.  It's not that hard of a thing to pull off, and if your game includes long stretches of tedium followed by easy opportunities to hose yourself, it's a pretty important thing to consider.  If not for the long stretches of tedium I wouldn't be angsty about it, but goddamn does it take a long time to get from point A to point B.

So did setting things to super easy mode and then staying away for a few days fix things?

I've been too annoyed to fire the game back up.  Even if I can get out with my life, that whole group of quests is locked out and I'll have no way to get them back.  Which probably means another few hours slogging through wasteland/metro shooting bandits, orcs, and zombies before I find the next bit of content.  Pfaugh.

Ahh, Crowley and the Underworld. Yeah, I stepped on that particular landmine, but I had a gatling laser and the ghouls didn't. Predictably, this ended badly for the ghoulies.

However, I did have a save not too long before and I wanted to actually do this quest "right". So reload and try it again. Still, cowboying the place was kinda fun.

One quest where I did get royally screwed by the save system (and lack of attention on my part) was the Tenpenny Towers thing with the ghouls. I tend to "feel out" everyone in a new location before I start actualy trying to do the quests. Well, this got me in trouble with talking the locals into letting the ghoulies in the front door. So I said screw it and introduced the ghouls to my minigun (didn't like whathisname's--head ghoul/troublemaker--attitude anyway). From what I found out later, this wasn't a bad thing and probably saved me a trip (and some power cells) later to clean up the mess. Serendipity and all that.

The only quest you do in Underworld is Crowley's, so it's not like you are missing anything.  You can start the Rangers quest there, but it's not required, you can start it elswhere too.  The place is really more a merchant hub than a quest hub.  Also, as was previously mentioned, if you avoid the place for a few days and come back, they usually calm down.  The only thing I can think of that you might be missing out on is Charon as a companion, and that's only if you kill him or Ahzrukhal, or the town never de-aggros.

Oh, and in the future, take the keys to Fort Constantine, unlock the doors but leave the armor, then give them to Crowley.  Head back to the Fort and pick up the armor.  Profit.

So Crowley telepathically knows whether you've taken the armor or not, but not whether you took the keys, and he'll never show up to claim the armor himself?     :oh_i_see:

I'd started on a couple of other quests in there before getting chased out, so I know it was more than just his.  Once I escape their immediate wrath I'll see if waiting a couple of days does the trick.

I think he's right about there only being the two quests. I got the ranger quest in the chop shop and the only thing I could talk to the rest of the ghouls about was Crowley and what he was up to. Once I'd talked to the other ghouls about that it unlocked the conversation choices that allowed me to just collect keys and not kill all of those people.

Or just give him the keys, follow him a ways outside of town, and shoot him. He'll walk all the way to Ft. Constantine if you let him.

That's what I actually ended up doing.

The only issue with this was he seemed to like to swim and I kept losing him in the river. After the third reload, I just capped him when we hit the riverbank and took his keys.

Of course, it was a headshot with a sniper rifle...

Oh no, he does eventually find out if you use my method, but he travels to the Fort first, and then assaults you out in the wasteland, as opposed to in Underworld, surrounded by allies.  I had thought I got away with my little trick nice and clean until I got jumped by him out by Fort Independence.  I ran away because I didn't want to kill him, but he continues to follow me.  It has actually become rather amusing.  He's persistent.  I'll lose him for a few days, and then he'll pop up someplace else and take shots at me.

There's also the option of just grabbing the armor.  It ends the quest so you don't get a chance to be paid by Crowley, but as far as I can tell, he just bitches at you about it and doesn't go hostile.

I checked back to confirm, there are only two quests in Underworld, Crowley's and Reilly's Rangers.  You don't have to actually speak to Reilly to start the quest, and it doesn't end in Underworld.  So you're in the clear, aside from possibly losing Charon.  There's an optional mini-quest involved in hiring Charon, if you don't want to spend the caps, but otherwise, that's it for Underworld.

Plus the Scrap Metal Trade-In, in case your Megaton contact vanishes (as he often does).

I mainly like it for the new merchants. My Megaton guys keep running out of caps on me these days.

The wandering traders usually are well stocked with caps, so they're always worth checking out. They also--the weapons guy in particular--have much better repair skills. Important for weapons like gatling lasers and sniper rifles where spares are hard to come by.

I also made a habit of hitting Rivet City and even checking in with The Family trader if I needed particular sorts of ammo or more caps than were otherwise available. There are also a number of scavengers that often have useful things and a few caps scattered around the map.

I trade pretty much exclusively with the wandering merchants, only occasionally going to places like Flak and Shrapnel if I need a particular weapon to repair with, or Sydney for ammo.  My trick for finding them quickly is to fast travel to Paradise Falls.  If one is not there, wait one hour.  Repeat until one shows up.  You never have to wait more than two hours, and they are never more than two hours separated from each other, if you are looking for a particular one.  The travel order is Crow, Doc Hoff, Harith, Wolfgang.

I'm late to the party on this one, so forgive me if I'm :dead_horse:, but Liberty Prime was fucking :awesome_for_real:

Otherwise the game was "meh" to "somewhat better than decent."

Also,

Fawkes says, "Sorry, I feel it's your destiny to die like an idiot while I stand aside, perfectly able to help, and do nothing."

Where is my dialogue option for:

Fawkes old chap - ever since I stepped out of Vault 101 I have been a shining beacon of hope in these shattered lands. I have run every errand (no matter how inconsequential,) for every whiny snot nosed incapable fuck left alive in this wasteland, and a few who I think might have been dead already. I am seconds away from jump-starting an entire eco-system. When sentient beings first notice me, time slows as a nimbus of light appears behind my head and a chorus of angels can be heard faintly even through the seventh veil. However, if you do not get your lumpy orange ass into that chamber and push <SPOILER?>ENTER, I am going to shove that laser minigun up your behind and pull the trigger. Afterwards I'm going to drag your body all the way back to that shithole where I found you (yes, even as this earth's last hope is going into meltdown,) murder all the children I see along the way with your penis, and throw you back into that cell before I piss all over your festering corpse. Now please, think again, and try not to get philosophical about my destiny.

Also,
(http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/6382/imasharkww3.jpg)

Dtrain wins the thread.

--Dave

Fawkes doesn't have a penis, though. Because Super Mutants are equipped like Barbie dolls, and doubly so because Fawkes was a woman before that. So that threat wouldn't work. :why_so_serious:

Other than that I agree.

Don't slow him down.  He is on a roll.   :awesome_for_real:

That was a much more eloquent way of phrasing what I said to Fawkes.

My character was all about making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country. It was a foregone conclusion that Lyons was going to take one for the team. Felt a little bad about it, but since Fawkes decided to be a dick, well...

If they game hadn't promptly ended at that point, Fawkes, I, and Vengeance were going to have a little heart-to-heart over his/her/it/whatever's instransigence.

A friend told me that in some DLC coming soon the game will no longer end like it does. Rather you will be able to keep wandering the wasteland. How that will work is anyone's guess.

Continue ? 9
Insert more coin.  :why_so_serious:

Fawkes says, "Super Mutant physiology does not support the manifestation of genitals."

Explain it to the dead children, Fawkes.

And that folks is how you win this game. Or how the Shark did. Which I also did. RAWR.

Here's a question about being evil. Can you enslave Flak without aggroing all of Rivet City? I've snuck into his room at night and done it and everyone in the whole city aggroes the second that Flak runs off with the collar on. I didn't have any trouble enslaving the woman in Tenpenny Towers.

If you aggro all of Rivet City, does that bork the main quest? Because I could pretty much kill them all except for Harkness and the kids, who can't be killed.

Like others have mentioned, cities de-aggro after a few days apparently.

It won't let you kill someone you still need for some other quest (including the main one).  I was starting another character to check out Unarmed skill, and went on a rampage through Vault 101.  I couldn't kill Amata, or the guy who is fixing the robot, or that robot.  I think they're essential to a quest, "Trouble on the Home Front", that you can do later.  And it never lets you kill kids, ratings systems makes that an automatic disqualification for going on the store shelves in some countries.

--Dave

Yeah, my first act as an evil karma person was to try and kill everyone in Vault 101 before I left, so I found the same thing. Ok, time to drench Rivet City in blood, then. It's not like most of the people there have anything to sell me that I want, anyway.

If you put on a Stealth Boy you can do pretty much anything and get away with it. Most of the time.

slight necro, but:
Have to disagree; having a super-mutant guy* that i'd been open-minded enough to free from his cell and then travel with throughout the wastes ... in the end step in to push the button thus both saving others from unnecessary sacrifice and starting new era for the whole ravaged land with his act -- that's enough symmetry, karma payoff and other stuff in it to make it a very satisfying and complete (optional) ending. Even a ghoul doing it despite most of the remaining humanity treating them like shit works good enough in this context.

And hell, if they must kill you then it's not like they didn't have tool already in the game to explain it in way that avoids the whole "lol, radiation" stupidity -- when you retrieve GECK from its chamber you're given option to activate it. If you go for that, it warns you that GECK annihilates everything nearby to turn it into new matter. If you go with it and do activate it there, it blows your head off in blue pulse of some mcguffin energy. Yup, it's the same GECK that's stuffed into the puriifier in the end to make it work. A much simpler, and much harder to avoid cause of death than +1 rad/sec.

*) Fawkes is not a girl, the guy giving interview was just mistaken (http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=912940&view=findpost&p=13586107)

I agree with the Acronym.

Anchorage is out.
Level cap raised to 30, and new ninja armour.  :awesome_for_real:

This isn't the DLC that raises the cap to 30 (that one doesn't come out until March).

It's short and straightforward but I had fun.  Got a kick out of seeing the non-abused weapon and armor textures.  I was very disappointed, though, when I found out that some of the cooler outfits from the sim aren't in the armory afterwards.  Both the Chinese and American winter gear with balaclava were pretty sweet looking.

The gauss rifle makes up for it.  Every shot makes you feel like :ye_gods: :grin: :drill: all at once.

I just got it, will play it through this weekend, but I gotta say, it was a royal pain to get to work. First, purchase 1000 points on windows live. Then download it to some esoteric folder under /users/<account name>/Appdata/Microsoft/xboxlive/yada/yada. Then copy the 3 files to the steam account DATA folder. Then launch the game, log into Windows Live and then the danged content works.

A short technical question. I recently got Fallout 3 and tried to install it on my Macbook Pro (native on Vista with Bootcamp). The game won't let me run it at the native display resolution however. I can only select

800x600
1024x768
1280<8something

although I have 512 MB of Video RAM.

What's the deal there?

Yeah...no.

Is all this DLC stuff you guys talk about fee-based? It's nice they're adding onto the game, but wtf? How much $ is 1000 windows live points? I installed the stupid Live app and saw it was fee-based and shrugged off Fallout 3. Maybe if they release all the DLC at some point as an expansion for a few bucks. Though I don't really buy expansions, I'd rather just buy another game mostly. The only chance F3 DLC has is if Saint's Row 2 and GTA4 don't get some kind of performance patching.

Driver issue?

About 12 USD.

microsoft decided to build monetary inflation into the system before hand. they are just so forward thinking that way.

It's stupid you can't get the content through Steam, since many of us purchased the game that way.

My roommate tried for an hour to get it, but Windows Live has the most god-awful interface.  Had an account but didn't, somehow.  Gave up on Live after this.  Funny though, because after a fifteen second 'fix', the roomie was playing.

Hint to MS and others:  Work on your user interface.  Google trumps throw-your-keyboard levels of frustration.

Windows Live is so hamfisted. It's a real step backwards from everything MS has done with their OS and the 360. Well, maybe not the 360. They went from bad to worse recently, imo.

This is what you people get for buying PC versions of console games. :why_so_serious:

Also the 360 is garbage.  Every day of my life brings another sampling of its hideous nature.  The most recent one is that I cannot use the wireless interface (which is also garbage) when an ethernet cable is plugged into the unit.  I love my PS3 so much.

What, free expansions because we can't be arsed to bother figuring out ham-fisted downloadable content methods which don't want to take our money?  Yeah, sucks to be us. :awesome_for_real:

I agree with Yeg. The more mainstream gaming moves to the consoles with pc gaming as an afterthought, the less I'll be gaming.

I'll stick with Civ4 plus the amazing FfH2. Right now I've got a stack of about eight 360 games, and I only play Madden, and I'll probably lay off that soon as the Pro Bowl airs.

But I think that 'consolization' is pretty firmly entrenched, from user interfaces to textures to shitty fucking ports of AAA titles that are fucked up so badly as to be almost unplayable. I'm almost happy about it, because I have more free time and money thanks to the gaming industry's race to the LCD.

Boo fucking hoo.

I don't see MMOs, major strategy titles (RTS and otherwise), Diablo and it's ilk, a sizable chunk of competitive the FPS market, or The Sims ($$$$) going anywhere soon.  There's your PC market.  Not a bad niche, but the PC isn't likely going to be the one system to rule them all ever again.

Only reason I've chosen to go with the 360 over another platform lately is that the controller feels better for certain games. 

It seems to me the industry is actually becoming more PC friendly recently. I think a couple years ago we would have never seen Mirror's Edge or Dead Space on the PC. However, with the popularity of the 360 leading to easy PC ports and the wide availability of decent middleware which makes porting less painful, we are starting to see most AAA console titles show up on the PC fairly quickly. While some of the ports have been utter ass( GTA 4, I'm looking at you ) ME and Dead Space seem to be a bit better than their console brethren.

I think the sticking point comes from the fact that MS would like to be able to monetize the PC the way they do the 360. They're ignoring the fact that on the PC we have access to tons of free content via modders, not to mention companies like Valve who give expansions away for free. If they are going to charge us for shit, it better be easy to use and worth the money.

Am I right in thinking I have to sign up to some MS steam abortion to play this? In which case, no thanks.


Also, how much does it fucking cost, everything I read goes on about some points bullshit, I assume you buy points with, you know, money. In which case, note to MS assholes:


Hey assholes, we already invented a highly liquid store of value that can be easily expressed in numeric form, it is called fucking money (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency). Stop being dickheads.


EDIT: Ok, $12, you covered this already. The whole thing is still retarded.

You mean like the PC using a 360 controller?  :awesome_for_real:

I'm very interested where all this pocket-picking is going to lead with the economy going into the shitter.

Well to be specific, the game I'm mentioning isn't out for PC. 

Genre, system requirements, UI, knowledge of the platform version quirks, preference on where I play (YES, WE KNOW), controller preference, etc all go into deciding which version of a multiplaform game I purchase. 

And the whole points system is just a scam.  They rarely sell you just the amount you need for a small game or whatever.  Things always cost like 1200 or 800 points, and you purchase in increments of 500.  They want you using those left over points to pay for something incredibly useless like a new theme or gamer pictures (Pipboy being the exception).  It's a nice (read insidious) way to get you to pay $2-3 more than what you intended for something.

I don't much care for the 'points' thing either - PSN handles it much more elegantly by using real currency.  That said, if you have a Zune account (or just register your Windows/XBox Live tag at Zune.net), you can buy points in other increments - most notably 400- and 1200-point chunks, both of which line up more evenly with the pricing of XBL titles.

OK, I didn't know you got some free Alaska.  In that case, you win.  Enjoy your console port.

If it was just the interface and other bothersome things we usually see, it would not be a big deal.  Doing crazy tech shit because MS doesn't really care to help you buy the PC expansion via download is stupid.  It's another insult on top of their money-grubbing ways.  I'm basically just rephrasing what Sky said, although I wanted to add that I love my PS3 and the PSN.

Also, about the controller for PC:
(http://i202.photobucket.com/albums/aa181/Yegolev/IMG00098.jpg)

Clean up that desk!

Call of Duty 4 was more fun for me on the Xbox than on the PC.  Battlefield 2 & 2142 was way better than Battlefield Modern Combat.  I had both KNOTR II somehow for pc and Xbox, and the Xbox was easier to get into for some reason.  But I have to admit I've not played "mods" for a while, used to love to tinker with TOEE, Diablo II, and Baldurs Gate II, but have given up on even trying to mod Battlefield games.

Each has it's own +'s and -'s, and it usually works out, well except the pay for it part.

So how is the download content?  It looks cool, but I'm still making diffrent builds and finding stuff to blow up on the regular game.

I do wish I had the pc ability to make my dog not die, but I'll just have to work around it :)

Just be patient. Microsoft is getting its pound of flesh first. Once the mad rush is over it will move to Steam.

Well I just finished the game, or rather, the main storyline. It was kind of underwhelming.

I just started playing this a week or so ago. I'm enjoying it, but the world is pissing me off. Didn't the war happen 200 years ago? How the hell is it that I am finding salisbury steak in long abandoned buildings that is still edible? In a world that lacks any manufacturing capacity, how is it I'm find weapons and ammo in easy to access abandoned buildings. Am I the first person in the world to ever get level 25 lock picking? All this shit should have long since been scrounged by other people.

Other people who stashed it there then died.  The salsbury steak has preservatives.  Those food purists were right.

Apparently all the carpenters and masons got wiped out in the war, too.

Yeah, don't get me started on that. I'm not saying we'd have chip fab plants back up and running, but it seems like some sort of factories would have been re-developed in 200 years. Also, where's the agriculture? What do these people eat? Is there tha big a surplus of ancient steaks and Fancy Lads cakes?

Not only the Carpenters and Masons died, everybody that knows how to read a Calendar died as well. A postwar year is actually a prewar week.

Only explanation there is.

I guess civilization didn't manage to spur up as well because of the smaller wars after the big one. And then there's the super mutants/hostile wildlife/pseudo vampires/iirradiated areas and slavers/bandits/raiders/enclave who constantly ruin shit for those who try to rebuild.  :awesome_for_real:


As for what they eat, i think they eat the mutated cows. Tons of cow farms in the game  :drillf:

Building things attracts attention.  The game does show how that tends to get you raided.  A lack of trees also makes it difficult to do anything but re-use lumber.  I'm surprised there is any left after 200 years.  Unless you want to use Bob.

Theres plenty that can be picked at if you wanted to.  I found the lack of paint annoying, surely a few shack-proud people could have scavenged up the odd tin and covered up the rust.

As for the main storyline, for me, nearly everything after the point where your father dies just so the enclave can't be the one to purify the water was just frustrating/annoying.  It took way too long to establish just why it really would have mattered had your father started the purifier while at enclave gunpoint, it certainly didn't seem worth dying for.  You are supposed to just accept that the enclave are bad and they can't be the ones to purify the water, by the time they did establish a valid reason it was too far gone to make up.  They really tried to inject too much forced drama into the storyline and it really didn't work.

I'm having some fun now though on my second playthrough as a unarmed psycho chick with my gangsta hangout in tenpenny towers.

Apparently raiders and super-mutants are completely stymied by a robot, a sniper, and some corrugated metal siding, though. Wouldn't you just start building with real materials after a few generations living in Fred Sanford's backyard?

That assumes educational levels capable of doing so after a few generations out there in a super hostile environment.  Vaults were the only source of continuing normalicy, but then the story turns them into little mini-horror movies.  Even the few which are doing fine suffer from some break-down that causes them to crater.

Yeah, you'd think some enclaves would manage it (like the Brotherhood), but then that's part of the Mad Max charm.  Everyone you encounter is barely eking by, and one radscorpion encounter from a horrible fate.

As for the food being edible, I look at it as a joke about preservatives.  As for there still being food around to scrounge after two hundred years, remember that before the war, you had a few hundred million people around.  One day's worth of food needed to feed those numbers would be more than enough to feed a handful of straggling remnants for decades.

The general level of wreckage still around centuries after the bombs fell was explained by Bethesda by the fact that the DC area was bombed even more to shit than the rest of the country, so it's only been relatively recently that people have been able to inhabit it again.

Are they perfect explanations?  No, but it's enough to keep me enjoying the game and not be too bothered by all the strange little anachronisms littered around.

Yeah, story-wise some of the stuff people are saying should have happened by now HAVE happened by the time of Fallout 3, they just haven't happened in the DC area. California is the NCR, apparently up in Massachusetts they are advanced enough to be making androids, etc.

Playing psycho is fun in its own right, for sure. I just offed my third sidekick because I just fucking felt like doing it. Plus my psycho chick is wearing a dress and a bonnet along with bike goggles while she murders her way around the world, which is often extremely cool looking.