f13.net

Any reports how fallout Vegas is I see it releases tonight.

I was on the fence between 360 and PC until about an hour ago. I figured since I just bought a new computer I should probably take advantage of it, waiting for it to unlock on Steam.

I got the PC Collectors edition, so I have to wait until tomorrow to pick it up.

It's weird how not pumped I am for this game, considering how much I liked Fallouts 1, 2, and 3.  League of Legends has been taking up almost all of my gaming time lately, though... that may have something to do with it.

I think part of it for me is that it seems like I was just playing Fallout 3 and almost feels like this is just an expansion pack.

It has been my experience (and I hope I'm wrong in this case) that when a major title doesn't have a single review up a day before launch that it will have issues.  Again, hoping I'm wrong. 

I'm VERY leary about buying without someone saying anything about it.

I'll buy it in a year with all the DLC if it gets decent reviews. Frankly it looks a little uninspired, and I can't figure out why I'd shell out 50 dollars for this instead of just grabbing my copy of Fallout 3 off the shelf and reinstalling it, if I really wanted to.

I caved and bought it (pre-loading atm), so I'll report back on some impressions when its unlocked and I've spent some time with it.

http://feedyourconsole.com/2010/10/review-fallout-new-vegas/ (http://feedyourconsole.com/2010/10/review-fallout-new-vegas/) 10/10.... Course the embargo doesn't lift until the game goes live, so take it with a grain of salt.

Obsidian. I'm wary.

Tonight?! Oh man! Must resist, though. I gotta wait at least a week to see how it goes....Will I last a week? No idea!

I am just waiting for hardcore mode at long fucking last.  A game of post-apocalyptic survival that didn't care whether you ate or slept and let you carry thousands of bullets for no weight never quite sat right with me.  They could just throw those gameplay tweaks into Fallout 3 and I'd be happy as-is.  Staying alive by scrounging wisely and being more clever than the people around you is sort of made a moot point when you have thirty plasma rifles in your backpack, and it wasn't really feasible to try to artificially inflate the difficulty by using low-level equipment, as the higher-level stuff out there was pretty untouchable by anything less than assault rifles.

So yeah, I'm looking forward to this.  Survival games have been my crack ever since System Shock 2; something about starting small and carving a strong character from humble beginnings has held a special place in my heart.

Plot?  Don't care.  Location?  Eh, I like Vegas, so should be fun.

The "hardcore" mode in New Vegas intrigued me so I took a gamble and ordered it.  Then I doubled down by ordering it for the PS3.  I may have misplayed my hand.

I will be snagging this for the 360 after work tomorrow. Hopefully, I'll also have some playing aides, if you will.

I shall update after exposing my raw brain to the wasteland. I promise 110% fewer HST references.

THIS.  In bright, blinking lights with flames shooting out of it, this.

I still might cave though.  I'm weak. It's Fallout.

Reports state that the first DLC is Xbox exclusive.  Seriously?

Seeing as there's a link to such statements on the news page for the game in the Steam thing, I'd wager so. Hopefully its only that the 360 is getting them first, and not purely as a 360 thing. Still annoying, regardless.

I love F3, but still haven't finished all of it. Well, all of the expansion content.

Giant Bomb has a review up: http://www.giantbomb.com/fallout-new-vegas/61-25933/reviews/

I'm pretty stoked for hardcore mode, the bugs not so much.

Props for thread title, from one of my favourite movies ever.

I'm going with this. I did this with F3:GOTY, DLC is moronic and I'm too backlogged to jump onto this.

Also :condi: to different release dates across the world. 2 days 16 hours till it's unlocked. Sit and spin .

Judging by the review it's a typical massively buggy Obsidian release. I've been burned by Obsidian before and refuse to get caught again.

Next.

If you have it for PC, there are mods that add the kind of "hardcore mode" limitations you want.  I'd suggest going that route.

Yep, officially holding until a GOTY is launched and seeing if that one is less buggy.  I've purchased F3 twice:  The first time was at launch and I never made it halfway through because it was buggy.  The second playthrough I haven't finished yet but the GOTY version seemed more stable. 

Meh... oh well.  I just can't justify spending money on a buggy experience.

One thing that has me leaning heavily toward buying this is that Obsidian is stock full of Fallout 1 and 2 developers.

Although I am expecting bugs, I am also expecting much better, more Fallout 1&2 like gameplay.

I'm entirely confused about how Obsidian keep getting these gigs.

Their products turn a profit?

Is this another would've been unbelievably good if it wasn't broken obisidian game?

I'm only about an hour or so in, but it's been solid and bug-free for me so far.  There's more interesting bug reports from elsewhere (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/10/19/fallout-new-vegas-old-obsidian/), though.

Here is a review roundup that I am stealing from the SA thread:


Quick round up:

Joystiq	3.5/5
Giant Bomb	4/5
Feed Your Console	10/10
RPGFan	85%
Game Informer	8.5/10
Just Push Start	4.5/5
Ars Technica	Buy
GamePro	4.5/5
Gaming Nexus	B
vCharleston Gazette	9.5/10
Hooked Gamers	9/10
TQCast	4.5/5
Gamer's Hell	7/10
G4 TV	4/5
AVault	5/5
FileFront	91/100
Atomic Gamer	9/10
Eurogamer	9/10
PCGamer	84/100
Offical Xbox 360 Magazone	9/10
Computer and Videogames	8.1/10
IGN UK	9.0/10
GamesTM	9/10
NowGamer	9.3/10
Escapist Magazine	4/5
Destructoid	9.0/10
IncGamers	9.1/10
FrontTowardsGamer	9/10
NowGamer	9.3/10

Preloaded, available on the 22nd. Because being European sucks again!

Well, I was on the fence until I saw the Charleston Gazette loved it.

They have a well known bias for Obsidian products.

Oh dear. Sounds like the 360 version is infested as well.

http://fidgit.com/archives/2010/10/fallout_new_vegas_six_hours_of.php

From the reviews I'm seeing it seems that the 360 version is far worse than the PC version.

There's some heavy irony. How do you fuck up a release on a standard set of hardware?

I'm guessing the 360 is more sensitive to memory leaks.

Diff developer, sure.  But go take a look at F3 on the PS3.  If you install certain DLC or play the GOTY version, once the save file reaches a certain upper memory limit the game freezes there, too.  And they never acknowledged the issue or offered a fix for it.  They simply ignore the threads that popup in their tech forums.  

It's the same software, even if a different developer.  

We live in an age on the internet where the signal to noise ratio makes it almost impossible to discern anything subjectively useful from forums. However, you would think that people wouldn't apply this same logic to technical forums where people say, "Yeah this won't work because it's freezing my system" over and over. I know I go out of my way to look for technical issues on all the Steam forums before I buy a game, and pay zero attention to the This Game is Boring posts that may litter the place.

Heh, the Giant Bomb review is written by Gerstmann.  Sufficiently scared me off for now.  It looks like he played the 360 version, so I'd be more interested in hearing how the PC version performs. 

Skeptical my machine could handle it, but no way I'm settling for a console version now.

It's Obsidian.  KOTOR2 was probably the buggiest XBox game I ever played.  It really has to be a combination of their coders never working with their own creations, their project management vastly over promising, and their QA process just not working (be it a compressed schedule, lack of proficiency, poor planning, or lack of communication with development, I have no idea).

At least with a PC version you'll get some die hards fixing problems well after Obsidian has washed their hands of it.

Not so good:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/10/19/fallout-new-vegas-old-obsidian/

Also, I was reading Neogaf at work and it seems the water effect is bugged on Nvidia cards and has to be set on low for that game to run playably.

360 version on it's way (hey, I got a deal on it). Guess we'll see if it's totally in the tradition of Fallouts 1 and 2 (i.e. buggy as hell and prone to crash at inconveniant moments). Looking forward to the hardcore stuff.

I'd have gone Steam, but scored the 360 version for less and I need a couch game (other than Xenosaga, which is less game and more interactive movie). We shall see--if the thing ever shows up.

I read that as well, but I haven't had any issues running on ultra/4xAA on my GTX460, regardless of whether there's water in the scene.

I picked up the 360 version, but have to wait until after work to play .... dammit!

Maybe I'm the minority here, but I had no problems with Fallout 3 on the 360, and I played through all 4 DLCs.  No problems at all.

Is it possible to alt-tab in Vegas? FO3 crashing every time I do that drives me nuts.

There's some wierd memory alocation issue with the engine, it is crash prone on the PC (atleast my pc).  The only reason why I know it's a memory alocation issue is it fails to load or crashes frequently if I'm runing my VM at the same time.

Is the game even fun?  Only thing you guys are talking about are the bugs, and I take that with a grain of salt.  I had no bugs with either FO3 or KOTOR2.

Doesn't mean you'll be magically immune this time.  Fallout 3 wasn't developed by Obsidian, however. 

I know.  But my personal experience, for whatever reason, is that I don't experience bugs like many others do...or maybe it's just that they don't bother me as much when they do happen.  Also, I'm sure people are pre-disposed to exaggerate the bugs from a game by Obsidian just as an automatic reflex.

Michael Hogan voicing an old, friendly doctor is making me  :uhrr:.  Not because he's doing a bad job, I'm just having trouble adjusting to hear him do anything other than an angry, drunken snarl.

There's a Quick Look of Vegas on Giant Bomb for those who want to see how it actually plays. Watching it now myself.
http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-fallout-new-vegas/17-3395/

Edit: it's slightly spoilerish as it's taken from the middle of the game.

Only read one comment (GAF) from a PS3 player saying there was 1 crash in 6 hours.  If I don't hear anything worse than that ratio by tomorrow then I'll open it instead of returning it.

Introduction suffers from Bioshock 2-itis: opening cinematic instead of compelling introduction to the world, character creation / setup nowhere near as interesting or involving as Fallout 3.

I'll Radicalthon my progress. I'm making it as tough as fucking possible at the start just to see how I do. I think there's a 100 save file limit for Hardcore which adds a little something special there.

There's a problem with quicksaves on the PC - something related to the Steam cloud apparently. So save manually.

PC quicksaves don't seem to work, and I'm having the occasional crash. Mostly it just seems really slow. And that energy weapons suck. And they added a whole lot of food/drug crafting.

Does it have any Bao-Dur? Because fuck that guy.

After about 90 minutes of PC version, graphics on high, I haven't seen any serious problems. A little bit of a hitch now and then when it is loading something.

Also, spoiler: geckos.  :awesome_for_real:

EDIT:

I can alt-tab without crashing, and nothing seems to be wrong with my quicksaves.

I've had two crashes, however those have been due to issues with Steam's Cloud moving the saves to a back up file and then moving the back ups to your saves.

Steam has since disabled the cloud while they work out the issue.

Runs like a champ for me.  And the initial sequence is kick ass-  much more what I expected from the Fallout setting.

So far no crashes or flaws beyond some of the physics engine silliness that was already in 3.  Hardcore mode has been fairly lenient thus far by not being a complete dick about food and water.  I went through about two days before the lack of eating piled up enough to start giving me penalties.

One thing that really impressed me thus far is that if you're wearing a faction's outfits, random people will think you're with them.  Including their own people.   :drill:  Nothing says love like strolling up to a bandit, chit-chatting about how awesome it is being a bandit, then shooting him in the temple point-blank.  Of course, once you start shooting they wise up pretty quick, and apparently there are special guard NPCs who won't be fooled by your disguises to prevent someone from being able to just wander right up to a gang's leader in mismatched, blood-soaked gang clothes to assassinate him.  But that's some of the attention to gaming detail that I loved in Obsidian's other games.  Which always made me all the sadder when the horrible, unfinished state of those games sent them crashing in flames.  So fingers crossed this time!

*twitches*

Havn't gotten too far into the game, as I had to restart my character twice (due to my own stupidity). I've only seen a single issue (one guy was stuck, mid-air, with his head clipping into a ceiling, but I could talk to him still, so not a huge issue) and have been thus far surprised with how well its running on my mid-range (slightly generous) computer, with most things at high except for shadows and water reflections (which are both turned to low) as neither matters to me.

I'd forgotten how quickly weight adds up in Fallout. Always near encumbered status, and I'm not even on hardcore mode. Granted, part of my problem is I'm a pack rat with nowhere to put shit. On the whole, liking the game thus far, more than I did Fallout 3, at a similar level of hours played. Except for the radio. God damn is that a small selection of songs.

grhm.

I think this will be my GOTY for late 2011 or early 2012.  :uhrr:

The icon for the New Vegas Samurai achievement is  :drill:.

Fallout as a franchise was all about bugs. Lets be clear on that. FO1 and FO2 were buggy, crash-prone messes--and a helluva lot of fun despite it.

I never ran into all that many bugs in FO3 on either the PC or 360 (and I have both). They had different quirks, at least on my machine. Despite the horseshit whining about consoles and the supposed superiorty of the PC, I never noticed that much difference between the two graphically. Sure, the PC is better, but the difference isn't huge (mostly draw-in distance and some detail). Now if you like mods, then the PC has it all over the consoles. The 360 was more inclined to werido display bugs and some slowdown. The PC tended to lock up and crash to desktop on occasion. Half a dozen of one...

All I can say is I'm waiting with bated breath for my 360 copy to show up. Now when the GotY editions hits Steam for $20 or whatever, I'll jump on the PC.

Picked up mine today for the PC, just put a few hours into it. Only gameplay issue I had was being unable to change the resolution while in game; took me 10m to figure out I had to use the launcher.  :uhrr:

The story seems to have a good balance between advancing the real plot and providing side quests with options; just like FO3 I find myself playing a nice, if violent, guy who also happens to be a kleptomaniac. There seems to be a lot of shit out in the wilderness that's marked red (aka karma hit for looting) even if nothing friendly is nearby.

This is the buggiest XBox 360 game I have ever played. I was getting graphical issues, jumping NPCs, broken AI, and all sorts of craziness. It feels held together by gum and shoe string.

The crafting system is overwhelmingly bad. Good that it's there, but there's so many recipes to remember and junk you need to collect. Hardcore Mode adds several timers similar to the Rad meter that just needs to be managed, and can be done so easily. It doesn't really feel like survival on the frontier as it is managing several meters a la the Sims.

I almost don't want to do the Radicalthon. Everything just feels so *weird*, like someone made Fallout 3 except with some really bad programming and design principles.

The dudes I'm up against so far can be fucked the hell up with melee weapons; perma-stunned with machete = GG.

With 75 points in energy weapons, I kill most things faster with The Chopper and 18 melee points. This is not a good thing, I also have a completely broken quest which sadly is part of the main quest line.

So it's an Obsidian game.

Friend was trying to convince me to buy it and was getting nowhere until he told me you could make your own ammo.  What can I say, I'm a crafting nut.

Bought, downloaded, start playing.  Got to kill geckos, find out that the skill books are temporary now (an interesting idea, even if I wasted the first 3 I came across), collected some items,  made some healing powder, fixed a radio AND have a spectacular video crash that kills my card, no output to monitor.

Never saw that one before, but don't worry it came back on reboot. :)

I may need to scale it down from the detected value (ultra high).  But as far as the game goes...it feels like a big expansion with some nods to older mechanics (geckos, doctor bags).  I like the crafting possibilities, the temporary skill boosts are an interesting idea to play with, and I'm looking forward to beating this in hardcore mode (which I picked first).

I will squee if there is a Frian Bargo character in New Vegas.  Or Warroids :)

Its playing flawlessly so far on my PC. Aside from some extra crafting, some new traits, it looks and plays just like regular Fallout3. That's my only complaint, that the tech mechanics haven't moved one jot. Seems very lazy.

Heh.  I hope there are a several different nods to be found once I pick it up.

Just remember these words of wisdom:  "Nothing will get you past this point."

Played about 8 hours yesterday with the PC version. Haven't run across any bugs, everything on ultra high and not a single crash yet. I do notice once in a while quick blurry circles kind of like a cue mark or "cigarette burn" from a film. I don't know if it's supposed to be there but I pretend it's sand hitting me in the eye.

Roommate has played about 8 hours as well on the 360 and hasn't noticed any bugs either.

A question about the mission "Come Fly With Me" if anyone has done it yet.

Skill books are still permanent, they just added a bunch of skill magazines that are temporary as well. No, this isn't clear at first.

Skill books are not temporary; they added in skill magazines which are temporary. There are still permanent skill books in game.

Fallout 3 crashed all the time for me, so I think maybe they did make some changes.

What are the specs on your PC if you don't mind me asking?

When I got to Primm, the first interior area I went to, the game literally fell apart. It was the single most heartbreaking thing considering how I seem to recall Fallout 3 being very stable on the 360.

No major bugs so far, other than having to lookup how to force Steam to install from a disk when the first attempt futzes.

Oh yes, in the opening crafting quest, which sends you to the school to find some root - I found Jalepinos, no roots. Wasted half an hour looking around with no luck, when I stumble on the quest giver and she promptly tells me I completed the quest...

I like the DPS info on the weapons. I don't like the limited Radio songs, but that will be modded up quickly enough. I'm pretty sure I could sing the entirety of Big Iron on his Hip from memory now.

I'm just overjoyed about the crafting.  All of that random crap strewn everywhere finally has a useful purpose?  Yes, please.  The weapon blueprints from 3 weren't exactly thrilling exercises in salvaging, though they were useful in some situations.

The only problem is that the sheer number of recipes and components makes keeping track of what's useful something of a bitch.  I'm gonna have to write up a document listing the items that I should actually be picking up as I wander, as there's no way I'm remembering every ingredient of every recipe.

Yeah the "EVERYTHING MIGHT HAVE A PURPOSE" has kicked in my hoarder sensibilities.

GF pre-ordered this for me on the PS3, because she's awesome. It should arrive on Friday. I shall report back on it's bugginess on that platform!

Played my girlfriend's copy (PC) some last night. While I can't find any one thing that's a deal-breaker for me, nothing seems quite "right." It's just this vague sense that none of these parts Obsidian put together really fit as well as they should be.

- I ran into that RockPaperShotgun AI bug with the fleeing townspeople. It is incredibly annoying.
- I crash a lot, usually leaving buildings. I assume this is normal, since every Bethsoft engine since Morrowind's done that.
- A DarNified UI can't come quick enough.
- WHY CAN I NOT REMAP MY MOUSE BUTTONS. I HAVE FIVE MOUSE BUTTONS, GAME. LET ME USE THEM.
- "Hardcore" mode is pitiful. Three in-game days without food or sleep and my meters have barely budged. Fallout Wanderers Edition in FO3 would have me dead on my feet after 36 hours.
- Finding plants in the wild seems to be like dumb luck. Most I've seen are practically indistinguishable from normal cosmetic scrub brush.
- Performance dips in weird places for no real reason. I'll be trucking at 50+ FPS running along the wilderness and fighting enemies, but talking to a single NPC in a corner of a room can sometimes turn the game into a slideshow.
- Not sure how I feel about the crafting and ammo stuff yet. I'm leaning more in the direction of "dislike" but haven't gotten enough experience with it to decide yet.
- The radio is a pain. It's either too quiet or way too loud. I can't find a happy medium that has both the music and Wayne Newton at acceptable levels.

I really want to like this game. I loved FO3 (despite expecting to detest it), and I've loved every single Obsidian game except Alpha Protocol (which I didn't play) despite all their issues. Nothing is simply clicking for me here.

I think I'll step away from this until it's had about three to six months of patching and modding before I get back into it. Continuing it now will just sour me on the whole thing.

You can map actions to the mouse in the options menu. Just click on the device(s) button on the bottom right. Took me a minute to figure it out.

I didn't even see that anywhere, since the main menu UI is the same fucking color scheme as the background image.

A moot point either way, since I'm not gonna play it for a while I guess.

I don't know, the average NPC rendered by Bethesda engine kinda makes Bao-Dur look like Oscar-level acting material.

People in hardcore mode reporting that it's doing nothing must be experiencing some kind of bug.  After two in-game days, I had gotten penalties from starvation and sleep-deprivation, and probably would've had dehydration too except for the steady water boosts provided by my pre-order canteen, which seem to about halve the rate of dehydrating.  Those meters are definitely rising during play for me.

I dunno man, let's not jump to conclusions like that.  :why_so_serious:

Seems like all hardcore does is:

- Add 3 meters that require food, water, and sleeping to reduce
- Require limbs to be fixed at a Doctor's or with a doctor's bag
- Slows healing so it is unfeasible in the middle of a fight but you can rest up between encounters.

...? Not a huge implementation or rules change seems like. The fact that Goodsprings has unlimited free water and healing is something interesting.

I dislike some of the mechanic changes:

• Speech is no longer % based, you need to meet the requirement to pass any check
• A perk is only gained every two levels

[il]A high int does not get you the same number of skill points compared to Fallout 3[/il]
[/list]

Besides the save bug, I'm enjoying it.

They really seem to have ramped the content. Way too much stuff is requiring 100 hacking, 75 speech, 75 repair, 100 science.

Stutters like shit. Completely unplayable in combat. Horrah.

Edit: Hey, it fixed itself! That said, am I the only one thinking the combat is.... well, ridiculously hard? Fine, I didn't roll a combat character, but common Radscorpions take atleast 20 rounds to kill. It just seems completely out of whack.

Sorry for the delay, missed this the couple times I checked the thread. My specs are; 2.66 GHz Intel Quad Core, 4 gigs of 2.67 GHz RAM that's capped around 3.2 or 3.5 gigs because I'm still using XP, on-board sound and a GeForce GTX 285. Can't recall what motherboard. I don't know if its really barely mid-range or not -- only that the graphics card is the only thing semi-newish (bought early in '09, I believe) and everything is in desperate need of cleaning and de-dusting, but I've been lazy.

Still, performance has been good. Lately been getting the odd stutter (one to three stutters every.. 30-45 minutes, generally after leaving an area I've been in awhile, but sometimes go hours without it).

Had my first crash today, as well; lost a good 7 minutes of play time because I'm a paranoid saver. I rotate through 10 or so save slots. If I haven't saved in ten minutes, its a minor miracle.

So, beyond the bugs, most of the comparisons I'm hearing sound like Fallout 3.  Thus far the only hope I had for this game was that since some of the original Fallout people were working on it, it might still feel like Fallout from a story and atmosphere perspective.  Does anyone have any comments on that front?  If it just feels like another installment of Fallout 3 I'm not particularly interested, especially given the bugs, but if it feels like Fallout 1 or 2, then it might just be worth trying to tolerate the bugs for.

Combat is a pet peeve of mine in FO3 and apparently Vegas too. The way I see the Fallout universe, guns should be horribly lethal and consequences grave, even to the player. It would be much more fun to oneshot that radscorpion to bloody bits with your future gun that only has five bullets left in it, and after that possibly deal with a horrible scorpion poisoning, than it is to simply grind down hit points.

Yeah, I think I'd prefer for more scarity in ammo, coupled with less ammo to kill stuff, just as a matter of flavor.  Then again, it would either make some guns insanely powerful OR entirely useless (a minigun would demolish legions of enemies, or you'd never really have enough ammo to fire it for more than a couple seconds, though maybe that would be ok, I dunno).   From what everyone is saying, it seems like holding out is the best plan still, so my original wait for GOTY edition in a year with all the DLC (and hopefully bugs fixed) plan seems to be going well.

I seem to remember miniguns working exactly that way in the original fallout.
 :oh_i_see:

My son called 1st dibs on the Xbox 360 version, since it is a slow week @ school, no crashes playing it so far & looks great.

Also adds weight to ammo.

After hitting a showstopper bug, I restarted. 6 hours in? Another showstopper. And, I only get achievements when I have the Steam pre-order stuff turned off :/

Fucking Obsidian. It does feel like a decently done TC of Fallout3, but it's missing on the humor. And I really wish I had a manual to look through to see what the hell some stuff does.

Try AP rounds on the rad scorps.  I just ran away from them myself, my guns are dinky. 

I really like the reloading mechanics...oh look at all this shotgun ammo and this single barrel, slowloading shotgun.  Let me just break this down until I get a decent combat shotty for CQC.  no weight for the parts. :)

NEW - since the update, I can no longer get past the copyright splashscreen.  I knew I should have waited. :(

I don't get the complaints about the food and water and sleep being just sliding scales.  What'd you expect, a peggle minigame where you bounce food into your stomach?  I have yet to experience hunger or fatigue in real life as anything other than a linear progression, so I'm having a hard time thinking of any other way for them to handle it.

I've run across an apparent memory leak, things started to get stuttery after a few hours. Exiting and restarting the game cleared it up.

Stupid save game bug, well I kinda wanted to restart anyways.

If you have this game on Steam:

Right click on the game ---->  Properties ---->  UPDATES tab ---->  Uncheck the "I want steam to fuck up my save games" box ----> Exit Steam and restart (I did the machine just to be safe)

I got mine yesterday and didn't bother opening it.  Too many reports of a ~1 second stutter every couple minutes, short freezes, and loading issues with long freezes leading to rebooting the PS3.  I wanted to play this on a console for stability over the PC but that was too optimistic.  If these issues couldn't be sorted out in development then I can't imagine them being magically patched.

I found kiting Radscorpions and whacking them with a Lead Pipe until they turn around and leash, then lobbing dynamite as they retreat just for shits and giggles, is an effective means of taking them down. Guns are useless against them (especially on Very Hard). They rarely get a hit on me because I move so fast and I have a longer reach than they do. Plus when they attack they enter an animation and I can go in and whack them some more while they are animation-locked and immobile.

I'm using far more explosives and melee weapons in the first couple hours than I ever did in Fallout 3. Also: Powder Gangs are a good source of cheap dynamite, which sells for a good amount and can usually be lobbed at enemies and cripple them good. Also: FUCKING MINES! The first one always gets me. Powder Charges are hard as shit to see ( I know, :awesome_for_real: )

I've had one crash bug in mid-load and no other major issues. However I am lugging around a bunch of junk that I need some house or some place I can safely stash. For now I'm using mailboxes as mobile banks.

Was there some cheap place I can stock up on ammo? I'm cleaning out vendors of everything they have as I come across it and am barely staying ahead, though I've got rifle ammo out the wazoo (and no decent rifles). I did enjoy breaking down 20ga rounds and converting them to Magnum using the bench (and walking up on critters and blowing their brains out), but upgraded ammo recipes don't seem to be (initially?) available for the cheaper ammo like 9mm and 10mm. Chet in Goodsprings mentioned something about a surplus box I have yet to find.

So far, exploration is still the best part of the game. It's like getting an entire season of a television series where every episode can be watched in whatever order you'd choose without repercussion, though the main story is driving my direction.

There's a perk that supposedly gives better gunpowder recipes, and another one which does similar for energy weapons.  As for the cheap ammo, I thought I saw it in stock at Chet's shop?  Maybe I'm wrong.

The bugs I can live with, but if the writing as flat out boring as any other Obsidian title I'd just end up thinking 'what's the point'.

Eurogamer, RPS and Giant Bomb all seem to think the story is the best thing since sliced bread, so I don't think we need to worry too much.

I've yet to follow the main storyline very deeply, but it would be hard to work out worse than Fallout 3's boretastic non-story and idiotic ending.  Thus far, the NPCs I've encountered have been more interesting than those in 3, so that's encouraging.

Hopefully there will be lots of robots.  And aliens.

8 hours on PC, no serious bugs. Every once in a while things look just a teeny bit stuttery with graphics on ultrahigh, and sometimes NPCs run even more awkwardly and weirdly than in FO3.

I've seen some slight glitches in questlines--getting Primm a sheriff, for example, there was a bit of weirdness that I was afraid would really bork the sidequest, but it straightened out later. I've had one or two cases of townspeople briefly flinching or shouting to watch out when I showed up and then calming down, in cases where I'm friendly or neutral to them.

Basically I like it. Feels like a huge xpac for FO3, really. Thought the first Caesar's Legion guy you run into (probably, depending on what you choose to do in the early game) is appropriately menacing in a sophisticated way that feels original.

Struggling with hoarding stuff--I particularly find a great need for Doctor's Bags and thus all their ingredients, since I'm running on hardcore (which is really just a slight thumb on the scale for inventory management, but as such, is a fine extra element to think about...I actually drink occasionally from radiated sinks and stuff.)

There are indeed lots of robots. No aliens yet, though.

There are spaceghouls, though.

To answer my own question earlier in the thread about "Come Fly With Me."

And don't forget you can get Felicia Day as a companion.

I played some more tonite, still haven't made it to Vegas yet. I failed a quest I don't think I had ever accepted, which was kinda  :uhrr:. Otherwise, no complaints. I've done every quest I've run into so far, and think I'm up to level 6 or so. I saw a vendor selling what looked like a unique gun ("That Gun") but it was going for 1k caps and the stats didn't look that good. Anyone know if it's worth buying?

O_O

Ran into my first crash bug - apparently the game doesn't like it when you try to buy two copies of the same playing card.

I'm a little curious about something in the first town.

When running around the town, I found Victor's body lying on the hill above town. I then found his house, and everything inside was marked as usable (not red) - so I was thinking maybe I'm supposed to move in. Only now,

So here's a typical example of how quests can get borked in this game, a very classic example of Obsidian having subpar QA, because this is clearly fixable and should absolutely not happen in a quest-based game that has an open-world architecture. This is exactly the kind of shit you're trying to avoid in quest design and exactly the kind of mistake you're looking to find in QA.

I think some of the quests you can fail without accepting are tied to faction. For example,

I dunno if there's any earlier, but you can get safe storage in Novac.

There are several places you can permanently rent rooms, and you're given quarters in at least several casinos (quests) The storyline does pick up, and the faction thing is interesting, but flaky. I was shunned by the Legion, killing some assassins sent after me got me all the way to Vilified  :uhrr: And there is more humor appearing as the game advances. Also, like in Fallout3 you can 'go directly to Rivet City' to bypass some of the early questing.

And Felicia Day is the best companion ever. She makes heads assplode like no one else. She does like stepping in front of me in combat and being decapitated with the Bumper Sword, which kinda sucks.

Containers reset in Fallout New Vegas? Because I used whatever I pleased in Fallout 3 without items vanishing. I stashed everything in the crates beside the Workbench in Goodspring. Am I in for a nasty surprise?

This post on GameFAQs (http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/959557-fallout-new-vegas/56828970) indicates that there's at least a few places that don't reset (mild spoilers).

There has been two patches now for the PC version, one out last night for 360. At least it looks like they are on the ball getting things fixed.

Perfect, according to that Victor's house is safe to use. Works for me, since I use Goodspring as a base for the free water anyways. It's going to take me a while to get in to Vegas itself, I tend to be way too methodical in these games about exporing everything.

Good to know once I pick it up.  I always used the school at the start in Fallout 3.  Complete with teddy bear and spooky dead raider decorations.

Found my first annoying bug: if you got the Weathered 10mm Pistol from buying at Gamestop, do not mod it. Doing so will cause an annoying missing-texture glitch:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeBhc7fF9Dw

Bugs aside, it's a good game. Better than Fallout 3 in my opinion - a little more realistic/consistent and less theme-parky. The crafting is pretty cool actually, even if I don't can't be bothered with it a lot.

Also, it has to be played on hardcore. It's not a big thing, but it makes the crafting more interesting and generally makes it more "worldly" when you have to scavange food and water when you come across it.

It has some improvements but Fallout 3 takes the cake for me in having a better introduction sequence (Liam Fucking Neeson is your dad) and narrative. You don't start in town with a clear tutorial, a cinematic intro that shoe-horns you into the world, and a starting town that has no problems with clean water (compared to D.C. And Fallout 3 whose whole plot stemmed on providing clean water for the area).

Did they make her look like Felecia Day? Well, Felecia Day as interpreted by the Oblivion Engine?

Is it just me or is shit really scarce on Hardcore? I'm constantly running out of ammo and the only reason stimpaks aren't gone is that they heal so slow you might as well sleep anyway.

Note that the cases from ammo you've fired are kept, so you can reload them infinitely as long as you have the other materials.

But yes, you have to be somewhat strategic with what guns you use. I use the Ratslayer as my sniper rifle just because it uses a common cartridge (5.56.)

Do you remember by any chance where you found a sniper rifle? It's the one gun I've been hurting for this whole time.

After the latest update Veronica doesn't seem to comment on events any more, thereby preventing me from starting her quest.  Other companions have disappeared randomly as well.  I should have waited fort the GOTY edition.

I just got Veronica today, all she does is threaten me whenever I shoot at anything. Oh and she also likes to punch Brahmin to death.

Does anyone know if ED-E's quest works on the pc? He's been tagging along for ages and the recording never happens.

edit: nvm on that. It just took a long time.

It's not a real sniper rifle. It's a Varmint rifle with default mods. Found here:

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

If you take it to Mojave Outpost (south-east corner of the map) you can get it repaired to 100% which makes it a pretty good sniper rifle against anything human.

I'm enjoying it a lot more than fallout 3. It does feel like a world. Also... the military camp where they have the front line against the legion... OMG. (Is it Camp Forlorn?)

Camp Forlorn Hope :)

Also, there are some glorious potty-mouths in this game. I didn't really expect dialogue containing "ass-rape." But it's there.

In other news,

(http://filladan.diginfo.se/Lank/521703k37ppo59489opp6705mo1opk3m)

The related gun... I MUST HAVE IT!

I found a pair of a actual sniper rifles on the mission for the omerta's in vegas where you're supposed to destroy the weapons stash.

Edit: 83k caps? How the fuck?

If you up barter, caps flow. And the Sarsasparilla quest rewarded several thousand caps for me. With barter at 20, I've got 17k caps, and I stopped collecting crap to sell after the first couple hours.

Some of my friends claimed with high luck, they can replicate Fallout 2 Max gamble - infinite cash from slot machines.
He got around 72,000 caps from one casino max earning and just stopped looting for sale items.

Just finished tutorial quests and hit Primm...kinda shocked they recycled fallout 2 music. But I'm not complaining.

There are definitely reused art assets too. But hey. The story is good - so far.  I hope they don't KOTOR 2 the ending....

Ohh, 22 hours /played this weekend. And I have a day off coming up on Tuesday...

I had problems sleeping last night because I wanted to get up and continue playing.

I might be in trouble here. :oh_i_see:

PS.
Money generally isn't a problem from what I've found if you aren't a mule - which is difficult to be on hardcore what with carrying the food and water. I sell pretty much everything that has weight and more or less all chems. It adds up quickly.

Where do I get 9 mm silenced pistol?
I assume if I attach silencer on Varmint Rifle, it will reduce chance of being discovered when sniping?

I was contemplating robbing that silver whatever store...the place that sells all the energy weapons. Seemed like a lot of nice stuff sitting around. I wasn't sure if it would mess something up farther down the road though.

Uh.. why would it ? Just turn on your stealthboy and go crazy. it's part of the Oblivion charm. Take a karma loss etc. As long you're not spotted, you're OK.

When I reached New Vegas and didn't have enough cash to enter the Strip, I just knocked over the Casino in Freeside. Still didn't have enough cash, so I went and slaughtered the Kings. Still not enough cash, so I blew up the robots guarding the gate.

Is this how you're supposed to play?

But seriously - I didn't mess anything up plot wise, did I?

Did anybody else take the Wild Wasteland perk? What exactly does it do?

Obsidian indicates the game is buggy because it's so big (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=271206).

Must explain why they gutted KotOR2 instead of patching it...

The kings have been aggro to me the whole time, so killing them shouldn't matter. The robots outside are just gatekeepers I believe, so their loss shouldn't mess you up either. Not sure about the casino, don't think I went in that one.

Just put in a good long session. Working on the Brotherhood questline, hoping to unlock Power Armor training; I know they taught it in FO3. Got to explore a couple Vaults, which is always fun. While heading to one of them, I killed a guy named Cook Cook and looted his head; also in the area I found a disassembled weapons shipment. Anyone know what those are for?

I am very much enjoying this game. It has been remarkably stable since that 16mb patch on day two and I installed THIS (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1524493) fix which removed the stutter people have talked about. I just got to Vegas and my map and questlog are both ablaze with locatiions to see and people to meet. Wish I didn't have to sleep.

So, running into  was awesome!

And then getting the . Might be the best quest in the game so far, sucks that you have to . Seriously, they should have made that part mandatory for everyone.

The writing and references to Fallout 1 and 2 are pretty damn cool.

I'm about 12 hours in on the PS3 now and it's really not as buggy as I'd been led to believe. I've had a couple of lockups on area transition, but I've got at least 3 other PS3 games that do things like that so it's no biggy. Occasional brief stutters, some texture popping, that's about it. The only thing that's annoyed me is that it's still too easy to get yourself stuck with crouching and jumping. I've learned to avoid jumping on top of desks and fallen over bookcases without saving first, but that's just how it was in Fallout 3.

Really enjoying the game, there's a great mix of dark, horrible shit (the Legion...) and funny kitsch (Come Fly With Me).

I wish they'd worked on the inventory system a bit though. Would be really nice to have separate sections for crafting mats, skill magazines, ammo components etc. I'm sure this stuff will be modded in on the PC but on the PS3/360 I guess we're stuck with it. Minor gripe though, I love the crafting in general and shall devote a different character to it maybe.

Oh and I had country music going round in my head all night lastnight!  :uhrr:

It gives you more weird content. I'm not entirely sure, but I think that I've encountered at least one WW location, a cave full of "rodents of unusual size". No idea what's in there because said rodents crippled all my limbs in record time. I've leveled quite a bit since that so I should visit that cave tonight.

Watched my son run around with some big club, he has been having fun with the Xbox 360 version with out any crashes or bugs so far.

I didn't knock over anything in Freeside to get cash, personally. I did, however, utterly decimate the Silver Rush store, after having done their quests and one of them wanted me to bring one of the possible companions to him for killing. I said no and bam, hard fight ensued.

As for the Kings -- there's a few quests with them, and one which leads to one of the non-human companions, so you probably mucked that up. The Freeside Casino also has a small amount of quests (and a dinky room you can get as a reward).

Cook Cook's head is for a bounty quest you get from.. the airport NCR base near the Strip, I believe. Weapons shipment is also quest related, though I believe its a Gun Runner's quest.

One of the quests I missed out on was the I Fought the Law quest from the head Convict guy in the prison. I needed loot, and I was shooting first and asking questions not at all, at that low level, though.

I'm enjoying the game, especially with a bunch of the mods already out for the game (some for fixes, others for graphics.. a few for fun, like one for getting all the Companions).

My big problem with the game, other than how some stuff just isn't explained at all, is just how fast enemies move. Even in VATS, and crippling their legs first doesn't seem to help too much. Haven't had many serious bug issues.

inventory management in this game is terrible.

Gonna search for a mod. Or is there any one with a recommendation? Really need to categorize items. I hate seeing 2358235u2 items and scrolling like crazy just to find the rifle I want.

I'm enjoying the hell out of this game but the map sometimes drives me crazy. Mostly it seems the little arrows to quest locations are kind of wonky at times.

So, I have a question about how to find some things:

1) Arcade Gannon. He's voiced by Chuck people. I have to find him. Where is he?
2) The Gunrunners. I assume they're in Freeside but I've combed the whole place and never found it. Even the dang quest arrow didn't help me.
3) Melissa for the Great Khans quest. I have a sneaky suspicion she's in the quarry overrun by Deathclaws. Is this right?

I suspect I'm closing in on end-game. I went the wild card route. Mild spoilers about potential allies:


Oh, and I'd like to talk about the coolest random moment I've had so far. I'd pissed off the Legion and they sent assassins after me. I was pretty low level, like 5 or 6 at the time. So I'm coming over this hill and they attack and I start backpedaling while firing my pistol. Suddenly all of these shots start going past me and I turned around thinking "oh shit, I've been flanked."

Nope. A random merchant caravan was passing by with 4 mercs. The mercs and the trader opened up on the assassins and made mincemeat of them. I was able to just loot the bodies and walk away without getting a scratch!

A minor spoiler/bug. 

And attempting the dam at level 16 is amusing, but futile.

The Merchant caravans are fun to follow as you're exploring - they are much tougher then they were in Fallout 3. I was conflicted though when they ran in to a squad of Legion, whom I haven't pissed off yet. I decided to hang back and watch - the Legion tore up all the mercenary guards, and then the Traders themselves mowed down the Legionaires. I meanwhile, walked around mid firefight, happily looting bodies.

I'm still early in the game and I'm trying to keep my options open by staying friendly with as many groups as possible. Don't know how long that will last.

On my first playthrough, I decided to go totally against Legion, Freak and Powder Gangers, and picked up Boone as a companion, so we've been going all around the map mowing down Legion whenever we can find them.

Deathclaws and Cazadors are tougher in this one than FO3, I think.

Once you get to the Strip, there's a bit of quest overload.  Good lord.

My favorite so far has been
That said, I ran into lots of scripting issues during that quest, and more than a couple of crashes.  If you get a repeatable crash and are traveling with one or more AI companions, have the companion either wait a good ways away from where you are or send them home and it should help a lot.

Also, fuck cazadors.  Jesus, they're rough.

The cazadors are a rather interesting subversion of giant insects being numerous and weak. :oh_i_see: These are numerous and kick the shit out of you. Together with deathclaws, they're the only mob I actively avoid, especially as I'm playing on hardcore where companions can die and love doing so.

Just picked this up, despite no time at all to play it. But I'm making time by cracky!

Way too linear, but that's my only complaint. It is everything it ought to be, as a stand-alone expansion rather than reinventing the wheel and failing. Love the dialog, music, fights are fun, and it still feels explore-ish so far. Seeing Vegas constantly on the horizon, even at the start of the game, is awesomely foreshadowey.

Did anyone not take the weirdness perk? It just seems too awesome not to take it.

"Hardcore mode" is really "Here's more fun things to do mode" for me. I anticipated being filthy rich and loaded down with ammo halfway through the game, so I figured having to buy food and water all the time would keep things interesting.

There's a reference to the Desert Rangers from Wasteland.

Officially awesome.

I really don't see how you could find this to be too linear. There seem to be at least 4 major paths you could take for the main story.

I've been having craploads of fun, and I'm not even ready to head to Vegas yet. I will admit that it's made me all paranoid, having various factions to deal with. I haven't decided how I'll play the various factions, so aside from Powder Gangers, I've been successful at not pissing anyone off too much.

Yeah, what's this complaint about? Linear is one of the last words I'd use to describe FO:NV.

Try wearing faction clothes yet? With this you can slip past without engaging usual hostiles. Pretty sweet.

Also, hardcore mode isn't that hard. Just adds some consideration when eating / drinking stuff. Once you realize you can sacrifice a small amount of radiation to save up on stims by drinking sarsaparilla, it gets much easier. And I hoarded around 50 dynamites and 50 bottles of sarsaparilla. Something is definitely off about the dynamite amounts. Too much loot and the damn Varmint Rifle silencer DISAPPEARED from the vendor. @#%*(@

I'm still grinning like an idiot, just finished...

As for wanting to arm Archimedes.

Well bear in mind I'm only 3 hours into it, but it seems so far that the game traded side quests for faction paths. After going to Megaton in FO3, you ended up with a zillion things to do. But after Goodsprings, it's just one thing to do, but several ways to do it. For example, as soon as I left town I came across the first camp of an opposing faction, and right then I could see the game unfold differently.


OMG IT'S NOT A COMPLAINT.


NOT A CRIPLING COMPLAINT ANYWAY.

Bought it used today for PS3.  I played F3 on PC, so this will be interesting.  An hour or so in, no problems yet. 

I'm used to the graphics on PC, so this looks a little ruddy.  But it's on a 42" and I get to relax on the couch, so we'll see.  Not sure why they had to fiddle with some of the really basic things like skill books and bobbleheads, but w/e.  Maybe it was to take away the min/max side of the first one?

There are still skill books. The magazines are quite useful in the early game, especially as I somewhat gimped myself by tagging repair. I had debated lockpick, and now wish I'd tagged that. The comprehension perk is doubleplus useful now because it also increases magazine duration.

Found my first major bug, regarding the Brotherhood of Steel quest Still in the Dark.

This game is pretty dark in places. In Vault 3 there's a several guys who have very explicitly OD'ed on his their bed.

I really want to play this... but.. Obsidian.  :heartbreak:

Must.. wait.. for.. goty...

So... I can't rebind keys. The game doesn't tell me why, it just says It cant. OKAY... Oh, and the mouse acceleration makes the game unplayable for me, THATS OK TOO. Game works for all of 10 minutes before it crashes... GAME OF THE FUCKING YEAR.

Can't rebind keys as in you can't find the option? Or the option is actually broken?

I heard you can disable mouse acceleration in the ini file. Or do what I do and just use a wired xbox controller, you really don't need the precision of a mouse for this game imo.

You'll be happier if you wait.

When I try to rebind keys it just tells me "THIS KEY CANNOT BE RE-BOUND!" except it doesn't actually yell at me.


I found a fix on overclock.net that didn't work, maybe I'm not looking hard enough?

Mass Effect 2 had some shit like this too; but at least Mass Effect 2 actually let me rebind keys and it... worked.

Though, to fix mouse acceleration in ME2, it required a lot of stupid ini file tweaking whilst staying within the character limit so the game wouldn't flat out reject the changes.

Still having absolutely zero technical problems at all, about 14 hours in now. I have like 20 uncompleted quests and I just keep finding more.  :awesome_for_real:

I've had two crashes and the occasional glitch on PC thus far, which is pretty much identical to FO3's behavior.  So, it's not a shuddering wreck like KotOR2 in my experience, but it's also showing a lack of improvement over the original in the technical issues department despite being years newer.

Gamewise, I still think the people are more interesting than in FO3, but I'm more fond of DC as a setting, as it had tons of fairly big office buildings to wander around in, while my experience in Vegas has been mostly desert, mountain, or small single-story building.  While that's certainly realistic for what one would expect in a desert, I miss the bounty of tunnels and buildings to explore.

For me Vegas is much more stable than FO3 ever was. Vegas works straight out of the box without modifying any files, and can survive alt-tabbing (this one drove me nuts in FO3).

Holy shit, I just got attacked by  

I love you Wild Wasteland.

My kid got first dibs on this (he got all A's on his midterm) and I said okay, he keeps saying wow dad check this out...I'm like no! don't tell me yet!  Too many good video games, not enough time.

I admit, I didn't know what that flock of butterfly thingies in the distance was. Then they closed on me and Boone. Then Boone was dead. I didn't even have time to yell what the fu...

I didn't know companions were mortal in Hardcore. Gonna mean a lot of reloading once I find Felicia Day.

Also - "So tell me, best friend Tabitha..."

Couldn't resist dropping in a couple mods already (newvegasnexus.com). They have a radio station on there with 55 era suitable songs and commentary - quite good.

One annoying glitch for me involves the UltraLuxe & other stuff on the Strip

Seems like following the main quest is the only way to keep the game interesting. Nothing but random combat and not much to salvage ruins in the wilderness. I took a detour after finishing Novac's quest which didn't grab me at all. What was that rocket launch for actually? It felt like Obsidian was going out of their way to inject a little bit of wackiness after subjecting the player to darker post-apoc theme.

Places I visited:

In "FalloutPrefs.ini" set "bBackground Mouse=1".

Make sure you have write permissions to the file.  That's probably why its failing.  Possibly why it's crashing, too, if other important files are being blocked.

Finished the game last night, went the Wild Card route. I was level 22, without ever having found a companion. Overall I'm very satisfied. Still have a bunch of side quests I'm gonna take care of before I reroll and go through a new way. Might do NCR this time; playing Legion seems like it would be very challenging. I'm also probably gonna throw on Hardcore.

Think I'm about 20-30hrs into it (just met House for the first time and otw to give Benny his come-upins now), and I'm slightly underwhelmed.
I like it (I'm physically unable to not like a Fallout game though), just isn't grabbing me like 3 did.
Roaming feels less interesting (and more guided by the main story as well)
and the crafting ... meh: 2 dozen types of food I'm never going to cook and I can't care about a dozen different ammo-types + all the variations.
I miss my self-made nailgun  :heartbreak:

Also, it puzzles me why every time I get 5+ NPC's on screen it stutters, which I never experienced with 3 and I can't see any graphical improvement in New Vegas.

As an anecdote: I still remember a moment in 3 when I was rummaging around a town (the one filled with mines where you found the old-cook sniper guy), just kicking down doors. I walked up to a bedroom and I saw a couple of skeletons lying on the bed, spooning each other; it choked me up a bit that (although I blamed it on the dust at the time). It was full of dark/melancholic little nuggets that game, I'm just not finding a lot of that in New Vegas.

It feels lighter and not just in a cooky fun way, sort of realised my fear of being Fallout 3.5 Light actually.

360 version finally showed up. 8 hours in and I"m having a blast. It really reminds me of FO2 (The Hub!).

So far, no virtual insect infestation is apparent, but I'm sure some will show up. Obsidian is involved and it took awhile for the nastier ones to appear in FO3. Visually, it looks damned good. Better than FO3 on the 360. No complaints there. From what I"ve seen of combat, I can see where the PC would have an advantage on the shootier aspects of the game. In FO3, what was pretty much the case as well. 360 owners will tend to rely more on VATS and the abilities that support it. In the PC version, I did more FPS style play and didn't bother with a lot of the AP regen and whatnot. Wasn't necessary there, allowing other sorts of abilities to be taken.

I guess I can kiss off the rest of this week and coming weekend in regards of getting anything construtive done around the house.

I've been following the path around the south that the game directs you on. The game feels smaller yet larger. I can't really describe it better than that. It feels like I could just walk over to New Vegas with no issues if I wanted, but I don't feel the obligation. Besides, supposedly I have to deliver something to New Vegas that is in the possession of the guys who killed me (the chip they flashed), so that's been my priority, although
I have felt less incentive to wander and for good reason. I'm on Very Hard so certain fights are beyond my capabilities and merely showing up to the fight space could result in death. I once came across an army of 5 or 6 droids and they ripped me to shreds. Another pack of Feral Ghouls tore me into pieces; they move so fast there isn't any escape. Lacking good defensive skills... yeah I know I have it coming.

So I've stuck to story progression and the immediate areas around them. I have taken a bit longer to get places because I am being hyper-efficient with the supplies I'm carrying and the materials I'm stashing away. I know eventually I'm going to not need any of this stuff but I'm savoring each moment of the game. I was close to Novac after spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with things in the south-west block (I like to clear every house and check every interesting area out for stuff) and managing the massive amounts of junk items I come across that COULD be turned into something useful if I just had the skill.

Overall I still am not sure what the story is since Nipton was really a ghost town to introduce the Legion, Mojave was flavor, and Primm was a stalling tactic, but I have seen hints dropped which actually feels really nice. "WHO IS COURIER 6?" There is intrigue that keeps me moving forward and hints at a larger story that I have yet to know the details of. However seeing NCR / Legion, I haven't felt a strong desire to pick a side just yet, (Legion's methods are brutal but for some reason, in this Survivor wasteland, not altogether unexpected) though I am hated by Powder Gangers cause, y'know, criminals.

Also I need levels like mad for a Very Hard playthrough so I'm doing my best to get the most out of every area I'm in. I just finished Camp Searchlight (Radscorpion Queen, lol) and am about to head towards Novac.

I never even knew you could find things out about the other couriers. Did you find enough of the Dog Tags for Camp Searchlight? I've cleared the area out and went back a few times looking for respawns, and only ever found 7 tags.

Edit: The bug I had with the Brotherhood also glitched the I Could Make You Care quest. I didn't have Veronica, but the quest started when I got the Euclid gun; it told me to go talk to the Brotherhood elder, but he still said the same shit he's been saying since I broke the quest.

That's been my take thus far (and I am not on Very Hard).  In FO3, I believe the enemies "levels" were loosely based on your character's level.  For example, at low levels, you saw Baby/Small Radscorpions, then Regular Radscorpions, then Giant Radscorpions, then finally those god awful Giant Albino Radscorpions.

I'm at a mere level 6, and just got my ass handed to me being jumped < at least > 3 Giant Radscorpions as I wandered off to do some random exploring.  I guess I need to stay on the straight and narrow until I level up some more, or at least get some better firepower to handle the tougher mobs in the world.

I actually like how Vegas does it better; FO3 (and Oblivion) scaled the monsters to your level which made the world feel less immersive to me.

When you're first leaving Goodsprings and then even more Primm, stay close to the road. Just beyond Primm there are some ghoul and radscorpion packs off the road that are fast and likely deadly with your gear and skills at that moment. I kind of like this--they're not there to block you from moving forward, but they do make just idly wandering around more dangerous. It's a principle the game employs throughout: going well off roads closer to Vegas is pretty much "hey, look at the cazadors and/or deathclaws".

I walked in to the area where you pick up the radiation suit, and despite the obvoius warning of the dead body - decided to look around. Oh look, a golden gecko. And his fourteen brothers. I was level six.

After a quick reload, I ventured in again, and this time tried the old Oblivion (and every other 3d game) tactic of perching against melee monsters. At first it felt a little cheezy, but I just found I had far too much fun watching geckos fly accross the landscape as I tossed dynamite amongst them.

Fuck those things. I died more times to geckos than either cazadors or deathclaws.

The scrolling around inventory management is turning me off from crafting anything but Weapon Repair Kits.

Also , simple food mechanics. Cheap, rad-free fresh fruits are readily available from dead enemies and sipping on Southwest Sarsaparilla Softdrink is almost as effective as taking a stimpack while in combat, if you add in multiple fruits / nuts with it. Just make sure you chug a bottle of water to offset the dehydration penalty.

90 Fire Arms at level 10. But I'm still yet to find a scoped rifle. Where can I get those at Novac?

I found a night scope mod for a varmint rifle on the first merchant guy in Goodsprings, but I believe it is random which mods a given merchant will have each refresh. Just check back with any merchant you found a mod of any kind on every so often and you'll eventually get one. So far I've found scopes for varmint rifles and hunting rifles.

I don't know that there are any non unique rifles that have scopes un-modded. Probably sniper rifles, but I haven't found one yet.

There were only 7 including Private Edwards. The sergeant (Anston?) lied to you; a bug perhaps. You get a shitty Service Rifle out of it that I already got tons of prior. That area was pretty difficult but if you hit the turrets and the patrolling rangers they'll tear apart the town's denizens.

I almost missed Courier 4. He's in Primm next to the Mojave Express.

I'm running into paranoid instances like you are though; did I miss this tiny item? Or this hard to see body? Finding Courier #4 left me with the impression I would be coming across other Macguffin-carrying couriers. But where are they? Am I going to get upset if I finish the game without finding them? Another example, I went to a ranch house with 4 Diary Entries scattered about. I got 2-4 and wanted to find 1 but couldn't do it. So I left but I know... god damn it... that diary entry is still there somewhere.

My OCD tendencies as a scavenger tend to make me take longer to complete a game like this.

Knock out a leg and it takes all the wind out of their sails.

Crescent Canyon to the south was full of them. I take so much damage from them though that it's difficult just to stand there and VATS their legs.

I will say, as much as I liked FO3, New Vegas just feels more like Fallout to me. Part of it is the western setting, I'm sure, part of it is the story is just a more Fallout-y sort of story, at least so far.

I really thought he wanted 10; maybe a bug like you said. The quest never completed at 7; no rifle given and it's still in my journal as 'Find Dog Tags'. I somehow wandered past Primm on my trip to Vegas. I only stopped back later because I had to clear out that quarry for a Khans quest. The farmhouse with the diaries pages pissed me off too; I think I only ever found 2 and 4.

Regarding scopes, there's a Sniper Rifle, Marksman Carbine and an Anti-material Rifle that I know of with built-in scopes. I found the Sniper and Anti-material on the Gun Runners vendor eventually.

There also is the gobi.... Which is sitting in a chest on a ledge kinda by searchlight and the s. Legion town. But you do need 100 lockpicking I recall.

As to the abandoned farm diary The weapon mods seemed to peter out, only a few low level guns get all 3. I mean, just a suppressor for the sniper rifle? I never found myself using it anywhere close to where people could hear me. The whole game just seems unpolished, lots of potential, but needed longer in the oven.

Where'd you find a suppressor for the sniper rifle? Gun Runners never seemed to get one in, and that's the only place I've reliably found mods. I do wish there were more mods in general.

I got the sniper suppressor at
Also, I finished the game before seeing the strength/skill mechanic for weapons. Guess it doesn't make that much difference when using over-skill/str stuff.

There's a free marksman carbine in Vault 34.

What I need right now is Radscorpion eggs for the sexy lady in Thorn, but no Scorpion seems to drop any.
 

God damn AI. It sets up a kill box with traps on the ground floor. Something happens and it runs down from its kill box and kills itself on the traps it set up.

 :facepalm:

I've found surprisingly little in the way of weapon mods but maybe they'll be in New Vegas. I'm headed for Boulder City soon but dealing with REPCONN and areas around Novac. I will give them credit for how they came to the name Novac.

Searchlight: Make sure to get the one from Private Edwards.

Lots of quests, but main grape is that most of the quests are just quick travel fodders. A little mystified why they bothered giving long treks when there's NOTHING INTERESTING HAPPENED in between the treks. I tried walking the distance myself and found nothing of interesting to do. Just hostiles random to snipes, and little else related to the quest.

Can you quick travel before visiting somewhere? I recall in FO3 you had to explore before you could fast travel, which is probably why Bethsoft added so much to discover in between.

Once I hit Vegas, a lot of quests told me to go back down south of mojave. So quick travels are quite useful in this regard, there's not much point in wasting time to walk there yourself, shoot 2 powder gangers along the way over 15 minutes walk.

Goodsprings to New Vegas, level 2, 1 stealthboy. Just avoid the blind deathclaw.

There's some stuff going on in the between stretches, watching rival factions meet up on the road and shoot it out is fun. Really wish the game would crash better, seems to crash and keep telling steam I'm playing, had someone call me yesterday and apologize for interrupting my game while I was out shopping.

Wait, someone called you to apologize for interrupting your game? Does not compute.

Someone called me, thinking I was home on the computer playing New Vegas while in reality I was out shopping. They apologized for interrupting my game as they could see in the Steam Thingy that I was playing, but not responding to their messages, I was confuzled until I figured it out. Due to New Vegas not crashing cleanly when it crashes.

Not suprising. I had times where Fallout 3 would crash to desktop, and I wouldn't notice until several hours later that Fallout.exe was still running as a proccess in the background.

Christ, when I got to Nipton, my PIP Boy started playing "Big Iron" just after I...

Repercussions for any possible actions seem pretty well built in

 :grin:

Well I beat the game the other day. I won't spoil the ending but I will say I was impressed. It gave a little overview of the major communities and what, if any, changes I brought to them as well as how my actions affected the major factions.. Surprisingly it actually mentioned the two companions I did quests for and talked about what happened with them slightly. I was quite pleased and am now going to play through again to find as many companions as I can to see how their lives turn out.

You're not really "supposed" to do anything specific, you can talk to him, shoot him, whatever. When you get autofails on quests as consequences to things it is really just one possible path closing off. Kill Faction Leader A, and you can't do his quests, etc.

Yeah I finished the game, although at point, the NCR in Vegas strip went bonkers after I turned in a quest at their embassy and started shooting me on the streets, joined by the Securitrons...that was broken.

Time to restart as melee character.

Just finished, not wanting to spoil things I'm just going to say this: Personal GOTY. Sorry Frictional.

One thing that I found neat - eventhough only Hardcore mode has real companion deaths, the epilogue still takes it into consideration. I had one companion die and couldn't be bothered loading, whose epilogue(obituary?) told me her deeds had eventually led to her death.

Seems I ran into my first bug. In the quest "I Put a Spell on you"


Quite annoying, really.

Were you wearing faction armor or brotherhood power armor? Power armor that just says Power Armor is fine, they dislike the Brotherhood Power Armor wearers though.

And I thought I read in an interview way back that they were adapting VATS for use with melee, but no it's still one big target in VATS mode when you melee.  I was looking forward to lopping off arms and such.

Are you playing on the PC? If so Newvegasnexus has a fix for that.

So I've lately just been exploring, instead of following the general direction quests pointed me in, and I find a few death claws; and smoke them easily enough, not surprising given I'm level 17 and running with EDE, Veronica, Boone, Cass, Rex and Gannon, Raul. Oh, hey.. a cave system I can enter... filled with death claws. No problem. Things start easily enough as I mow through pairs of death claws, then I get turned around for a moment, and freeze.

Three young death claws, four normal death claws, a mother and a legendary death claw are charging right at us, and are already very close before we even get a single shot off. The legendary death claw has more than 3x the health of the normal ones. The young death claws drop quickly, just as the last young one dies, I hear a pained squeal. Rex is dead (Hard core mode). As I start plugging away at the normal death claws, using my light machine gun using armor piercing ammo, given the high DT of death claws (20ish), I'm pained to know the dog is dead, but note I'd at least finished his quest. Then I head the clank of EDE dropping, and again I'm glad I finished the quest there too. Just as the last normal death claw drops, I noticed Raul and Gannon are also dead; two which I hadn't finished the quests for. I consider reloading at this point, but decide against it, as this was why I modded in the number of companions I could use.

The mother death claw drops quickly enough, and my AP has regenerated enough to plug into VATS again, so I do so, hoping to cripple the arms of the legendary death claw before it can kill any more companions. I notice in VATS that Veronica is around 33% health, Cass around 60%, and Boone is at full. Veronica and Cass both have some distance from the legendary death claw, which itself is at around 60% health. I figure I'm safe. As my VATS shots finish, the right arm of the death claw crippled.. it quickly proceeds to kill Boone; another companion I hadn't finished the quest for. It dies shortly after this.

So, all told, I lost 5 companions in that cave, all because the legendary and at least one normal death claw clipped right through a wall to join the fray and my own over-confidence. I, myself, was sitting around 10% health after the battle. All in all, my best moment in the game thus far.

I find this one a lot easier than 3.  Once you get Boone it is a cake walk, for the most part.  It also seems to be a little bit less of a sandbox than the previous one.  I hope it spreads out. 

A loading screen tip says once you get to 50ish melee and/or unarmed it opens up new attacks in VATS.

I'm not as far in as you but it is definitely in the conversation right now for mine too (with ME2 and RDR).

There are few things more depressing than when finishing up depositing items back at your hidey hole you accidentally hit A)  Take All instead of X) Exit..........  Over an hour later, I finally got my shit sorted back out again. 

God I hate when that happens. Thankfully, I use the Lucky 38 room so I have a box for every type of item, and if I hit A I can just go back to the relevant tab and deposit all the excess.

Thanks, but that didn't work either. I stand in the monorail, get the options to disarm the bomb but the quest doesn't update.

I think the reason why Boone is overpowered is due to his default weapon of choice : scoped hunter rifle & sneak attack criticals he's pulling off when both of you are in stealth mode. I had a funny moment when the combat tune just played and I turned to the red marker...one head popped over the hill, only for Boone to kill it before I could even draw my pistol. Also, I'm playing high END build now and simply told Boone to camp over the hill while lure the mobs over to an open killing field. So easy.  :awesome_for_real:

Boone and ED-E are great as a combo for that very reason. I've been exploring Freeside, but I never get a chance to fight any random thugs. ED-E and Boone spot and kill them before they close to range.

How do you get 2 companions? Is there a perk, or is it a mod? I ask because I was running around with Arcade, then tried to recruit Boone but he said there isn't room in the party or whatever.

Afaik you can only have one human(ish) companion and one robot-like thingamajig (there s only 2 robot companions that I know of though). So yeah if you meet another humanoid and you want himl/her as a companion you gotta ditch the one you're with  :heartbreak:.

Oh ok, that makes sense. I was wondering how everyone was talking about having two companions. Thanks.

There is a mod for unlimited companions though.

At 50 melee you get a special attack that you can queue up multiple times in VATS. You still can't target individual body parts.

Things I wish I'd known earlier...

If you dismiss a companion take them back to the 38 first or they'll walk back from where ever you dismissed them. It can take a while in game time for them to make it back.

The little square box with a number and symbol above a weapon's damage is the skill level you need to get full damage from the weapon.

 

Too much talking! Ugh! Got to New Vegas, and spent over an hour wading through dialogs! Too much I say! But it was all interesting! So I couldn't stop talking to people because I wanted more! But then again I didn't! I don't know what I wanted! Argh!

There was one quest that seemed to start in the middle:
Man, the only reason to have a high Repair skill is to build new stuff? Ugh. Wasted points.

There's a perk you can get at 90 repair that lets you repair an item with any vaguely similar item. It's quite handy.

Yeah I raised my Repair to 90 just to get that because I feel like I should be able to gut a Single Shotgun to repair a Caravan Shotgun, as an example.

Also: shotguns useless on Very Hard except against unarmored opponents (critters).

Fast travel to vault 34 is just evil.

Shotgun Surgeon perk makes a huge difference.

Sly that happened to me too; I had no idea who she was so I just told her to fuck off.

No - you need 100 repair for a few quests.

Most of the non fighting skills come up in conversations, even guns has shown up a couple times. Repair is pretty frequently useful in quests. So is medicine, interestingly.

And barter! Which sucked on my first playthrough because I rarely raise barter!

Barter checks in conversation are mostly oriented just towards getting a bigger reward, although there are some 'negotiate this deal' type quests where it comes in handy. I think I've gotten more mileage out of the others overall.

Hm that's true, and I do like the repair quests. YAY I feel better.  :why_so_serious:

All I'm getting from this thread is "buy this game!". Is that right?

It'd be a good idea, at least if you liked Fallout 3.

I was extremely wary, but I eventually caved.  Glad I did, game is a pretty fun.

Runs a lot better than I expected it to as well.

So I picked up ED-E and things were going fine... however, when I got to the Mojave Outpost, it started shooting the wandering trader and his guards. Neither of them turned hostile, and I didn't want to take the risk of a karma/faction hit by killing the guards, so I just reloaded and set the 'bot to wait a safe distance away from the outpost.

Is this a bug [likely] or a feature [remnants of the killer robot programming :awesome_for_real:], and has anyone encountered stuff like this?

(the wiki says ED-E sometimes bugs out when in aggressive mode, but I keep it on passive)

I haven't had any problems with companions going berserk on things they shouldn't, no.

I had to reload in the dam a couple times as they would get agro for no reason or start shooting people for no reason.

ED-E is really bad for this so keep that in mind.  I also had Veronica wig out once in Camp McCarren.

Shit it's Tuesday, this game has just eaten a week of my life!

Still not finished the main questline, I'm hoovering up as many side-quests as I can first. Really like the fact that you can't get anywhere near maxing a char out this time. You could pretty much get 10 in all SPECIALs and 100 in all skills without too much hassle in Fallout 3, but you actually have to choose this time.

Energy weapons seem to totally suck, except for the Pulse Gun and Gauss Rifle, which is odd. I'll try explosives or melee next playthrough but I think that'll just make it harder really. And Jury Rigging is just an awesome perk, well worth the 90 repair points. Still totally meh about the crafting though, seems like too much complexity for too little gain.

I've not had any problems with ED-E going agro but Boone went psycho in The Strip one day and just started randomly opening up on people, was entertaining...  :why_so_serious: Other than that it's been relatively painless on the PS3 in terms of bugs, apart from fairly regular lockups. I get 1-2 hours playtime before a lockup so regular saves are a must.

The setting feels slightly off though and the world feels a bit sparse. In Fallout 3 every single location or building had something there, even if it was just a safe that could be picked or a corpse or something. In NV there seems to be lots of locations that have just a destroyed building and nothing else at all there. Makes it feel a bit less detailed and lovingly created than Fallout 3 did.

So a question about a quest (spoilered to protect the innocent)

On getting Boone as a companion re: above question

Yeah, quests triggers tend to be wonky in this one. You'd have to be spoilered just so you don't break them involuntarily. Which takes away some of the fun. I already broke three quests.

Bugs like that are my biggest complaint with this game. There's no excuse for not testing possible ways your quest could be completed, particularly if it will lead to missing out on rewards or other quests.

The game hasn't been too buggy for me, however when something happens it is spectacularly bad.  So save often. 

Stupid question from someone who only recently decided to start using Steam:  can you save New Vegas games in the cloud in Steam?  Hell, do all Steam games let you do that?  I think I've decided I'm going to get this game, only trying to decide if it should be PC or console.

Thanks for everyone's replies and suggestions.  Each of you was correct in your methods.

That really annoyed me at first until I figured out that I was getting full experience for his kills.

As far as I recall, they turned it off due to a bug that deleted your saves.

Go PC just for the mod community.  That greatly improved the Fallout 3 experience as far as I am concerned.  Also, I have no idea, as I'm saying this, if this game will support it the way Fallout 3 did, so if it doesn't someone can correct me.

I'm sure the modders will be just as plentiful.  Several have already ported over their old assets, since it's basically the same.

Seems the companions are a little tougher than they were in 3. I'm walking through freeside with Veronica following me. I see a person moving towards me on the edge of the screen and he takes about two steps when - the game cuts to slow-mo cinematic as Veronica runs up and *beheads* the punk with a single punch.

My only dillemna is that I want to focus on using explosives, but that likely will not work well with two melee followers in Veroncia and Rex.

I'm definitely going to try melee on my second run-through: Legion and Freak loving melee psychotic...

I wish the companions had 3 aggression settings - the current two plus a "Do not attack at all" option. Or maybe that and also a "Only attack when I attack" option.

It's very annoying when stealthing about and you get slightly too close and the CAUTION warning comes up and ED-E and Boone just open up. I end up using "Wait here" quite a lot.

I hated that too apocrypha. Between that and the constant chatter whenever I go into stealth ("My stealth bandaging skills...") I hated the brief time I spent with companions. Once I finished Arcade's quest I didn't bother going to get Boone. Companions need a "Speak Only When Spoken To" option.

It's called the 'Go wait for me at Lucky 38, tard' conversation choice. Or you can just tell them to wait somewhere safe, and you still have the perks. I parked ED and Lily then went forth and had a nice time.

All the issues can be modded away on PC. I took multiple companion mod to just drop people off by telling them to 'wait' at safe points like Novac Motel etc. I hated that part of telling to go back to 38, cause sometimes they get stuck somewhere. One time I told Boone to wait at 38, he popped up on top of HELIOS One when I was going to activate the defensive tower. What the fuck?

Just catchin some rays, waiting for karma.

Incendiary ammo + anti-materiel rifle =  :awesome_for_real:

I need to break out of the 'charming sniper' mode I always play these games in.

That's what the third, or maybe the fourth, playthrough is for. ;D

I wish they had a "get the fuck out of my way when I'm trying to walk through you" option. 

There is. Radial menu. Bottom left. Back-away.
The faction system is nice, but I wish there's an official uniform issued for each. I mean, being part of the NCR war effort is nice, but it'd be better if they issue you with trooper armor as a symbol of trust. "We'd be proud if you wear our uniform" kind of gesture, culminating to Ranger armor and eventually, Ranger Veterans.

Cause right now, all they treat me is like a heroic mercenary, which isn't what I'm after.

Also, IMO best part of the game:

But I wish they tone down the Legion's cruelty a bit, there's no fucking way there's a gray area for that faction, it felt really forced. And Caesar's voice not doing anything for me. He felt more like a generic gang leader I shot at the street than " THIS IS SOMEONE IMPORTANT " feeling I'm supposed to get when I heard him speak for the first time.

Got the game, loving it and am I the only one who plays...

~guns(sniper)
~lockpick(must open every goddamned chest)
~Speech

because it seems like I can't enjoy the game as much without these skills, is it an explorer type thing?

Very possibly.

Speech is much better than in F3, here it changes this pretty majorly instead of just being a shortcut thing. Playing with a charisma of 1 is quite amusing though, everyone seems to hate you to start!

That's the way I typically have played the newer incarnation of Fallout.  In Fallout 1 or 2, I usually didn't have lockpick and would replace it with science or melee/unarmed. Melee and unarmed seemed to be a lot more fun before the change to the current engine.

But yah, I can't seem to break out of the charming sniper mode either, and it hasn't gotten easier with how the games play now.   Although it seems that you get a lot less mileage out of speech now.  In Fallout 1 or 2 having high speech changed the game significantly.

Another charming sniper here. I really have to try melee for my third playthrough. Maybe I'll try dumb as a post for my fourth time.

For shits and giggles last night I rolled a str10 end10 melee psycho and just killed my way across the wasteland. I actually got pretty far in the main storyline because almost all the people you need info from you can also get the info off their corpses.  I will say that high melee is pretty OP and there is a sort of sick joy that comes from recklessly charging at someone taking shots at you with a tire iron in your hand.

I tagged guns, stealth, and repair. I'm now wishing I'd tagged either lockpick or science. Oh well, that's what multiple playthroughs are for.

That's pretty much exactly how I've been playing it too.

Sniping is a bit overpowered I think, especially since you can open combat with a non-VATS snipe that is a pure FPS shot. In Fallout 3 if you just aimed at a distance where you'd have a 5% chance to hit in VATS it'd take that into account and you'd still miss. Doesn't seem to be the case here, I headshot at extreme range out of VATS.

I try to do so much I end up spread thin. Currently tried focusing on Barter, Speech, Lockpick, Survival and Explosives, and then a secondary focus on Guns, Repair, Science, and Sneak.

I've had to stop raising Survival and pretty much gave up on getting Sneak or Science any higher. I'm level 12 right now, and will be spending almost all my points the next two levels to get Barter to 70, so I can take Pack Rat (I have 4 Str). That perk was designed perfectly for my obsessive playstyle.

Guns, Speech, Repair here, with a secondary focus on Science, Lock Pick, and Sneak.

Am I the only one who always starts with 10 int?

I start with 8ish usually in these things, there's always a way to raise it early enough it seems like.

Being able to target eyes with a Ripper does that.  It's why I never bothered going melee in FO3.

Yeah it does kind of suck for melee. (insert comment about this is why Oblivion sucked here)

There's a surgeon you can stumble across that can implant things to boost your stats. They boost them by either 1 or 2, I wasn't paying close attention to the before/after.

They're +1 and you can only have as many implants as your Endurance -1. Which makes End quite a valuable stat to boost at character creation in retrospect, compounded by the every-other-level perks, i.e. not wanting to waste them on Intensive Training.

There are actually few enough compelling perks that I've spent several on intensive training. YMMV.

Ah, I wondered what was being checked when she was testing how many more implants I could take. That makes sense now, thanks.

Close combat isn't really bad. Mid game weapons like Ripper and Chainsaws are a nightmare with Psycho drug on. You just hold Left mouse button and rippppppppppppp. Late game, there's a glove which shoots bullet when you punch people...think about it....

I recall:
10 gives you 14.5 points per level
9 gives you 14
8 gives you 13.5
7 gives you 13

the benefit from 10 isn't worth it.

From the Wiki (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Intelligence):
So the benefit from 10 is the same as the benefit from 9. Each point in Int (from level 1) is 15 skill points, which is the same as taking the Tag! perk.

The Educated perk is worth 52 skill points if you take it at level 4, and Comprehension is worth 28 if you find every single skill book, but also makes the magazines give +20 instead of +10, which is awesome - means you only have to get Lockpick/Science to 75 and you can open any door/computer if you've got a magazine and a +5 vault outfit.

I think I started with an Int of 8, boosted it to 9 with the implant and took both Educated and Comprehension. I can't remember what my skills are at level 30 but I'm nowhere near maxed - there's a couple that are under 30 (Survival, Explosives), a few over 90 (Repair, Barter, Guns) and the rest are in the upper range between.

edit: perks wrong way round.

So between 13-14 skill points for the extra point.

(really minor sidequest spoiler)

Various merchants sell all the parts you need for that quest.

I seem to have hit a "save game too large" bug. I can play for 10-15 mins now before a lockup on the PS3, usually when I'm opening my inventory. Might have some corrupted item of some kind in there or something, I dunno, but it's very annoying.

Will try clearing out my inven next time I fire it up and see if I can recover it.

Oh son of a bitch, that's a holdover from F3 - check Bethesda's forums about F3 w/DLC installed.  People only getting so far into the game and their saves are trashed.  I really had assumed (yeah, me!) that they've have knocked that one out.  

So glad I broke my routine of buying on PC for the PS3....    :oh_i_see:

EDIT:  From memory, I think when the save file hits 10mb it begins having issues, if it makes it to 15mbish it's toast.  There's no recovery, just start over.  My personal opinion is that it's so fundamentally broken someone/group should get off their butts and drop a class action, but w/e.  I'm guessing it's a pretty small group of people affected on the PS3.

Sorted it, it's not a save game bug, it's a location. When I try to go NW from Bitter Springs (which is where I was when the crash started happening) the game locks up every single time.

There's a vista from the top of the ridge above Bitter Springs that has several layers of rolling hills going off into the distance and something in that is killing the PS3. Ah well, will try looping round from another direction and see if I can get to that unexplored location some other way.

Thank god... I was seriously about to have a hissy fit. 

Thanks for the help guys! CmdrSlack's solution worked, sadly the guy at the other place wouldn't talk to me since my gun skill was too low. (I'm playing a sorta-pacifist on this playthrough, no weapon skills above 25  :awesome_for_real:)

Hey amazing, the companion quest is actually enjoyable. Ones that work, that is. Veronica  :heart:

I really hate invisible walls.

I hate groups of deathclaws and golden geckos.

I hate crashy quests. I just want to talk to Chauncey, but my game crashes every time I get near him in the quest location. Had a similar issue with a little girl Boomer and her missing Mr Cuddles, fixed by waiting until she was at school. Chauncey you HAVE to talk to in the location to progress the quest.

Never had that problem with Chauncey because I shot everyone in the Ultraluxe due to being pretentious dickbags. It was very convenient that land barons guards all were carrying shotguns inside the casino. Saved me from having to use the silenced 10mm on everyone.

Saving Veronica's quest for next playthrough. I quite liked Boone's quest, if only for how entertainingly miserable he is.

Agreed. If you don't want me going that way then make the terrain obviously impassable, and be consistent with what steepness of incline I can climb.

Winners take drugs!  :grin:  I want a single button to take a dose each of Psycho, Buffout, Jet, Med-X and Rebound all at once! I hate Fixer however, it's just too small a downside to popping chems now. Having to take a trip to find a doctor or accepting the addiction debuff made taking chems something I saved for rare occasions.

I can't not take tons of drugs all the time. It's just amazing. I sell Fixer so I can have more money for more drugs. Eventually I got tired of pussy-footing around and started drinking all the alcohol, Nuka-Cola, and Sasparilla I could find. Technically you can't get addicted to Nuka-Cola and Sasparilla, but whatever.

I had Sasparilla hotkeyed for most of the game as my post-battle HoT, while also trying to farm for the special Bottle Caps. Anyone wanna spoiler how to get that quest to start? Do I need a certain number, or to go to a certain place? Some guy had harassed me very early on telling me to watch out if I ever got a lot, but I had like 30 by the end of the game and it never seemed to go anywhere.

50 is what you need, no spoilers.

That quest sucked ass. Heard if you carry too many of the caps it eats up more processes, slowing down your game.

I found 72 in one playthrough, no slowdowns. And semi-spoiler for that quest:

After trying another energy weapon playthrough, they are just inferior in every way to guns.

50? FFFFFUUUUUU-

Science is pure awesomeness

The strip is always free, you just need to have 2000 caps on you. Which is pretty damned easy by the time you get there.

I'm nominating  :why_so_serious: vault 11 for most interesting storyline.

Yeah Vault 11 gets my vote for "most fucked up vault experiment" this time around.

The sheer amount of choice once you hit New Vegas is mind-boggling.

It is him, yes. The cast is actually pretty awesome.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Ausir/Fallout:_New_Vegas_cast_revealed if you want to see it in detail, might be some spoilery stuff to that.

===========

So, I had never played Fallout 3 on my current machine, and I was curious to see if it had the same crash-free experience that New Vegas had (I think in 40 hours I had 1-2 crashes total.) On my old machine, where I played Fallout 3, it crashed constantly. Turns out it still crashes quite a lot on this one. So New Vegas definitely made some serious engine/stability improvements.

I don't really remember Fallout 3 crashing on my PC at all.  But I'm sure it did, being a BethSoft game.

The hardware I'm running New Vegas on is exactly the same, except that I'm running on a bigger/better monitor and thus a higher resolution.  I've had two crashes so far in I'd guess 20 hours or so of gameplay.  I'm satisfied with the stability.

  

On a different note, the game is really light on quests at the start, but it really starts piling on once you hit New Vegas. Starting to see a lot more buggy behavior now, but nothing too completely horrible. And thankfully, nothing game breaking yet.

I know I had heard mr house before! Awesome casting.

One bit of bad voice acting: most of the versions of "Later" that close out a lot of conversations. An NPC can sound completely 'right' up that point and then suddenly will do this petulant surfer-dude "Later" that completely breaks the impression.

While we're counting, I had absolutely no crashes on Fallout 3. I've had 2 crashes on New Vegas, after about 25 hours of play. Honestly not bad, considering my machine is something of a frankenstein.

Yeah, the sheer staggering number of quests after you get to New Vegas is, er, staggering. Some of them are duplicates, like
Interesting layout too, as New Vegas becomes literally a hub that you work out of, rather than multiple hubs like in Fallout 3.

Some of the faction quests has a weird ending for me. I didn't feel that the conclusion was satisfactory. The fate of the Brotherhood especially.

BTW, the faction interrelationships in New Vegas are, imho, way more interesting than in Fallout 3.

I need to play this game more so I can read this thread. Thankfully I am ignoring Black Ops.

BoS spoiler

Just finished my first playthrough. Good, solid 8/10 in my view. Marred very slightly by an increasing tendency to crash on the PS3 as I progressed and by way the final set of quests played out. Too easy for them to get confused and overlap in ways that didn't feel right with the various factions.

Anyway, definitely going to get more playthroughs with different faction affiliations. I would like to try something other than guns but they just seem so superior to the alternatives in every way. Melee looks viable, although a lot harder I'm guessing.

For some reason the gauss gun counts as a laser and that thing is amazing.

The quests definitely get more buggy as they begin to conflict the further you go in, very annoying.  I saved before the critical choices and on an alternate playthough ending:

Also: Mojave Wasteland Classifieds. (http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/mojave-wasteland-classifieds2.php?page=1)

Haha awesome!  :awesome_for_real:

I can't tell if I'm glitched or not at the endgame of my first run.

You have to reset the npc, go to console, type 'disable' and target Grant, hit enter then type 'enable' with him still targetted. He'll immediately enter into the dialogue. Had to do this on my NCR playthrough as well. If you want the achievement for saving the pres, just save after you do the console thing, quit all the way out, and reload the game.

Has this had any substantial patches yet? It's on sale this week and it's Fallout (3) and I'm itching. What's the DRM like?

Nope. There was a patch yesterday or the day before, but it was a bunch of minor stuff. No big bug fixes though. I'm still saving like a motherfucker.

After trying it out and deciding it felt enough like Fallout for me to give it a chance, I went ahead and got this game on Steam and started playing...

The main comment I have thus far in general about it is that the saving system is a godsend.  I would never be able to tolerate this game if quicksaving wasn't instant and seamless, due to how often it crashes on me.  I wish more games had saves that you can hit and keep playing without it having to stop the entire game in order to save.

Sadly amusing observation: The pirated version I used to test the game didn't really crash much.  The newest update once I bought it and downloaded from Steam, that's the one that's been crashing.  Whatever the recent update did, it wasn't good for my computer, at least.

This has to be one of the very worst damn games I have ever played.  I am so tired of shooting things and bearly doing any damage to them.  Can someone please inform me how I can get the damn workbench to give me the option of making weapon repair kits? I have tried everything and I have the components it just won't give me the option to accept.  Also what the hell is with melee weapons being better than guns???  

Also is there any weapon better than the multiplas plasma rifle for energy weapons?  I am seeing a lot of mods and have no idea how to use them even after I purchase them.  F**k obsidian, save your money and buy this game when its at the bargin bin.

If you're not hurting things, try armor piercing ammo or use something that does bigger single shot damage.

As far as the multiplas goes think of it as an energy weapon version of a shotgun. It will do well against low armor targets and badly against high armor targets, it also has a huge spread so it will be lame at long range, you want one of the other energy rifles if you're not up close. The best energy weapon for armored targets is probably the gauss rifle although there is also a pretty crazy unique laser pistol.

Energy weapons are generally weaker in this game than they were in Fallout 3 because of the DT system.

As far as crafting goes do you have the repair skill of 50 needed to make the repair kits?

Modding is easy. Go to your inventory, select the weapon, there's a command to mod it that it shows you right on the screen. X on the PC I think.

Also note that mods are weapon specific, so (for example) a 5mm Pistol Silencer only works on a 5mm Pistol.

And unique (named) weapons come pre-modded so to speak, so they can't be modded again.

TechFail.  You may now attend to your regular programming.

Weapons in New Vegas are divided by ammo type, and gauss rifles use MF cells, presumably to actually shoot the non-energy projectile. It isn't completely logical, no, but it works out balance wise and Fallout science has always involved a large degree of hands waving around.

You are a complete moron, go back to halo.

A THATS why they are dumbing down games. There really are people too stupid for complex things like "press x to mod the weapon" and "that shield symbol in the HUD means this particular weapon is blocked by the armor of the enemy and does almost no damage".

I shouldn't a have to look at a hud icon to tell me shooting something in the face is ineffective; though with the way everything reacts to being shot in this game; I guess it's necessary.

The way I see it, Fallout is more like an acquired taste; like aged cheese, or chewing on the bottom of a shit stained shoe.

As for me, as much as I love RPGs; Fallout just doesn't do it for me. The two biggest things that kill it for me are the cornucopia of bugs such Mouse acceleration (despite tweaks), crashing, rubber banding, and the muddy feel of the combat. It feels like I'm playing Fallen Earth, except nobody else is there... ... ... actually it just feels like I'm playing Fallen Earth.

Seems incredibly stupid that gauss weapons don't use the proper ammo (2mm ammo for both the PPK12 pistol and the M72 rifle, which I remember since they were the most powerful non-energy weapons available).  I don't see any particular reason why they should use energy weapon ammo instead of having their own type of ammo.

The one major annoyance I have is this ridiculous reloading thing.  It's too damned 'realistic' in needing to have exactly the right type of powder and primer for each bullet.  At least it's pretty much completely ignorable, but it certainly clogs up my inventory with useless trash.  Speaking of useless trash, good grief is there a lot of useless trash, everywhere.

As far as the not doing damage complaint goes, I haven't seen it.  Right from the beginning with the Varmint Rifle I was pretty much two-shotting anything I came across by headshotting it (usually manually).  Now with the Sniper Rifle, I can kill things from so far away that I can headshot two enemies then the others go berserk trying to find me but are unsuccessful, and get stuck in this loop of being alert and looking around for the attacker, not finding me, then calming down and walking around their usual patrol, then noticing their friend's corpse again and looking for the attacker, not finding me....

I think the thing I miss most is shooting people in the eyes, though.  Why don't we have an Eyes location for VATS targeting, anyway?  Meh.

Did you ever try the mouse tweak I posted?  I don't remember if I posted the improved version:

Locations may be different, and I read something about the file moving in Steam, so make sure you have the proper one.

I think they buffed melee a lot because it sucked so bad in Fallout 3.  You also learn extra moves from npcs as the game goes on.

My one other constructive response is that you really need to tag and spend points in at least one form of combat or you will suck quite bad.  If you are trying to shoot people with a bullet based rifle and have no gun skill you are going to do terrible damage and miss most of your shots.

As for the other nonsensical complaints perhaps I could interest you in a strictly linear jrpg from 1989 where your only freedom of customization lies in "buy the one piece of new armor and one weapon in each new town you visit".  You might find it surprisingly difficult because those evil programmers made two separate stores in each town that you have to go to.  One will have a large sign on the building showing a sword and the other will have a giant shield, I forget which one sells which though so you're on your own there.

I'm still quite annoyed at vats accuracy being so bad, with 100 in guns and a max repair weapon, vats misses a whole lot more than the %hit says.

That said, the .45-70 Gov't ammo being scarce, and the 2 guns that use it being buggy aside, I can headshot stuff manually at max view distance with the rifle. Without a scope. Which vats won't even target. Just finished my "Mr House" playthrough without using vats at all, and didn't miss it.

Hater above, you do realize you that you can also repair weapons by highlighting them, hitting Repair, and using an identical weapon? It's even better with the 90 repair skill perk that lets you use any similar weapon.

Other thoughts...

Gauss rifle is the only thing that saves the whole energy weapons skill. Flamers being under energy makes less sense than the gauss.

Melee is OP at high skill/STR. Walk up and one shot anything with Oh Baby once you have the melee perks.

Is Kaesar really the historically accurate pronunciation of Caesar?

I don't know if it's the historically accurate one.  It is how it's pronounced in German.  (Kaiser)

Weapons are generally categorized by their driver - bows (bow, ballista), slings (sling, trebuchet) and gunpowder weapons (musket, cannon.) The type of projectile has never really been interesting. Potentially you could call modern gunpower weapons cartridge weapons to differentiate them from the old lock guns, but it's still gunpower. A gauss rifle uses energy (electromagnetism) to drive a projectile, not gunpowder, so it's would be correct to call it an energy weapon.

Kaisar is the Latin pronounciation, sesar is the bastardized Anglo-Latin one. In the game the Legion uses the Latin pronouncation (kaisar) because they are Roman wannabes, while many others uses sesar. It's a pretty neat detail actually.

 :grin: Maybe you need to take it easy a bit and hit the V key next thing something gets to close range. Most encounters with humanoids or geckos in early game are resolved with VATS head shots with the 9mm. Just kept using Varmint rifle to snipe till you get something better and switch to pistol and hide behind corners. When the enemies pop into view, 95% head shot accuracy. Bang. It's dead.

Repair kits require 60 repair skill to make. Also, you may have missed out some components in the description window. You can scroll it down a bit. I know I did the first time. No. Melee weapons aren't better. Spiked fists are more broken.  :awesome_for_real:

Tried that, mouse still feels like shit. Milder shit; but shit nonetheless. Incidentally; even after applying this fix - the mouse control on the pip boy (and menus) is still as it originally was: almost unusable.

Melee weapons do seem amazingly powerful.  A certain companion that wears a power fist continually shocks me by what she can punch out in one hit.

And the thing is, melee weapons are pretty much supposed to suck.  They were never particularly good in 1/2 - their highest damage output was comparable to high end projectile weaponry, but inferior to even the weakest of energy rifles.  Except the melee weapons that had such a damage output used energy weapon ammo and were only found quite late in the game, by which point you were pretty much guaranteed to be kicking ass with a plasma rifle or something.  But beyond that, it also took two to three turns to get close enough to the enemy to employ them, so you were getting shot full of holes while doing no damage if you were relying on melee. 

After doing some looking up for exact numbers, even the mighty Mega Power Fist did less damage than a simple Laser Rifle.  Similarly it really shows how backwards this game is with energy/projectile weapon damages.  Most of the energy weapons I find in New Vegas do less damage than similar projectile weapons, while they are supposed to do more damage than anything but the most powerful of projectile weapons.  The standard plasma rifle is supposed to have a minimum damage only 2 points lower than the M72 Gauss Rifle, while having a maximum damage 23 points higher, and the YK42B Pulse Rifle, the most powerful energy weapon in Fallout 2, has a minimum damage that's higher than any projectile weapon's maximum damage.  I'm not sure why they screwed up on energy weapons and got them ass-backwards, but it completely ruins the 'these are really powerful weapons' vibe when they're...well...not.

Well typically I have heard the term 'energy weapon' used to describe anything that does not shoot small hunks of metal at the enemy, regardless of the method of propulsion.  When making a determination between projectile and energy, a bow and a sling is still a projectile weapon.

In this case the key question is what skill is required to improve the weapon and what resistances lessen damage from it.  A gauss rifle should require guns skill, and should use physical resistances to determine damage reduction, while a plasma rifle should use energy weapons skill and use energy resistance to determine damage reduction.  I have yet to encounter a gauss rifle myself but from the energy weapon description I can only assume it's using the wrong skills.

There's no soft C in Latin. So, yeah, it's Kai-sar.

Not going to address some of the whining about this game. You either like games or you don't. I don't like RTSs at all, but I don't kvetch about them much. Fallout is what it is. New Vegas has a lot of elements from the original turn based games. I like this sort of thing a lot. Some don't. The only really buggy thing I"ve noticed on the 360 is a seemingly wonky hit detection thing--like the afore mentioned 95% head shots constantly missing. When I run into this, I use the fucking iron sights. And shit dies--right the hell now. And this is with the 360. Should be really easy on the PC.

It's Fallout. It rocks. Enough said. Looking forward to some AMR fun tonight. Bad robot! No biscuit!

I think there are a few weapons that are bugged in VATS, their head target point is set too high so the shots go right over. I more often use VATS for crippling legs or shooting weapons out of people's hands now anyway, headshots are easy enough manually.

Currently my repair is at 75.  Again I have all of the prereqs it just won't allow me to make the actual kit.

I am finding that out about energy weapons.  Honestly watching Cass destroy things in one hit that takes 6 shots on a plasma rifle simply frustrates the heck out of me.

I see the X now, thank you.

I really did love the past incarnations of Fallout.  Fallout 3 was great as far as atmosphere went but the story was fairly lame IMHO.  This one is in parts completely incomprehensible.  Worse still some parts of the "Yes Man"/faction dynamic seems way too limiting.  Repairing items is a real problem for me so far.  I am not finding enough armor and sending my stuff for repair with the NCR is prohibitively expensive.

I am still waiting for a reason to care about anyone in this game.  I think more scenes like what happened in Nipton early in the game would have been better at least for me.  That scene made me definitely not want to side with the legion.  In any case I think this will be the first game in about 7 years in which I will not finish.  I am not sure what that says, maybe nothing but my dislike of the game grows with every playthrough.

There's a perk that lets you repair with similar grade weapons. I got that, and then you can repair a 10mm with a 9mm, etc.

You are just hovering your mouse over the damaged weapon and hitting 'R' to repair weapons, right? You do not need a weapons repair kit to fix weapons. That's just a bonus thing that's new to FO:NV.

Once you start using unique or expensive weapons you're pretty much stuck using weapon repair kits. I mean, how often do you find a sniper rifle as loot to use for repairs?  And there's no way I'd want to spend like 3000 caps buying one just to use for repairs.  Without that special repair perk it's almost mandatory to use the kits.

Maybe on very hard, on normal difficulty you can very easily finish the game without using a single repair kit or that perk. Remember as long as your weapon is above that little notch on the HUD you are still doing full damage, there's no reason to obsessively keep weapons at full condition. Just use your lamer weapons for lamer guys, I was still busting out the varmint rifle at endgame for stuff that wasn't worth wasting anti-materiel ammo on.

This. I kept a fully modded 10mm Pistol throughout the whole game just for use on stupid shit like mantises that weren't worth a sniper round.

Also money should stop mattering relatively quickly. Luck + casinos =  :awesome_for_real:. They do cut you off eventually but if you break the bank at all of them you will be very, very rich.

Not everyone wants to play the game like that.  If Mourne really did have a bug that didn't let him make weapon repair kits so he had to go through unnecessary gyrations to keep his guns working he has every right to be annoyed by it.  It's an awfully strange bug though and I've never heard of anyone else having it so I'm still leaning toward thinking he's doing something wrong.

Again, with the repair perk, you can repair a sniper rifle with an assault rifle, a 10 mm submachine gun with a 9 mm gun, and for any named weapon, you can repair it with any other weapon in that category.

I found the entire 'weapon repair' system nonsensical and simply got a mod that prevents things from degrading.  If they're damaged when I get them I still have to fix them into good condition, which makes sense (they might be in pretty bad shape when I first get them), but guns do not require constant replacement of parts that would require cannibalization of other weapons - they require wiping with a cloth and some oil.

Armor repair is more reasonable though.  I mean, any time you get shot it's going to damage the armor to some degree, so having to constantly repair it actually makes some sense.

Weapon repair makes a lot of sense to me. Many of these weapons are going to be 200 years old, and those that aren't are going to have been manufactured without high-precision, mass manufacturing facilities.  Things are gonna break!

I've started a 2nd play-through, and this time I'm collecting parts for weapon repair kits right from the start, even buying them from vendors whenever I see them. I'm now level 10 and ED-E's carrying 30 kits around for me.  :awesome_for_real:

I liked the Kaiser/Caesar pronunciation thing, except where a given NPC changes the way they pronounce it between sentences. Or even has a different voice actor for different bits of dialogue. It's just poorly done when that happens.

Finished the game. The endgame was somewhat annoying because of the limited faction choices.


Well, I had fun while it lasted, maybe I will do the other factions from an older savegame.

For all the alternative quest completion methods, they missed a big one:

Hell, things break as it is nowadays. Look at the recent Bushmaster recall of ACR rifles. Or anything Bushmaster. I had a friend that had an M7 and the PoS couldn't finish a magazine without multiple malfunctions. Or the milsurp Hakim rifle that constantly broke parts. Or most low end 1911 copies. Some stuff is just junk to begin with and has to be dealt with.

As for gameplay, well, it is a little overdone, but not so bad as System Shock 2. I haven't felt it held me back much, and it gives you the opportunity to play around with weapons you might not otherwise have used (hello, Cowboy Rifle...damn that thing turned out to be fun--and hellishly effective).

It's not just the silliness of weapons degrading every hundred or so shots, but also the manner in which they do it.  They start doing less damage for some reason?  A better system to reflect the possibility of weapons breaking would be easy to come up with.  For example, whenever a weapon is generated, have a hidden stat that says how many times it can be fired before it breaks.  (I initially considered a percentage chance on each shot of breaking, but this would promote save before a fight, reload if weapon breaks tactics - having it determined when the weapon is obtained makes that impossible.)  This stat can have various modifiers depending on the specific weapon too.  For instance, a weapon purchased from the Gun Runners might be hiqh quality enough to fire off a thousand or more rounds before it breaks, while a weapon randomly found in a crate in the wastes might break pretty easily.

It could even be expanded on with multiple states of breakage, such as being unable to fire at all, having a chance each shot of exploding in your hand, and various other potential mishaps.  But it would be vastly less nonsensical than the weapon slowly doing less damage with each hit.

But hey, it's not a big deal and it can easily be modded so it doesn't really bother me.  Just the kind of thing I like to pick on.

Third run and realized the Ultra Luxe quest has a ton of options to expose the plot. Amazing really.

With the right perk, Ultra-luxe is simplicity itself, they love me there! Sadly, the cannibal perks don't seem to reduce food need in hardcore. Each playthrough I've done I've gotten sick of the constant food and water crap before level 14. Doesn't seem immersive, just an added annoyance.

Nice idea but would also just promote "save before every fight" and if your gun breaks reload and use a different weapon.

I like weapon degradation as it is right now. Your alternative would just be frustrating. Maybe this is less realistic, but also less annoying. Hidden mechanics tend to be a real PITA.

It does solve hunger issue for me. I always eat people I killed with that perk and never got hungry in the wastelands. Hunger is no biggy till advanced stage anyway.

This isn't actually that unrealistic.  Any factor that decreases the acceleration of the bullet via direct impedance or lost propellant gas will result in a velocity drop, which may mean fouling, abrasion compromising the seal of the action, a firing pin that doesn't strike squarely or with barely sufficient force, a dysfunctional locking mechanism, and probably a bunch of other little shit that I barely could comprehend.

And lost velocity is lost kinetic energy.

The most serious issues would be reliability and accuracy. Serious throat erosion or heavy pitting in the barrel can seriously effect accuracy. Bullets tumbling is bad juju. On the other hand, I've seen very badly damaged bores still give serviceable accuracy. I have a 1941 Johnson with a real sewer pipe barrel (only has a few scraps of rifling left), but it'll still hold minute of antifreeze jug at 100yds--and it doesn't keyhole, which is kind of amazing when you think about it.

Regardless, the weapon degradation is sort of contrived, but I don't find it an issue and it adds interest to the game. I find the same thing about hardcore mode. It makes you think about what you're doing and plan a bit more. Yeah, it adds time spent to everything you do, but that's part of Fallout. I've had some pretty amusing stories from friends who pushed too hard and wound up running around desperate for water until they found an incredibly irradiated toilet to drink out of--and damned glad they had that!

I don't have a problem with degredation, only the rate at which they do so.

I don't mind the decay on weapons at all. It helps consolidate loot weight when I haven't bothered to hit a vendor to sell for a while.

What does bother me is that I only really get time to play on the weekend.

In the meantime, I'm forced to just read about the game and turn up stuff like this: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-ways-fallout-new-vegas-made-me-worse-person/

The fool!

I also have no idea how he got into the situation from number 2.

Not to mention you can actually just pick up some glasses in the doctor's house when you wake up.

Also, any glasses work. My character has the four eyes trait and wears sunglasses. Works just fine.

Do glasses prevent you from wearing a helmet? I didn't take that trait because I didn't think +1 Per was worth not being able to use any helmet.

Some helmets you can use, some you cant. IIRC the motorcycle helmet and the metal helmet = no, combat helmet = yes.

Holy fucking shit, that was hilarious.

Closed face helmets are a no, open face are yes, I think.

You can wear glasses with the 1st Recon Beret, which is the only hat I have any intention of ever wearing in this game, apart from occasional uses of a Roving Trader Hat ofc.  :awesome_for_real:

Here's a thing. How come I can fashion explosive devices that will shred supermutants out of bottle caps, cherry bombs and lunchboxes, and how come I can repair Power Armour with Metal Armour, but I have no idea how to make a campfire myself?  :uhrr:

First New Vegas DLC to be 360 exclusive. (http://bethblog.com/index.php/2010/11/17/first-new-vegas-dlc-announced/)

 :facepalm:

Well, its one official DLC Xbox exclusive vs zillion mods PC exclusive.

Still no reason to buy the Xbox version. Wrong thing for Microsoft to throw their money at (only reason Bethesda can possibly have to pull this Xbox exclusive stunt).

You know what? Screw DLC for Fallout. The game's meant to be a complete story. Imagine if a bunch of derivative spin-offs had been made of LoTR for exa..oh wait.

Damn. Know what just gave me chills?

This one does have some of those little depressing touches that I never noticed Fallout 3 really having.

F3 had those.  The one I remember is the drainage shelter with the crutches and the journal from the father talking about how much sicker the kid was getting.   There were a few others as well, but that was the only kid one I recall.

I'm not hating F3 much, but a lot of areas could use a lot of improvement in writing, New Vegas addressed that defeciency. But reading some F3 fans hating New Vegas for being too 'Speech check' intensive is depressing.This is why we can't have good things. They wanted more shooting and supermutants to kill in the wastelands, imagine that! Call of Duty: New Vegas,it ain't!

I want more shooting as well, sadly shooting those retards would be illegal.

I do wish there was some more action-packed elements, but if that's not Fallout, that's not Fallout.

Maybe they'll add in some QTEs and a surfing mini-game in the expansion for them.

Just getting started. Took the mission to kill Ringo. Met him. Changed my mind. Killed Cobb (at level 1 mind you). Love how the characters change my mind sometimes in these games.  Guns, Science, Repair tagged with Good-Natured trait.

I started a new game with a dude that has STR9 CHA9 LCK9 INT1. He likes bartering, explosives and melee weapons and walking the wasteland. We shall see how it goes.

I'm not sure if I'm ever going to finish this game. I'm about 30 hours in and maybe chipping in one night a week for a few hours but I'm not losing interest. That's really strange for me to do that with a game, usually once I stop hammering it (:drill:) I completely stop.

You know, i was fairly impressed how much the geography of F3 matched DC, but This (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Goodsprings,+NV&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=44.879582,99.404297&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Goodsprings,+Clark,+Nevada&ll=35.832341,-115.432287&spn=0.005671,0.012134&t=h&z=17&layer=c&cbll=35.832334,-115.432077&panoid=-ojETgARKfZCUk-Zgb6_tw&cbp=12,22.46,,0,9.37) just blew my fucking mind.  I know what i'm doing if i ever go to Vegas, fuck the casinos.

Until you look left and see it's flat. :-P

Holy holy shit.

Stuff is just a bit closer together, that's all...I've been to the real Red Rock canyon a bunch of times.

Death Valley or Zion would make interesting expansion fodder. Or maybe Reno/Tahoe.

Reno/Tahoe and Black Rock City. With Burning Man still going on. Oh wait, most of Fallout is already pretty close to BM as it is.

Meh. The ending was something of a disappointment. I mean mostly the final fight. I had to reload about a dozen times, then I realized I just wasn't going to get it, and... ~tgm. Kinda sad. I would have liked to know what the final battle was going to be like, so I could build my character accordingly.

Edit: Yeah I did more research on that fight, and apparently the best way to get through it with a run-n-gun character like me is to slather the place with mines. Which I would love to do, and have done before in other occasions. I just didn't want to reload an earlier save and spend hours shopping.

The final fight was kind of a letdown difficulty-wise. With your own robot army it is a total cakewalk, and as part of the NCR it was easy as well. Of course, I went full sniper with Grim Reapers Spirit, so I could headshot up to 4 enemies until my Action point ran out.

Other builds would have been much more difficult I guess. I must try a melee and Explosives guy for my Caesar playthrough.

How do you get the robot army to help????  :ye_gods:

Different playthrough (sady). I would have loved to bring the robot army to my NCR buddies, wipe out Caesar and then integrate New Vegas into the NCR with some leverage for the treaty.

The "I killed Caesar, now go fuck yourself too General" was a bit too crude for my diplomatic approach.

It didn't seem too difficult for me, and I had a run and gun setup as well.  I guess what made the difference was getting the Boomers and the old Enclave gang on my side to help out.  I haven't done a playthrough where I haven't enlisted the Boomers, so I'm not sure, but I'm assuming that the bombing run thins the ranks pretty extensively, because I kept thinking to myself, "there don't seem to be very many enemies walking around."  Having the Gobi Campaign Scout rifle with JSP ammo and 100% crits might have helped, as well.

I had the Boomers too. The fight I had the most trouble with (and went ~tgm on) was the fight with Caesar's voodoo-mask guy and his entire army of million-hit-point flunkies, whom I couldn't take out with sniping.

That was mostly the source of my endless save/restore. I had tried several times to snipe his followers, but they just kept coming, then realized I wasn't going to win the fight without going online, spending hours researching spoilers (where's the best gun and armor, where are more quests for more levels, etc), or spend days replaying the fight as I learned through trial and error what to do.

My godmode fun consisted of running through camp attracting everyone, then dropping endless grenades where we were all standing. It was fucking glorious.

It's a real shame that

Bigger shame is that if you AM rifle head shot him from stealth, you don't get his speech/cutscene and can't complete the quest.

Also, charisma 1 didn't seem to impact anyone's attitude toward my character, boosting speech still made everyone love me.

That's weird.  I did kill him from a distance with two shots, didn't even notice he was the legate until I checked his corpse, and there was no cutscene, but everything finished up okay.

The way I had to deal with him was to snipe him in the head from stealth, which put him down to 2 bars of health but didn't make him aggro; after that he ran over and began his speech normal. Then I had enough speech to get him to fight me mano e mano (instead of aggroing his horde of minions) at which point I went into VATS and put another round in his head.

Trying to kill him from a distance just glitched the quest out; it kept telling me to go deal with the Legate but there was nothing I could loot or anything on him that would advance the quest.

The main thing that a high charisma does for you (besides gate a few perks) is boost companion damage and DR. I think it is +5% per point, so at 10 they do 50% more damage. I think the stuff about it making people like you more was just talking about the effect it has on associated skills - at least, I never saw a dialogue option marked [Charisma] or anything like that.

Emo-girl still bops heads off, and downer-guy makes them explode. What more damage could I need? That said, I'm kinda sad that Charisma is a dump stat. Int > all due to skill points I think.

I was hoping a high Charisma would give me bigger breasts, but I never did really understand the stat until recently.

Intelligence and Constitution. Constitution allows you to get those implants. Intelligence tends to get uninteresting with the boom boom pow though as you're drawn to Energy Weapons and Science, which aren't "exciting" skills to have.

It was funny to get Power Girl and watch her run up one-shot most of the dudes I've been fighting on the hardest difficulty setting. When you can't do it yourself very well, bring friends!

Is constitution a hidden stat?  :grin:

Egh. Endurance ><

Int isn't that great anymore either, each point only gives .5 skill points per level.

They add up over 30 levels. a half point here, a half point there, soon you have enough skill points to matter!

If you haven't equipped Veronica with Pushy, you are missing out on some great slow motion kills.

I'm SO holding out for the bugfixed goty in a year or 18 months or whatever now.  :cry:

I've logged about 65 hours. I have not seen one bug worth mentioning. The closest thing I came to with a "bug" was when I was trying to sell well over 10,000 ammo pieces at once and the game would crash on sale. Pretty sure it was some sort of buffer overflow. I did it 2,000 at a time and it worked fine. No other crashes or issues to speak of in all those hours.

Hell, only once has a single companion gotten stuck somewhere and I think I told him to stay behind by mistake, I'm not even sure what happened. Easy fix though, walk up to him, press E, and say Hey Follow The Hero, Asshole.

All the little patches they've done have fixed stuff pretty well.

Restarted, dumping CHA and keeping INT at 5. Tagged Explosives. Love it more than ever.

No bugs for me, either. 

I have to say that I wish they would have made the crafting a little more interesting.  I didn't put much into science and it seems I can't make shit. 

The urge to restart is very strong in this one, everytime i find a cool weapon a different type of character could use better i want to start over.

This time, instead of immediately going to war against the Powder Gangers, I played friend and did some quests first.  Missed a whole bunch by being self-righteous the first time.  No way I will ally with the Legion, though. Sticking with NCR.

This game got me good. I already clocked over 40 hours and haven't even started the main questline in Vegas yet.

The game has some minor glitches but nothing really bad. The PS3 version locks up after half a day of continuous play and the rest is really minor.

I think it's closer to Fallout and Fallout 2 than 3 was both look-, humor- and story-wise.

I consulted a character creation faq before starting to play and CHA is basically a dump stat it serves no purpose except increasing the damage dealt by your NPC companions so I left it at 1. You solve every quest by using Speech so I#d rather put points there

As far as the other stats go I took INT at 9 (for the maximum amount of skill points) because it could be increased with the implant to 10, strength is only 3 (4 with the implant and with both the perk and power armour you can use any weapon up to a STR requirement of 8)

Distributed the rest on the other stats (but no more than 9 because I planned on getting all the implants excpet the one for CHA)

So INT 9, END 9 (gives you a maximum of 8 implants, all of them except CHA), STR 3, CHA 1, LCK 7 and the rest for AGI and PER.

I tagged Science, Speech and Lockpicking. If you buy all of the implants (fairly easy to do if you head to Vegas after the tutorial and play slots at the Atomic Wrangler) and take the educated perk you basically get 17/18 skill points per level which is more than enough to push all the important skills to 80/100 respectively.

I'd then suggest to push Science, Speech and Lockpick to 80 as soon as possible (barter is not so important since you can just gamble at the Vegas Casinos for easy money, the Jackpot at Slots is 32.000 caps and with high luck it doesn't take to long to get that). You use those three Skills the most for quest related stuff and with the skill magazines and either a perk (educated) or the vault overall you still manage to get to 100 if you need to. (If you have both you can stop at 75).

There are also several books to boost Science and other skills.

Other than that I tried to not make enemies if I could manage to, but when you start "The House always wins..." all factions return to neutral again anyway so it doesn't matter to much.

My thoughts are similar to yours so far.  I'm over 60 hours in, and have not touched the main quests since it wanted me to go to Boulder City.

I have had a great time exploring the Capital Wasteland ... er, Mohave Wasteland.  There are quests and hidden crap everywhere.  I have already hit level 25, so I probably will be capped out before even getting to the Vegas quests stuff.

Deathclaws totally suck ass now - man, are they tough!  Cazadors just slightly less so.  But that makes this game challenging!

The only complaints I have are the frequent hesitations/lag and the fact that sometimes VATS and/or my Pipboy does not respond in combat.  The game has frozen on me twice so far on the 360.

But none of these issues have overly dimmed my experience.  This is a great game; one I will sink countless hours into, just like FO3.

122 hours so far and I"m not level 30 yet, nor have I touched the main quest once establishing (slightly uncomfortable) contact with Mr. House. There's just so much to do. 360 version and only three lockups in that time. Hardly seems Fallout in that respect, considering in FO2 it crashed to desktop about once every hour. Part of the large hours played is due to falling asleep in front of the TV (which prompted me not to buy plasma), but probably not more than 5% of the total. I think.

Having much fun. What more needs to be said?

Just one question for everyone: where the hell do you find .50cal pistol ammo for the handgun and subgun? Couple of Gun Runner merchants have it from time to time, but there are no reloading components. Am I missing something, or is this just the way it is with .50cal pistol ammo? This kind of makes me think one--or some--of the devs are familiar with modern wildcats like the .50ACP round. It's proprietary and made by one outfit in Texas (interestingly enough named Guncrafters) and liscensed to a few small ammo outfits. In light of that it kinda makes sense, but those two weapons are so useful I'd like more ammo.

.50 cal ammo stays rare all game. On my 2nd playthrough now (also going max skills route, complete with the level 1 run to New Vegas Clinic) and have been buying as much .50 cal whenever I see it as I can afford. Well... as much as any vendor ever has anyway, money stopped being an issue with 10 luck pretty early on.

.50 should be used only with an anti-materiel rifle and on Deathclaws. Shooting anything less feels like a waste of precious ammo.

There seems to be some half-baked stuff with ammo. No reloading on 12.7mm, small amounts of .45-70 Gov't available only, etc. Some of the mods that flesh out weapon-modding and reloading are pretty nice, but it just seems like an unfinished system set, or that things were added without enough testing.

Different ammo types. .50BMG isn't a problem. You simply don't use that much (and inciendiary is where it's at for nightkin). .50 pistol is the issue.

Oh, and I find the .308 it more than enough for deathclaws. The real use for the .50BMG is on hardened sentry bots--if you don't have an EMP weapon, that is.

Yeah, I thought the same.

You can only break down regular ammo and you can only create regular ammo for example but not AP or HP.

Also there are not that many really good crafting recipes with the exception of doctors bags and repair kits. Although high barter + repair + jury rigging perk is the license to print money.

I was actually a little bit disappointed by the item crafting system. I collected every piece of crap I could find just to find out that mots of it is only used in crap recipies.  There aren't even any unique recipies.

I'd also post a slight correction to my previous post my starting S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats were actually:

Strength: 3 (4)
Perception: 5 (6)
Endurance: 8 (9)
Charisma: 1
Intelligence: 9 (10)
Agility: 6 (8)
Luck: 8 (9)

(number in parentheses indicates cyber implant)

but I mostly used the gamefaqs character creation guide for New Vegas.

Biggest laughs so far:

The hand loader perk opens up quite a few good alternate ammo recipes.

The Hand-loader recipes are nice, but it'd be nice to have at least some findable, instead of perk-gated. (except .44mag hand loads, you need iirc 60 guns and 60 survival to get that) Just seems like a half-baked thing, as is Hardcore mode.

I'm upset that there aren't any 5.56mm or 9mm hand loader recipes, or 5mm for that matter.  It seems like there are a lot of gaping recipe holes in the crafting system, and for ammo in particular.

If you are looking for 12.7mm ammo, go to Contreras at Camp Mccarran.  He regularly stocks about a thousand rounds of it.

You don't want 9mm long term anyway.  I use 9mm to make .357.

Yeah none of 9mm, 5.56mm, or 5mm are really used in weapons you're likely to get out to deal with something you'd want to burn special ammo on anyway. Maybe 5mm, if you were just in love with miniguns.

"Maria" uses 9mm and is pretty decent for dealing with trash.

Found the dude who was holding all the .50cal stash. Stocked up to the tune of about 2k rounds. Hot damn. Also, I'm now seeing some .50 cases, so might be able to handload a bit.

Life is good--for me.

Quick question.

Whats the quickest/easiest way to get a companion?

I've read it's someone at the 188 trading post is the easiest but I'm getting killed by deathclaws trying to get there :-(

Veronica at 188 Trading Post is indeed the easiest, but at low level you probably want to head further south before trying to head across east towards the post - go down past Nipton first, then cut east and follow the road north.

Other easy ones to get are ED-E, from Primm and Boone from Novac, although both require a bit more effort to get than Veronica.

Boone is pretty easy

New Patch on the way - looks like they fixed a lot of the glitches


http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/709122/Fallout-New-Vegas-Patch-Hits-PS3-Coming-To-360-And-PC-Next-Week.html?utm_source=g4tv&utm_medium=rssfeeds&utm_campaign=TheFeed (http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/709122/Fallout-New-Vegas-Patch-Hits-PS3-Coming-To-360-And-PC-Next-Week.html?utm_source=g4tv&utm_medium=rssfeeds&utm_campaign=TheFeed)

Thanks guys - is there anywhere safe I can stash excess stuff in the Goodsprings area as I'm encumbered already! :-(

Inside Victor's house should work I think.

I put my stuff in the dumpster next to Chet's shop until I got my own place later in the game.  Didn't have any issues with that, though it made me feel like a real wasteland hobo.

I use some of the Sunset Sarsaparilla crates next to Chet's shop, near the reloading benches.  The ones marked blue, makes it easy to retrieve and add stuff without worrying about any wandering townsfolk seeing me and randomly attacking me.

Am I the only one who doesnt understand why I'm stealing 'That Gun' when I own the key to the storeroom and everything else in it?!

It is shop inventory, how would having the key make a difference?

Property rights in relation to Karma are a bit screwy.

I love it when I find someone's room where I can rob them bliind but I can't sleep in their bed or even sit on their couch.

And then there are red items I am allowed to steal without Karma hits. Never found a reliable way to gauge that either.

Agreed.  You can rob the Van Graffs blind without a single karma hit, but take something from the Powder Gangers early on in the game and *that* gives you a hit.  Why is looting crap from a gang stealing?  Very wierd.

Because you aren't stealing from the Powder Gangers.  You are stealing from a NCR prison that just happens to be in Gangers control.  It is like stealing from a bank that is being robbed by other bank robbers.  Kind of. Maybe.  Ehh, I tried.

It's really a broken concept. Try it next time. Kill every single innocent you found, and you realize after every encounter with zombies, your karma is back in the positives. I learned to ignore the karma totally and just do whatever I wanted. It's not even a useful feature.

Karma isn't really important in New Vegas, the reputations are what are important.

Frankly, I always assumed that this is because they had different people working on different parts of the world and they didn't have consistent guidelines for what should be marked as theft. So you'd have one guy going super conservative. "Is it the player's? No? It's theft." and another guy going "Eh, the Van Graffs are pricks. I won't mark anything as a karma hit."

What always killed me was finding an abandoned campsite in the middle of nowhere but everything in it is marked red.

I'm fairly disappointed in the crafting aspect of this game.  It seems like it was slapped on as an afterthought. 

Judging from the amount of shit there is to pick up and make stuff out of I don't think crafting was an afterthought. I think it's more likely that they just ran out of time before they managed to make it worthwhile.

Also I can't imagine it would be very difficult to mod back in the recipes from FO3. Someone probably already has, really.

A lot of them are. One of my companions is sporting a railway rifle, cuz it's awesome.

Is it possible to more or less avoid the main storyline in this game?  My favorite parts of Fallout 3 involved just wandering the wastes of my own accord, and I've got 3 weeks in a row of reduced work load and am trying to figure out with what game to fill the time.

It's easily avoidable. I like to follow it long enough to get a decent apartment with storage in Las Vegas and then just do all the side quests.

There are some challenges to doing this too soon:

1) There are some VERY hard areas of the wasteland, even once you max level. 
2) The main quest lines lead you to potential companions, which make combat easier, RE: #1 above.

That said, I have two good companions and haven't made it to Vegas.  I am actually purposefully backtracking and attempting to do some areas "out of order" and it is working fine.

I thought I'd found the majority of the side stuff leading up to Vegas. I was wrong.

You can easily spend twenty hours doing other stuff before ever setting foot in Freeside or The Strip.

I've had to put the brakes on my main quest stuff just to see what I want to see. I'm already afraid that I've fucked my first play through a bit by taking the allegiances a bit far into "caesar hates you" territory after the "all is forgiven now" point of the main quest.

My second playthrough will involve me fucking over Caesar and the NCR well in advance of my arrival on The Strip. Once the companion stuff is done, back to advancing the main story line.

You can get Boone and Ed-E pretty quickly into the game and they are fairly kick ass companions. 

Yeah, but doing their loyalty quests is key, IMO. That takes a tad more time or well-planned questing,

Can anyone suggest a good unlimited companion mod?

Every time I start the game, I get the message about ED-E having information ties to keywords.  Yet, the interface doesn't allow me to try keywords.  Therefore, I am assuming I just need to meet the right NPCs.

Is this correct? Yes or no only please.

Affirmative.

After encountering two quests that I couldn't finish due to bugs (one being the companion quest for Veronica) and being entirely frustrated by the constant lock-ups and overall bugs I finished the main quest.

Talk about disappointing ends. It's basically the Fallout version of 'sorry mario the princess is in another castle' followed by about 30 seconds worth of epilogue thats mostly told via still images. So that's the same as Fallout 3 then.

After that I played through the Fallout 3 GOTY edition and  I stand by my earlier verdict. Fallout New Vegas is closer to the original Fallout as far as story and atmosphere is concerned but even there Bethesda didn't really get the spirit and humor of Fallout right.

They are still great games, otherwise I wouldn't have clocked over 90 hours in Fallout 3 and more than 70 in New Vegas (which makes both games a bargain compared to titles like Black Ops) and I haven't even played Broken Steel yet.

Yet both didn't completely capture the feeling of the old Fallouts and towards the end both became to much like 1st person shooters (but way too easy because of the VATS system and maxed out skills and perks).

Also the ending of the original Fallout 3 (sans add ons) might be the most ridiculous ending I've ever seen. .

What annoyed me more though were the many small issues that even plagued the Fallout 3 GOTY edition, like Three Dog announcing stuff that never happened (or failing to announce stuff that did) and dialogue that is essentially the same whether I'm the power armor wearing and plasma rifle toting savior of the wastes or a chicken-breasted nobody from Vault 101. Seriously when I'm a staple of the local news radio people might have actually heard from me or my exploits.

In closing New Vegas scrapped quite a few things from Fallout 3 I rather liked but also tweaked the game so that it essentially worked better than the original.

The next installment seriously needs better writers however, there is too much vapid dialogue and to much shooting but not nearly enough puzzles (allthough it's heaven for an explorer type gamer) there is simply too much repetition.

I don't want FO games to have puzzles.  They are achiever/explorer wonderlands and should stay that way.  If you want FPS puzzles, play Portal.

Picked this up again. I lost my hoarder reflex and just started plowing through the content after I realized 80% of the time what I was exploring in non-important rooms was junk. "Important" rooms always have locked doors or are labeled as such, like going into a Vault and seeing "Security" or something.

Vault 11 had an interesting story. It also makes me realize that my arsenal does not include anything that can penetrate high armor targets except for a .308 Sniper Rifle.

Good thing that the electric floor puzzle on the oil rig in Fallout 2 totally doesn't exist then. Among others.

Having 15 minutes puzzles in a 40 hour RPG is fine.  Too bad I have to spell that out.

Besides, the solution to that puzzle is almost identical to the one in Wasteland that involves the electric floor checkerboard.

Yes it's exactly an 'achiever and explorer wonderland'. Seriously the next Fallout better let me buy a pack brahmin or five. The loot won't carry itself you know. I realized halfway through the game that I wasn't selecting companions for firepower (I'm the crusader with the plasma rifle anyway) but for the capability to carry as much loot as possible. No power armor (or pack of super glue) went to waste on my watch.

I also salute the advances 2077 brought to locker and file cabinet technology, it's mind boggling just how much stuff you can store in one of these.

Also the impulse of 'I wonder what's in that house/that cave' probably would get anybody killed in no time if this were real and not a game (and would seriously piss of your party that sometimes just wants to get to the next town for a nice bed and some drinks)

As far as puzzles go, difficult ones meant that the terminal that unlocked a door wasn't right next to it but rather a few rooms over or you needed a key that you found on a corpse anyway. I don't want Fallout to turn into some sort of Dungeon Master but a little bit more than that would be nice.

Achiever and explorer, I don't think, account for digital hoarding tendencies.

You mean exploring doesn't imply taking everything that's not nailed to the floor, once you are there? I may have been doing it wrong then  :why_so_serious:

I can see it maybe more as Conquerer, with you amassing resources to "conquer" the game world. Or maybe you want to achieve status in the game space via wealth. What drives the hoarding, I can't tell you. :P

I'm a huge hoarder.  Also a huge explorer.  I'm not sure why they would go together, but they seem to.

I would say both are defensive playstyles, not wanting to be taken by surprise, be prepared for everything. Knowing the landscape carries security and likewise does having an abundance of resources. I tend to do both, too, but the hoarding is harder to keep in games with limited (and/or tedious) inventories. A more aggressive playstyle is more preoccupied with what's needed to solve the immediate problem, rather than one two hours away.

Just half-baked theories, though.

I think they're just both manifestations of completism. Must see all locations, must find all objects.

Might need it for a recipe...

Heh. You weren't good enough friends.

I can sell this

I'm also both a hoarder and an explorer. They go quite well together. My shack in Goodsprings was so full of stuff I might have been close to create a singularity from stuffing that many items into so few containers. And I could have bought New Vegas with my pocket change. EDE was my favourite companion because he could carry stuff and didn't need armor and weapons (which reduces his carrying weight)

Are you sure you didn't install the DLC before your second playthrough, Slyfeind? That sounds like Broken Steel behavior to me.

If you owned Broken Steel for the 2nd playthrough, that's why.

Vault 22 appears to be broken to shit. Lovely.

The more I play this game, the more I'm just shrugging my shoulders, sighing, and getting on with life. The game mechanics start to get less interesting as it becomes more readily apparent that the combat in this game isn't interesting at all. Either my ally goes up and pulls a FALCON PUNCH on the creatures I encounter, or I encounter something so hard that it's me plinking away at it and taking damage from it in an arm-wrestling match where I get to shoot myself full of healing items if my stamina gets too low.

*The same thing* happens with every one of these games. They don't remain interesting *as a game* through the whole experience. They eventually become content delivery systems. Fundamental flaw of the open-world game. Trying to make it so that enemies match you as you raise in level can lead to bandits in glass armor as well, but even then, it's just a power level thing and not making the game *more* interesting, just higher numbers to deal with.

There are spurts of neato things, like one random house I went in to that was booby-trapped with explosives that required careful navigation (or setting off the trap ahead of time.) But for the most part, anytime I'm fighting an NPC, it's exactly the same, every single time.

Hm. I guess this would be as close to a non-linear, real-time JRPG as you can get?

Is it a known issue that Loading Times increase the longer you play?

I spent 15 of 20 minutes playing last night in loading screens hoping from area to area to tie up quest stuff. It was boring as hell.

Uhh, vault 22 worked fine for me, and loading times were a snap. Bad mod perhaps?

Xbox 360.

Well, there's your problem then.  :awesome_for_real:

I beat the game.

It crashed during the ending cinematics.  :oh_i_see:

I am having real trouble with this style of game. I saw a lot of my quests to be fetch quests with the only thing interesting about them being the exploration of the fallacy of Doing The Good Thing and Doing The Bad Thing. The combat / "game" of it never got its hooks into me because of the way encounters always played out the same.

I did like how they made the NCR / Caesar's / House's positions explained to such a degree that it made it clear that all of them *meant* well, but there were some significant negatives to their extreme positions that didn't get addressed.

So apparently some DLC came out for this. I have yet to fire it up, but it's loaded. Now to get the kid off the Xbox.

I disliked that tne end is basically a "sorry, mario the princess is in another Castle" type of affair.

I really don't understand what you mean by this.

EDIT: Unless you mean the DLC, which by the context I guess you probably do. Thought you meant the end of the regular game...

No I meant the end of the regular game, when you get to Caesar's camp and


Talk about an anticlimactic ending if I ever saw one.

I walked into Caesar's camp and laid waste. I'll never finish one of the new Fallouts. It's too easy to just... kill everything.

Regarding Caesar

The NCR ending is like that because:

And otherwise, Caesar
So yeah, it's not that your princess is in another castle.

Is anyone playing hardcore?  I'm a casual gamer, but the urge to play hardcore is really strong.  Is it cool or is managing all those health levels a hassle?

Food is abundant enough to not be a hassle and for me the trips back to stash my loot in Goodsprings coincided with me having to drink some water (and I had to sleep every few trips to the shack).

So I would say no, its not a hassle, but its not particularly challenging either. You either do it for the Achievement or because you want the game to be more realistic (as was my intention), not because it makes the game harder.

Survival is still pretty useless even in hardcore. Should have been called  'slightly annoying' mode.

The only meaningful change in hard core for me was that stimpacks heal over time (instead of instantly), and limb breakage requires a doctor bag or hydra (or a trip to a doctor).  Makes brute forcing through fights a bit more difficult, encourages sniping or setting mines a bit more.

Ammo having weight is a nuisance as well, but easy to work around.

Finished the game.  Love it!  It's in my top 3 of 2010 (ME2, RDR, FLV).  Already playing again, this time on hardcore, which is just kind of annoying.


Kudos to Obsidian for making a great rpg, even with the bugs and random crashes.  I like Vegas better than Fallout 3. 

It's a good ending, there are a few different ones that could plausibly be the most desirable depending on your point of view.

Edit: we wouldn't want to offend Shiznitz, would we?

For the record, that was all opinion and no spoiler.

Combat seemed too easy on hard so I'm using house rules of no bullet/energy usage, only explosives and melee, mostly just explosives. Still pretty easy for the most part (cazadors - wtf?) but the explosions are fun especially indoors with lots of mobs in tight spaces. Was going without a sidekick too but started getting bored with menial stuff, especially of making trips to sell junk, now trying to power through content with Cass but damn there is lots to do in this game, spent a lot of time re-running quests trying to blow stuff up in new ways.

random screenshots:

Arise! The Dead Money DLC is finally available for the Steam version.

HELLS YEAH

I like the game, but it's getting annoying in small steps. Not sure if we still need to spoiler, but eh:


Anyway, lots of little things like that add up over time. Really enjoying the game overall, though.

If you are talking about vanilla FNV, yes there are skill checks involving him.  He has a great gun that I used the whole game.

I'm a wimpy scientist. If I can't make the escape work, I'll just shoot him in the head.

I'm not even sure that works; IIRC I tried to just pop him and it aggro'd the whole Legion. My only options were Crucifixion or Arena.

Caesar told me I can shoot him right there, there might have been a speech check involved, though. I did it and THEN wiped the Legion out. I was Good-aligned, but getting shot and ditched in a shallow grave really pissed my otherwise goody-two-shoes off. I wanted him dead execution-style. Eye for an Eye and all that.

Anyone try the new DLC? I hear mixed reviews.

Mostly complaints that it's grizzly bear traps wall to wall.

"I found a trap!" (http://awkwardzombie.com/index.php?page=0&comic=021411)

At least now I know where the non-panda avatar comes from.

Had to go to the console to find ED-E who had disappeared at some point. The console..it's a bit obtuse.

Yeah, ED-E does that to you. I tried to teleport to him when it happened to me and was stuck in a small room with no exit. Then I had to teleport him to me and resurrect him instead. I guess its the floating around that gets him stuck that easily. Sometimes Bloat Flies and Cazadors attack me from nowhere as well.

EDIT: Dead Money

I was moderately entertained by it, but it was neither as suspenseful nor as survival horror as they claimed. Might be the fact that I am a hoarder and my character had both the regeneration mod and Rad Absorption Perk, but ammo was at no time low and I walked out of there a rich man loaded down with (Super)Stimpacks, Weapon Repair Kits and Caravan Lunches.

The "different combat tactics" spiel was also wrong, it still is critical headshot all the way.

After sleeping on it for a few days the similarities to Bioshock must be planned. It feels like a Bioshock mod for Fallout. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

It seems like another piece leading up to a final confrontation to an equal opposite of yourself (another courier that is hinted at in the main game is talked about extensively here), and that makes me excited about the rest of the journey.

I had done all the extra quests on Fallout 3, and was in the Jefferson Memorial and my character bugged!  GRRRRR! So I may start playing this, should I play regular or go ahead and get the down load extra content and do both?

They're not really connected story-wise so there's not a lot of reason for you to feel you need to finish FO3 before playing New Vegas.

However, there is some love for FO2 players.

Trying to make a push to finish off the game, I forgot how long these things get (usually a good thing, but I wanted to play a couple more this gaming season!). Crashing a lot more now, really killing the momentum.

Decided that I'm with Boone, the hell with those Legion bastards, so I went all sniper on them with him and ED-E. Cakewalk through the Fort until Caesar's tent, wiped three times before I decided to give it up for now.

A quick question for anyone playing the PS3 version: Has it been patched enough to be reasonably stable yet? I am almost done with Fallout 3, so I am thinking about this one.

New DLC coming in May, June and July. (http://bethblog.com/index.php/2011/05/03/details-on-honest-hearts-old-world-blues-and-lonesome-road/)

This reminds me that I need to finish my first playthrough, which should look great on our new TV.

For ten bucks a pop, I am hoping for a length similar to the Pitt or the other big DLC for Fallout 3 (it was set in Maryland, perhaps?).

I hadn't fired this up for several weeks and Steam updated it this weekend.  Patch or content?

Apparently a patch to make the new content work with the engine if that linked blog post is correct.

There were also balance tweaks to several weapons.

I don't know what changed with fallout but i get a blue screen of death occasionally when i enter combat and have to full reboot. had a nearly full playthrough without this before and didnt change my pc at all so....patch?

So after a recent upgrade, I decided to reinstall New Vegas and try again. Being the mod whore that I am, I browsed through New Vegas Nexus, added a few basic character design mods, and noticed this new companion mod people were raving about.

Normally companion mods tend to be on the meh side. This one is the exception. Full custom graphic design, multiple quest lines, companion perks, travelling commentary, and complete voice acting. Aparrently the mod designer did the voice acting herself, and is actually quite good. Highly recommended for anyone starting a new game (may have issues if you are half way through).

Note, the site requires you to log in and turn off the "adult" filter, because apparently having an optional fade to black scene at the end of a quest line is "adult".

http://newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=41779 (http://newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=41779)

Just got this on Steam sale yesterday, figured I'd bump the thread up for some more discussion for hte people who just picked it up.

My initial impression is that it is better than Fallout 3, and that is saying something because I liked Fallout 3, but this feels even more like Fallout to me.   Probably the setting more than anything.  I chose Hardcore mode when it gave me the option, though I am not yet fully aware of the ramifications.  I guess I need to eat drink and sleep regularly, or something.  I like that they give you that choice, it always seems to be something modding in early on anyway.

I'm starting out actually following the story line, but I don't know if I will continue to follow it long term.

Just finished Honest Hearts myself. Interesting stuff.

I liked New Vegas better than FO3, and I really liked that game. The only thing about Vegas is it seems to be missing the serious spelunking missions. One of the high points of FO1 and FO2 were poking in old vaults and abandoned military bases. You've got the vaults (and boy do you...Vault 34...brrrr...), but I want some military bases dammit! Looking like we might get such a thing in one of the next two DLCs.

Hardcore mode isn't really a great hardship. Just have to think about weight distribution more and maybe reinforce that with a couple of perks. It does make you plan out long term missions away from whatever you call home more thoroughly. Also makes finding a suitable hidey hole to sleep and store things a bit more involved. I like it, but it's not a huge deal.

You'll find you'll follow the story iniitally pretty closely, but there are a huge number of distractions and they'll keep you very busy for a very long time. I would recomend getting to Vegas fairly early, or you might close off quest lines if you spend too much time wandering around finding stuff and possibly killing people before you should.

Bought this on steam-sale as well. For some reason this game doesn't like my rig, at all. Crashed to desktop twice during the start-up training missions, with a "your gfx-driver shut down" message.
Upgraded to latest 275.33 drivers which did me no good on that game at least. Guess I'll try and turn down some gfx-options to see if that helps.

I got Dead Money in the steam sale, and holy shit that's the hardcore mode that New Vegas should have been.  I've been having to sweat and scrounge every minute of the way; this is the first time in New Vegas that I actually had to resort to eating food for health and praying for a workbench so I could cobble more ammo together.  It's brutal and I luvs it.

Yeah, it was that. I went in at level 28 and it was friggin' vicious. Two things make it somewhat easier: lightstep perk and nerd rage. The BAR was your only trump card to things going south in a hurry, but keeping it in ammo was just  :ye_gods: . It was fun, though, and also filled with foreshadowing for future DLC.

I'm liking it so far.   I'm at about 30 hours in and there is clearly a ton of stuff to do.   It suffers a bit from Emo Avellone's "No good guy path for you!" but it's far better than F3.   The combat/gun changes also really help to keep it enjoyable.

Started this yesterday. Holy fuck insane mouse acceleration. I can hardly use the mouse the acceleration is so fast, but on the other hand, the .ini fix requires me to turn off Vsync, which I need on my 60hz refresh rate monitor.

It shouldn't.   The fix is this:


You just put in those lines and you are good to go.    What fix did you use?

Turning off vsync and HDR did wonders for me. Still no idea what i'm doing though, and i always seem to be short a few points on just the skill that i would raise next. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu...
Energy weaps seems rather useless at levekl 3 though. "Oh, another shotgun, how cute...."Guess i'll play a few hours more before i restart the darn thing.
No, i do not read user manuals on new phones either !

After you go far enough away from goodsprings I believe it allows you to re-allocate points, never tried though.

Yeah, it lets you redo your points allocation and your looks.

I'm really enjoying New Vegas and I absolutely hated Fallout 3.  I just wish it was a bit more stable :uhrr:.

My experience has been similar, but without the stability problem.  I'm pleased that I finally picked this up during the Steam sale.  It feels more like a Fallout game than Fallout 3 did and has really scratched an rpg itch that I've had for a long while.

If you guys haven't looked around you should definitely check out the mods at http://www.newvegasnexus.com/ (http://www.newvegasnexus.com/).   I don't usually mod much on my first playthrough but some of the things like high quality gun retextures are good even with the first playthrough.  There's quite a lot of stuff that isn't just lol bewbs.

I have recently replayed Fallout 3 and all add ons and I like it more the second time around than I did the first time I played it.

Fallout New Vegas is much better though. After my second playthrough of Fallout 3 I deem it a legitimate Fallout (I didn't the first time through), yet Fallout New Vegas is feeling much more like Fallout 1 or 2 than Fallout 3 does.

I think this is because of two or three things

1 Humor. Fallout 3 barely has any humor at all. It is a postapocalyptic RPG and the capital wasteland is beautifully designed. Even with all of the subway tunnels and arbitrary rubble blockages you barely feel the limitations of the level design, it hides it well. It doesn't integrate the dark, sarcastic humor of the original Fallouts, though. New Vegas adds the same brand of humor that made the originals so damn good.

2. The juxtaposition of 50s style technology and pulp fiction with the postapocalyptic. New Vegas is better in mixing the unique blend of over the top pulp fiction and postapocalyptic feel. This ties into 1 because it was done for the humorous contrast of the ultra optimistic "the world of tomorrow" style with the fear of annihilation from the cold war and the real annihilation of the nuclear war.

The mix works astonishingly well and it's always funny when Mad Max meets Lost in Space

3. Feels more like a postapocalyptic society. Fallout 3 has nearly no settlements or the settlements feel small. New Vegas has more of that

4. No Mutants allowed: New Vegas has only a few Super Mutants compared to Fallout 3's legions and legions of stupid green skinned cannon fodder roaming the wastes.

The thing that turns me off about New Vegas was the sparse nature of big buildings.  In DC you could be wandering around, and oh hey big office building, let's see what's inside and you can spend an hour exploring it.  New Vegas is mostly desert and shacks.  Even the city itself has only a handful of buildings.

5. Actually involved people who worked on 1/2.

Well damn, I even thought of that.

I finally remembered the name of this mod:

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=41480

This essentially lets you put Fallout 3 into FNV.   That way you get to take advantage of the much improved combat and better weapons, perks, companion system etc.   They're still in alpha but it seems to get updated quite often.

After having my first interaction with Yes Man today I can safely say that I'm hooked on this game.  The humor and characters are phenomenal; things sorely missing from Fallout 3.  It's been a long time since I was this engaged in the plot of an rpg.

He was one of my favorite NPC's in FNV.  Keep playing, you're in for a great ride.  Still haven't bought any DLC though, I keep 'saving' them for some reason.

I can wholeheartedly recommend Dead Money if you like scrounging to survive on minimal resources.  If I could find a mod to make New Vegas's hardcore mode more like that, I'd be in heaven.

Once you meet the Yes Man, how are far is one into the main quest? 3/4 done?

Cala

I'd say closer to 1/4.

I would believe it.  There seems like a tremendous amount of stuff here.  I became a cannibal at level 4 or something so the White Hands were spared my wrath, but I plan to side with Caesar once I meet him.  I've already decided I'll replay the game as NCR on hardcore sometime after this play through a few months from now, there's just so much stuff.  It helps having CHA 10 and a high speech though, I'm sure, as I end up seeing a ton of conversation topics.

Got stuck on a quest with a gun fight that I couldn't win so I took a detour to check out Vault 22 with Cass.  So awesome.

If I have a beef with New Vegas outside of it being hilariously buggy (my favorite is ants getting their "joints" stuck in the ground, when I score a critical hit and they "snap" loose and literally fly hundreds of yards through the air) is that some of the iron sights the guns have are non-existent or useless.

Edit: actually, if anything I'm really annoyed at the un-eveness of combat. FO3 and NV feel way, way different.

In New Vegas my guns hurt, but I can't hit a fucking thing even with high gun skills and fully repaired weapons. In FO3 I always hit even from seemingly unfair distances, but outside of wimpy raiders everything takes half my ammo to kill. Shit, mirelurks are ridiculous.

Can't hit using VATS or by aiming yourself? I mostly used VATS because I suck at shooters, and I never had problems with accuracy.

With and without VATS. I've literally ran straight up to enemies, crouched, used iron sights, fired center mass, and watched literally only 1 out of 6-7 rounds hit.

In FO3 I was removing heads and at least sort of injuring enemies from pretty far away. Of course, anything halfway tough takes like 50+ bullets to kill for some reason with any gun but at least I'm hitting stuff. FO3 I've been so annoyed fighting mirelurks and super mutants I just use VATS and throw grenades at them over and over since those seem to be able to hurt them. I'm like level 9 or so in NV and it's getting better but that's only because I'm swimming in caps and armed to the teeth with fully repaired weapons.

Don't use iron sights, it's hillariously bad.

I prefer NV setting, but F3 seemed more stable on my rig.  Between the launcher stopped working issues, the mouse acceleration issues and the slight hitch/lag anytime I bring up the Pipboy, it's just annoying.

I can easily look past the issues because of how much fun it is, but I wish Obsidian would have continued pushing fixes.  Like Bethesda, there's these glaring errors that they're just willing to let slide. 

I am excellent at shooters but I always used VATS and nothing but VATS because a) ammo economy, you easily spend 2-5x times more without b) weapon spread is so bad on all weapons that you generally can't aim them better than spray&pray.

Considering that I _loved_ F1-F2 turn based combat, I'm not particularly annoyed by having to VATSORGTFO approach. Still, it would be nice if I could aim and point-blank-hit with flamethrower for a change....

Fallout 3 and NV both seem to be about as crashy. I've had 3 CTDs in NV and 3 hardlocks in FO3 so far. I've had various graphical glitches in NV mostly to do with poorly aligned textures.

FO 3 crashed 3 times on me. Hard lock up where my xbox basically freezes up completely and only power cycling helps.

I have clocked 120 hours of time played so far, though (collected all bobbleheads, most of the skill books, did every quest and every achievement I could) and I still haven't finished the Pitt or even explored all vaults and map markers yet. I'd prefer it if it wouldn't crash at all obviously but 3 crashed over a period of over 120 hours is still OK. I set it up so that it autosaves every time I rest, fast travel or enter and exit structures so I usually don't lose any progress when it happens.

NV was a lot less stable initially but it is now on par with FO3 since the last patch. I'm still contemplating however if I should wait to play it until the last two add ons come out. I'm asking myself if they'll do the same as with Broken steel and it's "almost perfect" perk.

It's silly really in FO3 I now have a character with 10 in all attributes and 100% in every skill and it bums me out a little bit that I cannot do that in New Vegas #firstworldgamingproblems.

Also after watching Skyrim footage (which as every other Obsidian game will be brilliant but more unstable than a house of cards) I want a Fallout 4. After thirty years of gaming both computer games and classic pen and paper rpgs I am burned out on medieval style worlds.

I don't even feel any stats except Intelligence making much of a difference to be honest. It's just the way the game rewards VATS too much that made combat easy peasy, no matter what build are you using...as long as you avoid Radscorpion rapes at early game till you get explosives. :)

I LOVE iron sights in this game.   In fact if I had a complaint it would be that if I'm in a situation where I can shoot from long distance it takes all the difficulty out of the game.   I find myself tempted to move forward so the targets at least can fire back.


Using the right gun is everything in this game.    The spread on a 10mm pistol is 33 times as much as the Varmint rifle for instance.   Basically early on if you want to shoot long distance you use the Varmint rifle period.   Pretty soon you can start getting cowboy repeaters which will be your main rifle for a while.

A little shield shows up next to the targets healthbar if you're not punching through their armor too.   Sadly shotguns and SMG's are fairly useless because of the armor system.

Shoot mirelurks in the face.  They're well armored everywhere else.

I have some issues with nearly all first person shooter mechanics.

You either have magic guns with no spread no recoil and tracking that is completely unaffected by wind and gravity or guns that are more effective as thrown weapons or clubs (What we usually call 6 shots + 1 deadly throw).

They modify too many parameters all at once. A 10 mil handgun might have a crappy range but when the opponent is already on top of me then it shouldn't matter whether I hit him in the face with a 9 mil handgun, 5.56 mil rifle or 6000 degrees of molten death from my alien blaster the opponent should end up dead.

Secondly all opponents possess the gift of precognition, telepathy and second sight, because they always seem to know where I am. It doesn't matter that it's pitch black outside and that I'm camping 1200 metres outside of the base equipped with silencer, night vision googles and the Fallout equivalent of the invisibility cloak, one shot and 50 angry wastelanders dressed as parodies of roman centurions make a beeline for my position.

Which brings me to my third per peeve because they don't move, they run like squirrels on adderall with their tails on fire.

Without VATS I would have a hard time to hit any of them

It's Fallout.  Shoot everything in the face. 

Or get an assault carbine and just go full auto on their ass.   Works roughly the same as face shootage.   Am I the only one who mostly doesn't use VATS btw?  I find it's only really useful if I've got like 4 people rushing into melee range.   In F3 all I did was use VATs so I find it refreshing.

I'm the same way.  I only use VATS when I'm in a bad spot, and have found the sights on guns to be perfectly fine.  I use almost nothing but rifles though so they are naturally more accurate at range.  I will say that I'm not a big fan of my scope though now that I've put it on a hunting rifle; I prefer the iron sights and wish I could de-mod that weapon.

Really?  I don't even use the hunting rifle unless I want to do long range shooting.    The scope is great for sneak sniping.

No, I despise V.A.T.S. and one of the main things I love about New Vegas is that I can get by just fine with shooting people in the face myself.

That's why I mentioned it.  I use it for long range shooting, but haven't found the scope to help me in that endeavor.  Maybe once I get sneak up some more it'll be more useful.  My normal range weapon right now is a cowboy repeater.

My sneak is only 30.  I just crouch from a mile away and shoot them in the back.    If you're really far they won't find you immediately.

I have 100 sneak and the silent running perk and in light armor from fifty feet away and ten feet down things will immediately spin around and start shooting at me.  Never rely on stealth in a Bethesda game; it sucks.  The only time stealth doesn't suck is if you've cheesed the system in Morrowind to be in armor that gives permanent invisibility, at which point you're untouchable.  There's no middle ground.

Use a silencer?   I don't have any problem at all with 30 sneak and no silencer though so I think you're doing something wrong altogether.

Yeah I've been able to play sneak-based characters just fine (caveat, I haven't tried a melee one.)

Do melee characters work well in FO3 or FNV?  I started playing FO3 and the game's questions made me a melee oriented character, but I changed after escaping the vault cause I felt like I would be gimped if I was a melee when everyone around me has guns.

On another note, is there any way to respec my character later in the game?

In FO3 I was unarmed/sneak mostly and once I hit lvl 15 I simply destroyed anything in my path.  If it was a tough monster I'd drop into VATS for paralyzing palm.  Otherwise, I walked over anything. 

Before that, I used guns a bit to help supplement the damage incoming. 

For NV I'm going sniper route. 

Melee in NV > melee in FO3.  Early levels are rough but you become badass quickly.

On VATS, there are a lot of perks that boost VATS attacks only so I still use it.  About 50-50.

You'd probably be swimming in cash due to the sold weapons and ammos you never use if you go melee that you can spend most of them on Grenades, Drugs, and Stims to buff up. Oh, for snipers that hate getting spotted, just drop a mine before you start shooting. Retreat to one of those blind corner buildings...bam. No more hostiles.

Sniping love:

1) Get sniper perk (duh).
2) Get better criticals perk.
3) Rebuild a laser rifle with +damage and the 'scope.
4) Get laser commander perk.
5) Vaporize at will.

Actually, I spend most of my time sniping by manual aiming. With decent stealth and some distance, you'll almost always crit. I like mixing it up on occasion (hello CZ57!), but death from afar was my usual method of dealing with my fellow wastelanders. Suppressed weapons do help keeping them clueless, but hardly a necessity.

My last playthrough of NV was an unarmed build (fist weapons obv, not actually unarmed); it was a ton of fun. I even went through with a melee companion, because I didn't like the ranged guys stealing my kills. Next time I play I'm going to do a real melee one, so I can roam the wastelands with a katana.

The only thing I don't like about actual melee weapons in stock New Vegas is that they start out really crappy and stay kind of crappy for a long time until they're suddenly really fucking good.

I put down my melee-only game when I realized that I'd be running around with a big chunk of rebar for about 15 hours before finding something better.

Unless I paid up for the DLCs and their better low-end melee weapons, naturally.

Still enjoying this a lot.  Only about 4-5 hours in.  I really like managing my food/drink/sleep on hardcore.

Yea the melee weapons are really bleh.  I'm not touching a melee game till I figure out which mods to use for it.

I just checked the wiki for the location of an easy to get, low skill req unique and headed there asap.

The super sledge?

Love and Hate; I was playing unarmed not melee.

I have more caps than god now since I sold a gigantic pile of junk (mostly energy weapons and like 10,000+ caps in energy weapon ammo) and old weapons that don't hold up anymore even 100% repaired.

Been using a cowboy repeater, lever action shotgun, THAT GUN, and assault carbine mostly. That Gun is starting to show its age which makes me sad since it is fucking awesome. With all of these fully upgraded and a gigantic pile of ammo I bought with my energy weapon proceeds I'm now actually semi-capable of killing shit on my own. Boone and ED-E literally make me look worthless though, especially since I repaired Boone's gun. Jesus Christ, Boone is a monster.

Edit: Okay...now I may need to leave Boone behind to get something done. I finally got around to doing the 3 bounty quests for the NCR and Boone won't stop blasting the fucking heads off the named guys, which prevents me from getting the full bounty.

BTW Fabricated, your new avatar picture is mesmerizing.

In the "The moment I can pull my eyes away from that I'll go out and punch the guy who created it, soon, maybe in 5 minutes I'll just have to look at it a bit more beforerhand"  :why_so_serious:

I finally ran into a very annoying bug.  I did a save and it sort of stalled for a second but then came back.  I thought nothing of it but now whenever I fast travel or change zones my companions will sometimes start booking it to the middle of nowhere.

I am dropping Boone.  He makes it too easy.

Yea taking along ED-E and Cas is a bit overkill for me.  I'm thinking of finding a mod to nerf them.

I thought companions were too easy myself....until I started seeing deathclaws. Yeah my melee guy was godly with his ranged companions until these face rapers came along to rape faces.

I love the chainsaw.

After putting 10 hours into NV, it's just a different experience than FO3 completely.  I spent nearly a year trying to beat FO3, getting bored at different parts.  I also felt like I had to min/max in FO3.

With NV, I'm just playing it, picking things as I go, leveling as I want.  I'm playing into the wee hours of the morning, wanting to see 'just one more thing' when I notice it's 3am irl. 

My complaints are aimed at it being buggy, but my biggest complaint recently is that mobs and objects are getting caught beneath the terrain too often. 

I had the same experience initially because I expected FO3 to be like FO 1 or 2, which it isn't.

After replaying both 3 and NV though I can see the positive sides of both.

If you're not too spoiler adverse you can watch the different ending cut scenes on youtube to see how your choices will play out. There was one small faction that was barely bread crumbed that I missed entirely on my first play through. I was surprised when their ending cut scene popped up.

Which faction?

I had to watch the ending cutscenes on Youtube because every time they'd start for me, the game would crash.  :oh_i_see:

Yeah, I remember those guys. They were damned disagreeable and difficult to deal with. Well, difficult to talk to. Easy enough to...well...deal with by other means.

Same with the Great Khans. Always hated those bastards in FO and FO2. Hard to negotiate with in NV. So they got introduced to diplomacy by other means.

I just played through Honest Hearts, and it was a lesser experience than Dead Money.  Shorter to play through and less interesting.

Ahh, I don't think I ever ran into them.

Game's been out almost a year. I don't think we need to spoiler shit anymore.

Eh, yeah, you're probably right, I figured there were a lot of people that just bought the game over the summer sale so there were probably a bunch of folks interested in the thread that might not have played things, but thats on us not to get spoiled I suppose.

Just did Dead Money and Honest Hearts.

Dead Money was fucking fantastic.


Honest Hearts I liked a lot of the look of, but I kind of screwed it up by taking my psychokiller melee character to, and killing Joshua Graham in irritation right after he cleaned his tenth pistol. That pretty much meant, "No quests for u".

Getting started in Honest Hearts was fraught with peril. It took three tries before I figured out what was going on. The Courier was way too fast and deadly. Chalk usually bought a farm before he could twitch. Before I figured out he was your principle contact. I did really like the looks of Zion in the game. Very cool. Nice having clean water without having to scrounge for it, too.

Dead Money was rather frustrating in some ways, but man it had atmosphere and sense of dread rarely seen in games these days. I would have liked gloating over Elijah's downfall more myself (hate timed anything in games), but that downfall was so sweet. It still gives me a warm and fuzzy recalling him slinking into the vault talking his shit while a stealthed Courier lined his head up over the sights of the BAR...

So I picked up old world blues and....



SCIENCE!  :drill:


Not that far into it but it has the voice actors for Dr Venture and I think Nibbler/Futurama announcer. 

I played about an hour of Dead Money and decided I hated it and moved on. There are a couple mechanics I really hate about it.


Liking Honest Hearts much more so far.

About 20hrs into the base game and I noticed some things that I find interesting. 

First, I have run across three companions in the first 10 hours (ED-E, Boone, Victoria).  Compared to FO3 where I found Dogmeat 20hrs in and Fawkes maybe 45hrs in, NV is a significant improvement. 

Second, I tried to use my heavy combat build from FO3, but I've found that it's just not wise to play NV without a decent Speech or Barter.  There's so much that I've been limited to doing because those skills are low.  Whoever decided to balance the game out like this is a pure genius.  I'm actually half considering rerolling my character to play with more speech options.  This game wasn't designed to be min/maxed.  It's awesome, bugs aside.   

I hope Bethesda looks at these changes when they put together FO4.

I played two characters all the way through and the thing I really liked about it was that I wasn't at all tempted to min/max or even really stick to a build that was about some particular vision of effectiveness. The first guy was a basically good-hearted NCR-favoring sniper who liked hanging around with Boone and didn't want anything to do with House and that all made sense to me. I had a great feel for what the character ought to be doing in a given situation. Then I played a psycho lady who helped the Powder Gangers kill the townspeople and liked to use melee weapons. But she met Veronica and kind of softened a bit and became a more principled anarchist: down with NCR, down with Caesar, down with House, down with anyone who was going to tell people what to do. Again, it all made sense: I didn't have to think much about what she'd do in a given situation or what skills I'd level, or even what perks to take (there's actually a perfect perk that suits her character). It was interesting that despite all the really bad things she did--like 600 deaths towards being Lord Death of Murder Mountain--the game still had her classed as karma-positive. Just killing Fiends alone, which you pretty much have to do, nets a lot of positive karma.

Proton Axe!

I SO will make a Melee-only character now in remembrance of Wasteland.

Proton Axe?!  That has to be a nod to Wasteland.  I'm tempted to make my second character a melee fighter just so I can wield it.

I also found a nod to portal in old world blues in the form of a broken eyebot that looks like a personality core.

:heart:

Played through Honest Hearts, liked it quite a lot actually.  It was interesting on Hardcore mode.  Plentiful clean water, but had to hunt or scavenge for food, made even more interesting because the 75 lb limit to go on the caravan trip meant that I was really poorly equipped to deal with the conditions.  Actually made it a lot more fun though.

Played some of Old World Blues yesterday, loving it! Nice humor, and yes, the Portal is strong in this one! FOR SCIENCE!

Just finished my first play through of the game, and created an independent New Vegas, destroying both the NCR and the Legion.  I already know that I'll be replaying the game a few months from now, and it was easily the best rpg I've played in years, but the ending was thoroughly unsatisfying.  I knew what was bound to happen in the end with the path that I chose, but it still felt terribly abrupt and awkward.

In the end though, a poor ending doesn't spoil the game.  I'm looking forward to playing on the side of the NCR, or something, next time and going through the DLCs on a Hardcore game.

I was just upset that Yes Man didn't remain the loyal leader of my robot army in the independent ending.

Don't get me started on the ending again! The Independent ending is dumb in so many ways! Just use the robots to get a good independence deal with the NCR (they did it once before) in exchange for assistance against the Legion.

I found the Yes Man thing foreshadowed quite well, actually. But maybe I just distrust people who say Yes to everything   :-)

Oh, I saw the Yes Man thing from a mile away, but I kept going because I thought it'd still be satisfying.  Instead I just got the equivalent of a  "kthxbye lolz."  At least have him kill me or something; honestly, that's more believable, and I would've been alright with it if it was done in some dramatic way. 

I thought that maybe Yes Man wasn't letting me walk all over him at all, but was instead playing some much deeper game before I even arrived and simply let me think that he was really my servant along with his previous masters.  I was just necessary because he wasn't able to do all of the footwork by himself.  Instead he is "going off somewhere to find the chip that makes him more assertive!"  It felt cheap, especially since it came from a great character who could have been even better, and ultimately more strangely sinister.

I'm not sure the yes man thing was really him turning on you. Sure it seemed like he would from the start and the independant ending makes it seem like he will but they keep it pretty vague as to what actually happens.

I really liked Vault 22 :)

Christ we're all old fucking gamers.

Yep, I just finished that part and I really thought it was paced well.  It was fun!

Finished with Old World Blues. Unexpected ending, but completely fitting with how the DLC makes fun of itself! The ending slideshow was on the dumber end of the spectrum, which stands to reason with the nature of the NPCs in this DLC.

Game balance went completely out of the window with this expansion, but the convenience can't be beaten.

I have now played most (80 - 90%) of the sidequests of the original Fallout NV. I gave up on my initial playthorugh because it simply was to buggy to continue exploring.

If I compare NV with the newest patch to the version I played 6 months ago then it's actually pretty stable and bug free. I could finish all of my companion quests and I haven't encountered a single game stopping bug (like the quest giver that just vanished after a certain point in the game on my last playthrough)

The only issue I have is lock-ups of the 360, once every few hours, that need a reboot.

They use the skill tree even less than with FO 3 though. If you put points into science, speech, lockpick and guns (or the offensive skill of your choice) you are all set.

Not that it matters. After the new DLC I have everything but Melee Weapons and Unarmed maxed out. I guess when you go and kick the other couriers ass those will be maxed too.

I didn't know that; must have missed that side quest or dialog option.

No repair? That repair an item with any similar item perk is quite handy.

Repair is pretty darn useful, yes.

Loving Old World Blues so far, easily my favorite of the 3 DLCs.

I need to play OWB. I started a new character, did Honest Hearts which was okay, but I'm not enjoying Dead Money very much.

I also meant to do a melee playthrough, but.. uh.. yeah fuck that.

There's a nice stealth suit in OWB that would go well with a melee build. Stat boosts, sneak speed boost...

Sorry I left out repair. Repair and the jury rigger perk and you'll never have any money problems except that your vendors don't carry enough money for all of your loot.

The stealth suit is adorable. Now if only it would stop assuming I want help <3

Thus far, OWB has the personality I was looking for in a fallout game. Beat Dead Money, it just seemed like someone wanted to create a bad movie with the FO3 engine.

And incidently the true genius of the DLC is that it is explained so well in game.

It's campy B movie scifi. Perfect Fallout fodder, and hilarious to boot. My only real complaint thus far is:

(http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090917011945/wasteland/images/e/e2/WL_ani_226.gif)

From the best RPG ever! :awesome_for_real:

I have now done every NV quest there is with the exception of the main questline after "Ring-A-Ding-Ding". I'll now do all of the DLC and then keep a save of my game until "Lonesome Road" comes out.

I started with Old World Blues. So far I like it a lot. The only thing I don't like is the dialogue. Not the writing or the voice acting, just that there is so much exposition with the think tank so that you have to listen and talk to these morons for at least 15 Minutes before you have all the info and quests.

I'd love a x2 speed option or a "text only" mode so that the subtitles appear faster. I'm not that patient and minutes and minutes of exposition (although it's very well made exposition) taxes my patience quite a bit.

It seems to be a similar game-breaker to Mothership Zeta though, what you get as loot or perks at the end is a bit unbalanced.

Finished Old World Blues.

I very much liked the setting and the tone, you probably could even have made a Fallout 4 that is based entirely in some sort of derelict pre-war research area like the Big Empty. It bows to Wasteland and other old games and it strikes a very good balance between very dark and very dark humor. I especially liked the idea of the trauma override harnesses.

The ending was an interesting twist although I didn't quite get if it was Moebius' own idea or not. I liked the different personalities of the appliances (especially the paranoid stalker-esque one of the Stealth Suit MK 2) even though you don't notice them much.

It is quite challenging though. The opponents are tough to kill and you won't find much ammo or opportunities to repair gear (unless you scavenge a lot and have the repair skill to craft weapon repair kits), the sink ai will repair stuff for you but it will cost you dearly. I've spent thousands of caps and hundreds of bullets during OWB.

My main gripe would be that it is very combat-heavy (each and every enemy in the big MT research facility has a unique and ridiculously overpowered variant, *cough* bloatfly *cough*) and that - by the time you will have finished OWB - you will be totally fed up with nightstalkers. You'll kill ridiculous amounts of those beasts, it must have been more than sixty al in all.

The area of the big MT is rather large for an add-on but get's a little underused, you have to re-run certain tests four times and the rest is just mindlessly killing things that are rather hard to kill.

After that I've started dead money, which I rather like so far. I like that it is more skill oriented and less combat heavy. getting your euipment taken away sucks, though. It has a little bit of a resident evil or silent hill vibe and the Sierra Madre Casino and Resort is another quite interesting and dark setting (the red cloud gives it a great horror flick feel).

The writing of the characters is actually better than in OWB in my opinion.

After OWB and dead money I'm really looking forward to lonesome road.

In my opinion the quality of the DLC so far has been higher than in FO3. Mothership Zeta is too monotonous and long, The Pitt and Point Lookout are OK and the only one I really enjoyed was Operation Anchorage

Oh yes, the harnesses. That was a nice "WTF, creepy" moment.

I went through about 15 weapon repair kits to keep my weapon in top shape. So yes, without the Repair skill you kind of had it hard. Especially because you didn't play Dead Money yet (you can buy Repair kits after you finished that DLC).

The diffcult part weren't the weapons because I could craft weapon repair kits and I also have the jury rigging perk. It was the armor. The nightstalkers were especially effective at chewing my armor to shreds and you didn't have that many opportunities to repair it with armor found in the Big MT.

12.000 caps to repair the stealth suit to 100% condition is a steep price to pay to not get mauled by a pack of snake-coyote hybrids. The nightstalkers managed to reduce my Combat Armor Reinforced MK II from 100% to zero two times.

Ah, I used a Light Armor (Joshua Grahams Armor) and thought it went down that much because it was just Light Armor (plus, there dropped plenty light armor to repair it with).

It was just as bad with medium and Heavy Armor? Ouch!

Yeah, I could offset it by selling all of the stuff the lobotomites and trauma harness suits left after I killed them, though.

I hate that VATS is still buggy. The LAER was especially prone to miss a number of consecutive times even though I had a hit chance of 95%. With the speed the nightstalkers attack you and the fact that they like to get up close and personal, VATS was the only option to hit them at all so it sucked when you managed to empty an entire clip at point blank range without hitting anything, especially since you cannot cancel a VATS sequence once you committed to it.

The nightstalkers were also the only enemies where sneak attacking didn't work half of the time. They always seemed to notice me, even though I was at 100% sneak and had the steal suit MK 2. Well it wasn't that bad because getting caps isn't that hard in New Vegas but it would have been better if they'd either introduced armor repair kits that were craftable (just like the weapon repair kits) or offered a few pieces of medium and heavy armor that you can loot to repair your armor yourself.

Basically OWB is designed to act as a money sink for high level players, the implants alone will set you back 40,000 caps, you'll likely spend a lot of money on repairs and I've managed to burn through over a hundred stim packs over the course of the game.

By the way the only thing I disliked about the stealth suit, the ai is using MedX and stimpacks very liberally. I literally had to switch back to an earlier save because the suit managed to burn through 20 doses of MEDX and 50 stimpacks (and getting me addicted to MEDX in the process) just while doing the X18 test area.

Interesting to hear all the trouble you had with nightstalkers - as a Guns/sneak guy, they were really not a problem. Took them out at range with the silenced COS sniper rifle (or my trusty anti-materiel if I didn't care about giving my location away), or if I got stuck fighting them close-up, used the K9000/FIDO to tear them up - there was an absolute ton of the .357 ammo for the K9000 lying around the Big MT. I never had any trouble with sneak attacking failing, either.

I had far, far more trouble with the roboscorpions.

The reason the Stealth Suit eats up all your stimpacks, btw, is it doesn't take your medicine skill into account when it spends them so you get very little healing per stimpack compared to what you could be doing yourself (assuming you have raised your medicine skill, that is.)

Its more annoying than trouble. Nightstalker is running up to me. Drawing Lucky (for example), lining up six shots (at about 95% hit probability), the first two connect, but as soon as he is in melee VATS is useless. Worse, you can't interrupt your shooting sequence, so the Nightstalker tears you up while you sit there uselessly. I ended up shooting them without VATS while slowly walking backwards.

There's no big guns/small guns split in New Vegas, though, so why not just use an automatic? Even something like an SMG works well on them, they have no DT to speak of.