Vegas baby! Vegas

[Khaldun]

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.

[Surlyboi]

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.

[Slyfeind]

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.

[Tebonas]

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.

[Slyfeind]

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? 

[Tebonas]

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.

[Rishathra]

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.

[Slyfeind]

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.

[jakonovski]

It's a real shame that

[rattran]

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.

[Koyasha]

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.

[Rendakor]

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.

[Ingmar]

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

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.

[rattran]

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.

[LK]

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!

[MuffinMan]

Is constitution a hidden stat? 

[LK]

Egh. Endurance ><

[Threash]

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.

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

[rattran]

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

[Rishathra]

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

[Azazel]

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.

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

[schild]

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.

[rattran]

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

[shiznitz]

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

[ghost]

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. 

[Threash]

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

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.

[shiznitz]

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.

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[fatboy]

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.

[Shrike]

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.

[apocrypha]

.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.

[Tarami]

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

[rattran]

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.

[Shrike]

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

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.

[Jeff Kelly]

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: