Vegas baby! Vegas

[Tebonas]

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.

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[Tebonas]

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.

[Rendakor]

I didn't know that; must have missed that side quest or dialog option.

[Arrrgh]

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.

No repair? That repair an item with any similar item perk is quite handy.

[Ingmar]

Repair is pretty darn useful, yes.

Loving Old World Blues so far, easily my favorite of the 3 DLCs.

[kildorn]

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.

[Arrrgh]

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...

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[kildorn]

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.

[Tebonas]

And incidently the true genius of the DLC is that it is explained so well in game.

[kildorn]

It's campy B movie scifi. Perfect Fallout fodder, and hilarious to boot. My only real complaint thus far is:

[Lakov_Sanite]

[Tarami]

From the best RPG ever!

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[Jeff Kelly]

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

[Tebonas]

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).

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[Tebonas]

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!

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[Ingmar]

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.)

[Tebonas]

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.

[Ingmar]

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.

[Jeff Kelly]

My personal problem with the Fallout shooting system is that I find it very hard to aim if I'm not using VATS. The first shot is usually not the problem but once the enemies are on the move I usually miss, especially when you need to run and gun (e.g a pack of nightstalkers charges you).

VATS is useless when the opponents are in melee range. The AI aims without considering the barrel length of the gun so it usually aims right "through" your enemy rendering a whole salvo of bullets useless. It also doesn't track the movement very well so you tend to miss (because the AI fucks up the aim) even though VATS claims that you have a 95% chance to hit. So TL;DR you would hit if the computer wouldn't fuck up aiming in VATS.

I've also lost count on how many times I had a clear line of sight in VATS view only to fire a whole salvo of bullets into a wall or the ground because the perspective in VATS view is slightly shifted from the first person view perspective (where the VATS actions are actually performed).

Without the help of VATS though I waste even more ammo because the opponents move so fast that my tracking cannot keep up with their movement.

An additional problem was my level. I started OWB at Level 38 and since NPCs scale with your level a whole clip of my Gobi Campaign Scout rifle or the LAER wasn't enough to kill one nightstalker (or roboscorpion) even though I was aiming for the head mostly. So fighting nightstalkers wasn't really difficult but very, very annoying. You went into sneak mode and lined up a shot. If you were lucky you'd kill one nightstalker by the time your clip ran out. By the time you had reloaded the rest of the pack had already closed into melee range and you'd run and gun until they were either dead or your AP pool had filled up enough to use VATS again (or they managad to eat you).

The ghost people in dead money at Level 43 eat a whole clip of my police gun or automatic rifle and if I'm unlucky they still have enough health left for dog/god to kill them instead.

[Lantyssa]

Don't queue up so many shots in VATS.  Let it finish, move if necessary, then go back in and do one or two more.

[Merusk]

Is this a problem new to Vegas?  I didn't have any such problems in FO3 itself. .. then again I don't think most of the super mutants ever got into melee range with me, either.  Those that did were sprayed manually while I backed-off.  I used VATS for headshots at range or if I wanted to cripple something, nothing more.

[Ingmar]

I started OWB at Level 38 and since NPCs scale with your level a whole clip of my Gobi Campaign Scout rifle or the LAER wasn't enough to kill one nightstalker (or roboscorpion) even though I was aiming for the head mostly.

I started at the exact same level and had no problems with the gobi rifle on nightstalkers (which I used until I replaced it with the COS sniper rifle you can find in OWB.) Shots from stealth were almost always one shot, one kill, manually aimed at the head. Are you using hand load ammo? Hollow point? You should really be carrying some kind of burst firing auto weapon for close work, or even just something like This Machine, trying to VATS with a sniper weapon on things that know you're there and are running at you is not a good plan. I'm with you on the roboscorpions though, even using AP ammo they take an annoying amount of shots to die. A silenced sniper rifle (either the regular one with a mod or the COS) helps a lot with that as you can engage them from a range where they'll have trouble finding you in the outdoor fights at least.

Are you playing on the 360? I wonder if that explains the difference (thumbstick aiming or a console-specific bug?) we're seeing or if there's something about your list of perks that is making your sneak attacks suck comparitively.

On the ghost people, yes, they tried to and succeeded in coming up with the perfect storm of annoying gameplay mechanics in Dead Money - taking your gear away, hyper resilient enemies, irritating auto-kill traps, etc. I am still trying to decide if I am going to give that one another go now that I at least have my energy weapons skill raised. Probably not. 

[CmdrSlack]

The ghost people weren't that bad once I realized that you can kill them quite easily....

[Lakov_Sanite]

Yeah, I didn't find dead money hard at ALL. Granted I felt OWB was much better written, I felt it had the most annoying combat...it wasn't bad but dear god you just ate through ammo trying to kill things.

[kildorn]

The ghost people weren't that bad once I realized that you can kill them quite easily....

edit: my annoyance with Dead Money was that it was a lot of backtracking, and a rather stupid amount of traps. The ghost people were only annoying in that you usually had a shitty weapon to deal with them.

[Jeff Kelly]

my annoyance with Dead Money was that it was a lot of backtracking, and a rather stupid amount of traps. The ghost people were only annoying in that you usually had a shitty weapon to deal with them.

This. It is made clear very early what you have to do to keep the gost people from getting up again (all of your NPC companions have dialogue options to tell you that). It is just that basically all the weapons you have at your disposal are crappy choices to put them down ion the first place.

[Jeff Kelly]

I started at the exact same level and had no problems with the gobi rifle on nightstalkers (which I used until I replaced it with the COS sniper rifle you can find in OWB.) Shots from stealth were almost always one shot, one kill, manually aimed at the head.

Which is only the first kill out of a pack of usually 3 to 5 nightstalkers. Sneak attack criticals are still very effective I never disputed that.

Are you using hand load ammo? Hollow point?

Hollow Point for everything that doesn't have a DT to speak of, AP for everything that has, normal ammo for things where it simply doesn't matter either way. I don't hand-load ammo because I both lack the perk and the recipes so far. You don't get that much HP or AP ammo in the first place though.

You should really be carrying some kind of burst firing auto weapon for close work, or even just something like This Machine, trying to VATS with a sniper weapon on things that know you're there and are running at you is not a good plan.

My usual setup is:

Gobi Campaign sniper rifle for sneak or long range kills
This Machine or All-American as burst fire options (All-American is slightly better than This machine, also more opportunities to obtain 5.56 HP and AP ammo than .308)
a side-arm for close combat situations (usually the Ranger Sequoia)

The way VATS is designed, though, you manage to miss with all of them in close-combat situations where for example nightstalkers are already up-close and personal and gnawing on your ass. The way your character lines up the shots makes him/her to point the gun - any gun - right through your opponent so you will always miss even though VATS still claims you have a 95% chance to hit. FO 3 had exactly the same flaw by the way.

Aiming without VATS is a pain in the ass on consoles though if your targets move. On the PC I never bothered to use VATS because I could aim accurately enough without it.

Either way you need a lot of bullets to kill a single enemy at my level, usually a whole clip. For some of the nightstalkers I needed a whole clip of HP ammo to put one of them down, if I didn't manage to kill them from stealth. Which hurts if you only have about 200 shots of HP or AP ammo.

I'm with you on the roboscorpions though, even using AP ammo they take an annoying amount of shots to die. A silenced sniper rifle (either the regular one with a mod or the COS) helps a lot with that as you can engage them from a range where they'll have trouble finding you in the outdoor fights at least.

My problem in OWB usually was that I lacked the opportunity to engage the enemies from a stealth position in the first place. The roboscorpions usually appear after certain quests are finished and they usually appear where they manage to spot you right from the beginning.

The rest seems to have a near super natural capability for spotting me even though they didn't even apear on my HUD (PER 7). I also didn't want to sneak the whole way through OWB just to avoid being ambushed by enemies. Simply because my troubles were just minor or major annoyances and not really troublesome and didn't make it much more difficult (just more annoying)

Are you playing on the 360? I wonder if that explains the difference (thumbstick aiming or a console-specific bug?) we're seeing or if there's something about your list of perks that is making your sneak attacks suck comparitively.

360 or PS3 doesn't matter. Aiming in a twitchy combat situations with thumbstick controllers is awkward, to put it politely.

On the ghost people, yes, they tried to and succeeded in coming up with the perfect storm of annoying gameplay mechanics in Dead Money - taking your gear away, hyper resilient enemies, irritating auto-kill traps, etc. I am still trying to decide if I am going to give that one another go now that I at least have my energy weapons skill raised. Probably not. 

My reaction is different. The thing I hated most about OWB was the ridiculous amount of very resilient enemies because it didn't make the game any harder just vastly more annoying. I always knew I'd be able to kill them eventually and I had the funds to equip myself with enough ammo and firepower to conquer a medium sized country anyway. All it did was to delay the game and to annoy the fuck out of me. The lack of companions also meant that it took you even longer to kill them without it at any point being a real challenge.

It is the same with Dead Money, the only difference being that they take away everything you carry with you, so you still have hyper-resilient hard to kill enemies but you now also lack the means to kill them quickly. You'll still kill them eventually but they are even more of an annoyance. I mean God/Dog manages to kill ghost people faster in melee combat than I can even though I use an automatic rifle.

The description of Dead Money gives the impression that it is more focused on skills, puzzles and elaborate traps than combat which initially made me glad. After playing the main game and OWB I was seriously fed up with killing things because it has stopped being a challenge long ago and has simply become just an annoyance and distraction.

Yet the traps are largely the same traps you already encountered in the main game and you still have to kill a lot of enemies while back-tracking a lot through the same levels.

[Khaldun]

Dead Money did eventually get annoying, I agree, but I appreciated the shaking up the status quo.

I've done all the DLC on my melee character who uses Oh Baby for meat enemies and now the improved Protonic Axe for robots, so I didn't really notice the 'tough-to-kill' stuff in OWB. Dead Money was much more difficult in that respect because it's lead pipe and no armor for a good portion of the early going and the ghost guys were difficult to kill quickly.

[Ingmar]

Jeff: not going to SirBruce you in response but it sounds like against packs you would be better off with a suppressed regular sniper rifle (or head over to Little Yangtze and get the COS sniper rifle, I cannot stress how much I love that gun) instead of the Gobi - the sliencer means that after you snipe the first one down, you'll only get put into a "Caution" state and you can reposition and get more shots. The Gobi is a nice overall gun but better for taking out single targets really because it gives your position away, I used it a bunch anyway but I am playing on a PC so I have a lot less trouble aiming on moving targets than it sounds like you having are on the console.

I haven't tried it but I bet a shotgun with that shotgun knockdown/knockback perk would be ideal for when they get close.

[Jeff Kelly]

Thanks for your suggestions. My initial post was more a sharing of my personal experience with the add-ons and I didn't really expect any suggestions so thank you. I didn't bother to look into it too much because the situation I'm in is just more annoying but not bad enough to actually put effort into fixing it :D .

It's just that not using VATS is difficult on consoles but using it is a double edged thing because VATS in FO 3 and FO:NV is still buggy and broken in some respects. Also raising the level cap to 50 wasn't that great an ida in my opinion.

FO 3 had the issue that you outgrew the enemies as you got higher in level. At level 30, opponents ceased to be a challenge because you dealt a huge amount of damage. At Level 45 though you've already hit your personal damage cap (since your weapons don't scale and you've long ago found the best ones there are anyway) but enemies still scale with your level. So you need more and more shots to kill a single one of them, so the game is actually getting harder again after getting easier at around level 30.

I've now reached the level cap and in dead money I need 8- 10 shots of my police pistol (with ,357 ammo) to cripple a limb of one of them just because I don't deal enough damage. That means I have to spend more than my entire action point pool to kill a single enemy. Which is ridiculous.