Vegas baby! Vegas

[Kitsune]

I'd recommend playing them in the order Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, Dead Money.  Honest Hearts is the shortest and easiest of the three, which is why I'd put it first, and yeah, all of the MT references in Dead Money would have made better sense had I seen Old World Blues first.

[Jeff Kelly]

So I've now finished my second NV playthrough.

Did all side missions, did all achievements except two (play whole game on hardcore and heal 10.000 points of damage with food), played through all available DLC and played all four endings.

Total time played was somewhere around 120 hours.

The endings drove the point of OWB home again. All of the powers struggeling for dominance over New Vegas are still obessed about the old world. NCR wants to ressurect the old world glory of the US style republic, House wants to ressurect the old world glory of vegas and business and the Caesar went even further back to look for inspiration on how to bring civilization back to the wastes. The brotherhood of steel is obsessed about old world technology and the corrupting influance it has.

They are obsessed about civilization - old world civilization - or their understanding of what that meant. They are literally celebrating the ashes.

The theme - if there is a theme for New vegas - is that if you spend too much time looking backwards and obsessing about the past, you'll get steamrolled by the future. New Vegas and the powers that be all have old world blues.

Even the other courier that you'll meet in lonesome road has it. From the little he left behind you can gather that he is obsessed about the real united states of america not the distorted picture the NCR or the legion has but still.

I liked New Vegas a lot more than Fallout 3 and I'm looking forward to lonesome road. It may be buggy but it is exceptionally well written and constructed. Each faction as a believable if at times misguided agenda and there are no good or bad people not even Caesars legion is evil in the pulp fiction sense of the word.

[jakonovski]

For my second playthrough, I found a fix for the mouse acceleration. It's so much better! I have a feeling that when it's all said and done I'll have clocked over 150 hours on NV.

[Malakili]

For my second playthrough, I found a fix for the mouse acceleration. It's so much better! I have a feeling that when it's all said and done I'll have clocked over 150 hours on NV.

I couldn't even make it past the menu screen without searching the internet frantically for a fix for that :).  Thankfully, the fix is quick and easy, it would've been unplayable for me if I couldn't have turned it off.  I can't believe that developers are leaving this on by default, let alone not giving an easy way in the UI to turn it off.  I know its a game onconsoles, and I know acceleration is standard for analog sticks, but could it be THAT much a pain to add one menu option?

[Fabricated]

Finished Honest Hearts and now I'm getting into Old World Blues.

Honest Hearts - Short, pretty, kinda boring. I guess it's meant for lower level characters but is supposed to scale? I was exploding everyone in like 1-2 shots from my big hitters and kinda breezed through it. Hard to care about any of the characters, but Joshua Graham is pretty cool and so is Follows-Chalk. Another ending where it tries to make you feel like an asshole for picking the obviously correct choice but whatever. With the Thompson, The named M1911, the silenced/modded M1911, BAR, and This Machine I now have my "WWII asskicker" weapon set completed. Not much to say about this DLC other than I would have felt a bit cheated if I paid anything over $5 for it.

Old World Blues - Takes a hard,  hard left turn from the Grimdark Dead Money and nature-stroll-with-ethical-questions Honest Hearts. I laughed more in the first 20 minutes of OWB than I did in all of NV, DM, or HH.

Also, Dr. Venture's voice actor is one of the think tank scientists. 

[Zetor]

Speaking of voice actors, I was half-expecting Dr. Borous to start hamming about "Rings of Rexxor" and "Suns of Shakar".

(bonus points for RANDOM capitalized WORDS and "Science!")

[CmdrSlack]

Finished Dead Money, man the end was annoying and tedious. Honest Hearts left me wanting more. I am now well into OWB, and am wishing I hadn't let the stealth suit suck up all of my stims. The Lobotimites hit hard as hell. I think I will manage to limp out, but I feel strangely compelled to finish the sink quests. Also, I must find some mugs. Poor robot.

[jakonovski]

Approaching level 15 and access to DLC. A STR9 CHA9 INT1 build is pretty fun, although there could be more instances of stupid talk missions. So far the only consistent one has been the solar tower thing. I maxed Bartering ASAP and now I'm drowning in caps and hi tech gear, even though I have no other good skills apart from Survival.

[KallDrexx]

I don't see a point for the barter skill, at least in the original FO3.  Maybe it's because I have max repair skill, but I am swimming in caps with all the vendors I have found so far completely at 0 caps of inventory.  I have 83 stimpacks, 20 something med-xs, shit ton of radaway, and a whole lot of high value gear to sell that I can't find a vendor with enough caps for me to drain.

[jakonovski]

I'm sitting on 10k caps at level 12, after spending 6k on reinforced mk.II Combat Armor, so the skill is working pretty well in New Vegas. Also it's kind of fun solving problems by buying people out.

[Jeff Kelly]

The amount of caps on vendors scales with level in NV and FO3. It starts at a few hundred and ends at 8,000 (12,000 for the guy at McCarran Airport) in NV and I think 2,000 or 4,000 in FO3. Vendor's inventory resets every 72 hours (if they aren't buggy).

If you have a decent repair skill and the jury rigging perk (a perk I strongly encourage you to take)  you'll bleed the vendors dry even if your barter skill sucks.

I regularly run out of bartering stuff. I already have all of the caps, stimpacks, doctors bags and ammo the vendor has and I've still some inventory I could sell.

I now have 50,000 caps, own over 400 stimpacks, over a hundred super stimpacks more doctor's bags I could even use and enough ammo to outfit a medium size army. After dead money you also regularly (every 72 hours) get complementary vouchers that are good for 1,000 Sierra Madre chips. This is basically a license to get all the .308 and .357 ammo and all the stimpacks, other drugs and weapon repair kits you'd ever need.

I've now simply stopped looting enemy corpses except for stuff I use to repair my own weapons and armor with.

FO3 is basically the same except for a curious absence of bobby pins on the east coast. In NV I now have 200 bobby pins, I finished FO3 with 4 though.

[Khaldun]

In the earlier game, before you get all the stuff you'll need and the repair/rigging perks, I find myself almost unable to resist paying one of the repairing NPCs to repair all my most important gear and then killing them to get back the caps. Gotta be careful not to kill them all, though, until you can repair everything you need yourself.

[KallDrexx]

Oh I didn't know about the 72 hour reset.   That's actually good to know.

[Lakov_Sanite]

At the end of dead money I just junked nearly all my gear and walked out of the vault naked carrying 5-6 gold bricks. Exchange those on the ghost vendors for a ridiculous amount worth of old world cash(which has no weight) and you'll never want for loot again. Anytime you need to buy anything you just pay in....cash!

[Sky]

At the end of dead money I just ... walked out of the vault naked carrying 5-6 gold bricks.

Best Fallout story ever. Should be the box art for Fallout 4.

[Jeff Kelly]

It was the only time during several replays where I saw the "you're overencumbered and cannot run" message and was really pissed off.

[Fabricated]

I wonder...does the strength increase from say buffout allow you to carry more gold out of the Sierra Madre? Just hulk up right when you're good to start the final event, dump all your equipment, and carry as much gold as you can. The strong back perk helps too.

[Ingmar]

Probably going to want the 'fast travel while encumbered' perk too.

[Fabricated]

I don't think you can even escape at the end if you're encumbered. You don't get a very long time to get out.

[Rendakor]

Buffout would work if your strength wasn't already maxed out, but no chem (or other effect, for that matter) can put you above 10 in any SPECIAL.

[Jeff Kelly]

The perk only allows you to fat travel between locations. If you have to walk you're still just as slow as before.

You have a 60 second time limit to escape the Sierra Madre Vault and you won't make it encumbered.

There is a way to escape with all 35 of the gold bars though. A fact I only realized after I had already finished the DLC.

[Ingmar]

I was presuming you'd need to fast travel at some point once you got out with them.

[taolurker]

 

[cironian]

 

Wow. That's some quality work there. The humor feels more like something from Firefly than Fallout style, but who cares.

[tgr]

The only things that said "fallout" to me in that were the numbers on the back of his head, and the final shooting. Everything else was firefly.

And I don't care, because that was still pretty awesome.

[caladein]

Lonesome Road is now out, $10 at the usual places.  Probably going to pick it up later in the week.

[Ingmar]

So far I'm liking it. The new weapons are mostly pretty amusing.

[Fabricated]

Just finished it. Rather linear and suffers from the same problems that the rest of the game suffers from at high levels; the only things that can harm you are animal-type monsters. The deathclaws in Lonesome Road are fucking ridiculous and were one-shotting me with like 45+ damage resistance at 455ish HP.

The plot? ...eh.

[Ingmar]

I cannot hit shit with the Red Glare, I am not sure what my problem is.

[Lantyssa]

Too much glare?

[Tebonas]

So, now we have a walking (or rather flying) Repair Station/Workbench/Reloading Bench 10 minutes in.

I'm curious what levels of overpoweredness this final expansion catapults us to.

[ghost]

Who cares.  I just want to run around and kill shit.   

[Tebonas]

And you can do that better and better with each expansion.

I'm not complaining here, the game has been finished a long time ago. Everything else is just fooling around and killing with more and more outlandish methods! 

[Lantyssa]

I got a gecko pet.  I don't need any other companions.

[Furiously]

Did he save you a ton on insurance?