3541

It seems that Chris is exaggerating a bit here.

On my second play-through, on Hard difficulty, in that end game fight which you can entirely skip with 100 in speech, the enemy was taken down by a … Hunting Shotgun.
The Shotgun Surgeon perk, slug ammo and aiming exclusively for the head.

In the first play through I had energy weapons but also 100 speech, so that fight never took place.

The DPS stat in this game is highly deceptive. The highest DPS weapons are sometimes utterly useless against armored targets, and only moderately effective even with armor piercing ammo. The Minigun, for example, and indeed all kinds of rapid fire but low single bullet/beam damage weapons are very weak against targets with high Damage Threshold. Only 20% of the stated value gets through. Shooting a Super Mutant Master with the Light Machine Gun, for example, is just throwing away bullets.

Meanwhile, lower DPS but higher single hit weapons are very, very powerful. Which is how a Hunting Shotgun, a mid game weapon, can take down the final enemy in the game. It does 78 damage per slug at 100 Guns, and ignores 10 of an enemy’s Damage Threshold (thanks to the Surgeon perk). A few of those to the head - the least well armored part on an enemy typically - and anything goes down fast.

In fact, the combat in New Vegas is so easy one doesn’t need things like a Riot Shotgun, Anti-Material Rifle, Brush Gun or Plasma Caster. The game can be completed with Hunting Rifles/Shotguns or Tribeam Laser Rifles. Mid game and quite prevalent weapons.

This is of course if you’re good at shooting heads, in VATS and outside of it. Otherwise you’ll always be scratching the enemy’s armor if not shooting exclusively for the vulnerable, low armored spots.

And if anything the combat becomes too easy when packing weapons like the Riot Shotgun, Brush Gun or the Plasma Caster. Hell with the Riot Shotgun one doesn’t even need VATS. Just point at the enemy’s head and keep pressing the fire button.

Right now on my 3rd (and likely last) play-through I’m trying out explosives. We’ll see how that goes relative to the (arguably) overpowered guns and energy weapons.

3542

Are you sure the surgeon perk works with a repeater? I don’t think it counts as a shotgun.

3543

It doesn’t.

3544

I didn’t really have a problem killing most bosses and stuff with guns. I used a combo of VATs and non-VATs combat (and I am not very good at FPS in general). The Ratslayer/modded Varmint Rifle are great early sniper weapons. By mid game there are host of good weapons and the sniper rifle is a real killer against creature if you get the drop on them.

Sure I got my butt handed to me when a wandered into DeathClaw Quarry. However shooting from long distance with hand load ammo and even the Alpha Males didn’t last very long.

I noticed that they severely nerfed the sniper rile in the latest patch damage reduced from 62 to 42 and more importantly the critical multiplier dropped from 5x to 1x. So obviously we weren’t the only folks finding the Sniper Rifle to be a fine combat weapon.

I was also pleased to see that upgraded laser weapons. In my third play through, I was planning on going with a dump unarmed guy with lockpick and it looks like if I start unarmed I can pump points into energy weapons and still be viable at the end.

3545

If Chris Nahr, of all people, has a hard time with the game maybe the mechanics aren’t that easy to understand.

3546

Well, I didn’t know the mechanics at all. What I knew of Fallout 3 was long forgotten. All it took was a couple google searches to find the fallout Wiki - which explained a lot. And a guide to melee/unarmed builds, from which I learned how Damage Threshold functions in this iteration of Fallout, and why it makes high single hit weapons so much more powerful in New Vegas.

It’s really not complicated at all. Especially compared to many other RPGs. Figuring out D&D game mechanics was several orders of magnitude harder for me, for example.

And I don’t think it’s that Chris couldn’t figure out the game mechanics. Rather he was just misled by the DPS stat. From a cursory examination anyone would think that DPS is king. Its unfortunate that the game doesn’t explain how weapons interact with armor/creature damage threshold, and you need to go to the internet to find out.

3547

In my mind, any time you have to go outside the game to learn important concepts or mechanics, because the game doesn’t do a good enough job of explaining things, then the game has failed.

3548

The game does explain Damage Threshold early on. It does explain how the various ammo types interact with it.

The game has not failed to explain these mechanics. If anything the game has failed at is explaining that the player should take the DPS stat with a large grain of salt. But at which point are we asking it to hold our hand?

I personally didn’t make the connection that high DSP/low damage weapons are not so useful while lower DPS/high damage weapons are more useful. Who knows how many people did make that connection upon seeing their first machine gun, and comparing it to their first shotgun.
It took an outside guide for that for me. I probably would have figured it out soon enough on my own, but I read the guide before even getting to level 5.

3549

And I don’t think it’s that Chris couldn’t figure out the game mechanics. Rather he was just misled by the DPS stat. From a cursory examination anyone would think that DPS is king. Its unfortunate that the game doesn’t explain how weapons interact with armor/creature damage threshold, and you need to go to the internet to find out.

Yeah, as Telefrog says, if you have to look at a godforsaken wiki, the designers have failed. If the in-game damage guidance is wrong, the designers have failed. Whee!

3550

The game does explain the mechanics, even visually providing you with feedback with the broken shield. The manual, on page 12, lays out the DAM-DT mechanic in clear language and even explains the shield system nicely. The DPS numbers are fictional for many of the guns, but

A) The original complaint was that Chris didn’t have access to super-powerful weapons like the Minigun, instead getting stuck with the Plasma Caster. The Plasma Caster is a high damage, low ROF gun while the minigun is a low damage high ROF gun. If he had tried with the Minigun and failed this would make more sense.

B) I had no idea how the DT system actually worked mechanically until I looked it up afterwards(I believe the 20% minimum damage is undocumented), but learned of the sniper rifle’s effectiveness through, you know, trying to shoot dudes.

I think Chris just built a non-combat character and appears to be complaining that after he built that non-combat character he was forced to use the non-combat options. It’s a little odd that you literally need to max out speech to get through the final speech check, but OTOH at level 29 you should have two or three maxed out skills.

3551

I should have pressed “submit reply” two minutes later. :(

3552

The game doesn’t fail at explaining things, it just completely misleads you!

Yeah, that sounds like a win.

3553

I think I may have an idea why Chris had such trouble with the Plasma Caster, one of the highest single damage weapons in the game. It’s a plasma weapon, and these have a terribly slow projectile. It’s hard to hit anything out of VATS at any range, and you get like two shots in VATS with this thing.

Other guns/lasers are really easy to use outside VATS, and you need to kill that final enemy pretty quickly, can’t wait for action points to recover. This is not very compatible with plasma weapons. In my original play-through I dropped plasma weapons pretty fast and concentrated on Tribeam lasers and then the Gauss Rifle.

And hey, if you do the Van Graffs quest line, you’re even told that lasers are quick and accurate, while plasma is slow and hard to hit with, but packs a punch. The game tries to help the player out throughout.

How does it mislead you? DPS is one of a myriad of weapon stats. It us players who are conditioned by other games to see DPS as king.

It seems to me that, for some people, whatever Fallout New Vegas does, it fails. Got it.

3554

Actually, I went back and tried a few times against the end bosses. The Legate was, as I recalled, a chump, but that motherfucking General, or more precisely his entourage, was deadly. Three seconds flat sounds about right. I accidentally won on my second or third try with a sniper rifle by activating a stealth boy when I meant to use a stim, which dropped all the aggro so I got to look on in bemusement as my minions slew all who stood before me mwahaha and stuff.

I’m not really sure how you didn’t get a minigun, unless you didn’t do Repconn or black mountain or Vault 34 (oh my god that vault was frustrating).

3555

With regard to the Varmint rifle its important to point out that a lot of its use, imo at least, early on is that you get access to both the silencer and the night scope quite quickly through the first vendor which makes combat where you get the drop much easier. That first sneak attack critical was often vital for me when there was a group of enemies and you often got a few more if you hadnt aggressed the group within their detection range.

3556

Which is it then? A trick to screw with players that think DPS is king, or a mistake? Is it too much to ask for a stat that clearly tells me which weapon is better against an armored foe?

Nice assumption. Here’s a news flash for you. I like FNV. It’s one of the only PC games I bought in 2010 that wasn’t less than $20 in a Steam sale. I just think there’s room for improvement. Obviously, there’s some kind of issue if mistaking DPS for actual effectiveness is common enough that people need to consult a wiki to learn otherwise.

3557

The game thoughtfully provides just such a statistic, base damage. Nice attempt at a gotcha, I guess somebody watched A Few Good Men recently.

Obviously, there’s some kind of issue if mistaking DPS for actual effectiveness is common enough that people need to consult a wiki to learn otherwise.

Yeah, except that didn’t happen.

That’s sort of the bizarro world narrative you and Jason cooked up to explain Chris Nahr’s trouble where he foolishly used the high DPS weapon and was unable to defeat the boss where a lower DPS weapon would’ve made it easy and us Wiki readers(EVERY OTHER POSTER, apparently) knew all the tricks.

Instead Chris was complaining that he never found the 42 damage/67 DPS sniper rifle and was forced to use, instead, the 65 damage/195 DPS Plasma Caster. Then we went off into this explanation of how DT works.

3558

Oddly enough many game designers make the Great DPS Mistake too.

For example, in Anarchy Online, enemies had a lot of armor. The devs created a zillion weapon types for each class, but most had high DPS and low damage. Of course, if you do 100 shots a second with 10 damage each but the foe has 10 damage reduction per shot, you do nothing to the foe despite the fact that you’re doing 1000 DPS. You’d much prefer a gun that shoots once a second for 100 points of damage. With this silly error, which for some reason they refused to acknowledge or adjust during the year or so I played, the AO devs managed to reduce 99% of their weapons for each class to irrelevancy.

A similar mistake was made in Earth & Beyond. The supposed warrior race had high-DPS high-rate of fire guns, but they were worthless compared to the lower-DPS but high-damage missiles used by the trader race. E&B also got it wrong by giving the missiles much longer range to boot…

Anyhow, this seems to be a commonplace designer error. I think it’s not an error at all in NV, though, since there are ways to use the high DPS weapons effectively, and since you can easily carry both types.

3559

Seriously, is this your first roleplaying game? Heck, even a lot of RTS’s use the damage threshold (reduction) concept.

Fallout 1 and 2 had armor that worked differently against each TYPE of weapon damage. None of this pansy single armor value against all weapons stuff.

3560

I can’t even play Fallout New Vegas and I know how the DT stat works. Not only is it documented, but the interface does a great job of showing it in action.

Also, as much respect as I have for Chris Nahr, I wouldn’t put too much stock in what he was or wasn’t able to figure out. He had done some pretty finicky modding work on Civ IV, yet he didn’t even know that settlers cost food! I mainly remember that because it sounded like something I’d do. :)

  -Tom