3661

I don’t mind cazadors at all personally. Yes, they are often quite difficult, but if you shoot off their wings, down they go.

Cliff racers were annoying because they were small generic pest thing that constantly jumped around and were a huge pain in the ass to kill. Cazador swarms (they are rarely alone obviously) tend to be over rather quickly one way or another…

I suppose if you had a gun in oblivion you could just shoot a cliff racer when it jumped as well…

3662

My main problems with them:

  1. They’re spastic, and thus hard to snipe from a safe range
  2. They swarm and pick up their buddies on the way to you
  3. The poison sucks ass, because antivenom is rare

I’m ammo-stingy, so maybe I’m just not burning enough on sniper fire but they typically are on the way once I hit one of them. Then it’s a race between knocking them down and having to reload because my companion is dead. Screw 'em.

H.

3663

Yes, i think cazadors are one of the few enemies where you REALLY want to use vats so you can auto target their wings.

3664

The legion explorers that you find out near and around Nelson/Legion Raid Camp are usually carrying 2 doses of antivenom a piece. It’s also weightless so you can hoard it pretty easily.

3665

Damn, I just now started busting up the Legion, I was trying to stay neutral with everyone for too long. Unfortunately I’ve also wiped out Nelson and am having trouble controlling myself on CC, simply because I’m waaaaay too high a level for this area now and can steamroll a town. I’ll go check for that sweet AV!

H.

3666

Absolutely. When I am going after cazadors. I take a long range shot against them from long range, switch to a faster weapon like the Cowboy repeater and immediately go into VATs and shot the wings. I find it damn near impossible to hit them outside of VATs while they are flying.

3667

So, I’m playing this and getting a stutter every 5 or so seconds. Not too bad but annoying. This is post-patch. All mod fixes seem to be pre-patch. Any help?

3668

3669

Man, you sound like a statistician.

3670

I suspect you have formal training in mathematical statistics. Amirite?

3671

My Cazador plan: I use the riot shotgun, as the spread usually encompasses the wings.

3672

Haven’t found that yet, but I’m thinking the laser Thompson might be the tool I need.

H.

3673

About 30-40 hours in, I give up.

Actually, it is impressive to a certain extent, that they kept me this long. Bottom line: it’s a pretty piss poor game. The world building is decent, mind you, but the gameplay is poor all the way to core.

Take your favorite quest in FO:NV. Ok? Now, break it down to it’s gameplay components. What are you left with? It’s probably about 1/3rd fetch missions, about 1/3rd trivial combat and about 1/3rd looking for some item mixed up between pieces of trash. Oh, and if you played on the 360 like me, you should add in 1/3rd loading time and bump down those other values.

Also, you probably hit two bugs during that quest. Go to the FO:NV wiki and go to a random page. I am willing to bet you that it has a “bugs” section. Now I never had a game breaking bug although I did have a lot of crashes and slowdowns. However I spent at least 2-3 hours researching obscure bugs and at least 4-5 hours retracing my steps after those bugs hit. Here’s my favorite bug. There’s a guy, in a zone, wearing a cowboy hat. Ok. There’s a mission where you kill him. If you kill him and return to that zone, you will crash (or at least you would a patch ago). The workaround? Wear a cowboy hat and you won’t crash. That’s wasn’t a bug on some obscure set of PC hardware. That’s was a bug on the 360 version. The bug that stole the most time: putting on a White Glove society outfit permanently bugged my reputation scores. I didn’t realize this until over 2 hours later and my only recourse was to load an old save. As far as I can tell, this bug occurs every time you put on that outfit and I was able to reproduce it consistently.

On top of that, the game pretends to be sandboxy but, let’s face it, a lot of the content is meant to be linear. I managed to completely fuck up the stories for half a dozen or more missions just by doing them out of order or coming into an area from the wrong direction (the Nipton story was completely screwed up by this, for example). People were regularly assuming that I had or had not done something, incorrectly.

The combat goes from being a pretty mediocre shooter to being completely trivial in the first 10 hours. Right now I have This Machine (which isn’t that hard to get … it’s not like I’m using the antimaterial rifle) and there are almost no encounters that I can’t immediately destroy with VATS and a few headshots. I suppose I could force myself to use a 9mm or something, but why? Make the game fun on it’s own. Even Deathclaws were pretty boring. First of all, the Deathclaw mission might as well be the first rat killing mission I did in EQ for all of it’s originality (“howdy hero, there be Deathclaws in that there Quarry, might you kill them for us?”). Secondly, I found that Deathclaws were completely binary: either I killed them before they reached me or they one-shotted. That, fwiw, is not fun gameplay.

While eschewed the speech skill at first, eventually I leveled it up under the premise that it’d give me more interesting options. Similarly I leveled up lockpicking and science. What I found was that these don’t actually create more interesting interactions or gameplay. Honestly, they just take it away. Having a high speech skill just means that you’re regularly going to have mobs walk up to you and say, “hi, I have this interesting quest or I’m going to try to kill you … unless you press this button in which case I’ll give you a loot pinata and remove any challenge you thought this game had”. Time and time again I had that happen – reading the Wiki afterwards I’d realize there was some long quest I’d skipped with [Speech 75]. I started ignoring my speech options just to try and spice up the game but it felt stupid: why have this skill leveled up and not use it? But, honestly, what fun was left in the game was certainly improved by pretending I couldn’t talk to people / open up chests / hack computers. And sure, the lockpick/computer challenges are fun … a few times. After that they’re 100% time sinks and not the least bit interesting.

I just did Vault 11. I’d read that a lot of people thought it was cool. It’s a great example of what the game is all about. The content: 100% trivial and boring. You run through a vault killing completely innocuous enemies that couldn’t really dent you if they tried. You search through piles of trash everywhere occasionally being fed tidbits of the story. Finally, you get the punchline which, while mildly interesting, is gimmicky at best. “Ha ha, they were tricked … get it?” At the very end there is an arbitrary difficulty spike but, tada, VATS’ing through it is still pretty trivial.

I came to realize that playing the game feels like grinding in WoW. Lots of time spent traveling. Lots of time spent grinding on mobs that, face it, aren’t really a challenge. Then, if I bothered to read the text, a few cool story moments, before the next laborious fetch quest. Mind you, the world and the leveling grind kept me going for quite a long time. I don’t really regret playing the game. I just came to realize that I’d get a lot more out of reading a book where I didn’t have to load 4 zones (damn the XBox loading is slow … and it just kept slowing down as I played to the point where I’d restart the game every 1-2h just to speed up loading) then sort through trash for 10m just to get a minute or so worth of interesting plot.

Two caveats. I enjoyed FO:3 but I don’t remember it well enough to argue that it was better (it was a while ago and I was heavily medicated at the time). Secondly, I made the mistake of playing this on my 360 and I probably wouldn’t have tolerated it longer had I played it on a PC where I would have had faster loading and access to mods. My bad. I’d just played Arkham Asylum on my PC and regretted it … but I didn’t think through the fact that FO is a very different game, i.e. exactly the sort where I would want to play on a PC. Oh well, next time.

I should probably just finish the game and ignore the side content but, with a FO game, it seems like the game is the side content. Maybe I’ll do that. But not yet. I’m done grinding and I want to play something where there’s actually a remote chance I’ll be called on to do something skillful or challenging for once.

3674

Play action games instead of RPG games which focus on plot, setting, character interaction, dialogue, exploration and role playing, not on having hard and interesting combat.

3675

I agree. I don’t get the love for Vault 11. It was pretty obvious to me what was going on because the “twist” was telegraphed way too early. The enemies were lame.

A bit off topic, but why do you regret playing Batman AA on PC? I plugged a wired 360 controller into my PC and totally enjoyed the game. Higher resolution, enhanced physics, and the controller experience!

3676

Yeah, all those things are what interest me. Although having better quality and more interesting combat scenarios would also be great. I think for that to happen though they need to seriously improve the companion AI and/or control of how they act so you can actually get them to survive reliably through difficult combat set-pieces.

Although seriously, modding on PC really means that you should buy it on PC. In a year or two there are usually some fantastic high quality mega-mods or compilation packs for the Bethesda games, or you can pick and choose what you want to fix what bugs you.

3677

People playing Fallout games for the combat are the ultimate expression of the saying, “You’re doing it wrong.”

3678

That’s just nonsense. Almost all old school RPGs put a lot of focus on combat and the idea that story and c&c is what defines an RPG is quite new.

3679

You’re more than entitled to your opinion, but I’m also more than entitled to tell you that based on these two comments I am forced to conclude that you have absolutely no taste in games whatsoever.

I’m done grinding and I want to play something where there’s actually a remote chance I’ll be called on to do something skillful or challenging for once.

AI War, Tidalis, Starcraft 2 online, and Heroes of Newerth are the best non-grindy skill-based / challenging games that I’ve played recently. Two of those are from Arcen, who “get it” as a developer (but not necessarily as marketers) and the other two are online games.

If you want skill-based challenges that lack a grind, your choices are rare indie/small-dev games or online player-versus-player.

I can only think of three skill-based, challenging, non-grindy RPGs. Off the top of my head, those are Temple of Elemental Evil, Knights of the Chalice, and Helherron. And even those three can be grindy in parts. And are largely lacking in stories. Demon’s Souls is also a good choice if you never get into the grinding for equipment metagame and just play as if you were trying to finish it ASAP.

Remember, (most) game design is about presenting the player with challenges and AI that are designed to put up a convincing fight and then lose gracefully. That’s true regardless of genre.

3680

This is true, but almost all old school RPGs are also insanely grindy, which is one of the things he said he wanted to avoid.