Razgon
4241
Are you playing on hard? Because on normal, which I play, the toxic cloud isn’t that bad.
Also, I loved the characters, and the feeling of once more being vulnarble and being somewhere that was deadly, was fun to me!
You can still explore, and if you scavenge enough, you can make a ton of food, or buy it with the casino chips.
Uh… i wouldn’t call lazy design to technical limitations. The elevators are inaccesible because the same reason you have locked doors and blocked stuff in every game: because games are not as big as real life, they have to have limits. A real life casino/hotel would have hundreds of rooms, of course the game doesn’t have that.
There is lots of loadings because limits on ram (more in consoles, of course) and the technology used in the engine is old.
Just out of curiosity, is it the path of least resistance for guys with that perk, or is it the only path?
I’m not clear on the trick. I mean yeah, I get that they fall down if you blow a limb off, but so far that’s not proving easy even for a level 32 character with near-100 weapon skills across the board. Upthread someone said something about using all those throwing spears you loot. Didn’t help. They’re slow, nearly impossible to use outside of VATS due to the throwing delay, and don’t particularly take limbs off despite the description.
So far the only easy kill I’ve gotten was when I blew one up with a grenade. My grenade supply, naturally, is very limited.
I’m not at all clear on how they want you to play. As I said, the “scavenge for stuff” part of the expansion conflicts rather violently with “take damage every moment you are not inside a sealed building.”
Very Hard / Hardcore. The rest of the game isn’t all that challenging below that difficulty. I agree the toxic cloud doesn’t do that much damage, but over time it does add up. I can live with it, but it removes any margin for making mistakes like stepping in bear traps.
Ordinarily, that perk is largely a convenience. Up until now, bear traps, mines, trip wires and the like have been concealed, but visible if you’re paying attention. I keep running into areas where the traps are invisible if you aren’t using Ghost Sight, and very tough to spot even then. So yeah, I can see how taking that perk makes sense, though not something I can consider until level 34.
A brief comment about the DLC: I don’t like that they seem to be set apart from the main game world. What I mean by this is that the areas aren’t integrated into the natural progression of the NV plot like everything else has been (so far, at level 22). When I attempted to do Dead Money at level 16 or 17, it told me I should come back at level 20+. When I attempted to do Honest Hearts, it told me I had to drop my companions and have less than 75 carry weight. I haven’t attempted OWB, yet, since it’s the latest DLC and I figured it’s geared towards a higher level anyway.
I feel like the DLC are separate adventure mods that allow you to use your current character, but aren’t really part of the world. They are isolated sections that don’t allow the same sort of free-to-come-and-go gameplay as the rest of the map does. It’s a failing, I think, that they couldn’t blend DLC with the current state of the world. Other parts of the world that may not be ready for me have warnings that come from NPCs, signposts, or challenges that are progressively difficult to keep me from going forward. It feels natural and immersive.
Is it that it’s just easier to isolate the DLC and balance and play-test it on its own rather than worry about the integration? It may be a minor thing to some, but I find it a big enough annoyance that it’s prevented me from starting any of them so far. Might head back to Dead Money and see how it manages me now that I’m level 22; I wonder if I can keep my companions and come and go as I please.
Surprise, they are exactly that.
Well, Dead Money is that challenging. Just lower the difficulty to Hard for Dead Money.
Razgon
4248
I think its so that they can tell a new story, and experiment with how to tell a story, and new gameplay mechanics.
Actually, the world map aside, they do fit in with a lot of lore and callbacks to the big world outside - They are part of the same world, but enough cut-off so that its a separate adventure module for the game.
Considering the design of the rest of the world, then yeah, it’s a pretty big surprise. I didn’t expect that, with an open map as big as it is, that they’d have to isolate sections like this. Break down one of the artificial barriers on the edge of the map and expand it, open up some blocked doorways into buildings, have a landslide uncover a cave in a mountain side, but keep it all part of the game world I’m in.
No matter; I’m disappointed is all and annoyed about the need to find a way to drop my carrying weight to get into Honest Hearts. Once I do, I’ll probably be fine. I like carrying around a tonne of stuff.
Razgon
4250
There’s a chest right by the entrance to the Honest Hearts start, where you can dump your stuff
Yeah, I don’t get some people’s love for Dead Money, for all the reasons you mention. It gets a bit better once you get inside the casino, but I totally avoided that expansion when I played through the game a second time (as the though of doing that on Hardcore was…ugh.)
What!?
Well, thanks for the info. Didn’t even notice, since all I did was talk to the one NPC, got the message to come back later when conditions are met and I left.
I saw a locker when I went to start Dead Money. Was that implying that I need to store stuff there, too?
Razgon
4253
Fun, tense, back to square one in terms of the game suddenly being difficult again, and the characters are awesome! Play that part on “Normal” and enjoy the ride, I say
Razgon
4254
My pleasure - and about Dead Money - no, just investigate a bit, and all will be made clear :-)
Yeah, repeating the same stuff over and over doesn’t make it true. I get you liked it, but I (and others) didn’t.
Razgon
4256
ugh my bad, I actually thought that was on another forum - Sorry!
That Khan quest IS bugged. If you don’t do things in a very specific order, you are unable to complete the quest, even if you have the right items to do so. Read the wiki, it explains how it can go bad.
Sarkus
4258
If it is then why haven’t they fixed it in all these patches? Now granted, there is an online strategy guide I came across that says that talking the guy into making a fool of himself in front of Papa is supposed to allow you to ask Papa to break the alliance. That would make more sense, in that you would then have two different paths to peacefully resolve the situation, one for high speech characters and one for everyone else. But the actual game doesn’t work that way and nobody seems to have bothered to fix it if it was the intention of the designers to have it work that way. I suppose the only real way to know for sure would be to look at the official strategy guide and see what it says about that quest.
It was the first DLC I did, and I can say it’s very playable at lower levels. I would invest a bit in energy weapons before I went, but it’s not essential.
I did Dead Money at quite high level, and enjoyed it thoroughly.
Playing through FNV again it annoys the shit out of me that House wants me to kill the entire Brotherhood. Not because I am against BoS genocide, just that it’s a pain in the ass.
Old World Blues turned out to be very good, very good indeed. I was very glad, though, that I brought in a gauss rifle (courtesy the BoS hit team at the Follower’s Outpost). Without it, OWB may have been so much of a slog that I might have been forced to turn the difficulty down to to normal from hard, which I don’t want to do.
First run through Dead Money (since I came out of OWB at L24), seems all right, design definitely focuses on griefing players who are used to standard sneak & snipe play.
