Ah, yeah. Sorry. My mistake.
flyinj
4302
Kind of rude that the one thing most people probably want is the one thing that they only give 25% off on.
Oghier
4303
Should I finish FO3 before New Vegas?
I stalled about halfway through the main campaign in the former, and the Steam sale just tempted me enough to finally buy the latter. Do the plots connect? Are there heaps of inside jokes and callbacks I will miss if I hop right into Vegas?
Dead Money is really painful. It’s not the change in tone or the scrounging. The tone is interesting and the scrounging brings back the best parts of the early levels. It’s that Dead Money changes combat in some really unpleasant ways, and the “hunt the radio” puzzles force you to die and reload over and over again. I paid $2.50 for it (75% off!), and it was worth that.
Dead Money is definitely 30+. You’ll find quite a few Very Hard (skill 100) locks and terminals, enough that you can’t really get by just with the magazines you find. Of course, you can argue that you don’t have to scrounge that stuff to survive, but it does make life tougher.
Honest Hearts is probably 15-20. I played it at 28, and even with enemy scaling, it was much too easy. It’s fun but short and mostly somewhat forgettable, though some of the diaries you find make interesting reading.
One interesting side effect of Honest Hearts is that it can make playing an energy weapons character more feasible at the start of the game, because it adds the “convert fission battery to small energy cell” recipe to the workbench.
I did exactly that. Having a story-essential NPC show up in the middle of combat, right behind a hostile that looks just like him is just poor scenario design.
I didn’t really notice any connections. If you’re familiar with the overall Fallout story and the motivations of the various factions (Brotherhood of Steel, Enclave, etc.), I don’t think you’ll miss anything too significant by playing New Vegas without finishing FO3.
No, not at all. New Vegas has some callbacks to Fallout 1 and 2, but really doesn’t mention Fallout 3 at all. About the only connection that comes to mind is that the Survival skill book (which bumps that skill permanently by 3 or 4, depending on your perks) is the “Wasteland Survival Guide,” which you assist in creating during Fallout 3.
So that’s what that book’s for! I found a couple and had no idea. Thought they were quest objects.
If a book appears on the “AID” list rather than misc, and it doesn’t say +10 (or +20 with Comprehension) to a skill, it’s a permanent skill boost. There are a couple of quest-related books, they appear on the Misc list.
Yeah, I know THAT, but I never bothered to check.
I absolutely loved it.
It’s not the same as the main game, no. It’s quite tightly focused, story-driven and survival horror - and while you have a choice of several quests to do through most of it, you do need to complete all those quests to proceed. The companions are much more interesting than those in the main game, and what you say and do with them really does feel like it makes a difference.
There’s an amazing amount of atmosphere, and a bitterly ironic story (on quite a few levels) involved, and it makes heavy use of the cloud and speakers to make you solve game-play puzzles.
And yes, the enemies are quite different from the normal game. While there could have been some more diversity, they’re both spooky and dangerous.
I really liked Dead Money too. The characters and dialog are really good and I liked how it felt different from the rest of the game. I also liked the hologram vendors, since they didn’t take caps (well really how the Dead Money economy was separate from the rest of New Vegas).
I’m not sure what people mean about it having different combat mechanics other than having to remove limbs/heads to properly kill the enemies. There are weapons you can pick up right away that have a big boost to amputating limbs or you can just walk up to them when they’re “unconscious” and hack off a leg. Note that I was level 30 when I started and I had a high Energy Weapons skill. Since the DLC starts you with (arguably) the best general-purpose energy weapon in the game (which can be repaired by getting weapon repair kits from the vending machines), I may have been in a better position than other characters. The red mist and radios I found easy to avoid or remove, but I did get killed a few times by booby traps and the hologram guards later in the DLC. I had the most trouble at the very end, but that was because I trying to be too clever and went the wrong way.
They hop around like they can teleport, which makes it really rough to target limbs unless you’re in VATS. Or if you’re using one of those bonus-damage melee weapons you mention, since VATS doesn’t give you a choice of targets if you’re using a melee weapon.
The “remove a limb” thing isn’t trivial either. Yes, you can chop an arm off after they fall down, but getting them to fall down without crippling a limb is very, very difficult. Despite “Living Anatomy” showing a moderate amount of HP and 0 DT, they absorb a lot of punishment, like they have some form of damage resistance.
The throwing spears, of which you get a ton, are remarkably ineffective. Again, because the Ghost People bounce around like grasshoppers, the spears have a very long wind-up animation, and very slow projectile speeds. Most of the time they end up land where the target was, not where it is, regardless of your melee skill.
The holo rifle isn’t that great, largely due to the small clip size. I suppose it might make for one-shot kills if you’re playing on Normal difficulty.
That’s odd, because for the most part the hologram guards were not a threat. Sure, they’ll shoot at you if you spend too much time in the open, but they give you plenty of time to get back into cover if you screw up. Unless of course you back yourself into a corner, which is possible in the final room, but not common elsewhere.
Sarkus
4313
I disliked the radio collar mechanic in Dead Money quite a lot, but the other stuff was annoying at worst, especially once I realized that removing a limb wasn’t that hard with the light machine gun. I really liked the new NPCs and the story was well written and interesting. Sure, I died several times but there’s nothing wrong with a challenge even when your character is in the mid-twenties levelwise.
edit: Moved to the right thread.
I’ll leave it as lawyers > game recomendations
Started Old World Blues last night. I was talked at for about 40 minutes before I was let loose. The two guns I was given both seem to suck so far compared to my other stuff. I’ll give it more time tonight.
I was talked at for about 40 minutes before I was let loose
Sigh. Sounds like somebody wanted Operation: Anchorage 2, the Shootering.
Myself, I sat through the entire intro dialogue. Twice. Some definite mirth and good writing in there.
And if you’re adverse to any more robotic verbosity, well…this may not be your DLC of choice.
Then again you didn’t say whether you considered that 40 minutes negative or positive, so n/m
ANYWAY, myself I’m finally inside the Sierra Madre. And I don’t think I’ll go any farther. After my n-teenth playthrough of F:NV (and mods) and a long (if enjoyable) playthrough of OWB, I’ve hit that fatigue point somebody mentioned earlier. I just don’t want this implementation of Fallout any more, mods and 1 & 1/2 DLCs to go.
Honestly, I like good dialog, but the start of Old World Blues was a bit much. I found myself getting bored. The primary problem for me is that it’s a monolog, none of your responses have any effect for a bit as they aren’t really listening to you.
I didn’t have quite this extreme a reaction, but yeah, I liked Dead Money too.
I totally did not have this problem. Strange that you found it so prevalent. My character was stealth/melee, which up until Dead Money meant that I snuck up behind people and stabbed them in the back. Once in Dead Money, though, it meant that I was making headshots with the throwing spears from a distance, which was an instant kill. Every. Single. Time.
Heads just exploded, which removed the dismemberment requirement nicely.
Difficulty? Because I was playing on Very Hard, and that wasn’t my experience at all. It took several hits with a throwing spear to get a limb dismemberment.
The jumping about issue is much less of a problem if they’re not alerted and standing still. Once they’re moving, though, getting a hit from a distance was very, very chancy. Even in VATS, I’d get cases where my chance to hit was displayed as 60%-70% and my actual hit rate was 25% or less.
I think if the exploding collars were taken out, I would have enjoyed Dead Money much more. I really didn’t care for that mechanic, trying to spot the radios you could shoot to allow you to pass. The weird ghost enemies and mist were annoying, but they didn’t really bug me too much.
