4601

Sometimes if you can get another (older) save to load, you can get a stuck save to load afer this. Sometimes not. FNV with all the DLC and some mods is one of the least stable games I have played. OTOH, it is one of the best games I have played, ever, so I put up with it.

As far as the LR consequences go, it just doesn’t make sense to me. The developers should have found a way to stick it in the final slides and a few conversations or not had such a significant event happen in a DLC.

4602

Depends on what you’re shooting. I’ve had experience like yours if I’m shooting at an animal, because VATS has you contorting in some pretty weird ways when something like a Nightstalker attacks, and I think that results in misses. Shooting at humanoids usually results in what you’d expect, because they don’t get quite so close and you don’t end up pointing your rifle at the sky.

4603

Well, I restarted Steam. Deleted the Quick and auto save and renamed the .bak files and tried those. Did not work. Tried manual saves did not work. Put original auto and quick saves back. Tried another manual save, it worked and then the quick and autosaves worked. Not sure if the last manual save was one I had tried before or not. I only had about 7 manual saves. Weird, but glad it worked. I think I had about 7 hours in.

Early on I was shooting geckos and seemed to run into it and then it was that dude that sent you up to save his “girlfriend” and then ambushed you. I shot the hell at of that guy in vats at near point blank range and he is wearing a potato sack and nothing. When I went into the Bison, I just started crouching and skipping VATS and did pretty well aiming.

Part of my problem with skipping VATS is the nausea I always whine about. I like to pull back as far out of First Person as possible. In FO:NV, the sight is offset to the right of your body when you do that, so that makes it even harder to aim without VATS. So, in Bison, I did start shooting in First Person and got the aiming down. This all results in me simply not looking around since that is what affects me most. I get caught from the sides and back more often. So, I just save more and if someone catches me offguard, I just reload. Don’t like relying on the reload so much, but the game is fun enough that I am going to do that. Dragon Age did not effect me as much and I can only assume it was because I could pull back further.

On another note, I am mostly a fantasy game guy. I like the apocalyptic setting in theory, but I get sick of the bland scenery and I must like dwarves and orcs more than radiation scarred humans and scorpions. Probably because I don’t play first person games, but the tension seems much more palpable. Good stuff.

4604

God almighty I hate the Legion. I made a video about it.

4605

Heh. I don’t want to get crazy, but I did that when the Legion was going to kill that one guy. I just attacked the shit out of them and killed everyone in the tent. Then, with a scavenged weapon, I killed every single other guy I could find in the entire encampment.

Ended the war single handedly I did. Except well…NO ONE KNEW! The game wasn’t able to handle that situation. So everyone else went on like I hadn’t done anything. I quit not longer after that (admitedly, it was my second time playing it and I didn’t finish the first time either).

4606

No one post about the new edition?

Fallout New Vegas Ultimate Edition

4607

About time, I can finally get it now(or on feb 7).

4608

I’d gotten so used to them sucking that I didn’t even notice that. Yeah, yet another reason they’re a shitty faction - you kill their faction-defining, incredible, charismatic leader and the game just pretends you didn’t to keep plot coherence. I’d love to know what the designers were thinking.

4609

It would have been nice if there were more than a couple NPCs that acknowledged that you killed ‘that one guy’. Then again, ‘the amazingly destructive thing’ you do can do to the NCR and/or the legion’s homeland doesn’t get mentioned in game, which seems even more egregious to me.

BTW, awesome video Jason…you drugged out maniac. ;-)

4610

“Bet he didn’t see that coming when he had his coffee this morning”, cracked me up.

4611

LOL, pretty funny. Now you might want to look into some anger management classes. :).

4612

I just finished all 4 faction endings. I unlocked every achievement, saw every marked and ummarked location, completed every marked and unmarked quest, lawnmowered the DLC, and all unlocked every achievement. Well, except the stupid boring ones, like “pick 50 pockets” and “fail 50 speech challenges” and the sounds-fun-but-really-tedious GRA ones.

220 hours total. No, really. I have no idea how it took that long.

Narrative
On one hand, there’s no story that really grabs you like Fallout 3’s father figure. On the other hand, the faction system is very well fleshed out, full of surprises, and has tons of neat interactions. If you know what you’re doing you can pull off some hilarious double crosses. My favorite is a close run between Vault 11’s social experiment, killing Benny and wearing his terrible outfit, and My Kind of Town if you install Primm Slim.

I Don’t Hurt Anymore was definitely something new in mainstream gaming, but the treatment seemed rather cartoony given the subject matter. Yeah, I totally resolved your lingering trauma over getting raped by rapidly clicking through 90 seconds of dialog trees. Ugh. Boone’s serious-face quest was treated far more respectfully.

I wish they’d done more with Victor. His cornpone sense of menace makes for my favorite character in the entire game.

Oh, and Fantastic. He’s the video game incarnation of Bong Boy. Hey, Man, when in Rome.

DLC
Dead Money was an abomination; a half-hearted ripoff of Bioshock with incredibly aggrevating mechanics. Whoever’s responsible for that mess should be ashamed.

Honest hearts was ok, I guess, but it felt kind of phoned in.

Lonesome Road was alright; the terrain modification trick with the warheads with something new in the series, but they really missed an opportunity with Ulysses. I think they were going for wise statesman of ages gone by, holder of ancient secrets, but instead we ended up with a deranged street person. I half-expected the final reveal to be the Trilateral Commission.

I can’t gush enough about Old World Blues; it’s hands-down one of my favorite things in gaming, ever. Wacky mechanics, fun, coherent stories that line up with the world, strong personalities; what more could I want? They even fixed the aggrevating common occurence of areas being way too big or similar; all of the locations are thematically distinct and just big enough to be neat without getting old.

Overall the DLC was far superior to Fallout 3’s sad offerings.

Companions
The FNV followers are just incomparable to Fallout 3’s crap. Every one of them has a distinct, plausible, interesting backstory. Except for the pets (EDE and Rex), not once did I feel like I was hauling around an ammunition container.

Challenges
I really could have lived without this mess. A few were completely hilarious, but mostly it just meant a never-ending spam in the upper left corner. “Used a lot of doctor’s bags! Crippled some limbs!” Yeah, thanks a lot, god knows that was rewarding having it clog up the notification list, rather than seeing useful things like “your arm got blown off.” Try again.

Leveling Design
They’ve come a long way on perks; there’s some really awesome stuff in there. They’re either funny as hell or have interesting tradeoffs. You can build a melee and explosives specialist that’s comical fun to play - everything you touch dies, but you’re still vulnerable to agile opponents with ranged weapons.

The skill system, by contrast, has had all the fun taken out of it. There’s four kinds of skills:

  1. Useful. Melee, Unarmed, Guns, Explosives, Medicine - you need at least 1. You can’t get them all, but you don’t need to.

  2. OCD bullshit. Survival, Repair, 50% of science - what the hell are they doing at Bethesda that they think playing garbage pack rat is fun? I could sort of see it if the entire game world wasn’t littered in small containers of mostly worthless equipment, or if the crafting equipment was free, but neither is true. There’s nothing spontaneous or joyous about the process; it’s a tedious min-maxing grind for a tiny payoff of making a few neat items.

  3. Decorative. I honestly have no idea what the point of Barter, Lockpick, Science, and Speech is; they might as well be a checkbox for “occasionally give me a small amount of decent equipment in exchange for a aggrevating minigame.” You miss virtually nothing in the game of interest if you invest 0 points in them. This is in sharp contrast to Fallout 1 and 2, where these skills actually rewarded you with unique stories and equipment, and the game actually feels significantly different.

  4. Broken. Sneak doesn’t work for shit and has just bullshit mechanics, same as the last game.

Inventory
The item system has a lot more unique weapons and armors, but they still have the completely aggrevating mechanic where you end up hauling around a complete set of enhancement equipment for every secondary stat if you want the “best” character. Why on earth can’t I wear Benny’s suit under power armor? Why do I have to hot-swap the damn things if I want the best prices? Same deal for lockpicking, etc.; it’s just lazy.

Summary
One of the best games I’ve ever played. At least, it was after I bought all the DLC, waited for all the patches, and then modded the living hell out of it. It’s kind of sad to realize how many broken game mechanics are still there in their open world systems, though.

4613

Sneaking is mostly for getting ridiculous bonuses. Doncha know that .308 to the head hurts more if you didn’t see the person firing it(and someone lamented having skills affect gunplay in Alpha Protocol). With sneak at 100, the better criticals and finesse perks, and a silencer on my sniper rifle, I could walk into a legion camp, crouch, one shot someone to the head, and not have anyone go hostile or lose rep because I was “sneaking” and they died before they could go into combat mode. So it’s useful, but yes the implementation sucks. Like it’s predecessors they’re not willing to do the huge amount of work to have a plausible middle ground between “everyone knows where I am when a fight breaks out” and “I just made someone’s head explode in the middle of the crowd, and no one batted an eye.” Even at 100 it’s almost useless for avoiding combat if people are already hostile, you’ve got disguises for that in this game anyways.

I loved Dead Money, it was kinda downhill from there. Though Honest Hearts had some great light armor duds. Old World Blues and the other one were mostly an excuse to use the heretofore overpowered power armor.

4614

Good description of the sneaking. It’s like they’ve got this jack-of-all-trades approach where they mostly get everything working.

Oh, I forgot to talk about Hardcore mode, didn’t I?

Good god, what the hell were they thinking. Doctor’s bags to heal, stimpacks slowly healing, etc. - great idea. Shoving food down your characters mouth, companions permanently dying - you have got to be kidding me. It’s like shitty 1980s game design.

4615

Dead Money with the annoying beeping collar? Ugh, played that for about half an hour and re-loaded a save from before my entrance. I enjoyed all the other DLC.

Beep, beeep, beeep, boom. Hehe, cool…not.

4616

Yeah, the collar was a bad mechanic. Reminded me of Obisidian’s use of another limiting mechanic in the NWN2 expansion. Hated the idea there as well. Too bad in the case of Dead Money, as there is an interesting and well told story that unfolds if you press on.

The odd thing is that Honest Hearts main story is crappy (but it has a great side story), they did a good job writing Old World Blues, and then completely crapped the bed with Lonesome Road.

4617

What?

“Can you do without it?” is the wrong question. So is “is it absolutely required to see a particular part of the game?” You could go through the game with 0 Energy Weapons skill, and you’d miss nothing in the game of interest. Unlocking areas is not the point of Energy Weapons skill. Rather, you judge skills like these based on whether the benefits are worth the investment, and for 3 of the 4 skills you mention, they definitely are.

Speech is one of my favorite skills. The game is peppered all over with Speech checks, and they often do something other than just up your rewards in some way. Speech isn’t absolutely required, but it would be a lousy game if it were. Saying “I don’t know what the point of Speech is” is akin to saying “I don’t know why you’d bother putting points into Hacking in Deus Ex 3.”

Speaking of hacking, Science often lets you deal with obstacles in alternate ways. It’s less about loot than letting you get into an area without fighting a particular turret or group of robots.

Lockpicking is primarily a loot skill, but the loot you get from it is so worth it I can’t understand how you’d class it as “decorative.” Some of the unique weapons are behind locks that can’t be opened any other way.

Barter is kind of marginal on its own, though it’s better than Fallout 3. Its primary value now is dialog checks and perk prerequisite checks. Pack Rat can be really nice if you don’t have a companion along as a mule (i.e. the DLC) and you’re playing with Hardcore, so ammunition has weight. I always played Hardcore.

4618

Hacking also gets you access to little tidbits about the world/universe that are not otherwise available. For that and the reason Gus mentioned, its a skill I’ve always invested. I can’t imagine not having it.

On the other hand I’ve never missed anything by not investing in sneak.

4619

I should have been clearer - it’s that you get nothing of any significance for it, either character, equipment, or story There’s exactly one quest in the game that requires a certain speech skill to start or finish, for example. Other than that, I can’t recall a single dialogue tree where I found anything of note using it; it’s minor flavor. There was more unique options in Fallout 3 for the skill.

Same deal for Lockpick and Science - there’s a couple spots where you can hack turrets to fight for you or take a shortcut, but they’re pretty weaksauce.

Some of the unique weapons are behind locks that can’t be opened any other way.

To my knowledge, there’s exactly 2 of them.

They do something along these lines, but I remember the secondary skills being way, way more satisfying in rewards for your investment in Fallout 3, much less Fallout 1 and 2.

4620

I really dislike the whole idea of a speech check. Wouldn’t it be awesome if the conversation-based conflicts had to be resolved by choosing the “right” thing to say on the basis of context and tone, rather than just dumping points into speech during skillups?
Wait, then you’d have to pay writers, and we couldn’t have that…