4621

Eh, then you get quicksave-quickload retries to get the “best” conversation. See: Deus Ex HR.

4622

IMHO Deus Ex HR is one of the best implementations of a speech influence system. It could be combined with a skill check to make the player more or less likely to influence an NPC rather than just have an I win button based on speech skill.

4623

So have some kind of limited ironman mechanic eg Dx. Souls… their sales prove that that the market is ready for irreversible consequences. And make it fun to deal with unintended or “negative” outcomes so even “losing” is fun. Or don’t make all conversations checks do-or-die moments to get access to their particular reward. There, I just solved RPGs.

4624

Great, you’ve made a RPG which is interesting to a very small fraction of their market. And the rest?

4625

You can make the task of cleaning the virus out of the BoS database a lot easier with SCIENCE. So that’s three.

4626

I think part of the problem was allowing you to bypass certain things (like EDE repair, Primm Slim, etc.) with items rather than skill. It made the skills more peripheral. There are some things you just shouldn’t be able to do without the skill unless you can get somebody else to do it for you, like that guy from Mick & Ralph’s for the Fisto quest.

4627

Good post Jason.

I found melee to be a MUCH harder way to approach the game. I’ve got a melee character sitting around level twelve or so and I find any fight against swarms of melee guys (anything from wolves to cazadores) is doom.

4628

Man, melee with cazadores or deathclaws would just suck.

4629

I find you definitely have to be a lot more tactical about it. Thrown weapons helps a lot too, along with explosives.

4630

Good point Raife, I’d forgotten about that. There was a surprising number of places where you could just collect garbage to repair something, rather than having the skill.

Yeah, I kept my explosives and melee skills in sync. I don’t know if it was a mod I was using or vanilla, but the damn deathclaws can’t get you if you just keep knocking them on their ass by hurling grenades. Once you get to the grenade rifle or missile tiers it’s all over for those bastards.

The unique 40mm grenade machine gun is one of my favorite weapons in a game ever. You can’t actually see the target after the first couple because there’s so much dust, but you don’t really need to thanks to the red enemy indicator on the compass.

I envision my character absent-mindedly pointing it off to the right, holding down the button, and smoking a cigarette, looking down at the Pipboy on their left arm waiting for all the red blobs to go away.

4631

Do the grenade launchers use explosives or guns for their skill?

4632

splosives
That’s a touch I liked…

4633

Jason’s post inspired me to load up my F:NV melee guy. I just found a thermic lance. This thing is sick!

4634

I used a thermic lance for a while, but eventually it taking up the entire time damn screen in first person became too aggrevating. I ended up using Ghenna from the Gun Runner’s Arsenal from then on.

Explosives. They did an absolutely fantastic hell of a great job with the weapon/skill interactions; this is the first one where there’s a point in doing anything but small guns.

The Lonesome Road rocket launcher is almost too overpowered.

The chief reason to buy the GRA DLC is that it adds special mininuke variants to the shopkeepers. God almighty, it is satisfying to spray those things around.

4635

Haha I’m almost tempted!

I’m sure I’ll get bored of the thermic lance, especially once I get a shishkebab + pyromaniac combo. But holy hell in the meantime it’s useful. Especially since it’s easy to get on target; Fallout doesn’t have the most responsive melee combat system so with the super sledge or Chance’s knife it can sometimes be hard to stay on target.

4636

Oh here’s a question: what do you do to make major caps?

4637

I never invested a single point in barter, but I never felt like I had to do anything special to make money either. At the start I lawnmowered my way through the cities stealing anything not nailed down with a cash/weight ratio higher than 20, but in retrospect, this was a not-fun tedious waste of time.

I made the real money through out-of-town random locations, though. You don’t make shit from animal-heavy areas, or caves, but human enemies drop a ton of profitable weapons. Until level 15 or so most ammunition has really good ratios too.

Oh, sell all your damn magazines too. They’re not another OCD gameplay mechanic that’s not fun.

4638

I had little trouble making caps. Weapons and armor are worth a ton even without Barter, which I never put any points into. This is particularly true if you have Jury Rigging because then you can buy crappy weapons and armor and use them to fix up the valuable stuff and sell it for a huge profit. Sometimes I would also use Weapon Repair Kits on expensive weapons I found that I wasn’t going to use so I could make more money selling them.

I guess you could also try gambling if you wanted, but I wasn’t really keen on it.

4639

And like 30-40 that can be solved or changed with the speech skill.

I’m pretty sure there was more than one that required speech to start as well.

4640

If you have adjusted luck 7+, gambling will make you more caps that you can use as soon as you can get to the casinos. In fact, it’s so grotesquely unbalanced that after I did it my first game, I deliberately avoided doing in my later playthroughs. I played once as a Luck 1 character just to close that avenue off entirely.

The annoying thing is that the luck adjustment is only really effective for certain bets: blackjack, and even-money bets at roulette. It’s ineffective for slots and high-odds bets for roulette, because luck can only make small adjustments to the outcome. It can alter what card comes next, but for roulette it only changes between adjacent number cups. If you’ve bet on 17, and the ball doesn’t land adjacent to 17, luck can’t help you at all. Similarly, it can only affect adjacent possibilities for slots, so it might get you an extra cherry, but it’s not going to give you a big payout.

If you have high Luck, you’ll get a message “you feel lucky” right after Luck changes the outcome of a bet for you. If tried it out with the Luck 1 character, and you get a similar “you feel unlucky” message if Luck changes the outcome against you.