5022

I am not aware of any game breaking bugs. However, there is a DLC called Dead Money (I think). Avoid it. Also, if you think you are going to have a hard time finishing Fallout NV unless you have a lot of free time on your hands or you skip a lot of content before F4 comes out.

5024

Since people in the Fallout 4 thread were already playing from “New Zealand” yesterday, I couldn’t take it anymore and I went back to my New Vegas game after a long break. I had already done Goodsprings, the starting town, and last night I went to the town of Primm and rescued the deputy there and got them a new Sheriff.

I’m really surprised that the start of the game is so tough. Ammo is fairly scarce too, despite spending all my money on various ammo types in Goodsprings and now in Primm. My scoped 9mm pistol is fairly effective, but man, I sure do take a beating in the time it takes to kill enemies. Even headshots in VATS have to be repeated about 6 times to kill most of the enemies so far.

I’m also surprised at the lack of any interesting characters or dialog so far in the two towns. This is the first time Obsidian has let me down in that department.

5025

I have to play the game for a second time and use that run to play all the DLC, which I still haven’t experienced it. Maybe next summer.

5026

Two pages back I posted about scarce ammo early in the game and Tom Chick replied with these thoughts.. Obviously you are using VATS (I had not been using VATS for critters and was probably wasting ammo) but his other ideas may help.

I stop playing in August because of frequent crashes. But I need to revisit it, and perhaps ratchet back on the mods in hopes of reducing crashes, because I doubt my machine can play the new one.

5027

The early game characters aren’t terribly memorable, that is very true. Primm has some moderately funny/interesting stuff but Goodsprings screams “tutorial” and is about as interesting as that sounds.

I went through another partial run of New Vegas last week or two, finally getting around to finishing Lonesome Road, the last of the DLC I hadn’t gotten around to. I replayed Honest Hearts and Old World Blues as well, but skipped Dead Money, which I found unduly frustrating. Ammo is always something that bugs me. I want to play a character who focuses on one or two weapons, but I never have enough ammo to do that. Or, more accurately, the pack rat in me can’t help collecting all the ammo (no weight in non-Hardcore) I find, and thus, I feel dumb not having a gun for each ammo type, which in turn means a cluttered inventory, etc. Then I rationalize it by saying “what if I run out of <ammo type X>?”

Then there’s the repair thing. Love this gun! Oops, it keeps wearing out. That leads to constantly scrounging wrenches, duct tape, scrap, etc. to make repair kits, which is…not fun, and weighs me down (literally and psychologically!). One of the downsides to having so many options in the game–more so with the minor Gun Runners Arsenal DLC–is that there are so many guns that aren’t that different in actual effect, yet I feel compelled to have them all. My issue, not so much the game’s, but grrrr.

VATS is something I have never used as much as I should. I default to shooter mentality, and yeah, that burns ammo like no tomorrow. But VATS often is frustrating. You get maybe one round in before they close on you if they’re short-ranged or melee types, and half the time you don’t do much damage. Deathclaws are a great example. Unless you one-shot them from stealth, they’ll be on you so fast that you might get one VATS round in…and then they rip your head off, even when you’re fairly high level. I found it safer to spray and pray as they run in on you.

Still, I love NV, well over 200 hours in it on multiple characters. Waiting here for Amazon to deliver my F4 my wife bought for me, and hoping it’s as good as NV was.

5028

As I explore some more south of Primm, I’m encountering some nice stuff. I love how tough this game is. (Playing on Very Hard). Having to sell everything I don’t need to a traveling merchant, in exchange for some food and water, and ammo. That’s something I’m forced to do, and it’s about damn time I had to do that in a Fallout game. (Yes, I’m playing with hardcore mode on).

Tomorrow I’ll be switching to Fallout 4, but I’m enough into this now that I’m finally starting to have fun.

5029

I seem to have lost my actual install. That’s sad because I heavily modified it, down to change things right in the scripting.

Though I fished one old post where I was detailing some stuff I picked from mods:

  • Water is indispensable and needs to be pure. You can either buy it (or find it), or you can use the empty bottles to refill at the sources every time you deplete them (and you can drink from a bottle a few times before it’s empty). If you drink surface water you get radiation and get sick quite easily. The need for water goes with the time of the day, during the night it decreases, in interiors it decreases, if you’re sleeping it decreases a lot (same as the need for food), but if you’re out under the sun at midday you get thirsty very quickly.
  • The need for food and water makes you plan your travels more carefully. It’s never a game breaking problem because as long you’re close to a source you have infinite water, but you’ll have to keep gravitating toward the hubs where you can find food, water and a place to sleep (realistically). So it makes environment more meaningful, and these objects part of the gameplay. You can’t sleep more than you need, you can’t sleep if you’re badly wounded, and you can’t eat more than you need (problems with digestion). Fast travel is also disabled as long you’re not rested and relatively healed, so there’s no way to quickly escape consequences.
  • Another side effect is that food and water use your inventory space, so you can’t also bring along an arsenal of weapons. You have to make choices, and making choices is good for a game.
  • In the same way, fatigue goes up depending on the time of the day and what you carry. Same for the speed when you run, and how long you can run before you have to stop and recover. Your stats also affect how much food you need during the day (if you’ve lots of constitution and strength you need to eat more).
  • The healing system is a bit of a mess because maybe too realistic. When you’re wounded you start bleeding. Even if you still have lots of HP in this system after you’ve been wounded you’re not safe at all, because you have to stop the bleeding in some way (and sometimes you need more than one bandage, and the effects take time anyway to stop the bleeding, so you have to wait it out). Bleeding decreases over time even naturally, but a bullet wound starts getting problematic if untreated and will make you lose lots of HPs. If bleeding goes on for too long you get blood loss (and eventually need transfusion, or rest for quite longer), you start fainting, and the wounds get infected. If the wounds get infected you need antibiotics. And all this contributes making your life miserable in combat, because if you’re wounded you start seeing everything blurry, you limp slowly and so on.
  • Food doesn’t heal you (and actually can make you sick, see above) but as long you reach a campfire you can use your portable cook-kit to prepare a meal (since raw, uncooked meat also makes you sick because of germs).

All this has a rather RADICAL impact on the gameplay, but it makes it a different game that I thought was better than what the standard game offered. If you don’t adapt all this becomes just a chore, but if you accept it, it creates a number of emergent situations that are incredible. A gunfight was never as intense as it gets with these mods. You have to be a lot more wary and fighting many enemies becomes a real challenge.

…and in all that I forgot to mention than in the case you break a limb then no stimpack fixes it. You have to apply crutches (and I think you need a medic, or high enough medic skill). And don’t think that the crutches heal the limb right away. Nope. I think it needs about three days, during that time if it’s a leg you move VERY slowly as if you are indeed a cripple, and if it’s an arm it severely affects the aiming. Of course since you can only sleep a fixed amount of hours for each day, and not more, then it means you are FORCED to go around and play in cripple mode for quite a while (well, of course you can also just “wait” with that option, but if you’re awake you suffer for the full effect of the need to eat and drink, and it can be quite a problem).

5030

So far my experience with New Vegas pretty much mirrors the criticisms in the Fallout 4 thread: nearly everything I encounter is someone who is hostile. There appear to be no friendly wasteland people, and the dialog in the couple of towns I have found has been very sparse and forgettable. But I soldier on, and I’m having a hell of a good time with Hardcore.

After taking out my latest band of Jackal gangers at an outpost, I’m down to two Doctor’s Bags left. Perhaps taking “Smallframe” to get the +1 Agility wasn’t that great when my limbs break so easily. In this particular fight they crippled my chest. I’m not sure what I’ll do once I’m out of Doctor’s Bags, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. I’m also down to only 16 stimpacks and I’m almost out of food and purified water.

The gunplay really sucks though. Even though they added Aiming Down the Sights to Fallout 3’s system, most weapons feel really weird and crappy when aiming down the sights, and the weapon sound effects and the way they fire, it all just feels very off and unsatisfying. It’s the first game I’ve played where even the shotgun doesn’t feel great. OTOH, all the weapons feel great in VATS mode. I just wish they’d spent a bit more effort on the normal real-time combat.

5031

There’s this video that explains a bit why the Bethesda’s Fallouts “suck”, and why New Vegas is better:

You can probably skip the first half, though.

5032

So far in Fallout: New Vegas, I was agreeing with this post about Fallout 4, and not seeing how they were any different. But yesterday, I finally ran into Caesar’s Legions. That was pretty cool. And true, it’s part of the main story quest, but still. It’s nice to encounter something other than just raiders/gang members when entering a town.

5033

I started playing New Vegas for the first time instead of buying Fallout 4. Am I doing something wrong, or is the walk speed incredibly slow in this game? I don’t think there’s a run button as far as I can tell. I don’t know if I’m just used to newer games with faster movement options, but something seems wrong. I’m in the first starting town and it literally takes a full minute or two just walking from the bar to the woman with the geckos by the well, which isn’t that far away. I want to like this game, but I can’t imagine trudging through a sprawling open world at this pace. I don’t remember having the same problem with Fallout 3.

5034

Walking speed is fine for me, unless I’m overburdened, in which case it’s really, really slow. Speed is determined by how much you press the left analog stick in a particular direction, not sure how it’s handled on the keyboard. In Fallout 3 I used to go back and forth between M+K and gamepad, but in NV I’ve just done the gamepad from the beginning. Also, obviously, if you press the left thumbstick down, you go into sneak mode by kneeling down all the time, and you’re slower then too.

5035

I’m not sure why but I’ve been seeing news bits here and there for FNV the last week or so. Nothing worth clicking on, just some behind the scenes stuff, until today. I don’t know what’s going on, probably nothing, but this latest bit of Fallout news I felt was worth sharing.

5036

Whether or not Chris Avellone is involved, it would still have to go through Bethesda wouldn’t it?

5037

I imagine it would be the same deal they had what they did when Obsidian worked on New Vegas, unless Avallone is working with Bethesda directly, which I suppose is possible if they about to announce some new expansion/DLC he’s been working on with them or something.

I personally hope this is an Obsidian created Fallout game with the Fallout 4 style/engine, with Avellone being tied to the project in some (major) way.

5038

Well Avellone left Obsidian right? He could be working with Bethesda these days. Dude’s got a lot of side projects.

5039

Funny that this thread popped up, for the past few days I’ve been thinking about replaying the game. Must be that time of the year or something.

5040

It was the 20th anniversary of Fallout last week, which is why you’re all seeing more Fallout articles.

5041

That would be a good combination. Fallout 4 gameplay was much improved, if nothing else. I’m not sure how significant the role they will give him might be, since he can really only wear one hat at a time. He’s not a one man studio. I don’t think hoping for F:NV2 is realistic.

5042

Good write up, and I agree this was one of the best vault stories in the series. And also goes on to show just how crappy the writing/stories were in Fallout 4.