My Collector’s Edition arrived from Amazon yesterday, along with my regular edition strategy guide. The CE comes in a nice, aged looking box and the contents sit in a black cutout thing that prevents them from rattling around in the box. The poker chips are much heavier than I expected and are very nice. The platinum chip is at least twice as big as the regular chips and also pretty weighty.
The deck of cards is very nice and comes in a cool aged looking box. The card backs are from the various casinos on the strip, which I think is required to play Caravan. Each has a picture and small description.
The comic book is hardcover and made of quality materials. The story contained therein is okay. Certainly nowhere near as awful as the “bonus” comic that came with my copy of Singularity. It definitely sets up the beginning of the game adequately and gives you a little more insight into those that wronged you.
I’ve not watched the making of DVD yet. I plan to while I run on the treadmill today, so I’ll report back on it. Hopefully it’s not packed with spoilers like the Bioware discs tend to be.
Overall I’d say the CE tchotchkes are high quality and worth the $69.99 I paid (with a $10 credit from Amazon). Not sure I’d feel that way if I paid $79.99. I’m not sure how I can display the chips properly, so they’ll likely sit in the box while that collects dust. The main attraction of the CE for me was the making of disc, so we’ll see how that goes.
Since everyone else is commenting on bugs encountered, I’ll just say that in a little over two hours of playing, I encountered nothing. Of course that means nothing. Tom encountered game breaking problems only after investing dozens of hours into the game, so we’ll see how it goes. There was no Day 1 title update on the 360.
I wish there was some way to keep the radio on so I could hear the talk stuff, but not the music. I can’t stand listening to the music while navigating the Wasteland, so I keep it off and miss all of the news updates and whatnot.
In the very beginning I filched all kinds of stuff from Doc Mitchell’s place with no Karma hit at all. None of it was labeled in red, so I helped myself. Same with the contents of Victor the robot’s house.
I went with Guns/Repair/Speech as well. The only trait I took was the one where my shots do 20% more damage, but I shoot 20% more slowly. So far it’s been fine. For my first level up I also took the perk that let me add a point to a SPECIAL attribute.
I’m definitely loving the game so far. I was surprised at how quickly I acclimated to playing Fallout once again. After playing so much Fallout 3 I know exactly what I want to do and how to manage inventory space and weapons. Weight hasn’t been a problem at all and I’m not lugging around stuff I know I’m not going to use. For a chunk of FO3 I wasn’t too sure what might be useful in the future so I burdened myself with a lot of junk. Now I already know what yields a good amount of caps and I only pick that stuff up (cigarettes, for example) and sell it quickly, along with ammo for weapons I don’t use (i.e. explosives). So far I’ve got about 500 caps after only a couple of hours of playing.
What I am not so successfully acclimating to is my character’s relative weakness. For a huge portion of my play time in FO3 my character was a walking tank. I could clear a whole room of bad guys and decimate any creature I stumbled across. As a level 2 character in New Vegas, that’s not the case, so I’m still getting to know my boundaries. For example, I walked into the NCR prison near Goodsprings and started shooting up the place. It did not end well for me at all. Similarly I ignored signs warning against radscorpions in an area, figuring they were no big deal. Turns out I can barely scratch them with my current stats/weapons, so I won’t be going back that way for a while.
