Throwing weapons are cool in Mount&Blade
Yeah, that was it, man. I would buy something and then sell it back to them repeatedly until I had all their coin. So feeding the addiction and keeping the stats at above max with goofball wasn’t a problem.
And I actually killed the Vault Leader with a thrown flare at the end after he told me I couldn’t return. It was pretty funny, they must have coded it so that he’d die if you did even 1 point of damage or something. I was just going to be petty and toss something at him before he got back into the vault, but it like splattered him and blew his leg off. He tried crawling away but the burning flare scorched his trailing intestines and he didn’t make it. Throw skill for the win! Good times.
So, 57 names, eh? Well, the meltdown rant at Equis aside, I still think Nekkid’s an okay guy so far. Zealous, sure, and a ton defensive… but who hasn’t been when they’re receiving the rough side of Dungsroman’s tongue (as opposed to the smooth side TOUTSUITE CAN I GET A HELL YEAH)? I guess I’m a bit skeptical, but I’ll keep an ear out for your Midnight Ride once they start shambling their way over en masse like doofy zombies.
M&B thrown weapons are actually useful, I forgot that. I was mostly thinking of Jagged Alliance 2, where the damage done by physically hitting someone with a grenade was roughly equal to the amount caused by the subsequent explosion.
We’ve gone over this so issue so many times already it’s redundant and antagonizing just for the sake of it.
Also, for you to be collecting names and making “lists” makes you a paranoid elitist in your own right. Who cares where people come from, there was no entrance exam or a bloodtest, and it takes all types to stay interesting.
First Aid - I’ve never put points into it and I’ve only used in the beginning of the game when I couldn’t afford stimpaks. Still, I’d like to see the medical skills stick around for a theoretical F3, the Doctor is a decent archetype.
Doctor - Rare, you can heal the occasional critical and it restores more HP than first aid but again stimpaks are just easier.
Outdoorsman - Actually kind of nice if your a Diplomat or an H2H specialist (F2 only.)
Repair - Pretty Much Useless in F1. Occasionaly usefull in F2 with the prewar facilities.
Traps - Disgree, If you go with Lockpick you probably want to pick it up. There are enough spots that one without the other is just futile.
Throwing - Playing through F1 or F2 as the throwing expert would be brutal. I’d keep it though for F3 and make Grenades much more powerful as they are in Silent Storm.
That’s it! I’m going to play Fallout with Throwing, Doctor, and First Aid tagged.
As it stands, I found the following skills completely viable:
Small Arms
Big Guns
Energy Weapons
Melee Weapons
Unarmed
Lockpick
Sneak
Speech
Steal
Useable but less useful then the above:
Science
Repair
Gambling
Science and Repair were used in FO1, but were much more prominent in FO2. And hey, gambling was the instant money skill! I’d say that was pretty useful.
Ben – Lighten the fuck up. As Old Man Gravy said earlier, the neat thing about Qt3 is the variety of opinions. Shit man, if you want to keep out all those unsavory types (i.e. people with different views than you) then Qt3 would just be as much as a hivemind as the Codex supposedly is. :rolleyes:
everything but small arms and energy weapons(i.e. Unarmed is worthless without the power fist)
Dude that is so wrong it’s sickening. I’m guessing you just fought your way through the game and never bothered to try anything else.
Oh, and making sneaky throwing weapon master kicks ass.
It was a McCarthy joke. I’m pretty sure Ben doesn’t really have a list.
N-L: Unarmed in FO1 was completely worthless without the powerfist. I mean, you could probably get overpowered enough with other skills to make that work, but it was vastly less useful than small/energy/melee. If you want to roleplay and try out different shit you can do make anything you want work, but that’s also true in hated Bethesda games.
And repair and science were usable in FO1, but they weren’t useful.
Gambling was a terrible idea for a skill, actually, since it went from “complete waste of skill points” to “breaks the economy of the game” in the space of 5 or so points.
Unarmed is fine. Saying it is “COMPLETELY WORTHLESS WITHOUT THE POWERFIST” is pushing it. By the end you want the powerfist if you’re planning to take out hordes of Mutants quickly, but believe me, the spiked knuckles worked against most humans or ghouls. Honest.
Actually, if you don’t mind importing, several old games have been bundled and re-released in the UK.
You can acquire The Fallout series (1, 2, and Tactics), Baldur’s Gate series (1+ Sword Coast, 2+ Throne of Bhaal), or The Icewind Dale series (extrapolate the pattern).
Wonderful.
You can also order them all from Play, if ye prefer. The prices are the same.
I’ve replayed the first Fallout several times and I figured out a nice way to re-experience the game. To see all the hidden content or to re-experience the characters, setting and story quickly is to lower the combat difficulty in the options (I don’t quite remember what they were, but just crank the difficulty down). Then roll a character with a really high LUCK – this is the important part. Since the diff is low, you can afford to go with low strength or other stat. With a super high luck, your chances of seeing the fun stuff go up dramatically. I’ve found this to be the fastest, easiest way to re-experience the game.
N-L: Unarmed in FO1 was completely worthless without the powerfist
Get off the drugs, BNOL. I’ve beaten the game with a character with tagged unarmed.
I mean, you could probably get overpowered enough with other skills to make that work, but it was vastly less useful than small/energy/melee.
Obviously, you’re using only your fists for fuck’s sake so of course it’s less powerful and probably not AS useful, but saying it’s completely worthless without the power glove is dumb.
If you want to roleplay and try out different shit you can do make anything you want work, but that’s also true in hated Bethesda games.
Most “role-playing” in Bethesda’s games boils down to making a bunch of shit up in your head like “I am ogrniarman, son of the Fallen God Chickenfaggot” and then running around going “I am running everywhere because of the sins of my father and I must repent for them.” It’s digital LARPing. Fallout actually supports real role-playing by giving you hard stats to go with it and actual choices and consequences and all that good stuff.
And repair and science were usable in FO1, but they weren’t useful.
Repair helped you solve a few quests and was needed to get the Power Armor (along with science I believe. OH MAN TWO FOR ONE.) Plus, science also allowed you to converse in-depth with ZAX and in my opinion, just that makes it useful for at least one playthrough.
Gambling was a terrible idea for a skill, actually, since it went from “complete waste of skill points” to “breaks the economy of the game” in the space of 5 or so points.
But it WAS useful, heh.
Hey, I’m back with some more notes:
I’m glad it took me a while to get back to this thread. The initial “Oh, you must hate turn-based combat!” round of responses would have pissed me off, because I love turn based combat. I think that’s my real problem, actually. If you compare Fallout to most turn-based strategy games (whether table-top or electronic) it comes up short. If you compare it to RPGs, it’s a lot easier to take. I still feel fights take too long to resolve given how simple they are, though. And the combat AI is absolutely brain dead.
The economy is still a massive pain in the ass. I chose bartering as one of my starting skills, which means I immediately broke the game without realizing it, but I‘ve been making a conscious choice not to abuse the economy like that. My bigger problem is that there’s just not enough liquidity in the system. Every town is a game of “how can I convert the heavy crap I’m currently carrying into caps / weightless items?” The answer involves selling my rifle to some dude in exchange for 427 caps a pistol, and 3 knives. The knives are sold to another guy in exchange for 85 caps, and some fruit, which is sold to sold to yet another guy in exchange for all his caps. And so on. At first, it was interesting. Now it’s just a chore.
But boy am I digging this game anyway. I’ve decided to ditch the “logical” order of the progression, and am currently in way over my head in the ruins of Los Angeles. The discovery of which has made me realize that Shady Sands is somewhere in the Central Valley. (Bakersfield?) Which explains the farming, and also why it’s such a shit-hole. I picked up some Plasma Grenades from the Gun Runners, and actually had some decent luck against the big nasties on the surface, only to find out they respawn unless you kill their queen. And, given the poor lighting conditions down there, my grenades seem to go every which way. Including onto me. Time to come up with a new plan, I guess.
QUESTION: Can my bodyguards who can use “Any pistol” or “rifles” use the plasma pistol or plasma rifle? Because underpowered or not, I’m going to find a way to take those suckers down.
The initial “Oh, you must hate turn-based combat!” round of responses would have pissed me off, because I love turn based combat.
Sorry mate, that’s just the usual reason why people ditch Fallout so early on. My bad.
I’ve decided to ditch the “logical” order of the progression, and am currently in way over my head in the ruins of Los Angeles.
That’s most of the fun of fallout is just doing things YOUR way and not the way some dipshit back at the Vault wants you to.
QUESTION: Can my bodyguards who can use “Any pistol” or “rifles” use the plasma pistol or plasma rifle? Because underpowered or not, I’m going to find way to take those suckers down.
Dunno, never tried myself aheh.
Yeah, most the followers, if I pick them up at all, are long dead before I arrive in LA. I don’t try and keep them alive. If they die, I just keep going. In fact I pick them up just see how long they’ll last “this time.”
This thread made me replay Fallout 2, which I had never finished. The game is pretty good, but mostly because it promises a lot of things, which it does not always deliver. But the sad thing is that as far as I know, no other game delivered what Fallout hinted at… So this eight year game is still something to consider whan you want to think to the future of RPGs !
Last time I played it, I was pretty much fed up with the dialogue, which I found too abundant to be a good gaming interface. This time around, I actually enjoy some of the lines, but I still fast forward to the lines where you have actual choice. I love to read books, not so much to read in videogames, where I’d rather make choices. Maybe the crappy dialogue presentation does not help… But I guess there are problems with the branched conversaton, which often results in a “guess what the developpers want” mini-game.
The combat is pretty bad, for a lot of reasons. It’s too slow, because you have to wait for the NPCs to act… and the strategy mostly consists of targetting the eyes… You can’t really use things like grenades if you don’t have the appropriate skill, and there are better skills to have, so your tactics are pretty much uni-dimensional. If you’re not overpowered, the result of a fight often depends of luck, because a big critical hit is what separates victory from defeat. I’m in Redding, the part where you’ve got to clean the mine… That fight is awful, far too long and boring for its own good (and I don’t know how you’re supposed to tank the wannabigos without the power armour)…
I guess there’s more strategy involved in a good jRPG like SMT: Nocturne or DQ 8 (but the fights are much more central in those games). Or just go Fire Emblem if you want turn-based strategy goodness ! Well I guess it’s an incentive to play a diplomat type character.
So, as a game, Fallout is good but not great. As an idea box, it’ great, one of the most interesting RPGs (alongside Ultima VII). I’d like to see other open endend rpgs (I did not play Oblivion, because Morrowind was not my cup of tea), maybe a little less repetitive, but with more politics in it (the way you can choose whether Redding is going to be dominated by the NCR, or New Reno is good, but there should be more things like that, and the story could capitalize more on those choices).
Sorry for the long, kinda confused post !
Those mines in Redding are a bitch. I like to wait until I can kill those bug monsters reasonably fast. If you’re plinking them with a shitty automatic pistol and hoping your leather jacket will protect you, maybe you should get topside and look for raiders to kill.
Well, I’ve got the advanced power armour MK II and a big Magnum, around 160 small arms but I just can’t be bothered to track down all these critters. It’s just lame game design at this point.
The saga continues. (Spoiler warning for the other people also currently playing Fallout.)
I finally solved Vault 13’s water chip problem. I was totally thrown by the fact that Fallout’s Bakersfield is not where Earth’s Bakersfield is. Or perhaps the map just doesn’t have “up” equate directly to “North,” I’m not sure. Whatever the explanation, I spent a loooong time wandering the wastes before I realized that you can’t just magically will a Vault into existence where you think it ought to be. I eventually gave up on searching the wastes, returned to the Hub, and caught the clue that I somehow missed before: The Necropolis is the only city that doesn’t deal with the water merchants. I’d previously been to the Necropolis, but I hadn’t noticed the manhole covers, so I just milled around the Hotel and left. But this time I knew I needed to go into the sewers. So I returned to the Necropolis only to find….
Corpses. Everywhere. And big-ass mutant invaders all up in the Necropolis’s grill. I try to initiate a conversation (the guys at the Army Base had been totally cool chatting with me) and they annihilate my hearty band. At which point I realize I hadn’t saved during my jaunt across the wastes. Shit. I load up my previous game, and find that the mutant invasion hasn’t happened yet. I negotiate with the ghoul underground, get the water chip, and fix their water pump, even though I know they’ve only got like a month left to live.
I think it’s pretty neat that the Mutant Army doesn‘t wait around for you, although the window is pretty small: Even if you don’t use the 100 day Water Merchant extension, the Necropolis is toast long before you need to complete the Chip quest. I don’t know if my character could have completed the chain with all those big mutants roaming around, although perhaps a quick talker such as myself could have convinced the Overseer to move the Vault’s population to Shady Sands.
I’m really digging the things Fallout does well, but I’m also kind of frustrated at how incomplete a lot of the ideas and events are. I’m starting to understand why everyone makes on-rails experiences these days: Open-ended games must be a real bitch to balance / script. But I’m glad that people try.