Fallout: New Vegas - Fall 2010

kyrieee wrote:

So, I have to ask, what about the game is it for you guys that makes you play it so obsessively? I want to get into the game but as a gameplay system there's just so little to the combat despite it being such a large part of the game and so far I've found the story and characters almost completely uninteresting. Not bad, like Alpha Protocol, just uninteresting.

Am I missing something, or do you guys get really into the story? (I just got to the strip btw)

Fallout (all of them) is a very make your own story / fun sort of game. It's easy to "beat" the game on the normal setting. I'll often make my own goals for what I'm going to do while I play, such as knocking weapons out of peoples hands and then shooting them in the legs. Or I'll just wander around letting Veronica punch things. There are a bunch of weapons that may not be great, but are great fun. Trying to mix that part up makes the combat more fun.

Then there's the wacky stuff that happens. Since the game is so expansive, there are plenty of really silly things that happen for no reason. I'll often just go along with the wacky and make a new objective out of that.

For example, I was disguised as a faction, went up to their base, was spotted as an intruder, paid my way into the base, then was suddenly shot at while the guard proclaimed that my disguise wasn't fooling him. No kidding, we just talked about this and I paid you 100 caps. Then I walk into the base and no one cares at all.

I think there is a lot of decent story and characters hidden in Fallout, but most of the time, you've got to make your own story and characters.

I just wanted to let everyone know that my first adventure mod for Good old Fallout New Vegas is now ready.

IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/PMT2banner.png)

Tales from the Burning Sands' first chapter (The Chef) is ready to rumble. As with all of my adventure mods, it's heavy on notes, story, characters and puzzles, and light on combat.
A new Help Wanted terminal has been installed in the fine establishment known as the Prospector's Saloon; there might be some useful information to be found there.

Tales from the Burning Sands Chapter One - The Chef

IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/smallsands1.jpg)

Puce Moose wrote:

I made a mod!

Downloading now.

Puce, what do you do for a living?

Squee!

Ah, my one regret with consoles in the inability to play mods. Sounds great Puce!

Ballotechnic wrote:

Ah, my one regret with consoles in the inability to play mods. Sounds great Puce!

Agreed. FWIW, Puce is the reason I'm hoping to pick up FO3 (and NV?) come steam sale time.

i38warhawk wrote:

When I'm out exploring the wastes I always end up jumping places only to realize than Obsidian has put up some kind of barrier (invisible walls) that stops me. Something I didn't noticed so much in Fallout 3, kind of limits exploration.

I hate that. It's a classic case of the game saying 'Yes, I know you could easily climb over these mountains, but I don't want you to!'. Quarry Junction is such a posterchild for this. You can't get in there except through the main entrance (encountering a metric ****ton of Deathclaws) or through a passage hidden somewhere in the mountains, I was searching my arse off for that one. And there you walk up to the mountain top and reckon, yes, I can easily climb and jump over this, but the game gives you the middle finger. Invisible walls in an exploration-based game - not on.

@Puce, quick bug report.

Spoiler:

after dragging Mort to the door and reading the terminal, when I stepped outside his body was stuck partially in the ground making moving him impossible. I used console to resurrect him and kill him to pull him out so it wasn't really hindering but I figured you'd like to know about that. The bucket by the graves is also fused into the rocks.

Anyway, another great mod man. This one was a bit shorter aside from

Spoiler:

searching for all those damned ingredients :D

but the notes were really well written and engaging. I generally skim over notes in these games but your stuff always has me reading ever line fully (and not just due to needing to for progression). Keep up the good work and I'll keep wrecking those blasted, ugly power pylons!

Edit:

Spoiler:

there also seems to be a weird thing in the speaker room. When you have on of the speakers on the side of your screen and start turning away, when you can only see about 1/4th of it it disappears. Not being picky or anything, just pointing it out

Thanks for the comments guys; glad to see people finding their way over to my little corner of the Mojave.

PandaEskimo:

Finished off my Masters in Biology, and currently I'm job hunting by day, mod making by night!

FedoraMcQuaid:

Thanks for the report! Those speakers have always acted a bit oddly (they're pulled from my An Evening with Mr. Manchester mod) from certain viewing angles. I may just start from a different base model and rebuild them.

Man, do not fast travel to the northern rail yards. If I didn't have The (This?) Machine with me, it wouldn't have ended like this:
IMAGE(http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/1193/nightstalkerdeathclawru.jpg)

Damn. I need to go do that now!

Holy Crap!

Spoiler:

I just killed Caesar while trying to free Benny (he died, but s'okay because I was only freeing him so I could kill him myself. Benny's death was going to be on my terms. Not the Legion's.

Then I snuck out of camp with a stealth boy, killing anyone who spotted me with a rebar club. I now have something called a "displacer glove" and some kind of Legion version of the power fist in pretty good condition because almost everyone I killed had one and I just repaired the lot of them.

So I've been officially vilified by the Legion twice now, once for killing the Legion raid party at Nipton, and now again for assassinating their leader.

Oh, and as part of the loot, I got a chainsaw. So I can head out to the wastes with that and my shotgun and kill a bunch of Feral Ghouls while yelling "have a taste of my Boomstick, baby!"

But that's not even my favorite moment. My favorite moment came in when

Spoiler:

A team of mercs was harassing Jacobstown. I walked up to their leader and told him that he'd rather deal with the supermutants than with me, and...

he took his gang and left.

I find that having high speech and Charisma matters a whole lot more in this game than it did in Fallout 3. In F3 I was socially maladjusted with high science, lockpick and small guns. This time having high lockpick doesn't seem as useful yet, and I haven't upped my science much in 15 levels.

It may be the same mechanics, but the game plays completely differently this time around for me.

Is it possible to wipe out the Powder Gangers? I've killed every single one I could find, but it doesn't seem to affect their blurb in the ending. Did I miss their leader or something?

New favorite way to kill Deathclaws: Fully repaired minigun, armor piercing 5mm ammo, >90 guns skill.

Instead of getting more afraid as they get near, it's like they're walking into giant fan blades as they get close.
Less effective on Nightkin in terms of not getting hurt myself, but still fun.

And a huge contrast to sniper shots to the legs and hoping my last bullet out of 5 would take them out or that I could switch weapons fast enough....

Just finished my first vanilla playthrough a few days ago =D.
Fully refreshed for a second run!

Meet, Jana.
IMAGE(http://imgur.com/gYFvq.jpg)

Caught in mid-confident stride!

ATI has released a 10.10e hotfix (Windows 7 only currently as I understand it) that mentions Fallout New Vegas performance improvements.
I'm running a 5850 and the hotfix seems to have smoothed out the small stutters I was experiencing here and there.

http://support.amd.com/la/kbarticles...

I never commented on the patch from a couple days ago, but like for others it did diddly squat to help vanilla performance on my machine. I immediately stuck the .dll fix back in.

Zhaosen wrote:

Just finished my first vanilla playthrough a few days ago =D.
Fully refreshed for a second run!

Meet, Jana.

Looking good! What mods are you running? Like with FO3, I plan on taking a long break and letting all the DLC get released and the game re-set in my mind before I try another playthrough.

Montalban wrote:

Looking good! What mods are you running? Like with FO3, I plan on taking a long break and letting all the DLC get released and the game re-set in my mind before I try another playthrough.

From the picture...
-FNV Enhanced Shaders HD - Final Beta (adds DoF,SSAOD)
-BEWARE OF GIRL Type 3 HiRez HiDetailed Replacer (female body)
-Wasteland Courier Type 3 (jeans+shirt)
-Pimp my scarf (scarf >.>)
-Tailor Maid NV (slaver shoulderpad+raider skirt)
-URWL for New Vegas Realistic Lighting (err, lighting)

Also got a bunch o others (repair/weight balance, bug fixes, etc)

Puce Moose wrote:

Caught in mid-confident stride!

ATI has released a 10.10e hotfix (Windows 7 only currently as I understand it) that mentions Fallout New Vegas performance improvements.
I'm running a 5850 and the hotfix seems to have smoothed out the small stutters I was experiencing here and there.

http://support.amd.com/la/kbarticles...

"File not found." :/

FedoraMcQuaid wrote:
Puce Moose wrote:

Caught in mid-confident stride!

ATI has released a 10.10e hotfix (Windows 7 only currently as I understand it) that mentions Fallout New Vegas performance improvements.
I'm running a 5850 and the hotfix seems to have smoothed out the small stutters I was experiencing here and there.

http://support.amd.com/la/kbarticles...

"File not found." :/

I had the same problem, but googled 10.10e to a link to the AMD Game forum. From there, a link was posted that I could download from.

I'm about to check to see if it helps. It looks like the hotfix mainly helps crossfire performance... which could help me :). It wasn't all that bad before, but I was getting some slowdowns in the strip area during the daytime.

Closeup of Jana =D, near the Yangtze Memorial
IMAGE(http://imgur.com/A6KpH.jpg)

Well since there are a ton of posts about this I didn't have a chance to read them all so I'll just share my opinions about the game. Like someone else was saying the exploration is amazing in new vegas. I've played for a good 50 hours since the release and still haven't come close to finishing the game. I love to just walk around and find locations and special items. Sadly I ruined some of my game play by training a deathclaw to a nearby town to see if they could help me kill it...(this was early on in the game) Sadly it destroyed them all. All in all I believe that new vegas is absolutely a great game

I seem to have hit a show stopper. I'm in Vault 11, and without spoiling anything, when I get to the "end" fight there I crash with a sound-stuttering bug every time. I have only been able to finish the fight once and in that instance ED-E died, so I reloaded. I have tried this at least a dozen times now, and it crashes every time but that once. Anyone got any ideas? I tried disabling the sound card but NV won't start without a sound device enabled.

My game stability has gone down the toilet since the last patch dropped. I had 5 crashes last night, and have encountered one particularly annoying bug, where if I unlock any of my "High Roller" rooms in any casino, all the casino employees suddenly aggro on me. Needless to say, I have re-loaded an earlier save and am avoiding the casinos until I can find a solution.

Anyone care to share their general apparel/weapon loadouts? The ones you settled on for the end of the game. Seeing all these screenshots that are flying around, I feel like I must be missing some better apparel. I've always been good at finding the unique weapons but armor, not so much.

For my first character I settled on the following:
Recon beret (given when you acquire Boone)
Sunglasses (generic loot)
Reinforced Combat Armor (generic loot, shops)
Anti-materiel Rifle (purchased from Gun Runners)
12.7mm Pistol w/ silencer (looted from a Legion Assassin, shops later)

By the end of the game I had a giant collection of almost every unique weapon you can get back in my hotel room but oddly I decided to run around with weapons that I could have just bought over the counter.

My first courier was a smooth talking cowboy...

So..
Sheriff Hat/Recon Beret
Desert Ranger Armor
Authority Glasses
"Lucky"
"Mysterious Magnum"
"RatSlayer"
"Trail Carbine"
Lever Action Shotgun

Kehama wrote:

Anyone care to share their general apparel/weapon loadouts?

By the end of the game I had a giant collection of almost every unique weapon you can get back in my hotel room but oddly I decided to run around with weapons that I could have just bought over the counter.

I have the bad habit of wanting to carry all my unique weapons "just in case." I'm trying to kick the habit. For the last 10 levels I've stuck with: Combat Armor MkII (188 trading post), Recon Beret, This Machine (quest reward from Camp McCarren), Lucky (found in a locked safe in Primm I think), Re-breather (quest reward from Nellis AFB), and the Anti-Material rifle for sniping (Gun Runners).

There's a unique sniper rifle here:

Spoiler:

In a locked footlocker at Sniper's Nest overlooking Cottonwood Cove.

But I'm happy with This Machine and the Anti-Material rifle.

My current outfit

Vault 34 Security Armor
Sheriff's hat
Authority glasses

That Gun (may replace this with Maria)
Q-35 Matter Modulator
Sniper Rifle

And, for specific :

Benny's Suit (for speech/barter)
Vault 3 Utility Jumpsuit (for repair/lockpicking)
Wasteland Surgeon's Outfit (for medical)

Silenced 22 (for those inevitable casino visits)

I had kept the sheriff's duster for it's +1 CHR benefit until it wore out; never could maintain it for some reason.

Ratslayer is my favorite, but at level 15 I still like to carry an assortment of weapon types to fit all ranges and available ammo. Basically, I've got so many weapons festooned on my gear that even I would shoot me on sight.