Fallout: New Vegas

[shinymcshine]

Just hit Lv 20, 30 hrs in and continuing to enjoy it, and then, especially after the faff I had not long ago with Bards Tale IV, my saves stop wanting to load !

 

Arrgh !

 

But it seems it's a known issue with Fallout New Vegas (search "infinite loading screen") and the resolution for me was to go on 'start new game' then load my previous save from the pause screen there, rather than from the opening menu screen. Don't know how often this might crop up from now on though.....

[OrangeRKN]

You should absolutely rotate through a few different save slots just in case one does break horribly

[shinymcshine]

I've got a whole bunch of save files, and for now all is fine.

 

In terms of main quest, I've taken out Mr House and Caesar with a view to supporting NCR at the Hoover Dam. 

 

The only issue I'm finding with the gameplay is that it's just not that interesting - I took the Wild Wasteland perk hoping for nice diversions, but nothing so far. Anyway, I've just picked up the Explorer perk (all locations revealed) so hopefully I'll find something engaging soon.

[shinymcshine]

Completed the main quest , Hoover Dam etc, and all a bit disappointing really. My plan was to ally with the NCR, as I was never really convinced that Yes Man wasn't going to turn.

 

But whatever I must have done quest wise it just left me the option to disable the dam and end up ruling (with Yes Man) as an independent.

 

So I stealth boy'd around the final battle, disabled the dam then put on my legion outfit to avoid combat and took out the final legion boss with a handful of plasma grenades.

 

Then had a chat with an unhappy NCR boss, who chose to leave me to it, and credits rolled. 

 

So a bit unfulfilling really - which maybe best sums up my feelings about it overall. 

[DANGERMAN]

yeah, I'd agree with that. I didn't think much of the end, I think I reloaded a save and avoided doing it because it just wasn't what I wanted from the game. I really liked the dlc for the most part, there's quite a lot of it, some of it is very different from the main game

[shinymcshine]

I've got the DLC to do, and plenty of free exploring too if I wanted, but after around just 35 hrs I really not feeling the love or desire to carry on with New Vegas, hence why I went into the end game.

[OrangeRKN]

My first finished playthrough I sided with the NCR, and subsequently I've played to completion as an independent. Two things I really like about the ending - 1) being able to negotiate your way out of the "final boss" with high enough speech/barter, and 2) finding out the fates of all the minor factions, making it a lot more granular than just "here are the three endings".

 

Not sure what you must have done to lock yourself out of siding with the NCR though.

 

For Wild Wasteland, there aren't that many encounters and some of them are quite subtle if you don't know what to look out for - finding the corpse of Indiana Jones in a fridge as a reference to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is only going to get more obscure as a reference!

[shinymcshine]

I'd done a bunch of things for the NCR inc. diffusing the monorail bomb, killing the 4 fiend leaders etc, (and saving the President) and I also killed a whole bunch of Legion leaders & Caesar, but despite travelling with Boone it never triggered his side quests either.

[bellow]

I never got to play this back in the day. Fallout 3 is one of my favourite games, but this landed with a lot of baggage - reports of endless bugs, and ludicrous difficulty spikes when wondering off the beaten path. And since exploration was one of F3's strongest areas I decided to give this a wide berth, and then just forgot about it.

 

And now, down to gamepass, I'm 24 hours in, have encountered nary a single bug nor undue difficulty spike, and I can safely report it's one of the best western RPGs I've ever played. It's just fab - endless conjoined sidequests flowering out in all directions, with storylines, characters and factions crossing in believable and inventive ways. Up to now I can't fault it. Needless to say, Obsidian have tidied up the shooter/RPG mechanics considerably in their latest offering, but this still has a certain charm which makes the gameplay compelling. But it's in the way they've put the world together that really makes it shine. There's so much to see and do. I've hardly touched the main story, so I've been side questing for over 20 hours, and haven't been asked to 'go and fetch something' even once. Brilliant stuff.

[one-armed dwarf]

I'm really interested to hear about this one cause it's being on the backburner for a decade cause everyone talks it up so much, but I really disliked Fallout 3. People talk about this like it's Planescape Torment or something (some devs from that might have been at Obsidian at the time I think)

[bellow]

20 minutes ago, one-armed dwarf said:

I'm really interested to hear about this one cause it's being on the backburner for a decade cause everyone talks it up so much, but I really disliked Fallout 3. People talk about this like it's Planescape Torment or something (some devs from that might have been at Obsidian at the time I think)

 

I mean, if you have gamepass and you're curious about the game, you might as well just fire it up and see for yourself.

 

On the other hand, if you disliked Fallout 3, then I'm not sure I'd recommend this. It does feel different in a Gameworld sense, but the actual gameplay is very familiar.

 

But then, I think both of you should just play it now.

 

Forum playthru!!!

[one-armed dwarf]

I actually have the game on steam but I don't think it works on Windows 10, I have to trudge back through the Nexus and I'm already triggered by that place cause of all the time I spent trying to install a mod that lets me drink potions with my hands in VR Skyrim lol.

[bellow]

Lightweights.

[Sly Reflex]

Don't make me break out Noel Edmunds out again.

[bellow]

Last night I was given the choice to convince the higher ups in a clan to help my faction, or slaughter the lot of them, lest they join with the enemy. Unfortunately, one of their number was stationed behind a quarry populated with the fallout world's toughest foe, the dreaded deathclaw?.

 

I just couldn't find a way through, and ended up going back to the clan headquarters with the bloody intention off, basically, mass genocide.

 

I'd killed loads of them before I decided i just couldn't bear it. These pixels just didn't deserve this.

 

Luckily, being a game rather than real life, I loaded up a save and went, heroically, back to the quarry, where I remembered I had a stealth boy in my pack, and reached the clan member, unmolested by deathclaws, in about 30 seconds.?

 

Now I have to go back to the clan and pretend none of their 'alternative reality' ever took place. I'm expecting a bit of standoffishness, to be honest.

[bellow]

Funnily enough the above quest ended up glitching out. I googled the glitch and it turned out to be a well known bug stopping a quest line to do with the great khan clan on the 360 version. So I had to basically kill the leader of the clan to fail the quest in case leaving it open affected future interactions with the quest giver. Bummer. But then there's so much high quality content in this game it's hard to feel too hard done by. Seriously, I'm closing on 30 hours and I've still hardly touched the main campaign. Amazing, when you think that Obsidian's last foray into this type of game topped out at 20 odd hours to complete.

 

Anyway, second time round I didn't really feel guilty about seeing Papa Khan and guards to the afterlife. It's a harsh world out there. 

[bellow]

Done. Got just over 50 hours out of it, but still felt a bit short changed given that their are some reports out there of 100 plus hours to be had in New Vegas. I honestly don't know where those hours are coming from though, since I got myself the explorer perk and managed to discover about 90% of map locations, took any quests that I came across, and fully explored every cave, cavern or vault.

 

Like all these games you're left with a warm feeling of satisfaction from all the things they do well - great exploration, well written interlocking sidequests and thoughtful RPG mechanics. But also a bit of a sour taste for how the main campaign often trudges it's way to a disappointing and often incoherent conclusion.

 

Here, I spent most of the game courting a faction I judged to be honest peace keepers in the Mojave, doing their quests and building up a high enough rep with them to be able to call them in for support in any sticky situation. However, because I decided to go down a peaceable route in the main quest, judging the boss of Vegas to be a bit of a homicidal know-it-all, and reckoning I could do better job myself, I got locked out from their quests without warning and for no good reason that I could see. To make matters worse, to finish the game I had to slaughter the lot of them, with no peaceful alternative (or at least none that wasn't tied to having very high 'speech' stats, which I would have easily had if the game hadn't capped at an utterly unreasonable level 30). It made no sense. 

 

I'm complaining a bit here. But to be honest, 45 of those 50 hours were as good as it gets for Western RPGs. Totally solid. The next step for Obsidian is to marry the RPG breadth of New Vegas, to the coherent main campaign storytelling of Outer Worlds, so that one side of their game isn't laughing at the other. The way things have panned out for them they should now have the time, money and back-up to do exactly that with Avowed and Outer Worlds 2. (Maybe New Vegas 2 is no longer a pipe dream as well...)

[one-armed dwarf]

Started this a few days ago, with a build specced for luck because well it seems like it would be good in a game called New Vegas. Which I can confirm, I won 12k bottle caps via blackjack and they banned me from gambling but not before giving me the keys to a swanky penthouse.

 

Started playing it mainly cause of a few things about Starfield that were leaving me really unsatisfied. I like the game, but it's approach to narrative and questing was leaving me feeling rudderless because nothing about it really feels connected. Unmoored in a plastic world of loading screens and zero consequence. I heard the quest design in this was good but I'm surprised at how much the game reminds me of Gothic. The world is not level scaled, and is actually quite linear and funneled for an open space. Certain shortcuts are made much more dangerous (especially on very hard/hardcore), you could get to the strip really early on if you want but you would have to fight very dangerous creatures and it would require a pre-planned approach. Which I suspect is maybe controversial considering how open Fallout 3 is. 

 

What that allows tho is a more careful plotting of questlines which naturally fall into your path and push your character forward. Cascading out into separate storylines which weave back into the main thread about getting revenge on Chandler Bing. It feels like a very noirish storyline, set in Fallout's typically heightened take on post-apocalypse. This being more post-post-apocalypse cause society is functional once again, to a point at least. It's a more coherent game than Starfield or Fallout 3 I'm finding, wrt inhabiting the role playing space and seeing the interaction between character sheet and the environment, and questlines which flow together in this way and typically offering more than one way to resolve them depending on your abilities or motivations

 

There's a mod for PC called JSwayer, named after the lead designer because it is he who actually made it. Makes it more hardcore and even closer to the likes of Gothic with very strict inventory limits and levelling is capped to 35 and requires hard choices, but it's too late to install that now without it being completely disruptive to the story I've already had with this character. Maybe another time, fwiw I do think the base game can become a bit easy even on harder modes. Suspect it's cause of how easy it is to aim

 

I will say it took me a very long time to learn the rules of caravan, but once I got it I found it quite fun. The AI really doesn't seem to know how to adjust to having a King card placed on their caravan, wins you every game I feel like (or maybe it's my 9 Luck putting in work again). Also I picked up the 'rad child' perk which gives you constant regen while irradiated, like a permanent stim pack. A small price to pay for -1 to endurance and drinking some toilet water. It heals higher at higher rad levels but the debuffs become much harder there.

[Nigel Tufnell]

This was the one i played most of all the recent Fallout games, it was 300 plus hours when i got the platinum on it, definitely the one i have enjoyed the most, considering picking it up again on Xbox for another playthrough.

[Nag]

I've never played this, presumably it's on Game Pass... just another addition to the list of shame.