Doesn't FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS deserve its own thread?

anyway i agree w/everything you've said goole - i wanna add that I think Arcade's an amazing character & the most interesting companion of the Fallout series. i love this cut exchange that was gonna be in the game after meeting Caesar:

Arcade: "What a load of Brahmin shit! Can you believe that guy?"

Player (Option 1; requires INT 8): "I don't think either of us can fully understand what he and the tribes have gone through."
Arcade: "A fair point, but from the perspective of someone west of the Colorado, the man is clearly out of his mind. Maybe he didn't intend for things to wind up this way, but that doesn't mean he needs to perpetuate this bizarre anachronistic myth. And it doesn't mean that we should sit by and nod our heads at every absurd faux-Roman casus belli he can dream up. He's a tyrant. The bad kind. And there's no way we're letting him take Hoover Dam."

Player (Option 2): "Who, Caesar?"
Arcade: "Of course, Caesar! You can hardly even hold his men responsible, given how they're practically raised to worship him as a living deity. What's the point of surviving the war? Why did the founders of the Followers crawl their way out of vaults to bring knowledge back to the wasteland? So we could act like the last two thousand years didn't happen? Play dress up so we can fight ancient wars all over again? No way is he getting away with this. I'm not letting it happen. You're not letting it happen."

Player (Option 3): "He seemed pretty smart to me."
Arcade: "Being "smart" doesn't matter if you're insane. Everything makes sense to Caesar because he's twisted everything to his world view. He's Caesar reincarnated, the NCR is the corrupt Roman senate. I wouldn't be surprised if he thought the Colorado River were the new Rubicon. He abdicates responsibility to a myth of historical inevitability. But he's not Caesar. This isn't Rome. And he isn't going to get away with this."

Player (Option 4): "He's a madman. What did you expect?"
Arcade: "Well, yeah! Right. What did I expect? The man's a megalomaniac. He acts like this is some pre-ordained cycle we're returning to. Of all the people who could learn from our past mistakes, he goes and throws all of our knowledge off of a cliff. Instead of trying to learn from the past, he re-creates it, runs back over the same old barren ground."

and JE Sawyer had some interesting things to say about his character arc (arcade spoilers ahead):

Arcade's conflict is about his identity. He is torn between a sense of loyalty and tradition to his father and adoptive family and a desire to be independent, self-made. He feels caught between generations and cultures and isn't sure who he should be or how, if at all, to use the "legacy" (material and otherwise) left to him by his father.

Arcade's endings are intended to reflect that no one is damaged more by reality than the idealist. He does his best to be practical and rational, but there is a strong idealist streak in him/the Followers in general. In some of Arcade's "best" endings (meaning, the circumstances he thought he wanted), he is still somewhat disappointed by how things turned out. In his "worst" endings, he can wind up bitterly disillusioned, brutally murdered, crucified, casually executed and discarded in a ditch, or even defiantly suicidal.

Arguably the worst ending is the one in which Arcade is given to Caesar as an enslaved doctor. The existence is so unbearable to him that he does what the historical Cato the Younger did at Utica: rather than give Caesar satisfaction, he disembowels himself. Like Cato, Arcade cannot live in a world where everything he tried to resist has come to pass.

I should just buy a ps3 huh

I've played a few hours of this and loved it, sometimes I miss playing video games

If I buy a system which one should I get

PC

http://i28.tinypic.com/symgrc.jpg

the last time I pc gamed was when I played bf1942

still really loving this game dudes!!

but damn if some of the quests aren't buggy as hell. like, annoying, progress-stopping fucked. i looked up the veronica quest (who am i kidding, i'm looking up every damn thing) and wow, it's really bad. almost none of what is supposed to happen happened for me!

seems extra unfair that the companion quests seem the most screwy since those are often the most rewarding as far as dialogue and acting. unless you're on pc and can console command your way into it

the only memorably bugged out quest for me was the monorail one. i've been giving this a break again... i'm never gonna finish this game

i'm considering d/ling sierra madre just to bump the level limit!

everytime i see this thread pop up it makes me feel guilty for stopping playing this game.

lol danny trejo!

ok i'm going to riff on something super nerdy and pointless, but sometimes the character design system in this game really bugs me (it does in most games). you ought to be more free to pick what you want, basically.

you can't increase your SPECIAL stats after character creation, but there is a perk you can get that does; you get perks every other level, so we can say 1 pt of SPECIAL is worth 2 'levelings' worth of perk improvements

you get 10-15 skill pts every level-up, depending on your INT, there is also a Tag! perk that gets you 15 into 1 skill. so there's a rough skill-to-perk equivalence too.

so, designers, why aren't these values transferable? why don't they just let you buy what you want out of a shared pool of points? like, you get 20 or 30 points every level-up, if you want to buy a pt of SPECIAL worth 30, or a perk worth 10 or 20, or put all of it into skills, why not?

really don't get why games don't do this. free the player imo!!

Isn't there a maximum number of times you can buy that perk, though? So you can't just keep getting it and max our your character.

nah you can get Intensive Training as many times as you want. in FO2 you could only do it once per SPECIAL stat.

i dont really understand goole's complaint or what part of it he feels restricted by

dead money dlc dropped to 400 xbox fake dollars today only.

drudgesiren.gif

oh cool

i shd answer tam tam at some pt maybe

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Fallout:_New_Vegas_voice_actors

lol holy crap i didn't recognize any of these people. i mean, the famous people. except for danny trejo. and kris kristofferson.

makes you wonder why they even paid them to do it if you cant even tell..

well, it's all pretty high quality even if i couldn't! the yes man character was pretty entertaining w/o me figuring out it's dave foley

i really enjoyed william sadler as victor

I actually like the NCR. One of the themes in the game is that these fucked-up little communities are somehow viable in their own way and submitting them to bureaucratic/managerial structures AGAIN negates the opportunity for exploring different modes of organizing groups of people that we haven't tried before...

But I rarely see anything much worth preserving. Sometimes this is more of a design/programming/AI thing, though. I felt like blowing away everyone in Primm... what a shitty way to start a game. You walk into an abandoned casino and there's a bunch of people just staring blankly or walking into walls. "Please mister, protect our town." What town? You idiots, your town is an abandoned casino. Go find something to do. Sigh, Fallout.

I had put this down for two months but came back to it today and just had a horribly confusing session (is this a bug? is this related to my "reputation"?) for the Ultra Luxe casino mission or whatever. Deeply, deeply broken. But I can see what they were trying to do and god damn if the idea wasn't cool... e.g. doing an episode that's like an Agatha Christie novel, similar to that part in the last game where you go into that creepy VR simulation of a 1950s American town. As spectacular as Red Dead was overall there were no missions where they even ATTEMPTED something like that.

I love ghouls. Their voices are so funny. There's a homeless ghoul in Freeside or whatever and you pay him a bottle cap and he gives you a clue. Today I just sat there feeding him money just to listen to his funny voice. I love it when there's a whole town of them.

I wonder if this honest hearts dlc is going to be similar to the fallout 3 update that raised the level cap and continued the game past the finale.. Im more inclined to buy stuff like this rather than standalone stuff like dead money..

i have heard that none of the dlc's will extend the story past the end

Mods do! Which is why I will only ever play Bethsoft games on the PC.

?? what is there to do after the main storyline? just run around and shoot shit, or are the miscellaneous quests still open or something.

At the moment just pick up any random quests you haven't done, and of course play through any new stuff you've dl'ed. So far there aren't many decent size new player-made quests but I'm keeping my eye out - I'll post here when I find one. It's taking modders a lot longer to create new quests than in the old days because everyone's pitching for high quality voice acting now.

I have a question: I can only have one human companion at a time, but does that mean I can, say, leave Boone in my hotel room, go pick up somebody else, adventure around with them for a bit and then drop them off and trade back for Boone?

yes.

dead money: fuckin hard!

Sweet! I started another playthrough but I'm going really slow & hardly any time to play. It's tempting to open up my 1st char & just hit Dead Money.

They're recommending you be at least level 17 before you hit that shit.

Watched a video review and it looks cool and unique.

I'm so into this again. What a big generous game. So much to do it's overwhelming. Today I finally just broke down and threw all my casings and ammunition components on the ground. I realized I'd never figure out how it worked to make ammunition so I decided to cut my losses on this whole area of the game. Making food? Don't really care either. But this is a seriously, seriously big game. Fallout 3 is not this big at all at all.

Official patch out for this now.

what's it do? i hear tell of weapon tweaks...

Oops I jumped the gun a bit there. It seems it's not out yet, but on the way next couple of weeks. According to Midlife Gamer, it targets optimisations and stability improvements, is currently in certification all platforms, fixed a lot of the crashes and lockups, and brings weapon balance tweaks and other requested fixes.

they nerfed the Brush Gun with that big patch! those FUCKERS!

yeah and the sniper rifle has been amped up? i think? there's a limb damage and crit chance bonus which i don't think was there before. the unique sniper rifle is now in fact better than the generic (it wasn't, lol).

pretty funny that this has been out for like 18mos and they're doing weapon tweaks, good god

see if you were playing on ps3 you wouldn't have this problem

no, you would have notably different problems instead

BOOM! Right there!

eh i'm kinda a guns realist, i think it'd be cool if the varmint rifle and NCR service rifle did about the same (p high) damage, cos, like, they would.

and the 'assault carbine' shooting 5mm? what is that, even? that's the only thing that reminded me of F3, which had some ridiculous ammo/gun/damage combinations. a .32 round in a hunting rifle? so dumb.

it's not like there isn't a valid gameplay reason for it though - too many different types of ammo can be overwhelming, so every type of ammo has to be usable by multiple weapons. i think they hit the sweet spot between high attn to detail and game balance, tho clearly the most anal types will never be pleased (stares @ u)

I really don't want too much gun realism in my video games, and I don't understand the desire for it at all.

haha i know WHY the variances are the way they are! there have to be low-level and high-level weapons.

games ought to have enough realism in there to allow you to feel involved; but at a certain point if you're getting bent out of shape about variations from ahem irl ballistics, yeah, it's your fault *sulks*

I really don't want too much gun realism in my video games, and I don't understand the desire for it at all.

― Mordy, Friday, May 13, 2011 12:44 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

well im sympathetic to goole's POV too - it just kinda depends on the game. one thing is that real guns are just generally more interesting than fake ones (as fallout 3 demonstrated with its clunky 'original' crapfests). attention to detail sucks u into the gameworld. new vegas puts a lot of thought into the variety of cowboy weapons & ammo which i think is really cool.

yeah, for sure. i just don't want to get to the point where it's like, "this chamber doesn't seem authentic," "the caliber doesn't seem real enough," "the head explosion graphics aren't quite realistic yet," like you start wandering down this path and pretty soon you're asking for more accurate killing simulators. i don't mind if it's a little cartoony (or in Fallout's case, a balance).

pretty soon you're asking for more accurate killing simulators.

shit yeah i am~

hey

i beat this

lol

i went with the NCR ending (surprisingly posi)

without spoiling anything, Legate Lanius is fukken badass

im gonna go back to an older save and play out the Yes Man and House endings, then contemplate another playthrough as a Legion bro