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

Playing as a Philo Beddo-style black chick boxer w/ knucks right now. The VATS-assisted punching anims are fun.

Forks, did you ever pick this up?

i did and i never got into it? started a new job right about when i got it and couldn't find the time to devote. PLUS i bought it on ps3 stupidly when i played fallout on 360 so the controls never quite felt right. Someday...

a ha. I'd recommend hitting it up during the next Steam sale for PC. Modding the shit out of this improves it immensely.

I'm trying to find a proper dog mod. At least one guy has created a mod where you can add corgis to the game.

I feel the need to run any song on a custom playlist thru a normalizer and processor that strips some of the fidelity out. I like the tunes on where when it sounds like they're playing old 78s thru radios lost in time. Weird ghostly stuff that somehow survived and came from a different time, preferably kinda obscure so that I can't connect my own memories of the song with its use in-game.

Like, hearing Tom Petty on here wouldn't work. This is an escapist universe that Diverged from our own sometime around the Korean War. I want the reflected after-echoes of post-war/midcentury American transmissions.

I wonder if a UK/Euro Fallout would work. Would there be more Quartermass jokes?

Have you played S.T.A.L.K.E.R.?

Yup. Been a while, tho.

This is a good selection, and all the tunes are available in mono .oggs, too:

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35984

Haha the fact that I even know what a mono ogg is means I'm statistically much more likely to play Fallout games.

Bought an upgraded video card just to play this on 60 fps with the settings cranked

I have been playing through New Vegas and I'm at about 30 hours. On a whim, though, I put in Fallout 3 and loaded my last saved game, 50 hours. I hadn't actually finished it, but it turns out I was 30 minutes from completing the game so I ended up doing so.

Differences I now note/remember:

--At this point in Fallout 3, my quest dial, or whatever, is totally dark. I've completed everything I've been given. Definitely missing areas of the game, but on this playthrough it just hasn't come up. In New Vegas my quest dial is still full of incomplete crappy things I can't be bothered to do, things I simply can't do because they're broken or too abstract, things I've somehow fucked up due to my "reputation", and things I'm not likely to do because I can't be certain it won't fuck me up.

--Fallout 3 is actually visually the superior game. I couldn't believe it. Even generic corridor sequences somehow look better. When I loaded my game I was about to escape from the Enclave and coming out into that DC Wasteland after only having played New Vegas for months was like... Holy shit, New Vegas is ugly. Fallout 3 seems more detailed somehow. How much of a letdown was The Strip itself? A big letdown.

--Now that I remember, I rolled mainly with a Railway Rifle and a Shishkebab. The sense of achievement at having made my own weapons was fucking cool, but the guns in New Vegas ARE really cool. At this point I basically load New Vegas to shoot various guns at people, hopefully modify them, and find many other cooler guns. Great guns. Great shotguns, more than one scoped rifle, loads of grades of handguns and their ammo... oh man. I don't fuck with explosives or energy in New Vegas. In Fallout 3 I sort of had to, and maybe it was rewarding for having done so.

--The targeting sights in New Vegas help me shoot a lot. I'm not a "shooter" person and found strafing Super Mutants in the DC Wasteland sort of at the limit of my actual "gaming" ability.

--Load times are worse in New Vegas (PS3).

--The story in Fallout 3 was clear what I could do to further it. In New Vegas I'm basically at the point where all these impossible, boring, or unclear objectives have to crystallize in order for me not to have to spend my time on the boring shit that's still lit up in my quest dial. I'll be fucked if I'll ever do that REPCONN facility again and I hope those ghouls fucking die.

--Companions are like... everywhere in New Vegas. People just turn up and offer. I never had a companion in Fallout 3 until the very end and then I thought it was kind of a special offer. Nothing was cooler than wandering around DC Wasteland for the first time and being completely ill-equipped, irradiated, and very lonely. Now I've got a bunch of sidekicks cracking jokes about card games or something.

--The map in New Vegas is rigged. You start out and you can't go a certain way because you'll get slaughtered by cazadores or deathclaws. So you have to follow the least interesting sequence of quests ever just to get around the map. Later, you can't go a certain way unless you want to hang with cazadores or deathclaws. Pretty sure my progress right now is being impeded by me not being interested in fighting boring hard monsters (not "fun" hard monsters). In Fallout 3 I was pretty sure I could get where I was going if I was careful, learned the terrain, and had enough ammo. There were tough bros in that game, but not annoying tough.

latest DLC is now 25% off on Steam.

Old World Blues is entertaining. More of the same, really, but a bit more charm and a lot of great items.

The voice-acting of your friends in the Sink is REALLY uneven. While I find the scientists all done well, half of the Sink characters are just...off. I liked the auto-doc and the CIU, ones like the toaster and muggy are wrong. Tonally off, both in writing and voice.

Tho "Blind Diode Jefferson" is just awesome as a joke name.

I actually like how the map in NV is set-up. I think it's an awesome way to do an immersive tutorial and intro to the world w/out the kludgey tutorial bits. Hell, you can even skip Sunny's part.

I like that there's the delayed payoff of actually getting to the city, and even you do, there's still 3/4 of the game left.

I'm kinda curious how stable the mods are to play FO3 inside the NV engine.

Uh how would that work, would it just be regular FO3 with iron sights and dehydration?

Possibly

Hop on it, kids; FONV is onsale for $15 today, all three DLC are 7.50 each on Steam.

Might pick up FO3:GOTY for only $22.50, too.

The writing and the voice-work on Dead Money are great. The survival horror aspect and repeated textures of the town, not so much.

Nice that you finally get a B.A.R, tho. Odd how it doesn't show up in Honest Hearts, tho, from what the main character of that one mentions.

Also, this shit is way Bioshock-y

and kinda inscrutable how they led with THIS as the first DLC

namechange

Finally beat Dead Money last night. Great writing, fucking annoyingly brutal gameplay.

Deadlock/Running Man collars suck. Made it out of the vault with 4 gold bars, tho.

Both fallouts now on super sale on Steam.

Chris Avellone is posting links to SA on his twitter feed, resulting in the discovering of this fan-art:

http://i.imgur.com/DrykP.jpg

Where's Veronica? Or did the lesbian fisting gag mean she was unsuitable. There are some weird people in here. I don't recognize some of them.

i liked Old World Blues but i skipped through a lot of the dialogue ruthlessly. labored nerd humor is not my thing ("why u playing fallout then" heh)

OCD character-build types take note -- the "book depository" robot thing in your room potentially changes the whole game. you can print up skill books for next to nothing, where previously the game had a handful scattered around the whole gameworld.

Yeah, but you can only make one of each skill book, right? +4 teach stat is a limited effect

oh i only tried it once! i thought you could just keep doing it.

Trying to get the Cinematech mod to work, b/c I want 35mm film grain in this thing.

Christ, Steam says I've played this at least 118 hours already.

Ugh, I think I'm burning out. 140+ hours in on this character, and the last dlc ain't even out yet.

I did install the "orgasm" mod that patches the lack of sound bug during the humping fade-to-black scenes. My blue-haired bespectacled black chick character will fuck her way across the wasteland or die trying, sexdroid or no sexdroid.

your pursuits are noble

http://askarcade.tumblr.com/

kind of loving dead money atm. all the peeps talking about blowing through it in 2 hours are FULL OF SHIT btw. i am a pretty seasoned FO3/NV player and man lemme tell u, u gonna die a bunch of times, esp if you are a compulsive gotta find everything dude like me.

I didn't like the village part of dead money; too many bear traps for my limbs, too few building textures.

I'm waiting for Lonesome Road to hit, and am playing FO3 in the meantime. Bethesda is posting little 60-sec "holotape" mp3s to their blog of Ulysses' diary.

yeah the bear traps were pretty goddamn ridic, i just started into the casino so maybe i am particularly into it right now because getting out of the villa and all the ghost people was such a goddamn relief.

i will prob also go back to FO3 for a bit after i finish this, never did the pitt although i own it and should prob go ahead and suffer through mothership zeta one of these days

Mothership zeta is one note, but has some interesting ideas. Quite short, too.

The best part is probably the audio logs you find.

I just began Point Lookout yesterday; you can see how some bits were tested out for FONV there.

i really really liked point lookout

Point Lookout was the most standalone of the FO3 addons for sure

http://www.bethblog.com/index.php/2011/08/25/lonesome-road-coming-september-20th-couriers-stash-and-gun-runners-arsenal-one-week-later/

o i didn't see this part:

Gun Runners’ Arsenal (Xbox LIVE for 320 Microsoft points, PlayStation Network and Steam for $3.99) increases the range of unique weapons,weapon mods, ammo types and recipes waiting to be uncovered in the vast Mojave Wasteland.

Among the unqiue weapons added are the Bozar, an all-powerful 5.56mm Light Machine Gun, the Smitty Special, an overwhelming variant of the Plasma Caster, the MFC Cluster mine, the Esther, a unique Mini Nuke Launcher, and the ridiculous Nuka Breaker – a new melee weapon made from a Nuka-Cola neon sign. In total Gun Runners’ Arsenal adds 27 new weapons, 40 new weapon modifications for existing weapons, 18 new new recipes, and 29 new ammo types — including the 12 Ga. Dragon’s Breath, Hive Missiles, and 25mm/40mm Plasma Grenades. Finally, Gun Runners’ Arsenal also adds more than 20 all-new challenges to the Mojave Wasteland.

i get a little annoyed at how many weapons are "omg kewl" instead of just effective, but maybe i'm not really in the spirit of the game

wait by 20 new challenges, do they just mean shit like "bash 50 dudes in the noggin w/ the Nuka Breaker" or something actually interesting

Usually, yeah. I do the challenges if I get perks or stat bumps

Beat PL tonight, sorta. FONV could use more tripping sequences, and Lovecrafty bits

Love the Bozar in FO2 :D

the bozar is the greatest fallout weapon ever. super pumped for this

Kinda disappointed that there's not more narrative dlcs announced. The writing on each one one has been great, and the voicework on HH/OWB is _fantastic_.

http://cdnstatic.bethsoft.com/bethblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/FONV-Lonesome-Road-Screenshot-3.jpg

boss fight!

Possibly. You got yer unlaunched nuclear ICBM there too, giving it the vibe of a Bond film climax.

However, this is Fallout, and one of the great things I love about the series is that you can talk your way thru it. It requires far more skill to create ending drama thru well-written dialogue than just bashing each other with shovels, but Avellone & co can probly pull it off. We'll see.