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

am now at the strip, wondering how to string out my new vegas experience - what's the path to the final mission? is it finding the guy who tried to shotted me, or is it going to meet Mr House? Avoiding both right now, and considering going in search of the super-mutants at black mountain to kill some time and see my new companion veronica in action...

I found the approach to Black Mountain very enjoyable. It's a winding mountain road with lots of hairpin turns and debris that act as natural hiding spots (for mutants) or cover (for you and yours). There are a fair amount of Super Mutants to keep you busy, and because of the way the level is designed, you can play it almost any way you like (sniping, explosives, melee, whatever you like). I felt this section of the game was nicely designed.

Awesome! That's my next location then...

Woah, vault 11. Amazing.

Finally finished this. What DLC should I try first?

i haven't played them all but the one that got the most love was old world blues. i've only played honest hearts because i picked based on which dangling plot thread (the burned man / brother elijah / courier five) i was the most intrigued by. it was okay. very pretty.

i guess courier five is more intriguing than the burned man since courier five is prob the most mysterious thing in the original game. did you ever find the mountain pass out west, a little south of goodsprings, with GO HOME COURIER and stuff graffitied on it? i assume that's what opens up in lonesome road. it's creepy but in kind of a lesser way than the burned man is creepy; it's much more of a video game hook than a lore detail. i like lore details :/

oh man, I never played all the expansions!

also! how'd you finish?

i played the crazy death fog filled lost casino expansion and liked it a lot. surprisingly hard actually.

i commented on all of the dlc's at some point

i'd rank Honest Hearts best: the burned man character was the most interesting, best written, best acted of the lot, and revealed the most about the world's backstory. the weapon and perk additions were the ones i liked best (ii even rc at this point). the landscape is a little more lush, woodsy and watery which is a nice change of pace.

all the rest are about the same in quality to me, all interesting but none totally stunning.

i made great use of the "sneering imperialist" perk.

I can't remember, did this game store your progress in the cloud or w/e? Not sure if I have my save directory and it'd be nice to do the DLC content without starting over

also! how'd you finish?

I went with the NCR, because I naively thought they were the "good guys" (this is always how I play). Was a bit surprised that Eureka! was the final mission as it felt a little anti-climactic - I kind of expected the last mission to be a real battle royale. Sure enough, the first time I played it I walked into the Legate's compound and, through some glitch somehow, spotted him before talking to him and proceeded to blow him to pieces with the Thump Thump (I'd mostly finessed my skills for laser and pulse weapons, but foolishly walked into this mission with massively depleted energy cells and couldn't BAMF! back to somewhere I could buy some more, and so was reduced to explosives). This kicked off a massive onslaught of Legionaries and it took a lot of stimpacking, drugging up and ammo to kill them all, especially with Veronica and the robot taken out of action so early on.

Was shocked when the Epilogue slide show kicked in, but my xbox hung during this and so I had to finish Eureka! again. This time I approached Legate before attacking him, and managed to talk him into retreating back East.

Am still bummed the NCR walked over the Followers, who were perhaps my favourite tribe in the game. Restarted from an earlier point afterwards to try playing the Liberated Vegas ending, but couldn't remember if that involved whacking Mr House or not. Gave him the coin and he activated all the killbots. I think I could have killed him then, but I held out and took a mission from him. He asked me to wipe our the Brotherhood... But I just couldn't do it; Veronica was my favourite sidekick. But maybe if I ditch her and get the Caravanner as my sidekick again... I don't know. I think I'll try the DLC before replaying the game. But what an amazing game... The Fallout games are definitely the best I've ever played, certainly at least since Vice City, the last game to so swallow me up into its world.

Ok so I will officially say that the ncr ending is pretty much super boring

― O_o-O_O-o_O (jjjusten), Thursday, July 12, 2012 7:16 AM (8 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why o why did i not listen :(

My two picks are Honest Hearts and Old World Blues for worth playing. For some reason, I couldn't grasp the motivation of the bad guy in Lonesome Road

I can't remember, did this game store your progress in the cloud or w/e? Not sure if I have my save directory and it'd be nice to do the DLC content without starting over

Think it did, I recently had a hard drive issue and had to re install everything, was surprised when I'd downloaded Fallout NV through steam again and there was my previous saves.

Thanks Kingfish!

For reasons that I cannot explain, I ended up getting Dead Money, which is really hard, and not much fun, and I've gotten to a point where, thanks to my impoverished health score, a lack of any food/stimpacks and a cloud of poison surrounding my current position, I cannot move any further. I think I'm about ready to give up.

Time to change the difficulty setting then. Certain builds in certain games have moments that are like this, where it gets so unbalanced and unfair that you just say fuck it, switch a setting, and move on. I did this playing Brutal Legend just to get past one of the bullshit RTS sequences.

That was my first thought, but even with difficulty dialed down to easy (which is usually my default setting, as I love games more than I am any good at them) I can't get past where I'm at, and its too much of a ball-aching grind to play from an older save point. Have dl'd Old World Blues now, will give that a go later...

http://distilleryimage10.s3.amazonaws.com/9ae4b3dea6d611e2a1c622000a1fbcae_7.jpg

Anyone heard about the Project Brazil mod for F:NV? The release date keeps getting pushed back but it sounds interesting - can't fault their ambition, at least.

An Alternate Start in Vault 18 with a New Player Character and Main Quest.
A New Intro Video to really give it that "New Game"feeling.
An Ornate Main Quest Line with Compelling Side Quests rich in Fallout & Character Lore.
Hours of Voice Acting recorded at pro-quality in Radian-Helix Media's Tucson, Az Studio.
A Very Large Worldspace in California - The Black Bear Mountain National Forest.
An Epic War between The Super Mutants, The Survivalist Raiders, and The New California Republic.
A Pirate Radio Station DETH 981 with 2 New DJs and Quest + Crafting + Perk Unlocking Segments.
A News Radio Station called NCRPR - New California Republic Radio - with quest updates in the News.
5 Potential Human Companions and 2 Robot Companions available depending on player choices.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/fallout-3-project-brazil

lol dead money really was Actually Hard. a respectably brutal dungeon crawl but/therefore an exhausting grind. it's fun being in extremis in this game tho: the ex-crooner ghoul character taught me how to mix martinis with the "cloud residue" you can scrape off the walls in the town, and i drank them so much to keep my health up i became an alcoholic and had to knock them back nonstop as i descended into the vault.

too many giant infodumps divided into 5000 dialogue topics with that coyly optional adventure game vibe, but the story was still rewarding if you're into (certain corners of) the story of the main one (and remember it really well because you've replayed it a gross number of times). one of the characters is implied to be veronica's ex-girlfriend. lots of courier-five foreshadowing that made me wanna finally get around to owb/lonesome road.

more fun than the vault with the fucking plants.

I just started this a couple of weeks ago and I love it. I knew I would love it because I love Fallout 3 but I love this too.

I just started playing through the DLC for this and I'm currently painted into a frustrating corner in Dead Money. I don't quite have enough health left to barge my way back through hordes of bastards after setting off the gala opening in the belltower. I might have to go back to a previous saveg. Grr. I played through Old World Blues first and it was a lot more fun. Can't wait for Dead Money to be over...

and that's exactly when I gave up on dead money too.

Yeah, Dead Money was dire. I enjoyed the Mt Zion & OWB dlc tho

Just finished Dead Money. What a horrible piece of shit. I'm rich now but doubtful if was at all worth it. Just started Honest Hearts - it must be better, right?

i didn't think it was so bad but maybe that's because in the main game my current char only needs to fire one laser rifle shot from 500 yards to make someone actually explode, so having to whale on near-invincible demons with sticks for a while was a nice change

honest hearts is much, much prettier and the stuff w "the survivalist" is great but i don't remember there being any challenge at all

yeah HH seemed pitched to a lower-level character

I enjoyed the one with the robots with TV for heads, where you get lobotomised - which one was that? But I found with the DLC for both Fallout 3 and New Vegas that it was the game's central narratives that kept me chugging along, and didn't feel nearly as compelled to slog along once the mysteries of who shot the courier/where the dad was were solved.

def had that reaction to the f3 dlc but f:nv does a neater job of leaving loose ends (elijah's trip east, the burned man, the other courier) so that the dlc is about stuff i was already curious about instead of like oh, a spaceship

i guess the nv world just feels bigger than the game and f3 didn't to me

one thing that worked great in that respect is how the gameworld is being fought over by a power to the west and a power to the east and you hear about both of them constantly but never see their homelands

(f2 players have spent plenty of time in the ncr but you get the sense it was much wilder then)

NV's multiple minor factions make it seem like a more lived-in place. i really liked its treatment of the bro'hood of steel as this odd culty thing sitting sorta apart from the main conflict, where f3 just treated them as a default good guy group

xp yeah the evidence that california had become this more-or-less resettled state was a cool tip to, say, deadwood or something.

yeah otm about the BoS, who are in NV what they were in 1 and 2 (see also: super mutants)

dlh otm - I played a bit if Fallout 3's DLC but I didn't feel compelled to continue like I do with New Vegas. The breadcrumbs for the stories are laid pretty clearly through the main game and it's been fun putting the pieces together so far, even if Dead Money was a bust.

a post in this thread i think about every time i play this game is fields of salmon's:

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...

because so much of the game is spent learning disillusioning things about the ncr that are all the usual disillusioning things about capitalist republicanism (government in the pocket of cattle barons, the momentum of doomed imperialist adventures becoming more powerful than the executives supposedly managing them -- pres. kimball's five minutes of hot air followed by a depressed hot-mic "ok, let's get the fuck out of here" a nice touch in this regard) and then caesar calls you into his tent to lecture you about the hegelian dialectic and argue that the only answer is fascism. the independent-vegas ending is a rebuke to this whole version of history but it isn't pat or feelgood and the ending slides imply you maybe haven't thought this through all that well yourself

unless there's a way to get it NOT to say that the followers of the apocalypse "struggle to provide even basic services" to the anarchic vegas you create. i've tried.

well child rearing has ground my horror and episodic tv to a halt, so guess who just picked up the legendary edition or whatever for the ps3. rolling out a fairly balanced female character with bumps in intelligence and charisma, curious to see if theres any difference based on gender. will still enjoy it if not, plus having all the weapons cache shit preloaded should make a difference. fuck the ncr this time around, also stoked to try all the dlc since all i did last time was the nightmare casino one.

I just ventured out of Goodsprings for the first time on my way to Primm and was confronted by a couple of coyotes. One of them lunged at me so I shot at it without killing it, so it backed off. Then the other one came at me, which I was able to one-shot, but when it died it made an oddly pathetic whimpering sound. I checked its corpse and it turned out to be a coyote pup and now I feel terrible, like the worst human being ever.

It was either you or them dude