Fallout: New Vegas

so. being unable to currently convince the ultra lux guy that im a cannibal and want to donate my companion to his jolly ol' cause, and pretty much lacking money, equipment or really anything...

i decided to work for the van graffs. which i was not aware you could do.

and now ive stolen all their shit. good stealthboy. best friend. (first time one of those damn things have actually kept me hidden)

laser rifle is one shotting enemies around primm and it took 3 or 4 shots to kill a van graff thug in an alternate reality that didnt happen.

also sniping is a lot more satisfying when you can see the exact path of the shot. varmint rifle shooting is infuriating in comparison.

Are the DLCs all worth it?

Also, do I need to start a new game if I download the DLCs? [[/Currently at level nineteen, which took almost twice as many hours]]

(I'm on the 360, so if any glitches spring up from it, unofficial patches aren't going to help)

—-

Y'know, while I (My character? I'm just going to use first person) haven't actually met back up with the guy (I've more or less consistently avoided New Vegas Proper), a line from Cass made me realise that I don't really care about getting revenge on Benny. I had something he wanted (He may or may not have set me up—I'm still not clear on that part), and so he took it from me.

I mean, yeah, he murdered me in cold blood, but hey, that's the wasteland. Hell, he even seemed apologetic, and gave me a proper burial (Well, I was never actually dead, so when you think about it it wasn't a proper burial, but that's not something to complain about, now, is it?).

I'll probably just guilt trip him into telling me what happened. Maybe destabilise the New Vegas economy a bit, I dunno.

edited 31st Jul '14 4:37:53 PM by Rem

I'd say the DL Cs are worth it. Definitely get Gun Runner's Arsenal if you're on the 360.

And you don't need to start anything over. Stuff gets added in as you play.

Yes. Yes. Fucking yes.

They are every bit as great as the main game- better, in my opinion.

I got the DL Cs with the Collection. I was somewhat underwhelmed by them taken as a whole; certainly didn't prefer them to the sandbox.

I actually liked Dead Money, it was a nice change of gameplay and a test of player skill and character skill points; however, I can see how the latter might be kind of a bitch for players whose run has so far relied on gear and magazines. Still, I liked fighting my way through the Ghost People and even dodging speakers, and the rewards matched the difficulty.

Honest Hearts was okay. Different genre and different area, more of the "tribal wilderness" part of the Falloutverse than the Mojave. The big Aesop fell flat, though; this is a game where you have to commit an assassination or a massacre as a part of every possible route to the ending, and the idea of "preserving some tribals' innocence" is frankly ludicrous when the New Canaanites are themselves warriors.

Old World Blues was a fun Monty Haul romp through a bizarre facility of mad scientists. I liked that, and I liked having the Sink as an endgame base. There wasn't much to it, though.

And Lonesome Road was the Ulysses DLC. I despised it, and I am never going through it again, and not just because it's the ultimate long-slog combat mission. A "fated meeting with Ulysses" meant absolutely nothing to me because Ulysses was just some stupid megalomaniac parroting Chris Avellone's hatred for the setting and desire to nuke it all again.

same. i agree with pretty much everything you said.

honest hearts...david literally is his own worst enemy. no matter how you slice it, he'll never be happy because either you corrupt his pet project or you let him take them from their homes and he spends the rest of his life doubting himself.

frankly, i consider the location to be more important than a random foreigners idea of "innocence" and the explicit consequence of evacuation is things being razed to the ground and salt spread over it. which is decidedly not good. the tribals can be "innocent" in later generations. right now, they need to fight off invaders.

also david is rather...bleh. its not really his right or place to say anything about how other people live but iirc, those tribals chose to accept him so whatever. i just wish he didnt come across as patronising.

edited 1st Aug '14 3:23:43 AM by Tarsen

I really wouldn't considered anything to do with Daniel an "aesop."

He's presented as being very, very wrong. He's pretty much the epitome of Mighty Whitey, except not shown as anywhere near good.

The best ending, in my opinion, is fighting Salt-Upon Wounds with Graham. You aren't forced to let Salt walk free, and Graham's demons are "if not appeased, then sated" and the Sorrows and Dead Horses get to keep their land. Everyone wins. Except the White Legs, but fuck them.

I loved Old World Blues because of how hilarious it was. It made me laugh so hard. I liked Honest Hearts because Zion was just Scenery Porn and Joshua Graham was awesome. I can kind of see Daniel's wish to preserve the innocence of the tribals but at the same time, he's a bit too naive.

Old World Blues was probably my favorite of the DL Cs because it actually felt fun, whether it was talking to inanimate objects or senile mad scientists. I...want to like Dead Money a lot too, but it was annoyingly difficult, and the followers available proved to be largely useless and were never actually available during the hardest parts of the story; I admittedly use my followers as meatshields a lot. I ended up having to kill Christina but I really didn't want to, or Dean for that matter because he's a lovable little bastard. The only one I ended up sparing was God. Atmospherically though, I really did like Dead Money a lot, and it was rewarding enough to just survive it, if not make off with as much gold as I wanted.

By and large, the smartest thing I've ever done in New Vegas is prioritize my medicine skill; very useful over the course of Dead Money and just in general.

I like all the DL Cs, and always run them in order of release.

Dead Money- Evil slog. This is what often makes the tactics I use for the rest of the game, however. I tend to make off with ridiculous amounts of loot in the end, though.

Honest Hearts- Probably my favorite experience. It's just so fresh compared to everything else.

Old World Blues- Technically my least favorite. I love the story, location, and characters, but I HATE the combat. I consider this to be the worst slog of combat in the game.

Lonesome Road- I like it because of its military focus, and all the cool loot you get. By this point I'm already coming to the close of my playthrough, so the closure is nice.

The DL Cs are all great; combined, they're almost a game of their own. They even have a bit of an overarching arc that connects all four, all culminating in Lonesome Road.

They also have great characters, awesome loot, awesome perks, it's...mostly awesome. Like 98 percent.

That's kinda my problem with it. They're a self-contained game that has little to do with the Mojave sandbox, and the big Myth Arc is a rotten, uninteresting one based around a rotten, uninteresting Author Avatar.

Why should they have to be directly connected to the Mojave?

Personally, I liked the ability to explore adjacent, but unrelated, parts of the world. And, I mean, aside from the Sierra Madre, they are all hinted at in the main game.

edited 1st Aug '14 7:53:44 PM by Mukora

The Sierra Madre actually does get one mention in the game. The NCR has named one of their medals after it for some reason.

What? When does that come up?

The medal Kimball gives to the Forrest Gump Expy is called the Star of Sierra Madre.

edited 1st Aug '14 8:58:12 PM by Cleaningcaptain

Friend of mine told me about a little thing he likes to do.

He went and gathered all the lottery tickets from Nipton and now he's going about leaving them on the body of every high ranking legionnaire he kills.

I'm gonna start doing that.

Sounds like fun. I'll do that, too. I'm planning on holding off on killing Vulpes Inculta until after I undo all of his hard work in the Mojave (That's wiping out the Raid Camp, killing Captain Curtis and exposing him as a mole, wiping out the Fiends, breaking the alliance with the Khans, fouling up the Omertas' planned terrorist attack and turning Cottonwood Cove into a graveyard); Finding those tickets will give him something extra to think about before he meets the reaper.

I just managed to put 27 hours into Fallout 3 before I noticed I had. Obviously not in one sitting but ugh, I'm tired.

Wasn't there a follower power armor mod a long while back? I ask because Fawkes looks rather silly in his torn jumpsuit next to me in my Winterized power armor.

Why should they have to be directly connected to the Mojave?

Because they should be able to affect it. It's clear that Dead Money, Old World Blues and Lonesome Road are operating at a level of technology and power that could easily render everything going on in the Mojave irrelevant (see the Elijah ending and the Dummied Out Think Tank ending), but there's expressly no effect on the Mojave from anything you do there except...two areas that can be created by nuking them (the nukes don't actually affect the Dam fight).

That's the other thing with the Myth Arc. Except for Honest Hearts, the power level of the active factions in the DLC is enough to overwhelm everyone in the Mojave, yet it's off in its own little world and given to Chris Avellone so he can either indulge his literary pretensions or bash the Fallout universe. If you want to make hidden Places Of Great Power, then don't do so in such a way as to pretend that they don't exist in the game proper.

Not seeing your point here...

Because honestly all of them are hidden away properly and usually sans Honest Hearts its the Courier's doing. Dead Money? Courier took care of that. Honest Hearts, Graham and Co. want to be left alone. Old World Blues? Either the Courier kills the Think Tank or he tells them to stay there. Lonesome Road, no one ever goes to the Divide anyways and for good reason.

Besides the DLC CAN'T change the Mojave anyways. That would take a shit load of effort and time that Obsidian didn't have.

Mike speaks the truth there. For the DLC to have any impact in the wider Mojave, Obsidian would have needed to have been given the permission (and money) from Bethesda to rebuild the entire game from the ground up. That was never going to happen. Besides, Obsidian were still hella pissed at Bethesda not giving them their well deserved bonus over some crappy Metacritic score, so there's that as well...

Anyone got any good mod recommendations? Maybe something big.

I dunno, New Vegas is just feeling a bit boring lately and I don't know what else to add.

Have you tried all the mods by Someguy2000? His stuff is always really high quality.

You could also try playing the normal game with stuff like Project Nevada.

I haven't actually tried Project Nevada, I usually pass over big overhauls like that but I might try it.

I'll look into the Someguy thing