Fallout: New Vegas

The bunker is absolutely gonna be my home base, though. It'll let me turn common cigarettes into any ammo or stimpaks.

The Police Pistol is a direct upgrade over the .357 Revolver in every way and its powerful crits are great for dismembering Ghost People.

Speaking of, just carry a Cosmic Knife and slash the shit out of any Ghost Person you down. It'll hack off a limb really quick and they'll stay down.

One odd thing about Dead Money, though, is that shotshells are abundant, but it's almost literally a roll of the dice whether you'll get a shotgun before entering the actual casino, which IIRC always contains a Hunting Shotgun. Like, you just have to hope a container spawns a Single Shotgun (unless you have a mod that lets you reclaim shotguns from traps), or all the 20 gauge shells are pretty much useless. I think there's a Lever-Action Shotgun somewhere, but I have no idea where.

Edited by Balmung on May 22nd 2019 at 3:39:39 AM

The one-time nature of the campaign would've been a good reason to introduce some missable decorative elements for the bunker. Though I suppose some 100-percenters would've hated that if they already didn't like the DLC.

Edited by Unsung on May 22nd 2019 at 6:34:43 AM

I honestly actually really like Dead Money. The collars are annoying, but Ghost People are pretty much the only innovation in combat in the entire game, the Cloud is a more interesting hazard than irradiated areas (side note - shouldn't Sierra Madre food be rad-free? The Sierra Madre explicitly does not permit irradiated items to enter and food in the Sierra Madre is fabricated on-site by the matter replicator vending machines), once you fix the bug that makes the companions never give you a moment of silence, they're actually pretty good and interesting characters, and I love its extensive use of the item crafting system.

I think my favorite part of my first Dead Money playthrough was how I could never find any stimpacks or doctor's bags until the end, and while I was able to keep my health up with food I wasn't able to heal limb damage, meaning I spent nearly the entire thing with a broken leg from a bear trap.

It really added to the feeling of tension and helplessness in the start - and then once I got to the casino and found myself with plenty of ammo for the police pistol and shotgun, it made me feel that much more badass to finally start blasting those Ghost People to bits without even bothering to sneak around them.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on May 22nd 2019 at 3:23:13 AM

Part of that is that, from an equipment progression perspective, Dead Money makes you pretty literally begin again, and much like the early game, healing supplies are tight until pretty late in Dead Money (though, don't forget that you can get stimpaks from vending machines with a code from the clinic and if you thoroughly loot the clinic, you should find a few doctor's bags and be able to craft two or three more).

Also, perks make a huge difference in Dead Money. Old World Gourmet finds its niche use, as does Lead Belly if you're chowing down on mildly radioactive snacks on a regular basis, Them's Good Eatin' is incredible, and Light Step borders on mandatory, and Vigilant Recycler is all but necessary if you want to use energy weapons. If you have a melee or unarmed build, Purifier probably trivializes combat with its massive damage boost against abominations (which Ghost People are, though IIRC, they're also still human enough for the Cannibal perk). If you want to shoot stuff, you best have Scrounger because it nearly doubles how much ammo you find in containers. Every little thing you can do to boost your healing capabilities, reduce damage taken, and scrape together more ammo is a huge boon.

Edited by Balmung on May 22nd 2019 at 6:21:59 AM

Finished Honest Hearts with the "Get the Sorrows the hell out of Zion" ending. I made Salty Boy run like a bunnywabbit instead of either killing him or letting Joshua Graham ventilate him with A Light Among the Darkness as per usual. Joshua Graham is probably my favourite character apart from Ulysses, but I didn't want to spend as long in Zion as I did in the Big Empty, so evacuating the Sorrows seemed the quickest option.

I'm now in the Sierra Madre casino's surrounding area. And I'm playing almost fair, apart from getting rid of Cloud damage and making the Ghost People killable with projectile weaponry because I can't cope with the cognitive dissonance of putting a magazine of .308 Winchester through their centre of mass and them getting back up again any longer. Oh yeah, and making the collars and radio combo a non-issue because FUCK ELIJAH!!!

It's not at all because I'm embarrassed to admit it took me ages to figure out that you could shoot the Ham Radios and blow them the hell up and stop them from doing it to my character's head, no sir!

I'm not sure disabling the Ghost People's mechanics, turning off the Cloud entirely, and completely disabling the collars counts as "playing almost fair".

Seriously, just knife them when they're down or shoot the leg. Even a quick burst of .308 to an extremity drops them quickly.

Well, I could have summoned in a Grenade Machinegun, the Selenaire, the Nyx Shotgun, a few thousand rounds for each gun, my decent armour sets and so on. And I've done Dead Money on Hardcore with no cheats or easy-life mods, and also completed a vanilla run of it on the PS 3, so I've served my time in gamer hell. Repeating something I don't enjoy? Pass. Using weapons skills I never use outside of the Sierra Madre? Nah, life is far too short.

I will never understand anyone who sticks up for any part of the vanilla experience of Dead Money as I consider it antithetical to the whole concept of decent gameplay. And as I said years ago on this subject, if you're going to do a survival horror thingy, get people who know what they're doing to make it for you. Obsidian clearly didn't have the first clue of what they were trying to achieve and failed miserably to make a fair run of Dead Money something worth doing more than once as bragging rights.

Besides, even if I did go the "take the risk of letting these damned invulnerable speaker bullshit things blow me up and/or risk dying in the Cloud" thing, I'd still be installing A World of Pain for Dead Money as it makes the basic experience lots better.

That's the beauty of knifing them when they're down instead of trying to lock spears with an active Ghost Person - you don't need a single point in melee for it to work. One or two chops and a limb flies right off and they never get back up.

That's the one thing I will concede is absolute complete and indefensible bullshit in the DLC. At the same time, finding destroy able speakers and breaking them is a big part of the DLC, and completely turning that off seems kinda lame because that's actually satisfying. Which is why I installed a mod that doubles the time before the collar goes pop (and Christine extends it to 3x as long as vanilla - might actually give myself that perk to keep once she's in place for the gala - 30 seconds before your head explodes is a huge improvement over 10 seconds)

Edited by Balmung on May 23rd 2019 at 6:39:25 AM

Done with Dead Money and I got everything. 37 gold bars (traded 11 in at the Gun Runners for a shitload of weapon mods and ammo), every vending machine code and Holorifle upgrade, the complementary voucher entitling me to more chips in perpetuity, every variant of cosmic knife/knife spear (sold all the throwing ones), the Assassin Suit, the Reinforced Sierra Madre armor + helmet, Vera's Dress x2 (modded for more DT so Veronica will actually put it on), a bear trap fist, the caravan shotgun in one of Dean's stashes (having a use for all that 20 gauge ammo was nice), the lever-action shotgun in the casino, the hunting shotgun in the casino, got an unspeakable amount of booze, cut down every last Ghost Person lurking the Sierra Madre. You name it, I got it/did it.

I don't know if I'd bother killing all the Ghost people, let alone doing everything. Good job.

I'm sure some of them would respawn given enough time, but aside from a few of Dean's stashes, I got and did everything Dead Money has to offer with no deaths other than Elijah, who I nearly killed by leaving two gas bombs (I wasted the rest trying to use them to pre-emptively kill the turrets and tossing most into the void due to missing or the bombs rolling, and then the turrets kept on ticking anyway) in the entry way before ventilating his old man chest with my BAR. His Gauss Rifle is worth far more to me than any sort of poetic justice.

IIRC you dont even need melee weapons to kill ghost people, I remember blowing off their limbs with the police pistol and some dynamite because I had a high crit rate and small guns skill.

I don't think you can get dynamite in Dead Money.

But yeah, you can shoot or blast their limbs off. If you get really lucky, you can even disintegrate them, but I have never successfully done that. Maybe if I dragged the Van Graf Laser Rifle along and used WMX to stack mods on it because the Laser Pistol doesn't have the punch to do it with any reliability.

I just favor using melee when they don't lose a limb on the first go because it saves precious ammo and every bullet counts in Dead Money.

Grats on doing Dead Money.

I finished my run too, with the same kind of result. (Oh yeah, apart from I also locked Elijah up in the Vault after I'd finished the DLC by killing him - I have the YCS/186 version of the Gauss Rifle, so his isn't all that tempting.) Then had to deal with a severe problem caused by a modded Transportalponder that meant not only did the meshes and textures of my modded guns not show up but all my saves were showing up as corrupt.

Went back into the Sierra Madre once all that was fixed (ish) with my Saiga-12. Which now has a twenty-round detachable DRUM MAGAZINE!!! and a suppressor. I am back in hell because I have a mod that lets me take a maximum of 100K from the Casino, and it would be rude not to.

I think I'll finish this game run and then uninstall it, and do a new install with slightly fewer mods and see if it's more stable.

BTW, what mod did you use to get a longer time before BOOM with Elijah's collar thingy?

Dead Money Annoyance Reducer. It does six main things.

1.) Doubles the timer on the collar from 10 seconds to 20 seconds (no change to Christine's perk, which adds a 5 second delay before it starts beeping and 5 more seconds until it goes boom)

2.) The passive damage reduction from Dean's "Unclean Living" perk sticks even when he is no longer your companion and is increased from a 25% reduction to a 33% reduction. The grace period before you start taking Cloud damage only applies when Dean is your companion and you don't get the damage reduction until he has been your companion at least once.

3.) Replaces nearly all non-hardcore Cloud with the very slow periodic damage from hardcore, which is also reduced and has a higher floor than normal hardcore (cannot take you below 50 hitpoints, rather than 10). This particular feature is optional and "alt" esps are provided that just use the normal Cloud instead.

4.) Gold Bars now weigh about 24 instead of 35

5.) You have a full minute to leave the Vault after killing/trapping Elijah

6.) Fixes the issue that made Dead Money companions far chatter than the base game companions so you can get more than five seconds of peace and quiet.

Minor optional feature: Retextures dangerous speakers to be easier to find.

---

Had to disable Simon and the Silver Rush Crier via console because they became hostile after I completed Heartache By the Number by burying the Crimson Caravan and Van Grafs in red tape so that I could travel Freeside without getting attacked and without my followers causing me to violate the stated agreement with Ranger Jackson (no aggression against either). I figure this way, I minimize my odds of preventing the ending I want for them (return to California to face justice, get a little frontier justice from the Gun Runners).

Edited by Balmung on May 28th 2019 at 6:33:09 AM

Finished the first three parts of the New World Parliament mod series. Quite good once I got rid of some of the bugs and figured out how to actually get New Vegas Anti Crash to work properly. There's an extremely OP minigun, called "any ammo", which has a 100 round magazine but spits that out in about a second, and some armoured suits of various quality.

It's also voice acted, which is nice, and odd, at the same time. Because English accents.

https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/66673

if you want to have a look at it.

I believe you get the legal ending for Cassidy as long as Gloria (and Alice) survives, you can kill her goons just fine.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Eh, it's done now. Just pretend Simon and the Crier were called inside to help them pack up for facing the music or something.

Also, hoo boy is the Crier aggressive - he chased me all the way into the Old Mormon Fort.

I met the Van Graffs last night. The New World Parliament 4 mod puts a sniper that targets the player on top of their building, who you end up having to kill. And while I was there...

Doorkeeper went down first, then most of the rest of the grunts came out the door and they went down, then I walked inside with Sunny Smiles, NWP's Companion Joshua, and slotted the remainder.

Plot Twist is that I haven't even seen Cass yet, I just decided to kill errybody in the Silver Rush and steal all their stuff because I wanted to.

I don't know if Cass has any different dialogue options if you've already mullered the Van Graffs before her quest chain starts, but I guess I will find out in the future.

More Traits has one of the best traits ever - High-Value Target, which causes various Assassin teams to try to murder you every so often (about once a week instead of once every 3 days like the Legion and NCR). This is great because they deliver incredibly powerful loot right to you. Loot like a 22 SMG that ignores DT or a minigun that has a realistic rate of fire when upgraded with the high-speed motor.

I remember replaying this game at least 5 times before. I walk through every quest (aside from "Legion Path" quests, as i never played for the Legion) in the game. And finished all DLC. One time, for fun, i locked myself in the bunker of casino (in "Dead Money" DLC to see what happens if i proceed after warning on bank's terminal).

Also, i find it funny, that many pages ago there was a discusiion what is better: democracy or dictatorship, with plenty of people saying that opposite side of arguments suck. And nobody decided to bring it to On-Topic Conversations forum (any politic thread) (if they were so interested in the discussion).

Edited by VeryVileVillian on May 31st 2019 at 10:11:30 PM

You ever clear two White Legs camps with two bullets?

Cuz you can totally do that with 50 cal explosive rounds.

Huh, got the "Courier who broke the bank" achievement even though I haven't actually gambled at the Bison Steve casino.

Also, I really wish the Legion didn't have Aurelii so that I could more easily cash in my chips for sweet, sweet shotgun-compatible Denarii. Instead, the best I can do is $100 NCR, another $100 NCR for a total of 80 chips, then cash out for Denarii, because 100 chips trades for one useless Aurelius instead of 25 very useful Denarii.

Edited by Balmung on Jun 5th 2019 at 8:30:46 AM

Yeah, you actually only need to get kicked out of the casinos on the Strip for that one.