Thank you, sir. *Adds New Vegas to the list*

Edit: Hey… with this post I am officially a Mouth!

This post has been edited by Destri Melarg: Jan 29 2015, 11:38 PM

Mustard pretty much summed it up. Obsidian took an open world game, from an open world-franchise, and did their darndest to make it as linear as possible. You literally cannot just start the game and go off in any direction you want to. Not unless you want to die and roll a new toon five minutes into the game that is. You have to go where the game developers want you to, when they want you to. They even put up collision boxes (which are basically invisible barriers) around certain areas to make it impossible to go that way.

The upside is that the linear approach is designed to advance the overall story, as Mustard said. I don't share his opinion on how great it is though. I personally could not care less about any of the main quest. Annie is my first character to have tried to do it, and the more of it I do, I still find that has not changed. I am just going through the motions to see what is there. I may as well get the content I paid for after all. But I am not doing it because I find any of it truly interesting.

That is not to say you won't like the main quest, or anyone else. It just does nothing for me personally. I prefer sandbox style games that don't force a main quest on you. So the more FONV tries to do that, the less and less satisfied I am. I think it was Wyrd who said a long time ago that there are two kinds of games. Some tell you a story, others let you tell your own story. I prefer the latter.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jan 30 2015, 01:03 AM

Absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt YES!!!! It is a blast, one of the most fun games EVAH !!! - And most especially should play through before the next gen is on us; but one play-through is never enough. NV has so many different facets you can't possibly cover in one play-through.








Why March? Better to hit the DC Wasteland in the winter months, the cold keeps down the stench of decomposing super mutants.




This post has been edited by mALX: Jan 30 2015, 01:40 AM

Agreed, that is one of my major beefs in Skyrim.


New Vegas does push you into the midst of it, but my character did manage to do a lot of exploring overland and in dungeons; and she did stay neutral for as long as feasibly possible in all the games I played.

One thing SubRosa said that is important to remember - enemy levels are not done anything like the TES world in this game. The enemies are on their highest level right from the start, while the Player is at his lowest level then - so early in game the Player is legitimately having to fight for his life (and loses it quite frequently till they level up).

As the Player levels up, the power level between themselves and the enemy begins to balance out and stays that way for a long time; but at the highest levels, the Player may begin to become overpowered compared to the enemies.

On the 360, there are still some issues that the patches have not resolved, unfortunately - but regardless of them, that game is still worth however many play-throughs you give it.

What Col Mustard said is very accurate:



The difference - I did go in and just explore till about halfway through, and was not disappointed at all. The only thing that disappointed me was that they never made the patches they needed to make for the 360 to resolve the game-ending glitches.

In other news, I started Lonesome Road tonight. Yes, Mirocou, I do plan to try all the DLCs with Annie, then go back to the Mojave to 'beat' the game like a red-haired step-child.

I was a little confused because I had read that E-DE plays a major role in the DLC, but it would not let me take E-DE with me to The Divide (the location it is set in). I discovered that you find another E-DE in the Divide. He is pretty important, and can do a lot more than the vanilla game's version. Though I was surprised to find that his name is pronounced "Eddie". I always pronounce it in the same way the letters are spelled out: "Eee-Dee-Eee". I guess that is the Star Wars-phile in me, since that is how all their robots are named.

So far so good. I love the look of the Divide. It is even more blasted and ruined that the Capital or Mojave Wastelands. It definitely conjures up an image of a ruined Earth: a broken future, and shattered past.

OMG, oh I hope you get some screenshots! I was calling him E-D-E too, urk.

Thanks for all the advice. Happy gaming with the DLC, 'Rosa.

Does this mean you are racing off to play?

Not exactly racing… I still have to finish Inquisition, GTA V, and The Last of Us on the PS4. Then I have to finally play The Witcher 2 before The Wild Hunt is upon us. That will probably take me into summer.

I fell in love with "The Last Of Us," - never got to play it (don't have the PS3); but watched the entire movie on YouTube - like 6 hours!

I played it on the PS3 and fell in love with it (or, more precisely, fell in love with Ellie). Now I have it for the PS4 so I get to play it again. I even held off playing the DLC because I knew I was going to get it for next gen.

I fell in love with her too, really hated for the vid to end even after 6 hours of straight watching!

Now you have an excuse to drop hints about your b-day present.

My son already thought I wanted it for Xmas, I had to talk him out of it because he can't afford it. Told him I wanted batteries for my wireless mouse instead, lol. (It is actually his wireless mouse, I've absconded with it, lol).




This post has been edited by mALX: Jan 31 2015, 10:13 PM

So, yeah.. The Fallout games...

I am a few days into Lonesome Road, and have a few observations. First off it is extremely linear. There are a few small side areas you can go off to explore and find extra goodies, but otherwise you are following a straight line through the dlc.

The enemies are not that varied. The first 'dungeon' is a missile base, and it has some robots and turrets you can fight, or deactivate if you have the hacker skills. You encounter a few of the second type of enemy, which is much more plentiful as you go on. They are called Marked Men, and their name always makes me think of Down in the Park because of the first line of the song. They are basically red people, have good armor, and some hefty weapons. They remind me of fighting Legion, very tough, and you want armor piercing rounds. Finally there are The Tunnelers. They are a variation of the spore pod people from Vault 22 in the vanilla game, at least their mesh is. They have different textures, and are really tough opponents as well. Especially since they tend to spawn out of thin air, and come in packs. Those are the only things I have encountered, except for a handful of Deathclaws in one area, and two mole rats in another. It does get to feel kind of redundant.

As far as stuff goes, my goodness, does this dlc hand out the loot. It is the Monty Haul dlc. It gives you far more high value (and high weight) items than I have ever seen before in a Fallout game. Even with E-DE to help carry stuff, I still have to leave most of it behind. There are no actual vendors to sell loot to. But there are automated commisary stations that E-DE can unlock. Each has 6,000 caps, and you can buy and sell stuff to them. They seem to all share the same pool of items, because I noticed the things I sold at one commisary are still there in inventory at the next commisary. But each one does always have that 6k of caps.

The look of the place is simply fantastic! It is the most desolate area I have seen in FO3 or FONV. They really outdid themselves with not only the ruins, but the red and orange skies and blasting winds creates a palpable feeling of blighted ruin. As I said in another topic, it has a shattered past and broken future. Finally, the devs could not resist a sarcastic touch with many of the roadsigns, whose messages stand in stark contrast to the blasted landscape around them.

America's bright future is in your hands

Welcome to The Divide

Our Hope For Our Children

It is a broken, tortured land

Finally, the main antagonist is another Courier, named Ulysees. His recordings reveal that he is an agent of Caesar, and is responsible for putting the White Legs on the warpath in Utah, and destroying New Canaan (all this is part of Honest Hearts). So it is a continuation of that history. Ulysees also alludes to things the player did in the past, which I decidedly do not like. I prefer to create my own characters thank you, not have the game tell me who I am.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Feb 1 2015, 01:14 AM

I beat Lonesome Road during yesterday's snow storm. The final confrontation with Ulysees was tough. He is definitely the toughest opponent I have faced in FONV so far. He does tend to ramble though. I skipped over trying to talk him out of his evil plan just to shut him up, so I could start shooting.

Still, between Ulysees' pontificating and his journal entries that are scattered throughout the Divide, you get a pretty clear picture of the Legion. Ulysees was a member of a tribe called the Twisted Hairs, who sided with the Legion. They knew Arizona better than anyone else, so they became scouts. Once the Legion completed its conquest of the state, Caesar had the Twisted Hairs all exterminated. Ulysees was more loyal to Caesar than his own people, so he continued serving the Legion as a scout and spy. Ulysees then went to Utah and used the White Legs tribe exactly how Caesar had used the Twisted Hairs, sending them to wipe out New Canaan, then abandoning them to destruction afterward (that is the backstory of Honest Hearts).

After the final big fight you have the option of launching the remaining nukes in the Divide. You can send that at Caesar in Arizona, or at the NCR. I think you can also split them between both, or choose not to launch them at all. Annie being an NCR spy, sent them all at the Legion. That doesn't destroy Caesar himself or the Legion army at Hoover Dam of course. It just wrecks their 'behind the lines' area in Arizona.

Which ever region you decide to nuke becomes a small place you can explore afterward. Nuking Caesar gives you Dry Wells to explore. It was all green and had ghoulified Legion survivors, plus a big crater that blocked off farther travel.

I also discovered there was a little unmarked quest in Lonesome Road. There are 20 posters of a pre-war tv show called RALPHIE, about an E-DE robot. If you find all 20 and click on them you get some experience. So I went back through the Divide and did that. Some of them are not at all easy to discover.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Feb 2 2015, 03:44 PM

*



Is there a high radiation level here? I always get a creeped out feeling when I am nearing an obvious structure and there are no people or enemies in sight - you know it is not going to go well.

I really like that they varied the destruction so places like this will stand out for having been the seat of the worst of it. The fact that you were able to feel/sense it = I like that a lot, that means some developer really earned an accolade, and I hope he (or she) gets it.

I really like the way you showed the contrast of those signs to their surroundings too, really brings home the mind set people were at before the fallout.

I LOVE Annie's ranger (?) hat! Those look so great on females!

Okay, so on the loot: Can you come and go before or afterward to make trips with that loot? Can you carry it out to the entry and make a pile to be picked up at a later time?


*


Holy Cow, what a great storyline though! And the mini-quest of finding the posters - kind of like Anchorage's intel briefcases! I LOVE those little touches!

What a great update, I so appreciate hearing about Annie's adventures, especially these to parts of New Vegas I never saw!



*

You can make multiple trips in and out of the Divide, so if you really want to, you can get all the loot out. I did make a second trip after I cleared it, to find all the Ralphie posters, and pick up more stuff that I left behind. The respawn rate is pretty high though, I found that the initial areas were already refilled with monsters, and not much time had passed at all. So be careful.

Most of The Divide is not radioactive. However, there are low levels of radiation near the warheads scattered around. There are 50 nuclear warheads in all, and you have to blow some of them up to unblock areas and continue further along in the Divide. Others are option to explode. There is an unofficial quest to blow up all 50, but Annie only found 49. I just didn't feel like taking the time to hunt for that last one.

There is one area in the Divide with massive radiation levels though, called The Courier's Mile. Early on you have to fire a nuclear missile to continue. The place it hits is the Mile. It is an optional area, that I missed at first. It is filled with Deathclaws and Marked Men. And the rads get to about 18 a second in parts. So you don't want to stay long.

Dry Wells is also highly radioactive. I think it was about 10 rads per second in most parts, but it gets worse as you go deeper in. When you reach the bomb crater at the end it is massive. I don't think it is as bad as the front door of Vault 87, but I am sure that if you go down that crater, you will die from the rads anyhow.

The Ralphie posters were neat, because they mirrored the little backstory they had for ED-E 2.0. I just noticed, the vanilla game version is E-DE, and the Lonesome Road version is ED-E... He plays recordings from his old Enclave days, of conversations his creator had with him. His creator saved him from his evil commander (Colonel Autumn from FO3), who ordered E-DE to be disassembled to use the parts to make powered armor. Instead the creator set him loose in the wasteland, and E-DE has been trying to find Navarro, and old Enclave base from Fallout 2. It sounds like the tv show Ralphie the Robot was basically the same. I thought it the most interesting part of the dlc. But after stopping Ulysees, there is nothing more you can do about it. You cannot take E-DE with you to the Mojave, or otherwise help him along the way. The whole little subplot with him just stops without any resolution.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Feb 10 2015, 12:47 AM

How frustrating that must be!


I think you already know about my obsession with reaching places that the game has tried to discourage Players from reaching via over-radiating them. I killed my character literally hundreds of times with rad-x and rad-away on hot keys being hit every second till I finally explored the exterior of vault 87 (the trick I finally learned was to run in from the North (nne) rather than the east/west/or south; especially not through the Super Mutant camp where your chems and health is deteriorated by the time you start trying to make the run in, lol).

In Mothership Zeta She died hundreds more testing their warnings about not stepping outside the ship without your space suit on (along with my own personal curiosity over whether there may be some secret place one might be able to reach only by jumping off the side of the ship).

In "The Pitt" - well over 200 deaths from swimming the river looking for hidden treasures and trying to explore the fringes for off-maps, etc.

So technically, you have more or less perked my curiosity to explore these areas thoroughly for hidden treasure, because somewhere in my brain I correlate high rads with higher chance of great loot,





This post has been edited by mALX: Feb 2 2015, 10:32 PM