Well, you know what they say; the better security the better the loot!



What? That´s not a saying?

That's how I see it too, they wouldn't set up a full guard to watch over a crate of empty bottles; so it must be some great haul there!

I dunno, how many times does Bethesda put a Hard or Very Hard level lock on a container, and it turns out it has 10 gold pieces/caps inside?

Yeah, I've had that happen too - so I know my way of thinking can't be right; but it never stops me from dying of curiosity when I see nearly impossible odds at reaching a place, and killing myself a billion times to find out.


(I think that falls under the category of "some people never learn," )





This post has been edited by mALX: Feb 3 2015, 09:04 PM

Well, the old games like the original Tomb Raider were all built that way. The really out of the way little places that most people would not think to look would always have some special goodies placed there. Now a days I don't think they bother as much.

In other news, I worked from home yesterday, thanks to all of the snow we had. That means I had plenty of to time to 'work' on my FONV game. I had started the Dead Money dlc Sunday evening, and I was able to wrap it up last night.

First off, it does not feel at all like a Fallout game. Instead it seemed more like a Silent Hill game. You start out losing all of your gear and being thrown into a hostile environment with an explosive collar around your neck, and a madman with his finger on the switch. Making this worse, radios and speakers will make your collar explode. Some you can shoot out, many (read in the important areas) you cannot. You only have a few seconds to get through those areas, or your head explodes. Needless to say, I reloaded the game a lot playing this dlc.

The enemies come in two types. Ghosts are the first, most plentiful type. They are basically people in long black coats, gasmasks, and helmets, who jump and stagger around in a most inhuman fashion (I did mention Silent Hill right?). Killing them does not kill them. They just get back up after a minute or so. Unless you dismember them. This makes finding a knife very important. The second bad guys are holograms, which cannot be injured by anything. You have to either sneak past them, or shoot out their emitters. Said emitters are often placed somewhere that you cannot see, much less reach, without using the TCL cheat code to fly/walk through walls. That is all you face for the entire dlc, and they become very tedious, especially the invulnerable holograms (which are thankfully few).

On the plus side, the new spanish villa meshes and textures are just gorgeous, even in their post-war state. The interior of the Sierra Madre casino is even more lush and extravagant. But the best thing of all is that once more Serana takes a turn voice-acting some of the parts. Laura Bailey does the voice for Vera Keyes, a pre-war starlet whose hologram is also the spokesperson for the casino. She also does the voice for one of your companions, a BOS scribe who is initially mute, but later restores her voice. Or at least gets Vera's voice after a medical bot fixes her up.

We also get to meet Dean Domino, whom we have all seen on pre-war posters around the Mojave. He's a ghoul now, the only survivor of the Sierra Madre's grand opening, which also coincided with the nuclear war. There is a neat backstory between Dean, Vera, and the casino's owner - Sinclair. I won't give away spoilers, except it is about love, betrayal, and money.

One other nice touch I am noticing in the dlcs is that the characters within are linked together. The BOS scribe in Dead Money is referred to by Ulysees from Lonesome Road. She refers to Ulysees in Dead Money. Both were previously at The Big MT, the site of Old World Blues. Ulysees is the one who sent the White Leg tribe from Honest Hearts on the warpath, precipitating the events of that dlc. So obviously Obsidian had these all planned out in advance, for them to have linked the characters and events together so. That is a very good touch.

All in all, I did not really like Dead Money much though. I don't think I will ever want to do it again. I did not mind losing all my gear. But what drove me nuts was the bomb collar that was constantly being set off all the time by radios you cannot see, destroy, or ever find (I think they place some between the walls). Combined with that the town outside of the casino is a maze of twists and turns and multi-story buildings, all of which look exactly the same. So you wind up going through the same places over and over again, and constantly reloading because the invisible or invulnerable speakers are blowing you up. Oh, and lets not forget the clouds of poison gas that start killing you after seconds of exposure. In the end it just became very frustrating, and I couldn't wait to get it over with.

One other point of note, is that once you start the dlc, you cannot leave the Sierra Madre and go back to the Mojave until you have finished its main quest. After you finish the main quest, you can still explore around the casino and surrounding town all you like. But once you leave for the Mojave, you can never go back. This is similar to Honest Hearts, where once you journey to Zion, you cannot go back to the Mojave until you finish its main quest. But with Honest Hearts you can still return to Zion at any later time. Lonesome Road OTOH, you can leave any time, and go back any time.

So next up is the final dlc, Old World Blues.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Feb 3 2015, 10:48 PM

SubRosa, thanks for sharing and I'm glad you enjoyed 'working' at home on your snow day. FONV DLCs - who knew?

I have to agree that this DLC sounds awful till you get to talk to the main characters, and even though the story you find there is neat - is it worth the beginning, lol. It was brilliant to think of going through the walls, I would never have thought of that!

Your account of the DLC makes me want to look for YouTube vids and see if anyone figured out some hidden path (like in Super Mario Bros. when you crouch behind a wall and it drops you to the end of the level,

Sounds kinda silly not being able to go back until the DLC´s MQ is done. If that were the case with Fallout 3 then I would never have explored Point Lookout. And not being able to return to the DLC area once it is done is also a bit off to me

This post has been edited by mirocu: Feb 5 2015, 05:34 PM

Welcome to the way Obsidian thinks. You are going to play the game how they want you to play it, not how you want to.

I started the final dlc - Old World Blues - yesterday. Like most of the others once you start there is no going back until you finish the main quest. You don't lose your equipment like in Dead Money, but you do lose your brain, spine, and heart. Getting them back is your impetus for completing the dlc's main quest.

It has a very 50's sci-fi movie feel to it, which is not bad. But they turn it up to 11, to the point of feeling really hammy and silly. For example the main bad guy is Dr. Mobius, from The Forbidden Zone. I am still waiting for the Krell brain boost... He and the Think Tank (I will not label them 'good'), are brains in floating mechanical bodies. The spokesperson for the Think Tank sounds like The Blue Falcon from Dynomutt, or the Tick. He is so hammed up and over the top that Wes Johnson's Imperial Legionaries from Oblivion sound tame and dull in comparison when they try to arrest you. The silliness doesn't really help things, imho. Though waking up with no brain, spine, or heart yet still able to do everything as normal does not exactly lend itself to taking the dlc seriously either...

Once that is out of the way you have a pretty decent sized world to go out and explore. Unlike Lonesome Road, you start out in the middle of the area, and can go anywhere you want. So exploring it is fun and truly open-ended.

There is more variety in creatures than the previous dlcs, which is also nice. You have Lobotomites - the previous victims of the brains you are working for. They are basically psychotic people with guns or melee weapons. There are hostile cyberdogs, night stalkers (mutant dog/snakes from vanilla FONV), and all manner of robots. There might be others, I have not gotten too far yet.

They give you a couple of new guns. The Cyberdog Gun (it has a dog's brain, though what it does besides growl and bark is beyond me) is nothing special. It is an automatic weapon that uses .357 ammo. It is not very accurate though. There is also a sonic pistol that is necessary for the main quest, as once you upgrade it, it can disable force fields. Naturally lots of quest important things are behind force fields... It can also stun robots, which is nice. But the damage it does is so low that I found it easier to just fill the robots with lead.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Feb 5 2015, 11:58 PM

The way I saw it expressed was "Bethesda games are for people who can think for themselves, and Obsidian's are for those who can't."

Yesterday I was walking through a parking lot, and I saw two bottle caps laying on the ground. I instantly thought "Money!"

One sure sign of having played Fallout a bit too much

Last night I finally beat Old World Blues like a red-haired stepchild. Ph3aR M3 N00bS!

All in all I liked it a lot. I really love the stealth suit. At first the white stripes on it turned me off, but I warmed up to the look after a while, as it made it appear more unique, and helped set it aside from the Assassin Suit from Dead Money/The Sierra Madre. I really love the suit's AI, which warns you of danger, and provides a little welcome companionship without shooting you in the back or constantly stepping in front of your rocket launcher, like you know, companions do.

I found this mod that fixes a few issues with its stipack and med-x administering. Likewise this mod fixes a bug with its sneaking speed. Thankfully the two mods work together, as they alter different things. I even made myself a third mod of my own to tweak the suit's stats to make it light armor, since medium seemed a bit much.

Old World Blues also offers a bunch of other new toys to play with. Most are energy weapons, like the LAER. The Sink - your base for the dlc - has a bunch of little AIs you can upgrade that will do different kinds of item conversions. The toaster will destroy regular toasters you bring it, and break them down into scrap metal, scrap electronics, and so forth. I am so high level now that I really don't need any of it, but it could be handy for a lower level character.

Mostly I loved the completely open world, and a decent mix of enemies. The pipes that criss-cross the area were really fun, since you could walk across them all (just watch for mines on them!). Sometimes they made for handy bridges over chasms. Other times they help you sneak past baddies, or get the drop on them with a sniper rifle.

The only thing I really did not like about it was the almost slapstick silliness that they portrayed the Think Tank and Dr Mobius with. It made it difficult to take any of the dlc seriously. If they had played them with a more serious tone, it would have been my favorite dlc of them all. But as it is I put Honest Hearts as the best of them, and then Old World Blues as second. Dead Money was definitely my least favorite, and I cannot see ever doing it again. Lonesome Road was good, and worth doing, just not as good as HH and OWB.

Now it is back to the vanilla game, and time to wrap up the main quest. I am in the mood to finish up FONV and move on to something else, so I don't think I will spend a lot more time on it.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Feb 9 2015, 09:10 PM

Maybe go back and join me in the Capital Wasteland..?



When I start playing again, that is

Wow, SubRosa, sounds like you've almost *cough* beat the whole NV game and all of its DLC as well.

What's next after FONV? Back to TES?

I have to agree with you on this, I wanted to go back to Anchorage so bad, was so disappointed that we couldn't that I deleted it and reloaded it just to play it again.

That happened to me when Fallout 3 first came out and I had "marathoned" 25 levels of it, lol.

Oh how interesting this is - and I hope you took some screenshots to share with us!! I know that DLC with the exploding collar is going to bed disabled on my data list after reading your take on it on here!

Oh, I so hope you keep going till after the big battle, I am dying to hear about it !!!

Miroucadian: When I am done with FONV, I plan to rejoin Mirocu in the Capital Wasteland. Pseron Wyrd gave me the idea to play a character named Molly Hatchet, and I have been itching to get around to her. I have even found and created some axe mods for her to use. Maybe after I am done with her in FO3, she might even migrate to Tamriel?

mALX: When I marathon a game like that, I start having dreams in the game's graphics! I still remember one day a few years back where I was going into work in the morning, and at the front door I found myself saying "Another day, another septim..."

I wouldn't completely write off Dead Money. You never know, you might like it more than I did. Give it a whirl and see what happens.

I did take some screens from Old World Blues, over in the Fallout Screenshots topic, and in my vids topic. The last few post of mine in each are all OWB stuff. Everything from the Science Fiction Double Feature pic and on.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Feb 11 2015, 02:15 AM