Horses have one good use: climbing mountains when I'm too lazy to exploit the geometry.Originally Posted by Nalano
Horses have one good use: climbing mountains when I'm too lazy to exploit the geometry.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory since 1982.
@Dominic
To pull this slightly back to topic, at least, I'm curious what settings you use within Project Nevada. I installed the latest version recently and was surprised to find the default level cap at 50 and the default experience rate at 100%, surely that's suboptimal?
Buying games you aren't going to play is a waste of money (no matter how cheap they are). Forcing yourself to play games you wish you hadn't bought is a waste of time. Both are best avoided.
The base level cap used to be 30, and each DLC pack extended it by 5, so 50 is fine. And there's just about enough quests to get you to max level if you skip a couple here and there.
Level isn't *quite* as important if you're using PN, as you're not exponentially gaining health - your HP is static and determined by endurance. I've added a couple of mods that increase the number/size of spawns around the world (including random patrols by the factions, which can clash in the field), and even at Lv22 with good gear, a band of Fiends almost killed me, even with Lily going apeshit with her 5mm death-hose.
Since we're on the subject of Fallout, I'm about to start Fallout 3 and I have some questions about mods:
-- Is there a mod that simply rebalances/tweaks vanilla as opposed to an overhaul like Wanderer's Edition? I'm the kind of person who believes that a first playthrough should be the vanilla version. Or is Wanderer's Edition just that good and I should use it for a vanilla playthrough?
-- Is it worth getting mods that add more stuff to the game? I'm talking about Marts Mutants Mod, or the weapon packs. Is vanilla really that lacking in variety as the mod descriptions suggest?
-- Is there a way to strip GFWL out of the game?
There's XFO and "Its Bubbly". But those already tweak quite a bit. if you want to play just vanilla, just install some of the bug fixing mods (NOT the unoffical Fallout 3 patch. It breaks more things then it solves, unfortunately).-- Is there a mod that simply rebalances/tweaks vanilla as opposed to an overhaul like Wanderer's Edition? I'm the kind of person who believes that a first playthrough should be the vanilla version. Or is Wanderer's Edition just that good and I should use it for a vanilla playthrough?
Yes. Use the Fallout Mod Manager, and look under "tweaks".-- Is there a way to strip GFWL out of the game?
Not all that much, although Marts Mutants Mod is highly costumizable and does make quite a few nice additions to the game. If you go with Vanilla and thing it is a bit easy halfway down the line, you can use MMM to add more enemies to the game, for example.-- Is it worth getting mods that add more stuff to the game? I'm talking about Marts Mutants Mod, or the weapon packs. Is vanilla really that lacking in variety as the mod descriptions suggest?
I played Vanilla on very hard, and then on hard. On hard, I still got murdered whilst I had reached level 45...
Although I did end up with a lot of skill points in the end. I became Jack - Master - Of - All - But - 4 - Trades and still had my but handed to me...
Last edited by Grizzly; 02-02-2012 at 05:38 PM.
Hmm... I'm not sure if the Unofficial FO3 Patch does that, but certainly give it a go.
For your first time, no. To be honest, I find FO3's weapon selection to be fairly good. It doesn't go overboard like FO:NV does, at any rate. The problem is that a lot of the mods go against the lore or stand out, and you just don't want that. There's a mod - Wasteland Armoury, I think? - that adds a lot of lore-friendly weapons, but I find adding more weapons just muddies the waters.
Strip? No, but you can disable it. Grizzly's suggestion should work, but there's also a dedicated Games for Windows Live Disabler mod available on FO3 Nexus.
I think what stood out most in the WIT was how... staged some of screens were. A screen shot complaining about under populated areas taken during a scripted event where all NPCs are removed for example. My favourite though was the shot of the Mojave talking about how empty and unremarkable it is whilst literally standing on the doorstep of one of the largest and interesting locations in the game. I mean I don't know if he was delibaretly doing it so he could do a "funny" review or if he was innocently taking screens offline and didn't know the context.
But read through a few of the 800 comments and you'll see the vast majority of people are complaining about those inacuraccies. Or about Quinns sucking at latin.
Yeah, Quinns got a lot of flak for that article. He deserved most of it. He phoned that review in.
On the topic of New Vegas itself I think it basically improved on everything from FO3 which was game a I could never really get into and when a game becomes a chore is when I stop playing. Though not my favourite Obsidian game (Kotor 2 4 life) it is certainly my favourite of the sandbox RPGs*. In terms of writing, both in terms of story/character and in terms of quest design, it stood head and shoulders and bra above Fallout 3.
*Haven't played Skyrim yet, waiting for the inevitable Goatee.
Last edited by Bhazor; 02-02-2012 at 06:26 PM.
Presumably they would also utterly fail to survive WWIII, the omnipresent radiation or indeed be capable of building a device which can hurl 25,000 degree plasma with 1950s technology in the first place. There's a reason it's called science fiction.
Landmines. Or snipe their legs. You can one hit kill them with an anti-materiel rifle if you can get a crit on the head, usually requires decent sneak though.deathclaws are worse in New Vegas, because we don't have the dart gun like in Fallout 3. The dart gun would send their legs all wobbly and they'd hobble slowly after you
What is a sandbox RPG? Just wondering.
Thanks for the reply. Can I ask what mods you used to increase the spawns? I assume it works well with PN? What's the load order there? Sorry for the barrage of questions, but I appreciate the assist. I'm setting up to give NV another try, and what to get the best experience I can out of it.
Last edited by vinraith; 02-02-2012 at 11:28 PM.
Buying games you aren't going to play is a waste of money (no matter how cheap they are). Forcing yourself to play games you wish you hadn't bought is a waste of time. Both are best avoided.
Hmmm. For fun let's go with: a game in which a majority of the mechanics conform to the standard, zeitgeist definition of the genre and where there is a comparitively large amount of leeway in how a typical task is completed.
Or it's when people play D&D at the beach.
Are Fallout 1 and 2 sandbox RPGs then?
They'd fit the definition of RPG I've given but as for the sandbox part I don't know - one of my big gaming secrets is never having played Fallout 1 or 2. So, is there a large amount of quests/tasks in the game which have two or more solutions (more the better)?
My original definition should probably include something regarding nonlinearity so:
A game in which a majority of the mechanics conform to the standard, zeitgeist definition of the genre and where there is a comparitively large amount of leeway in how a typical task is completed; tasks which should not all function to progress the main plot of the game.
Last edited by Casimir Effect; 02-02-2012 at 10:50 PM.
The only right answer was no answer.
They both fit that. Fallout 2 especially has a lot of quests. Each one can be solved in multiple ways.
Then I would term them sandbox RPGs, and on an unrelated note I do intend to play them someday but... time, y'know.
So is this where you now have a stunning rebuttal delivered with the oration of Caesar and the gusto of Churchill?
That would be boring.
I just read the original F:NV WIT. It's an embarrassment.
I loved New Vegas, probably my favourite RPG in years. Skyrim just doesn't seem to measure up by comparison. Sure, in Skyrim the world itself is more interesting, and taking a good stroll feels great, but it lacks the character that Obsidian brought. There were so many memorable characters, and dialogue was often the high point. In skyrim the characters bore me to tears. As well as that, it really gave you some unique solutions to nearly every quest, whereas in Skyrim you're pretty much doing the same thing, but maybe in a slightly different way.
Load-order, I just went with whatever seemed most logical. Project Nevada first and foremost (after patches, obviously).
The mods I'm using for spawns are Increased Wasteland Spawns (basically adds more vanilla-style spawn nodes around the map, so should be compatible with just about anything) and DFB - Random Encounters, which adds a chance every 10 minutes of play of dropping a random in an interesting random group headed your way. Makes the desert feel a it more hostile/lively.
I also used the New Vegas Configurator to increase my active cells and view distance-related a bit, as I've got a fairly beefy PC now and can handle a larger view range. I'm also running Nevada Skies to make lighting more vivid, especially at night. Vegas really looks quite striking when it's genuinely dark outside. It makes the alternate vision modes on my currrent helmet (night and thermal) all the more useful, too.
Not encountered any stability problems. I think one crash so far out in the open after 25+ hours of play.
None of those criticisms were exactly wrong though, were they? The game really is ludicrously sparsely populated. The environments really do suck. Visually it just beggars belief. It doesn't make it a bad game, but really guys.
Personally I think what got people was the "phoning it in" comment, which after playing it seems unfair. It's stuffed with the kind of content Obsidian does well (quests, dialogue, characters). But nothing else really works. It'd be pretty easy to just bounce off the whole thing because of that, but a reviewer/journalist/critic/whatev can't really afford to do so.
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