Henroid

I apologize for having so little to contribute to the thread beyond this:

Aye I never use VATS. I actually kinda wish energy weapons were more scarce in these games. It would make the Brotherhood of Steel's angle more threatening and meaningful. Plus, they're so goddamn powerful in the first place.

While I'm not listing any actual details about MGS5 in this post whatsoever, I'm gonna cover it up in a nice spoiler tag in case anyone is worried anyway. I looked into everything there is to know about the character Quiet, because up 'til now everyone has been wondering what the reason is for such gratuitous T&A to be her design.

I was ransac- prospecting the houses in the first town you meet the Legion in (if you follow the main quest right away) and stumbled across a garbage laser pistol, and then had to fight a robot that was guarding someone's home. I had zero skill investment in energy weapons, but hot damn that pistol melted the hell out of the robot. So I'm thinking that energy weapons are truly something not to fuck with in this game.

Well. It is when you dissect the game into a memorized set of mechanics and patterns. As soon as you see it from that aspect it's very easy, both in the original and Twin Snakes. But that's a LOT of games and they still make plenty of games that way right now. I'm going with Ponchis on not liking the re-writing of the lines and re-recording. A lot of things lost character in the remake. There was something more cruel and actual villain-like when Liquid Snake says of Gray Fox, "He prayed for death, and it found him." In the remake it's some garbage high-brow quote and SNORRRRE JUST BE A BADASS PLEASE.

I kinda feel bad for spending so much time dumping on MGS by the way, because there are things I enjoy about it (that aren't related to the gameplay). That said, I wonder if the plot (uuuuugggggggghhhhh) of MGS5 lives up to the quality of the Mike Oldfield trailer they made last year. Hearing on the podcast that the game takes place during the Soviet / Afghanistan situation really piqued my curiosity. But my imagination runs goddamn wild on this sorta thing and for all I know it could just be a lazily used dressing.

I'm embarrassed right now btw because I found out that yes, the Legion IS that durable and it's because their armor has incredible rates of DT, damage threshold. So, fuck. I feel so silly. Oh well. Time to load up on magnum grade armor for my shotgun and armor piercing for my varmint rifle.

Ugh, so despite uninstalling that mod - every last file gone - SOMETHING was changed permanently about my game install. Legion-aligned units still have impossibly high HP and weapon skills and I've just about had it. This is my third time running through the game's opening portions leading up to the Strip (the first two times I played far beyond that) and if I have to reinstall I might just be done and bored with the whole game. There's no way in a vanilla install that the Legion units are supposed to be this strong. Taking shotgun blast after shotgun blast to the head, point blank, for a minute shouldn't result in a guy having more than half HP. If I can even live that long.

If you hear the word "Ronin" in American-based fiction of any sort just head for the hills. Edit - Actually one time I can remember it being used legit was from Venture Bros. when #21 remarks on the loss of the Monarch as their leader.

I forgot about that, yeah. Still, it does fall into step almost perfectly with Kojima's stuff anyway.

Ugh, another day, another discovery of a mod being total fucking garbage about communicating what it does. I picked up a mod for New Vegas called "Caesar's New Regime." At face value, everything it does is aesthetic / immersive, giving new armors and classes to the Legion. Alright, that's fine. My encounters with the Legion had been scarce in the game, so the one all-out fight I attempted (and lost) was when you first meet the Legion in Nipton or whatever that town is called. Now, I figured they were super strong because it was an important character and his handful of guys, meant to be a storyline "don't fuck with us" sort of thing. Turns out my impression was wrong; I'm at a point in the game where the Legion is sending random assassin squads after me, and they have been impossible to fight. Something didn't seem right. I went checking over the mod's documentation and found nothing. I went to check the Nexus and... oh, there it is. A vague line that says it makes the Legion harder to fight, substantially. Problem is my save is fucked because even after uninstalling the mod (every last file) the latest assassin squad is already spawned in, and while some of them have their gear gone and are reasonable to fight, there's one among the group that has a billion HP and gun skill, so his sniper shots are wrecking me and my companion. He survived TWO cars exploding. Edit - I like the original Legion design better anyway. They look like LARPers that have gone insane.

Metal Gear Solid was a great game up and down. A few dips here and there, but amazing. Whatever jokes there are here and there were acceptable because they weren't staples of a director's shtick. It was over-dramatic at times, it was full of exposition and lectures, but it was thematically and emotionally stable throughout the whole game. And then the series was downhill for me at that point. The Twin Snakes remake is just the perfect example of 'jumping the shark,' or like... Just imagine if George Lucas said, "I'm remaking the original trilogy" before he quit Star Wars, and all his awful habits and lack of talent and imagination barfed out a mess that resembled but ruined something that was otherwise 'perfect.' The amount of John Woo introduced into things really killed it. I know MGS was full of crazy unreal things (Psycho Mantis, some of Vulcan Raven's bullshit), but it wasn't slapped all over, and not everyone was a super-hero-ninja-double-spy. MGS3 stands out as alright because, though it is long-winded, it gives some background on what motivates Big Boss. Though the series after that puts a giant boot-stomp on the face of MGS3 to heavy-handedly enforce things that were otherwise abstract or easy to make guesses on a guided path.

So overall, I'm not that well-versed in the specifics of the Fallout series. Never touched part 2 (I think I own it on Steam), and part 1 I couldn't really get into because it's so archaic to control. But over all these years, a lot of die-hard fans of the series (either people I know or just things I read across the net) have talked about how awesome the Brotherhood of Steel is. With the caveat to ignore the Brotherhood in FO3 because apparently it wasn't written right or is some weird branch. So Fallout: New Vegas is my first time seeing the Brotherhood as intended, I guess. And uh... I'm not exactly seeing the awesome? They're close-minded extremists, which would be a turn-off enough, but they have a hard-on for weapons and don't like anyone else having weapons. They're basically fanatic-Christian-Americans in this setting. They're really just awful. So now I need to double check with people I know about what they mean by 'awesome.' As in, do they actually idolize the Brotherhood, or do they admire them as adversaries? Because the latter would be fine. Ever since I picked up Veronica I'd been leaning toward helping the Brotherhood because she is pretty great. Then things didn't go right. Both for her and for my outside view as the player. Pretty sure I'm gonna blow that fucking bunker up. As an aside the Brotherhood branch in FO3 is way, way cooler.

In some respects. But at least when Lucas declared he was quitting he stuck to it.

I loved the opening of the MGS5 discussion because it helped put into words how I've felt about the series this whole time. I liken it now to how I feel about Neon Genesis Evangelion (which by the way, good call on the "it's anime" thing). That series is frustrating for me to watch because it is all over the place in its tone and handling of itself (ha, masturbation). One episode will be light-hearted and comedic, and the next will be a psychotic mind-trip, but then the next will be a standard awesome-action-show. I don't crave that kind of mess from any content I digest, and Metal Gear Solid as a series was showing signs of it by the end of part 2 onward. There's parts of those games that I admire and appreciate but on the whole... Let's just say Kojima is far from the "genius" that people laud him to be. I think he's a creative personality who doesn't know what he wants to focus on and also lacks the ability to self-edit.

Physical initial sales is the more precise part of this. I think the NPD is maybe finally getting companies to get on board with including digital sales into numbers. For some reason it wasn't allowed by publishers.

By the way, Square has a history of unrealistic sales projections. Tomb Raider, for them, was a "failure" because it didn't crack 7 million sales in its opening month, which was inflated because Final Fantasy 13 failed to meet its projections. Square takes missed projections and adds them to the next game's so that they can "make up the loss." Except it widens a crazy-to-begin-with gap. So who knows what their expectations for Mankind Divided are.

Overall the pre-order advertisement is a gross miscalculation by Square. I don't think they know who their audience is when it comes to the die-hards for Deus Ex. Which isn't to say they won't successfully sell something to just anyone who likes the game. But I mean, enthusiasts see that kind of advertisement and go, "Gross." What I will give them though is that scheme is amazing. They basically took the DotA 2 prize pool tier thing and turned it into a pre-order arm-twisting scheme. Especially since that shit isn't specified at all; if those "tiers" of rewards don't even come close to expectations people are going to go nuts at Square. Which won't matter in this case since Square will have already gotten their money and publicity, but future attempts at the same scheme are going to be met with extreme scorn and probably won't work. Then again if they do provide, then fuck everything because Square has introduced the next step of questionable business in the video game industry. I'm not terribly worried though. EA tried to monetize bullets and that shit didn't fly.

It multiplies much more better than that eventually. Gecko Steak, for example, heals the following amount at each rank of Survival skill: - Heals 2 HP/second for 15 seconds, -30 Dehydration, -75 Starvation at 0 skill. (30 hp total) - Heals 4 HP/second for 15 seconds, -60 Dehydration, -150 Starvation at 50 skill. (60 hp total) - Heals 6 HP/second for 15 seconds, -90 Dehydration, -225 Starvation at 100 skill. (90 hp total) Considering health hovers around the 200 hp mark for the player character, that's pretty substantial. And again, a healing from food + healing from medkit stack, so you can keep your health up in no time.

I've really been taking to this in video games the last couple years. In Oblivion I wasn't having fun because I was playing it to be like... an efficient player trying to game the game. I need to go back since my playing trend changed. Creating a character - more than the stats, but goals, things loved, things hated, etc - enforces me to make particular decisions while playing. It's just a great feel. On top of that apparently I'm fun to watch when doing this? I guess I should start streaming.

Food reads as healing low because it's x amount over y time. Which is what medkits change to in hardcore mode.

Food in Fallout: New Vegas does actually heal you for a pretty notable amount, is the thing. It's very comparable to using medkits. In 'casual' mode it's harder to tell because medkits are instant, but in 'hardcore' mod both modes of healing become over-time effects. The difference is medkits have no weight to them.

Oh hey, we do have a Fallout (4) thread. I got Fallout: New Vegas this past weekend, and immediately discovered why people considered it many tiers above Fallout 3 (which was never a knock on FO3, from my circles of feedback). It just plays much more smoother than FO3 did, especially with wielding guns. I've been plugging in mods, just minor stuff with no crazy overhaul nonsense (my least favorite kind of mods are "let's make this game into this other game" types), and I think I'm settled in on a set. Gameplay-wise I'm altering very little. - A mod to change (only some sadly) of the VATS-only perks to have bonuses that apply to VATS and out of VATS alike. - A mod to make skill tagging give +25 instead of +15, like the first two FO games did (but this mod doesn't give the faster leveling of the skills; one does exist!). - A mod that gives some modern FPS conventions, most notably a grenade button, sprint button (based on AP, which I love because I never use VATS), and the targeting reticule shows the accuracy spread. - A mod to increase the rate that hunger, dehydration, and lack of sleep set in. Everything else is aesthetic / cosmetic to the game, no overpowered nonsense like getting a perk every level. Though I guess the weather mod changes things plenty enough. The sandstorms are goddamn bananas, I was actually terrified to head out into the wasteland while one was ongoing. Couldn't see shit! I'm currently reading about Tale of Two Wastelands and how I can plug that in, get things organized. I never actually finished FO3, and maybe I've seen 25% to 33% of its content? If that, even. In NV I kinda rushed my way to the Strip on the main story because I can't stand not having a house to store stuff in, and man... the Mr. House stuff (especially after you retrieve the chip for him; no spoilers here) is crazy good. But yeah... Really want TTW at this point. That'll be my project tomorrow after work; getting that to work properly along with all the other mods I have. Nothing I have is a direct conflict with TTW and a few are actually supported by some of the TTW community directly. On the topic of Fallout 4, while poking around about New Vegas info I found out that they're removing the skill system for FO4. Everything is going to be entirely perk based, which sounds pretty crazy to me. I wonder what kind of lessons Bethesda is going to apply from Skyrim and from Obsidian's work with New Vegas. I hope a lot. Namely making food worthwhile. Somehow they missed that lesson with Skyrim from NV.

To be fair you were setting your dwellers on fire.