Fallout: New Vegas

[mikemariano]

I recommend talking to

Yes Man

if you haven't already.

Ooh, I didn't even know that character existed. Maybe I'll approach him. Thanks!

[miffy495]

I accidentally found

Yes Man. I had decided to ditch Mr. House after tracking down the dude who shot me and thinking "yeah, an allied casinos would probably be preferable to House ruling everything with an iron fist" but then in exploring his apartment I triggered him to be aggro. Killed his henchmen and chased him downstairs to find Yes Man who provided me with a way to ally myself with no one and work for a free strip. So far, I've been able to stay friendly with the NCR as well, and as long as they stay off the strip, I'm happy to help them out.

[JonCole]

After beating the game along the

Caesar, Yes Man, and Mr. House

paths, I can easily say that

Yes Man

has the most open and enjoyable of the bunch. From what I've seen of the other ones, you have to almost fully submit to their agendas, so they might have some more story context but less room for flexibility.

[Forbin]

Finished Old World Blues the other day. It's probably the most I've enjoyed anything in the Fallout series so far, but running the test facilities 3 or 4 times was a bit repetitive. The guy who plays Dr Venture on Venture Bros is essentially just doing the exact same character, and that's fine by me. Had a bit of a Portal vibe to it as well.

Started playing Dead Money, and I think I'll give it a skip. Has anybody played Lonely Hearts?

[miffy495]

I have all 3 but was waiting to get further in the main game before I went into them. Can anyone recommend a good (semi-natural feeling) time to play the DLCs if you're integrating them into your first playthrough of the game? I'm about level 16, if that helps.

[Forbin]

Old World Blues is recommended for 15+, i'd start it right away. The items you get are good, and the Sink is a nice base of operations.

[shammack]

Started playing Dead Money, and I think I'll give it a skip. Has anybody played Lonely Hearts?

I agree with you about Dead Money (my least favorite of all Fallout DLCs by far), but I liked Honest Hearts. It gives you a nice big outdoor environment to explore and increases the usefulness of crafting quite a bit. I think the goofiness of Old World Blues made it my favorite of the add-ons, but gameplay-wise, I think Honest Hearts is a little stronger. If you played the Point Lookout DLC for Fallout 3, it feels fairly similar to that structurally.

[mikemariano]

Yeah, I'm not going to beat this game by the time Skyrim comes out.

I spent two and a half hours earlier this week doing the companion mission for Arcade Gannon. At the end I told him to leave, both he and I convinced that he could make the greatest difference...uh, doing what he did before I recruited him. With his future filled with promise, Gannon walked out of sight.

Then he promptly got killed by bighorners.

I didn't know this, though. I was too busy going back into the previous location—and autosaving his death.

I didn't do a real save the entire quest, so if I want Gannon alive, I'll have to cross the entire Wasteland with him again. At this point, though, I have no use for him, right? Why not loot his corpse and move on to the next mission?

Because I'd feel bad, that's why.

[Forbin]

It sounds like the game was trying to reenact Shane for you.

[mikemariano]

Has anyone seen this?

J.E. Sawyer releases his own Fallout: New Vegas mod

This is an unofficial mod for Fallout: New Vegas created by the project director of the game.

It seems to take Hardcore Mode and go several steps further. Stimpacks have weight. Hunger, thirst, and sleep all increase more rapidly. And "normal" stimpacks are now rare items; most will be "expired" and provide less of a benefit.

I'm a lowly console player so it's unlikely that I'll try this out, but I think this is a neat idea and I'm glad to see the project director being even more devious in the way he's approaching the game. I also like that a pre-war item like a stimpack is now less effective.

Much of my early going in hardcore mode was walking around Goodsprings, purified water close at hand. I did little more than eat, drink, and explore. It's interesting to see the project director go and amplify that experience.

[Upthrust]

I really like Sawyer's hardcore mod. Playing the vanilla hardcore mode only felt like a different experience at the beginning of the game for me. After that it was like playing New Vegas with the occasional inconvenience of drinking something every hour or so. The hardcore mod gives a better version of the 'world that hates you' experience. My character now is a fragile alcoholic* who murders livestock for food and makes money by hustling merchants in Caravan games and cheating casinos. Satisfyingly, this character is solidly neutral. The hardcore mod changes the karma system so you don't automatically end up a paragon of humanity by slaughtering a dozen fiends.

Combat is surprisingly playable if you're careful, though some characters are suddenly significantly harder to fight (power-armored enemies are stupidly good). I've also begun only carrying two guns at a time instead of hauling an armory with my everywhere I go, which I feel gives a play-style much more flavor.

*The +2 strength from drinking whiskey makes a much bigger difference when my maximum carrying weight is 90.

[Sno]

Did you guys hear about this?

[elmuerte]

Yep. Absolutely ridiculous to base a bonus on something as arbitrary as review scores.

[Lu]

What kind of douche bag thinks it's a good idea to base bonuses on that? I'm going to go ahead and say a corporate douche bag.

[Upthrust]

I really hope that isn't the only measure they use.

[miffy495]

I blame Nick Breckon for this.

[Sno]

What kind of douche bag thinks it's a good idea to base bonuses on that? I'm going to go ahead and say a corporate douche bag.

I understand it's even a fairly common measure in the industry, which is pretty disgusting. I've also heard persistent stories wherein critics complain about how metacritic is, without any external input, deciding how different scoring systems should be weighted in regards to that averaged 1-100 scale. That just makes it all the more insane that publishers use it so rigidly to decide such important things.

[TheLastBaron]

Yeah, there was an episode of the Jumping the Shark podcast where they discussed Metacritic and basically how it sucks for them. Game Shark uses the A-F letter scale and they don't get to decide what that correlates to on the 0-100 scale, Metacritic has their own scale. If they give a game a B, which I think most people would agree is a decent score it gets a 75, and a B- is a 67. This means they end up getting complaints from publishers who are mad that their game got a score of 67 when it didn't get a score a 67, it got a B-. Also, a 67 is a yellow score as opposed to green, which apparently is another huge thing for publishers, having their game be in the green.

[brkl]

Honestly, I would say B is closer to 85, B- 80 and A is 90. There's surprisingly little room in the 0-100 scale.

[Sno]

It seems like pretty much every site that works on a letter grade system has at some time or another vented angrily about Metacritic being a bunch of dicks.

I've also heard the issue raised for 1-5 scales that don't neatly fit into that 50-100 range that the 10 point and 100 point scales generally work on. A 3/5 is probably a pretty ok game, but looks like critical death as a 60/100 on the Metacritic scale.

You know, and then there's the sites that work on a 10 or 100 point scale while endeavoring to utilize that full range.

That Metacritic has appointed themselves the sole arbiter of what all of these review scales mean is exceedingly harmful to the industry, and people seriously need to stop using it as a resource.

[Nachimir]

There is also the much wider problem of score inflation in video game reviewing: Anything below 70% is assumed to be bad rather than average.

Metacritic clauses are a humongous problem for development studios. On one hand, studio heads are idiots to sign them, and their business development people should be planning for a worst case in which they don't get any royalties and have other work lined up already. On the other though, that's not at all easy. Studios don't go down for lack of trying. When you have 100 - 250 salaries to pay and a publisher can get studios queueing outside the door, you might just have to sign.

The industry is full of people who get attention heaped on them, saying "Keep your IP", and "Take risks! Do your own thing!", but sometimes, a studio has two months of money left and Barbie Racing is the only offer on the table.

Studios could always do with better negotiators, but it's also a bigger social problem: A small number of studios willing to sign instead of negotiate a metacritic clause out can make it more difficult for the rest to refuse too.

[Ben X]

Yeah, I remember this being the issue of the day about a year ago or so.

That Metacritic has appointed themselves the sole arbiter of what all of these review scales mean is exceedingly harmful to the industry

I don't think Metacritic have appointed themselves anything, they've just come up with their own system, the workings of which they're clear about (even if they won't disclose what weight they put on which sites). It's not their fault that publishers are dicks.

It's a good site for finding lots of reviews in one place, but I totally agree that the 'Metacritic Score' is pretty much meaningless. It was a little frustrating to see TGP get a load of 90% reviews, and hold at a 87% Metacritic score (which is very useful for the Steam page) only to see it dragged down to 84% because out-of-five marks are translated directly to percentages, and one particularly crappy, unheard-of amateur website which is inexplicably on Metacritic's list gave it an low score because they don't like British humour while foreign Eurogamer and the like high-scoring reviews were ignored.

[TheLastBaron]

I don't think the problem is Metacritic, rather than what people/publishers are doing based solely off of Metacritic. It's not like Metacritic themselves care whether the Obsidian team gets bonuses or not.

[mikemariano]

Combat is surprisingly playable if you're careful, though some characters are suddenly significantly harder to fight (power-armored enemies are stupidly good). I've also begun only carrying two guns at a time instead of hauling an armory with me everywhere I go, which I feel gives a play-style much more flavor.

Oh man, I suck at inventory management. This mod will crush me.

And this Metacritic nonsense is absolutely insane. Clauses like that don't belong anywhere near a contract.

I can't wait to see what Obsidian puts on Kickstarter!

[Nachimir]

I can't wait to see what Obsidian puts on Kickstarter!

*applause*

This is the finest response I've ever seen to a metacritic clause