Spoiler Warning S5E12: Where Dreams go to DIE

By Shamus Posted Friday Apr 29, 2011

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 172 comments


Link (YouTube)

Here we are, about four hours into the game and we’ve hit Mr. House already. I know we give Josh a lot of crap for doing all of the rummage sale stuff, but we’re actually moving through this game at a good pace.

Just think, if we had done the Manny Vargas quest and gone to REPCON, we would STILL BE THERE.

Thinking more about the way the strip is set up, I’m not sure why they decided to wall it off like that. Freeside is much larger than either half of the strip, and I suspect you could fit the whole strip into memory with some careful planning.

The problem is that in situations like this, you’re up against a lot of different budgets:

  • Maximum amount of animated characters you can handle at once, because it will clog the CPU.
  • Maximum amount of texture* data, over which the graphics card will be full and then everything slows to a standstill.
  • Maximum amount of general 3d stuff and scenery you can have on hand before collision detection and physics start to bog down.
  • Maximum amount of stuff you want to try to pull off a DVD (remember the game might be played on a console) at once without the load times becoming torturous.
  • Maximum amount of stuff you want in-view, because rendering more will cause tangible and abrupt framerate drops.

I can’t say for sure that Obsidian was well and truly up against one or more of those limits when they made the strip, but in comparing the strip to the rest of the game, and comparing this game to what other Xbox 360 titles have accomplished, it does seem like it should have been do-able. Personally, I would have been glad to give up a bit of texture resolution or a couple of nameless NPC’s if we could have been rid of that damned wall cutting the strip in half.

* Bethesda was always bad about texture sizes. 256×256 it a very small texture by today’s standards. 4096×4096 is gigantic, and should only be used for large objects where the player will be able to get very close. (A texture that size will eat 64 megabytes of graphics memory, all by itself.) Texture sizes go in powers of 2: 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, etc. In Oblivion, there were all sorts of cases where a large texture (I forget what “large” was back then) would be used on a small clutter object or on some bit of scenery that was normally only viewed at a distance. I don’t know if Obsidian continued this trend.

 


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172 thoughts on “Spoiler Warning S5E12: Where Dreams go to DIE

  1. Even says:

    They indeed walled it off because of console memory problems.

    http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/178756246071971402

    1. somebodys_kid says:

      Bloody consoles! My HD 5850 has 2 GB of GDDR RAM on it!! Use it!!

    2. Raygereio says:

      Honestly; I don’t think consoles would be the only ones to have trouble with it. Nor would your HD5850 by much help as I don’t think the issue is graphics related. I reckon the strip is walled off for the same reason the cities in oblivion and fallout 3 are walled off. The resource hungry AI. That’s the only possible reason really as it’s just another cell like any other in the gameworld, just with way more NPC’s. Sure, it has more lighting effects then your average piece of wasteland, but that doesn’t have that much of an impact overall.
      Take the mod for Oblivion that removes all gates from the cities and makes them part of the overall gameworld, for instance. It has a enourmous performance impact; all due to the AI of all the NPC’s that’s now active.

      Besides; this is actually something that we have the consoles to thanks for. Not to blame. I like low system requirements, thank you very much.

      1. Even says:

        Perhaps so, but it still makes reaching the Strip that much more anticlimatic. Just removing the wall between the Ultra-Lux/Tops and Gomorrah/Lucky 38 cells would have done wonders to create some sense of open space.

      2. Irridium says:

        Removing all the useless clutter would open up plenty of extra memory space.

        You know all those little papers and whatnot littering Vegas? They’re each their own static mesh, meaning the game has to load every single piece of paper, and anything else lying around.

        Removing it all would boost memory available so it can be used for other things. Like making The Strip one big place.

        1. Raygereio says:

          My point was that I don’t think the issue is directly graphics related. The consoles and PC’s alike can handle big areas in this engine – even with Bethesda style optimizing – as evidenced by the big open wasteland out there.

          Huge numbers of NPC AIs however cause this engine choke on itself and makes it use up ridiculous ammounts of resources.

          1. X2-Eliah says:

            Yeah, but on consoles you share the ram for everything, graphics and ai and items and stuff – so cutting away graphics data leaves more room for the ai.

            1. Raygereio says:

              Conceded; I’m not familiar with console-hardware-architecture since I don’t own one. But even then I seriously doubt the removal of clutter items will do anything balance things out and that’s just considering memory and not the poor CPU that has the sort the AI out.

        2. Dantian says:

          That’s actually a really good point. It didn’t make any sense to me that papers would be lying around on The Strip in the first place. Doesn’t House have his robots clean that up?

      3. MrWhales says:

        To refute your claim somewhat:
        Andale in Fallout 3
        http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Andale

        It isn’t walled off, and there are many fully-talkable NPCs around.

        1. Raygereio says:

          Let’s compare the not walled off Andale to one of the walled off cities: Megaton.
          I never actually got to Andale in FO3 so I’m going of the wiki here: Adale has 7 named NPCs (not sure if it has unnamed ones, as far as I can find none).
          Megaton meanwhile has 28 named NPCs and numerous unamed NPCs walking around.

          Also; it’s not so much a claim of mine as it’s a vague theory (hence all the insecure “I don’t think that”s and the like) based on the random bits of knowledge I have about Bethesda’s version of the Gamebryo Engine and the experience I have playing and tweaking Bethesda games (read: no solid, hard facts).

        2. Eric says:

          Andale is tiny in comparison to the Strip. It has what, like 5-6 NPCs vs. the Strip’s 50-80ish? Not a fair comparison. The closest area in Fallout 3 to the Strip is the Brotherhood of Steel Citadel, and that still doesn’t have as many NPCs.

          1. Chris B Chikin says:

            And it’s broken into three of four segments itself.

  2. Sander says:

    Still can’t understand why Bethesda isn’t using ID tech 5. It seems like a perfect fit for the games they make and they are both owned by ZeniMedia. The technology seems perfect for The Elder Scrolls and Fallout.

    1. Eric says:

      Because, if their previous games are anything to go by, Bethesda are fucking incompetent and stupid.

      1. Raygereio says:

        That’s a bit too harsh. Sure they aren’t exactly masters at writing, animation and fixing bugs, they could certainly use a pointer or two when it comes to optimizing their game’s engine and assets and – while they have their moments in this regard – overall art direction also isn’t their strong suite.
        But if they were really that incompetent and stupid I certainly wouldn’t have sunk 100+ hours in Oblivion and Fallout 3.

    2. Ringwraith says:

      As they haven’t even owned id for all that long, and Skyrim was in development before they acquired them, so changing engine would’ve made much sense.

    3. Irridium says:

      It would be a MASSIVE pain for modders. Mainly due to how textures are handled.

      Plus, building your own tech based on previous tech(so its still familiar) is much easier on everyone. Rather then learn a completely new set of tools.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        “It would be a MASSIVE pain for modders.”

        Dont get me wrong,I love games that are easy to mod,but this should be on the bottom of the list when you are making a game.Its much better to have a solid vanilla game than to have a game that can be modded to hell.

        1. Raygereio says:

          In a perfect world though, we’d have both a solid vanilla game techwise and a game that’s moddable.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            Like civilization 2 you mean?

            1. Raygereio says:

              Or the total war games pre-Empire, for instance.
              Or, heck, why not Oblivion and the two Fallout 3 games. Sure, the engine has its quirks; but I’ve seen far worse and the thing works.

              1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                Oblivion and fallout 3 were solid vanilla games?Hardly.There is a reason I specifically said civilization 2,and not 1,3 and 4 or alpha centauri or heroes of might and magic or starcraft.

                1. Raygereio says:

                  Well, I was talking about the engine itself.
                  If you’re talking about the actual gameplay experience then I agree; I for one can’t play Oblivion or Fallout 3 when they’re not modded to hell and back.

    4. Sekundaari says:

      Well this took some digging, but apparently, it’s not optimal for huge, dynamic open worlds.

  3. JPH says:

    Yeah, I remember seeing Josh’s reputation for the NCR switch to shunned when he pickpocketed the guy at the memorial, and I thought to myself “This is gonna come back to bite him…”

    1. Irridium says:

      A game with consequences?

      INCONCEIVABLE!

      1. JPH says:

        As if I was implying anything like that?

        1. Irridium says:

          Sorry, I just watched The Princess Bride not too long ago and felt like saying it…

  4. Kanodin says:

    I think it’s only the first time you go to the Lucky 38o that you have to talk to victor for the elevator, probably so he can give you exposition.

    I found Vegas disappointing, but only because they had been hyping the place up all game. It’s locations are interesting don’t get me wrong, there just aren’t very many of them.

    1. krellen says:

      Nope, Victor plays Elevator man until you kill Mr. House.

      1. poiumty says:

        That’s not true. I can use the elevator right now with no problem and I haven’t killed Mr. House. I don’t know the point where you can use it yourself, but I know there is one regardless of House.

      2. Factoid says:

        Victor is there, and you can use him to go up and down, but you can also interact directly with the elevator after the first encounter.

        1. BenD says:

          I think actually, you have to use Victor until you resolve something involving the Platinum Chip – until you give it to House, or make very final-like choices not to give it to House.

  5. Raygereio says:

    Bethesda was always bad about texture sizes.

    Yes, yes they were and are.
    It’s somewhat silly when I download texture mods for Oblivion and Fallout with textures that provide more detail to the world and have much smaller memory footprints.

    1. Eric says:

      Yeah, you know something is wrong when mods make your game look 2x better and at the same time run significantly smoother.

      1. Irridium says:

        Case in point: The grass in Oblivion.

        They had, like, about 24 polygons each. A mod reduced that to 3, without making them look any worse, and it made my FPS shoot up by 35.

  6. Bobby Archer says:

    When everyone was wondering what why ironing Rutskarn’s pants would make so much noise, I really wanted someone to respond with, “Because they’re his yakkety slacks!”

    1. Alexander The 1st says:

      Alternatively, his slacks are with builtin LARPing capability.

      1. Rutskarn says:

        Ironically, this is the only context in which I wear dress pants.

  7. Rodyle says:

    Dude! How the shit did Reginald Cuftbert just pass TWO huge bars full of alcohol without taking even one of those bottles?

    1. He’s gotta keep it cool, he already lost his head one time.

      1. Vipermagi says:

        Obviously, he lost his head because he was sober at the time, and thus not thinking clearly.

        1. Velkrin says:

          After the death outside Vegas the Bonnet assumed direct control and is now in control of his every action. The Bonnet will demand sustenance soon enough.

          1. modus0 says:

            Bonnet: Assuming Control.

            ;P

            1. Sleeping Dragon says:

              Also, when punching the securitron: “these attacks are pointless”

              and re: Victor: “this body does not matter” :P

  8. Vect says:

    So I imagine that you guys are going to go towards the Yes Man ending? Especially since it’s the “Fuck All Y’alls!” ending that fits Cuftbert the best? Or if Cuftbert was Stupid Evil enough, he’d go for a Legion ending?

    Still, if you’re attempting to blow past the game as fast as you can, I seriously doubt that Cufbert will be able to do much to Lanius in the end (unless those Golden Gloves work wonders at even below-20 levels). I’m also pretty sure that Pants-Dynamite won’t work on him.

    1. Kanodin says:

      I’ve tried this actually, and with a stealth boy you can get really close to him without detecting you, but I don’t think you could get in pickpocketing range without triggering his conversation. C4 right in front of him still works however.

      Edit: Turns out you can also lob a holy hand grenade up there and since he isn’t hostile yet he won’t move away from it at all. Why yes I did just go see what could and couldn’t be done to cheese the fight.

  9. Daemian Lucifer says:

    So you need to have 2000 caps in order to enter a casino,where you are offered 1000 caps to do a job?Genius!

    1. Jeff says:

      How do you think Casinos stay in business?

    2. Even says:

      You don’t actually lose it. It’s just to check you own at least 2000 caps.

      1. RejjeN says:

        Indeed, in a world like Fallout a place like the Strip would be rife with pickpockets and muggers if they didn’t have any kind of “quality control”, I mean people without caps shouldn’t even be there so it makes sense to me.

        1. Eddie says:

          It makes sense that the Strip would have that policy, but it seems like House should make an exception for you because he’s got a super important job for you that he’s been planning for about two hundred years.

        2. Alexander The 1st says:

          But all it means is that you resort to pickpocketing and mugging to get enough caps to reach the cap in the first place, which means that the only people who CAN get IN to Vegas would be the very people they wanted to “quality control” out.

          Case in point: Reginald Cuftbert.

          Also, Benny.

          1. Jakey says:

            Have you seen Freeside? It’s full of either washed-up gamblers or drug-addicted junkie thugs. They’re not going to pickpocket 2000 caps because 2000 caps is a small fortune by Fallout’s standards and they’re the exact riff-raff that needs to be kept out of Vegas.)

            1. AyeGill says:

              They’re not going to pick-pocket stuff if they get into the strip, they’re just going to assault random people and get blown up by the securitrons. Case in point: The random guys who attack you whenever you enter freeside.

    3. James says:

      they dont take the caps and theres other ways in.

      1. Have Boone as follower take Monorail
      2. Be Liked by NCR Take Monorail
      3. buy/steal a Passport

      1. Piflik says:

        4. Kill the Securitrons and take their Key to Vegas ;)

      2. Irridium says:

        5: Get in good with the Kings and get King to get you in.

        6: Get Ralph from Mick and Ralphs to help you.

        7: Just level up your science skill and confuse the robot with the speech check, letting you in.

        1. psivamp says:

          I loved the Science approach. You verbally hack it… Give it some bad data, it gets a nice little stack overflow and thinks you’re good to go.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            You tell it that your name is robert’); remove fee;–

    4. Daemian Lucifer says:

      I know that they dont take the money and that there are other ways to get in.My point is that mister house expects you to appear before him with 2000 caps in your pockets(if he didnt,he couldve instructed the securitrons to let you in for free because he knows how you look like)just so he could offer you 1000 caps as a reward for a job you already almost died attempting to do.

      1. Deadpool says:

        Half of “Everything you own” isn’t a bad deal really…

        1. Vipermagi says:

          Everything, not counting the value of all your items, which in my experience is usually above 2k, putting your total wealth at above 4x the reward.

        2. Daemian Lucifer says:

          For a job that almost killed you once before(not counting the rest of the dangers you passed afterwards)?It is a very bad deal.

          1. JPH says:

            Also, bear in mind it only took you a few days to acquire the 2k minimum. So he’s basically saying his reward for you will be worth about a day or two of work.

      2. Dumbledorito says:

        Presumably, if you can be entrusted with a plan a few centuries in the making, you’re competent enough to get past whatever hurdles New Vegas has to entry, right?

  10. Hitch says:

    “Screw you, Josh. I’m taking my bonnet and going home. I don’t know why you even want me around anyway. You never use me.”

    “Wait Josh, don’t do anything to the NCR Ranger, just let her run away because no matter what you do, you get a free reset so it won’t be negative in any way.” (Never listen to Ruts.)

    Oh, yeah: “Here we are, about four hours into the game and we've hit Mr. House already.” I read “hit” as assassinated and thought that Josh had immediately decided to fly off the rails.

    1. Ye, the head should just leave, not like Josh is listening to it by setting skillpoints in weapons he actually uses and such ;)

      …sounds like a new advice meme tbh.

      *Image of Josh*
      Setting points in energy weapons and melee, but using pistols instead?
      Why Of Course!

      1. Alexander The 1st says:

        *Image of Josh’s avatar*, probably.

        “Too much Bunny hopping?”

        “You can never have enough bunny-hopping.”

        Or:

        “Accept first part of a morally enriched and dialogue rich solution-intended questline meant to make you talk to people and decide on a solution after constant debating?”

        “Why of Course!”

    2. Kavonde says:

      Concerning the NCR Ranger who was hunting you: Ruts was right about not wasting your time on her, actually. Even if you kill her (which is tough), she apparently has access to a Vitomatic and an infinite supply of mustachioed sidekicks. She’ll keep coming back every day to let you know that time’s ticking down. On the bright side, killing her each time means you get some nice loot and a handy disguise you can use to hang out with standard NCR folks and rob them blind.

      The final time she shows up, you can kill her for good, and I don’t think the NCR sends any more immortal rangers after you.

      EDIT: Whoops, this was supposed to be an independent post. Eh, still works in this thread, kinda.

    3. Daemian Lucifer says:

      I wonder why Josh didnt kill mister house.First time I got to him,I saved,then threw a bunch of pulse grenades(which I was saving for just the occasion)around and killed the husk of a man just for the lulz.

  11. Eric says:

    I wouldn’t say Mr. House is based on Andrew Ryan. Aside from vague similarity in their appearance and kind of pompous attitudes… House is far more Howard Hughes than anyone else.

    1. Irridium says:

      I was expecting Dr. House.

      1. Jarenth says:

        Nah, too obvious.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            That is so cool.If only we could get hugh laurie to read the lines of mister house…

          2. Alexander The 1st says:

            This is too awesome.

            EDIT: They need him in Skyrim.

    2. Aitch says:

      It would be fantastic if you could eventually trace Mr House to a small unlit movie theater on the edge of town… light blasting through the stuffy haze onto his filthy naked body, cowering from you for fear of germs and people wearing bonnets…

      Oh, Howard, you really were a hell of an interesting fellow.

      Shame they didn’t run with it.

  12. Irridium says:

    You know what you guys should do? You should kill house right at the start. I can do so by hacking a terminal near the big screen(its average difficulty I think), which opens a wall(and also makes the robots hostile towards you, so make sure you use a Stealth Boy. Or not, if you want to do it the fun way). When the door is open, you can run to another terminal, hack it(also average), stop the bots from attacking, and go to where House is resting. Then you open his pod, and put a bullet in his face.

    Never tried doing it so early, but I don’t think it limits you to only doing it later. Its worth giving it a shot, if only for the lulz.

    EDIT: Actually, was talking to a friend on Steam and he confirmed it. You can in fact kill house at the start, provided you have the skill to hack the terminals and can survive the robots.

    Not sure how the game will evolve when you do that, but now I really want to see it happen.

    1. Kanodin says:

      I went after Mr. House after I first met Yes Man 1st game. Ooh also, there are two terminals, one at Camp Golf near a portrait of House, and one in a factory called House tools or somesuch, using these you can actually disengage the security for getting to House without needing 50 science. Still gotta fight the robots though.

      1. Dumbledorito says:

        Killing robots is a snap if you pick up the pulse gun:
        http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Pulse_gun

        I think it’s a one-shot insta-kill.

    2. Even says:

      I don’t believe it affects much. You’ll meet Yes Man eventually anyway when you follow the main quest line. It’d be hilarious though if it broke the questlines for the NCR and Legion somehow before getting the offer/infamy reset.

    3. Kelly says:

      It’s funny, because that’s exactly what the Something Awful Let’s Play by Tipping Forties did for their latest episode, which was ALSO released today.

      1. Vipermagi says:

        For those interested, a link to the aforementioned LP: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3400441

    4. Zukhramm says:

      You can pretty much do the Benny-House-The Fort sequence in any order you want. I was surprised the game let me and even reacted differently depending on when and how I did things.

    5. Daemian Lucifer says:

      If I recall correctly you can also pick the lock on the door leading to his chamber instead of hacking.

  13. Aitch says:

    Seeing the King’s casino instantly made me wish we could see New Reno in this engine. The building is shaped exactly as the casinos were back in Fallout 2, apart from not being able to look through the windows (making it near impossible to have the prostitutes and drug dealers join you in murdering everyone inside since the gunshots can’t travel between the casino and the city and hit a citizen by accident, but still)…

    It also gave me a bit of a twinge in my gut- recalling the good old days of becoming a quad-made-man, sleeping with Bishop’s daughter and then slinking off to sleep with Bishop’s wife, how you’d end up having a kid if you didn’t pack a jimmy hat, convincing the chop shop to mod the highwayman and then obliterating them all anyway, Myron… good god, Myron and the jet factory… the drunken priest, the idiot savant gunsmith kept in the basement… hours of excellent storytelling and atmosphere.

    The dialogue, the characters, the factions… even in isometric it felt more real than New Vegas does to me now. As hard as I try, I can’t get rid of the sense of disappointment. Like coming home only to find your bedroom converted into a study, except the shelves are bare of any literature and the furniture is made of cardboard. Sure, it looks real enough when you’re standing in the door, but…

    No sense in holding my breath for a dlc or a mod to do it, though. Designers just don’t seem to care for it, or find it too difficult to create such an in-depth area anymore.

    Or maybe I’m just getting old and sour. Oh well, such is time…

    1. Irridium says:

      Oh great, now you got me all nostalgic. Now I’m gonna have to re-install Fallout 2 and play through it again. I hope your happy with yourself.

      1. Dumbledorito says:

        Don’t forget to download and install the Fallout Restoration Project. Bug fixes, new and restored missions that were previously incomplete, new options, etc.

    2. Jarenth says:

      Man, double-screwing over Bishop was the first time I accidentally dead-end-saved my latest Fallout 2 game. Who knew he’d be angry?

      It sure as hell wasn’t the last time, though.

    3. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Yeah,there was so much more content back in those days…The irony is that bethesda started with this kind of rpgs so that we could have more open worlds and more content to fiddle with.

      1. Deadpool says:

        No, the REAL irony is that their RPGs sold better… WAY better…

      2. Tizzy says:

        I haven’t played any of the recent games, but I’m really puzzled: what’s the deal with all this trash lying around?

        I mean, sure, it’s very realistic (if you could see my place, it looks kinda like this too), but is it where we want to spend our precious CPU cycles (and dev time)? Every time they’ve been indoors in Fallout 3, or now in New Vegas, it makes me want to rub my eyes and sigh.

        Is it a way to try to appeal to the demographic who like to play those “spot the cool item in the clutter” casual games? (btw, I’m sure there’s a technical term for those casual games, but I can’t be bothered to look it up).

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Except it isnt even realistic.The war happened hundreds of years ago,so that trash should not be there anymore.

      3. Dumbledorito says:

        Keep in mind it’s dead easy to have more content when you just have to supply text and a skill-based dialogue tree. Someone could make a Zork game that would take years to explore, but it’s not going to be terribly interesting to look at.

  14. Adam says:

    Dangit. I love this series, but you’re now at a part of the game I haven’t gotten to yet, so now I can’t watch. (I had the same problem with the ME2 eps where you delved into the DLC. (I STILL DON’T HAVE LAIR OF THE SHADOW BROKER.)

    1. Raygereio says:

      Oh you’ll be fine, just watch it. It’s highly unlikely Josh’s playthrough will look remotely like that of a sane person anyway. ^_O

      1. Chuck says:

        That’s my justification, at least.

        1. Irridium says:

          Yeah, he passed by a SHITLOAD of content. He got to Vegas in 4 hours, I got there in 32 or something like that.

          So yeah, he passed by quite a bit of stuff.

          1. Alexander The 1st says:

            It sounds to me like we’re nearing the end of the game so far, since…well…it’s Fallout: New Vegas. Are we anywhere near the climax then? Or are we at the same plot distance as finding your father in the original Fallout 3?

            1. Raygereio says:

              I’m not sure how you got that idea. It’s not like the sole goal of the game was reaching New Vegas.

              I have no clue how to estimate how far we are in the game with Josh’s funky playstyle (nor do I know what side quests they’re going to do), but main quest-wise the task that Mr House just gave us is pretty much the beginning of the main quest line (the whole “find who killed you” is more of introduction quest line).

              1. JPH says:

                Yeah, he still has to go to each of the factions and do their quest-lines. There’s the Boomers, the Khans, the Brotherhood, the rich fancy guys on the Strip whose name I forgot, the Gomorrahs, and… Who am I forgetting?

                1. Vipermagi says:

                  Note that you can ‘complete’ these quests within an hour or two if you brutally murder everything in your path. Since you gotta go to Caesar anyways, you even have a fairly large supply of Bal. Fists to repair your own with :D The end sequence is also pretty… interesting this way.

                  Tops/De Luxe or something?

              2. Chuck says:

                New Vegas’ plot is sort of a two arc structure, with one being getting to New Vegas and the second part being there.

                This does not count the mass of side quests. I once played for an hour or two and all I did was explore, loot stuff, craft, sell loot, collect jumpsuits for whats-her-name, etc.

              3. Alexander The 1st says:

                Well, I haven’t played the game yet, but with all the focus on “New Vegas”, I was figuring that was the climax.

                I mean, I know FO3 did the same thing focusing on finding your Dad, but I disliked how the motivation was…just not really there to do the actual quest line after that part.

                I mean, Dragon Age: Origins had the “Defeat the traitor” questline take up a majority of the game, despite it not being the “actual questline” – which was to defeat the Blight, which started before the whole mini-questline happened.

                Once you do the “Defeat the traitor” questline, the game fast-tracks you to the final fight.

                I suppose they had to do this, since…well…you could sequence break the whole buildup to New Vegas, but it feels tacked on length, like Bioshock’s “Kill the ‘would you kindly’ guy” questline after the “Kill Andrew Ryan” questline, which just feels like padding.

            2. Shamus says:

              Yeah, we’ve just reached “dad” – the character to deliver some exposition and set up the main thrust of the game.

              Interestingly, you could breeze through a lot of the third-act stuff if you don’t care about the quality of your ending. Although, that means you’d be very under-leveled and the final fight(s) would be friggin’ HARD. So hard that Josh would have to resort to using weapons that he’s skilled in.

              1. Irridium says:

                Although unlike dad, we get to kill this bastard!

              2. Jarenth says:

                Which he won’t.

                1. Raygereio says:

                  Really? Because this the mutton chops we’re talking about. If we close off New Vegas with anyone still breathing I’d both surprised and disapointed.

                2. Jarenth says:

                  No, what I meant was:

                  Shamus said: Although, that means you'd be very under-leveled and the final fight(s) would be friggin' HARD. So hard that Josh would have to resort to using weapons that he's skilled in.

                  Jarenth said: Which he won't.

    2. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Dont worry.Unlike mass effect you can safely watch someone play new vegas and them play on your own and still have a vastly different experience.Its not as open as original fallouts,but it still is a huge game.

  15. Kelly says:

    Howard Hughes.

    House is based on Howard Hughes. Not Andrew Ryan.

    1. Peter H. Coffin says:

      Yeah, but the Ryan comparison is funnier.

  16. Entropy says:

    Come on Josh Wild Card Wild Card WILD CARD. REGINALD CUFTBERT SUBMITS TO NO MAN!

    1. JPH says:

      Well he already murdered a bunch of Legionnaires, and the NCR really doesn’t seem like Josh’s style, so I figure Wild Card makes the most sense.

      1. Entropy says:

        He could also go Mr House. But Wild Card seems much more up Reginald’s street.

        1. Irridium says:

          He needs to get Fisto. Because after you do that you get attacked by a gang of old ladies.

      2. Peachfuzz says:

        Doesn’t the Legion’s reputation reset after Benny, too? He could still make it work. But, yeah, I don’t see Mr. Cuftbert playing it safe.

        1. Rosseloh says:

          Not that I can tell. I mean, I probably broke the game with all my random crap, but I actually couldn’t progress the main quest in any way in my latest playthrough. Legion was hostile to me, and I had to talk to Caesar to get the platinum chip. I could wear a disguise and get far enough to talk to him….only to have no dialogue. No way around it that I found, so I ended up turning on god mode and killing him just to get through it.

    2. Daemian Lucifer says:

      However,it seems that Josh wants to submit to a woman,and her moonshine brewing skills.

  17. B.J. says:

    One other possible explanation for partitioning the strip would be to make it easier for multiple teams to script and debug all the different quest logic in the area. Maybe?

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Debug?Yeah right,an obsidian game checked for bugs by bethesda and you think someone bothered about making debugging easier.

  18. Mailbox says:

    I was confused too by the 2000 cap credit check first play thru, but I chose not to do that option cause I was still fooling around in Freeside. I eventually earned my pass into the strip by way of the kings quest and using my favor to gain access.

    Side Note: Valve has announced that Portal 2 DLC coming out this summer will be FREE. Interesting. Makes the idiots ( I have always prefered Morons) on metacritic even more so.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      The best way to do it is to obtain 2000+ caps,get the pass from the kings,and then science your way in.

  19. X2-Eliah says:

    I wonder how fast can Josh get the game over with – at this rate, this could be a really neat speedrun.

  20. JPH says:

    Incidentally: When I first glanced at the episode title, I thought it said “Where dreams go to PIE.” Did anybody else see this?

    1. Alexander The 1st says:

      Now you’re just making me hungry.

  21. Kanodin says:

    Ok so cool story about the pissed off NCR ranger, I had her and the Legion assassins show up at the exact same time just now. Needless to say they killed each other as I ran away.

    1. Entropy says:

      Heh, I had that, kinda. Legion guys came in first, tried to kill me. Some rangers turned up, killed the Legion Assassins while I was fighting them. I was like ‘Hey, thanks! I guess I’ll just be-‘ ‘THREE DAYS’

  22. Jarenth says:

    Josh, you’re in Vegas now. You know what you have to do.

    Go find your own house. And live in it forever.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Yes!

      Someone has to mod in Josh’s house into the game,and there should be a computer you can hack that will give you a short text adventure new vegas.

      1. acronix says:

        And, of course, the only commands the game understands are “bunny-hop” and “kill everything”.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          And “pickpocket” and “get drunk/high”.

          1. Gale says:

            “Pickpocket”, “get drunk/high”, and “kill everything” are mapped to the same key.

            1. JPH says:

              See, that’s what I call streamlining. With only two buttons, you can use the mouse for everything! Left click to bunny hop, right click to pickpocket/get drunk and/or high/kill everything.

              1. Jarenth says:

                Bunny hopping isn’t keybound, it’s the standard walking mode.

  23. Atarlost says:

    Next time you redo the end credits one of the deaths from this episode needs to go in.

  24. Archaic says:

    Random fact:those red news stand things on the strip actually hold skill magazines and i think there is nine of them in total. also owning the console version of this game, i can easily see why they would choose to wall off the sections of the city as lag and crashes happen when too much stuff is going on the screen. but irregardless of that i would of liked to see the strip as one area it would of been a)nicer and felt much more like a city and b) cut down on long load times. which after a while do drive you nuts but not enough to stop playing.

    1. Gale says:

      Yes! I love them. Comprehension makes magazines incredibly useful, and having a bunch of free ones there for the taking is a great reason to hit the strip early on in your playthrough.

  25. 13 CBS says:

    Interesting detail I found in Freeside: if you kill the rat that those 2 kids are chasing, they immediately pounce of the rat corpse and start feasting on it as though it were the most delicious thing they’d ever eaten. Until I saw that, I thought the kids were just chasing around the rat as a game. Bit of a poignant moment illustrating the squalor of Freeside, I thought.

    (The moment was ruined when, the next time, I disintegrated the rat into a pile of ash and the kids still ate it…with squishy meat-munching noises. Hooray for bugs.)

    1. acronix says:

      Don`t forget the “Thank you, mister!” dialogue from the girl when you speak to them afterwards.

      1. Kojiro says:

        And from the boy. They both have the exact same voice clip, sadly.

  26. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Im sad that obsidian chose the limit to be 3 days instead of 7.It would be so cool if the ranger chick came to you and said “SEVEN DAYS!”

    1. Hitch says:

      Or instead of just “NCR Ranger” she was called “71-hour Amy.”

    2. GTRichey says:

      That’d definitley be more of a Wild Wasteland thing than vanilla… but it’d be great regardless. A 7 day limit though in practice is a little too easy to completely ignore.

    3. Alexander The 1st says:

      I dunno, 3 seems appropriate too. Even more appropriate, given the medium.

  27. Entropy says:

    Also, Victor isn’t that hard to kill. You got unlucky and caught a grenade. I’ve killed him just be shooting him in the screen a couple times. Of course, I had good Guns skill.

  28. Vect says:

    So, considering that Josh seems to have a habit of pissing off the NCR, is he going to try and solo Camp McCarran once he’s decently leveled?

    1. acronix says:

      Take out the “once he´s decently leveled” part and I bet you are right.

  29. I’m concerned that you guys are going to rush this playthrough because of the perceived short attention span of your audience. I really enjoyed the long, devil-may-care wanderings of your Fallout 3 playthough, where you were constantly telling the games’ waypoints to go screw themselves.

    I don’t know if it’s the nature of the game; if it has certain sequences you really want to hit. Or perhaps you are getting into a better rhythm now. I don’t know. The recent videos just feel more like an anxious tour guide (“We’re walking! We’re walking!”) than an exploration of a majestic world by a crazed bonnet-wearing psychopath.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Theyve rushed fallout 3 as well.Its just that they did the dlc for that one,which was kind of out of the way.Plus Josh was getting lost a lot.

      1. Dumbledorito says:

        I wouldn’t mind a few clip segments or sped-up footage with tinpan alley music playing over them to go through long (yet amusing) stretches of gameplay.

        Though they’d probably end them all with the old saw of “and let us never speak of [INSERT LOCATION HERE] again.” :)

      2. Sleeping Dragon says:

        Still, if they just skip all side factions and sidequests I think there’s something like 3 or so quests left that need to be taken care of in the main questline? The season could be over fairly quickly.

  30. Alphadrop says:

    There’s at least five mods that remove the gates from the Strip.
    It does look ever so much better without them and I don’t get any extra slowdown despite only having a 8800gts and 3ghz dual core.

  31. StranaMente says:

    I can now say one reason for why we can’t have the whole strip in one area: it keeps crushing to desktop on me every 2 npc’s I meet. That’s why. Even with the latest patch. I have to walk watching the ground most of the time if I want to play it…

  32. Dante says:

    I heard that if you remove Mr House from his protective chamber he dies….of lupus

  33. Smejki says:

    Hi Shamus, Josh Sawyer (co-designer) himself explained why the Strip is splited into 3 parts:
    http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/178756246071971402

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      So Shamus actually guessed it correctly?Consoles really are to blame?Nice.

      Though one has to wonder why not remove the wall from pc versions.Its not like the game has no differences when it comes to versions.

      1. Smejki says:

        the thing is that for PC you would have to recreate it as the three parts are separate cells. you would have to take content of three cells and put it in one, bigger… by hand. You would have to make too many things from beginning. Its not about just removing walls. Retexturing, other UI (and such things that are on PC often different from console version) are pretty easy because its just about changing sources which are applied to already made and placed models. But assemblying sources so that it would become a game-level is way, way more complicated and time consuming; not worth the result at all.

  34. John R. says:

    Wow, all these comments, and nobody pointed out that there is no oil left in the Fallout universe. Where are all the pedants?

    1. Rosseloh says:

      Really?

      I never could get into the isometric style of F1 and F2, so I never got very far in them. Is it an Obsidian/Bethesda screw-up that one of the super mutants at Black Mountain happened to have a can of gasoline? Or did I just mis-read the note from Raul and it was in fact, an empty gas can?

      (And on that note, while I have a hard time playing them myself, if anyone here knows of or wants to create a detailed, commentary-style Let’s Play of Fallout 1 or 2, you’ll be my hero).

      1. John R. says:

        The exhaustion of the world’s oil supply was what instigated the big war. I guess it’s plausible that there could be a little left to justify the gas can, but in F2 all the electricity is nuclear.

        I, too, would enjoy an original Fallout LP, and I imagine somebody must have done a good one by now, but I don’t know who.

        1. Rosseloh says:

          That does make sense. Come to think of it all the vehicles you see are fusion powered (or is it fission? I’m no nuclear physicist).

          And the “car” in the Black Mountain situation is in fact a toy car; I’m just going off of what I think the note said.

        2. sebcw1204 says:

          i approve of an original fallout LP by this crew. we’ll see if it really stands up to Shamus’ nostalgia, and the best part is…..JOSH CAN’T FUCKING BUNNY-HOP!!

          1. Jarenth says:

            Josh will find a way.

            1. AyeGill says:

              Seconded. Josh will bunnyhop, in Fallout 1, and we will be driven crazy.

              Although, to be fair to Josh, i bunnyhopped a lot in New Vegas too.

  35. sebcw1204 says:

    opens with bunny-hopping. great. fantastic. clap. clap. clap. oh good, my slow clap program made it in here. seriously, i take it josh doesn’t read these comments. the extra speed from bunny-hopping is insignificant. stop it.

    1. some random dood says:

      Why yes, Josh does read these comments.
      Why yes, Josh does know how much bunny-hopping irritates some.
      Why yes, Josh does sometimes just run in the game – until someone reminds him how much some people hate the bunny-hopping.
      Why yes, Josh is trolling you.

    2. Daemian Lucifer says:

      He does,and thats why he will never stop.

      EDIT:Damn these random ninjas!

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