T w e n t y S i d e d
And Operation: Anchorage comes to an end at last.
From The Archives:
Ludonarrative Dissonance
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Batman: Arkham Origins
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Spec Ops: The Line
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
The Biggest Game Ever
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
Convincing him to kill himself was interesting, especially since it was the fastest way to kill him. Going through Operation Anchorage as a level 30 character with all 10s and 100s couldn’t finish quickly enough.
Still, it was less painful than Mothership Zeta. Every second alien seemed to have 85% damage reduction.
Really? I had the opposite experience. Chinese soldiers never wanted to die…but the aliens I could pretty much one-shot with the destabilizer.
I played Anchorage around levels 8-10, and mothership zeta was probably about 11-14 though…can’t say I’ve ever played through it at 30. If the enemies are auto-leveled but the weapons aren’t, that would probably explain it.
Aliens do have an astronomical armor reduction in their bodies. You need to shoot them in the head to deal with them quickly.
It’s a skill they get after a certain character level is gained. It’s somewhere between 15 and 20 I think, but never bothered to check. The shield grants them a crazy amount of DR.
I went there on lv6 or so and utterly plowed them (melee is pretty strong :D ).
Yay! You figured out how to embed a larger version of the video!
Your opening bit about your “mission objective” sounds to me like Mal: “Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill ’em right back!”
And you’re missing the point of the simulation! If the other soldiers _in the simulation_ are that terrible (1/2 Chinese soldier), then the soldiers we’re training (the live ones) _have_ to be worth 50! Terrible allies, insurmountable odds, every soldier we train will become John Rambo!
I liked that second fight. Jingwei takes a swipe at you _while an explosion is going off behind him_ and you fly through the air. Pretty good for some random guy in a uniform, eh?
Aside: Josh was having some echo problems.
…echo problems.
…echo problems.
…echo problems.
…Echo 3 to Echo 7?
ECHO OFF
Quick! Someone find a duck.
No use,there are just geese around.
Josh: define “one of the newest NVIDIA cards”? :B
Also: video capture uses a lot of CPU, and that section is one of the more intensive in the game due to the large number of characters… and probably a lack of any sort of optimisation whatsoever. Culling? Who needs it!
It actually sets the the game to only have 10 NPCs on screen during combat IIRC.
My new PC is running with a NVidia 470 GTX and a Core i7 860 processor with 4 GB of RAM. When it comes to horsepower, I’m well inside the “overkill” bracket, which is why it’s that much stranger that I was still experiencing slowdown in Anchorage. It could have been the recording process I suppose, or something that was running in the background that I’d forgotten to shut off. We ran into similar slowdowns later in the recording session (the episode that will air next tuesday, I believe), and I finally restarted Fallout, which seemed to solve whatever problem that was causing it.
I hope you have the fan-made fix for the RAM. Fallout 3 vanilla configuration was made to only benefit from a max of 2GB.
Also, Bethesda is terrible at programming, so this would work terrible even on a computer made from a far, far future specially to run this.
Why do you only have 4GB of RAM on a Core i7? They’re designed to use triple-channel RAM, so you should have 3GB, 6GB, or 12GB.
(My own machine is an i7 920 with 6GB RAM and a 295GTX. It laughs at most games. But there are still badly-coded ones.)
And no 32-bit app can use more than 2GB of RAM at a time (or 3GB if you change the kernel divider). The main advantage of having more is so that your background programs don’t interfere with the games.
No, you don’t get it. It’s deliberately coded to simulate glitches in the simulation’s code. It’s just an aid to immersion in the game world’s game world, that’s all. Just like the silly highlighted interactive objects, the horrible AI, the magical health dispensers, etc., etc.
I like his explanation. Definitely the right one.
That stupid hovering bug happened to me about three times as well.
Luckily I was doing the DLC at character level 20 after completing the main quest-line so I had a 100% chance of speechifying him to death.
Now that i think about I don’t think I ever fought Jingwei…I’ve always just speech checked him.
You guys got through that pretty fast. It seemed like it took hours and hours when I did it myself.
You’ve got me playing this game again now, which has been fun, and I didn’t even mind the Anchorage DLC that much until now…I mean it was annoying, but at the time I really just wanted more Fallout so I looked past its flaws. Now playing it alongside everything else I can really see how sub-par it is.
Mothership Zeta is better, but it’s still basically just another generic FPS. When you go through it, don’t forget to earn the Xenotech Expert perk. All you have to do to get is is play around with the buttons in the weapons lab and you get an extra 20% damage with alien weapons.
Demolition expert! DEMOLITION EXPERT! He just said he was using a lot of grenades! Get demolition expert!
Yeah, I thought the exact same thing. Demolition expert! Though the LU increase wasn’t a horrible choice, it gave a bit of critical chance and 13 skill points, one in every skill.
I also have started playing Fallout 3 again because of this series. I’m actually enjoying myself this time. Which is odd because I hated it the first time through.
I have no DLC though. These last three videos have made me happy about that. I have heard that The Pitt and Broken Steel aren’t bad though.
The Pitt: Slavers take all your stuff and you have to run around with whatever the game gives you. Good times!
You should get Steel though, just to make the ending make slightest bit of sense and raise the levelcap.
Yeah, any time an RPG takes away my stuff and puts me in with a bunch of prisoners/slaves, I’m reminded of the “Slavers” series from D&D, modules A1-A4.
DIE THIEVES DIE!
Great series of modules.
I think the Pitt was my favourite of all the DLC, and Zeta was my least favourite, to the point that playing it made me quit playing FO3.
It is mentioned inside the simulation that Psycho was, in fact, developed for this very operation. By General Chase’s R&D team. Surely he wasn’t just trying to steal the fame and glory by spreading misinformation in his simulation, no sir, nothing of the sort. I think the drug wore off outside the simulation because it’s effects on your mind were replicated in the VR by simply dosing you with the stuff.
Anyway, you might want to open that last locked door in the base…
Finally. It took you guys three episodes. You even started to repeat yourselves at some point.
The hitler comparison wasnt accurate. Jingwei was just a field commander, the leader of China was Chairman Cheng. It was still hilarious though.
For anyone who missed this, in his first attempt to kill Jings, Josh damaged one of the powerarmored soldiers and they all turned on him, not damaging them is probably the hardest part of that battle cause they turn hostile after like one shot.
So it’s the equivalent of someone going and punching Rommel to death, I mean I guess it could happen. This big troop of Brits during the Africa campaign raiding Rommel’s camp, wearing their khaki shorts, bellies full of beer and with boxing gloves strapped on…
so its down to fisticuffs, is it?
You couldve swiped the gear from that one sniper,I think.Just as he was dropping dead,there was a prompt to search his body.
Also,I want to point out how disappointed I am with combat ai,not just in this game,but in every shooter that has been released after 2007,when fear came out.Im tired of scripted enemies and enemies that just bullrush you.I want to see them try to flank you,push tables to use as cover,duck behind furniture,wait for reinforcements and then charge.I know good ai is hard to make,but it can be done.
Finally,thank you guys for going through this dlc.I wouldve been bored to death if I had to do it myself.Your comments really make it easier to watch.So thank you.And I hope youll do the other dlcs as well.
The Search prompt always appears, but it just beeps at you.
I read an interesting article about ai and enemy behaviour in one gamedesigner’s blog.
It basically suggested that you dont really need to program any fancy algorithms into your ai to make it interesting to fight with. You only need about three types of combat behaviour:
1) Aggresive, enemy type that comes straight at you, Serious Sam style, no fancy tricks or anything
2) Defencive, enemy type that hangs back and carefully takes potshots at you instead of bumrushing you
3) I cant remember the third one for the life of me, I think its the one that tries to hide and ambush you, I will update it if I remember
I think thats enough to make for pretty interesting ai gameplay-wise.
Now, making it seem real and accurate is a whole different question.
Evasive or retreating, IIRC, it’s where they attempt to avoid you.
Yes,thats how it was before fear.Now Ive been spoiled and I want enemies to use the scenery(duck behind debris and furniture,turn the tables over,etc),change their behavior mid combat,ambush you,flank you,and always use different tactics.In fear I loved reloading places before big combats so I can do them again and again,and always in a different manner.
Interestingly the combine overwatch ai was able to spread across the battlefield, split up and flank you and do all that other neat stuff. Unfortunately due to how the game was built and paced they couldnt show off their skills most of the time.
Regarding your bits about leveling up: I think you might be remembering Fallout 1 through some rose-tinted glasses. It’d been a while since I played F1, so I consulted the Vault Wiki concerning skills, and I’m not seeing them as all that different from F3, at least in terms of usefulness. You could make, say, a medical professional character, but it’s not like the game gives you a “doctor House” track to follow; you just have a harder time getting through the game.
I’m not saying that the stats are all that and a bag of chips in F3, as you can easily munchkin your stats and max everything out (or concentrate on the stats that break the game) if you play it enough. But it’s not like that’s a new concept in gaming, even in the Fallout series.
I dont think you could max out even all the usefull skills, at least not without resorting to munchkinism. And perks were a lot better.
Skills and stats and all that other rpg stuff are a lot less important overall, there are hardly any stat checks and even if there were, it would be easy to just take intense training a dozen times and max out. Without mods stats dont really define your character. Probably in order to prevent people from gimping themselves, the game basically makes you average at everything. Before stats you get 100 base health and 200 max weight, about enough action points for 2 shots from most weapons, 11 skillpoints and 20 or so damage resistance.
You can not only max out the useful skills, you can go above 100% on them. This didn’t make too much difference, however, once the numbers were broken down and/or you discovered that some skill checks always included the possibility of failure.
As for the perks, a lot of them were the same (generally), and as the guide shows, very few were considered essential or even useful, much like in F3 (I think the ones they recommend tagging are the same ones that are recommended for this game).
Still, the pacing was different. In FO3 the developers were pretty much forced to make perks lackluster cause you received one every level. Even if classic fallouts had the same amount of usefull perks, you would only get one every three or four levels. Most of them also gave you immediate noticable benefit. After a long wait you could feel the difference pretty much immediatly, it was hugely satisfying.
In FO3 you pick up a boring +5 skill bonus every level or just plain go for Intense Training.
Cant say anything more about skills though, maybe I really dont remember. Then again I didnt play FO1, maybe things were different there.
You do bring up something that I do think was missing from F3 and would have mitigated the munchkining, at least, perhaps, on the main quest: A ticking clock. Aside from hand grenades, I don’t think there’s really any quest that’s time-sensitive as there were in F1 and F2.
If you knew that you were going to blow the whole enchilada by taking a trip to point lookout (which, IIRC, takes a month of game-time), you’d probably reconsider the voyage. As it stands, it doesn’t matter what state you left the main quest in, unstarted or with the enclave holding the GECK at the Jefferson Memorial.
I think you should either set a time limit on the main quest or dont try to give it the feeling of urgency.
In both FO3 and Oblivion, all the dialogue in the main quest was written to convince you that you will ultimately lose if you dont act NOW, and fell flat when you walked away to dick around, explore the world and do sidequests and discovered that everybody outside the main questline acted as if nothing was happening.
It was somewhat better in FO3 as before you find Dad and start working on the purifier the story doesnt go for pretend urgency.
I believe the “Trouble on the Homefront” quest, to return to Vault 101 is a time-sensitive quest.
If you wait long enough after getting the notification, the quest shows as “Completed/Invalidated” and you can’t re-enter 101.
I think a problem with timing the main quest is either people rush through it and get to the “end game” without doing side quests, or people waste too much time and “fail” with the only way to fix it being restarting a much earlier save. Either way large segments of the player base get less enjoyment from the game, and the devs won’t do that.
Maybe somewhere in between, like segments of the main quest that reward completing them within a certain time window. The problem is with the current mechanics it’s easy to loose track of time (who knows how many days pass when you’re in the subways).
They should find a way to make parts feel urgent, but let you know when it’s ok to wander. I had that issue with Mass Effect 1 and Fallout 3 where I got to the unstoppable end-game well before I wanted to.
An UI clock would be a sensitive response, like the radar. Maybe even put it on top/down of it so the player can easily “OMG I been three days in this f%$!·%&! cavern killing ghouls!!”
I loathe, LOATHE, games with a time limit.
The endgame for fallout1 can be done without firing a shot at the big bad. My sneaky hacker set the self destruct and walked away whistling.
High doctor score was *huge* in Fallout 1/2, because crippled limbs, while less common, couldn’t be cured by a short nap.
You hacked the bad guy. In F3, you can talk the bad guy into blowing himself up. Not too big of a difference, though I think F3 would have been better served with science being involved, though that would have just cause people to complain that it was copied from the first game.
Again, from the Vault Wiki:
“Doctor: Pretty marginal. You can fix a broken limb at a very low skill level, and other than that you’re fine with First Aid, Stimpaks and natural healing.”
From this and other responses, could older games like F1 and F2 seem more complex because you had the illusion of complexity and choice? Because, much like with pen-and-paper RPGs, some pretty cool-sounding abilities loose their polish when someone crunches the numbers… which leads to “optimal builds” and other fun-killing concepts.
Which you don’t have to use, of course. Fallout 1 and 2 did have significantly more choice. Sure, not all of it was optimal, but at least it was there.
I would agree. “Some builds are better than others” is a heckofa lot better than “all builds are the same”.
Right, but what I’m saying is because you can keep playing Fallout 3 beyond finishing every quest, you’re going to max everything out. If you stopped playing at the end of the main mission and didn’t do any side quests, you’d have to sort of “pick a build” to get through it.
The other games had an ending (though you could cheat your way out of finishing Fallout 1 if you were quick) and less ancillary stuff to do, didn’t they?
Having all of the sources of skill points and an infinite time to farm XP is going to result in everything maxed. I can only think of some sort of D&D-style class system or more expensive skills being something approaching a solution.
Eh, even then around the mid-levels you’ll be maxing out your specialist’s skills (even excepting book-hunting and bobbleheads). I mean, in the vid they already have a 75 sneak at level 9 with four more skills 40-50+. If they were more of a specialist, we could pare down two of those skills to get three in the 70+ range, which means they would max out around level 12-13. (And then with 11 more levels x20 skill points = 220, more than enough to max out all of those.) Again, this is excepting bobbleheads (+10) and books (+2 each) and perks.
I wanted to play a stealthy sniper character so I put points into Sneak, Small Guns, and Lockpicking and by the end I was slinging Explosives, Energy Weapons, and I think Unarmed too. This made me go hrm.
And then munchkinning, I’m pretty sure you can max out ALL skills (and all SPECIAL) at or before level 20. (Even ignoring the infinite-book exploits.)
One solution: raise the skill cap above 100 and make skills cost more. Would need some tweaking with alternative skill boosts, but shouldn’t be too difficult.
Just halving the skill points on level-up would help a lot. 20 skill points (you can actually get a few more than that as well) is too much. Additionally, the halving is easier to do than redesigning all skill progression :P
clause to refuse: Morrowind.
clause 2: oblivion
clause 3: fallout 2 to a lesser extent.
i never found it fun to go through the temple of trials 10 times because i picked the wrong build or have to restart my morrowind game because its completely useless to have certain skills as your main skills and it makes the game ridiculously impossible.
but that could be just me?
Oh, no, Morrowind is hell if you pick your skills poorly. But then again, that is a draw for many people.
true, true. but its annoying enough that they tried to lessen the effect in oblivion. and then in FO3 practically removed it.
iunno, sometimes i just like to be a god amongst men, taking down supermutants with my fists.
of course other times i like to be fighting for my life among the wreckage of a destroyed civilization…
which is why i tend to explore DC at high levels, so i fight off streams of super mutant overlords almost exclusively.
XD
That is a big problem, personally I thought Morrowind was sort of clever about that though. Since what you chose in the beginning didn’t really matter as long as you chose 1 sort of armour and 1 sort of weapon as major. Of course the first time you play it it’s hard to know where you should go and whatnot so there is a problem.
The worst levelling systems are when you are forced to make big choices before you know what they do. I’m playing “Arcanum of steamworks and magick obscura” at the moment and while it is a really good game it suffers heavily from this. The levelling system is really intricate and interesting. The problem is that you make all the really important choices before you get to play the game so you don’t really understand how the game works. This meant that after something like 15h I have a character that needs to level grind all the time to be able to pass the obstacles.
Actually I had the same issue with the first Fallout except grinding wasn’t really an option due to the timer. This is basically why I don’t have the fondest memories of Fallout 1.
doesnt matter????
DOESNT MATTER!!!?????
yeah alright, but some builds are just made for fail, like not having a damage-centric magic skill picked and having unarmored
or picking marksman.
or not choosing sneak and lockpicking XD
okay, not letting me edit my comment. huh.
aaaaanyways, isnt arcanum that game with a ridiculous amount of different skills?
i can see how that would make it even more difficult.
I dont see why you would need to damage with magic instead of trusty old metal stick.
I also dont see why you would ever want sneak or security when both can be easily replaced by magic scrolls or even potions. Its kind of a problem with magic in morrowind. Why pick security when you can cast open lock instead? Why improve speech or haggle if you can just cast charm and get whatever you want?
Depends on if you are completionist or not. I use a mod that cuts down XP with 2/3, but even without it I ended Broken Steel at lvl 24. If you want to run around until you reach lvl 30 it’s your problem, but unlike Oblivion (where the main quest benefited from being done as early as possible, and you then did everything else) FO3 is better before you play long enough to release the Enclave.
IMHO, of course.
And here is something I’ve been wondering..
In Mass Effect, you can convince S***n to blow his brains out. You still getto fight him, but nevertheless, you could speak your way through one of the hardest fights in game. Everybody loved it.
In Fallout 3, you can speak your way past the big bad Pr******t E**n and get him to blow up the whole base in doing so. Nobody cared.
Why is that?
Because the speech check against [Fallout 3 ‘Big Bad’] is (and I’ll be touching on this later when we get to him) so friggen stupid. With Saren, you were convincing him that he had become a pawn of Sovereign. With the Master in Fallout 1, you were convincing him that his ultimate plan – a race to replace humanity and rebuild the world – was a dead end, because data you’d collected proved they were sterile.
With [‘Big Bad’], your arbitrary speech point investment and dice rolls are used to convince him that he should commit suicide “because I said so,” and he goes “Oh, okay. I’ll do that.”
There is also the fact that “big bad” essentialy loses all his power, bigness and badness by the time you get to talk to him. It doesnt even matter if you blow him up or not. He poses no danger already.
I always wandered why Master didnt try to adjust his plan instead of jumping to conclusions. If supermutants were sterile, they could just keep a bunch of human slaves around for breeding.
There could be some explanations for it. The easiest one I can think of is that keeping a group of human slaves makes the “new race to rebuild the world” dependant on “inferior cretures”, since humans would need to be around in order to keep the population flowing.
Well its hardly a suicidal dealbreaker. But yeah, arrogance and pretend civility and all that…
Also whether you choose to kill the “big bad” or not has no impact on the game. In ME the speech check meant you don’t have to play one of the harder and most tedious boss fights in the game in Fallout 3 there is no difference whether you kill him or not you don’t get a different conversation with anyone later and there are no less enemies. The only difference is the explosion animation.
i cant remember now if it was doctor or first aid that was useless.
but i took one and completely neglected the other. i think it was doctor, i mean what kind of a doctor cant do first aid??
WHY WERE THEY EVEN SEPARATE
Simple.
I can see, for example, a specialist who is incredibly knowledgeable about the effects of radiation poisoning on bone tissue not being the most competent first aidsman.
I can also see someone with a first aid certificate not being able to differentiate between different kinds of liver cancer.
Medicine is a very, VERY complicated field. Don’t forget that. For the sake of game mechanics, though, I agree with you.
i realize that in real life it would make sense to have it separate, but in the game, even when youre not talking gameplay, its just silly. i mean, heres me, this guy, from a vault.
wandering the wastes.
and when i level up i somehow learn how to do an organ transplant, but first aid? that is beyond my ken, right there. being specialized in the real world makes sense because you have all the books an teachers, but in the middle of a nowhere desert where people are struggling just to make a living and everything is broken half the time?
dont make no sense, ta me.
but them, trogg am just punch good.
XD
Aww, you missed one of my favorite Operation: Anchorage glitches. One of those guys on the roof of the building doesn’t count as someone you have to kill for the mission to be complete, so the mission will sometimes end mid-combat.
In a twist of cruel irony, I’m pretty sure the shot that killed you in the first Jingwei fight was a Gauss Rifle.
I love the fact that Cuftbert is an honoured alumni of the Stormtroopers school of Advanced Weapons Training and Precision Marksmanship.
(Does having a low Small Guns really make the spread that huge? I almost never have it lacking in points.)
Well its that and the Assault Rifle is basically crap.
I so hope that Obsidian will put some guy running around in New Vegas who goes: “Argghh, stop shooting me!” whenever you hit him….
But it being Obsidian, he will be glitched so he will be either invisible, so some speck of air will be screaming “Arggh, stop shooting me!”, or they will put so much effort into that one gimmick that they forget to test the main quest or something….
Well seeing as they are made up of some of the people who made the first two, I doubt it. And quite honestly KotOR2 and NWN2 were well to do seeing the idiotic time frame that Atari gave them.
If Alpha Protocol is anything to go by, we wont be seeing a lot of improvement in the bug department.
Im still enthusiastic about New Vegas, it promises to be a Fallout game with actual plot, characters and world that makes sense instead of 50s sci-fi themed diablo.
Honestly, Fallout 3’s a hell of a lot buggier than Alpha Protocol.
The second Fallout was known for being a bugfest, so because they are made up with some of the original developers, it means nothing. Also, as someone above me said (see what I did there?), Obsidian has a lousy historial of bugfesting.
They seem to have lousy project management.
Also I cant help but feel they are stretching themselves too thin right now. They just released AP and already announced Dungeon Siege 3, all while making New Vegas. I guess they have two inside teams or somthing.
It makes sense to me. They either have two parallel teams or are just working in a pipeline. They can have artists mocking up the conceptual stuff for DS3 while a design document is drafted at the same time the programmers are polishing up (please please polishing up and not cramming new features in last minute) New Vegas, all without stretching resources.
Someone needs to make a mod that inserts Josh’s “Stop shooting me!” as one of the random things enemies say when attacked.
I was afraid there for a second we might make it the entire rest of the way through the OP:A, and NOT hear, “Stop shooting me!” LOL
Power armor guys with FatMen…reminds me – in my current playthrough, making an effort to round up as many Bobbleheads as I can. Recently slogged through the National Guard Armory, found Small Guns bobblehead, only to find a bunker I couldnt open. Ran through my Notes, found parts of a message. Long story short, found the other parts of the message in various places, went back, opened bunker — found an Experimental FatMan MIRV: it fires _eight_ mini-nukes at a time. In previous plays of the game, I had never gotten the Small Guns Bobblehead, so the entire level was new to me, as was the exploring for holotapes.
Very cool, even though I wont use it ‘for real’ in my play through. Only for fun. :P
A good place to use it almost for real is Evergreen Mills. You can do a shocking amount of damage with it. Also if you’re going the all evil all the time route and Megaton gets on your nerves…
Oddly enough, already run through Evergreen Mills…with a hunting rifle. I do plan to backtrack to where I picked up the Dad’s portion of the note — there was a Very Hard safe I couldnt pick when I got there, but can now. There is another safe near one of the early notes as well (the one by the powerlines).
Megaton…yeah, it can get annoying, but I use it mostly as a storage facility (house), repair facility when needed (Moira – I do most of my own repairs) and shop. Get in, get out.
I actually used it on the giant supermutant back at galaxy news radio. I then proceeded to speech check Three Dog into letting me not do his stupid stupid quest. I pretended what I had said was “If you don’t tell me what I want to know I’m going to level this building in one shot.”
“I know what you’re thinking. “Did he fire eight mini-nukes or only seven?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is an Experimental MIRV, the most powerful handheld nuclear slingshot in the world, and would kill everyone here in a single shot, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, Dog?”
He does possess a +1 Lck head wrap. I guess he would say yes (95% is still not always).
Oh, great. I just noticed that he may be not just an Author Darling, but also a shout out of the crazy elven beggar in Morrowind…
So, all of this expansion is 1.5-2 hours long and is not exactly enjoyable stuff? Really?
I’d feel disappointed if I were a Fallout fan, that’s just shelled out the money for it, I think.
Well, if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s a lot longer. Also more boring and you keep expecting the good part to start. Then it abruptly ends.
It’s the one DLC I didn’t purchase.
I think I like Point Lookout the best. Mothership Zeta at least had some new stuff to look at and a cargo bay full of, well, just about everything: If you have ammo/weapon/item OCD, you’ll be in hog heaven.
“The Pitt” was okay, as I liked having a new city area to explore, but parts of it were buggy (I forget the name of the guy who runs the place. When he makes his big speech up on a catwalk, I hear two audio streams for him playing over each other, each one appearing to say different things}. It does explain where all the ammo is coming from (at least the kind made from metal).
Oh, I got that bug too! It confused the hell out of me at first.
All the DLCs are quite bad, except probably for Broken Steel, and that´s only because it fixes the ending and extends the levelcap. But all of them are plagued with enemies with humongous quantities of hitpoints, arbitrarial difficulty, and player punches (like the lobotomy).
It doesn’t fix the ending at all. It undermines your final choice has a few funny quests and then it sort of peters out. Sure you can still play after the ending which is a plus but the ending itself is even worse than the original.
Other than that it was great though. It’s like most of Fallout 3 it’s great when it doesn’t try to have a story.
It lets you not kill yourself or another person with radiation when you can send in a RADIATION IMMUNE SUPERMUTANT OR A GODDAMN GHOUL.
And final choice didnt matter anyway, even if you sent Sarah you still couldnt continue playing. The only thing it changed is whether Ron Pearlman called you a naughty boy or a nice boy in the ending cinematic.
And if you were shown a picture of you being a pile of green goo. Read that again. A pile of green goo.
Yes the choice was moronic but in broken steel they just pull a “oh you didn’t die” out of their ass. Sure the choice didn’t make a whole lot of sense and it had like zero emotional impact but at least it tried. In broken steel there is no longer a reason for the choice. And really is the end choice in broken steel any less arbitrary and needless? I think not.
Besides broken steel doesn’t change the fact that Fawkes won’t go into the chamber it just makes it not the ending.
As said broken steel is fun but it is also stupid.
To be fair they pulled the vanilla “oh you have to die” from the same general area.
Fawkes goes into the chamber, he even lampshades the retcon by saying “I was going to give you some bs about destiny but I guess youre right, I am immune to radiation”.
The choice was meaningless from the beginning. Letting Sarah die still gets you nothing more than a lecture and a Game Over. Going yourself gets you a “how awesome you are for doing what Daddy Sue did!” and a Game Over. It never, ever, had any meaning more than a player punch. After all the hate about the Game Over part, they took it away (and that´s why BS doesn´t have one after the main plot).
Now, why didn´t they took away the stupid choice then? The reason is they couldn´t take away their Karma Punch to the player for not following the writers´ moral compass.
In theory, I would like Point Lookout the best. The problem is that by the time you do it, there is nothing there worth caring about. ALL the loot you can get, including all quest rewards, are worse than what you already have. I wonder if they suddenly got an epiphany about “munchkin gear” after releasing O:A and The Pitt, that both gives far better loot…
Tbh, the Ritual Knife is one of the best early-game stabbyweapons. 12 AP per Vats strike equals win.
Also, Pt. Lookout introduces the perks Ghoul Ecology (+5 damage per strike) and Superior Defender (more of the same, as well as +10 DR when standing still). The first is actually supposed to only work on Ghouls, but it’s bugged. The latter is only supposed to work when standing still, but it’s (also) bugged. They both provide their benefit on each and every strike. With a Gatling Laser, the Auto Axe or Jack the Ripper this bonus is absolute devastation. Also pretty impressive on melee weapons and rifles (tiny for Missiles and the likes, tho).
It might not technically be loot, but it’s the biggest boost in power for most characters.
Actually OP:A and Broken Steel are the two DLC I have for this game; I may get the others later – but to be honest this whole trend towards DLC is really starting to bug me. The only saving grace I can see for the DLC atm is that it is actually helping me WAIT on purchasing a game I want so I can get a GOTY (Game Of The Year) edition later to get the DLC for free.
I found OP:A a bit dull as well; but overall not as bad as what you guys make out. Of course, since I tend to make Small Guns/Energy Weapon snipers it wasn’t an issue for me to use VATS and pop some skulls. Especially when you have ammo dispensers all over the place. It actually let me feel comfortable with screwing around and toying around with the Sniper Rifle; in the main game the Sniper Rifle while very powerful, tends to degrade so quickly I typically save it for more ‘important’ fights as an opener from extreme range.
Everyone should get Broken Steel though; the questline for it was decent (B grade IMO), but the lvl cap increase and being able to continue past the original ending is priceless.
Watching this Spoiler Warning series though is tempting me to see if they have discounted the older DLC for this game though.
i love the intro bits to this LP
how are you guys doing them?
is it just photoshop or what?
No, our logo just naturally occurs in the game. You might have the patched version.
that is 1/3rd of the reason i like this Lp right there.
XD
I think this really showcases the difference between Bioware “Open world” and Bethesda’s take on it. The difference being actually allowed to go anywhere, and being given your choice of which three linear paths you want to take.
Now if only they could work together…
Hey shamus tell josh use “size matters” as the flamer he wants to use is a “Big Gun” and what the hell happened to “Meelee character!!!?!!!?!????
I like grenade character more.
This lp has convinced me to start using grenades more.
Refering to 6:44 when the third guy who is’nt Josh or Shamus (The whatsit who uses a forum name instead of his real name like Ratskart of smething?) Says: “It’s not like you have a need for coffee mugs or anything but it would be nice to have the choice.”
What if you wanted to Role-Play Riddick Huh? HUH?!!! =D
I didn’t know why everyone died until I saw this, when I played through I didn’t hear the fighting and continued looting then when I walked out, everyone was dead and I kinda freaked