T w e n t y S i d e d

I’ll just concede now: Rutskarn won this episode.

I’d forgotten what things were like in these sandbox games. In Mass Effect or BioShock, you could generally count on the plot moving forward during any given episode. But here in the Nevada sandbox, it’s possible to burn through twenty minutes and not accomplish a dang thing, plot-wise.

And of course, Josh is really rushing through here. I know in my games I’m much more thorough about looting and selling as much as I can. Josh leaves a lot of corpses un-looted, and when he does loot them he leaves heavy items behind. On top of this, he isn’t going inside of each and every building and scaving for treasure. I think I spent an hour in Nipton on my last play-through. If you’ve never played this game, just imagine this episode four times in a row before moving on to the next one.

It’s more fun than it sounds.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The encounter with the man and woman shooting each other is an interesting one. Playing on the general do-gooder tendencies of the average player, the designers have her pleading for help. I’m not sure how, but it seems to be random which one of them wins the fight. Sometimes she’s dead before you reach them. Sometimes their fight goes on and on. Sometimes she wins. Rutskarn was complaining about the fact that you lose karma for killing him, when it’s very likely that a first-time player will attack the guy in a misguided attempt to thwart injustice.

Part of the problem is that I’m not sure what the designers mean by “karma”. Is it a measure of the bad you’ve done, even when you mean no harm? Like, accidentally running over a dog gives a person “negative karma”, even though it was an accident. Or is it just a re-branded version of Ye Olde Slider of Morality?

Is the winner of the fight determined by combat rolls? I don’t think so. Their fight goes on for a long time, and usually the winner has a good bit of health left. Over that many dice rolls, we should not see wildly different outcomes.

About the lottery winner: He’s a powder ganger, which means he’s with the group of murderous escaped convicts who have been raiding and making trouble in the region. If you talk to another survivor in Nipton, you’ll find out that the Powder Gangers were here as part of a kidnapping, ransom, and robbery plot. Their plans went sideways when the Legion rolled into town and started beheading and crucifying everyone. The legion held a lottery. The “lucky losers” were beheaded. Then most of the rest of the town was crucified. A few more were burned alive on tires. Then the second-place winner had his legs crippled, and the first-place winner was set free. The fact that a Powder Ganger won the lottery was just one final cruelty in a long list of injustices.

But the truth is, I kill the lottery winner because he’s the first guy you meet with eyeglasses, and I always take the “Four Eyes” perk. So… I don’t have a lot of moral high ground.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

We discussed the consolidation of skills in this game. This is a rare case where I like that some of the skills have been collapsed.

In a desperate wasteland with few tools and no sterilization, the difference between “first aid” and “doctor” is very, very hazy. Really, one is a sub-discipline of the other. So merging them was good.

As I said in the show, I thought merging “guns” and “big guns” was pretty good. Keeping them separate for reasons of logic was fine – I don’t expect practicing with a six-shooter to impart meaningful knowledge on the use of a rocket launcher. But from a gameplay perspective it kind of sucked. In Fallout, Using big guns without investing skill points in them was suicide, but it was really hard to put all of those delicious skill points into such a situational weapon. Especially since you’d need to be proficient with some sort of backup weapon for when foes invade your personal space.

As I said, I dislike that “unarmed” and “melee” are different skills. I know they’re not the same thing, but as with “first aid” and “doctor”, one seems like a specialization of the other. Brass knuckles are melee weapons, after all.

Maybe an alternate solution would be to have some sort of synergy bonus between related skills. Instead of just merging all of the different weapon skills, you can have them level together. You get a point of melee for every two points you put into unarmed, and vice-versa. The various types of guns could have similar relationships. Speech and barter might be more loosely related – one point gained for every four points gained of the other. (Or whatever.) Of course, this would unbalance the game so the skill point gains would need to be re-worked, which is a good reason for not doing it. But it’s fun to think about different ways to simulate these things.

In my own play-through, I always, always took the “Good Natured” perk. It takes away 5 skill points from all weapons skills, but gives 5 skill points to Barter, Medicine, Repair, Science, and Speech. Since I don’t use more than one weapon type, I’m just giving up 5 points in my main weapon skill to gain 25 points in a bunch of stuff that I do use.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.