T w e n t y S i d e d

I’ve done Honest Hearts twice now, and the rain thing is kind of odd. Originally, I saw it began raining, was impressed, looked up, saw a clear starry sky, laughed, and didn’t look up again. I was actually surprised to see the clouds forming in Josh’s game. I watched it more closely on my second play-through. It seems like it begins raining from a clear sky, and then the cloud layer slowly thickens. I think having those two things happen in the reverse order would be less ridiculous.

I also hadn’t noticed the raindrop thing. In case you couldn’t follow Josh’s demonstration:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning S5E48: Take Drugs, Kill a Bear”

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.

As promised in the show: Here is the story of the guy who played Oblivion drunk.

I normally play 100% white knight in Bethesda games, but the Oblivion Assassin’s guild quests were so fun that I couldn’t help myself. The characters are diverse and interesting. The quests have multiple optional goals, which makes them more interesting than a simple pass / fail system. The quest rewards are outstanding. The writing is delightfully pitch-black humor. The voice acting is uniformly excellent.

In my final play-through, I did all of the guild quest lines: Fighter’s Guild, Thieves Guild, Mage’s Guild, and Assassin’s Guild. I also contracted and cured vampirism. (And then used the console to cheat and fix what the game did to my face.) I became the arena champion and did every sidequest I could find in all the major cities and acquired all of the available houses. (Even though I only ever used the shack as an actual base, because it was most convenient.) All that, and I never set foot in Kvatch to begin the main quest. Screw the main quest. Which means that game wasn’t so much a play-through as a play-around. Make of that what you will. Same goes for this.

Getting back to Fallout: New Vegas…

I’m on my second play-through of Honest Hearts. On my first play-through I managed to miss the survivalist diaries. In my defense, the stuff found on terminals is usually pretty lame. “Dear diary, I have this pile of cool stuff and I put them in the container and then wrote about it on this random 200-year-old computer for no reason. The end.” But on the advice of Rutskarn, I went back and read them.

The survivalist diary collection is some of the best fiction to come out of the Fallout franchise. Including the stuff in the original Fallout. When I was done I wanted a whole novel of his stories.
It’s also the first time I’ve encountered anything detailed regarding the day the bombs fell, and the days following. For me, it was worth the price of the DLC by itself.

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.

A few more things I wanted to comment on:

Honest Hearts begins with you joining a caravan, which has three voiced, named characters. Each of them are interesting. So much so that I was really disappointed that they died in the first minute of the DLC. I would have liked it if they lived just a bit longer.

I also really like how one of them is wearing a vault suit. If you have high enough medicine, you can out him as an addict of the drug Psycho. I enjoy the idea that vault dwellers appear in the wasteland from time to time. Maybe they get kicked out of their vault for being a jerk. Maybe they sneak out to sate an incurable wanderlust. Maybe they’re chosen to go out on some errand. Some embark on world-changing adventures, and some end up getting eaten by predators, hooked on drugs, or murdered by raiders. And some leave to find their father, only to have adventures so stupid that they ragequit in disgust.

Out of curiosity:

1. How many of you shot at Follows-Chalk when he was introduced?
2. How many of you expected Yao Guai to be a lot more dangerous?
3. How many of you fell off a cliff when attempting to take a shortcut, as Josh did?
4. How many of you went from, “Oh wow! A beautiful new landscape to explore!” to, “Damn it, another stupid Obsidian rat-maze for me to run” in the first 15 minutes of playing?

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.