{"id":4473,"date":"2009-08-14T17:19:52","date_gmt":"2009-08-14T21:19:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=4473"},"modified":"2010-05-12T08:44:24","modified_gmt":"2010-05-12T13:44:24","slug":"experienced-points-mods-playground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=4473","title":{"rendered":"Experienced Points: Mod’s Playground"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week’s Experienced Points is a bunch of gushing about the Fallout 3 mod scene and how much it rocks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For the curious, my current Fallout 3 play-through is as follows:
\n
\nMy character is a guy, focusing on stealth and small arms, and neutral disposition. TERRIBLE charisma, rubbish speech skill. Bad haircut. This is radically different from my usual characters, who usually have silver tongues, angelic hearts, and favor clean energy weapons over messy firearms. Despite my tendency to swipe the odd item here and there I’m quickly building a saintly reputation anyway. Stupid karma system. I should look for a mod for that.<\/p>\n

I’m using the following mods. (A lot of these came from suggestions in the comments earlier this week. Thanks so much for the pointers. This game keeps getting better.)<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Eat \/ sleep \/ drink mod<\/a>. This makes a lot of profound gameplay changes. Taking drugs dehydrates you, which means if you’re the kind of person to dash headlong into battle and stimpack your way through the pain, you WILL run out of pure water very quickly. Dirty water imparts a lot more radiation now. It’s actually dangerous! You can fight it with rad-away, but again: You have to be careful not to overdose, and I think rad-away depletes nutrients. (Makes you hungry.) <\/li>\n
  2. No fast travel. I must say this game feels VERY different without fast travel. Specifically, you don’t even THINK about going downtown without several exceedingly good reasons. None of this “teleport to underworld, sell stuff, teleport to Tenpenny Towers, etc”. My first trip downtown at level four-ish nearly ended in death. And I don’t mean “whoops, I need to re-load the game because I got shot” death. I mean, “I’m out of water, I’m sick with radiation, I’ve been awake for 22 hours, and I can’t find the way out of this warren of ghouls and traps.” That would have been a game-killing death, since restoring from one doomed state to a previous doomed state isn’t productive. You don’t dare go to sleep when you’re low on supplies, because when you wake up you’ll be even MORE thirsty and hungry. Hunger, fatigue, and thirst eventually inflict staus ailments which will make you weaker, slower, dumber, less alert, etc. Which makes you less effective in combat, which makes you use stimpacks, etc. Pretty soon you end up in a death spiral. I got by with drinking dirty water, eating some scraps I found, and managed to just barely stagger back to Megaton to rest and replenish. Whew. After that I learned to stock up with everything I’ll need before I set foot out of the house. <\/li>\n
  3. Minimal map use. I’m trying to learn my way around the wasteland for real. I’ve clocked over a hundred hours in the game, but between the map and fast travel I never had to go anywhere more than once. Now I’m getting an honest sense of the layout. (Paradise falls is a handy – if ominous – landmark that can be seen from “miles” away.) Megaton is remarkably hard to spot despite its size and position. I still get hopelessly lost trying to navigate around through the metro system. <\/li>\n
  4. A mod that increases running speed. I did this just to make the “no fast travel” less painful. However, the extra speed makes it a bit too easy to play hit & run. I’d love a mod that (say) boosted your movement speed when not in combat, but returned you to normal when detected by an enemy. <\/li>\n
  5. A mod to make nights darker. Another mod to add streetlights<\/a>. Both are exceptional. It really is dangerous to go stumbling around in the dark at night, because your pip-light will make you such a target.\n<\/li>\n
  6. Quasi-Level uncapper, which lets you keep leveling past 20. (Technically, you just do level 20 over and over, although it gives you a note in your PipBoy to let you know what level you “really” are.) I’m not crazy about this or any of the other level uncappers. They all have annoying side-effects. To properly fix this problem the entire level ladder would need to be re-balanced. <\/li>\n
  7. Fast VATS<\/a>, to speed up the tedious cutscenes that play when you shoot someone. I'm not against a little slo-mo now and again for special moments, but having the game slow down every. single. time. you pull the trigger, and then having the camera linger over their corpse for several seconds, completely ruins the effect.<\/li>\n
  8. Mods for allowing similar guns and armor to cross-repair. So, all the shotgun weapons now work together, as do all the 10mm guns, etc. I’m still not crazy about the repair system. (I need to COMBINE BASEBALL BATS in order to “repair” the one I have? Really?!?) But this makes it slightly less annoying. It still doesn’t help with the Sniper Rifle, which is simply too rare and degrades too quickly to bother taking with you on extended runs. (And without fast travel, EVERY run is an extended run. I’m typically gone for three or four days at a stretch, and the sniper rifle is generally useless well before the end of day one. After that it’s just expensive and heavy.) <\/li>\n
  9. Various cosmetic mods: Better looking NPCs, green foliage<\/a>, alternate soundtrack with original Fallout music, more hairstyles, some color changes<\/a>, and a dozen other things I’m sure I’ve forgotten.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It’s amazing how these tweaks have guided me into realistic (or at least reasonable) behavior: Sleep at night, eat a couple of meals a day, try not to get hurt, don’t get irradiated just to loot some stupid boxes, carry lots of supplies, and don’t go looking for trouble. <\/p>\n

    My abominable charisma devastated my barter prices, which meant that my character didn’t completely<\/em> break the in-game economy until almost level ten. My charisma is 2 (out of 10) my barter skill is 17 (out of 100) at level 11 I have over $5,000, which is more cash than I could usefully spend. (My previous character, with CHA 7, and a barter skill of 100, ended the game with over $100,000. Kind of silly when the most expensive things you could buy are under $2,000.) Maybe there’s a mod for that<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This week’s Experienced Points is a bunch of gushing about the Fallout 3 mod scene and how much it rocks. For the curious, my current Fallout 3 play-through is as follows:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}