Obsidian in chart

[IronicNeurotic]

ITT: I don't regret ignoring skyway.

Thats the best way to handle Skyway and his followers.

 

[Jaesun]

Ignoring Skyway is for the weak. And you miss out on the un-intentional Comedy Gold™ he can provide on occasion.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

*snip*

Older Fallouts weren't that specific when it came to quest directions either, but they had the benefits of bird's eye view so you didn't need much other than a name, mcguffin and the location. This is also the same reason why it's quite impossible to get lost in older Fallouts: The locked perspective keeps directions static, and the use of hub "actual" maps and world map travel made moving around simpler in a good way.

I wasn't referring to old Fallouts, in fact I removed the mention how Turbo Plasma Rifle and Pulse Rifle both made all other weapons obsolete in their respective games out of respect towards the holy Trinity. Most of the time in older Fallouts you'd have even less reason for multiple weapons, considering that using more than two weapons was highly detrimental to your killing efficiency. However, in quite a lot of older RPGs, in example Infinity games, and old FPS games in particular (which would be the main reference here), you would make use of a plethora of tools at your disposal. Combat was one of the things New Vegas improved both over the originals and Fallout 3. This time around you do benefit from weapons beyond your ranged and melee weapon.

You see, there's more difference to a gun than its basic damage. For one thing, variant ammunition means a lot, as does rate of fire, reload time and clip size. Less-armoured groups of humans go down to a grenade machine gun, Deathclaws to a minigun with AP bullets, and an assault rifle and SMG are used for other occasions to conserve ammo for the other two. Much like in ye olde FPS games.

The effects your stats have for your progress is clear to see. Just look at a fairly low-key side quest, getting two experts in Freeside past going cold turkey and back to helping the community. If you have high Science or Medical, you can use alternative easier to acquire recipes for them, or with very high speech you can get them to just tough out the cold turkey phase. Neither of these examples, or any other example of skill use outside of hacking and lock-picking, has any mini-games involved.

The discussions on beating Deathclaws also counter your claim of the lack skills. A lot of people pointed out how having high Sneak really helped to set up traps, as did high enough skill to get the most out of your explosive traps. This was when you don't have access to a shitload of AP bullets and high power or rate of fire weaponry that you can use to fight off multiple Deathclaws at once. All of which mean your Guns skill needs to be insanely high so your character skill doesn't cause unnecessary misses and deals the damage, which is actually very damn important when fighting Deathclaws in NV.

There's definately more to the Legion than dressing up like Romans and being teh evulz. For one thing, it's pointed out often that Legion territory is possibly the safest and most orderly place in the Wasteland. It's also worth pointing out there was a lot more to the massacre at Nipton than a "barbarian raid", it was a moral test for the town, and the town failed on all the chances it had to make the Legion leave them be. As also pointed out, dressing up like Romans is no big deal in the Fallout setting, when the Khans in FO1 were pictured by the developers as Mongolians in tire armor. And those were random Raiders, while the Legion was founded by a highly educated guy who had access to holovids on history and built the Legion as a structure that counteracted any ties to the previous Wasteland.

The Mojave you see is both after the re-emergence of House, who "recivilized" the tribes of Vegas proper, where the influences kept leaking out, and later by the influx of NCR settlers. And let's not forget all the cowboy stuff the environment had around to begin with, such as Sunset Sarsaparilla.

Actually, NCR dresses up like WW1 stuff, and that's not a bad thing. Their uniforms are highly functional and do give them an organized military look. Certainly much more logical than all of them walking around in swank Combat Armor and building force fields instead of gates, especially when they're that far away from Shady Sands without finished railroads there.

It also bears mention that New Vegas has a lot of detail on how the people in the world stay alive and power their stuff. You see battery units wired up all over the place, power lines, farmsteads, a large collective farm, water pipelines, wells, roads, the works. Certainly much more than in 99% of RPGs one can come up with.

 

[The Ninth Circle]

We need a golf clap emoticon for that post.

 

[IronicNeurotic]

Ignoring Skyway is for the weak. And you miss out on the un-intentional Comedy Gold™ he can provide on occasion.

I'm sorry. I'm too weak.

:/

 

[DriacKin]

Ignoring Skyway is for the weak. And you miss out on the un-intentional Comedy Gold™ he can provide on occasion.

I'm sorry. I'm too weak much of a newfag.

:/

fixed

 

[Lumpy]

Ignoring Skyway is for the weak. And you miss out on the un-intentional Comedy Gold™ he can provide on occasion.

I'm sorry. I'm too weak much of a newfagDrog.

:/

fixed

 

[ironyuri]

*snip*

snip

Just to add to what Vaarna said (and god forgive me for responding to skyway criticisms):

Skyway's idea of "tribes" seems to be flawed. As far as I can tell he implies that the "tribes" of the Fallout setting are completely uncivilized across the board. Sure, Sulik's tribe may have been engaged in folk mysticism (the spirits), but not all tribes would necessarily have been like this.

Fallout is a world 200 years after the bomb. Consider the last 600 years of history (@skyway and anyone else). The last 200 years, from the period at the start of the industrial revolution, roughly, 1790 to the modern day 2010 has seen exponential growth in technology and development, whereas one might argue that the preceeding 400 years 1390-1790 bore witness to only gradual advances in human civilization.

200 years would not be enough time for an advanced society to completely recover from atomic cataclysm, especially one of the order which would wipe out vast tracts of habitable, arable land. It would also wipe out (In the world of Fallout) the vast majority of skilled technicians who understand the advanced technology (military scientists, professionals, government officials). This leaves a vast number of people without state or government and with no understanding of the technology which brought them to an advanced state of civilization.

On one hand this vast number of people would need a way to explain the cataclysm (return to religious or mystic forms of explanation and rationalisation of the world) and huge numbers of people would be cut off, isolated and forced into localisation to find their resources (tribalism). As each successive generation is born they would have to forget unecessary knowledge to survive in the Wasteland (book learning) and would need to rediscover basic human skills (hunting, foraging, subsistence farming).

For the first few generations, many of the city-scapes of the world would be highly irradiated and untraversable, forcing populations into the vast Wastelands and into direct competition with one another (tribal warfare). There would be no clothing, machine-tools or food manufacture on an industrial scale and the lack of education would precipitate a decline in understanding of the old world, possibily leading to a fetishisation of technology (gods in the machine vs evil spirits in the machine).

As hubs of civilization begin to rebuild (those who survived the cataclysm and managed to retain knowledge and learning), ie: the vaults, the Brotherhood of Steel- they would come into conflict with these tribes. Even in the case of Vault 15, the origin point of Shady Sands, the Khans, the Vipers and the Jackals, the explanation for their tribalism is that the vault door was rigged to open after only 20 years. Confronted with the direct aftermath of the catastrophe, obviously some inhabitants turned to tribalistic raiding using the weapons they had in the vault. (Think the militias currently operating in the USA, is theming around the great Khan so crazy when some militias theme around the Minutemen?)

Turning to New Vegas: the explanation for Vegas is that Mr. House after several decades in a medically induced coma re-awakens, uses his intact robot manufactory below the casino to produce securitrons and restore order to the Strip. He subjugates and "civilises" the three major tribes of the Mojave (there are other civilized settlements in the area, not EVERYONE becomes a tribal in the world) and rebuilds the strip, reconnects the power and water and then negotiates with the NCR.

200 years after a nuclear disaster in Fallout we have: a sprawling legalistic Republic utilising technology roughly at a level 50 years behind the world at the time of the atomic bombs. A vast slaver army, based on the Marian/Julian military principles of the Roman Republic (NOT BASED ON ANCIENT ROME) which assimilates disparate tribes and institutes a strict martial discipline across a huge territory stretching from the Colorado through Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada.

Not to make this post too long, but skyway is also forgetting a hugely important point: 200 years after the bombs technology could not easily be reconsolidated because raiders would fight over (especially weapons) technology and salvagers would salvage whatever they could sell to survive, whether it was a supercomputer part or a few coins and they wouldn't necessarily know the value of the item. Piecing the world back together would be incredibly difficult.



tl,dr: SKYWAY THERE WERE TRIBES IN FALLOUT 2 SO WHY SHOULDN'T THEY BE IN VEGAS YOU STUPID ASSHOLE FUCK YOU TO DEATH DIE IN A FIRE

 

[Radisshu]

A worthy successor to the previous Fallout games

Quest compass instead of "use your brains to find what you need via exploring"

A very worthy successor indeed

...

So you forgot how the Fallout map worked? I'm not saying the quest compass is a good thing, as it's ridiculously overused (pointing to individual NPCs rather than just general locations), but wtf mang. This is why nobody takes you seriously, you come up with too much retarded shit. When someone told you the location of something in Fallout, it normally appeared on your map. Sure, you could go exploring without directions, but that's possible in New Vegas as well.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

A worthy successor to the previous Fallout games

Quest compass instead of "use your brains to find what you need via exploring"

A very worthy successor indeed

...

So you forgot how the Fallout map worked? I'm not saying the quest compass is a good thing, as it's ridiculously overused (pointing to individual NPCs rather than just general locations), but wtf mang. This is why nobody takes you seriously, you come up with too much retarded shit. When someone told you the location of something in Fallout, it normally appeared on your map. Sure, you could go exploring without directions, but that's possible in New Vegas as well.

And the bird's eye view makes exploring very handy, since you have a perfect point of view for the little pixel-hunting there is and for spotting NPCs who you can talk to. And you can check names on things with clicks from afar. And the fact a non-stock building and character sprite was a giant YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO DO HERE sign.

That actually goes to show several of the advantages of the bird's eye viewpoint.

The advantage of the personal viewpoint used in NV, which Obsidian obviously realized, is that you can put a lot more into some exploration elements, such as items and computer panels around a dungeon. The problems they faced with ShitBryo are not so much inherent to the gameplay (that was actually Bethesda's fault, but Obsidian did considerable improvements on their gameplay model), but rather the technical side of things (Bethesda link didn't make things easier here either).