bryce777 said:
Well, basically, if you take the obvious course of the game, you will come on the deathclaws around level 3. I always do, anyhow.
You'd be going pretty fast in that case surely. If you're doing side quests I'd expect you to be higher than 3. If you're not, then why are you distracting yourself with deathclaws before getting the water chip?
I've also never encountered them randomly.
You do quite a bit around the military base, though you wouldn't be there early on. (goofiness aside)
You also really only see them later in the game unless you do something goofy. Yeah, you can say fuck up and do a southpark "Yes! We have explosives in the car!"
I certainly did something goofy, but it didn't seem odd at the time. All I said was "No I'm not a ghoul" (I didn't know the mutants were the bad guys at this stage). I then wanted information, so I asked the mutant guy who his boss was. The choice was then to kill him (and I was trying to be a diplomatic nice guy), or to go to see his boss. For all I knew his boss was some nice fellow who was going to give me the inside scoop on the real villains.
For a diplomatic, nice guy character with little information, I didn't do anything too strange. Usually I have a more shoot-first-just-in-case policy, but I was trying to be different.
There was never really an "explosives in the car" moment - my character had no real reason to lie to the supermutant, since he didn't know that they were the bad guys, didn't know that being a ghoul was less likely to get him shot, and didn't know that his boss was deep in some military base miles away, rather than in the back room.
Perhaps the moral here is that good natured, diplomats should gather information from weedy humans before confronting hulking mutants with big guns. However, even if I'd known the mutants were bad guys, I wouldn't have known that being a ghoul was a safer option - for all I know this Harry has been instructed to shoot all ghouls.
The only reason I could see for choosing the "I'm not a ghoul" option was that there must be a reason for that option to be there. Why is the option there? Because some characters will have information suggesting that it's a good thing to say. I don't have such information, but I can still deduce that it's probably the right thing to say just because there is an option to say it.
I didn't want to use this reasoning though, since it's not very in character. If I'd been free to respond in any way, I wouldn't have denied being a ghoul, so I didn't want to be influenced by the presence of a dialogue option.
I'll know better next time.
On the other hand, you are very much led into fighting the deathclaws pretty early on.
I don't think you are, are you? It is not necessary to fight the deathclaw before getting the water chip, so how are you led into it any more than any other side quest? It's one of the only quests where pretty much every NPC says "Watch out - they are giant man eating beasts with thick armor" etc. - surely that is a reason not to do it when you're level three.
In any case, I don't see how you can consider the difficulty of deathclaws a problem after the first playthrough, since you know how hard they are as a player, your character is warned about them, and you never meet them randomly. Perhaps you could meet one early on your first playthrough - though you really are warned -, but I doubt that most people would be level three at that stage. (I guess I might have had trouble at level 5, but handily enough, I was locked safely away on the other side of the map by then
)
Of course I met my first deathclaw after fighting my way out from the bottom of the military base at level 5. That experience made me more than a little cautious for the rest of the game.
I guess my Fallout experience is pretty much unique, since hardly anyone would have been unlucky/stupid enough to make the decision I did. However, on a realistic basis, you are given a lot of warnings that deathclaws are really nasty - you probably should expect to be ripped to pieces. The only reason you don't expect that is because as a player you've had years of being told "This mission is exceptionally dangerous, but there is a tiny chance you'll succeed..." before just about every major quest. The major problem is the expectation the player brings from previous games.
Taking the Fallout world alone though, are you ever warned by so many people to such an extent about anything apart from deathclaws? I don't think you are. For example, when you're sent to find a military base full of supermutants, you don't get repeated warnings - it's just the next thing on the to-do list.
In reality, the series of warnings you get about deathclaws would have you extremely cautious about confronting them, and you'd make sure to be very well prepared, and not to go alone.
Perhaps the designers of Fallout should have taken into account that players have an expectation that "Horrendously dangerous" means "A bit tricky". However, wouldn't that be dumbing down to an extent? If various NPCs tell you that these deathclaws are scary monsters that'll rip you limb from limb, do you get to complain when you confront one at level three and get ripped limb from limb? What did you expect?
