I just finished my second playthrough. This time an energy weapon specialist. Although to be honest once I found the name Gauss rifle* I ended up back as a sniper again, It simply the best method to kill people.
I am really curious how hard the game must be as an unarmed or melee specialist. I have a hard time imagining how you can clear out the quarry without several hundred yards between you and them. Gonna have to try that one next time.
It is so much fun to watch headless bodies tumble 50 or sixty feet through the air ragdoll style
Quick question - have avoided reading too much of this thread due to potential spoilers, but have had so much fun doing side quests that I’m level 19 and have yet to even visit the Strip (to finish main quest)
While I love the Fallout 3/NV games, one issue i have is that at some point you become overpowered and it’s as much a grind as anything else. Should I bypass side quests and move forward on main quest here pretty soon?
One of the things that has popped up quite frequently throughout this thread is that most people don’t seem to experience the “Becoming Stupidly Overpowered And Pwning Everything With No Effort” situation which popped up in Fallout 3. There’s not a lot of good armour in the game, and there’s no “Good” way to acquire the Ranger Armour used in all the promotional material.
The “Best” armour I found during my first (fairly thorough, IMHO) playthrough was Reinforced Combat Armour Mk II and some Brotherhood Power Armour I couldn’t use because otherwise I’d be attacked on sight.
Deathclaws were still a major problem even at level 26, and some of the random enemies you’d come across (Legion assassin teams etc) were more than an inconvenience to deal with even at higher levels.
One of the other things I liked was that the quests were often quirky, interesting, rewarding, and in a couple of cases (Repconn HQ and Vault 11; there are doubtless others), purely there for their own sake.
Still, I would suggest getting on with the main quest simply because you’re not actually as far through the game as you might think.
Remnant[/spoiler] Power Armour from the Enclave is the best armour in the game in terms of DT and does not act as a disguise - you can get some fairly easily by [spoiler]following Arcade Gannon’s personal quest - just travel to The Fort and select the ‘let’s hear Caesar, then get out’ option to trigger it.
I figured that from doing some looking around in strategy guides, but since you’re limited to one follower at a time, and by the time you get to Arcade you’ve probably got someone like Boone or Veronica accompanying you.
So, assuming you’re playing the game “as-is” (ie, without the use of strategy guides, metagaming, etc) then it’s highly unlikely you’re going to find the “Really” good armour, and even if you do, it’s going to be too late in the game to really be any use.
It’s not a criticism, incidentally- I like the fact that even late in the game, you’re not an unstoppable bringer of destruction, impervious to small-arms fire, and capable of taking out the NCR, Caesar’s Legion, and the Securitrons single-handedly.
You can ask him why his legion is so ‘strange’, and he goes on a spiel about how Imperial Rome and its totalitarian, unified culture. You’d never get Boone to have a chat with the C-man; he prods you to let you know he’ll take down any red he sees as soon as you approach legion positions (Nelson, Cottonwood Cove etc.).
I agree. That said I did take out Caesar’s legion pretty much single handedly, but that was using the alien blaster which is only available to those with the “weird wasteland” trait selected at the beginning. I’d also like to point out to those who criticize such “cheats” that I still can’t friggin’ beat the game until the comprehensive patch lands next week and (hopefully) fixes the rather large glitch I’ve run into.
Well, after almost 70 hours of playing the game (not including the restart due to getting stuck in a cabin with undefeatable cazadors outside) I beat the game. The funny thing is, I never got to meet Boone or Veronica. I had Cass for a bit, Ed-E, Rex, and Lily. I visited almost all of the locations too. So I’m gonna wait for the expansion packs and then start from scratch again.
The last playthrough, I threw all of my stuff into guns and speech. I’d probably do the same again to start off with as those seemed to be the best to get through the game.
Although in the ending…I was able to convince what’s his name to just move on at Hoover Dam. Kinda anti-climatic
I may end up starting over. I allowed my recent play-through of Fallout 3 to unduly influence how I spent my points. New Vegas, IME, seems to place a much greater premium on speech and barter than did 3. I keep getting stalled on quests because I can’t convince people to do things. I just don’t have the patience to scavenge every last shop and mailbox in the Mojave looking for copies of Salesman Weekly or Meeting People, either. I should have concentrated either on guns or energy weapons and not put points into both. Dumping a lot of points into repair also turned out not to be as useful as I thought it would be. I’ve kind of locked myself into having to settle everything through violence, which is fun, but locks me out of other possible quests.
An unrelated frustration is that people keep disappearing from the game. I don’t know if they’re getting killed or its some kind of bug. I haven’t found any bodies, anyway. The chick at the Gomorrah who I’m supposed to be helping with her boyfriend disappeared. The whole squad of scout/snipers from the fort right outside The Strip is nowhere to be found. I can’t locate about half of the potential companions.
The recon squad moves on to camp forlorn hope. The Gomorrah chick seems to be insane, one time while I was there she just flipped out and beat a gambler to death, for fun apparently.
I laughed. Still, there are some pretty epic lines in general, I think. I liked that, if you didn’t have sufficient Speech to pass the check with Mortimer at the Ultra-Luxe at one point, you can say
<lie> I tried human flesh once. Mmm mmm good. Now tell me all your secrets."Or trying to fool a drug dealer:
Boy, I…sure would like some drugs. Do you know where I could buy some drugs?He’s a … smooth courier!
The writing is, I think, a lot more interesting in New Vegas than it was in Fallout 3. I genuinely enjoy a lot of the dialog trees, along with, of course,
freaky sex with a robot and/or a ghoul cowboy dominatrix.Yeehaw!
I just started an Energy Weapons build leaning heavily on Survival in Hardcore mode, after beating the game NCR-style with my pretty-much-nice-but-steals-everything sniper (who was beloved by all). Now it’s time to be mean. Also, I turned on Wild Wasteland as well. I’m realizing how much I missed, but I was level 30 and wanted to move in a new direction. I never got to the point of effortless slaughter of Deathclaw packs, but with 100 sneak and 100 guns, I was pretty much unstoppable in practical terms.
I picked up Veronica by some surprise - I was trying to go pick up Lily, and taking the long way around to avoid cazador/deathclaw related inconveniences. I never met Veronica the first playthrough - somehow I avoided the Trading Post altogether and quite a few areas north of Nipton. I originally got to New Vegas by sneaking past all the deathclaws on the southern cliffs. The long way was easier and more profitable; even at level 3, I managed to pick up a ton of loot by being the bystander during several skirmishes between wandering traders and Legion troops.
Veronica I feared would be annoying, but actually she’s not so bad. Definitely chattier than Boone, but you can’t fault her enthusiasm for pummeling things into paste.
There’s something important to bear in mind with Veronica’s special Quest, “I Could Make You Care”.
One of the pieces of ancient tech you can go and look for is a Rangefinder, which works with an orbital laser satellite, powered by Helios One.
The problem? If you’ve already been to Helios One (and you probably have, since you have to go past there to get to Veronica and it’s such a big, obviously interesting and important place that you’re going to go inside) and rerouted the power to anything except the Archimedes II system (which, since you have no idea what it is at that stage, you’re unlikely to do), then when you’re later working out which of the three pieces of ancient tech to go for, the “easiest” (ie the one that doesn’t involve hiking through an irradiated and/or ghoul-or-creature-infested vault) isn’t available to you.
Fortunately I was able to fiddle with the settings under the hood to make the game think I completed “That Lucky Old Sun” by rerouting the power to Archimedes II and then the quest to look for the rangefinder became available and worked just fine.
That one was kind of a pain, but the weapons vault at the end was worth it. Soooooo many guns.
And the comprehensive patch hit the last of the systems (xbox360) today and it actually seems to have worked. Took out House and finished Arcade’s quest chain. Now maybe I can actually beat this silly friggin’ game.
25 hours of play in, I finally got my first real moment of suspense. Previously, it’d been nothing cruising along easily or getting my ass handed to me (and promptly reloading).
Played through the Hard Luck Blues quest, which requires a LOT of running around an irradiated vault infested with ghouls. The ghouls were tough (many of them), but the real danger came once I’d burned through all my Rad-away, and just saw it gradually ticking up, the longer I took to complete the quest. Finally finished and got out of there just shy of 800 radiation, but was really worried for the last 15 minutes or so that I was going to die from radiation. Fun, but I was definitely getting stressed that I was going to die for something so stupid.
