Caboose Heads for New Vegas

Lonesome Road is supposed to be released this next week. Probably the last one but who knows for sure.
Kind of wish they had extended this one ala F3's Steel DLC but it ain't gonna happen.

Anyone else as agitated at the Fallout Wiki as I am? FFS, every machine I have ends up locking up when I try to look for any information on there.

Quite irritating.

Haven't had any problem with the Vault wiki, that the one you are using?

And I'm playing through for the THIRD time, the first time I've ever done this with a RPG. I found a fan mod that starts you out as a faction member - I'm redoing my barbarian Khan and plan to go the House route. I couldn't bring myself to finish as Legion - losing Veronica because you have to kill the BoS just sucked too much, and there was some interesting role playing opportunities in finally meeting the Burned Man.

This time I woke up in a Great Khan's tent after being retrieved by my fellow clan members from the Doc, and I am using the Melissa Companion mod. She's the huntress that is watching the Death Claws at the Quarry and she's a great companion with lots of interesting commentary. I started in Great Khans leather armor, and had to find my way from their village to Goodsprings, which was a BITCH at low levels. I actually have a fondness for Powder Gangers now, because they saved my ass against hunting Deathclaws and fiends twice on the way to start the story.

The mods really make it feel like a new story - and the starting RPG one allows you to start as any of the major factions.

This time I've also go the Courier's clothes, an outfit for the Mojave Courier company, am running quests for that company, joined the Kings, and am living in an isolated tent near the Goodsprings Source. I go through a couple of the main story arcs and some side quests, then load one of the mod quests, and am having quite a bit of fun with it.

This is also the first time I've run into serious Legion assassin action - somehow managed to avoid that in the first two games. I was talking to Cass about the caravan issue and one of the assassins literally walked between us during the dialogue! LOL.

Great game, and with the mods infinitely replayable.

I want a fallout game that would use the kinect.

As long as it didn't actually give me the same rads....

I'm playing through again now, for the first time with the DLC.

The first DLC I played through was Old World Blues. Great stuff.

Then I hit Dead Money. Ugh. Awful. Truly, hideously awful. I played a couple of hours then went straight to www.newvegasnexus.com. The level designer for the Villa must never have played Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas. Some asshole decided to strip away fast travel; design fairly large, multitiered, mazelike levels that involve a whole lot of loops; place a few dozen radio and poison cloud traps all over the place that are spectacularly easy yet even more spectacularly tedious to deal with; and forgetting all the while that Fallout New Vegas has a kinda shitty in-game map function that was designed with wide open exteriors and compact interiors in mind. Easily the worst designed game levels I have ever seen in my entire life.

This is why you always, always, always play the P.C. versions of these games. Mods can deal with these things and keep you from hating the game.

Man, one of these days I'll get the PC version as soon as I have the equipment to run it. I'm missing out on all of the G.E.C.K. mods and would really like to design my own DLC for the yucks of it all. I just love this game.

Dead Money just sucked on so many levels, many listed by Liet. Another area that drove me up a tree was the constant woo-woo noise you're forced to listen to, the shit is endless and so annoying listening to the collars repeat themselves seems more acceptable. I just ended up playing some Floyd over it.
Not being able to return was another. There were glitches that wouldn't allow you to complete a couple of the challanges too.

I swore I wouldn't go through it again but really I have no choice if I'm going to make other full runthroughs, the unique items and things like the chips delivered to the safe in the bunker make it worth it since I can buy weapon repair kits cheaper than using other weapons. Why waste weapons when I can just repair them all and make that much more in cappage.
I usually walk out of there with around 30k in chips and then accumulate them from the bunker.

I have like 850k caps on this run so far. Well I did until I spent a buttload in Lonesome Road. You'll see what I mean when you get there. I easily dropped 100k there but I wasn't a tight ass about it and purchased some repairs too. New weapons and new duds aplenty in this one.

I also have ovr 8000 lbs of weapons in my locker in The Sink. The additional weapons that were once scarce like the Brush Gun and the 12.5mm MG are more than plentiful now with the assassin addition. Used to take me forever to get a Brush Gun but now, pfft, more common then a 10mm pistol.

I decided to make The Sink my new abode but it makes it difficult to have companions along since you have to dismiss them to go there. I use Novac when I have someone with me to pile items in the wardrobe then after an extensive run with them cut them loose, go in and unload the wardrobe, then just whip out the transponder thingie. With the overloaded fast travel perk it's a snap. Bada-bing!
Really partial to Ed-E. I can turn his weapons off and he makes great bait as I'm sneaking up on enemies. They're busy with him while I pop them giving me critical hits.


The assassins are a bit tougher to nail down but I've learned the prominent areas they spawn and have determined I personally love to blow the shit out of them with my trusty modified Grenade Machine Gun. "Kaboom-pow-pow motherfucker!" is my usual statement as their bits fly since that's one of the challenges.


Another really cool thing I found is when I use Mercy sporting incendiary grenades, the corpses fly up spirialing about twenty feet in the air in flames leaving a smoke trail and limbs flying in different directions the same way.


For those unaware, the GMG uses 25mm grenades in standard and High Explosive and Mercy uses 40mm in standard and Incende"air"y.

_________________________________

So I just finished Lonesome Road. Of course I'll do it again repeatedly for the different outcomes. I must say it was an alright DLC, zero lockups and the story ran through great. Plenty of surprises as well.
It took about ten hours for me but I don't get in a hurry on these things since that takes all of the fun of exploration out of it. That's the point, isn't it?
The level cap comes up another five making it fifty and run the right way from the beginning may make getting all of the skills to 100, but don't quote me on that since I'm not sure and haven't put it to the test given I'm not sure how many books are in play now that all of the DLCs have been released. I have all but two to 100 and was saddled with a measily 15 to 16 per level due to an error early on. With a 17 per and the books put to use prior to hitting 100 one should get close with the last two if not there. It's a bitch sometimes to remember where the books are and I usually end up with a few in the locker or lying about the abode.

New weapons, new critters along with some of the usuals make it interesting.

I'll go into it further in a couple of weeks after there are more people who've gotten it and we can compare notes.

Personally, I give it a solid nine and change so far.

The 27th holds two more DLCs for New Vegas.

First, an accumulation of the specialty weapons that were only available via preorder dubbed Courier's Stash. The packs are The Caravan Pack, Classic Pack, Mercenary Pack and Tribal Pack, each with it's own special variants of weapons.

Second, a plethora of new weapons and mods for exicting weapons coming with the GRA, or Gun Runner's Arsenal.

That is all.

Enjoy!

I actually like Dead Money, though it was hard at times. I thought the level design was really interesting, and had me worried about all the damn radios all the time. It was stressful, and I didn't die much, and I liked the NPCs. That should have been released after Old World Blues though so the slave collars and Elijah would have more of their backstory revealed. I'd give it a solid B - it's like the old school RPG dungeon that you kinded dreaded playing but felt good when you beat it. But to each their own.

Got Lonesome Road but haven't played it, I'm going through with my new moded Great Khan courier. It adds a dimension to the game, choosing a role playing path. For example my reaction to the Powder Gangers was a bit more lenient, especially the ones that were politically motivated against the NCR. And finding out guys like Manny Vargas are Khans changes the way my character reacts to them - as well as the Khans hired by Benny. I let them live in Boulder City for the first time, and got the Powder Gangers in Vault 19 to join the Khans.

It's an early reveal that Legion plans on enslaving the Khans, so I end up playing with the NCR a lot - but I don't like them, and I've made a few different choices. For example I've got no problem at all in stealing from them (doesn't hurt my Karma much because I kill so many bad guys). And I didn't turn in Chief Hanlon because he's right about the dumb politicians and I agree, I don't want the NCR here. And my Khan isn't that familiar with technology, so he feels he needs House to keep the robot army in line. If he killed House then someone who knows more about computers could steal the Robots from him, just like Benny tried to do to House. Without any skills to protect against that, he can't risk it - even though I know in game there's no option for Yes Man to do that (though it sounds like he might break free later after the game is over according to his dialogue). So Reaver Karsk is going to ally with House instead of ruling over Vegas himself.

Anyway, lots of fun, and I found new things this time through even without the mods. Level 22, just got to Caesar. After this I'll go hunting for the Thorn and due Honest Hearts, and do the New Vegas Bounties mod. My guys a hunter, so Bounty Hunting in the Wasteland is a natural progression.

Great game, especially with the mods. Right now my guy is outfitted in Khans Studded Leather Armor, a desert head scarf (helps keep out those nasty Rad Storms), Mondalus Shades, studded leather gloves, has a holster, backpack, and is wearing his lucky spurs. The old guns mod brings back all the great guns from the first two games, many of which were based on real guns. So I've used an Ithaca 37 shotgun, Sawed Off Winchester Widowmaker, FN-FAL, and H&K Caws. Looking to get the Pancor JackHammer and Steyr Aug from the Gun Runners soon.

Plus new companions - including a build your own companion mod, new adventures and quests, new areas, new monsters. It makes it a little more buggy, but IMO it's worth it.

Planning on getting the Mod that lets you run the Lucky 38 as a Casino after working for Mr. House for a while.

So yes, get a PC and get the mods.

[?=minor spoiler]I'm thinking a fully moddable and modded anti-materiel rifle firing explosive rounds is gonna be fun, and I might actually have to try out using a mine for the first time.[/?]

There are a lot of good quest and companion mods, although they tend not to be my thing. I like the New Vegas Bounties mods, which are pretty well balanced and have surprising good voice acting, but those are the only ones I'm using in my current game. There are also a lot of interface, graphics, rule tweaks, and bug fix mods, and I load up on those.

Tired of oversized text on the screen that limits the number of lines that can be displayed in conversations and forces you to constantly scroll? There's a mod for that.

Have a machine with more than 2GB RAM and want the game to be able to make use of it? There's a mod for that.

Feel that the graphical options for designing your character are too limited? There are tons of mods for that.

Find that the slow speed at which your character runs gets in the way of enjoying exploration? There's a mod for that.

Tired of backing up, saving, then running around frantically searching for a speaker every time you hear some beeping in Dead Money? There's a mod for that.

Want a reloading bench that can break down all your ammo at once rather than only in increments of 100 units? There's a mod for that.

Karma sound effects annoy you? There's a mod for that.

I can't imagine playing a console version of the game.

Console is pretty limiting but I try to make the best of it.
I know I'm missing a ton of options but for now it'll have to do.

Went back to the start of Lonesome Road again, trying to get the challanges nailed down but some of the items are pretty well hidden as are some of the access points. I've managed to find all of the locations so that's a plus.


I've run through the main game plus DLCs up to this point a few times now and done it a lot of different ways. I'm usually a good guy since it's just too much of a pain in the ass to be a bad guy, at least for me anyway.

I have been just going up to a point just before House sends you to kill The Brotherhood and stopped on the main quest line then going and doing all of the little side quests for NCR, The Kahns, and at least a visit to Ceasar so I can get the kid her doll from the dogs and activate the bots in storage. I always do that.

Companion wise, it's usually Boone first, then Veronica, Raul, and from there it varies on each run.

It also depends on where I put my points how soon I go get Ed-E but as soon as I can I pick him up. Rex I usually wait a while for anymore. Rex tends to take out enemies before I can nail them but with Ed-E I can switch him to melee.

I've also gotten to where I try to overlap quests so I can handle multiple tasks as I visit people, like the Freeside stuff for instance.

You have to make sure to do Raul before the end of Volare or he's screwed and can't complete his quest.

With Veronica I've gotten to where I steer her towards the Followers. I made the mistake of having her stay at the bunker once then blew it up and she was so pissed she just walked away...., with all my stuff!

With the Followers route, she refuses to go into the bunker again. I tried to see what her response would be if I wiped them out in that vein and low and behold, no response, she just kept tagging along as if it never happened.

Lily is usually next since I'm going for getting Rex handled by now.
I've only run Lily one way, keep her on her meds as they are so she remembers her grandkids.

Arcade is usually last on the list. I make sure to use him as a pack brahman.

It's sometimes hard to trigger his quest, it's usually after I go beyond the main story line stopping point I described earlier. Afterwards I usually send him back to Freeside so I don't have to kill him if I go Yes Man or House.

I use them all a while and send them back before they do their quests, then pick them up as needed to overlap quests and save time.

Anyhoo, I'm digging my place in The Sink and now that all of the DLCs are out it's time to make plans for a full run. Some of the new perks will be tits early on.

I forgot to discuss this before, so sorry for responding to a piece of the same quote twice.

I'd highly recommend the auto incremental save mod. When you have an autosave every 20 seconds, with up to six save slots used, game crashing bugs are much less annoying.

Also, in my experience Fallout New Vegas seems to be more likely to crash a maximally overclocked graphics card than other games are. Try dialing back your overclock a bit if your card is overclocked.

If you have a Windows 7 system and an Nvidia card, make sure to set the power management mode to "maximum performance" rather than the default "adaptive." The core clock management under "adaptive" is imperfect, and New Vegas really seems not to like it when the core clock on your graphics card has its speed dropped to 2D clock speed.

I've found that doing these three things helped deal with game stability problems a whole lot. I've still got some crashing issues, but they're much less frequent and much less annoying.

[?=Thar be spoilage under here] Need one nuke, three posters, and a bot.

Having a helluva time finding them too. Been through the map three times so far.

Also there's an unkillable tunneler in the cave before the high road. It refuses to take damage so I have to run like hell.

Don't get me started on Courier's Mile. Damn, those Deathclaws are hard to kill before they wipe the floor with you. I was baiting them to the entrance, popping them a few times and stepping back out. [/?]

Well, made it through all of it with as many challenges I could up to the new GRA added with their package.
Soooooo.....


Doing it again.

dead money was horrible, but the holorifle when fully modded *and it glitches when you use a weapon repair kit, the kit repairs and increases the weapon's maximum HP* is more powerfull than the anti-material rifle and doesn't loose condition when using normal ammo

Dead Money makes exploration painful and tedious, in contrast to the rest of the game which encourages exploration. In Windows, as noted above, I was able to mod the game so that radios don't explode the collar, but exploration was still pretty awful on a second runthrough given the multitiered mazelike maps. However, if you head straight to your quest objectives, consulting a walkthrough and diverting only to pick up the holorifle upgrades, stimpack and weapon repair kit vending codes, and the snow globe, and you have two levels of the implant GRX perk from Old World Blues, you can blitz through Dead Money in complete safety without too much pain in very little time and get all the meaningful rewards.

Implant GRX in particular made my second runthrough of Dead Money immensely less annoying. It's really the only way to go.

More broadly, I've completed a runthrough with all the DLC now. Dead Money was easily my least favorite and Old World Blues my favorite. Honest Hearts was straightforward and enjoyable, with fairly good writing, a solid if unspectacular bit of DLC. The environment of Lonesome Road is fantastic, the writing much less so. The whole back story feels like a classical Voyager retcon, inventing background that really should fundamentally shape the Courier but that you've never gotten even an inkling of before playing Lonesome Road. Still, not a bad piece of DLC if you don't let the story get in the way.

One note on Old World Blues: between its perks, traits, and the benefits of a fully upgraded Sink, the rewards from OWB are absurdly, practically gamebreakingly, overpowered. It's really the only flaw OWB has IMO.

I've been running a new character for about 8 hours now with all the DLC's minus the couriers stash (I all ready have the classic pack from my pre-order) and I gotta say, I love the GRA mod, just about have enough for the anti-material rifle and all it's mods.

Have a level 50 character I started when Honest Hearts came out, bought a Bozar, was disappointed.

I have four running or run to my usual stop point. Last one I went ahead and put Hardin in the big chair, I had never done that. That one will sit until I'm ready to take it all the way to the end.

I laughed my ass off when he had me go to Freeside and handle some 'business" before he would make me a Paladin.

Which reminds me of the branch off I took in one to see what would happen if I let them whack Cass. It showed some of the dirty underpinnings on that end.
I ended up killing everybody, going postal and ended it with Yes Man throwing the good general off of a tower.

I'm halfway between 19 and 20 on this one and I'm doing something I usually don't do by upping my unarmed and melee skills to maximum. I have a hankering to do a beatdown on a Deathclaw.
I usually let these two flounder in the twenties or thirties and use the points elsewhere.
Love and Hate do some critical damage. The assassins are almost easier to take out this way as long as I can avoid getting hammered with the brush gun or in this run they're fond of the trail guns.

Lot of different things about the assassins this time, early on they wore Centurian armor. Trail guns instead of brush guns, hunting shotguns instead of riot shotguns, just little stuff like that. i haven't been to the strip yet so that may have something to do with it. I like to hack my way in anymore which takes an 84 science and the robotics expert perk, neither of which i have where they need to be yet. I could buy my way in or use a counterfeit pass but nah.

I scrimped and saved to get the GRA brush equivilent at 28k+ caps, brain farting the name atm, and found myself a bit disappointed with the firepower for what it cost. That blew toads.
I suppose it'll look like a great weapon on the shelf when I get to The Sink. I put it away today as a waste of caps and weight.

Speaking of The Sink, on one of my runs I moved from Novac in one shot by just clearing everything out of the storage places and took it in one shot.

I lost my Sierra Madre cards.

Just, gone.

With that in mind the next one I made sure to take them and unload them into the safe there first, then came back for the rest. They stayed.

I figure OWB will be the first dlc this time, I want to see what the changes are when discussing things with Elijah. may or may not be a difference but it has in dealing with others when the order of things are changed.

Right now all I want is my katana and can't find it yet!

I love that they want me to kill Benny with his own gun. Now that really is getting owned. Should be easy enough.

Have I mentioned I love this game lately?



My next fresh start wil be dedicated to Baba.

I will make a Jesus character.

I'm considering doing a run through with an unarmed/melee character. It seems like the best way to have a significantly different experience going through the game. It's something you have to plan out if you want the build to be effective, as perk choice is dramatically different. It looks to me like it should be a harder build to get started, but it should catch up once you get enough of the advanced perks.

Speaking of which, the ninja perk is broken. It calculates the critical chance by multiplying by 1.15 instead of adding a flat 15% as described and as other similar perks and effects work. Another reason to play on the PC, because, of course, there's a mod to fix that.

The GRA weapons tend to be minor variations improving the base weapons. The Medicine Stick does ever so slightly more damage per shot than the brush gun, fires slightly more shots per second, and chambers an extra two bullets per reload with the same reload time. In the end it's a brush gun that does 10% more DPS with no extra effects. It makes the brush gun obsolete, but if you were using some weapon other than the brush gun it's just not enough to make you switch.

You know you've mastered a fucking game when you are contemplating a fists-only runthrough.

I do so love the new .50 dum-dums.

Really? Really?!?

You're going to throw all I've done for NCR advancement in the crapper over Squatter Bill?!?!

Hey, he attacked me!

Of course I hacked him to bits with my Katana!

Oh yea, game on mothefuckers.

Soft hearted devil my ass, you'll vilify me soon enough.


Actually it's just as well, with the new GRA challenges, *,**,***, it's hard not to go Yes Man.


Gotta figure out who to clear off the strip though. Probably Omertas.

They need a fallout game with the kinect as i Said before if Mass effect is going that way then bethsoft needs to go that way with the fallout games.

A couple of my courier, Reaver Karsk. That's the Desert Ranger combat armor from Honest Hearts.

He's death on wheels with the Super Heated Cosmic Knife - Slayer + Unstoppable Force plus bonus crits and flame.

The 2nd one is in front of his camp - the Isolated Camp outside of Goodsprings.

I'll put up a few more later.

A few more:



Raiders of the Lost Gecko!



On the Gun Runners brochure.





Last two are shots of the Great Khan Armor you start with in the RPG mod.

Just finished the mod Badlands - not bad at all, good level design and a tough slugfest through slaver tribes in the SW that are targeting the mojave because of the Legion occupying the NCR. Very happy with this mod, it challenged me at level 36 without seeming gratuitious in any way.

Thought the concept was good too - several tribes combining their relative expertise and hooking up with a pretty nasty Vault crew that have special... needs.... that the slavers can help supply.

Some minor modness like no voice over and occasional spelling issues, but lots of really well designed encounters that kept my Courier on his toes and wishing he brought more heavy ordnance.

Just finished my first NV playthrough and immediately started a second.

Some radical improvements on FO3 here: the rep system, the way you can dress out as different factions, and the politicking. There's a lot more going on in this game than there was in FO3, although I do like the environments and atmo of the original.

Wound up with an independent Vegas last time without really meaning to- I wanted an Alliance with the NCR but that didn't work out. The Legion is going down again this playthrough, but this time Mr. Happy is going to be out of the loop...

Yep. FO3 was great, and I really enjoyed it especially with the add ons DLCs. I played through the original, and before Broken Steel came out it the ending just plain sucked. But once they fixed that it was a great game.

But NV? There's just more there there. I almost never replay games, but this one is awesome.

Make a Wordforge mod. Elwood is head of the Brotherhood of Steal faction in Alabama.

Glad you like it, it's one of the best I've played so far.

I've been toying with the order of the DLCs on this one. This round I went to OWB first just after I hit 24 so I could set up in The Sink.
Looking for something different from Elijah when I do head for the Sierra Madre. Not sure where I'll work that one in yet.

My unarmed skill is coming along nicely. I've killed a few deathclaws already with Love and Hate, the game's special spiked knuckles.