Fallout: New Vegas

Playing more Fallout New Vegas. Spent again the whole day at it. Doesn’t feel so bad, it’s a great game. It’s telling that I remember a ton from only single playthrough from several years ago.

I think because the game is so large, it problems with the power curve. In the beginning everything is too difficult, but then around level 15 you can easily blaze through fighting missions. I personally don’t mind it, because I wouldn’t have the patience to fight difficult enemies throughout the game. I’ve been playing on Hard difficulty level (no Hard Core) since the start. I could always change it to Very Hard.

When I first played the game, I played the Caesar ending with a pretty nasty character. I remember stealing stuff and killing big people, using some insanely powerful rifle. I think I massacred the whole Brotherhood base. I think most players don’t make a character like that on a first playthrough of an RPG, because “good” characters feel more natural as most games only let you make them. But when I saw the Legion first time in Nipton, I realized this was a game which lets you play as bad guy. Indeed, the mechanics for stealing and killing are well done — I never seem to anger any more people than I expected. On that first playthrough, I hurried quite a bit because I didn’t have so much time to play, and so I missed a lot of obvious content. Whole areas I didn’t even enter. Now I even have the DLC installed, which I might try out. I wonder if that character level issue will be present in there too, so that I should maybe already start one of them (the suggested character levels are shown and collected in game wikis). Then, after that I think I’ll go for the NCR ending.

Modern western RPGs seem to be big about “making player choices matter”, but I never felt like they were succeeding too well. Now playing this game I’ve had a couple of past decisions that made me go “oh yeah, damn”. First I blew up the robots under Caesars camp because I didn’t realize Yes Man would let me control them. Then I destroyed research data in the plant infested vault because I thought it was only good for the mission at hand, but turns out it would immediately have completed this quest of Veronica’s I just got. It makes sense that if I want to sympathize with the Brotherhood, I shouldn’t go destroying data just because one (not very respectable looking) scientist says it’s too dangerous knowledge.

This Vault 34 with ghouls is the worst. I remember hating it last time I played too. I finally cleared it but had to escape before getting the final loot and quest items because the radiation would have killed me. Now I don’t have any idea where to find more Rad-Aways in the whole Wasteland, but I can’t come back until I have a dozen and/or better RAD resistance.

Deathclaws are scary. I like how the game handles power creep with weapons. I finally stormed the armory of that radiation infested vault 34 and it was just full of amazing guns and armor. But I couldn’t hope to carry all of it out from that maze so I used the repair functionality to merge most items to a single one and handed some stuff to my companion (I didn’t think Veronica was going to use that missile launcher!). That loses most of the value of the items, but really you also want to have one weapon of each ammunition type that is in perfect condition because repairing them is so expensive and bullets for any given type are limited. Armor is even heavier, and since I pretend to roleplay at least a little, I don’t make my dog carry broken power armor just so that I can sell it late for the fraction of its value.

I think the most unbalanced thing about the game are the companions. They can handle any enemy much better than I can, and heal from any injury without stimpacks. Usually I just shoot enemies from far away and let Veronica and Rex go beat them in hand-to-hand combat. I took a perk that lowers damage to companions from my attacks, but it’s still feels like cheating to spam grenade launchers at enemies next to them. Maybe I just suck at FPS combat and take more damage than necessary when fighting on my own, therefore thinking the companions are stronger than they actually are. The second most unbalanced/annoying thing in combat are explosives used by enemies. I tried approaching this Black Mountain base and there’s a mutant on some roof shooting missiles every ten seconds. Fuck! Two hits and I’m dead. Next time I’ll bring my own bazooka.