fallout – Page 6 – AggroChat

Power Outage

September 17, 2015 by Thalen

I've gotten in the habit of putting together a blog post in my head / as bits and pieces in the morning and then cleaning it up and posting it at lunch. Mostly that's worked pretty well, but then comes a day like yesterday where I'm in meetings all day with barely time to grab lunch between. Combined with not feeling like I have any one thing to say a lot about I ended up skipping the day. Hey, I never promised daily updates after August after all.

Currently I'm mostly keeping to a 6 day a week schedule with Sunday as a day off. I've missed a day this week and last, but that still leaves 5 days of posts, which I feel pretty good about it. I've considered moving my book reviews to Fridays and just doing weekdays, but the more I think about it shooting for 6 days a week and accepting 5 when life interferes with a day is something I can probably maintain.

You know what also interferes with a post? A frickin' power outage. I went home for lunch and intended to finish up this post with a few screenshots. Not five minutes after I walked in the door, I heard a bang in the distance and the power went out. It's still out now, so I guess I'll use images from the Internet for now and consider replacing them with my own this evening. Assuming I have power then.

Fallout: New Vegas continues to monopolize my gaming time. It's interesting how Obsidian retuned things to make the game more difficult. Fallout 3, once you understood the game, really wasn't a difficult game at all. Encounters at higher levels mostly were just big bags of hit points that took forever to wear down while Dogmeat tanked for me. Part of this was due to how quickly you would find high quality weapons and armor. I'm level 12 in New Vegas and I've only recently gotten hold of some reinforced leather armor; by this point in Fallout 3 I had a unique set of combat armor.

New Vegas also has made perks more valuable by reducing how often you get them. In Fallout 3 you get one every level so you can get all the really important ones and still have room to pick up a bunch of extras. New Vegas gives you one every other level, so you have to pick and choose. The very best perks were also rebalanced to not be so overpowering (looking at you Grim Reaper's Sprint). In Fallout 3 I would have picked up Intense Training multiple times by level 12; in New Vegas I just chose it for the first time to bump my Luck to 6.

I've still yet to run into any Brotherhood of Steel, but I did meet my first representative of the Followers of the Apocalypse last night when I took on the job of getting an old solar power plant up and running. It's good to see the Followers still around and holding to their ideals of restoring knowledge and technology for the good of all. It means there's at least one faction I can wholeheartedly support.

I chose not to use the plant to power a space based laser cannon.
Maybe next playthrough.

Travels in New Vegas

September 15, 2015 by Thalen

I've been a fan of the Fallout series pretty much from the beginning. I defeated the Master back in the day, took down President Richardson and the Enclave, and restored water to the Capital Wasteland. Despite my initial reservations about the change from isometric to first-person gameplay, Fallout 3 became one of my evergreen games that I tend to go back to over and over. So it's kind of strange that I've not played Fallout: New Vegas until now.

Part of the reason, I think, is my tendency to want to do things in order. It's the same thing that kept me from ever playing Oblivion because I hadn't played the previous two Elder Scrolls games. In this case there were still things in Fallout 3 I hadn't done, particularly in the north part of the Capital Wasteland, and DLC that I haven't touched at all. Despite that I decided that, especially with Fallout 4 on the way, it was time to head back west and see what the Vegas area is like.

Fallout: Now with giant dinosaurs.

In a lot of ways the changes from Fallout 3 to New Vegas remind me of the move from Fallout to Fallout 2. For example New Vegas uses a combination karma and reputation system much like Fallout 2 did. Now I have to consider my relationship with multiple settlements and factions in addition to my overall good or evil level. So far I've met the Powder Gangers (they hate me so much now), NCR (we're pals), and the Legion (oh my god these guys are awful). I know the Brotherhood of Steel is active in the area as well, and it doesn't sound like they and the NCR get on too well. It also sounds like they're the old school insular jackasses I remember from the old days rather than the happy shiny DC Brotherhood.

I am trusting this robot less and less as the game proceeds.

Increased complexity seems to be a recurring thing in New Vegas. Multiple types of ammo for each weapon instead of just one each, masses of crafting recipes for food, equipment and more instead of just a few weapon schematics. It was a little overwhelming at first. I still haven't really made use of any special ammunition, though I imagine it'll be pretty useful against stronger and heavily armored foes.

I'm also definitely beginning to get the feeling that this is the true sequel to the previous Fallout games. I've begun encountering nightkin super mutants, and have heard references to the Master from the original game. I'm pretty sure I've met the daughter of one of my companions from Fallout 2 as well. She certainly drinks like him.

Overall, about ten or so hours in I'm greatly enjoying New Vegas. Now if you'll excuse me there are some ghouls who want my help flying to the moon. I just want them to not be here, so I am on board with this plan.

AggroChat #74 – Force Binds Us

May 21, 2019September 13, 2015 by AggroChat

We start of this weeks show by talking about our continued adventures in Diablo 3, and while a some of us have slowed down our progress Grace talks about falling back into the familiar rhythm of chilling out in solo play. With the upcoming September 29th release of Wildstar Free to Play she also talks about spending a lot of time on the test server, and the recent hoverboard racing event testing. Thalen this week spent time venturing into some single player games that had never got around to playing. First we revive our discussion of Wolfenstein New Order and why you should play it for so many different reasons. In a shocker we find out that Thalen never actually played Fallout New Vegas, which spawns a discussion about our appreciation of the game.

Kodra on the other hand spent his week mostly playing a bunch of indie titles and talks about Circa Infinity and The Magic Circle. Magic Circle being the game that he spent a significant amount of time at Pax talking to the Dev about. Additionally we are all jealous of him as he talks about his experience playing Mario Maker, which is essentially Infinite Mario. This spawns a discussion about each of our early attempts at creating content for our friends to play like Excitebike, Wolfenstein, Doom and Descent. Related to Magic Circle, a seperate discussion breaks out about the Stanley Parable and what it says about gamers themselves.

Ashgar is still heavily involved in LBX: Little Battlers Experience and has even gotten in his model kits from last week putting at least one of them together. He helped to clear up some of my confusion that there is in fact a Roleplaying game there, and it is very similar to the style of game that Pokemon is. We also get into a length discussion about Pokemon Go and how the Ingress type game is likely going to change what we are playing next year. There is really no way this is not going to be a huge title, and for the most part we agree that Ingress has been a tech demo leading up to this.

Finally several of us have spontaneously gotten sucked back into Star Wars the Old Republic. Right now it is impossible to go anywhere in the world without being bombarded by Force Awakens merchandise, and after a point I simply could not resist the pull of nostalgia. The best thing about coming back to a game after years of being away is the huge backlog of content available to be played. The current twelve times experience bonus for subscribers helps as well, because you quite literally only have to focus on your class story to get leveled which was always the best part of the game. Ash, Bel and Tam are all caught in the gravity well of this game for the moment, and it sounds like some of our other hosts might have gotten the bug as well. We will have to see next week if we are still talking out it, or if we have gotten it out of our systems.

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