LogFAQs > #948013207

BetrayedTangy posted...

The real strength of the Bethesda Fallouts for me has been the side quests and unique locations. It has a wonderful sense of exploration.

Yeah, I think that's the best part of Bethesda's game designs. I put a lot of time into Skyrim just wandering around and ignoring the main quest-line. New Vegas is an Obsidian game and gets some praise for its story (especially when people want to bash Bethesda's writing in comparison) but at the end of the day it's in FO3's engine and so far its strengths seem to lie in the same areas as a Bethesda game. Your adventure trying to get to New Vegas sounds like it was a lot of fun and reminds me of the kind of "organic" events that can only really happen in a rare subset of open-world games like MGSV or Breath of the Wild, or occasionally Skyrim at its best. If you get to Vegas early, can you continue the main story without completing "They Went That-a-way?"

That's a good point about the dialog with Boxcars, I got that too, although it felt a little more strange in my case since he called me "The Powder Gang's Grim Reaper" even though I was only Shunned by them. I only fought them the one time when they were attacking my friends, it's not like I was actively hunting them!

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There were ghouls at the old REPCONN place, alright. Art and Boone couldn't get within a mile of the building without a horde of ferals jumping them. Inside the building, a voice over the intercom asked him to come upstairs, and when he made it he met a man putting on an exaggerated Ghoulish rasp who was convinced he actually was a ghoul. It turned out the tower was the base of operations for some kind of deluded religious sect led by a guy named Jason, who was so irradiated he could glow in the dark. Jason wanted the "demons" cleared out of the basement. They were actually Nightkin. Art had never met one before - he'd heard about them, of course, but never seen one in the flesh. He was a little nervous about fighting giant mutants with access to cloaking technology, but he didn't want to massacre the ghouls so he decided to give it a shot.

The super-mutants were led by a guy named Davison. He and Jason were two peas in a pod - Davison was convinced that a Brahmin skull was talking to him and leading his troops. Art managed to talk the big nut into leaving the building in exchange for a shipment of Stealth Boys that had been sent there by accident back before the war. They were supposed to be stuck in a back room trapped and guarded by a ghoul named Harland, who himself agreed to split if Art looked for his girlfriend, who he'd lost back when the Nightkin attacked the building. Harland didn't go along with Jason's cult nonsense and just stayed around this place because he wanted some company. Art kind of liked him, so he went further down and looked for the missing ghoul. He was worried that he'd make Davison mad if he killed his friends, so he left Boone behind and used a Stealth Boy to sneak around, but he still had to kill one mutie for a set of keys and got caught by another one on his way back. Most of the Nightkin fought with big clubs, so as scary as they looked he could just walk back and keep shooting.

As it turned out, the girl was dead and the Stealth Boys weren't there - they'd been sent back after some of the old REPCONN employees used them for mischief. Things worked out, though; that information was enough to convince both Harland and then Davison to skedaddle.

Now that the building was back under their control, the ghouls wanted help launching the old rockets that were still in the basement into orbit with them inside. Art had to provide some fuel and an old control piece that had been misplaced. The dinosaur-shaped gift shop in Novac had little toy rockets with the fuel inside (which had apparently made some unlucky kids sick back in the day) and the control piece was in possession of an old lady at a junkyard just outside town. He also managed to convince the guy who lived with the ghouls that he was actually a human, and then had to talk him out of taking revenge on the ghouls for playing into his delusions for two years. Once the rocket went up, the guy moved to Novac, where he seemed to share a room with old Manny Vargas. Art was now Idolized in Novac, despite being guilty of conspiracy to commit murder there.

Next Art went back to Goodsprings again to get a drink from their well and make some purified water out of prickly pears at the campsite. He also remembered finding an old robot back in Primm that he couldn't quite repair and wanted another shot at it. He had to read a few magazines but he got his own robot buddy up and running. Its name was ED-E. It could fly and shoot lasers, and of his two travelling companions it was easily his favorite.

The boys decided to check out the NCR Base, called HELIOS One, that was a little north of Novac. None of them had any NCR connections so Art had to smooth-talk his way in, and he also chatted up a scientist named Ignacio who was undercover for another posse, the Followers of the Apocalypse. The base was supposed to be a solar-powered electricity plant, but Ignacio thought it was also the site of a secret weapon called ARCHIMEDES, which he didn't want either the NCR or the Legion to get their mitts on. Luckily the guy the NCR had working on the place was a fraud. The base had some kind of scary old-fashioned security system, and Ignacio wasn't the fighting type, so he left Art and pals to check things out. Art got the place's power running again and distributed it evenly throughout the area. He thought about sending it the NCR's way since it would never hurt to make friends with the most powerful team around, but he didn't want those guys' heads getting to big. Ignacio gave him a book on programming for doing things his way, which was nice because Art had recently acquired an interest in robots. The guy must have spread the word, too, because he was now Accepted with Followers.

Like Manny said, the Khans who took the chip were in Boulder City. It was a town of ruins that the NCR had sacrificed to win the last big battle over Hoover Dam against the Legion. The Khans were holed up in the ruins with a few trooper hostages. Art convinced the NCR captain in charge of the whole situation to let him negotiate and then got the Khans to give up their hostages in exchange for safe passage. The NCR fella wanted to stab them in the back but Art got him to keep his end of the bargain, so no one died. That was nice - better than he usually did. It left him Accepted with both Khans and NCR.

The Khans had apparently been betrayed by Benny, the guy in the suit who had done the honors when Art needed a bullet in the skull. They thought he would be in Vegas, so that was where the gang were headed next. They bumped into Art's other robot buddy again on the way, though. They were headed the same way, so Victor asked him to meet up when they got to the big city. He was looking forward to it.

New Perk: Commando (increased VATS accuracy when using rifles)

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 11/129
Currently Playing: Fallout: New Vegas