Fallout General Discussion & Speculation

God, the quest bugs are infuriating. What's more infuriating is that some of the fixes are really straightforward and easy to apply and Bethsoft absolutely will not use them: a really egregious example being the "a-bomb bug" where Oblivion's animations would freeze up after a certain amount of frames had been generated. Easy for PC owners as they could just apply the modder-created fix, but console users were screwed and had to start a new game. Given that it was only about 100 hours or so in and a decent play-through could be 300-400 hours, that really sucked.

I guess I didn't realise CC and the bethesda.net mods were different things, but I've had absolutely zero interest in bethesda.net: apart from not wanting yet another software management system cluttering up my computer, I still feel aggrieved because they utterly ruined their forums once they moved it to the new software. Admittedly the current version isn't quite as bad as Jive, which really was terrible, but it's still a shadow of its glory days, not least as it seems most of the old guard also got fed up and left.

Edit: that's quite ranty.  I've been in a bit of a mood the past 24 hours... :/

Glad they fixed an issue.   I really need to play fallout 4 again sometime soon.  Maybe after Dragon Age Inquisition.

After all that griping I think I finally found the culprit and slightly shame-faced I have to report that it was a mod. But I feel that Bethsoft has earned a honorary blaming anyway.

But today I have been playing with normalmaps, because interfering with a game is always going to be more fun than playing it!

Today I met Sierra Petrovita after missing her the first time I played Fallout 3. She's so adorable, I love her!
She actually kind of reminds me of my aunt and uncle. They have an entire garage full of collectibles, and a lot of it is Coca-Cola! It's pretty awesome and it also makes me a bit homesick, haha.
I know she returns in Fallout 4's DLC so I'm curious! Can't wait to play that one!
I think I'm going to write her in as my Lone Wanderer's best friend, haha...although I still haven't decided who will be his boyfriend, but there are plenty of hot guys candidates!

While working on her quest I did do some more exploring around the wasteland and other miscellaneous things. I also completed the Point Lookout DLC.
I know there's still plenty more I could do/explore in the game, but with all the constant crashing after 50 hours of gameplay, I'm ready to move on to New Vegas!
I'll probably finish up Fallout 3 tomorrow by completing Broken Steel.

I'm really excited for New Vegas though! I remember having such an amazing experience with it the first time. It never felt like a chore going through the game and by the time I was finished I actually wanted more! It's one of the very few games where I've felt that way and I definitely consider it to be among my personal favorites.

Still have plenty of work to do on developing my Lone Wanderer and Courier Six OCs! I'll probably share them in the OC thread when I get around to it!

It's the other way around on ps3 sadly. New Vegas is the most unstable game I have ever tried to play on that system, and it hurts my soul-cause I loved it so much. I will have to get it on pc soon-as I think my laptop is more than up to the task.

Andrew Mancer Veronica is a good companion! I hope you have fun playing the game.

I loved Arcade, but honestly, Boone was my husbando...I'm terrible I know. Poor guy has dead wife syndrome and I'm like... Still, if his actually gay friend would have been a romance I would have gone for him instead-but there are no romance options sadly. Manny Vargas -drools-

I really liked Veronica, even though she was not available! But I was quite happy trekking around with someone who was quite happy to punch things and obsess about dresses.

I think overall I personally preferred FO3 but I think my priority is still wandering about exploring and seeing what there is to find, whereas Obsidian does much more tightly-controlled storytelling (which is sometimes a little dry for my tastes, but that's entirely subjective) and I also preferred 3's general atmosphere. I really enjoyed all three of the modern Fallouts, though.

Regarding screenshots, I tend to use the following console commands (I think most work in all Fallouts but some experimentation may be required).

tm - toggle HUD on and off. Do this one last because typos can otherwise be frustrating!
tfc - toggle flying camera so you can move around. Remember to put it into third-person first if you want to include your PC.
tfc 1 - same as tfc, but freezes the game. If this doesn't work in FO3/NV, do tgp after tfc to pause it (I think that one works, anyway!)
sucsm 4 - change flying camera speed. Lower numbers are slower, higher quicker. 4 isn't too slow but makes it a lot less uncontrollable.
tcai - turn off combat AI, so if you don't want to pause you won't get attacked, though companions and bad guys may still have a stand-off.

Then you have various things like pose-rings and whatnot that are useful to bind to a hotkey to put a character into a pose, as well as being able to remove or move objects using enable/disable, moveto etc. Don't forget to save beforehand if you start using stuff like that!

It's unfortunate that Bethsoft's always had a rather blasé attitude to matters of stability and QA. I could go on and on, but I guess this isn't the place!

The end being The End™ is often an irritation to me with video games, specifically when it it's only the end of the MQ and there's still more sidequests and exploring to do. I was surprised at how controversial Broken Steel was for daring to open up the ending, some people got really unhappy about that but I was relieved that I could get the MQ out the way without committing myself to everything ending.


I also thought the NV factions were a little bit too shades-of-grey for my liking and I didn't feel especially comfortable siding with anyone. Although overly black-and-white writing is often a bit dull and clichéd, I like someone to identifiably be the good guys! That said, you do have that in FO4 with the Minutemen but they do sometimes come across as a bunch of dullards! I guess there's no pleasing me.

There was actually all the mechanics of factions in FO3 but they were underused and only really seemed to have any relevance when it came to matters of crime and general social standing, though again that's not atypical of Bethsoft. Oblivion was a perhaps more obvious example, things like loot, enemy scaling and somewhat seemed very simplistic (albeit in response to often angrily shouted feedback about Morrowind) but actually the underlying system was very sophisticated as a lot of the overhaul mods showed. And that I suppose is one of the big reasons I persist with Bethsoft games in spite of the bugs: don't like something? Change it. And in that regard, I quickly installed a mod to allow NV to continue after the ending: sure, some quests broke as a result but I figured I would rather that than roll back to an earlier save or start over.