The Fallout New Vegas Thread * will contain spoilers *

CryingGod said:
Wat
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Speech, guns and melee trump all. Science gives skillpoints on level so thankfully you can put points into them, but for all other applications it's crap. There are about half a dozen Science dialogue options throughout the game compared to fifty bajillion speech ones.

I've got 13 points in lockpick and 100 in science and have still picked more locks and accessed more stuff with locks than with computer terminals. ED-E can be addressed with a moderate repair level and a bit of hunting for supplies.

Survival is shit because it's an alternate medicine route with some major downsides. The food heals over time and at 100 points only one or two recipes heal better than the (weightless) stimpaks/super stimpaks in my inventory with 30 points in medicine. With some tweaking it would be super cool and really involving having to knock together your remedies and chems, but only if Medicine was removed completely and the game was tweaked fairly heavily and you played in Hardcore.

As it is I use ED-E to store about 250lbs of misc food items, picking up and crafting every hour at least, and still only get a handful of things, of which only the Desert Salad is any good. Having to open your pip boy and poison my unarmed weapons with each new enemy is tiresome and unrewarding.

Barter is almost entirely pointless because the vendors usually have so few caps with such a long reset time that to sell all the junk you pick up you have to fast travel around to multiple vendors and sell your inventory away piecemeal. If you had a high Barter skill you would be unable to sell more than one gun to each person before having to move on.
 
I disagree, gun runners and BoS often have several thousand caps. Also dont forget about repair, once at 90 you can tag the skill to repair items with similar items, saves a lot of money and trouble.
 
huxley said:
I disagree, gun runners and BoS often have several thousand caps. Also dont forget about repair, once at 90 you can tag the skill to repair items with similar items, saves a lot of money and trouble.
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Yeah, repair is very good in this. Went for guns/repair/speech first time around and added melee when I had some spare points. It seems that some choices just give you better options. Melee gives weapons with a greater range and the attack rate seems to be more repsonsive than unarmed, which is my new build. No matter what I equip the unarmed power attack seems a lot slower than the melee one.
 
Barter does seem like the worst. There might be a couple dialogue options that use it (besides "I'll do this quest for more money"), though speechcraft usually gives an alternative prestige option.

Sobek said:
Where the hell is the damn sexbot? My stupid quest arrow just sends me back and forth between doors in Freeside. I have the holotape from Ralphie or whomever it is. I started doing a different quest in the meantime. I'd look it up but I'm at work and the gov't blocks anything game related.
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Yeah, there is a little narrow opening that isn't easily noticeable. Go to the King's water pump, then go up (North or west I think) towards that little NCR holdout area (in the same cell) where there is a fire barrell and two burned up cars. If you go further there is some rubble that looks like a dead end. Well, it isn't a dead end. There's an area behind it.
 
Agreed on Speech. It's without question a critical skill and easily worth boosting to at least 75 in the first few levels. Repair is also essential, as is Lockpick. It feels awkward not to tag some sort of weapons skill in a Fallout game, but frankly, it isn't really necessary with the iron sights. Given that VATS is so terribly worthless unless in very close range, putting a ton of skill points into weapon skills early on doesn't really pay off.

It would be great to be able to pump points into Science and Barter, but money isn't much of a problem with a terrible Barter skill and Science is used infrequently (and the hacking mini-game is too fucking painful to want to bother with most times anyway).
 
Do iron sights negate the need for skill in accuracy? (where 100 skill in guns = 15 skill in guns as far as accuracy goes) I haven't given much thought to that.
 
Yep. As far as I can tell, my accuracy with my skills at 10 is as good as it is when they're at 100. I might have a 0% chance to hit something in VATS, though outside of VATS, I never miss what I'm aiming for (depending on the weapon).
 
I was lvl 20 something before I put one point into guns or energy weapons on my hardcore playthrough. The first skills I raised to 90 were science/lockpick/repair. I then maxed out energy weps and then speech. VATS was mostly worthless and the iron sight aiming was just fine when crouched at a 40 skill with guns. I can't really bring myself to play through it a second time as a melee/unarmed as i explored 99% of the map the first time. I was actually lvl 30 before I went inside the strip, although i made it up to the med center at lvl 6 for implants.
 
Agree on speech. I also did a lot more sneaking around this time than I did with fo3. There's not much need for gun skill either when Boone kills most things for me before I can get 2 shots in 'em lol.
 
If anything, I'd say you can probably scrap repair. There are too many instances where you can have someone fix all of your gear and then just pickpocket them to get all of your money back. Worst case scenario you might need a stealth boy to do it, but at the end of the game I'd done that 5-6 times and I still had a half dozen stealth boys left. Doing that you don't have to care about your sneak stats either.

Lockpick is good to get at least 75/80, but there are very few instances where a Very Hard lock has anything special behind it and it can't be opened with a computer or plot-based key. Science is pretty much the same way. In most cases, having one or the other will cover your bases to open a door, safe, etc.
Plus, magazines aren't exactly in short supply. If you take the 20 point magazine perk, you can always just use quick load to see if something is worth wasting a magazine on. Get 'em to 80 and then use your points elsewhere.

One of the best suggestions I can make is to boost your lockpick and guns stats early and head to "sniper's nest" to the lower right of the map. Once you get the Gobi rifle there, you're going to be pretty strong no matter what you're up against.
 
Jellylesg said:
Speech, guns and melee trump all. Science gives skillpoints on level so thankfully you can put points into them, but for all other applications it's crap. There are about half a dozen Science dialogue options throughout the game compared to fifty bajillion speech ones.

I've got 13 points in lockpick and 100 in science and have still picked more locks and accessed more stuff with locks than with computer terminals. ED-E can be addressed with a moderate repair level and a bit of hunting for supplies.

Survival is shit because it's an alternate medicine route with some major downsides. The food heals over time and at 100 points only one or two recipes heal better than the (weightless) stimpaks/super stimpaks in my inventory with 30 points in medicine. With some tweaking it would be super cool and really involving having to knock together your remedies and chems, but only if Medicine was removed completely and the game was tweaked fairly heavily and you played in Hardcore.

As it is I use ED-E to store about 250lbs of misc food items, picking up and crafting every hour at least, and still only get a handful of things, of which only the Desert Salad is any good. Having to open your pip boy and poison my unarmed weapons with each new enemy is tiresome and unrewarding.

Barter is almost entirely pointless because the vendors usually have so few caps with such a long reset time that to sell all the junk you pick up you have to fast travel around to multiple vendors and sell your inventory away piecemeal. If you had a high Barter skill you would be unable to sell more than one gun to each person before having to move on.
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I dunno about the speech options, there was quite a lot of unique speech options, more so than others maybe, but other skills gave you other benefits where as speech only gives you speech options, so you'd expect it to be better in that respect.

Science made the terminals way easier to hack, at 100 level there is only about 6 options and 4 guesses, that's more of a convenience than anything else, although some terminals you simply cannot hack without the appropriate skill level in science, so late game a high science score is good. There is also quite a few instances where science appears in dialogue and as unique actions in game, fixing things like ED-E at the start but later on you get other stuff like fixing lifts, bots, mending all sorts of things for quests. You also recycle energy weapon ammo more efficiently which is good late game.

Here is a list of the sort of things it can be used for in quests - http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Science#Fallout:_New_Vegas

Survival I didn't bother with, it was fairly useless from what I could see, it does have some uses past making food, such as getting raw materials from creatures, probably better early game or more cash.

I didn't have the same problem with barter, although I kept mine low, I found certain key vendors who always had a lot of money, the NCR gun trader at route 188, the merchant at the BoS, etc. Also doesn't this lower their prices to you as well, not sure on that...

A lot of the skills have seconday uses which are quite helpful, and what makes the grass always seem greener is that there is often many different ways to complete some areas/quests/objectives. The game is meant to be like that, you can be average at everything or good at some things at the expense of others, the game is quite well balanced to offer you rewards for each skill, sometimes they're immediate like getting loot from a safe you lockpicked open, sometimes it's speech/barter asking for a greater reward from NPCs and loads of stuff inbetween.
 
Domingo said:
If anything, I'd say you can probably scrap repair. There are too many instances where you can have someone fix all of your gear and then just pickpocket them to get all of your money back.
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Seems a little too exploit-y for me.

EDIT: Isn't it interesting how we've managed to keep all the Fallout stuff in one thread whereas the CoD people need a dozen?
 
PrincessFrosty said:
I dunno about the speech options, there was quite a lot of unique speech options, more so than others maybe, but other skills gave you other benefits where as speech only gives you speech options, so you'd expect it to be better in that respect.

Science made the terminals way easier to hack, at 100 level there is only about 6 options and 4 guesses, that's more of a convenience than anything else, although some terminals you simply cannot hack without the appropriate skill level in science, so late game a high science score is good. There is also quite a few instances where science appears in dialogue and as unique actions in game, fixing things like ED-E at the start but later on you get other stuff like fixing lifts, bots, mending all sorts of things for quests. You also recycle energy weapon ammo more efficiently which is good late game.

Here is a list of the sort of things it can be used for in quests - http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Science#Fallout:_New_Vegas
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yeah, the thing is in my first playthrough I found everything anyway without a high science skill so it seems now in retrospect like a wasted investment. The science dialogues are always accompanied by a speech option as well, whereas it's not the case the other way around.

The problem I have is that it's not really a case of the grass always being greener; some skills are simply more useful than others. Like the speech being useful 90% of the time compared to both science/medicine combined being useful maybe 50% of the time.
 
I'm sure some of the traits are probably better suited toward the hardcore mode, too. Medicine and crafting are all but worthless using the normal difficulty. After all, you're either going to stimpak your damage away or get killed in 2 hits anyway. In hardcore I can imagine that will change a bit. Ditto for wanting to carry more weight (food/water/medicine/etc.), which shouldn't really be necessary on normal.

With Science, it seems like a lot of the hacking revolves around opening doors and safes that can be opened in other ways. Plus, there are a ton of Programmer's magazines laying around. I boosted mine needlessly, and looking back I would've gone with speech instead.

One other item that I found puzzling was the virtual lack of power armor this time. It's there, and you can use it, but it's quite the process and pretty easy to miss the opportunity.
 
I actually stumbled across the Brotherhood last night during a sandstorm outside, they attacked, I guess I was trespassing but didn't know it. I hosed my karma, but on principle I had to wipe out the rest of them, scribes and all.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
I actually stumbled across the Brotherhood last night during a sandstorm outside, they attacked, I guess I was trespassing but didn't know it. I hosed my karma, but on principle I had to wipe out the rest of them, scribes and all.
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You'll miss out on a few things including a companion's quest.
 
Domingo said:
Lockpick is good to get at least 75/80, but there are very few instances where a Very Hard lock has anything special behind it and it can't be opened with a computer or plot-based key. Science is pretty much the same way. In most cases, having one or the other will cover your bases to open a door, safe, etc.
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See i've only started my first play through and i am regretting taking science over lockpicking..

I have had to pass up so many locked safes etc that i am considering a restart to go the lockpick route.. i've only found 2 or 3 instances where i could science my way through a locked safe etc..

i should have learned my lesson from DA:O in that lockpicking is a must have. I really wish they would have made it more like Oblivion were the lockpick skill helps in the lock but you can still try and do it at a lower level. in this game i can't even attempt to pick the lock unless i have a certain skill level. (ahh i miss the oblivion skeleton key)
 
I tend to always go with Rogue/Thief type characters, so infiltration is a must for me. In New Vegas I'd definitely go with lockpick over science, just because there are a full-on ton of locked chests, but not really all that many computers. Computers just tend to be able to unlock a lot of the doors that are "very hard" with lockpicking.
I still don't think there's a ton of reason to have over 80 for either stat, though. Magazines are everywhere and the perk that gives you double points for mags/books is a must.
Knowing what I know now, I'd have done a better job with my points...but by the time you hit level 20 or so, you likely have good numbers anyway. The only truly hard enemies are deathclaws, and as long as you have a sniper rifle or 50 cal you'll be okay.
 
phide said:
Were you wearing any NCR gear?
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Nope, not fully allied with NCR yet. Hadn't done anything to upset the BoS. Boone and Rex were with me, if that means anything.

I walked in, started taking hits, dished out some Pushy pain for my troubles.

Now all I need to do is see if there are any more BoS strongholds to conclude my bloodhunt. They could have been nice, but no :D
 
Jellylesg said:
yeah, the thing is in my first playthrough I found everything anyway without a high science skill so it seems now in retrospect like a wasted investment. The science dialogues are always accompanied by a speech option as well, whereas it's not the case the other way around.

The problem I have is that it's not really a case of the grass always being greener; some skills are simply more useful than others. Like the speech being useful 90% of the time compared to both science/medicine combined being useful maybe 50% of the time.
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Again this is only in the context of speech with NPCs, where the speech skill excels in conversation (obviously), the other skills gives bonuses outside of conversation, and occur less frequently as options while in conversation.

That's not to say that all the skills are perfectly balanced, I agree some are better than others, speech is definitely a good skill to take but over something like science I don't think it commands as much of a lead as some people are making out.
 
I haven't seen the end of the game levels, but thus far speech is definitely awesome but at higher levels it seems to only serves to bring nothing more than non-violent results. Unless the endgame changes things, it seems that middle to upper middle level speech is more than enough if you don't mind using your gun to resolve the rest.

That said, speech is definitely awesome, even for the violent inclined. I just haven't seen the super speech checks to do much more than peacemaking. (like letting a rotten scum of a turd leave town rather than killing him)
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Nope, not fully allied with NCR yet. Hadn't done anything to upset the BoS. Boone and Rex were with me, if that means anything.

I walked in, started taking hits, dished out some Pushy pain for my troubles.

Now all I need to do is see if there are any more BoS strongholds to conclude my bloodhunt. They could have been nice, but no :D
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It's likely that since Boone is affiliated with the NCR, the BoS would go bonkers over anyone with their affiliation.

:):)Spoilers:):)

:):):):):):):):):):):):):)
There's a mission to make peace with the BoS and the NCR so that you're able to wear some nice BoS armor at an NCR base without NCR comrades going bonkers on you.
:):):):):):):):):):):):):):)


:):)Spoilers off:):)

So far this game is awesome. At first I didn't like it too much but as the game progressed (around 30hours in), I like it better than Fallout 3.

Boone is an overpowered companion so far (been playing in hard difficulty) with his hunting rifle. Sometimes he 1 headshots enemies before I even get a chance to fire! Gonna readjust the difficulty to very hard for better difficulty. He's annoying as hell a lot of times. Whenever I head shot an enemy half a mile away, he makes the SAME dumbass remark like "let me shoot that for you next time" as if he's too damn elite. I had to mod his bitchass to shut up when I do the killing :p.

ED-E is pretty cool. His sensor perk is useful and he's good as a meat tank to take distract enemies while I snipe away.

So far, the sniper rifle and All-American are my favorite weapons. Both are found at (SPOILER) Vault 34 if anyone's interested. The enemies there are PRETTY hard and pretty scary (so far the hardest part of the game) BUT WELL worth it since you can pick up some sweet weapons in the armory.

I Just jacked the ALL the laser weapons in that Freeside gang by picking up the weapons and putting them in the bathrom so I can jack them all at once hidden ;) I could have killed them all myself but I wanted to do their missions they offered.

Anyways, this game is very addicting and I can't wait to play some more :cool:.
 
amdj said:
It's likely that since Boone is affiliated with the NCR, the BoS would go bonkers over anyone with their affiliation.
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Yea, maybe so. He does have his assault armor from completing his quest arc. There isn't much gearwise I would want from BoS anyway
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Yea, maybe so. He does have his assault armor from completing his quest arc. There isn't much gearwise I would want from BoS anyway
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Who wouldn't want power armor? You're a leathery type fellow instead? (heh, I like to run fast too)
 
Parmenides said:
Who wouldn't want power armor? You're a leathery type fellow instead? (heh, I like to run fast too)
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Vault 34 Security armor is my personal favorite, sure it wears out fast but all my characters train repair so by the time I'm level 14 I always have jury rigging anyways so it makes it super easy to repair. I always get the travel light perk since running 10% faster is a very nice perk indeed.

Never liked power armor, even in Fallout 3 I always tended to go for the Deathclaw gauntet/ Combat armor type character which makes me sad that there is no such weapon in this game. Oh well the knock knock makes for a suitable alternative for most intensive purposes.
 
Even though the game doesnt look that great, I think they did a good job with the Legion camp, just a sad, depressing place.
 
sculelos said:
Vault 34 Security armor is my personal favorite, sure it wears out fast but all my characters train repair so by the time I'm level 14 I always have jury rigging anyways so it makes it super easy to repair. I always get the travel light perk since running 10% faster is a very nice perk indeed.

Never liked power armor, even in Fallout 3 I always tended to go for the Deathclaw gauntet/ Combat armor type character which makes me sad that there is no such weapon in this game. Oh well the knock knock makes for a suitable alternative for most intensive purposes.
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I am annoyed that they still have the same bonus/negative with the power armor...not to mention the actual brotherhood power armor has a good +1 strength bonus but you have to be dressed as a brotherhood member :/
 
Sorry for the technical question, but are any of you having probs running this game in SLI? I'm playing on the rig in my sig and this game is crashing on me about ever 20 mins at least, sometimes consecutively right after opening the game. Half the time the game crashes, I see the notification at the bottom right saying that my GPU driver had to recover, so I'm assuming SLI is to blame ATM. I only tried playing the game with SLI disabled once for a few mins and it ran too slow on Ultra quality so I refused to leave it disabled, heh. I'm considering ditching this SLI setup for a GTX 580 which should be a bit faster without having to worry about SLI issues, but I'd like to get your guys experience with SLI so far.

Thanks!

Oh, and I'm like level 16 so far and just figured out that having absolutely no speech skill sucks ass, hah. I can't do shit with some of these missions like trying to get Cass (caravan girl) to come see that black guy in the power weapons store. So I'm dumping most of my skill points in speech now, hah.
 
T4rd said:
Oh, and I'm like level 16 so far and just figured out that having absolutely no speech skill sucks ass, hah. I can't do shit with some of these missions like trying to get Cass (caravan girl) to come see that black guy in the power weapons store. So I'm dumping most of my skill points in speech now, hah.
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If you do manage to convince her to meet him you'll want to create a save file just before you take her in.
 
In the Legion camp where Ceasar is at I noticed there's at least one slave that has a real name but when you try and talk to her nothing happens. Is she someone important?
 
No real spoilers, but at the end of the game you can pretty much throw all of your previous alliances out the window if you want. For anyone who hasn't been to the Strip yet, once you confront Benny, that's when the plot really starts to vary depending on your decisions.
For anyone on a console, if you're looking to get all of the achievements or just want to be a completionist - definitely keep a save game from that point, or at least one after you visit all of the different factions they mention.
Once you start completing quests at that stage, you're going to auto-fail other ones as a result.
 
Domingo said:
No real spoilers, but at the end of the game you can pretty much throw all of your previous alliances out the window if you want. For anyone who hasn't been to the Strip yet, once you confront Benny, that's when the plot really starts to vary depending on your decisions.
For anyone on a console, if you're looking to get all of the achievements or just want to be a completionist - definitely keep a save game from that point, or at least one after you visit all of the different factions they mention.
Once you start completing quests at that stage, you're going to auto-fail other ones as a result.
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^^ All true.
 
T4rd said:
Sorry for the technical question, but are any of you having probs running this game in SLI? I'm playing on the rig in my sig and this game is crashing on me about ever 20 mins at least, sometimes consecutively right after opening the game. Half the time the game crashes, I see the notification at the bottom right saying that my GPU driver had to recover, so I'm assuming SLI is to blame ATM. I only tried playing the game with SLI disabled once for a few mins and it ran too slow on Ultra quality so I refused to leave it disabled, heh. I'm considering ditching this SLI setup for a GTX 580 which should be a bit faster without having to worry about SLI issues, but I'd like to get your guys experience with SLI so far.

Thanks!

Oh, and I'm like level 16 so far and just figured out that having absolutely no speech skill sucks ass, hah. I can't do shit with some of these missions like trying to get Cass (caravan girl) to come see that black guy in the power weapons store. So I'm dumping most of my skill points in speech now, hah.
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I had no problems running SLI on my 280s though I was using some of the mods that took out all the stuttering. I didn't have any crashes until halfway through the ending...
 
huxley said:
I am annoyed that they still have the same bonus/negative with the power armor...not to mention the actual brotherhood power armor has a good +1 strength bonus but you have to be dressed as a brotherhood member :/
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No you don't. There is unmarked T-51b and T-45d power armor in the game. There is also the Remnants Power armor, and Tesla power armor. Right now I am using the Remnants Tesla armor.
 
I have a question about the Botherhood of Steal and the ending
If I go with the independent route with yes man, will the ending be affected by whether I kill off the Brotherhood of steal or not? It seems as though the Yes Man warns me that they will be my greatest enemy, even though I did all their quests and on good terms with the BOS (maybe idolized, can't remember). The original elder is still in power, making concessions that he'll open up to the outside world some.
 
Every time I go to meet the detective's contact in the Ultra Luxe, the game crashes to with a frozen screen. Existing or with a new character. Mods or no mods. Same place, same type of crash.

This is the first major issue I've had with the game. Anyone have any idea of what is causing this? :confused:
 
Parmenides said:
I have a question about the Botherhood of Steal and the ending
If I go with the independent route with yes man, will the ending be affected by whether I kill off the Brotherhood of steal or not? It seems as though the Yes Man warns me that they will be my greatest enemy, even though I did all their quests and on good terms with the BOS (maybe idolized, can't remember). The original elder is still in power, making concessions that he'll open up to the outside world some.
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Not fully sure but I do know for sure one thing:

You get a warning quest of sorts where the NCR will turn into your enemy at the drop of a hat if you go "too far" with Yes Man. I saw this even though I was an idolized saint for the NCR. Snap of the fingers they were going to flip on me.

I wouldn't be surprised if the game is telling you the truth and the BOS goes against you, too, for similar reasons. The game is good about you letting you know if something is going to happen a certain way and why. I'd say you probably can take Yes Man's word for it and it'll be just like the NCR warning.

All I can tell you is: Use multiple saves and see what happens.
 
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