LadyCrimson

Well, between my slow daily pace, multiple factions/endings/companions and my silly habit of spending inordinate amounts of time goofing off with dino toys or torturing/testing companions for giggles etc. ...a couple months, yup. A month is more my average for a game now, but in the old days I played many games for 4-6 months before setting aside them for a long while. I'm just one of those folk that when a game especially tickles my fancy for some reason, a couple months is nothing. I'm sure there's still a few here who remember my Kotor2 obsessions. So are you unable to hear those ambient sounds even with the radio volume turned really low? I can still hear them above the music. Creaky metal, footsteps, wind, and so on. To me it was like walking around with headphones around your neck instead of over your ears. But I did turn the music off simply for being repetitious.

Maybe I'm confused because it was two patches, I think I got them separately. At any rate a higher speed connection would make short work of it. ------------------ P.S. And thanks once more to Obsidian for making a game that's made me stay up late, lose sleep, and ignore my spouse again. If we get divorced in the next couple months, it's all your fault. Not mine, of course not.

I don't know what your connection speed is, but IIRC the patch was around 18MB, so not too big. But I could be remembering wrong.

Steam definitely seems better than when I tried it for the Orange Box. If you're in offline mode it still pops up the "connecting to your account" box for several seconds before Steam window actually loads (I don't have it run at bootup) but it's really not. I've unplugged the internet cable and it still pops up. There's no delay in offline mode for starting/loading actual game. But you can't talk to ppl/do steam achievements etc. then of course.

Why do the late game armors always have to look so....silly? Not that they look bad, they're silver/blackish (I think) so almost cool. But still kinda silly. I prefer the clothing-look I guess.

I obsessively reloaded my save game of the battle against the robots trying to see how much it would take to make Boone fail in that one situation. He did fine three times in a row, needed a lot of help the fourth, and then apparently there are a few keys when combined together had him fall down in about one minute: don't approach while initially sneaking, but do approach head-on so he just walks forward instead of tending to strafe from side to side as he closes in, and give him a weapon which (seemingly) unlike his default rifle, can be shot to pieces in his hands, twice. Then he fell down, and I fell down with him. lol Ok that was hilarious fun, but enough of that...back to the actual game. haha

It's not a picture, but a video. Just 1 min. 40 seconds so if you think it sucks the pain won't be long. First 40 seconds is multiple very brief bits of Boone killing early stuff (I'm lvl 6-8 in all bits) but the last minute is from him killing those 9 robots for me (showing the last 4 I think it was). There's no game spoilers in it, just brief bits of combat. I remember why I stopped making videos tho (compilation ones vs. simple straight record/upload)...even just splicing out/merging pieces together from lots of diff. videos gets time consuming. I wish I could catch more of the funny stuff (not just Boone either) for an actual really good vid, but it's so hard to catch those moments when they happen.

I don't have ED-E with me & quest isn't broken. But I'll keep that in mind in case I ever do pick him up. :D

No....how about Riot Control Weapon?

I can't wait to get higher up/give Boone some awesome rifle or something. The companions are all 'too strong' perhaps but I don't care. I find it crazy fun. I hope they don't patch 'em to make them weaker, like Blizzard tends to since people can just not use them. I must have that bug then, because I've killed him twice in daylight while he just stands near the rock going 'heh heh' to himself. I shoot him once and he attacks, I kill him, take his note, done.

Did more reading and I guess companion skills don't rise, the varied numbers must be for difficulty setting? Because I put my current game on Very Hard and I think Boone is even more bad-ass than he was in Normal! He hasn't 'died' even once, where in Normal it felt like he was always falling over if outnumbered & I'd mop up the rest & wait for him to get back up again. Now it's like he's a superpowered machine of death, even in tight indoor quarters. Just his default rifle/hat/armor too, and not just the easy 1 on 1 from a great distance stuff. He wiped out a cluster of 9 sentry/gutsy's mostly by himself that I bumped into when I was lvl 6, taking hardly any dmg (he must have Miraculous Avoidance now) so yeah. This may not sound like 'fun' but it was. Very very fun & made me giggle like mad a lot. Especially outdoors, we're like the best most awesome team of death ever. Sorry I ever doubted you, Boone, you're a seriously kick-ass dude. Don't ever change. Btw, if you don't want him to shoot things until you're ready, but don't quite want to leave him at the hotel either, I found the convo option "I want to talk about your tactics" eventually leads to an "I want you not to attack enemies until I've engaged them" selection. It seemed to work, but I haven't really put it to the test yet ... just found it before I went to bed last night.

omg, LOL!!!

Green Zone. Good fictional thriller exploring a few of the viewpoints re:why/how the US invaded Iraq in 2003. Damon is his usual stoic all-American persona as the guy who's frustrated at finding no WMD's and wants to know why. Some action/tense set ups, well acted & directed. I was actually the most interested in the small role of the character 'Freddy' & his possible motivations.

Ok...then the only thing I can think of is that I've heard he can occasionally lose his rifle upon exiting a casino or just because. Sometimes it gets dumped into your inventory instead (can't give it back either, so you're stuck) but sometimes it's just gone. Perhaps this happened to you & the result is a Boone who refuses to recognize any rifle weapon. Just a theory. Don't know how to fix it/if it can be fixed on xbox, tho. Console commands don't work on xbox/ps right? Or do they now...

J.E. Sawyer: Since you seem to be around today, can you tell me if companions skills go up on some automated level? I noticed their hit points goes up as I level, so I was curious if their guns etc. skills do as well. Giving Boone an END boosting outfit didn't seem to increase his HP at all, so just wondering... Edit:wait, found the wiki on Boone. Shows a range of stat, skill, and chr. level, so I'd assume the answer is yes. But I guess from what I tried that SPECIAL boosting gear doesn't work on them (or it's a bug...)

I don't know what you mean by "the new sniper had a full clip," since far as I know ammo shown in your UI is YOUR available ammo on YOUR person, but I believe if you give a companion a weapon (other than their 'default' weapon), you must also place ammo for it into their inventory. Boone's default rifle has endless ammo (I'm guessing the others do too) but since you're trying to get him to use something else & he keeps going for melee, then no ammo would be my guess. But.....companions (Boone in particular) do seem to have a lot of little glitches. Like Boone can lose his hat, or once his original armor AND the hat he gives you just 'poof', disappeared, from my inventory when I was trying other outfits on him.

Almost time for baseball!! Go Giants!! ....At least one local team is doing well. *49ersm sigh* Even though I limit myself to 2, sometimes 3 cans per day, I've been trying to quit my diet Mt. Dew again (chemicals...), but it's "impossible"...I love the 70-100mg of caffeine too much, and I don't like coffee or black/green tea. Spicy food -- the burn, the burn is so good!

Oh yeah, all of your textures are compressed into that .bsa. For the companions, there are a few reasons: * It makes the game way easier to have two human companions whom you can equip. * Reduces logical complexity in a variety of scenarios. * Memory. It's hard enough to account for the player's various equipment loadouts in an area. Three human characters with potentially any weapon or armor -- that gets really hard to deal with. I definitely preferred/enjoyed the party mechanics in Kotor2 more. But then again FO:NV is, for me at least, as enjoyable if not moreso without any companion at all, so it kind of evens out.

I have no tech info to back it up, but I'm starting to agree. In an effort to be slightly more helpful than my usual "I get random crashes," here's the assessment of my experience so far: My 1st character I played for 20+ hours with only 1 freeze/crash, and then not long after it began to crash more frequently as time went on. It's still wildy unpredictable where I can have 3 crashes in 15 minutes or 2 in a few hours, but crash within a few hours of play it does. So far it's always a 'soft' crash, not a 'hard' crash. Screen frozen and the Windows 'game not responding what do you want to do: Close program" error box overlaid on top of it. The 2nd character I made I've played 10 hours without a single crash, so it certainly feels like the longer you play/the more info the game has to deal with might be an issue in some unknown way (for me). I'll let you know if the new character starts to crash more frequently later, as well. The save files for both characters right after chr. generation is about the same, and the incremental file size increase for game time spent, for each, seems to be about the same rate, so doesn't seem to be the sudden save-file bloat that I've heard Oblivion had for some. Lastly, occasionally when the game freezes I get sound looping where game sound goes wawawawa until I close the frozen program. But not usually/always. Also: this is with these system stats: Win7-64 Pro GTX275 (both driver 258.96 and 260.99 tried) 6GB RAM i7-920 (stock speed no OC) SoundBlaster Xi-Fi Extreme Audio (driver 1.04.0090, which is the last they released for it I think)

Yes, my concept for STR was for heavier weapon/less/no penalty for using them. It certainly wasn't for carrying, since I altered my base weight capacity via a mod. Nor do I care about more skill pts. per level up. The perks are nice, but my impression was that the stats themselves had some subtle bonuses that combined with a related perk would make things that much better. For instance, Luck and loot, perhaps. Not saying it's so, that was just my impression. Maybe I'm wrong. (edit:I guess loot isn't mentioned in the Luck description, but it does help w/criticals, so with both Finesse & high Luck...) . Or that some perks require at least 6/7 in the stat. Also, to see the dialogue options. I suppose I might also try building a chr. with 2 maxed attributes and very low everything else. heh

I haven't seen that many really negative reviews...altho I certainly haven't tried to find/read all the smaller/lesser known (to me) website reviews. Most of the ones I read think it's a great to good game, and they're mostly complaining about the bugs/crash issues, not gameplay. Which I can understand. If you're experiencing a lot of crashes or bug weirdness, it's often the thing foremost in your mind. I have some crash issues but I keep obsessively playing anyway, which I think says a lot about the gameplay despite any tech issues. So yeah, well done Obs. Very fun.

That's kind of how I'm feeling. For me there are maybe 6-7 Perks that I'd consider "I really want" and the rest are 'eh' or at most "sounds funny". So I was thinking I'd rather have higher stats, either to be overall balanced or pump one or two to 10, haha. Hm.

My current chr. I went: STR 4, PER 6, END 4 CHAR 6 INT 8 AGI 6 LUCK 6 and then took Intensive Training twice to put Luck at 7 and STR at 5. Going to do one more IT for Luck at 8 and then do perks. But if you want more STR or END I'd take away INT. (6). I like high INT mostly for non-combat dialogue options, tho the bonus points are nice too. Can't remember why I want 6 AGI, it wasn't for VATS. Something else in the description or for one of sniping type perks maybe. Perks are just...whatever helps your crits/dmg and defense for preferred weapon/combat style. I ignore experience gain/instant-level/increased magazine time type perks and don't do the extra skill pts. perk either. Most later Perks need 6 in their attrib. requirement, a few/some need 7, or else they're chr. lvl/skill-level number only requirements.

I'm really chatty tonight. One last question before I try to get a few hours sleep: What do you all think, in terms of Perks, about Intensive Training vs. combat-helpful ones. With only 1 Perk every 2 levels I wouldn't want all 10 ranks of Training, but 3-5l ranks to boost the stats you left weak seems helpful. Did you go for all the different Perks, or more stats?

That's probably because just before, I was forcing him to 'dance' via repeatedly hitting the Sneak key. ...besides, he's the one who's always staring at me! Everywhere I go, his head turns to keep me in view. So tit for tat. Who'll blink first? lol....most of the hairstyles are terrible! I considered going for one of the patchy bald but not this time.