Pop

I think it makes more sense to say they've become too PC-centric, actually.

Have you not tried unarmed before? Spiked knuckles at 20 skill are better than 90% of the guns in the first 50% of the game at least. You will go around literally punching heads off.

Watch your back, son. Preview time!

Truthfully, I think "I am simply aggressively expressing my hopes. Why not? Life is short and we need more smiles" is an excellent mentality to have when you're absolutely committed to be the creepiest mother****er on the face of the Earth.

Priorities, people!

Today in Letters to Bioboards

Ceremonial armor is all well and good, but if he bends over or falls down he's going to end up cutting / stabbing himself pretty badly. *edit - on closer inspection a lot of people have pointed out that it appears the "spikes" are actually feathers. If this guy is a Crow as some speculate, that is a pretty hilariously literal costume. If only all assassins dressed to announce exactly what they are, they'd be a lot more manageable. Also, lots of comparisons to Thane, which is apt. Jackets are similar, even. Also this is the first companion that Gaider has admitted to writing. Based on past history, that must mean the dude's pretty important.

Also guess what skin-bleached Drizzt, that's what

Can we please, please, please not go there.

From the brilliant mind of David Gaider: You don't always implement these features such that they are moddable. For example, you couldn't mute just Shepard in ME, because the voices for a scene were all one file, so you could only mute the entire scene - not just one character. Also, the change to how shattering worked in patch 1.03 for DAO was a change to how the engine functioned, so Lieutenants could no longer ever shatter under any circumstances. There was no way to change that back with a mod. If you think the skin tone matching is moddable, that's good news. If it's not moddable, then you're SOL I suppose. For those who want a game to conform to their idiosyncratic preferences, however, that's their only option. We aren't here to accommodate idiosyncratic preferences when they conflict with the game we intend to make. Strong boarding.

Boooo

The Rad Suit quest started in Camp Searchlight requires an attainable lockpick score of 50, and even with a character with a 30 lockpick skill and comprehension my first character still couldn't complete the quest, as Locksmith's Reader wouldn't spawn in any of the merchant's inventories. As far as the Powder Ganger Vault goes, you do indeed need an attainable science of 40 and explosives of 60. When I agreed to that dude's questline, without knowledge of what it would require, the alternate questgiver apparently disappeared from the Vault, effectively locking that quest until I had the requisite skill. That may be a bug but it always seemed like there were in fact two quests there. Nevertheless, I would contend that "hard high road / easy low road" isn't the most robust manifestation of C&C you can implement.

This is not the case, at least, not to the extent seen in F3. The vast majority of locked doors do not have computer terminals that will unlock them (they may have keys, though). It was somewhat disconcerting after F3 that NV had several quests that required a certain skill to complete. Comprehension helps in those cases. Ha! What game are you people actually playing?

It looks like Fable.

If it's a scruffy lookin' dude it's probably Killian Darkwater aka Macgyver.

If you run along the invisible wall in the mountains to the west and north of Helios One, you'll hit the perimeter of the Black Mountain navpoint, which will allow you to fast travel to the area where Raul is being held without having to fight your way up the mountain. You'll still have to fight a few mutants (and Tabitha, if you release Raul before you do anything else) but it beats the long walk up from Goodsprings through God knows what lies on the highway.

I don't know if anybody has posted this yet, but here's a neat little development: Someone made a mod allowing you to ally with the BoS when working for House the way you can when working with the NCR. Allegedly the modder found a bunch of disabled-but-still-present content within NV's files and reactivated it the way the KOTOR2 Restored modders did.

I don't know if anybody has posted this yet, but here's a neat little development: Someone made a mod allowing you to ally with the BoS when working for House the way you can when working with the NCR. Allegedly the modder found a bunch of disabled-but-still-present content within NV's files and reactivated it the way the KOTOR2 Restored modders did.

Really the most annoying thing to me about DA2, over everything else, is the Qunari appearance retcon. Was that really necessary? Was Sten a pretender or something? I don't know if I prefer teutonic giants to horned giants but in any case it would be nice if there was some modicum of resemblance. Anyway, going back through DA1 and I feel I may have been a bit hard on it my first time through (beat it then dropped) - a large part of it is that I cut Xevran's (is that his name) throat before he ever had a dialog with me, and part of it is that I'm a warrior this game - I tended towards spellcasters in every other Bio fantasy game but this seems to be the opposite of that prior trend. The game is a lot more fun as a fighter.

This is my face upon learning that Elijah will not turn out to be a Presper-esque character -> Other than that it sounds pretty cool!

God this thread is awful

Now, I must depart.

I definitely think Vault 11 is an example of black humor. It's just a little more stark than, say, Dr. Strangelove, where the guy riding the atom bomb is such a silly, iconic image that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the world is ending, and the horror therein. Black humor doesn't even have to be funny, really, not in the laugh-out-loud way. It's all about the juxtaposition of the depressing / horrifying and the absurd. The execution bit in the FO1 opening that Enoch mentions is another perfect example. So is Patrick Bateman caring more about the quality of his business cards and the asian fusion restaurants he eats at than the lives of other people, or his analyzing the artistic relevance of Huey Lewis and Phil Collins while he goes about butchering them. Of course Vault 11 is black humor. It's the thirsty guy crawling through the desert to end up at a water fountain that doesn't work. It's the guy who stops time with a magic remote control and then realizes the battery is dead. It's realizing that you love Big Brother. The point is to dryly chuckle at the folly of the characters, Speaking of Vault 11, PS Josh if you read this would you slap the guy who designed Red Rock Canyon? It has unlocked the long-dormant corner of my brain that contains cheesy John Cougar Mellencamp songs.

You've just described every standing army on Earth. The notion that the Legion is too extreme for its core ideals to be taken seriously is a legitimate position to take, but you can't ignore the fact that they have those ideals. It's another one of the ways in which the Legion is a counterpoint to the NCR - The NCR would like to believe that a post-apocalyptic society can take on all the vestiges of the societies that directly predated the end of the world, whereas the Legion treats the nuclear holocaust as essentially a reset button on history. The Legion is a martial, imperialistic society made up of united or conquered agrarian / hunter-gatherer tribes, just as civilizations were thousands of years ago. It stands to reason that the Legion is more honest about circumstances than the NCR ultimately are - Marx and others posited that true liberty could only be realized in a post-industrial society, and the post-apocalyptic world is quasi-industrial - technology exists but it is scarce to some degree, and thus the NCR has to constantly expand in order to sustain itself. The Legion, on the other hand, is doing just as much with less.

For legion to be ideologically opposed to NCR it would need to have an ideology. All that legion is presented in game is a martial society with absolute rule. And if the in-game situation is a form of analogy to ancient battles between Greece and Rome then it's a very poor one. To buy it you would need to believe that Greek influence irrevocably poisoned roman civilization but need to wait 1500 years for it to fall. Rome's "Golden Age" was ushered in by the assimilation (and to some extent, adaptation) of all things Greek into a new, greater society. It was Horace who wrote, when Rome had usurped the mantle of power from Greece, "Graecia capta ferum victorim cepit et artis intulit agresti Latio", which translates to "Conquered Greece has conquered the brute victor and brought her arts into rustic Latium". What Caesar wants is for the conquered NCR to conquer the Legion through her more noble (and unrealized) aspects.