HoonDing

I don't get some of the quest design in this game. During a fetch quest for Camp Forlorn Hope, I was attacked by some Legion clowns and obviously defended myself which made my Legion standing plummeting from 'neutral' to 'hated' immediately. Then somehow not even 30 seconds later, several Legion Assassins spawned and attacked me because "Caesar himself had ordered it". But then not much later it became completely mind-boggling that a Legion clown took me right into Camp Nelson to speak with the Denarus there... who didn't seem to care about my bad reputation at all, and just rattled off some lines and left me alone afterwards, allowing me to go outside and take out the entire camp. Afterwards, when I returned to the Denarus, he and his bodyguards were not even hostile. Maybe it's a bug, or the game wants to force me to deal with the Legion in a peaceful way, but it doesn't make a lick of sense to me.

ED-E is a good companion for his perk and he lets you target invisible creatures in VATS. Just tell him to wait in front of a dungeon while you clear out everything and he should be OK. Also, I finally encountered some low INT dialogue:

I bet somebody already made a Dartgun Mod...

Play the Underdark section of BG2 and you've played 50% of HotU. Or maybe 75%, considering you can sleep with a drow if you're male and there's some romance drama as well.

I'm very happy so far with the Ratslayer. Anything unarmored goes down with one long-range headshot.

Press four buttons and each one will do something awesome.

Wait til you get a giant radscorpion.

exactly, man. not only that, but SPECIAL doesn't seem to affect combat (except VATS), at all. I have 10 AGI and 5 STR but I don't think there's gonna be a big difference in combat if I go for, say, 6 AGI and 6 STR (6 seems to be the magic number for perks) and have 3 points left over. also, a lot of useless perks, they should've made it every 3/4 levels and left the Gifted trait in the game. I'm lv 29 now and some of the perks I took I did so only because it felt wrong to not take anything. maybe this is the reason there's so many "filler" perks. to satisfy the Beth fan boys. what I don't like is that this game doesn't encourage "builds", you can play through with almost any setup. this was not the case in F2. makes me a sad panda I don't think I could play any other build than a long-range sniper. The gunplay is just not fun for me. Worse twitching than in Counterstrike when human enemies are involved, who basically charge to the player character, then dance around like morons. But at least the healing over time makes it a bit more exciting, especially when being swarmed by packs of nightstalkers or radscorpions. A melee/unarmed build could be fun, though.

Well, FO3 just doesn't tag a name on every random shack and burnt out caravan. I just wish FO:NV had a better manual. There's no perk list so I had to waste one perk on Intense training already to get my Perception to 6 (started out with 5) to be able to get important perks later on. I should've also dumped CHA completely and started out with 6 STR, but whatever.

What exactly is the penalty for using a weapon without meeting the STR requirement? Is it just more difficult to aim?

Why Bethesda? They don't do romances & emocrap in their games.

I have a ton of dino toys myself. If only there were a Rock-it Launcher...

The game froze once on me so far, and I presume it's an audio issue just like with FO3. But I do have a very annoying hiccup every time I exit a loot screen or dialogue screen, which I presume is also audio related. I'll have to try to use Madfilter codec with it, which is how I solved audio/freezing issues in FO3.

I'm pretty sure a male can flirt with Cass and/or Veronica? Anyway, ED-E is darn useful with his sensor perk. He also allows me to safely pop heads while he's shooting stuff. The Ratslayer is really overpowered. I've been one-shotting golden geckos, nightstalkers & lakelurkers with it without any problems. Basically I've covered the entire area between Mojave outpost & Crossover wood post. I thought about killing Centurion Jackass and the rest of his clowns, but decided against it... since scooting around Searchlight made me end up with 859 RAD. Also: This guy probably wished he didn't win the lottery at Nipton.

I read it in the IGN preview about rogues.

The pirate-chick is apparently Isabel(l)a from DA:O, the duelist in the Pearl that you can have a two/three/foursome with.

I guess it won't be possible to kill the disc-jockey in NV, because there's a celebrity behind it. More's the pity.

But there can be only one.

I love how the music turns some moments that are supposed to be Grim Dark Serious Business into Comedy Gold. That's why I have it always turned on.

They're larping Romans, so no.

How high is the DT of a giant radscorpion, exactly?

About those Legion clowns at Nipton: "Vulpes Inculta" is an epic fail. It should've been "Lupus Incultus", "vulpes" means fox, not wolf. I'm guessing he's wearing a wolf head because the wolf is an important symbol of Rome, i.e. the she-wolf who fed Romulus & Remus (Romulus being the founder of Rome according to legend). Anyway, it's hard to take those schmucks seriously. The only reason why I didn't shoot their heads off is because I feared to break yet another quest.

The unique Varmint rifle, Ratslayer, has a 5x crit chance, and has all mods installed already. This weapon is the stealth character's wet dream.

A sneak critical with a fully repaired Varmint is apparently 72 damage without Better criticals according to the wikia. Combined with Hunter perk & Better criticals, it's 100+ damage. Pretty ridiculous for the first weapon you get in the game. But my character with luck 10 has 25% chance of doing critical damage with VATS, turning even a 9mm pistol into a tool of destruction. When I take Finesse perk and get a weapon with a higher critical multiplier, about half of my shots should be criticals.

What I find weird is that so far a sneak critical from the Varmint rifle owns almost everything I've encountered so far, including enemies that give 50 xp like Bighorners bulls. Even raiders in metal armour fall in one shot. Does this weapon have a higher critical multiplier or something? And really, so far weapons & armour are even easier to come by than in Fallout 3. I even found a laser rifle lying next to a dead wastelander.