I'm doing the Ghoul Quest near Novac, I've killed the dudes in the basement and been asked to find some maguffins to blast the Ghouls into outer space.

 

Obviously, I want to see them win a Darwin Award, so where are these items perchance?

They give you waypoints directly to them. But there's at least on alternative location too.

They give you waypoints directly to them. But there's at least on alternative location too.

To flesh that out a little, go talk to the junk dealer with the dogs a little ways north of Novac. IIRC, she can point you where you need to go for both items.

Obviously, I want to see them win a Darwin Award, so where are these items perchance?

 

The rocket nozzles are

purchased at the junkyard North of Novac for 500 caps.

The radioactive fuel can be found

just South East of Novac on a dead body in the middle of the road wearing a yellow radiation suit.

 

Many thanks to you all.

you can also give them the souvenir 5 rockets from the Novac gift shop, that will be sufficient rocket fuel (but you may need to pass a science check)

It's a bit confusing, I've done that bit, Chris the scientist has gone to Novac and now I'm meant to launch the rockets for them but how? It isn't clear at all.

They tell you to go to the observation room, which is in another part of the facility back towards where they used to hang out.

Yeah, I found the observation deck through sheer dumb luck. Go back to the room you entered when you first met them face to face. Go left of the entrance, up a set of stairs and through the door at the top. If you've got the science for it, you can even help out a bit by using the machine to the right of the launch button.

It's up those steel railing-style stairs, yes.

I got lost there as well.

you guys need to learn to use the compass

Guys, just use the local map... it ain't that hard...

The pip-boy map is a triumph of gritty low-fi aesthetics over any practical use for the player whatsoever. It is a bloody horrible bit of GUI, a clean map mod would be very handy.

Amen brother.

The pip-boy map is a triumph of gritty low-fi aesthetics over any practical use for the player whatsoever. It is a bloody horrible bit of GUI, a clean map mod would be very handy.

Bah, any Fallout game with a map function that actually provides useful feedback to the player would be a Fallout in Name Only!

 

Okay, ladies, take off yer dresses and quit yer damned whinin'. Go play an ol' skool text adventure if you want see some confusing mazes.

 

...And Vault 21 in Vegas actually confuses the player on purpose. If you listen to the floating dialogue you keep hearing the gamblers saying, "did you get turned around." I thought that was clever, but I'm easily amused.

 

I didn't have too much of a problem finding my way anywhere, but I agree that the local map is fairly useless most of the time. It's not only inside places, either. In perfectly reasonable fashion, you might have to spend a lot of time finding a path up or down to various locations outside.

The compass & local map do not help when there are multiple floors and multiple "triangles" and elevators like in some of the casinos.

I don't find it a "really big problem" or anything...but it does occasionally become a little annoying because I'm wasting all this time running circles.

The local map isn't a local map, it's all the levels in overlay, you see what look like a corridor, and it's the one below.

 

How did Bethesda manage to design something like that to begin with. There were no alarm bells ringing ?

Maps were pretty useless in every FO game, and it's no exception here. The upside though, is that you stop staring at the map all the time and treat the wasteland ilke a real place you explore. I think that's good, as long as there aren't too many super-convoluted areas (and there aren't, really).

 

I always assumed FO3/FNV maps were automatically generated...

How long would it take someone to sort through the auto generated in door maps and and sort them by level.

Quite a while, given their number and depending on the method used? I'd imagine at least a full day.

 

I mean, that's not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but they probably felt it was good enough as is.

The earlier Fallouts never had to worry about the third dimension and their maps sucked at least as hard.

 

But I still don't know how you can get lost with all the little arrows pointing you in the right direction all the time. I guess you guys are the reason why there are games like Fable, with its breadcrumb trail..

I always thought a map that automatically was drawn by the player character on graph paper as they walked around would be a cool compromise - mimicking what older gamers had to do manually.

 

Minimaps in the old Fallouts were like documentation for FORTRAN programs. You could use it, but it was easier to just look at the actual world/code.

 

 

 

 

On the radar markers, I think the most internally consistent use would be to ask the question "can I find it with a GPS?" If an NPC tells you about such and such building knowing where it's located then the ability for the player's compass to point the way isn't nearly immersion-breaking as getting compass direction hunting down a notorious outlaw who as far as your character knows could be anywhere.

Edited November 17, 201015 yr by Humanoid

The earlier Fallouts never had to worry about the third dimension and their maps sucked at least as hard.

 

But I still don't know how you can get lost with all the little arrows pointing you in the right direction all the time. I guess you guys are the reason why there are games like Fable, with its breadcrumb trail..

The little arrows point the wrong way in multiple levels.