Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Newbie » Fri Sep 16, 2022 12:43 am

There is one particular settlement somewhat infamous for its sniper...
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beatbandito
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby beatbandito » Fri Sep 16, 2022 4:49 am

nosimpleway wrote:So, uh, mental note. Sometimes in Fallout 3 you can just be walking along and then die.

This is not a joke: you probably stepped on a can the wrong way.
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KingRoyal
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby KingRoyal » Fri Sep 16, 2022 9:33 am

It's called hypertension and it's one of the leading causes of death for Americans have some compassion
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nosimpleway
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby nosimpleway » Fri Sep 16, 2022 12:07 pm

There was actually a gunshot, unless that's the sound the game makes when can physics resolve.

And there can and should be dangerous snipers holed up around the DC wasteland, but in a video game I feel like a) somebody might want to drop a hint as to where they are and b) they shouldn't be within a five-minute walk from the game's starting location. That's some Final Fantasy II shit right there.

Sheriff: "I'll give you 100 caps to disarm the bomb so everyone is safe."
Some rando: "I'll give you 500 caps to detonate the bomb and kill everybody."
me: "Uh, hey Sheriff, there's some guy who wants me to detonate the bomb."
Sheriff: "oh snap I'm gonna go do my job and arrest that guy."
Sheriff: [doesn't arrest that guy]
That guy: [murders the sheriff]
me: [counter-murders that guy]
me: From a storytelling standpoint that could have gone better but I deffo appreciate being able to loot the Sheriff's rifle off his corpse, this is pretty nice.



me: I wonder where to find ammo for it though

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nosimpleway
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby nosimpleway » Fri Sep 16, 2022 12:31 pm

Boy it sure is bullshit that I can't see enemies until they're already within spitting distance and have already shot me two or three times. Is a low Perception really that crippling? Sneaking is useless because I don't know who's around until they've already gotten close enough to see me!
[checks options for something unrelated]
[discovers "Actor Draw" distance is near minimum]
[turns it up]
[spots a hostile robot on a hill in the distance]

Well god damn. I thought I left all the "Well you could have just said so" behind with Salt.

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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby KingRoyal » Fri Sep 16, 2022 2:18 pm

If I remember correctly there is one area of the map that is guarded by a sniper on a perch who will kill you if he sees you. I think you have to sneak around him somehow to ascend his tower to kill him
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby nosimpleway » Fri Sep 16, 2022 5:20 pm

Now that I think about it I went into the graphics options because I had to cross a river. From a distance, it looked like a nearby bridge was out, but hey, I'll go see if it's at least long enough that I can swim to the other side before I die of radiation exposure. And as I walked, the bridge just kept getting longer and longer, drawing each next chunk in turn, until I was at the other side. Turns out all my draw distances were set to a minimum, among them "enemies you'll need to see" and "navigational elements you'll need to know about".

The game is a lot less frustrating when I can see where the things that are trying to kill me are before they're within melee distance.

So if you have to put on a shitton of mods and patches to get the game to work, and end up having to reinstall four or five times before the damn thing boots, go ahead and double-check those options. Something may have set the game up as "my PC is from 1995, please be gentle"

Anyway.
It's weird that the overworld is broken up into cells... sometimes.

Sometimes I can just walk from one place to another. But places like Arlington cemetery are walled off by rubble and fences, with a way in through one subway tunnel and a way out through another. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason for this to be the case? There's nothing in Arlington itself, and there's a food factory in the same walled-off bit that's occupied by the remnant of some Chinese military unit with a plot-locked door... but I can't figure out why that means the whole section should be walled off from the rest of the map.

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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby nosimpleway » Sat Sep 17, 2022 11:50 pm

Dogmeat is an incredibly realistic simulated dog.

Whenever I turn around, he's right there. In the way.

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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby nosimpleway » Mon Sep 19, 2022 11:27 am

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I'm pretty sure the leading cause of death in Tamriel is writing journals.

Anyway
I have discovered that the player character in Fallout 3 has less lung capacity than I possess, in real life, as a not terribly in-shape forty-year-old. There's like thirty seconds before your HP start rapidly draining away, even if you're wearing, say, a sealed Environmental Suit with a full hood and mask. (Which you want to do when swimming, since, y'know, the whole point of the plot is that water is radioactive everywhere.)

So I'm submerged underneath the broken-off hull of a wrecked aircraft carrier, looking for the entrance to this quest location that can only be accessed otherwise with a Lockpicking of 100. I run out of O2 but I'm pretty sure I can make it to an air pocket if I can keep my HP from depleting. So I hit up my inventory and restore my HP... by drinking a shitton of water.

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nosimpleway
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby nosimpleway » Mon Sep 19, 2022 11:29 am

Bonus fun: Find the door to the quest location. Obviously the other side is also still submerged. The game autosaves, HP runs out, and I die. Reload, instantly drown. Reload, instantly drown. Reload, instantly drown...

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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Mongrel » Mon Sep 19, 2022 1:09 pm

People relying too heavily on journals for exposition in Skyrim reminded me of the funniest damn mod review I've seen a long time

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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Newbie » Mon Sep 19, 2022 6:59 pm

"And yes, they smoke weed."
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nosimpleway
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby nosimpleway » Tue Sep 20, 2022 8:48 pm

I assume it's a boon for speedrunners, but playing blind-but-spoiled-on-some-stuff I accidentally stumbled on Vault 112 and bruteforced my way through a puzzle before taking part in any Shenanigans inside. I probably should stop doing stuff like that, because I just rescued Dr. Dad and I think I may have missed a big chunk of the plot doing so.

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nosimpleway
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby nosimpleway » Thu Sep 22, 2022 5:12 pm

Not actually all that creepy: spooky ruined hotel full of face-eating ghouls and paranormal phenomena that are easily mistaken for game physics bugs

Actually kind of creepy: A vault fully populated by identical clones of the same guy, named Gary, and you know it because they can only say their own name like they're fucking Pokemon

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nosimpleway
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby nosimpleway » Fri Sep 23, 2022 4:06 pm

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The entrance to this little "drainage chamber" was kind of hard to find. Maybe trim the bushes around the front a little, make it stand out a little more?

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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby KingRoyal » Fri Sep 23, 2022 4:13 pm

Really shafted you with that one
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nosimpleway
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby nosimpleway » Sun Sep 25, 2022 1:43 pm

I'm not in "lategame", I don't think, having not progressed the plot after I skipped to the part where I rescued Dr. Dad. I assume there's more to do after I meet him in the lab where he ran off. But I am level 26 and the game is now significantly less fun on account of the horseshit enemies that are spawning now.

Nearly every rando group has at least one guy with a missile launcher. It's not unusual for me to learn this when I get hit with the first RPG and have to stop to heal my crippled limbs.
Worse than that are the Mutant Overlords, who have like double the HP of the next mutant tier and typically come with a tri-laser cannon that, from what I understand, does bonus damage to the player character specifically. If I loot the weapon and shoot back at something else, that bonus damage doesn't apply.
Worse than that are the Albino Radscorpions, who can drain half the ammo I have for whatever weapon I happened to have with me when they appeared. I don't know if they do bonus damage but they do HP drain from their poison stings, even if I shoot the stinger first to cripple it.
Worse than that are the Ghoul Reavers, who have even more HP and do radiation damage at range, and crank out melee damage like they're Deathclaws.

Far as I can tell there's no Godfucker-tier exploit to overcome this, it's just "challenge" in that all the enemies' numbers have gone up higher than anything I can crank out to mitigate it.

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beatbandito
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby beatbandito » Sun Sep 25, 2022 2:04 pm

Fallout 3 can be rough with the scaling because of a lack of any respec and more skills to spread points over before realizing they're mostly useless.

Though it does have the one tried-and-true Bethesda method. Crouch next to a town guard for an hour, then punch everyone in the world in the ass before they see you.
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nosimpleway
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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby nosimpleway » Sun Sep 25, 2022 7:05 pm

I have Unarmed at 50, Big Guns at like 80, and all other skills at 90+. Several are at 100 already, including Small Guns and Energy Weapons. So whatever the scaling problems are, skill points don't fix it. Unless Unarmed turns you into the unholy lovechild of Goku and Kenshiro when it hits 100 and I've been putting all my points into other stuff not knowing that.

I did find a fortress full of Talon mercs and stole all their armor to fix mine (since running into like 2 Deathclaws is enough to take my armor from 100% to 0% effectiveness), then got some better armor than that as a quest reward. So that helped a little.

Maybe having Godfucker-tier Sneak in Skyrim spoiled me but Sneak in F3 seems pretty useless. I don't think I've managed to get up to anything hostile before they spotted me and opened fire.

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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Postby Sharkey » Sun Sep 25, 2022 10:10 pm

If you can get to the museum of history the Lincoln Repeater seems unassuming but it's the best single shot rifle in the game and has a spread of zero, so it's *perfectly* accurate and it's obtainable pretty early on. It uses .44 ammo which can be kind of thin on the ground but it can be repaired with hunting rifles which are fucking everywhere.

The Terrible Shotgun is your Godfucker, though. If you take Better Criticals and all nine pellets hit on a sneak attack it will one shot literally everything in the game. Either kill or pickpocket Smiling Jack at Evergreen Mills for it.
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