I've been playing too much Fallout lately, starting with Fallout 2 then Fallout Tactics and I even find myself giving an eye to "Fallout 3" of all things, the so called unholy son of the series. (actually that name goes to Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel we don't talk about that one.) It looks like the kind of game you play to mess around and when you don't want to take a story seriously.
But, as it always happens whenever I end up looking fallout stuff, I installed Fallout: New Vegas again. Fulfilling the prophecy of "eventually you end up installing it again. Because it's that good."
This is like the fifth time this has happened, man I love this game.
For everyone who doesn't know what a Fallout is or why this one has Vegas in the name: it's a post apocalyptic role-playing game where you shoot critters and objects all the time, this one's based around the Mojave Desert, that one place where Las Vegas is.
It's loved by pretty much almost every modern Fallout fan, or at least the most vocal part of the fanbase.
It's also the one game people use to criticize Bethesda, the owners of the IP, which I'm not going to do in this post because, frankly, I'm tired of people always having to bash Bethesda whenever they talk New Vegas.
New Vegas is good, a very good game. But it's eventually brought down by its many glitches and bugs. It's to be expected because the engine is made entirely out of wet noodles.
So a big part of playing New Vegas is looking through the mod pages and installing things to make your game stable before you add on quests/weapons/companions to the base game.
I myself try to change the mods I download every now and then, just to change the experience every time I play.
But I always end up installing a bunch of bug fixes and unofficial patches, as well as a mod that lets me sprint, so that I can run away whenever I see a deathclaw coming.
But enough about mods, let's talk about what I've been doing inside this game.
Usually, when playing through New Vegas, I tend to rush things and go straight to the Vegas Strip, initiating the final quests of the game.
This time I decided to take things "slow" and instead goof around the Mojave completing most quests that come my way.
Right now I've been doing some Brotherhood of Steel quests, because at the end you can join them and they give you some sweet Power Armor, which you can use to tank hits (no you can't) like a boss.
But to get to that point you have to finish a series of somewhat difficult quests (depending on what you do, you can shorten the amount of quests needed) which involve looking for dead BoS Paladins and entering decrepit Vaults looking for materials to fix up their bunker.
It's a lot of work but it's worth it.
Vaults are like post apocalyptic bunkers that "supposedly" were meant to protect people in the case of nuclear warfare. What people didn't know was that some of them had some messed up experiments going on inside, most of these ended up killing all of their inhabitants.
Out of all the Vaults in this game, the ones that the Brotherhood has you move through tend to be the ones with the messed up experiments.
This vault here is Vault 11, it has an interesting story that I was originally going to talk about in length, but because of certain things happening right now I decided to not do it.
More on that later...
The base gist of Vault 11 is that every year people have to send one of their own to be sacrificed, otherwise the Vault's systems will kill them. Naturally, only the overseer (which is the leader of the vault) knew this, and when he told everyone...
Well, things escalated.
You learn this through the terminals scattered throughout the Vault. That's how you learn about what happens in every single one of these, although it may look obvious at first, there's some neat details you may miss if you don't look at every nook and cranny.
It's interesting to me, so I end up sticking in the Vault for a little while even though I already have what I needed for the Brotherhood.
This pretty much happens for all of the three Vaults I have to go through...
Eventually I get all of the parts needed and the Elder gives me the A-Okay!, then he sends me on another suicidal mission so that I can get my Power Armor, but this time is for realsies!
So he wants me to climb this mountain, which is filled with Super Mutants, and put a microphone inside...
It's at this point that I realize why no one likes the Brotherhood anymore.
It's also at this point that I start to think that maybe some of the patches I put on the game make it a little harder? I didn't struggle so much with this part of the game before...
The elder wants me to go to Black Mountain, which is filled to the brim with Super Mutants, and then put a little thingamabob on the mountain's radio equipment.
These Shrek wannabes are Super Mutants, they are as fast as trucks and hit almost as hard as trucks do, and like anything else in this game, they take six billion bullets to kill.
Me on the other hand... Yeah, it's a little difficult.
Thankfully, I can count on my always loyal meatshields companions to take bullets do the job for me help me on this.
As I make the painful trek to the top of the mountain I realize how this game is made in such a way that, even if you just end up picking one direction and walking, you'll eventually find a quest that leads to another place where you'll find another quest and so on.
I mean, right now I'm supposed to put a McGuffin in the mountain and I ended up trying to solve a situation with the mutants at the top in the meanwhile.
And after endless suffering I finally manage to get my glorified soup can armor, as well as a nice title inside the Brotherhood.
It's then I realize that I must have played too much Fallout 1/2 because I forgot Power Armor isn't really... Powerful in this game.
I mean...
It looks cool and everything but it's... it's just as durable as a sheet of wet tissue paper.
Still, it's a good way to fight off radiation, which is my reason to get it on the first place. The armor itself is stronger than a lot of other armors that possess radiation resistance.
However, the armor itself is in extremely poor condition, even though the Elder told me it was a refurbished suit of armor. He was probably just bamboozling me.
I'll make sure to remember this when I blow up the bunker later...
The Brotherhood also gave me a key to their safehouse, which does have some left over power armor suits I can cannibalize to repair the one they gave me.
I can also use the armor of the dead Paladins I talked about earlier, but don't go telling the Elder about that...
The way to the BoS safehouse is pretty simple, you just have to keep an eye out for Deathclaws, which are pretty deadly even if you have the best kind of armor.
A face that only a mother could love...
Why...? Because they travel in packs.
A fact that I forgot about when I was sneaking by that Young Deathclaw, until I ended up standing right next to a big mean Deathclaw.
And then that big mean Deathclaw multiplied itself by two.
Yeah, I almost had a heart attack when I realized the big one was standing right next to me.
Thankfully, shotguns are overpowered in this game, so my trusty hunting shotgun ends up saving me from the evil Deathclaws (although they did rough me up a little.)
Once I finally make it to the safehouse and take out the Power Armors I use them to fix my own suit, so that it's durable enough to take a bullet without crumbling to the floor.
And now that my Power Armor is working as intended I can finally do what I wanted to do at first. I'm making the trek to another Vault, one supposedly filled to the brim with weaponry and with high levels of radiation!
So come join me next time, when I enter the depths of Vault 34 and desperately try to not die by radiation poisoning, or to become ghoul lunch.
