"They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard!"

>That said, the prototype for the "NPC sandboxing" thing he does,
>Serana from Dawnguard, is one of my favorite NPCs ever
>precisely because they implemented the sandboxing mechanic without,
>apparently, ever considering whether such activities are actually
>appropriate, or even make sense. You're talking about Dire Shit with
>various people, and she kills time while you're doing it by chopping
>wood or sharpening up an old sword or maybe cooking up some horker
>loaf. It's almost certainly a bug, or at least an unintended outcome,
>but I prefer to think that Serana is just that insouciant and weird.
>:)

Yeah, that is another thing I like about building on Skyrim's skeleton, that your companions and other NPCs actually feel more like real living people by doing all the little things like using a water pump to get a drink or banging away at the never-fixed walls.

>The tech base in Fallout is kind of like the tech base I
>imagined for Ishiyama in the UF universe. On Ishiyama, they still
>make steam engines, but they're 25th-century steam engines, far
>more efficient, smaller, and better-made than anything ever made in
>the real world before the technology was abandoned for something else.
> In the Fallout universe, electronics still have vacuum tubes,
>but they're really good vacuum tubes; their computer terminals
>work about as well as VT-100s in roughly the same form factor, and
>many of them still work 210 years later, both of which are
>astonishing for something without semiconductors. In a world
>with no, or only very primitive, semiconductors, the Pip-Boy is an
>amazing piece of kit.

Heh, there's an interesting mental image in UF, Mojave introducing the Pip-Boy 3000, the latest in portable computing technology. Has a whopping 64K of onboard memory, a holotape player, and a crystal-clear micro-CRT screen on which you can play one of several exciting games from RobCo's library. Guaranteed to take the worst that the world can throw at it and keep on running. Get yours today, supplies are limited.

>(They also had incredible food preservation technology.
>210-year-old canned pork and beans shouldn't even be recognizable as a
>can, much less still edible pork and beans. :)

Hmm, 200-yr old salisbury steak...or bloatfly meat...decisions, decisions.

>One presumes you can get the T-60 later on. I'm not sure that's a
>bait and switch, as such, given that earlier game trailers show the PC
>with weapons that are obviously not going to be available until well
>into the game and that doesn't seem to outrage anyone.

Yeah, power armor spawns are level-dependent, though there are guaranteed full sets of certain armor, just they're usually in areas that will kick your ass until you're leveled high enough to reach them. And yes, if you follow one quest, you are guaranteed a full set of T-60 armor.

>"Let's be honest, would you shoot a laser gun that I'd built?"

"I'll be frank, Jezza, I'm scared just holding it."

>Pipe guns are just advanced zip guns; anyone with a decent
>voke-tech-school training in machine tooling should be able to do
>those. :)

True, but there's still a level of skill involved in making a zip gun that can reliably feed ammo from a homemade magazine, again and again, without fail. Makes me glad Bethesda ditched weapon degradation this go around.

>True, I imagine all you need to know is the item reference code. I
>haven't tried it, because I'm not past the "only invoke god mode if
>you've inadvertently come across two yao guai and have no other hope
>of survival" stage yet. :)
>
>(I get there. I always get there. Eventually the tedium of doing it
>the way they want it done gets to be too much, and I just want to see
>the damn story beats. :)

My rule to myself as a PC game player is to avoid cheating unless the game's broken in such a fashion that cheating is the only way to advance. But the rule doesn't cover exploits and beneficial bugs, which is why I'll generally abuse the hell out of them if I can.

>Skyrim does that... sometimes. Mostly, but not exclusively,
>for main-quest items (the Dragonstone of Bleak Falls Barrow, for
>instance, is always in there the first time you enter the final
>chamber, regardless of whether you've met Farengar yet). I think what
>it is, is that anything that's always going to be in the same place is
>there and can be picked up even if you don't know its significance
>yet; it's only the randomized radiant quests where the item you're
>being sent for doesn't spawn until you're sent, because the game only
>decides where it's going to send you when that happens. (Sometimes,
>as with the White Phial, the dungeon is set up so you can't
>reach the Plot Item unless you've taken the quest, but that's a
>different matter.)

Yeah, they largely followed the same approach here, including some of the buildings having places closed off until you've started the relevant quest. It seems that, more and more, I got exactly what I was hoping for after I'd played enough Skyrim to really appreciate the game, which was Bethesda using everything they'd developed there to build a new Fallout game. Even the perk tree largely follows the leveling system in Skyrim, which makes me wonder if we're going to get a DLC where one of the rewards will be the option to "reset" it.

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CdrMike, Overwatch Reject