As noted, it's really just a pretty ugly light show in the sky that gives off 1 rad/sec intermittently. Only really a danger if you're already glowing enough to toast bread at a distance, but annoying when you're dealing with anything that loves rads out in the open.

>Who knew it would take an apocalypse to finally deliver on the promise
>of Modular Personal Weapon Systems? :)

"Turn it this way and it's a .45 pistol! Then turn it this way and it's a submachine gun! And if you turn it this way, it's a food blender!"

>Mm. Oddly, though, they seem to have just dumped that idea from the
>backstory entirely rather than just accepting that the player
>character already has power armor training. I mean, Tendo Choi
>there just blithely expects that this total stranger he knows nothing
>about will be able to climb aboard and go. Then again, maybe he's
>just clueless about it and lucks out that the person he's talking to
>is a vet. Broken clock, twice a day, etc.

Could also be "This guy just blasted his way into the building past a bunch of raiders, maybe he knows what he's doing." Then again, Preston tells you pick up a laser musket (a weapon that didn't exist pre-war) and instinctively know how to work it. Bethesda storytelling generally isn't big on sweating details like that.

>(I'm not the only one who noticed that Fergus is really Tendo Choi, am
>I? :)

I think it's the southern-ish accent and the handyman outfit that had me thinking I was dealing with "Trip" Tucker's long-lost Bostonian relative.

>Also, on this line, I'm not sure the female PC is meant to be a
>veteran; her line about the man speaking at the veterans' meeting
>happens before you can switch (nicely done way of letting the player
>make that call for an established adult character, I thought), and
>whichever one of them you choose, the law diploma in the living room
>is still hers. So maybe she's just resourceful as hell. Personally,
>I prefer to believe they're both vets, but the introductory bits
>slightly imply against.

It could be that she was military but went into law rather than infantry like hubby, or she could have seen combat in-service and then got the law degree after she got out. The pre-release info dumps included a bit saying both were veterans on their way to a get together for fellow veterans, so I'd just assumed that they both served.

>At least until one gets frustrated with the whole "scarcity of every
>dang thing" business and turns god mode on. Presumably not an option
>for console players, admittedly.

Yeah, we console peasants have to get by on what we can scrounge, which admittedly is not as hard as it seems once you've done a decent bit of exploring. By mid-game, I had enough cores that I could use my power armor for more than just the occasional jaunt into a particularly nasty neighborhood. Plus knowing that things like VATS and sprinting kill them quicker and avoiding overuse of both made them stretch.

Of course, I only found out two other bits of info later. The first is that, while wearing power armor, your regular armor bits provide no bonuses or defense bonuses, so if you're planning to run around in PA for a long period, you might as just stow your regular armor in a bin. The second is that your companions can also wear power armor, but so can random NPCs if you just leave it sitting around with a fusion core installed. But, by the same measure, you can get enemies to leave their power armor if you're sneaky enough to steal the fusion core.

>What's most interesting about the way the characters look in this
>game, I would contend, is that you can see what they were
>trying to do, with the facial expressions and body animations
>and whatnot, and how they didn't quite get it, but also that somewhere
>down the line somebody probably is going to get it. Possibly
>in whatever FO4's New Vegas is, possibly in Elder Scrolls
>VI, possibly in somebody else's game altogether, but it shows that
>the technology is reaching a point where making characters decently
>lifelike is probably just implementation now. Which is pretty cool.

Yeah, you can really feel that it's just the matter of getting enough computing power to get the little things down that say "This is a real human." Not to mention the greater variety in character models for NPCs, which mean you don't keep running into the same guy's identical cousin in every settlement.

>Heh, it's like a holdover from the Dawnguard expansion for
>Skyrim. "Honestly, do I have one friend in the entire province
>who can manage not to get kidnapped by vampires? Balgruuf, for
>Talos's sake, you have the second-baddest-ass húskarl in
>Tamriel after mine and a court wizard. Was it their day off?"

Yeah, oddly enough, the whole radiant quest system is both helpful and annoying. Helpful in that the buildings you clear out will refill, granting you the opportunity to keep looting them again and again. But it also means revisiting the same points on the map again and again, which gets annoying when you find yourself in the Medford Memorial Hospital for the nth time.

>That might not even be intentional, knowing Bethesda. :) (Hard to
>explain in that rigidly-in-universe tutorial style they use, either
>way.)

True, but there's so many bits of info that frustrated me until I found them out online that I can't tell whether Bethesda intentionally left us in the dark or just couldn't find a way to include them in the forced tutorials. Then again, it's a step up from the walls of text that would hit you in the previous games the first time you (for example) equipped a weapon.

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CdrMike, Overwatch Reject