Yeah, he just kind of stands around using the lathe and stuff like he knows what he's doing, but never actually makes anything. I suspect he's related to Fantastic from New Vegas. "No, man! I know exactly what I'm doing! I just don't know what effect it's going to have."

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. :)

>Considering that the Fallout universe is so
>behind the tech curve in terms of electronic miniaturization that the
>transistor is "cutting edge" come 2077, I'm surprised your reward for
>slotting in a fusion core wasn't a puff of blue smoke.

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.

(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. :)

>This is, of course, Bethesda once again playing bait and switch with
>fans. At E3 and in the trailers, they showed you marching around in a
>pristine set of T-60 power armor, the second-best you can find in the
>game. Then you start the game and find out it's a rusty set of T-45
>armor that always has a broken armor and leg.

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.

>The laser musket certainly does seem to be something that the Top
>Gear crew bodged together as part of a challenge from the
>producers.

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

>Think of the backstory sort of like Shepard's in Mass Effect,
>there for flavor more than any actual explanation for why your
>character comes out of cryosleep able to build automated turrets,
>operate power armor, and mod pipe rifles without any in-game training.

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

>>The punch line is that god mode turns off consumption of ammo and
>>whatnot, but not fusion cores. So power armor is still
>>useless. :)
>
>A minor hindrance unless they also made it impossible to just spawn in
>more fusion cores.

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. :)

>FO4 at least has one leg up on Skyrim, it keeps track of the places
>you've cleared, so when you get a quest to clear it out for J. Random
>NPC, you can go "Oh yeah, already took care of that" and instantly get
>the XP and caps for a job you did ages ago.

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.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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