Fallout VI: Shotguns and Six-Shooters

[Spore]

I need advise for New Vegas. I got some edition with all expansions so that you know. The graphics are what makes the game harder for me (though I could disable the Letterbox effect that made it look like some old Western on TV which is terrible with a widescreen). Are there graphics enhancing mods that you feel are easy to install and offer beautification? For character building:

0) Is the trait "Wild Wasteland" just there to toggle weird Falloutian **** like UFO crashs and ghoulified kids in fridges on and off? If yes they the trait is mine.
1) I wanted to start on some sleek charisma dude but couldnt find a sensible build for it. I will want to be agile and somewhat proficient weapons still and the Fallout 3 system is almost entirely foreign to me. People online said Charisma is almost useless even for charisma builds as you can easily override this with high speech scores (so I'm perfectly okay with finding reasons in my mind why my checks would still work).
2) Intelligence and Perception are recommended for hacking and lockpicking. I personally loathe terminal hacking anyway and more often than not computers just hold tidbits of lore that I don't really care about.
3) A build recommended high Science, Lockpicking and Speech (in that order) while having High Int/Per and no Cha. How is that for starters?
4) Just for kicks does a Low Int/Cha/Speech melee build influence immersion? I mean you got shot in the head and survived this. This could mean you have a tank of a body and are just retarded now to a point of "me smash evil shooty guy" now. It's perfectly immersive.

[Rodin]

I need advise for New Vegas. I got some edition with all expansions so that you know. The graphics are what makes the game harder for me (though I could disable the Letterbox effect that made it look like some old Western on TV which is terrible with a widescreen). Are there graphics enhancing mods that you feel are easy to install and offer beautification? For character building:

0) Is the trait "Wild Wasteland" just there to toggle weird Falloutian **** like UFO crashs and ghoulified kids in fridges on and off? If yes they the trait is mine.
1) I wanted to start on some sleek charisma dude but couldnt find a sensible build for it. I will want to be agile and somewhat proficient weapons still and the Fallout 3 system is almost entirely foreign to me. People online said Charisma is almost useless even for charisma builds as you can easily override this with high speech scores (so I'm perfectly okay with finding reasons in my mind why my checks would still work).
2) Intelligence and Perception are recommended for hacking and lockpicking. I personally loathe terminal hacking anyway and more often than not computers just hold tidbits of lore that I don't really care about.
3) A build recommended high Science, Lockpicking and Speech (in that order) while having High Int/Per and no Cha. How is that for starters?
4) Just for kicks does a Low Int/Cha/Speech melee build influence immersion? I mean you got shot in the head and survived this. This could mean you have a tank of a body and are just retarded now to a point of "me smash evil shooty guy" now. It's perfectly immersive.

0) Pretty much. It does move about some special items to locations where they're funnier, so sometimes I've seen it recommended to leave it off if you're going for a specific item. Other than very niche cases, if you want the silliness it's definitely recommended to take it.

1) Basically, the issue with Charisma is that there are virtually no checks which require Charisma specifically. This includes Perks - the best dialogue Perk requires Speech, not Charisma. So build the character you want to build, then just pump points into Speech and you'll be smooth-talking AND dangerous.

2) Intelligence is valuable for the skill points. On hacking, I know that in 4 it reduces the number of words on the screen, but I dunno if that's the case here. Perception is mainly useful for some perks you can get, I don't think it has an impact on lockpicking at all unless there's a perk I'm forgetting. At any rate, like in all the lockpicking mini-games your personal skill with it is way more important than any stats.

3) Sounds reasonable. High Science to hack any terminal, high Lockpicking to pick any lock, high Speech to get you in anywhere else. High Int because you're gonna need those skillpoints with so many non-combat skills. High Perception I guess for the perks, it also gives you a few dialogue choices here and there from what I recall.

4) If you go low enough Int, you get a good few "Me smash shooty guy" lines, which are good for comedy. Unfortunately, something like 90% of the lines are unaffected, so you oscillate between being perfectly erudite and dumb as a rock. It's not particularly worth it unless you're already building a character that way and Int is a good dump stat, in which case you might as well go whole hog for the few times when it's absolutely hilarious.

[GloatingSwine]

I need advise for New Vegas. I got some edition with all expansions so that you know. The graphics are what makes the game harder for me (though I could disable the Letterbox effect that made it look like some old Western on TV which is terrible with a widescreen). Are there graphics enhancing mods that you feel are easy to install and offer beautification? For character building:

0) Is the trait "Wild Wasteland" just there to toggle weird Falloutian **** like UFO crashs and ghoulified kids in fridges on and off? If yes they the trait is mine.

Yeah, Wild Wasteland turns on some odder things, in some cases they replace other content though.

1) I wanted to start on some sleek charisma dude but couldnt find a sensible build for it. I will want to be agile and somewhat proficient weapons still and the Fallout 3 system is almost entirely foreign to me. People online said Charisma is almost useless even for charisma builds as you can easily override this with high speech scores (so I'm perfectly okay with finding reasons in my mind why my checks would still work).

Charisma has no inherent effect on speech checks other than +2 points/rank in the Speech and Barter skills. It does give all you companions +5% damage and DR per point though, so if you want the ED-E/Boone combo to delete everything before you know it's there, it will help that. Also, speech checks in New Vegas are not random. If you have the threshold you succeed, if you don't you fail.

2) Intelligence and Perception are recommended for hacking and lockpicking. I personally loathe terminal hacking anyway and more often than not computers just hold tidbits of lore that I don't really care about.

This is because those skills are the most common hard gates, in that you can't even try and lockpick unless you reach the right threshold. Bear in mind also that New Vegas has way more skill checks in dialogue or quests than Fallout 3 did, and uses way more skills than Speech in dialogue. On the other hand, the temporary boosts from skill magazines are powerful, especially with the Comprehension perk (when they have +20 to a skill for a few minutes), so you can wing it if you know what to read up on.

3) A build recommended high Science, Lockpicking and Speech (in that order) while having High Int/Per and no Cha. How is that for starters?

People will often reccommend high Int in New Vegas because you get less skill points per level than Fallout 3 and there are more skills to choose from (it also occasionally unlocks dialogues or persuasions or gives an alternative way to do them). Perk requirements tend to be stricter in New Vegas as well. Perception is still mostly useful for VATS accuracy but you need at least 6 for Better Criticals and Light Step. (Perk requirements are stricter in New Vegas and there are no perks that just grant skill points)

It's worth pointing out though that there are a set of stat boosting implants you can get, but you can only have as many as your starting Endurance.

4) Just for kicks does a Low Int/Cha/Speech melee build influence immersion? I mean you got shot in the head and survived this. This could mean you have a tank of a body and are just retarded now to a point of "me smash evil shooty guy" now. It's perfectly immersive.

If you have an Int of 3 or lower you get special dialogues that border on hulkspeak. You can also get some outcomes easier if you're dim. (eg. you get a special recruitment option for one of the companions if you're Int 3 or less, which skips either a speech 75 check or having high opinion from his faction).

One thing to note for a first timer to the Mojave. This is not a Bethesda game, you are intended to follow the trail of the main story first.

[Triaxx]

Forget the plot, just head north. Nothing of note except some mosquitoes. (And I can't help hearing Codsworth say that now.) I am of course joking. Don't do that. Seriously, don't.

I suggest DYNAVISION, which lets you tweak a lot of the graphics options, though for your widescreen issue, I'm not quite sure. I know there are options, but I don't recall what they are off the top of my head. Manually setting your screen resolution in the Fallout.ini file may work, but you may also see some weirdness.

Wild Wasteland unlocks the vast majority of the pop culture easter eggs, and the less 'normal' stuff, which people complained about in Fallout 2/3. So that simple perk gates the weird so you can have it or not. I say don't because it replaces one excellent weapon with one that's not, but it's worth playing through at least one, just don't use a serious character for it.

Charisma can be almost entirely dumped for intelligence. Back in F2, it was useful because it determined the number of companions you could have. In NV, it's stuck at 1/1 (One humanoid, one dog/robot), barring mods. That said, there are a couple of perks that you can use Charisma for, but they mostly revolve around boosting companions if I'm not entirely mistaken.

New Vegas is all about alternatives, and a few of those are locked behind Average or better terminals. Same with locks. That said, if you don't like the hacking game, there's a mod called 'Easy Hacking' (If I don't have it confused with the F4 mod) that basically reduces the options to the only answer. I consider it cheating on par with just using the console to unlock the terminal, but I won't judge you. That said, it's totally possible to complete the game without hacking. Or without lockpicking, but not without either. Or it's just more difficult in some cases. Or you're locked out of things.

Intelligence will get you around most of the issues you'd find from having low other stats. You can always put points into a skill controlled by another stat. The thing is you'll need actual stats for the perks. So 6 Per for Better Criticals, which you can't necessarily get by being very smart. On the other hand, there's a small number of stat increasing perks available, called Intense Training. The trouble is that it locks you out of other more useful perks.

Stupid but strong and nigh-invulnerable is totally viable.

[Avilan the Grey]

I just want to point out that the first two games has gone from The Standard to Early Installment Weirdness years ago.

[LibraryOgre]

Something I realized yesterday, in FO2:

In the Temple of Trials, you can choose to pickpocket Cameron at the end, stealing the key from him and unlocking the door without fighting him.

[GloatingSwine]

What? Multiple unexpected ways to solve a narrative problem using your character's skills and abilities? In a Fallout game?

What will they think of next?

[LibraryOgre]

What? Multiple unexpected ways to solve a narrative problem using your character's skills and abilities? In a Fallout game?

What will they think of next?

I'll be honest, I tend to solve a lot with a plasma rifle.

[factotum]

In the Temple of Trials, you can choose to pickpocket Cameron at the end, stealing the key from him and unlocking the door without fighting him.

If you have Speech tagged you can actually persuade him to not fight you and get out that way. In fact, you get twice as much XP for solving that quest the non-fighty way, too!

[DigoDragon]

I'll be honest, I tend to solve a lot with a plasma rifle.

Pffft, haha XD

I like solving things with social checks, but sometimes a good bullet/beam/bolt to the head works wonders.


Completely unrelated to anything: I been playing Torchlight 2 lately, and a thought occurred to me that using the engine I could build an action dungeon-looting version of FO4. Just have to add a town crafting element.

[Triaxx]

Wasn't it possible to steal his key, and then talk him into opening the door and get him stuck? (With him trying to use a key he no longer possessed.)

[Balmas]

Fallout I and Fallout 2 were isometric, top-down sprite games that would barely pass muster for an indie title in today's market. Would a better story or more dialogue choices or more ability to have your decisions affect the world have improved the game? Of course! My argument, however, is that money is fungible, and the people arguing that these features are more important to the success of the game than what Bethesda DID wind up focusing on are deluded to the point of lunacy.

You're entitled to your opinion, of course, and if you're not taken with the direction Bethsoft is taking with Fallout, you'll probably be well served by not buying the next installment, and instead sinking that money into Undertale or something. But my Steam profiles shows I've spent 455 hours in the game, and I'm still having fun, so maybe, just MAYBE the crummy story doesn't matter so much as you pretend.

400 hours and two playthroughs here. Your point?

Look, the point I'm trying to make is not that it isn't fun or enjoyable. If it were, I wouldn't have sunk so many hours into it. I wouldn't have sat up grumpily as the UPS truck got delayed for three days delivering the copy I'd preordered months earlier if I didn't expect it to be good. But while it's a fun game, it's not a good Fallout, if that makes sense. It seems pretty obvious that they don't care about or understand this franchise, and only want to milk the fans of it for all the money they can get.

Sure. But Fallout 4 isn't the Transformers. The first Transformers movie received decidedly mediocre review (Metascore 61), and it goes down from there. Fallout 4 generally received positive reviews (Metascore 84), and while user scores are definitely more mixed, there's a generally observable trend that users a far more likely to write a bash review than a positive one. Now review scores are also skewed, because reviewers rarely have time to play the entire game through, and so perhaps the late story didn't inform their reviews as much, this is definitely possible. However, when you look at Fallout 4 user reviews on metacritic, positive and negative reviews are pretty evenly split. Is the game SUBJECTIVELY bad? Inarguably, there is evidently a large cohort of people who felt strongly enough about the game to pan it. But here's the thing: I posit to you that games are more than their stories. I agree that Fallout 4 has problems, and the story is one of those problems, but it remains in my opinion, a good game, overall. For ME, fixing the story fixes very little of what I think is important about what Fallout 4 whiffed on. A bad story can't make a great game bad, and a bad game with a good story is still a bad game.

Good game, maybe.

Good Fallout? No. It has nothing of what made the other four Fallouts great, choosing instead to focus on prettier plasma rifles and shady business practices.

Okay. For me, the story and dialogue, in most games, are a sideshow. It's fine if they're good, slightly annoying if they're bad, but ultimately something I'm going to skip as much as possible so I can get back to playing. I'm here to shoot fools in the wasteland, the reasons why are only so important.

I couldn't disagree more. Unless you're playing a mindless shooter like Borderlands, CoD, Serious Sam, or Enter the Gungeon, my character's reasons for doing something inform my actions.

As for dialogue, it's just as much a part of a game as the shooting mechanics. In fact, in a roleplaying game it's more important, as it gives the character a means of making decisions that isn't just shooting fools in a wasteland, as you put it. That's part of why Fallout 4's dialogue system is so egregiously bad: it removes the character's ability to make informed decisions.

Well, I've only done one ending for the main mission arc, so I can't compare how much it holds up with a different faction. But as I've said, that choice really just changes the hitbox of the enemies I'll be shooting when I bother to complete the main mission. But there's plenty of missions that I thought were fun, I thought many of the companions were likable and I liked gaining reputation with them.

I'll admit, I liked how they did the companions. That was well done, and they felt mostly fleshed out, even if some of them had pretty boring companion quests.

No different from Skyrim here. Or any other sandbox game, really. Even in a game like Bioshock Infinite, where the developer puts really great effort into making Elisabeth likable and making you care about her, she doesn't really have a very deep well of dialogue. This is the price of having fully animated and voiced characters. Doing this stuff and making it good is expensive and difficult. Maybe one day there will be text to speech which will allow you to make a computer be able to act, and animations techniques are getting better every year, but right now? This stuff is hard.

I note that there's a distinct difference between asking for the Devs to account for every possible dialogue option a player might ask an NPC and asking that the story make even a lick of sense when scrutinized at any layer deeper than "surface." Right now, there are entire factions that are stupid and self-contradictory even on the surface; this is the kind of thing that should have been picked up on by the editing team back when the story was first being written.

Some of that is the limitation of the genre, though some of the more interesting choices are under heavy weapons. One of the downsides of the perk system they chose is that it dis-incentivized using more than one weapon type. And putting a magic system into Fallout would be incongruous to say the least, nevermind that unmodded, Skyrim's magic system is hot garbage too.

As for crafting being necessary, I don't know about that. If you're willing to wait a bit for enemies to drop stuff, you can eventually get stuff that's just as good as what can be crafted. That said, you'll get there a lot quicker by spending perks. What I'd argue is this: There's not enough interesting things to spend perk on, period. Making crafting LESS useful does not improve that condition. My problem with crafting is that only a few specific weapons actually scale with you as your crafting improves. Is there a pistol who benefits from having gun nut 4? Again, not bad, but definitely could have been better.

The toughness perks were pretty yawn-worthy, and scale terribly as difficulty increases. The hacking and lockpicking perks were entirely dispensible, as the most they ever did was give you access to a closet with some ammunition and a handful of caps. There was a missed opportunity. Deus Ex had alternate paths to objectives which yielded to hacking sixteen years ago.

I think that actually comes down to the removal of the skill system. When you have skills, you're able to link the boring things like damage boosts, crafting, hacking, and lockpicking, to relative skill levels. You don't need to worry about dedicating those perks to boring things, and can come up with actually interesting options. This is especially crucial if you're going to cut the skill system entirely, and then limit yourself to only seventy perk slots of varying levels.

But for me, none of these niggles are enough to convince me that the game is BAD, and I really think that's because I didn't come to it armed with a bunch of expectations loaded up from having played and loved earlier iterations of the series.

Yeah, that's pretty much the difference right there, I think. I've got something like 1800 hours logged in this series, taken as a whole, and the only games I haven't played through are Tactics and the original Fallout.

I need advise for New Vegas. I got some edition with all expansions so that you know. The graphics are what makes the game harder for me (though I could disable the Letterbox effect that made it look like some old Western on TV which is terrible with a widescreen). Are there graphics enhancing mods that you feel are easy to install and offer beautification?

Which aspect are you looking to beautify?
-Fellout removes the pale yellow filter over everything, which I can't recommend enough.
-Fallout Character Overhaul makes faces actually look like faces, and has several compatibility patches for other mods.
-Ojo Bueno and NMC's texture packs both provide better textures for pretty much every item in the game.
-The Weapon Retexture Project retextures most of the weapons. Which you might have guessed from the name, but whatever.

0) Is the trait "Wild Wasteland" just there to toggle weird Falloutian **** like UFO crashs and ghoulified kids in fridges on and off? If yes they the trait is mine.
1) I wanted to start on some sleek charisma dude but couldnt find a sensible build for it. I will want to be agile and somewhat proficient weapons still and the Fallout 3 system is almost entirely foreign to me. People online said Charisma is almost useless even for charisma builds as you can easily override this with high speech scores (so I'm perfectly okay with finding reasons in my mind why my checks would still work).
2) Intelligence and Perception are recommended for hacking and lockpicking. I personally loathe terminal hacking anyway and more often than not computers just hold tidbits of lore that I don't really care about.
3) A build recommended high Science, Lockpicking and Speech (in that order) while having High Int/Per and no Cha. How is that for starters?
4) Just for kicks does a Low Int/Cha/Speech melee build influence immersion? I mean you got shot in the head and survived this. This could mean you have a tank of a body and are just retarded now to a point of "me smash evil shooty guy" now. It's perfectly immersive.

[/quote]

In order:
1) Yep, pretty much. You won't find any ghoulified kids in fridges, as that's stupid and removing the need for ghouls to eat and drink entirely negates the problem in one of the best quest chains in Fallout 1. However, you might find a fridge with a skeleton wearing a fedora inside it.
2) Luckily, there are mods which allow you to autosuccceed on the hacking minigame, if you have the relevant level of skill. (I have it installed, because between Fallout 3, Skyrim, and New Vegas, I've played that stupid locking minigame a thousand times over.)
3) The only think I'd be worried about in that build is the lack of a tagged weapon skill. Science is generally less important than lockpicking, as there are more locks to pick than terminals to hack.
3) Oh, absolutely! Something I love about New Vegas is that they brought back low-INT speech from the first two fallouts. Not in all conversations, but in enough to have it be fun.

Something I realized yesterday, in FO2:

In the Temple of Trials, you can choose to pickpocket Cameron at the end, stealing the key from him and unlocking the door without fighting him.

If you have Speech tagged you can actually persuade him to not fight you and get out that way. In fact, you get twice as much XP for solving that quest the non-fighty way, too!

"There will come a time when diplomacy and tact will prove to be useless and your hand must be raised instead. This challenge prepares you to face another human, look him in the eyes, and know that you may have to kill him."

"Sure thing, Cameron. Hey, could you look at this tagged Speech skill for a minute?"

"Oh, yeah, that'd work. "

[Squark]

Is there a guide out there for restoring the censored (no invisible kids, for instance) content of the original Fallout? I'm afraid my Google-fu is rather weak. I have the re-released GoG version, if which version makes a difference.

[LibraryOgre]

Is there a guide out there for restoring the censored (no invisible kids, for instance) content of the original Fallout? I'm afraid my Google-fu is rather weak. I have the re-released GoG version, if which version makes a difference.

http://falloutmods.wikia.com/wiki/Fa...estoration_Mod

[Squark]

http://falloutmods.wikia.com/wiki/Fa...estoration_Mod

Okay, so I actually did manage to find the right file. Wish the install instructions were a bit more fleshed out.

Edit: Some of the writing appears to be in russian- Did I accidentally install the wrong mod?
EDIT2: Found what I used last time, which seems to be more complete and didn't have any Russian. Thanks for the help.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I need advise for New Vegas. I got some edition with all expansions so that you know. The graphics are what makes the game harder for me (though I could disable the Letterbox effect that made it look like some old Western on TV which is terrible with a widescreen). Are there graphics enhancing mods that you feel are easy to install and offer beautification? For character building:

0) Is the trait "Wild Wasteland" just there to toggle weird Falloutian **** like UFO crashs and ghoulified kids in fridges on and off? If yes they the trait is mine.
1) I wanted to start on some sleek charisma dude but couldnt find a sensible build for it. I will want to be agile and somewhat proficient weapons still and the Fallout 3 system is almost entirely foreign to me. People online said Charisma is almost useless even for charisma builds as you can easily override this with high speech scores (so I'm perfectly okay with finding reasons in my mind why my checks would still work).
2) Intelligence and Perception are recommended for hacking and lockpicking. I personally loathe terminal hacking anyway and more often than not computers just hold tidbits of lore that I don't really care about.
3) A build recommended high Science, Lockpicking and Speech (in that order) while having High Int/Per and no Cha. How is that for starters?
4) Just for kicks does a Low Int/Cha/Speech melee build influence immersion? I mean you got shot in the head and survived this. This could mean you have a tank of a body and are just retarded now to a point of "me smash evil shooty guy" now. It's perfectly immersive.

0) Pretty much. You get some areas that have something... different. Mind you, it WILL lock you out of one of the best energy-weapon sniping weapons in the game if you take it.

1) Charisma is safely dumped in F:NV. But if you prefer, you can Focus both Barter and Speech and be a slick-talking bastard.

2) Intelligence is recommended because it regulates how many skill points you get per level. For that alone, you get Int. Getting stats for specific skill points is silly because you can easily cap all your skills. You get stats for either perk requirements or for other reasons, like how perception increases damage from guns. Hacking and Lockpicking are strictly skill-based. Stats have very little to do with it after level 1.

3) Science, Lockpicking, and Speech will get you pretty much anywhere you want to be. It opens up the world to you, but you will need to have some sort of weapon skill as well. My suggestions on skills:

Get at least a marginal amount of Repair. Maybe initially try to get 25 points. Trust me, this will pay off.
Pick either Energy Weapons or Guns. Stick with it. They are both fun, in different ways. This will be your 'enemy elimination' skill of choice for your character from now on. Do *NOT* try Unarmed or Melee as your first time. This is significantly more challenging.
Pick up EITHER Science, OR Lockpick initially. Most locks have a handy terminal nearby. If you go Guns, take Lockpick. If you go Energy Weapons, go Science.
Barter will make your caps last longer. Some people focus on it, some don't. Speech is used pretty regularly in various skill-related checks for additional stuff. Both are pretty handy.
A little Medicine and Survival will help you recover easier, never a bad thing.

4) Other than a low Int really hampering your skill progression, it's certainly an idea. Low Int actually has some unique dialogue options in the game that are pretty funny.

[Avilan the Grey]

For New Vegas I would definitely go Max Luck and then whatever else you want. Because in NV, unlike in 3 and 4, Luck Matters. A LOT. Especially in the places luck does matters IRL. Like Casinos.

[factotum]

"Sure thing, Cameron. Hey, could you look at this tagged Speech skill for a minute?"

"Oh, yeah, that'd work. "

Actually, what you say that convinces him (but only if you have Speech tagged--an otherwise high Speech skill is not enough):

"Look, I don't know all of your strengths and weaknesses, and you don't know mine. Accidents do happen, so what if one of us inadvertently kills the other other? Let's just end this now rather than take that chance, okay?".

[Triaxx]

High Luck is never a bad thing, since it also adds to your base critical chance.

Melee is better than Unarmed in NV, only for the prescence of throwing weapons, like Spears, Knives, and Hatchets. Because they're melee weapons, they do double damage in VATS and that's absolutely massive. Combine it with a very stealthy character and you can giblet most enemies before they realize what's happened because melee weapons are totally silent. Yes, even the Ripper, and the Chainsaw.

I do agree it's not good for a first run, though more because guns are so much fun, but keeping a few throwing knives in your inventory if you sneak up on an enemy is never a bad idea. (Throwing Knives are the weakest, but they weight the least.)

Barter leads to Pack Rat, and in Hardcore Mode, Pack Rat makes life livable. Pack Rat halves the weight of anything that weighs less than two pounds. So your 9mm goes from 1.5 to .75 pounds. Same with all the ammo. But like Melee, Hardcore isn't for a first playthrough. (Though if you've played F3, that's good enough, but since you haven't...)

[BladeofObliviom]

The secret godstat in New Vegas is Endurance. I rarely start a new vegas character with less than 8 endurance no matter their build, because it affects the Cybernetics cap.

[Avilan the Grey]

The secret godstat in New Vegas is Endurance. I rarely start a new vegas character with less than 8 endurance no matter their build, because it affects the Cybernetics cap.

Never bothered with the cybernetics except the luck one. But then I tend to go as a sniper / gunslinger / tinkerer kind of person so my start Endurance in NV is usually 1, 2 or 3. I need that Intelligence and Agility. And Perception. And Luck.

[BladeofObliviom]

The thing about it is that one point in Endurance is equivalent to a point in another stat, plus the other benefits of a point of endurance. I misspoke though, I usually go for 7. The Charisma Implant is unnecessary, but the NEMEAN armor implant is good.

[DigoDragon]

For New Vegas I would definitely go Max Luck and then whatever else you want. Because in NV, unlike in 3 and 4, Luck Matters. A LOT. Especially in the places luck does matters IRL. Like Casinos.

Having broken every casino bank in NV, yes, Luck is ungodly abuse-able when gambling. A 10 Luck means you have to put in effort to lose your shirt.

The secret godstat in New Vegas is Endurance. I rarely start a new vegas character with less than 8 endurance no matter their build, because it affects the Cybernetics cap.

That's the other really useful stat to have. :D

I think I went in with a 7, and skipped some cybernetics that don't do much in the game for me. Like charisma.

[Avilan the Grey]

The thing about it is that one point in Endurance is equivalent to a point in another stat, plus the other benefits of a point of endurance. I misspoke though, I usually go for 7. The Charisma Implant is unnecessary, but the NEMEAN armor implant is good.

How is it worth a point in another stat really? I seriously doubt 7 END can compare for me, as a sniper, to having 7 in both Agility and Perception?

[The_Jackal]

Honestly, I question why you're so into the game given the playstyle you seem to have. If the world is just a shooting gallery to you, and the world, characters, and plot are meaningless, you should be judging Fallout 4 on its merits as a shooter.

I didn't say they're meaningless, I said they're not as important as the folks who keep harping on the narrative would have you believe, and more importantly, those self-same people conveniently overlook the PRICE of that flexibility in a fully voiced triple-A title.

And it's not a great shooter. It definitely makes a better FPS than its predecessors (though New Vegas has an undeniable charm to its very Skill rather than skill based shooting), but there are a lot better games that just let you brutally murder things in awesome, satisfying ways. The new DOOM remake sounds like it'd be more up your alley than Fallout 4. That game is hilarious. All this deep lore and the MAIN CHARACTER can't give two ****s about it. And I mean that as a positive.

I like DOOM. But I also like having some scope to bring my own creativity to the party, and I think if Fallout is going to keep improving, it should definitely keep their foot on the 'flexibility and customization' pedal, because I don't think anyone would be particularly happy if Fallout became just another DOOM.

So even judging Fallout 4 just on its own merits, and JUST on its merit as a shooter-looter (when that should just be a tiny part of a game like this)...it still falls short of another game released a few months later by the same publisher. And any of the Borderlands games, for that matter. Better shooting, better looting, funnier dialogue, worse plot, and co-op.

I'm far LESS of a fan of the Borderlands franchise. If you think Fallout has problems with bad balance, bullet sponges, stupid dialogue, and mindless, repetitive gameplay, then stay away from Borderlands. I've played a fair bit of it, but Borderlands' game design is balanced around people hacking the game. PERIOD. When everyone in their community talks about making builds out of a specific legendary weapon with a miniscule drop rate, with precisely the components and affixes to make finding it take hours of repeatedly killing the same boss, you KNOW that everyone in the damn game is running bl2edit and pasting hex codes to edit their inventory. If you DO try to actually play the game without cheating, the cliff-like difficulty curve will chew you up and spit your parts into a nearby volcano.

Entertainment media is a whooooooooooooooooooooooooooole different beast than physical products. People don't "ironically enjoy" a crappy footstool or vacuum cleaner. They do media.

I'd argue that what is meant by "ironic enjoyment" is that people don't wish to admit that they're entertained by something because they think it reflects poorly on their intelligence, refinement, or character. It's fundamentally rooted in snobbery.

There's also the fact that consumed media stays consumed. If your vacuum sucks or is broken you can return it. If your movie sucks, you can't get a refund on the ticket. If you play most games, you can't just return it 10 hours in (or can't get a full refund).

Or you could argue that it's not consumed at all, since there's nothing stopping you from consuming the same movie all over again. The marginal cost for producing another copy of a video game or movie is near zero, which is the problem that all of these industries are grappling with, and the driving force behind online DRM requirements.

And even there, those crappy tv infomercial products work on the same principle as bad media. We don't need to make a product good, because we make it so cheaply that every purchase is pure profit for us. We also make it a huge pain in the ass to refund it, and when the well dries up we move on to the next product/game. Why do you think Uwe Boll was allowed to make so many films?

Well, I'll let Uwe Boll explain it to you himself, "The reason I am able to do these kind of movies is I have a tax shelter fund in Germany, and if you invest in a movie in Germany you get basically fifty percent back from the government." But the disconnect between marketing quality and product quality is really irrelevant to our discussion. Because I don't think for a minute that Bethesda set out to make a garbage video game and cash in on the name recognition of the Fallout franchise, and I doubt very much that you honestly think that either. I think that the decisions that Bethesda made in the creation of Fallout were driven by an honest desire to make a fun and innovative game, and while it's got no lack of 'could be better' aspects, it is, IMO, a success in that regard.

I'll just leave this as a parting shot.

[Morphic tide]

How is it worth a point in another stat really? I seriously doubt 7 END can compare for me, as a sniper, to having 7 in both Agility and Perception?

Implants. You can have 2 Endurance, 6 Agility and 6 Perception and turn it into 7 in Agility and Perception. Have a point of Endurance for each SPECIAL stat and all your SPECIAL stats go up by one, once you pay the caps. It basically lets you have a 9 in the stats you want 10 in without real cost. The only stats you want at 10 from the start are Intelligence and Luck.

[Avilan the Grey]

Implants. You can have 2 Endurance, 6 Agility and 6 Perception and turn it into 7 in Agility and Perception. Have a point of Endurance for each SPECIAL stat and all your SPECIAL stats go up by one, once you pay the caps. It basically lets you have a 9 in the stats you want 10 in without real cost. The only stats you want at 10 from the start are Intelligence and Luck.

Well as I said, never bothered with the implants really. You're still OP at the end anyway.

[BladeofObliviom]

How is it worth a point in another stat really? I seriously doubt 7 END can compare for me, as a sniper, to having 7 in both Agility and Perception?

Sure, but you don't have to dump your primary stats. Set your stats 1 below where you would have wanted them to feed END, then use the implants later to bump them up.

[Triaxx]

I always skip out on Charisma and Agility as implants for NEMEAN, and PHOENIX.

Of course I also play with Project Nevada which both expands the Cyberware implants and lets you add/remove them.

[Balmas]

Personally, I always use Project Nevada, and the cyberware plugin does a lot to both boost cybernetic implants and take them away from relying on Endurance quite as much.