>> Half the fun I had in Mass Effect 1 was slowly using the sniper rifle to take people down from miles away...

another natural born sniper huh?

i can't wait till i get up the caps to get the 50 cal sniper rifle in new vegas. and of course its like the 3rd most expensive weapon in the game after the tac nuke and the energy weapon.

>> Also, as bad as the inventory system was, I like looting bodies in RPGs and customizing my gear.

steam has New Vegas with all 4 add-ons for just $20. the add-ons include a whole ton of weapon customization stuff. probably 3 or 4 special components you can get for each type of weapon in the game. stuff like bigger magazines, scopes, lighter frames, long barrels, silencers, matched (more accurate) components, heavy duty components, springs to increase the ROF, and you can even breakdown and make your own ammo at a reloading bench. and its all very well balanced (none of that smithing and enchanting dominant strategy stuff you see in skyrim). you can't mod armor, only repair and improve it somewhat. but you can gather resources and craft stuff. cooking and potion type stuff at campfires, and things like weapon repair kits and time bombs at workbenches.

it might be the best Bethesda game Bethesda never made <g>

way to go Obsidian!

i can't wait till i get up the caps to get the 50 cal sniper rifle in new vegas

>> Once you have this, and though money to buy lots of ammo for it, I find the game becomes very easy especially if you've levelled up your gun stat.

it wasn't quite as expensive as i thought, but still plenty expensive. over 50 caps for a single HE round! i got the gun, and discovered i couldn't hit sh*t with it. and this time my character had a strength of 5 instead of 1. turns out you need an 8 strength. So Jennifer Lee - the 57x great granddaughter of General Robert E Lee (gave her some backstory) - Paladin of New Vegas (she's such a nice girl!) - is limited to 5.56 for rifles, and 10cm for handguns. at least until i level up and get some intense training perks. she wasn't even 10th level when she killed benny (and all the chairmen - and not one bystander - not even the cashier! ok, she killed the bartender in the lounge, but he shot first!) <g>. and of course she has 100 guns, 10 agility, and 10 perception.

>> Even the toughest creatures like the deathclaws and cazadores are easy pickings with the scope of the 50 cal anti materiel rifle picking them off with one or two shots at safe distance.

that i can definitely believe, that is one impressive gun! serious stopping power. and you gotta love those HE rounds. the heart breaker is i sold it off, after getting the fast action bolt mechanism and everything. the poor girl was having to hip-shoot the damn thing from no further than 10 or 20 feet to hit anything at all. but that's ok, all i really need is a varmint rifle with a night scope, extended mags, and a silencer. but i do have to admit - the first time i drew that .50 cal and saw it came with a scope, the sniper inside of me felt like a little kid at xmas! <g>.

>> Pro tip: to clear the quarry, sit on the cliff top with a 50 cal and lots of AP ammo.

never really tried to clear it, i just skirt it, and snipe a bit to mess with them from high in the rocks where they can't navmesh to. yeah, i know - technically its cheating,

>> If you really want challenges look for the legendary creatures, they're hard even at max level with good weapons. Go prepared!

where? how high a level do you have to be to trigger them? my badguy - er - chaotic neutral guy - is only 15th level, and Jennifer Lee is only 9th still i think.

>> Can you tell this is one of my favourite games ever? I played it and it's dlc to death.

glad to hear its worthy of that.

>> Some of the dlcs are very hard and original too. Try dead money and old world blues on for size when your character is levelled enough. :)

i got the game and all DLCs for just $20. i'm holding off on the DLC quests until i've played more /most of the original content, although Mr "i like you gun" did accidentally stumble across one, the caravan one i think it was. but i didn't pursue it yet.

>> Next time perhaps follow the quest lines without killing? There's plenty opportunity for bad behaviour and gaining caps without looting corpses everywhere :lol:

i've been following the quests much more with this new character. instead of helping novac get rid of the gouls by helping the gouls get rid oft he mutants by helping the muabnts get rid of the guy holed up in the last room, she just broke into the guys' room at novac, My badguy went through all that BS, and got as far a getting rid of the mutants, before he decided it would be easier to just go back to novac and kill the guy and get the info. there should have been a "talk now or die!" dialog option in the first place. but that's bethesda, they almost force you to be a good guy. here i am armed to the teeth, crazier than the terminator with a serious system malfucntion, and thy think i'm going to go though these four "help somebody" quests just to get some info from a dude when froma role playing standpoint it would be much more in-chacater for me to simply stick my gun in his mouth and say "TALK! NOW! MF! i'm gonna count to three - three - BOOM! dumb ass! you shoulda talked...." its is a M rated game after all.

the only other thing i "skipped" was nepton(?). (the legion atrocities in the town). i've been playing her as a nice girl courier. but she's starting to change her ways a bit. guns taken after combat tend to be the most lucrative loot in the game. since she can't just go around whacking everyone for their guns, caps have been a bit more work to come by. she pulled Morales body out of a viper's nest of cross flre and only got 50 stinking caps for it. "courier girl don't like it when she don't get paid". House didn't pay her for using the chip at Caesar's fort (unless the presidential suite was the payment - a bed? you give me a bed?). and Caesar didn't pay her for supposedly blowing up the place. i thought the option of taking out the boomer leadership for House might get her some guns, but she can't make it thought the artillery fire. don't know what the deal is, my badguy could do to no problem - but then again i think he had about a dozen stimpaks too. so while she "works" for house, she not really working for him. he didn't pay her for the last job and now he wants her to go deal with boomers? i don't think so - courier girl don't play that game. powder gangers are getting hard to find. she took out the prison already. since Caesar put the hit on House, and she works for House, i figured it would be ok if she messed with Caesar (and maybe got a gun or two in the process! <g>). first it was off to nepton where i got to use the .50 cal to take out Caesars #2 with a single shot (this was before i sold it off). then it was off to cottonwood to take out that installation. now she's exploring, trying to find the legion recruiting and training center that's somewhere in the south east part of the map - don't recall where - my badguy character found it. funny thing is, the best armor she has (for gun fighting) is legion armor. so now sh'e running around in the best perfect condition legion armor and has to take it off whenever NCR is around. in the end, i'm not sure who's side a nice girl like Jen would be on, they're all kind of assholes. maybe she'll just be a neutral courier. more likely someone will treat her bad, and that will tip her hand towards or against some faction. but she might turn into a merc and just prey on them all. it will be interesting to see the result of how the events unfolding in the world and her in-character role-playing responses to them (within the limitations of the choices available in the game) combine to determine what will happen to her. she may not end up doing a whole lot. cause "courier girl don't do jobs if she don't get paid". and a lot of the quests seem to be "help me for a handful of caps" at most, if not "help me cause bethesda thinks you should do stuff that's really not in your best interests just cause it a nice thing to do.". we all have to do enough of that in real life. in games you should be able to indulge in a little selfishness.

all in all a pretty good game. not many issues. i get about one crash or lockup every 4-6 hours of continual gameplay. probably have a memory leak somewhere. seems to be related to streaming assets off disk. and it does have the "armor falls through the ground mesh" problem from oblivion still in the engine code. i dropped all my gear at gun runners to haul loot. after a few runs i look over and most of the gear is gone. then i see a set of armor come bubbling to the surface of the the sidewalk, then slowly sink back down, never to be seem again, just like it was in quicksand or something - or a submarine sunk at sea - she surfaces once, then makes that long slow dive to the bottom. instead of doing a new save each time, i''d been overwriting the same 3 saves round robin. i almost didn't have a same to go back to and almost lost all my weapons and armor.

>> you should be playing in the nightmare (hardcore?I dont remember) where you need to drink, sleep, ammo weights, etc..its really cool.

i'm saving hardcore and higher difficulty levels for later to get more replayability out of the game before resorting to mods.

and of course i want to try a number of different types of characters at each difficulty level. so far i'm doing the goodguy and badguy gunslinger characters. i want to try an energy weapons character, and a prospector/barter skill charscter, and an "old school" or "true west" character: no energy, full-auto or semi-auto weapons, no armor, and just dynamite, no grenades, rockets, mortars or grenade launchers - just 1800s tech. maybe make them an old retired marshall or something.

>> The legendary creatures are usually hidden in caves and bunkers etc and in various places where you have to look hard.

ah! ok!

at one point she was exploring the northern perimeter of the map, and ran into a cave full of green swamp-men things (forget the name). good action - but a terrible waste of ammo. since then, she has stayed away from caves (there seem to be no guns in caves! <g> ).

.

>> I enjoyed Farcry 2 more (but didn't beat it - got bored after 10 hours or so). I liked the open-world aspect of it.

It wasn't very sandboxy and wasn't very living-world, though, but it was definitely open world and enjoyable.

i'm coming to the conclusion that it takes more that just a big seamless level (IE an "open world") to make a good game.

a big seamless level with a few hundred hard coded non-respawning spawn points is nothing more that a giant doom level. shoot all the badguys and then its just an architectural walk through.

adding 100 hard coded non-replayable quests only delays the inevitable.

adding hard coded non-replayable crafting of player homes (elder scrolls), villages (farycry 5 primal), or estates (witcher 3) also just delays the inevitable.

respawns, random encounters, quest generators, house design (a la the sims), and replacemnt of important NPCs (such as dead merchants killed by dragons in skyrim) all seem to be called for.

they finally add random encounters in skyrim and what is it? you encounter a dragon in town while hauling loot back from the dungeon to the store! wait a sec there guys - isn't that dragon supposed to be at the bottom of the dungeon, not waiting for you back at town once you get out? <g>.