Foeofthelance

Thanks! (Prays to all the gods and devils this works...)

I've got a bad save in Dead Money, the result of the game deciding I'm not actually standing on the beam I'm standing on every time I load the file. I've got a back up that I can go to, but for a variety of reasons I'd prefer to just re-install the game and the latest versions of the mods I've got instead. (If that seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, now you understand why I've never finished the game!) The problem is that I've recently moved, and can find neither my disc nor the box with the CD key in it. Is it possible to just re-install via Steam, or would I have needed to purchase the game through Steam instead of my hard copy?

And how did you manage to get shot by a wimp like Benny and some Khans in the first place? I mean if you were a level 1 wimp yourself, it makes sense, but apparantly you are this awe inspiring badass courier who wandered the divide and went places entire battalions feared to tread. And yet a schmoe like Benny gets the drop on you? No, sorry, just not buying it. Benny and his goons would never have gotten the drop on such a character, and would have died if they had tried. Sorry, it just does not run. It is yet another major flaw in the main story of the courier. This reminds me of a bad 'thriller' that ends and has me asking five thousand question starting with the words 'wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense ...'. They need to go back to a classic fallout story for the next game. Keep it simple. You are level 1 and dont know dick about the world because you grew up in an isolated vault/village and give the character a history, with friends and family, and then give him a simple but believable reason for leaving. And for gods sake dont add things in the game that require you main character to be a grade A moron to actually progress the main quest. No more Bathesda special starts please. Give me a classic fallout start any time. Look at this way: Yes, they got the drop on the Courier and managed to take the chip from him. On the other hand, not only is the Courier still awake for Benny's pregame monologue, he manages to survive a bullet to the head and being buried alive. We also know that Benny couldn't pay the Khans after the job was done. My theory? Benny spent all his caps on a Fat Man and some mininukes, plus an in-game ton of explosives to ambush the Courier. He wasn't too careful about it either, which is why the Khans are so badly beat up when you run into them - they got caught in the secondary explosives from the traps. Forget the NCR being in Boulder City. They had the Khans outnumbered by about two to one and still lost people as hostages. By the time you catch up to Benny again you've already got your skills back plus some. By the time you hit the game's level 30, you're so far past where you started that you can walk into Caesar's camp with a combat knife and a loin cloth and still pile up the corpses of his army. I do agree about the "Don't launch option." Probably the second biggest script error since the original ending of FO3 from the sounds of it.

Nah, I'm thinking something more akin to a large, unopened control-type vault that hasn't run into any of the disaster scenarios inflicted on the others. Either that or one with a designed patriotic/nationalistic bent. They're still sealed up due to the ravages of the Divide, but inside they've got functioning old world tech that's been well maintained, the numbers to use it, and a die hard focus on "American" ideals. Either that, or in true Fallout style they've gone so far into their ideals that they've come out the other side as a sad parody, driving Ulysses to grief and madness when his last hope for the glory of the old US vanishes in a series of shocked conversations with a group of people trapped in an episode of "Leave it to Beaver" and who refuse to accept the reality of what has happened to their country and lack the will to do anything about it. You then either have to decide whether to force them out into the real world, leave them alone and buried as a sad reminder of what was, or join Ulysses in killing them all as a violent rebellion against their lifestyle.

Then the devs are just lazy. There is no good reason the final DLC (that will finish up the storyline) should not take place AFTER the dam battle. I really hope the final dlc isn't just you traveling into a canyon to fight the other courier, it should finish up the storyline after the battle of the dam as well. Actually, from what I'm seeing, the DLCs aren't so much supposed to be continuing the story so much as filling in the story so the Courier is making a more informed decision before he decides the fate of the entire region at the Dam. Each of the DLCs seems to correspond to one of the core game factions in one way or another. -Fredrik Sinclair might as well be a failed Mr. House, for all intents and purposes. He, like House, built a modern utopia designed to beat the bombs - only he failed, and the Sierra Madre became a cursed, blighted affair fit for Dante. He, like House, designed his own personal artificial army - only now the holograms are rogue, presenting a threat to anyone who might try to solve the Sierra Madre's problems. Now imagine how much worse the Mojave would be if you cleared House's way, and then something were to go wrong, such as the failure of the dam, or the Protectrons falling prey to the computer virus the Brotherhood discovered... -Joshua Graham/the Burned Man gives us yet another voice in the chorus of people claiming, "Caesar is bad! Don't side with Caesar!" And just to reinforce the point that Caesar is a bad choice, we get the White Legs trying to commit genocide so that Caesar can ensure the death of a single man. -Last but not least, you get the scientists of the Big MT running into the same problems as the politicians of the NCR; namely, they've got too much to look after, and not enough resources to do it with. Despite all their claims, they still need someone from the outside to come in, pick up all the pieces, and generally clean up their mess before it gets any worse. My wager, then, would be that Ulysses represents the Wild Card option, in the form of his desire to see the old world resurrected. His goal is to show the Courier that there is no good choice amongst the others, and that he should seize his destiny and make the Mojave over in the image of his choosing. For Ulysses, that's bringing back the US. For the Courier? Who knows? That's up to the Courier to decide.

The Recharger weapons don't have purchasable ammo. Rather, they respawn their own ammunition when they're active. I believe it is at a rate of about 1 round per second.

I'm fairly sure the guy who passed on the job knew who you were, and may even have known what the chip was; the storekeeper in Primm said the guy was shocked/freaked to see your name on the list, and insisted the chip be passed to you. I agree the fact that he is never mentioned or heard about again is kinda bizarre, and hopefully something they address eventually. As for the other courier being back in Primm, I figured he had just dropped off the decoy he was transporting and was looking for more work when the convicts showed up and sacked the town. As for the other four guys, who do you think carries your stuff when you drop it in one of the shipping boxes?

I've got about 70 hours logged so far, and the only real bugs are the occasional crash to windows. That's more likely a system thing though, since I'm generally bouncing back and forth between NV, a half dozen AIM conversations, playing music on a buggy sound card, loading things on my E-reader, and juggling my power cord, which has become frayed. Its not a new computer, either... Seen a few scorpions trying to hide in the ground, and there is a single gecko that always spawns inside a rock face, but even my mods are playing nice.

Well, its either going to be DLC or a modder's playground. I admit that the idea that the vast empty lands are intended to host DLCs is the thing that makes me wary of mods saying, "I opened up the X and put my mod in the big blank zone!" I don't want to see either good money or good mods get crushed together, when I want both!

What's weirder is while running around in the GECK I found a cell with "Lily", "Lily's Grandson", and "Lily's Granddaughter". It didn't seem to be connected to anything, and it was just a empty Vault style cell.

Huh. I would have thought simply joining two cells via a door would have been simpler. Put one end in the Citadel and the other in Goodsprings, the way it gets you back and forth between Point Lookout and the DC Wasteland.

^ Wrong I use noclip and such all the time to unstuck myself and still get achievements. Maybe it depends on the command? Noclip or other unstuck commands probably get ignored, while God mode and infinite ammo type cheats get logged and prevent certain things from being triggered?

Answer me this... If you say there is no differance between playing a female character and a male character, then why decide to change genders at all? I'm not saying its weird for men to play a female character; if you're a homosexual and you believe that a female character better expresses your personality or even if you're just a really feminine heterosexual male and don't like how men in video games are ALWAYS portrayed as muscle-bound machoist, then by all means go for it... I just don't understand why a normal, straight man feels the need to create a female character. Well... Why not? Personally, I flip a coin unless I'm using a game as a story base and have a specific character in mind. But at the end of the day the game is imagination based escapism for the people who play it. If there really is no difference between male and female characters, than both are equally valid options for a player, no matter what their gender may be in real life. After all, this is a game where we decide who lives and who dies, the fate of entire nations, whether we are a petty thief, a strong armed thug, a noble paladin, a well-intentioned diplomat, or just a smarmy rogue who talks those other folk into doing his dirty work for him or her. Yeah, sure, there are a hound dogs who just play a female character for the tight clothes, but there are just as many who think, "Well, I want my next character to be a Janeway type, willing to fight when she has to, but more willing to talk.", or "Hey, I liked the Sam Carter character from Stargate, how would she deal with the wasteland?" We do it because that's what our imagination asks of us.

I already asked about this, and the answer was a very emphatic NO. Any mod for New Vegas is limited to only the files included in the Vegas edition GECK, and anything hand built by the modders. Requiring any file from FO3, especially the main .esm file, violates the EULA on a bunch of things. That said, building DC cell by cell with the files included with the Vegas Geck is fine, if very time consuming. A lot of files are there, but some of them are only references while others have been gutted. For example, I've been trying to build Liberty Prime Mk. II, essentially a Sentrybot that the BoS upgraded with Prime's combat data. Prime's Combat Style file is in Vegas, so far so good. So is his voice file. His movement sound files are referenced, but the sounds themselves seem to be missing. His combat quotes are deleted entirely. His weapons list is present, but the weapons on it aren't, so its blank until I finish rebuilding them using other weapons as a base. The good news is that most of the files required for them are there as well, though once again the sounds are missing. Its like putting together a very bizarre jigsaw puzzle. You can look at the box (FO3) to see what you're making, but some pieces are missing, and others are there but when you turn them over to put them into place they turn out to be blank.

Honestly, from what I can tell Obsidian just ripped out anything that seemed to be "defined" in FO3, then went a built a few replacements for things they really needed. For example, the model for Liberty Prime is missing, but most of his information is still in New Vegas. My guess would be the end table had a named object on it and got deleted as collateral damage.