wowboy23

I guess I don't understand the original question... When I first played through LR, I first came to console in front of a missile silo that I used to open a door. I then come to another console just like it, triggered it thinking it would open a door, and to my surprise, a nuke goes off. Did I miss something that would have informed me that the nuke would be launched?

Immersion is indeed a very subjective thing. For some, immersion is just getting lost in a good story. For others, it's great gameplay and dungeon exploration. For me, it's those things, but it's also how "alive" I perceive the world to be. For me, the most immersive game would be one that would seem like it is getting along just fine even if my PC never comes along to do stuff. If I feel like the NPCs are cardboard cutouts just waiting for me to come along and activate their regurgitated speech, then it fails the immersion test. I've always enjoyed the Interesting NPCs mods from the 3DNPC website. They don't have as much Fallout content as they do Elder Scrolls, but what they have is good stuff. The Companion mods like Willow and Niner always do a good job of adding some interesting characters to the Mojave, and Someguy's mods add quite a lot of content that makes the Mojave come to life. Another thing that adds to my immersion experience is the connection I have to my PC. Hardcore mode went a long way to relieving the feeling of being an unstoppable robot. Imp's needs mods have taken hardcore mode to an extreme that I have found to be addicting. Also, bluebellfairy's animated mods add something really cool to the game... the ability to watch your character eat food, inject chems, and sleep. These little tweaks can go a long way to making the game more immersive.

Damn... I'm old.

You didn't play Zork did you?

it's not the past, seriously stop insulting people for this standing. many companies seem to feel obligated to make their game seem cinematic when they shouldnt be. they should just make the game the way that makes sense. Mass Effect is supposed to be cinematic where as FO really doesnt need to be. Fallout didn't need voiced NPCs, let alone a voiced PC. I believe Josh Sawyer even once lamented about the constraints that voice acting places on writing... namely that once that soundtrack is recorded, there are limitations on how much you can change, making the window for turning out the best story possible much smaller. While you (and I as well for that matter) want the GAME aspect of a game to be the priority, as we move forward that simply is not the case. It seems that a majority of the audience wants to feel like they are a character in a movie first, and feel like they are playing a game second. As such, a voiced PC is the logical leap forward. Frankly I'm surprised Bethesda held out as long as they did.

Immersive Citizens is an outstanding mod. I don't play Skyrim without it and the NPCs are leaps and bounds more interesting than Bethesda vanilla NPCs. So yeah, I would second it. I've been working on a new worldspace for TTW for over a year (on and off... I keep getting distracted by work and family... maybe I should quit and get a divorce to devote myself to important things ? LOL ) and one of the things I wanted to implement with the NPCs in the main settlement was relationship points. Sorta like with Willow, how she opens up more as you get to know her, but this would be with everyone. One NPC for instance is very reclusive and will hardly speak to you when you approach them, but after they see you several times over several days and you don't do anything the NPC doesn't like in town, he approaches you and asks you what your story is. Only then can you get to know him and learn some interesting things about the town. That's just an example. I think trying to make NPC relations less iterative, as in "click this bit of dialogue, then the next, then go back and try another dialogue path" is a good thing and makes conversations more organic. Tying the concept in with economy and needs makes it even more immersive... imagine an NPC telling you to bugger off because they are in the middle of eating and they are hungry. Or to tell you they will speak with you in a moment because they are in a hurry to get to the shop before the shop runs out of the flour that was just delivered by a caravan... With clever design and attention to detail, it could be pretty amazing.

I'll second the RND and wet n cold type of mod. One of the first things I did for New Vegas was tweak the hardcore rates so my character would need to eat drink on a much more frequent basis. Having the hot/cold affect the player and NPCs would be great. Adding illnesses would be fun too. I'd also add a comprehensive economy mod. Too often, we take the approach of just tweaking restock rates. Why not make it tangible and dynamic with full participation from NPCs? This would mean shops are frequented by local NPCs. Store owners would need true supply sources, and prices could fluctuate based on supply and demand.

Since I'm old, i'll share some perspective from way back. In college in the early 90s, I had great fun writing areas and quests for a MUD. When Fallout came out, I was hooked and immediately took to ripping it apart and trying to mod it. As a writer, quests were my forte. I got out of gaming until I heard that Fallout 3 was coming. My text based mind couldn't wrap itself around quest mods with voiced NPCs. The community found a way to combine voice acting resources and now it's hard to even play a quest mod WITHOUT voice actors. The moral: have faith. If a modder has an idea to make the game better, the community will find a way.

This topic is near and dear to me as the music was what initially caught my attention when I popped in that disk to my PC back in college in the 90s and heard that signature guitar riff of the Ink Spots. I grew up in an area that culturally was 20-30 years behind the rest of the country, and my grandfather had an expansive collection of records from his youth (which I have inherited) that featured pretty much every post-war era popular jazz artist. I could go into detail about this, but I have long suspected that because we see a dearth of post-WW2 jazz but pre-Rock N Roll era music, that one of the key points of divergence in Fallout alt-history is that the American counter-culture never really took off. We see pretty much no evidence of it having any sort of lasting impact on the Fallout world. With this in mind, I would recommend a whole slew of artists: Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstein, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Glen Miller, Count Basie, Billy Holliday, Kay Kyser, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Cab Calloway, the Andrews Sisters, Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day, Louis Armstrong, Dick Haymes, Perez Prado, Louis Prima, and of course the inimitable Francis Albert Sinatra. One thing to be aware of, if you want to go more authentic Fallout 3 (and probably 4) I would listen exclusively to those artists' recordings from about 1938-1953. If you want the more swingin' sounds of New Vegas, I would listen to the more recent recordings of the same "Great American Songbook" songs from the later 50s and 60s. A great example of style differentiation is to listen to a Sinatra recording from either his days with Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, or his solo career under the Columbia label and compare it to his later work under Capitol. You will hear a distinct difference. Another good thing to do, if you have Sirius XM, is to listen to the 40s Junction station in the Jazz Standards section. They have pretty much every song of the era you can think of. Anyways, hope that helps!

I'm actually starting work on the first phase I described. I'm going to start by adding an NPC to the Citadel... Star Paladin Hobbes. He is going to initiate a quest to destroy Vault 87 and kill Commander Jabsco at Fort Bannister. At the conclusion of this quest, I want to have killed Super Mutant spawns in DC ruins and get rid of the Talon presence at the Capital. Wish me luck :)

Hi... I'm new to the modding community here on Nexus, but I used to mod the hell out of FO1&2 throughout my undergrad years, and continued to work on mods during my time in the Air Force. You have the basis of a very good idea here... to turn FO3's open ended ending into a nice, strategic simulation, that would provide the player with an almost indefinite amount of playing time. How I would tackle this would be to do it in very small phases. For example: Phase 1) The first objective I would add would be to revisit Vault 87. After telling Elder Lyons about the source of the Super Mutants, you are given a bomb and told to trek back to V87 and plat the bomb in the most radioactive part of it (where you got the GECK.) When you plant it, you are transported outside the entrance and all entrances to the Vault are blocked off. While I would hate to end Super Mutant spawns throughout the wastes, I would have this stop them from spawning in the DC ruins. This also stops Three-Dog from warning people from scavenging in the ruins. (Also, if you choose to destroy the Enclave HQ at Adams AFB, they stop spawning throughout the wastes) Phase 2) Add scavenger NPCs to the DC ruins. Add more caravans to the wastes. For this phase, I would have a quest from the Brotherhood to visit all the major settlements of the wasteland (Megaton, Rivet City, Underworld, Big Town, Little Lamplight, etc.) and have mini quests to either recruit them into a kind of "Confederated commonwealth" get their assurance that they will remain neutral, or render them unable to offer any opposition. At the conclusion of each mini-quest, the settlement will either raise an old world flag or a white flag. When a settlement joins, they also get additional Brotherhood guards, and 1-2 of the local NPCs join the Brotherhood. Phase 3) Next major questline will begin with the player having to clear the Capital of Super Mutants and Talon mercenaries (who also stop spawning after Jabsco is killed, another condition of this quest.) When this accomplished, Brotherhood guards will spawn throughout the building, and representatives from each town that joined forces with the Brotherhood have assembled to form the new government. Here is where I would start the strategy portion. While I wouldn't go so far as to have the player actually assume a titled position, he is still THE hero, and would hold George Washington-like respect. Basically, he would be president, without being called it (I would stop short of actually having an election because I can forsee additional work to make this happen with little reward, other than to be called "President") So, whatever you say will most likely go. For the government decisions, I can see having the player decide on the tax rates. If taxes are too low, no additional guards would be hired for caravans and caravans will be attacked. This can lead to food shortages, which will lead to civil unrest and riots in the towns. Also, with fewer guards, raiders would be encouraged to rally together and perform large raids on towns. If the taxes are too high, there will be plenty of guards, but people will be broke and riot. This is just one example. I'm sure we could get creative and come up with a lot more stuff to put into the wasteland government.

We should start a drinking game... every time someone posts a "What happened to RFCW?" thread, we all take a shot.

Do a quick run through Fallout 2 and base your city on the New Reno in it. FNV is only 30-40 years after FO2, so New Reno shouldn't be significantly different.

Fixed... If anyone out there is having a similar issue under similar circumstances... What happened to me was that I was trying to run Point Lookout with RFCW in New Vegas. For some reason, the object effects for Point Lookout are not compatible with New Vegas. So, as soon as I entered Calvert mansion and got hit with an axe, my character bugged. To fix it, I simply disabled the object effects for all the Point Lookout weapons. They weren't anything super special anyway.

Somehow I had a save get contaminated through modding (my own stuff, nothing I've uploaded) and my character's right arm was pinned at his side, unable to draw a weapon. The pip-boy also wouldn't come up, I couldn't interact with anything in the world or even go to the save game/load game/settings screen. All I could do was move around and jump. While it was easy enough to uninstall the plug in I had just made and revert to an earlier save, I was wondering if anyone knew what caused this so I can fix it in the future?

You guys think Bethesda is bad? They're nothing... I was playing Risk the other day and was using pieces from two different versions of the game... some from the robots game and some from the Greek gods version. Hasbro sent ninjas after me for daring to mix resources from two different games. They totally kicked my ass and threw my game pieces all over my house.

Well, I've been a lurker here for a couple of years. I've always admired the craftsmanship that goes into a lot of the better mods around here and have always wanted to take a stab at it myself. I'm an aerospace and computer engineer at my day job and have been having to design a lot of complex software systems to run on some of the stuff I and my team have designed. I've been wanting to take this skillset and use it for a more frivolous pursuit such as game modding. I got into Fallout back in college playing it in the computer labs when I was supposed to be studying. I then spent half of my Air Force career playing and modding Fallout 2. When I hear 3 was coming out, I took the plunge and bought an Xbox. I loved the game for what it was, which was the basics of Fallout lore on a modern system. When New Vegas came out, I was blown away, because it felt like the old games had finally gotten their much deserved sequel. Anyways, enough about my life story... I've recently been spending a lot more time at home for medical reasons, and I've been killing a lot of time with this nice new gaming PC I picked up to run the RFCW mod with FO3 and FNV. I've been experimenting with various mods on here that I've been drooling over for the past couple of years, and have started modding myself. I've been going through and fixing various bugs, missing textures, broken navmeshes, etc. that have cropped up after I installed the final version of RFCW, I disabled the ability to start in the Mojave (My character is born in the Capital Wasteland and then moves west to become the courier) and added a short little fetch quest to bridge the two wastelands -- Basically the Lone Wanderer receives a note at the same time he/she leaves Vault 101 (at the same time he/she gets all the DLC broadcasts and notes) that invites him/her to take a job with the Mojave Express, the first job being to go to the RobCo factory and retrieve a platinum poker chip that had been mistakenly shipped there from California. He/she grabs the chip and then meets up with Victor who transports the player to the Mojave. I then play the "3 years later" bik, and then start the "Welcome to Fabulous New Vegas" quest, complete with intro movie, and the player wakes up in Doc Mitchell's office. Anyways, I'm having a blast adding new rooms to areas, and I'm just starting to build my own little area with an accompanying quest and I now see what you guys have been addicted to all these years :) It's a blast! My first question to you guys though... I'm having trouble locating exactly what makes the radio stations broadcast. The issue I'm having in my install of RFCW is that they broadcast fine in Wasteland exteriors, fine in interiors, but go silent in exteriors like Megaton or Freeside that get loaded separately from either wasteland. Can anyone point me in the right direction so I can fix this? Thanks in advance!