An independent New Vegas mod.

[peadar1987]

To capture the atmosphere of a mass exodus, you could just have a few stragglers, a little brahmin train moving the last of the stuff from Forlorn Hope and McCarran. If you talk to them, they could mention the chaos over the previous week or two.

[devinpatterson]

Victor as the villain gets my vote; the ability to jump from securitron to securitron at will lets him crop up all over the place to cause all kinds of mayhem and be potentially unstoppable;

Yeah it's a killer ability :smile: Imagine the first time you sleep you wake up to a (ambush package) a securitron with victors face, nose to nose. His way of saying your going to be seeing a whole lot more of him. I doubt they'd tip their hand that way, but it sure would make for an iconic moment.

 

Edit: maybe make it appear like a dream with a fade to black afterward, then waking up?

 

 

if he can take possession of one securiton at a time until you've destroyed the last securitron in the army then that's a bargaining chip he can use against the courier for blackmail purposes, or the carry out "Houses Last Will and Testimony" or some such.

We we're thinking of preserving House in the NCR and Independent quest line. There's info on the wiki about personality matrices from living persons into bots (Jane for example). Plus he's in a advanced auto-doc of unknown capability, so it seems like it's not too much of a strech for it to perform this procedure upon his death. Consider it a contingency plan in case his mortal coil was to pass. So if House was killed we thought he could live on as a digital personality matrix (in a mainframe or bot). If he's not killed his body will mysteriously disappear (victor carts him off).

 

And then the two of them go on a vengeance/revenge spree using Victors special ability. One of the first things Victor does is overload the now active lucky38 reactor and disable/lock terminals, doors etc that lead to it. The player must race against time to get that reactor stopped. While he/she is doing this, a hacking attempt will be made via victor against Yesman in the mainframe, so the player must also stop that, or all securitrons in NV become hostile to the player. Basicly it's just a really bad day for our hero, that goes from crappy to worse. The basic idea is here in a previous post, but it's been tweaked in later posts.

 

Also (and im more than happy to contribute to this) how about making Victors (or House, or Yes Man) voice all broken up and distorted like the The Master in Fallout 1? It'd be a fine way to recycle in-game dialogue, disguise any additions to it, and seamlessly add in new audio without it spoiling the moment.

I like that idea :thumbsup: There was cut content, where victor is supposed to cuss you out and have a little battle after you leave the penthouse. How about we restore it, he gets shot up and killed, but the next time they meet his voice is all messed up like you describe. And yeah that would work for a Yesman damaged by the hacking attempt or a resurrected digital House as well. Nice call

edit.

 

Edited July 13, 2013 by devinpatterson

[devinpatterson]

To capture the atmosphere of a mass exodus, you could just have a few stragglers, a little brahmin train moving the last of the stuff from Forlorn Hope and McCarran. If you talk to them, they could mention the chaos over the previous week or two.

 

Well you just add some travel packages and have a quest script activate them, so they'll head out to the outpost or whatever. The player might see them or s/he might miss it entirely. So I was thinking less a mass exodus and more lots of little groups making their way out. the players more likely to catch a glimpse of them if there's many smaller groups, leaving at staggered times.....a few here, a few there, kind of thing.

[devinpatterson]

Too be honest I think that the space line quest may be stretching things a bit far.

Yeah it would be a monumental task for the whole plan(maybe off to a martian research center/base), but it doesn't have to go in that direction. It can be concerned with the early stages and make additional quests for House to assign. Might make a nice change to Houses other quests of basically kick'n the cr*p out of everyone he doesn't like or thinks has crossed him. It doesn't ever have to actually touch on leaving the planet.

 

But I wouldn't mind hearing ideas about leaving these earthly bounds either. Maybe it could be tied into the mars mod if it ever gets off the ground.

 

True enough, House wants to start sending humans into space but he realizes that it will take about a hundred years and I doubt that the Courier would have the means to pull off something like that. Maybe something can be done along those lines in a addon for the TSC Vegas mod. Only problem is that particular mod is currently hidden until the author Nylonathep fixes it and finishes his work on Mothership Zeta Crew for Fallout 3.

I think Zeta really depends on alien tech, and having that mothership. Without it, it all kind of falls apart. I kind of gathered that House would be using Repconn's new(ish) plasma rocket technology (my assumption of why he bought it). Which makes a reasonably short trip to Mars. A real world analog (don't know if I heard it on NPR or read it on the web) mentioned that plasma rockets could send a man to mars in as little as two weeks (never followed up on that to verify though).

[devinpatterson]

But I take your point Devilman, a unrealistically large/ambitious mod to involve space travel. And then where would they go? Orbital base like van burne, lunar or martian installation? The stars themselves? The wasteland's bad, but any other off world natural environment is much, much worse.

 

Still, interesting to speculate about.

[Devilman1975]

 

I kind of gathered that House would be using Repconn's new(ish) plasma rocket technology (my assumption of why he bought it).

 

Just an idea I've had for the House version, if the Bright Brotherhood survive the quest Come Fly With Me and return to the Repconn test site afterwards I can imagine that House would probably consider them squatters and order the Courier to have them removed. Since the place is important to the Bright Brotherhood I doubt that Jason Bright could be convinced or payed to leave. House would want to send in his securitrons to secure the place if he plans on using it for his space program in the far future.

[LuciaofArroyo]

(i don't mean to clutter this thread with potential storytelling that may be unrelated to the story so far, but here's my idea for Act 1 of this story, any thoughts?)

 

Ok- player incarnates in the music room of the Tops Casino (companions return to their default locations to free up the lucky 38), living the high life... two weeks or so after the Hoover Dam encounter (NCR has been mostly evacuated and Vegas is essentially independent, i think the easiest way to get this done is to just assume that either House or the Courier were in charge of Vegas, and NCR went home being given simple trade agreements to satisfy them and the Legion lost), suddenly someone runs in and informs the player that the securitrons on the strip have gone beserk and are firing on the casinos and citizens, he suggests everybody evacuates to the upper levels of the casino for safety. The people in the music room panic and exit at the door, the player is engaged in conversation again by one of the chairmen who asks something along the lines of “what do we do, you’re supposed to be in charge now!”, the player can then have the chairman follow as a companion of sorts (disposable muscle that’s ineffective against a securitron anyway) or tell him to evacuate the guests from the casino, or whatever, and gets a little exp and karma for telling him to do the “right thing”.

 

 

The player exits the music room –begin sound effects of distant gunfire and explosions- and makes their way through the front of the casino which is now mostly empty as the guests have fled. The back of the casino near to the elevators has been barricaded, and there are two more chairmen there, one engages the player in conversation and can be recruited much like the first one was. When the player nears the front desk of the casino they find a blackjack dealer girl who tells them that Swank has been killed (assuming the player kept him alive in the first place) and the securitrons are butchering everybody in sight, again the player can recruit her or tell her to get to safety, she tells the player that “they always knew the securitrons might snap one day”, and hands the player a key to a container in the money room of the casino, where there’s a small stock of pulse grenades.

 

When the player leaves the casino the warzone sound effects get louder (obviously, there’s carnage everywhere, the strip is a bloodbath), and a lone securitron rolls over to the player. It’s Victor! “Howdy Partner!” He explains the situation that… (well, I guess the working idea is that Mr House or a backup copy of him has seized control of the network, so we’ll go with that, right?) …and that the player is persona non grata in New Vegas, and Victor, and the other securitrons on the strip attack.

 

 

(the terrain of the strip… the grenade and missile launchers of the securitrons can turn the landscape to rubble and open up the avenue to create little areas, but whatever the case may be, the whole area is a smoldering ruin; Gomorrah and the Ultraluxe are blockaded with rubble ((oh boy, wouldn’t it be nice to turn the Ultraluxe into a hole in the ground?)), the exit to freeside is blocked off by a fallen piece of the Gomorrah Casino ((there’s plenty of terrain from Lonesome Road that can be used here)), and the lucky 38 is on lock down (and of course The Strip areas have been merged together to form one sandbox). Basically, the only areas the player can enter at this point will be the Tops Casino, NCR Embassy and the Monorail Station.)

 

 

Once the securitrons have been dealt with, the player must “tend to the wounded”, and amongst the existing corpses a handful of wounded civilians spawn, and the player must check them one by one, gathering more info about what’s happened. After each of these have been spoken with (or shot by a noob player for kicks), another chairman appears and engages the player in conversation, telling the player that the securitrons are in the process of laying waste to freeside in great numbers, and that they should escape Vegas while they still can. “Like hell I’m going to abandon my weapons and junk I spent the whole game collecting that are inside the lucky 38!” the player (as good as) replies, defiantly. The Chairman shrugs and leaves you to your fate, as he (and any surviving companions) flee to the Monorail Station.

 

 

This occurrence, after a few moments, triggers booming loudspeakers as the last will and testament of Mr House is read to the Strip and Freeside accompanied by classical music, warning sirens begin to blare advising citizens of “Las Vegas” that enemy bombers are approaching the city, almost drowning out the will and testament itself.

 

 

The player is given two quests; “escape vegas” or “retake the casino”, the casino line is doomed to fail but should be playable, and it’s the escape route that should be considered the main storyline from this point.

 

 

Should the player attempt to retake the casino, a securitron carcass will have spawned that holds an override command to unlock the doors of the casino, once inside, the doors will lock and the play will combat several god-like securitrons until (at the end of a 60 second timer let’s say) the casino explodes, and the player dies.

 

 

Should the player “escape vegas” however, they’ll be directed to the abandoned monorail station where they find the chairman and friends desperately fiddling with the controls to bring the train back to Vegas from Camp McCarran, but they’re failing to do so. The Chairman asks for help, and the player suggests (duh) that there would be a keycode or something at the NCR Embassy, which the player now must go and find.

 

 

As the player exits the station, Victor appears again, this time by himself, engaging the player in a conversation where when asked “didn’t I already kill you”, he explains that he can move from securitron to securitron (I think this dialogue is explained in his appearance at Novac, but in my first 2 games I didn’t hear him saying this, so I guess it might be worth recycling the lines to set him up as the “immortal victor” that he now is). He explains that Houses last resort defences have kicked in, and missiles are indeed on their way to hit Vegas, giving the player a visible countdown until impact, (no more than 3 minutes, enough to get into the embassy and back again, and deal with victor) and then victor attacks once again. Once inside the Embassy, the place has been stripped of items apart from some clutter and empty wooden crates, a wall safe and of course the front desk and the ambassadors desk are still there. The player is directed to the wall safe, which is unlocked and empty, the player is then directed to the ambassadors desk and there’s nothing there either... leaving the player with nothing. At this point a note would spawn underneath the front desk, it shouldn’t be marked, but if the player is smart they’ll figure out where to look for it, and picking it up completes the “find the key” portion of the quest. Heading back outside to the strip there will be some rampaging Kings thugs running towards you from the direction of the lucky 38, marked as hostile, who’ll attack. This is explained later as retaliation, since Freeside would think that the fat cat citizens of The Strip finally set the robot army loose to “clean up freeside”. The player can fight them, and will be followed by them anyway, but once the player’s inside the monorail station they’ll disappear. After the player uses the embassy code to bring back the monorail, there’s an explosion and the screen fades to white.

 

 

(sound good so far? Clearly the player ends up at the abandoned camp McCarran.. that's where I was thinking of going with it... but yeah, any thoughts?)

[peadar1987]

 

To capture the atmosphere of a mass exodus, you could just have a few stragglers, a little brahmin train moving the last of the stuff from Forlorn Hope and McCarran. If you talk to them, they could mention the chaos over the previous week or two.

 

Well you just add some travel packages and have a quest script activate them, so they'll head out to the outpost or whatever. The player might see them or s/he might miss it entirely. So I was thinking less a mass exodus and more lots of little groups making their way out. the players more likely to catch a glimpse of them if there's many smaller groups, leaving at staggered times.....a few here, a few there, kind of thing.

 

 

You could set up a cubic activator outside the areas that are being evacuated, the front gate of McCarran, for example, and when the player enters it, spawn the troops and caravans leaving, that way they'll only activate when it's appropriate. Or even have them knocking around, and use the activator to add a travel package.

[devinpatterson]

if the Bright Brotherhood survive the quest Come Fly With Me and return to the Repconn test site afterwards I can imagine that House would probably consider them squatters and order the Courier to have them removed.

Yeah, good point. And House's dbag'ry continues across the Mojave. Aren't there also some members remaining though, when the ghouls take off? If so we can play out that story line without having them come back to earth (if we want). House sends in Securitrons (before he contacts the courier), they are blocked (locked doors, or need to be hacked) and so he sends in his "problem fixer"?

 

BTW interesting to think of them returning. I kind of always thought it was a suicide mission. But if they did come back would they be limping home, low on fuel, near death? Or would they had found something......maybe something that Jason wants to warn people of, or something that he wants to bring more ghouls to (an installation/base out there)?

[devinpatterson]

i don't mean to clutter this thread with potential storytelling that may be unrelated to the story so far, but here's my idea for Act 1 of this story, any thoughts?

I definitely have thought, one of which is you have a real knack/talent for story telling, I'm really impressed :thumbsup: Another thought is greak minds think alike (j/k), I had a similar scenario that parallels some aspects of your story line, but nowhere in the same depth of detail. I think it's going to take a bit to digest and examine, the whole post, so I'm just going to make comments/thoughts piece by piece as I go along...possibly in several posts.

 

i think the easiest way to get this done is to just assume that either House or the Courier were in charge of Vegas, and NCR went home being given simple trade agreements to satisfy them and the Legion lost

We definitely do have that in the House ver and an option for it in the Independent. I didn't want the player to feel like the independent ending was on rails, so I thought we could have 3 general directions; Keep the NV treaty (gain NCR fame, loose substantial income), issue a letter of withdrawal (essentially exactly the course you outlined above) and just for the sake of granting the player freedom of choice, issue a declaration of war.

 

On the House ending, I'm not worried about the player feeling like his/her choices are limited, because with House calling the shot, they are on rails. He issues a order of withdrawal right away (your scenario above).

 

the player is engaged in conversation again by one of the chairmen who asks something along the lines of “what do we do, you’re supposed to be in charge now!”, the player can then have the chairman follow as a companion of sorts

I like your idea of a disposable chairman, even if he can't make a dent in teh securitrons, he'll draw fire. A couple points though. If the House ending is implemented you end up as the courier's right hand man (or woman) and as such, your not under attack by house. He'll use you, but not try to kill you. Or did I misunderstand, and you'd recommend axe'ing the House ending all together?

 

On the independent ending, however, yeah he wants to kill you a 1000 different ways, as slowly and painfully as possible. So it works great for the independent ver of the mod.

 

S*censored* has been killed (assuming the player kept him alive in the first place) and the securitrons are butchering everybody in sight, again the player can recruit her or tell her to get to safety, she tells the player that “they always knew the securitrons might snap one day”, and hands the player a key to a container in the money room of the casino, where there’s a small stock of pulse grenades.

Is that censored word in reference to House? I like the idea of the backup cache and hte paranoia of hte securitrons.

 

When the player leaves the casino the warzone sound effects get louder (obviously, there’s carnage everywhere, the strip is a bloodbath), and a lone securitron rolls over to the player. It’s Victor! “Howdy Partner!” He explains the situation that… (well, I guess the working idea is that Mr House or a backup copy of him has seized control of the network, so we’ll go with that, right?) …and that the player is persona non grata in New Vegas, and Victor, and the other securitrons on the strip attack.

I can imagine some folksy wisdom about no good, low down snakes in the grass etc :wink: Yeah re: House, if killed a digital copy (his personality matrix) is active, if left alive his body has been whisked to safety (probably a vacation villa somewhere safe).