Want to get back into NV, realism mods?

[Acoustic101]

Looking to get back into NV and really need some suggestions/answers to questions:

 

Any realism mods (sounds, more damage, ect)?

 

Wasteland defense vs RTS?

 

Should I possible resort back to Fallout 3 with the 2 questions in mind ^?

 

Thank you!

[jcro25]

For me the essential mods for fallout new Vegas are:

Fellout\Nevada Skies for the weather

NMC's texture pack which really improves the default textures and makes the game feel much more realistic

Project Nevada for realistic gameplay, cannot play without it

WRP-weapon retexture project, drastically improves most weapons in the game.

 

Hope this helps,

Jcro25

[charwo]

What about environmental mods? I doubt the Green World mod for NVis realistic, although to be sure, I'd need to read up on the state's vegetation status pre-settlement. That said, does vanilla NV and DLC accurately show the plant life of the regions depicted?

[jcro25]

The best environmental mod I have had and forgot to say is the Wasteland Flora Overhaul by vurt, It allows you to pick between a wasteland that is alive and has regrown or a more realistic dead wasteland which includes trees cactus's etc

The file can be found here:

Wasteland Flora Overhaul by vurt

Hope this helps,

Jcro25 :nuke:

[charwo]

Wasteland Flora overhaul. Sounds awesome!

 

But why is a dead wasteland more realistic? The barren Potomac watershed was one of the most glaringly unrealistic of all of the features of Fallout 3. Even more unrealistic than having to shoot a raider in the head at point blank range four or five times to fell them. Radiation does a lot of crap, but burnt out world is not nearly one of them. That's a Mad Max convention and only works in Mad Max because the Australian Outback is by nature a barren, lifeless hole. Nukes had nothing to do with it. And if you don't believe me, look at any recent picture of the Chernobyl Exclusion zone. It wasn't barren in the early 90s, and the flora and fauna in the region today are THRIVING, albeit with much high cancer rates.

[Ladez]

Well, I think there's a big difference between an explosion at a nuclear power plant that releases a s***-ton of radiation into the atmosphere, and a city being hit with multiple nuclear warheads. I haven't read much about chernobyl, but from what I understand there was no giant fireball explosion. In the image below it's clear that there was some major damage, but not the widespread destruction that a nuclear warhead would have made. So I don't think chernobyl is a fair comparison in this case. Washington D.C. was hit hard in 2077, being the capital and all, so I think the destruction there is pretty realistic. As for New Vegas, that region was pretty much unscathed by the Great War, so I agree that it would not be as dead as the Capital Wasteland. With that said I do believe that some of the screenies of WFO looks a bit over the top. It is a desert after all. There's pretty much grass there, but not so many trees.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1b/Chernobyl_Disaster.jpg

[charwo]

Ah, but the thing is, it's been two centuries. Even with a horribly polluted water table, it still wouldn't do the damage. In fact, the whole notion of the burnt out earth would require something so dramatic that would end human life well before plant. And take a look at the area right outside the Chernobyl reactor:

 

http://cache.io9.com/assets/images/8/2012/01/5041643a2bdfc67ca4abcb240a917c2c.jpg

 

The thing is, you're dead on about the catastrophic damage to DC itself. The issue is that there is no device known to man that could trigger the environmental destruction. There are in theory conceivable weapons that could burn out the DC area that badly in the weeks and months after the explosions. But, by 2081, 200 years before New Vegas, the DC area would be green again, those trees that died in the countryside would have burned to ash making fertile soil. There wouldn't anything but saplings, and the water table would still be radioactive as all get out, but life will arise anew. Everything else in Fallout can be justified, albeit sometimes with tortuous logic. But you can't justify the burnt out world, the green mods are required in any realism mod mash.

[Ladez]

All right, you make a good point. But I stand by my opinion that the Mojave Desert should not be turned into a green area. As said, there should be lots of grass, but the trees should be far from each other in order to look anything like the real desert. But don't get me wrong, it's not up to me what people do with their own games ;)

[TrickyVein]

In fact, the whole notion of the burnt out earth would require something so dramatic that would end human life well before plant.

 

Sometimes reality can exceed fiction. I take your point about either 1) life continues, or 2) it doesn't, but as far the visual aesthetic of the wasteland, dry and dead is far more appealing, as well as serving the 'Western' appeal of the game better than having forests and plants running rampant. D.C. looks like the bombs fell *20* years ago, which was an artistic decision, rather than *more importantly* paying attention to the issue of deep time (if one ignores this, then you can appreciate at least the consistency of Bethesda's vision, however wrong it may have been); that as we all know, 200 years have passed since then, and the environment should reflect this. One needs to convey not only the immediate catastrophe, but also the ruin since the great war to be considered 'realistic' in the Fallout world. Because New Vegas reused most of the assets from Fallout 3, it too suffers from the same issue, unfortunately. But the desert has always been devoid of life, and always will be.

 

(It is worth noting that many of the species that have since retaken the Chernobyl exclusion area are stunted and mutated, and trees in general respond poorly to acidic soil which results in smaller size, fewer and discolored leaves.)

 

The Enclave were also right when they said that everyone in the wasteland was mutated. It continues to disappoint me that everyone in the Fallout series thus far, except for having the extremes of ghouls and supermutants, look to be in perfect health, their genetic material unaltered. But this is part of the pseudoscience of the Fallout universe which diverges from our reality (atomic energy is safe and has no side-effects!). The rates of missing or disfigured limbs, dwarfism, mental retardation and other issues would skyrocket in the years following, and persist, manifesting throughout generations in the human population, but this is not what we see.

 

There are also top-down artistic design decisions that I would to see implemented in a Fallout game which accurately reflect its universe that I would like to see implemented: there should be no wood that isn't burnt or completely rotted away in any building of pre-war design; no glass should be left un-shattered or completely missing; all metal materials should be rusted and definitely not shiny that haven't been forged anew. Given these conditions, imagine the impact of seeing something kept locked away since from before the war that was in reasonably good condition!

Edited October 2, 2012 by TrickyVein

[charwo]

Ah, but you aren't thinking fourth dimensionally! :D

 

Thing to remember about Fallout is that despite the graphics of the personal computers and 50s aesthetics that the prewar world was as advanced as our in every way, at least until 2020 and probably up to 2077. Know how I know this? Because Mr. Handy was released in the Fallout 2020, and that's about when we'll be able to build them, when the AI configs and the cost of manufacturing will converge to where building robot helpers will be viable. In the last few years we have built robots capable of doing lab tech work and even composing music (her name is Emily Howell and the piece I heard is quite good). The actual computing power is stunning on high end government machines and the AI needed to give RL-3 such a personality. The lack of high end consumer electronics is not evidence of a divergent line of technological development (as the atomic craze clearly did not start until the Resource Wars), it is evident of the development of a pervasive police state and likely massive EMP weapon disruptions as a result of the EC/Arab League War that kicked off the Resource Wars. Fallout isn't 50s, it's clearly pseudo 50s,especially in Fallout 1, and I think that was a deliberate social engineering policy by what became the Enclave. Sure the Transistor wasn't invented in 1947, it was probably invented in 1948.

 

And that's the trick to Fallout: it looks like it's schizo tech and alternate science, but it's not. Not by a damn sight.The buildings look the way they do after 100 to 200 years in terms of how they were built in Fallout. From the very beginning of the series, like the first T-51b the player gets, the fusion reactor in the suit is designed to last for 100 years of continuous operation. The Fallout pre-war was built on the notion of extraordinary overengineering, and frankly, any of the glass you see in Fallout that is still intact speaks not to a game design, but the fact bullet and shatterproof glass were a way of life. If only in the wake of the Resource Wars, the United States rejected the notion of planned obsolescence, and this was probably not a coincidence. The 50s aesthetic was a design, a way of Americans to accept a much, much lower standard of living in an age without affordable gas. Part of the bargain was that what they did get would never wear out. It's likely even the pre-war bonnets are made with space age materials and designs, and I know that must be the case with Vault Suits because the Vault 13 suit survives two relentless campaigns on the Vault Dwellers line. And Fawkes' suit is faded and shredded by his growth, but that it's intact at all is a testament. The buildings of Fallout, at least the ones that are left, were built to last forever. That the Hidden Valley Bunker system had a power supply for 750 years and Vault 101 was designed to last 900 is not a Project Safehouse thing. The Vault 13 waterchip worked without fail at full capacity for 90 years before breaking and the joke is people say the water chips were poorly designed. Everything was built like that.

 

The flora and fauna of Chernybyl are hadly mutated in the sense you're talking about. Plus, random mutations are absolutely natural. Plus, mutation is not something that happens just with radioactivity: there's a mutation among Andes Dwellers that make them much more likely to develop the barrel chests needed to breath the thin air that other people. Now, they need to be born and live in the Andes for this mutation to express itself, and smaller populations of other s do this too, but a mutation is an environmental adaptation. Those trees in Chernobyl that don't grow right will die out in short order, as natural selection is utterly relentless in that regard. The same way Corn, which is such a mutant verity of the grass it cam from it puts Nightkin to shame, would die without human cultivation because they can't self pollinate in numbers needed to make an area sustainable. Also, most of the cows and toy dogs human s keep would suffer the same fate. Brahmin are not a mutation, they were deliberately created, probably out of a craze for cow tongue.

 

There is nothing that can justify the molted look of the Yao Guis and hairless dogs. Nothing. However, the Ghouls do make sense, with one important conceit. Baseline Humans in Fallout are nothing of the kind. They are right on the cusp of being trans human, probably a result of massive genetic engineering for prolonged health and better healing, both of which are coming into fruition now and are needed to control health care costs. Normally the healing time in RPGs is a narrative conceit, but here it explains the Ghouls. The Ghouls didn't die precisely because their healing factor, though genetically damaged, keeps them from dying, and the ones that survive to become glowing ghouls have DNA that allows them to heal damage in the presence of radiation which could ultimately be a gene engineering by absolute design as well. The most unrealistic thing about ghouls given the mutagens of the war and gene manipulation of the pre-war is the lack of wigs and prosthetic noses, both of which can be produced in a pre-industrial scavenger society.

 

And the sad, sad thing about this discussion: in terms of gameplay and such, it makes no difference. Now if you want to justify all the wildlife in Fallout, you need a green mod. Abundant flora is required for abundant plant life and those giant bugs will need almost as much calories in their diet as mammals of equivalent size and the giant radscorpions and death claws are technically mega fauna carnivores that our current earth can't support (thus, no dire wolves and Terrible Pigs). So life has to be THRIVING, especially plant life as it it's the foundation for any food chain. The problem remains: life in general has moved on, but the Wasteland is still a waste because it's not safe for human subsistence agriculture. At least not in the DC area. But even going to Point Lookout that's not the case. Even with the Pitt, there's enough agriculture trade going on for the Pitt Raiders to supply their vast workforce in the steel mills through caravan raiding.