Fallout: New Vegas

[AtmaWeapon]

I'm going to try to limit my length to 1,000 words (not counting the 18 in this sentence.)

If you played Fallout 3, you've played New Vegas but you might be disappointed. New features provide a more challenging and balanced experience but the game doesn't feel as lovingly crafted as its predecessor. If Fallout 3 was a 9/10, I'd say New Vegas is an 8/10.

New features and balance changes are numerous. There are more ammo types, more guns, new skills, new perks, new enemies, and faction reputations to watch. A hardcore mode makes follower death permanent, gives ammo weight, and forces you to eat, drink and sleep just like a real boy. Bobblehead stat bonuses are replaced by implants that are both expensive and limited by your endurance. Skill books are rare but offset by more common skill magazines that offer a very short boost. Guns have both a skill and strength requirement. Broken items like the dart gun and stealth suit have no equivalents. I've played as an Int/Cha focused character and a Str/End focused character and I'm very pleased with how the shift in focus completely changes the game. In Fallout 3 it didn't seem to have such a pronounced effect.

Hardcore mode is an interesting addition but more of an annoyance than anything else. It makes all healing take some time which makes combat more tense, but you carry so much food and water to offset hunger and thirst that most of the time you'll just eat a ton of junk since stimpacks are reduced to "food that doesn't fill you up." The hunger/thirst situation could be a serious concern for low Str characters, but my 10 Str brute has enough food to feed the entire Capital Wasteland so this wasn't balanced very well. Ammo weight is so insignificant and the need to carry varied weapons is so little that you'll rarely bother limiting your ammo due to encumbrance unless you plan on only using missile launchers. Limb damage can only be restored by a relatively rare item or doctors; I find this to be ridiculously inconvenient as it means I sometimes have to leave an area half-explored because some enemy got lucky with a headshot.

Unless you plan on gambling and winning caps are much tighter in the game. This is a problem because I haven't noticed many of the high-end weapons showing up on enemies so you have to purchase them with caps. It's nice that this clashes with the desire to boost your stats with implants but it's also frustrating when you hit level 30 and still can't afford the gun you want. I feel they went a little crazy with ammo variety and included too many. There's a few ammo types that seem too rare; across 2 playthroughs I was able to acquire 50 rounds. No way am I going to spend 8 quests' worth of caps on a gun that's only good for 50 rounds. I haven't used energy weapons but the opposite seems true for them; there's maybe 4 standard ammo types per 1 energy ammo type and by the end of the game I've got more microfusion cells than several different standard ammo types combined.

The challenge is much better in New Vegas. As the non-brute character I found myself in need of a follower in many combat situations. Some of the enemies are probably too difficult, but in many ways I feel there *should* be some enemies you prefer to avoid. VATS accuracy has been dialed down enough I don't use it much; gone are the days when it was more reliable to use VATS than manually aim. The only thing that hurts here is the follower AI is atrocious. You might see a dangerous enemy far away and tell your follower to be passive, but that won't stop them from breaking out a melee weapon and attacking anyway. This hurts more in hardcore, where follower death is permanent. I sometimes have to move my followers somewhere else and tell them to wait when facing something that will require finesse.

Overall I'm pleased with how many different ways you can finish quests. If you have high charisma and speech you can smooth talk your way out of many fights. If you have high intelligence or science you can figure your way out of many fights. If you have neither and are focused on combat you can shoot your way through many fights. Occasionally the "no smarts" approach requires a cruddy "find these items" solution, and I wish they had found a different approach.
This brings me to the ugly part: what's missing from Fallout 3. I feel like the soul of the game just isn't there. The Capital Wasteland was at least 50% bigger and mostly desolate. In NV the map is smaller and there are twice as many locations, but there's half the story associated with them. Many locations are simply a map marker, and many more are just small buildings with insignificant loot and uninteresting enemies. Nearly every location in Fallout 3 had a story you could unravel via terminals, holotapes, and items left behind. NV's locations are as desolate and soulless as FO3's wasteland. The randomly spawned raider encounters from FO3 aren't present; this puts a cramp on what you can do for caps. Most of the quests have a very grindy JRPG "do something the NPC is too lazy to do" feel to them, and often you're only doing them for XP or caps. I feel like FO3 told a much better story and created a better universe than NV.

And then there's the glitches. My first playthrough was nearly ruined by a follower glitch that made none of my followers use their appropriate weapons. Your weapon will often glitch into the center of the screen and obstruct your view when it's not busy falling through the bottom of the screen and returning from the top. NPCs will become hostile for no reason. Quest NPCs will decide to not interact with you. If you were used to the glitches in Fallout 3, they're worse in NV. This is unacceptable and only in the video games industry can such a situation lead to a profitable game.
If you were a fan of Fallout 3 then NV is worth at least one play. I think Fallout 3 is a much more enjoyable game, but it has balance problems that make certain character builds dominate. If you're looking to see what Fallout is all about I think you should start with FO3 and only move to NV if you really enjoy it.

(~1,080 words; not bad considering I usually only stop when I hit the 10k character boundary!)

[Daarkseid]

There was a story a tell in the background of Fallout 3's world because the capital wasteland got nuked to the point where there was no rebuilding of society for a lot longer than most other places in the country. All those terminals, holotapes, and the like exist because the Capital Wasteland had previously been the DC, a place with high population density and development. With 200 years of very little in the way of redevelopment, thanks largely to the super mutants and the heavily irradiated potomac, society hadn't begun to move again and begin clearing out the remnants of the old.

Its in that area Fallout 3 had to standout, because otherwise theres little else in the game that isn't lifted from the previous Fallouts; Super-mutants, FEV, the Brotherhood of Steel and the god damn Enclave. The Fallout 3 world is kind of new to the series, and evidently new to the post-great war societies that had formed more than a century ago. EDIT: The lifting of stuff from the earlier fallouts isn't a fair criticism, considering how much is lifted into New Vegas. But it makes more sense in New Vegas considering the region is literally next to where Fallout 1 took place(southern California).

New Vegas, on the other hand, is telling its story with the actual characters, the actual events from previous Fallout games(mostly 1 and 2), and with some actually decent writing. This is probably what makes the game less stellar for people who only started with 3 though. There's not going to be any appreciation for references to the events in the Core region that directly caused the situation in Vegas. There's not going to be much in the way of clues from 200 years prior anyway, because Vegas never became depopulated, and the area immediately surrounding Vegas is literally(even in the real world) a wasteland without a nuclear war needing to take place.

Except for the fact I found at times exploring resulting in some lame finds(like an abandoned shack that had literally nothing to pick up or interact with), New Vegas is a superior game to Fallout 3. Better writing, characters, and quests that have far more solutions. The reputation system is also more interesting than the basic karma system, and better represents a world that isn't black or white, morally. The crafting system is far more useful than in Fallout3, though there's still a bunch of recipes that are either too much trouble to be worthwhile(like the recipe for Atomic cocktails requires two Nuka-cola victories, Atomic Cocktails can be found all over the place, especially in liquor cabinets, but Nuka victories are as rare as or more rare than Quantums were in F3), or they're largely superfluous because you can find the finished product more easily than the ingredients(like doctor's bags are just easier to purchase than to make). Making ammunition is also neat, but again its mostly for making custom ammo types, standard ammunition is better off bought from merchants. Part of what makes crafting ammunition difficult is that primers are only available with some merchants, rarely, and the Gun Runners, who only supply at most 2 boxes of each primer type, and sometimes they don't have more of that type the next time they restock. Your only recourse is to get another ammo type that uses the same primer type, and break it down. Which may be the intended purpose of the reloading bench. Less about actually more ammunition and more about producing custom ammo. It still kind of irritates that obsessive part of me that wants to find some use for all those 10mm and 5.56mm casings I've accumulated, but I know I never will because they're generated faster than primers become available.

I say all this as somebody who enjoyed the hell out Fallout 3(played through the game 8 times and all 5 dlcs repeatedly). I also recognized Fallout 3 had an awesome world to go exploring as a lone wanderer, but in every other respect, New Vegas is just a superior game.

Then again maybe its because I'm also something of a gun nut who also played Fallout 1 and 2. The trail Carbine, a lever-action breach loading rifle chambered in .44 magnum, became a much favored weapon after I modded a scope onto it and found it did a respectable job killing Death Claws(not a fan of the anti-material rifle because of its slow firing rate and str requirement).

The glitches are a huge deal though. A few of them were actual programming bugs that have been patched for the PC version, but the vast majority seem to be due to the actual game content, like scripting errors, and the developers are wanting to get all of them taken care of before releasing a big patch to fix it all. That the game has been out for more than a month without a major patch is disappointing, Veronica was a such an awesome companion but the fact she doesn't level with the player means she becomes easily shredded later on against hordes of even fairly easy enemies. I've been able to avoid a lot of the other major bugs due to foresight and playing accordingly(like not putting food and other consumables in ED-e, because other NPCs, whether hostile or not, will want to get at said consumables, and will by their scripted behavior, have to kill ED-e to get at it).

[AtmaWeapon]

I don't disagree with your rebuttal; I changed my playstyle a bit and found ways around some of my complaints. I don't think we see eye to eye on the story segments though.

I understand there's many, many references to the prior installments in the series. I also agree the writing is a little better. But what really grinds my gears is the sheer number of filler locations. As you pointed out, there's many places that are full of garbage with no real reason to exist. Vault 11 is probably the best location in the game IMO. The rest of it just feels less alive; I suppose your point that NV has been picked over much more than the capital wasteland is valid but I'd argue I'm trying to play a video game, not watch a documentary.

I still feel like the game requires high-end weaponry too quickly and is too stingy with the ammo for said weaponry. Some of the "common" items are pretty hard to come by too. I love my AM rifle to death but for some reason I can only find AP ammo for it in any quantity; the best I've done is 50 incendiary and 50 regular ammo in 23 levels. I picked up a tire iron early on, then couldn't find any with which to repair it for 6-8 hours; I had to replace it with a lead pipe. Now the pipe's in sad shape and I can't find a replacement. WTF? Pretty much the only long-term viable melee weapon seems to be machetes since the legion soldiers generate them for you. Too bad there's not many random encounters!

I also think the game's load time is atrocious and the structure of many quests make it worse. The King's Freeside quests were awful and are vital if you don't have many caps or don't want NCR reputation:

Go to the other side of Freeside, do some stuff, and return (3 load screens)
Talk to some people in the Mormon Fort (6 load screens)
Research and return (4 load screens)
Finish the quest (4 load screens)

It's a really simple JRPG style "talk to this guy then come back over and over again" quest, but with travel times and load screens it can take 30 minutes or longer to finish. All of the casino quests are really bad about this, and I really hate doing anything around the strip because the whole thing's tiny areas connected by load screens. They rub salt in the wounds when they toss a crappy location at you: you get to waste 2 minutes staring at load screens when you could be playing. I know this isn't true, but I almost always feel like I spend more time waiting on the game to load than I do playing it.

I'm glad we agree on the glitches. This week's bother was my followers disappeared from where I told them to wait. If I wasn't playing hardcore I could have just slept off a week; since that would have cost a lot of food/water I had to just wander around without them until I got notice that they had died. I picked up Veronica again but might dismiss her; I got used to being solo and it was really nice to not have to fear she'd run off and attack a deathclaw on the other side of the world or something.

I love the game to death but between the glitches and frequent load times it can be a real exercise to play it.

[Mercy]

Why don't we have a "front page" blog for this sort of writing any more? I particularly like different takes on the same game.

We have been holding off on picking up New Vegas because of the glitches. I still have fond memories of chasing patches while playing through Fallout many moons ago but never again.

-m.

[AtmaWeapon]

I had a great glitch last night. I turned in a quest with the NCR ambassador, which pushed my NCR fame to "Idolized". 10 seconds later, an NCR MP shows up. "Fancy meeting you outside of the strip. Now you're going to learn why you don't cross the NCR!" I was in the strip! I was idolized by NCR! They attacked me! Killing them pissed off everyone in the embassy, so I reloaded the save. It happened again. So I reloaded again and this time just ran; the MPs followed me outside and this set off the New Vegas securitrons. After a few reloads and an experiment or two, I was able to lure the MPs into an out-of-sight room and let my follower kill them; I didn't gain any NCR infamy for that since there were no witnesses.

I think what's holding the patch up is Microsoft's byzantine approval process. From what I gather it can take a month or longer to push a patch through Live, so I think the devs make larger patches so they don't have to go through that process too much.

I still think high-end ammo is too limited and mid-range weapons don't do enough damage. I started working on Black Mountain for the first time last night and it was a major pain; it takes a ton of ammo to bring down a super mutant, and even with 10 strength and 100 melee I'm not doing much to them with a super sledge or rebar club. I killed about 4 mutants and it took half my AM rifle ammo and 3/4 of my shotgun ammo. Next go-around I guess I'll do it lower-level with Boone, the ridiculously overpowered follower.

I think I'll finish up this playthrough, move on to Call of Duty, then come back to NV once a couple DLC packs have come out. They ought to have ironed out some of the worse glitches by then, and I'd love to do another sneaky sniper. The game's difficulty varies too wildly to make a brute force playstyle feasible. One minute I'm ripping through fiends with high-end weapons, the next I'm getting killed in 5 seconds by a herd of golden geckos. Cazador are ridiculous, and I can only take down deathclaws if I have sniping distance. I miss my broken dart gun.

[Daarkseid]

I didn't find the supermutants on black mountain particularly difficult to kill, though maybe that's due to hitting the place before level 20 or 30. Or maybe I'm appreciating being able to unload my weapon into something that doesn't go down quickly(such as human type enemies), nor is able to take me down the moment it closes its distance to me(as with Death Claws). Or my campanion helped out, Veronica or Cass(who can burn through a shit load of ammo using a lever action weapon).

Whatever the case, Black Mountain wasn't hard for me. I think the first time time, I remember there being a rather dirty melee fight breaking out between me, veronica and two supermutants up close, but I got out of it after going into the pip-boy and dosing myself with chems to give myself an edge.

The enemy I have problems with are Death Claws. Fucking deathclaws, I'm playing a character whose combat specialty is explosives, but sneak attacking a deathclaw with Annabelle(unique rocket launcher) barely did anything but aggro two deathclaws which basically meant I was dead. I'll have to go back and try out plasma grenades, or the grenade launcher, see if there is any explosive weapon capable of bringing down a deathclaw. With my energy Weapons character, I found the Plasma Caster did a good enough job because if the first shot to the death claw's head resulted in a critical, then at least half of its HP would be gone, and the plasma caster has a very high firing rate, so I could finish the deathclaw by sheer force of repeated shots to the deathclaw's torso.

If there's no explosive solution, though, I'll probably just break down and get an AM rifle. Since I haven't touched the .50 caliber stocks at any of the vendors, I should have plenty to take out all the deathclaws in quarry junction, and then maybe finally going to Deathclaw Promontory. I'll just have to make sure to use Steady, because my guns skill is at 55, and I'm currently at level 28. I have two levels left, and that amounts to 30 additional points; if I blow my last perk on Tag!, I could have a 100 Guns skill at level 30. Not sure that I want to do that, however.

Cazadors are nasty, but they're mostly only bad on hardcore when I don't want my companion to die. Then I have to find a way of approaching a swarm in a tactical manner to keep them from attacking all at once. Which is harder said than done, but its the best way to deal with them, short of telling said companion to sit back someplace safe and just taking on the swarm by myself(which can be suicidally dangerous because the venom can mess with your ability to respond to near death by bringing up the pip-boy).

I'm mostly glad the enemies are a lot tougher in this game for reasons beyond simply making the enemy into a bullet sponge, as was the case in Fallout 3's DLCs.

The ghoul reavers and Super mutant overlords were tough, but only because you had to burn through a shitload of ammo, and in the case of the Reavers, probably have to replace your armor afterwards because those fuckers apparently liked to rip your armor off when tearing into you. Then the swampfolk and tribals in Point Lookout were only hard because in addition to their high HP, they got massive damage bonus's when using the weapons found in point lookout. It was only a real matter of just outlasting them by having a ridiculous amount of ammo(pretty easy to accumulate) and stimpacks binded to a key so I could just spam that key when my hp was low.

In the case of some enemies in New Vegas, you have to outlast(like being swarmed by ghouls), but there's no possible way of outlasting a deathclaw without getting the first shot. And only if its one deathclaw. Being assaulted by two is a lot like fighting deathclaws in Fallout 1, except there was a way of winning that kind of fight if you had a high enough agility(and therefore the APs needed to be able to run and shoot), in New Vegas it's a hopeless endeavor. Well, maybe not if you use Turbo. Turbo is an amazing chem to have for serious fights, but its effect is fleeting and there's no real inexhaustible supply if you don't help out with the Great Khans drug lab.

[AtmaWeapon]

I agree a lot with the last post.

Black Mountain was difficult but I think it was a combination of poor planning and self-imposed problems. Veronica's reaching the point where enemies can kill her too quickly for me to save her, so I left her at 188 Trading Post for a while. I could have picked up Boone but I'm trying to play without him this time. My character is very Str/End heavy with 100 in guns and melee and very low sneak, speech, etc. I approached Black Mountain with an AM rifle and about 80 shots, a sniper rifle with 50 shots, a lever-action shotgun with about 80 shots, Liberator (unique machete), rebar club, and frag grenades. My plan was to pick off mutants with the sniper/AM then swap to melee or the shotgun when they got close. I assumed they had high DT so the shotgun seemed like a good choice. The shotgun wasn't worth anything; it took 8-10 headshots to down a Super Mutant Master and I didn't have the ammo for that. The AM rifle could explode the masters if I got a sneak critical, and the sniper rifle could one-shot most of the lesser mutants. I didn't anticipate how many Nightkin there'd be; they were a serious problem even after I managed to fully repair a super sledge from them. The main problem was they hit back while I hit them with melee and my armor was shredded. I didn't complete the quest peacefully, and the combat took me by surprise; good thing I had that super sledge. There was a way I could have skipped most of the combat that I would have done if I knew about it in advance. The peaceful resolution was unavailable to me due to a pitiful 23 repair. Raul's pretty much my favorite follower right now, we're cleaning the scum out of Vault 3 :)

Next trip I'll be attacking it with 75+ sneak, 75+ guns, high speech, Boone, and high enough repair for the peaceful solution. This is my standard setup; to me the best defense is not getting shot at. The game plan then will be to snipe the first few mutants to get a feel for how likely I can make it up the mountain the long way; if that doesn't look realistic I'll take the easy way.

Deathclaws are really fearsome; I think I've complained about them twice so far and they deserve a third. With 10 strength and 100 guns, it takes 3 AM shots to kill one *if* I make a critical on the first. If I start shooting from maximum range, it gives me *just* enough time to kill the deathclaw before its first blow lands. If I aggro a 2nd deathclaw in the meantime I may as well reload a save. The AM's the only effective approach I've found. My last character had 100 sneak and 100 guns when I took on the quarry, and I had to stick to the ridge and drain 8+ shots per deathclaw with 2-3 of them criticals; it took an hour to clear it out. I've got 55 explosives but so far every grenade I throw doesn't really bother the deathclaw. Melee's just a stupid choice. I don't even want to think about trying anything called Deathclaw Promontory. The cazador aren't so bad on this character due to high endurance reducing the odds of getting poisoned, but it's still an intense fight. On my sniper characters if I can't drop 3 of the cazador before the swarm comes running I'm in serious trouble. I agree that the really high-end enemies in FO3 were just ridiculous. I got to where I'd just sneak by overlords because it wasn't worth the time to kill them.

My remaining gripe is the good armor is so expensive and you don't really find it on any enemies. It wasn't a bother for my sniper because I was rarely taking damage and wore only light armor. For my melee tank I'm usually smashing someone's face in point blank and it really eats up the armor. I can barely afford to keep reinforced leather armor in decent shape, let alone think of dropping 8k caps on heavier armor.

[Daarkseid]

Heavier armor seems to be a lot more durable than the stuff you find earlier in the game. I've taken some serious abuse while using Reinforced Combat Armor mk II, and it still managed to remain at 17 DT(from the max 20).

Power Armor is even more durable, but that requires becoming a member of the Brotherhood of Steel. Without that, you neither get access to non-brotherhood faction power armor(which makes the NCR want to destroy you) or the training to use it. I just finished clearing quarry junction, where I got mauled a few times by the death claw I was currently killing. Although my T51-b helmet got trashed, the armor itself is still at its maximum 25 DT. There's is another way to get power armor training, but that requires finishing a certain companion's quest.

Only issue with Power Armor(other than the aforementioned requirements) is when needing to repair it, you either need Jury Rigging so you can use less expensive Metal Armor to repair it, or else you're going to have to pay an NPC a ridiculously high sum to get it back to nominal condition.

As for my experimentation of explosive weapons against Death Claws, the most reliably quick method was to lay 3 C-4 charges in the path of a death claw, then get the death claw's attention with a well aimed rocket, before quickly switching to the detonator. In two instances, the explosion not only killed the deathclaw, but amusingly launched it into the sky, never to be seen again(probably some havoc issue). Otherwise, plasma grenades, the grenade launcher were horribly deficient when factoring in their firing/reloading rates. Annabelle could do some serious damage when firing high explosive missiles(expensive), but in the end I found myself having to resort to a gun to finish off the beast.

Its also in that instance I found the M1 Garand(called This Machine in game) could also be an amazing weapon against death claws when loaded with .308 AP. I wound up just sniping the mother deathclaw and babies using This Machine from an excellent sniping position. Though I did have, as insurance, a C-4 trap set in case the mother caught onto me and decided to run onto the ridge. Didn't have to use it, thankfully.

As for Deathclaw Promontory, I'm probably going to experiment with the Grenade Machinegun, as well as the Fat Man. Hopefully a 100% in explosives as well as the perk that increases blast radii will cause some serious damage, though I'm about 80% certain I'm going to be horribly killed in the process.

[AtmaWeapon]

That's it for me until the entirety of the DLC comes out. Tonight I knew I just had the last 3 NCR quests to do, and wanted to do the unaligned ending as well. Instead, here's what happened:

Elder MacNamara glitched due to some weirdness with ED-E's quest and wouldn't let me achieve the peaceful BoS/NCR agreement. Sucks that I spent so much time on his quests and Veronica's quest. The game forced me to kill them.
ED-E is hostile to me. Maybe because of my NCR rep?
Raul decided to glitch during the last NCR quest and sit in one room. So I fought room after room of 6+ legion guys solo.
When I got outside, the game froze.

Forget this game, the horse it rode in on, and may the children of the developers fail in all of their life's ventures for seven generations. I'm never buying another Bethesda game new again; from now on I wait until it's used + DLC disc to ensure they don't get a cent of my cash. I just spent 60 hours of my life on a game I can't even beat because they were too busy masturbating to children having sex with animals to let fourth graders inspect their scripts for errors. The guys that wrote Action 52 could probably teach Bethesda a thing or two about programming.

[Daarkseid]

Wow, that sucks. I recently completed the game by way of the NCR quest line, and Eureka! is made slightly easier by having two brotherhood Paladins at your back. Their tri-beam lasers cut centurions to ribbons. A shame they don't follow you as far as to the legate's camp, though they would probably get killed by then anyway.

Haven't heard of ED-E going hostile.. except in instances where he was sent back to primm for whatever reason. Mostly I had to put up with him being rendered non-functional after his upgrade, and then he disappeared when I went through Vault 34. I had expected him to be sitting still at the entrance(right where I first ran into the first enemy to trigger ED-E's ceasing of function), but I think one of the scripted events in vault 34 caused ED-E to start moving towards me again, at which point he probably ran into a ghoul, stopped moving, and then got killed. And due to a glitch in the game, I wasn't notified of his death, nor did I lose the enhanced sensors perk.

I didn't really mind losing him at that point, since he was little more than an inconvenient static storage device, and getting to keep his perk was a nice consolation.

The patch that was recently released seems to have fixed some stuff, though reportedly there's still some issues(and just now the game froze on me when exiting my room in Novac).

It would probably be a better use of your time to put off playing the game any longer until the DLCs have all come out, and then at that point, start up a new game. I suspect the game will still have occasional freezes, however. Fallout 3 still continued having freezes at various points, even after Mothership Zeta(awful) was released. One annoying one I recall is having a sewer zone(the one where you can find a ghoul who has a nuka-cola collection) become off limits after I initially left it because of needing to empty my inventory. From that point one, entering it from both entrances caused the game to freeze during the loading screen.

[AtmaWeapon]

Yeah, freezes don't normally bother me but this one was the last straw. This was a frustrating playthrough for me because I chose a build that is outside my normal playing parameters and I had to learn the hard way that you *really* need either high lockpick, or science (and preferably 2 of the 3) to get the best stuff. I'm still missing the achievement for finishing three of the paths; I'll come back when DLC is out and finish up this game then start one that has me allied with the Legion. I'm not looking forward to that either. (My fallout characters always hate slavers.)

[Starkist]

Sure I'm late to the party, but I just got New Vegas a few weeks ago after I finished some college classes. I played it through once on the independence track and just now finished the Legion questlines. I agree with all the good things said about the game. It's as good as Fallout 3, only better, with much more variety and intricacy.