Fallout Fallout Travel Logs

[danutz_plusplus]

Similar to the other similar logs, and wanting to avoid spamming the currently playing thread.

I'm pretty deep into my Fallout 1 playthrough. I never got this far in any previous attempts.
I've liberated Boneyard from the regulators and sold a bunch of stuff to the mercenaries in the Fortress (the one surrounded by the radiation moat).
Sold so much I've pretty much fully decked my character. I've bought the 9k Sniper Rifle from the Hub, I bought a plasma rifle and a decent chunk of ammo for them all.
So I'm now using my assault rifle as my most basic gun. Interchangeably with my combat shotgun for close targets.
And will revert to the rifle for far targets, and leave the plasma rifle for the ultimate weapon.

So I think I'm now back on the main quest, trying to find the source of the supermutants. My only lead is the Brotherhood sending me into the Glow. I hope that's the lead I need. I also need a bunch of radiation protection.

On a sidenote, I've noticed a bunch of bugs with one very ugly one. I had read that you can use most any containers to store your stuff, since the weight limit is killing me.
Well I stored a bunch of expensive stuff in Gizmo's (in Junktown) desk. And when I went there to get it later, it was gone. Just empty. What the fuck. Should I be expecting any container to have this bug? I used other ones, and was able to retrieve them. But Gizmo's desk really put me on edge. I really don't want to lose my stuff.

Other bugs are more related to the world state. I constantly have characters referencing other characters that were dead.
The last example was Razor, the leader of the resistance that took over Boneyard, referenced going to Smitty, but he had died in the firefight that just happened, during Boneyard's liberation.
There's quite a few other such examples. I was a bit disappointed to see that. But I guess such are games, even back then they were quite buggy.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Holy shit this game isn't kidding. I didn't really understand the mechanics of radiation, and what to use and in what situation, so I kind of cleared the Glow with randomly using or more like not using RadX or Radaway.
So by the time I was done with the area, and wanted to leave via the global map, I would always die seconds after starting on the journey. After reading about the consequences of what I had done and what I should've done, and not wanting to lose my save files, I went and used a savegame editor and buffed my SPECIAL stats to 10 and managed to get to the Brotherhood where they healed me of radiation poisoning. Damn, serious stuff.

What I can't seem to get away is the Radaway addiction my character now has. I assume that's what it is, since the "Chem" marker appeared after I binged on Radaway, hoping to reduce my addiction.
I can't find any guide how to reduce it. Does it just go away on its own?

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Oh, and I bought the sniper rifle for 9k caps, the plasma rifle for 4k caps and some better armor for 5k , when all three of them are given for free to the player in the Glow. Dammit. That's a lot of caps down the drain.
And I couldn't take them all from the Glow with me since I was also quite full. That weight limit is constantly a pain in the ass. If I ever play again I'll dump a lot more into Strength.

 

[JDR13]

I don't think there's anything you can do about Radaway addiction besides waiting for it to go away. According to the Fallout wiki, it last for 1 week.

As for the bugs, I don't remember there being that many, but it's been a lot of years since I last played FO1. It could be that there are more bugs now due to playing it on newer systems/OS.

Did you apply any patches before starting? There's an unofficial patch that is supposed to fix a lot of bugs.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

I don't think there's anything you can do about Radaway addiction besides waiting for it to go away. According to the Fallout wiki, it last for 1 week.

As for the bugs, I don't remember there being that many, but it's been a lot of years since I last played FO1. It could be that there are more bugs now due to playing it on newer systems/OS.

Did you apply any patches before starting? There's an unofficial patch that is supposed to fix a lot of bugs.

I initially tried to apply the Fallout 1 in 2 that lets you play F1 in 2’s improved engine. But gave up on that. So I ended on just the base version from Steam that has the highres patch included. I don’t know of any other fixes included in it.

It’s been very stable and no crashes. Just some quest and world state bugs. But since F1 is so open I can generally work around them.

My only worry currently is hitting that 500 day limit now. I do take my time around things.

 

[JDR13]

Here's the patch I was talking about, though it's probably too late to bother installing it now.

TeamX Fallout 1 Unofficial Patch Version 1.3.5 relased!, page 1 - Forum - GOG.com

Download the best games on Windows & Mac. A vast selection of titles, DRM-free, with free goodies, and lots of pure customer love.

www.gog.com

My only worry currently is hitting that 500 day limit now. I do take my time around things.

Afaik, that was removed a long time ago in one of the official patches.

 

[Couchpotato]

Your making me want to replay the first two Fallout games. Though like I said before, both need a modern day remaster otherwise they show their age, even with mods.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

I've somehow very easily managed to make myself a power armor suit. All it took was talking with some knight to give me some missing part and then another Knight taught me how to repair the suit he had on the table. And I'm not getting any mean looks from other Knights and Paladins about wearing their armor. It's pretty badass piece of suit. I'm not taking any damage from anything normal. Neighter melee or regular firearms. Does it get damaged or need repairs or am I set for life with it?

Also, I just noticed, but is the power armor supposed to increase your strength? I've now got it at 10 and my carry weight has increased. Nice.

I also stumbled on my first of, what I can see, a broken quest. I've gotten a quest to free some knight in the Hub, who I apparently freed ages ago when I was in that part of the Hub. At least I think I freed him. I remember killing those bandits and the gate to his cell is opened, so I must've opened it via lockpicks. Anyway, now I can't finish it since the dude in the Brotherhood doesn't seem to register his as freed. Tough.

So I guess I have no other quests to do but to go west and find the supermutants or something.

Your making me want to replay the first two Fallout games. Though like I said before, both need a modern day remaster otherwise they show their age, even with mods.

Yeah, a remaster with upscaled or remade graphical assets would be amazing. Something similar to the infinity-engine enhanced editions. But I'm not sure who would bother. Though Bethesda pretends to care about this IP. Maybe under Microsoft they'll get more involved. We can only hope.

 

[JDR13]

Yeah, a remaster with upscaled or remade graphical assets would be amazing. Something similar to the infinity-engine enhanced editions. But I'm not sure who would bother. Though Bethesda pretends to care about this IP. Maybe under Microsoft they'll get more involved. We can only hope.

That would be nice indeed, but I agree it's unlikely.

I'm not sure I could replay FO 1 or FO 2 in their original form again. As great as they are, they're starting to get to that point where I have a hard time getting into them due to their age. I prefer to just remember them as I do.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Man does this game feel uneven sometimes in balancing. I managed to clear out the whole north-west supermutant base and destroyed it, all by using the sniper rifle. It's either a bug or the mutant AI sometimes doesn't trigger if you shoot from far away. Though other times it does. I've constantly had groups of supermutants, standing close to each other, and most of the time I managed to take them each one by one, and the rest didn't trigger and never came after me when they should've hear/seen their compatriots getting killed. Other times they do trigger as a group and come at me together, but that was very rare. So, being in power armor I pretty much cleaned the floor with them, from afar.

The Vault under the Cathedral on the other hand has proven to be of an insane difficulty spike. Gangs of a couple of supermutants show how now seem to force me to tear through my stimpacks. They also themselves seem to have enormous amounts of stimpacks so they take a long time to go down. Crazy, I wonder how this whole final area feels if you don't join the Brotherhood of Steel and have their power armor. Or is joining them mandatory?

But besides all of this, I'm really enjoying it still. I love the open-endedness of it and how most of its quests do not require that you follow every breadcrumb so that the next step activates. And I've also looked at a walkthrough and man there's a lot of variation in handling things. Just insane options I would never have realized.

Oh, and found another quest scripting bug. Apparently I was supposed to not just clear the whole supermutant production facility on my own, and needed to return to the Brotherhood for help assaulting it? Because after I cleared and destroyed it I returned to the Elder Scribe, that sent me on this mission, and I had two contrary dialogue lines: one where I told him that I found the supermutant base and needed help clearing it and one where I told him that I've already cleared it. And the first one kept being available even after I told him I destroyed the base, and seemed to go on its scripted way to the end, but luckily it also didn't corrupt my quest state. The option just disappeared after using it once, but with no effect luckily. I was a bit worried that it could corrupt my quest and end up being told to destroy something I couldn't a second time.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Well, I reached the fight with the Master, and it seems I made the bad decision to try and take him on directly in combat. The encounter with his was a real pain in the ass, mainly due to the fact that he endlessly spawns supermutants. I killed like 10+ of them and they kept coming. I suspect that's intended and not a bug?

After a couple of tries of cheesing him from afar with my sniper rifle, I ended up on the easiest way to kill him, before even killing any of his bots or mutants. Apparently pulse grenades do a ton of damage to the Master, so I went back to all the towns and got around 15 pulse grenades. Well it was overkill since about 6-7 of them was enough. And I could throw two of them per turn, as compared to normal weapons which I can only fire once per turn. And that did it very easily. Not proud of the approach, but the fact that he endlessly spawns enemies isn't fun either.

I also had a fun encounter while trying to run away from the self-destruction that the Master triggers when he dies. I sprinted towards the elevator (btw, I still had one elevator on the Master's level that I could not access; I wonder what's behind that). So as I was sprinting towards the other elevator, to take me topside, all the bots activate and the quick ones with blades manage to surround me 2 times and the last time it's right in front of the elevator door. They actually managed to gang-up on me and block my path to the elevator. I was also quite low on health. But I manage to take 2 shots at the one right in front of the elevator door, and then managed, with the last couple of action points, to get on the elevator. Pretty exciting.

I did glance at a few of the other ways of handling this encounter and they do sound cool. I will want to try them at one point when I replay this.
It's been very enjoyable to play. I can kind of see now why this game is getting all the praise. So much versatility in what it allows. It's a very impressive gameplay system they put together.

One thing I find curious about the final cinematic. Were the conclusion shots, where Ron Perlman narrates the state of the world as you leave it,, added later on or something? That whole sequence felt a bit disjointed.
You've got the Cathedral exploding cinematic, then cuts to the conclusion shots, the back to the Overseer telling you to leave. Then back to another cinematic with you walking into the wasteland.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

I just now realized that I finished my Fallout 1 playthrough in around 25h. Is that right? Feels very short compared to other rpgs?
How long do your general playthroughs last, if anyone can remember?

Oh, and a funny thing. In this playthrough, during my first interaction when my name was displayed I realized I had forgotten to input my name. So I was None throughout the whole game.
Which reminded me of a user I kept seeing, either on the rpgwatch forums, or rpgcodex, or maybe nma-fallout, Brother None? I only now realized where he probably got that name from.

Another interesting thing, I started Fallout 2 and noticed that you can barely see Tim Cain, and the guys that left during Fallout 2's initial phase, in the credits. He's only credited as Additional Programmer.
Also no credit given to the initial team, or the core team I should say, for laying the ground work that Fallout 2 was built on. Just the tech alone, since it was built on top of Fallout 1's tech (so much so that you can play Fallout 1 in Fallout 2's engine), should've warranted a proper mention in the credits. But I guess leadership at Black Isle was probably pissed at them for leaving.

Another interesting thing about the Fallout 2 credits, after I applied a few of the various fix packs. The Sfall patch, develop by a group in the community, was apparently shipped in the official versions on steam and gog, but no credit was given to those people for the fixes. So the latest version of SFall edited the credits to include those community members.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Started Fallout 2. While I have played various degrees of F1, I have never touched F2 until now.
I like the attention and much more densely populated areas with quests, at least for the beginning area, but as I go through the dialogue lines some of the lines really don't feel like they're in character. At least not in character of a tribal dude who spent his whole life with his tribe and now sets off on a quest outside of his village.

Some of the remarks you can opt to say are downright immersion breaking and stuff you heard in cheap comedy years ago. (ex, the expression wink wink nudge nudge).
And some characters really feel out of place. For example the other tribal dude, with a bone in his nose. Way too reminiscent of certain older cultures we're now familiar with. You mean to tell me that hundreds of years after the nukes fell some tribes actually reproduced the same tribes we now know of? Feels a bit uninspired.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Now that I'm back on my main rig, it's making playing Fallout 2 kind of ridiculous. I'm on 50% of the screen.

But give it enough time and you kind of forget that it's there. You kind of get lost into the game.
But it is kind of ridiculous that I'm on a 4090 and playing a 25 year old game.

 

[JDR13]

Does it scale properly at least? Looks like it.

Do FO 1 & 2 even let you select a resolution? I don't remember.

 

[Couchpotato]

There are a few HD fanmade patches you could try out.

I'm not sure they would work on monitors with that resolution though.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Does it scale properly at least? Looks like it.

Do FO 1 & 2 even let you select a resolution? I don't remember.

Yeah, it looks good scale-wise.
Not sure if you could originally change resolutions, but you can now, with the hd pack that comes preinstalled with the Steam and GOG versions.
I've followed this guide to setup a few more fix packs: https://technomaxery.com/articles/fallout-on-a-modern-system.html
Technically I can even set it to my native 3840x1600 resolution. But anything higher than 1280x960 basically makes everything tiny as hell, since they're all 2D static images, so they scale down as you increase resolution.
But 1280x960 is perfect for me, and after some time I don't even notice the black bars on the side.

 

[JDR13]

But anything higher than 1280x960 basically makes everything tiny as hell, since they're all 2D static images, so they scale down as you increase resolution.
But 1280x960 is perfect for me, and after some time I don't even notice the black bars on the side.

Yep, I had that same issue when I played through Arcanum a few years back. At 1080p, it was zoomed out so far it looked like an RTS game. Iirc, I settled on 1024x768.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Yep, I had that same issue when I played through Arcanum a few years back. At 1080p, it was zoomed out so far it looked like an RTS game. Iirc, I settled on 1024x768.

That's the resolution I played Fallout 1 at on a 27".

 

[danutz_plusplus]

I've found a better resolution for my ultrawide, in Fallout 2. 1600x900. It's considerably wider, while not too high to make things too small to see.
I've reached the Den, and I'm surprised how much I'm enjoying it. These games really have aged beautifully, considering they're 20/25+ years old.
The 2D artwork was an excellent choice. I can't imagine how awful they would look if they were in 3D. But they look fantastic, even if a bit blurry or pixelated.

I was surprised to find a crashed helicopter from the Brotherhood so close to the Klamath, or whatever the first encampment is called. And no one in town made any mention of it.
I was also surprised to see a Mr. Handy robot there. I never understood the purpose of these robots. Weren't they made as a house appliance/assistant? That's what I remember fallout 4 hinting at? Were they repurposed for military use?

I also cleared the caverns underneath of all rats and other small creatures and got myself a fuel cell from a futuristic looking car.