Playthrough Thoughts

[darthbdaman]

I just did a quick run of the main quest and the wasteland survival guide. I haven't done that since RFCW, and I wanted to share my thoughts on what i noticed.

First, there were almost no bugs. The lack of bugs was quite astounding. I was running a number of mods, and I expected to see quite a few issues with odd leveled lists and duplicated weapons, but i was mercifully spared any of those. 

As far a TTW bugs go, doors being red that shouldn't be, was the most widespread problem. Tons of doors are miscolored. The only other general bug I had was Wadsworth missing some of his voice over. No one else was missing any, which made it especially odd.

I didn't notice any issues playing the main quest, right up until the end. During Take it Back, Liberty Primes pathing is comically terrible, and I had to save and reload multiple times, due to him getting stuck in buildings, water, or just walking in circles. Once I got to the Memorial Rotunda, everything went tits up. The first time I walked into the Rotunda, Autumn and the soldiers immediately started shooting at me, and I couldn't speech him. I reloaded and tried again. This time he talked to me, and when i talked him down and he went to leave, his men started shooting at me. I thought this might have something to do with my Brotherhood Faction Armor, but nope, same thing everytime I tried it.

Once I killed Autumn and his men, I went to go activate Project Purity. Lyons asks who should die. Being the smart person I am, I brought along Fawkes, expecting him to go into the chamber. I told Lyons that, she said okay, and when I proceeded to talk to Fawkes, he gave me his destiny bullshit from vanilla FO3, and refused. This locked the game there, as i had no way of opening the chamber and Fawkes wouldn't agree to do it. So I save reload, kill myself, the ending slides all play properly, and Broken Steel starts as expected.

Considering the alpha state of the mod, it is quite remarkable I encountered so few bugs, so good job everyone :)

As far as suggestions go;

Enclave reputation is completely pointless. It would be cool if they had faction armor, so they wouldn't shoot you on sight, but other than that, you cant get in good standing with them, and it feels very odd having it in the game at all. It's sort of like have super mutant reputation, doesn't make sense.

Lyon's Brotherhood reputation is similarly pointless. The game forces you to be in good standing with them, so outside of faction armor, I don't see the point of this one either.

You should get a 10mm pistol in the vault, if not for lore reasons, for the simple fact the the 9mm doesn't fit within the vault setting at all. It makes sense in the hands of raiders out in the capital, but otherwise, game balance be damned, 10mm fits in way better in the FO3 setting. Make the pistols really low condition maybe.

I really don't like the east coast enclave using MKI Power Armor. I find that it cheapens the idea that the enclave is technologically far superior to the Brotherhood, and is able to properly outfit there soldiers. Maybe have a very rare chance of enclave soldiers using MkI, and have a very rare chance of Brotherhood using T-51b, just to sell the idea that they are diametrical opposites. It also would give a distinct feeling to the West and East Coast variants of each faction.

Minor nitpick, heal the players limbs when they are captured in Raven Rock. If you are playing hardcore, you have just gone through all of Vault 87, and cannot get your limbs healed with stimpacks. Its a pain in the ass, getting stuck in raven rock half dead, limbing through the place. I probably should have brought more doctors bag, but it would still be nice :)

I think that everything I wanted to say, good job if you actually read all of that ;)

[TrickyVein]

Thank-you for taking the time to compose such a well-written and cogent review of your TTW playthrough. Yours is the kind of constructive feedback that I think we all wish we got to see more often.

[quote=darthbdaman]

As far a TTW bugs go, doors being red that shouldn't be, was the most widespread problem. Tons of doors are miscolored.

[/quote]

Indeed they are. There's nothing we really plan to do about it, either. 'Fixing' the ownership of every door that's marked as being owned in the game would be a huge task and cause more issues than the one we have, currently, which is just being inconvenienced by seeing red text instead of green text.

[quote=darthbdaman]

The only other general bug I had was Wadsworth missing some of his voice over. No one else was missing any, which made it especially odd.

[/quote]

See this thread. Seems like it's an ongoing and yet unresolved issue with different NPCs being affected for some individuals. I can't say anything more about it, unfortunately.

[quote=darthbdaman]

I didn't notice any issues playing the main quest, right up until the end. During Take it Back, Liberty Primes pathing is comically terrible, and I had to save and reload multiple times, due to him getting stuck in buildings, water, or just walking in circles.

[/quote]

Not that it's a good excuse for including it in TTW, but this has been a persistent problem with Fallout 3 since its release. TTW includes bugs like this that are in the vanilla game, bugs though they may be. See TTW Fixes for addressing some of them.

[quote=darthbdaman]

Enclave reputation is completely pointless...Lyon's Brotherhood reputation is similarly pointless. The game forces you to be in good standing with them, so outside of faction armor, I don't see the point of this one either.

[/quote]

In practice, I think that most would agree with you. This really just illustrates the lack of quality roleplaying choices in Fallout 3, but I still think having faction rep with both of these factions yet serves a purpose which you identified, wearing faction armor as a disguise. It is possible to get Lyon's Brotherhood to hate you at the end of Broken Steel, after all. For the sake of consistency, also if TTW is going to implement a faction system in DC then you can't not include the two largest factions in the game.

[quote=darthbdaman]

You should get a 10mm pistol in the vault...I really don't like the east coast enclave using MKI Power Armor...

[/quote]

You could try out this mod, which restores the 10mm. Lots of threads and discussions have been had on whether the 10mm or the 9mm should be given to the player in the beginning of the game. (See these cross-content discussion threads for opinions for/against using the 10mm and other things.) Yes, your insights are valid. The question of which types of PA to give to the East coats Enclave has also been discussed. I'm sure that others will bring their opinions to the table in this thread. 

[quote=darthbdaman]

Minor nitpick, heal the players limbs when they are captured in Raven Rock. If you are playing hardcore, you have just gone through all of Vault 87, and cannot get your limbs healed with stimpacks. Its a pain in the ass, getting stuck in raven rock half dead, limbing through the place. I probably should have brought more doctors bag, but it would still be nice :)

[/quote]

This is a good idea, and I don't recall reading anyone else's comments about this.

[Risewild]

Since Tricky already addressed your awesome post with his awesome replies I will just add a few tiny things .

darthbdaman wrote:

I didn't notice any issues playing the main quest, right up until the end. During Take it Back, Liberty Primes pathing is comically terrible, and I had to save and reload multiple times, due to him getting stuck in buildings, water, or just walking in circles.

Like Tricky mentioned that is unfortunately a vanilla FO3 bug, and seems to happen to only some people... For example I have tested that part in every TTW version released and I only got those problems in versions before 2.4. After 2.4 I never got Liberty Prime getting weird again I guess it is just luck.

darthbdaman wrote:

Once I got to the Memorial Rotunda, everything went tits up. The first time I walked into the Rotunda, Autumn and the soldiers immediately started shooting at me, and I couldn't speech him. I reloaded and tried again. This time he talked to me, and when i talked him down and he went to leave, his men started shooting at me. I thought this might have something to do with my Brotherhood Faction Armor, but nope, same thing everytime I tried it.

I never had that problem I will have to go and check in this version (2.8.1) and see if it happens to me too.

darthbdaman wrote:

Once I killed Autumn and his men, I went to go activate Project Purity. Lyons asks who should die. Being the smart person I am, I brought along Fawkes, expecting him to go into the chamber. I told Lyons that, she said okay, and when I proceeded to talk to Fawkes, he gave me his destiny bullshit from vanilla FO3, and refused. This locked the game there, as i had no way of opening the chamber and Fawkes wouldn't agree to do it. So I save reload, kill myself, the ending slides all play properly, and Broken Steel starts as expected.

We had this happening in 2.7 to some people, I tested it several times and we reach the conclusion that works well in TTW and must be a mod conflict, I can't remember very well but I think RoyBatty might have find the culprit (again I am not sure of this.).

darthbdaman wrote:

Enclave reputation is completely pointless. It would be cool if they had faction armor, so they wouldn't shoot you on sight, but other than that, you cant get in good standing with them, and it feels very odd having it in the game at all. It's sort of like have super mutant reputation, doesn't make sense.

Lyon's Brotherhood reputation is similarly pointless. The game forces you to be in good standing with them, so outside of faction armor, I don't see the point of this one either.

True, can't argue much with that , but there is a thing, like Tricky pointed it out the Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel are the two major factions in FO3, even if the player is conditioned to be hated by one and loved by the other we should have their factions present in the game anyway (since FNV has the faction system, would seem like it wasn't well implemented if we didn't put those two with their own factions), also like Tricky mentioned at the end of Broken Steel we can [SPOILERS] decide to bomb the citadel, so then the reputation would change and we would become enemies.

Also I guess that in doing this other modders will be able to use it (although TTW isn't really made to accommodate other mods, other mods should be made to accommodate TTW), there are a few TTW mod ideas floating around the forums that make the player choose if they want to help the Enclave and stuff and having the reputations implemented would help doing that.

darthbdaman wrote:

You should get a 10mm pistol in the vault, if not for lore reasons, for the simple fact the the 9mm doesn't fit within the vault setting at all. It makes sense in the hands of raiders out in the capital, but otherwise, game balance be damned, 10mm fits in way better in the FO3 setting. Make the pistols really low condition maybe.

Tricky also addressed this point quite well, this have been discussed almost since TTW went public and there are always good points for either option. I can't really talk about it because:

• 
  I usually use the Baseball bat (since I mainly play with melee and unarmed characters)


• 
  I also usually do not kill anyone when escaping the vault, I only kill a few Radroaches (I save Butch's Mother and I might kill a few more roaches that get in my way)


• 
  Usually I have a higher energy weapons than guns value (because the way I assign my SPECIAL values) so Amata wants to give me a laser pistol.


• 
  I also usually tell her to keep the gun so [SPOILER] she kills the guard guy herself.

But also I suggested in the past to have an option ingame where the player can decide which gun Amata will give to the player, so if the team did not forget about it, there is hope for the future . For now you can use the mod Tricky linked there .

darthbdaman wrote:

I really don't like the east coast enclave using MKI Power Armor. I find that it cheapens the idea that the enclave is technologically far superior to the Brotherhood, and is able to properly outfit there soldiers. Maybe have a very rare chance of enclave soldiers using MkI, and have a very rare chance of Brotherhood using T-51b, just to sell the idea that they are diametrical opposites. It also would give a distinct feeling to the West and East Coast variants of each faction.

That is another point that have been discussed a lot over the years, but since the Enclave we have in FO3 are part of the same Enclave that the Remnants are, it makes sense that the low ranking soldiers would use the same kind of "weaker" armor, also in TTW the DC MkI armors were tweaked to look newer and in better shape than the Remnants ones.

JaxFirehart explains how the Enclave armors work here.

darthbdaman wrote:

Minor nitpick, heal the players limbs when they are captured in Raven Rock. If you are playing hardcore, you have just gone through all of Vault 87, and cannot get your limbs healed with stimpacks. Its a pain in the ass, getting stuck in raven rock half dead, limbing through the place. I probably should have brought more doctors bag, but it would still be nice :)

This is a point I do not think anyone has mentioned before, to be honest I don't see why the Enclave would heal the player's limbs when they are so willing to kill him after the player gives General Autumn the Purifier Code. But I was thinking that maybe have a couple Doctor bags nearby the cell (let's say they are to be used when the questioning would get too rough on a prisoner) could work. Just throwing ideas around .

Thanks for you post and I hope to see other team members come by and say their piece about it .

[Puppettron]

re fo3 Reputations:  one of the main reasons for having reps for factions you can't do anything with is for modders to play with.  there'd be no reason to have them in the CW otherwise because fo3 ran entirely off the faction system.  adding reps on our end is more of an action of leveling the CW to FNV mechanics.

so when Reps are working perfectly and folded in, we modders will have a much easier time of using the more dynamic NV disguise system rather than just a binary faction system.  and i've actually got most of a disguise tutorial sitting around here that i should go have a look at again soon

also, mods that add content to the game that might have things to do with those reps will have more things they can do with those groups rather than putting the player into the binary factions.

[darthbdaman]

I just did You Gotta Shoot em in the Head and noticed a bit of weirdness going on. I went and got all of the keys peacefully, talked to tenpenny and told him that i would kill crowley, and returned to underworld. I also acquired the T-51b after getting all of the keys. Normally this would end the quest, but it didnt.

I then gave all the keys to crowley without mentioning Tenpenny. At this point he ran off to Fort constantine. Normally he requires confirmation of tenpennys death. Seems odd

[TrickyVein]

This is also a vanilla Fallout 3 bug.

[darthbdaman]

I guess TTWFixes doesnt fix it

[paragonskeep]

In regards to the limb healing etc possibly have it that Eden "heals" the player after agreeing to take the FEV. After all Eden WANTS you to succeed so it seems plausible that he would do this. 

[JaxFirehart]

I for one think that the doctor bag placement is the best solution

That said, the point of hardcore mode is to be hardcore. "Not carrying enough doctor's bags? Fuck you, learn to craft them or bring more next time, scrub."

[RoyBatty]

Albinos were always that way in FO3. Supermutant Overlords were that way in FO3. Reavers were that way in FO3. The Aliens were that way in FO3. Companion AI (particularly Paulsen) was way less stupid in FO3.

There's ways around all of this, SM rebalance lowers SM's DT/health but plasma weapons/mini nukes shred them, not sure if the bulletsponge thing is for albino radscorps or not... either way shotguns to the face destroy them (same with mirelurk warriors). There's already a hotfix posted for the aliens Intertial Dampener.

PL enemies will wallop you too as in FO3 too.

Most of these things are simple FNVEdit tweaks that can be done by anyone. So if you like or want it different, make a mod that addresses it. I'm sure other people would appreciate such a mod.