I have modded New Vegas right up the wazoo: Part 2

Yep, the continuing adventures of "How many mods I can add to a game before it explodes and takes half the street with it". This time around, I've mostly focused on adding extra clothing, armour, quests, building interiors and a stack of extra people. There doesn't appear to be any real impact on the game as yet, and there are only two things I simply cannot get working (only head retextures so no big deal really).

In no particular order, here's a bunch more mods I'm running. I'll cover some of the others mentioned above (like additional people and buildings) next time, as I haven't actually come across all of the content I've added yet.

1) Wasteland Seeker Armour.

Not gonna lie - this might be my favourite armour in the entire game, modded or not. You do a little quest to grab it (there's two versions, actually - the other comes with a rebreather but it's surrounded by about a million high level enemies so I don't have that one yet). It's the kind of thing I expected to be in the game from the start, but the closest I could find was the hideous ghoul brotherhood robes.

And nobody is going to wear that.

Combine with some form of eyewear and the "face hidden" mode from pimp my scarf and you're going to look pretty badass.

2) Nevada RV house.

I really like this one, because it gives you a base of operations East of the Mojave Outpost, somewhat South of Nipton.

You get a shack with a ton of storage, an RV you can sleep in, a chemistry table to rid yourself of addictions and a dog.

Word of warning - you're not far from a place where Viper gang members spawn, and I was not entirely impressed when my dog exploded due to a sudden raid. Alas poor Yappy, I knew him not at all.

3) Portable Campsite. Another one for the "how was this not in the game" pile. You buy the bed and the campfire from random shops:

Then you throw them on the ground and activate both items. You can now sleep anywhere and cook some food whenever you feel like it.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Nice, simple and immersive mod. Sometimes the bed gets stuck in the ground or hovers ten feet in the air just like real life.

4) The Books for Bullets Program. Trading in books in Fallout 3 was great fun (no really, it was) and it blew my mind the first time I saw a ton of pre-war books in Vegas, thinking "I'm gonna make a fortune out of these" before realising they didn't carry the same worth that their DC cousins did. No matter, I'm sure you'll get to do something cool with all these books lying about the place. Right?

Wrong. You didn't do a damn thing with books, and I was somewhat let down by this. I also thought the whole crafting bullets skill was a nonsense due to never being able to find the parts I needed.

WOULDN'T IT BE AWESOME IF SOMEONE WHO CAN CODE THINGS HAD A SIMILAR IDEA AND FIXED MY PROBLEM.

Step right up, person who made this mod. It adds a "books for bullets" machine to a police station, and gives you the crafting components you need depending on what type of pre-war book you feed it (yes, the mod changes pre-war books into things like Fiction, Spiritual, History etc).

The machine:

The books:

My face: :D

Fantastic mod.

5) Homeless in Goodsprings.

This is genius - a smart way to give your character a home (of sorts) in Goodsprings at the start of the game in a way that doesn't break the story with an unrealistic "Five minutes into the game and now you live in a mansion" mod. You know the alleyway at the side of the saloon and the store? Yep, you're going to set up there.

It's pretty simple, and you get some XP for each part of the alley that you sort out.

I was worried that me dicking around out in the open might attract a passing Deathclaw and cause a massacre but it hasn't gone horribly wrong so far.

6) Black Leather Armoured Duster.

No two ways about it: this coat looks badass.

Nice hat, too.

7) Oven cooking.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could cook with ovens? Well, now you can.

Depending on your Luck stat, you may find lots of working ovens or you might have to fix them before using. And then it might be out of fuel, so you finally have a use for flamer fuel (admit it, you never bothered to pick it up because you never bothered with flamethrowers). Great mod.

8) New Vegas Bobbleheads.

This one adds 21 bobbleheads to the wasteland, and you can configure the mod to give you skill bonuses or just money for every one you find.

9) Buildable Bots.

Science. Everybody loves science, especially when it involves insane death robots. And you'd love to build your very own insane death robot, wouldn't you?

Of course you would.

Well, GET READY FOR THE SHACK ATTACK, BY WHICH I MEAN THE WOODEN SHACK BELOW.

Inside, you'll find one of the most interesting and fun mods around. Behold the metal things!

Finally, there's a reason to collect all those bits of junk and scrap lying about the place. Fire up the machine at the end of the room and you can pick your weapon of choice:

This is what I ended up with:

They'll follow you around like a regular companion, and you can repair your robot if they get too messed up. My robot died horribly, so I ransacked him for parts. Easy come, easy go.

10) Existence Robot Radio.

The ambient music in this mod could easily have wandered into town on the back of an official game soundtrack. It really is that good.

Bizarrely, the video only gives tiny snippets of music which seems a little pointless but don't let that put you off. Well worth the download.

I think that's everything for now. Next time I'll go over the rest of the 73 or so mods I've stuffed into my copy of New Vegas...

 

New Vegas improvements go missing in the wasteland

I've been meaning to write a thing about Skyrim for a while now - or, to be more accurate, a thing about Skyrim via the barren lands of New Vegas. This review of Skyrim prompted me to write the below ramble. I think I've covered most of the things I wanted to whine about, but I may throw in the odd update.

It seems to me there's a lot of things Bethesda simply ignored en route to Skyrim via the glorious path that was New Vegas. Of course, NV was put together by Obsidian and where Obsidian listened to the things players practically begged for, Bethesda seemed to throw up their hands, proclaim "didn't read lol" and just built Skyrim on the much older Fallout 3 model.

Why they did this, I have no idea. Things that Skyrim was crying out for yet are somehow strangely absent:

1) Hardcore mode. How the Hell this goes AWOL from New Vegas to Skyrim I have no idea, but given all the hunting, skinning and eating you can do it seems absolutely insane that Bethesda left this out. You can mod it into the game, but really - this was a hugely popular feature of NV (I wouldn't play without it), and should have been in the game. It's not like Skyrim would be negatively impacted in any way by its inclusion, so....where is it?

2) Actual impact stemming from faction choices. One of the greatest things about NV was all the faction interplay, sizing up the options, working out which side was the best shot at a future for Nevada and siding with one, becoming mortal enemies to the other, playing sides off against themselves or going rogue and doing your own thing. At one point I reached a tipping point and had so many options open to me, so many choices, so many possible directions the game could go in that I had to physically stop playing for a day or two while I weighed up the direction the wasteland would take. Games: serious business.

I loved that dressing as NCR and wandering near a slave camp was a guaranteed shootout. I couldn't get enough of mods that added in faction ID cards that you could forge to wander on into the enemy base. I tasted the sweet sweet bitter candy of pushing one side too far and having to steer clear of dangerous roads at night, instead hiding away in whatever friendly NPC location I could find. It made everything a little more tactical and, you know, interesting.

Here? I can side with the Imperial Legion, throw on some Imperial Legion Armour, walk right into Windhelm while rocking that armour to the max and jump up and down on the dining table of Ulfric Stormcloak. Nobody stops me, challenges me, queries why the legendary Dragonborn - who has decided the Empire is awesome, thanks - is no more than ten perilous feet away from the saviour of the Stormcloaks.

If this was New Vegas, within minutes of walking into the camp Cesar would be wearing me like a skinsuit and bits of my companions would be nailed to multiple crosses along the Nevada highways. Or I'd have those NCR goons warning me I had a few days to change my ways before dedicated murder teams would be shooting bullets into my skull. Or Mr House would not take kindly to me poking around the Lucky 38 and I'd be dealing with his stupid robots.

In Skyrim, I'm tap dancing my way through the homes of my enemies for the sake of being allowed to do every single mission that I can, and I feel like this is quite the step back from the advances made in New Vegas.

3) Companions. In Fallout 3, they were pretty uninspired for the most part, didn't have many interesting things to say and were quickly relegated to walking gun turrets / crap carriers. Don't even get me started on that game ending, but anyway...

New Vegas blew me away where companions were concerned. Every single one of them was a fleshed out character, they all had a great set of (involved and lengthy) personal quests that could directly impact perks that could bring you, future relations, the ending they received (yes, they all had multiple and varied endings depending on your actions and faction choice) and their general comments were endlessly entertaining. I mean, don't even get me started on Cass.

Too late, you got me started on Cass. Cass is amazing, from her random babble in the wasteland (the line about "Shh, we're hunting..." still cracks me up) to the quest you help her with, the difference in depth between this character and anyone given to you as a companion in Skyrim is mindblowing.

There's one mission in New Vegas later in the game involving Cass, except at the time I didn't make that connection and as a result I rather stupidly walked into a trap consisting of about 9 tooled up douchebags, whose sole purpose was turning her into liquified goop.

I was given the choice of simply handing her over for a reward, or signing my own death warrant as they went on and killed both our asses. By this point, I was so connected to the game world that for the first time ever in a game I was not only positively furious that they intended to splat a pretend persons brains across the floor, I was 100% balls out determined that this would not take place. What followed next can only be described as an orgy of death, explosions, shotgun shells and my character no doubt giggling to himself while smearing the blood of his vanquished foes on his face and chopping off their limbs with his fire axe.

Lydia is fun to launch off a cliff with Fus Ro Dah a couple of hundred times.

Like I said, the difference is mindblowing. Not only are the companion quests and character depth missing in action, the Skyrim characters also appear to be stupider than characters in a game released back in 2010.

In my humble opinion, the pathfinding in Skyrim isn't as good as NV. I can run all over the place in NV, turn around and be 99% sure Cass or whoever will be right behind me. In Skyrim, they'll often simply stop following me even when on a flat surface, or just....vanish. Somewhere. Or chase a wolf into a river then over the edge of a waterfall. In fact, I kind of suspect the reason you can kill your companion with weapons and magic but not by blasting them off a mountain with Fus Ro Dah (try it!) is because the only reason that shout exists is to overcome the issue of pathfinding and companions endlessly getting stuck in stupid places.

Seriously, why can't I kill Lydia by blasting her from the top of a mountain? Makes no sense otherwise.

Finally, the problem of doorways - specifically, companions becoming a lump of granite in a doorway and refusing to move. You'll notice in New Vegas that you can run into your companion and they'll just shift out of the way. In Skyrim, you're just running into a brick wall and hoping it eventually gets the message.

I haven't played Fallout 3 for a long time. Do companions do the "You shall not pass" thing there too? Either way, Skyrim companions were definitely brought into the world with a -INT score.

4) The interface. Oh God, the interface. Everything that needs to be said can be found here, but for my money the best vanilla UI in a Bethesda game is - you've guessed it - New Vegas. There are still problems, but most things are easily accessible, trading is straightforward (and you can see what ammo is needed for your weapons with no fuss) and the companion wheel....wait, let's back this up right now.

The companion wheel introduced by Obsidian remains the number one way to have your companion do stuff. It's fast, simple, reasonably sophisticated and lets you toggle tactics on the fly without too much dickery. Crucially, it also separates talking and doing. I don't need to have a chat with Veronica if I just want to take stuff or have her hang back while I shoot some dude in the face from afar. Similarly, should I want to listen to her various awesome hipsterisms, I can click the dialogue option and start waffling.

So of course we get to Skyrim and the companion wheel is replaced by slow moving text options. Whether I want Lydia to trade objects or alter her fighting technique, I have to wade through dialogue options, sometimes scrolling and often cursing. Look at this:

The option to trade items is hidden offscreen unless I scroll down to see it - meanwhile, visible options include "what does a housecarl do", which you are going to select ONCE IN THE ENTIRE TIME THAT YOU PLAY THE GAME.

I cannot flip enough rageburgers at silly, silly decisions like that one. I loves me some Skyrim. I loves me some Lydia despite her vaguely Antichrist-like vibes. I especially loves me some blasting Lydia off the highest waterfall I can find.

But while charting the journey and development of these titles from Fallout 3 to Skyrim, I have to ask myself the question:

Did Bethesda even notice the improvements in New Vegas? And if so, why weren't they incorporated into Skyrim?

I have modded New Vegas right up the wazoo

Playing NV on PC instead of the console is quite an eye opener - might as well be a different game, given how much extra content you can jam in there at no added cost. This is the best of what I'm rolling with so far, with no horrible crashes or explosions in sight. I'll be looking to throw in some gameworld expansions, but I at least want to play through the official DLC before I inevitably murder the coding with deathbricks.

1) Black Wolf Backpacks. How this game didn't come ready rolled with backpacks I'll never know, but this mod adds a collection of nifty carryspace onto your frame. You can double up the large backpacks with the small bumbag thing too. (Note: giving your companion a backpack increases their carry capacity forever, but this is hardly something you're going to complain about).

I'm still waiting to see the heaviest weight for sale, so I'm having to make do with the next size down for now. You can pimp out your bags here, though why anyone would wander the wastes of Nevada with a bright white "shoot me now" target on their back is beyond me.

2) Another "what were they thinking" fixer, the Sunny Smiles companion mod does what you'd expect it to.

As you can see, I have Cass, ED-E, Sunny and her dog tagging along too. Sunny doesn't impact on follower limits, so you can have a furious fivesome wandering the wastes (until someone is horribly murdered, anyway). I'm pretty sure you'd have to whack the difficulty up to the highest level if you're going to do this.

If you want to leave Sunny somewhere, you can tell her that location x is "your new home" and she'll wait there until you come back. You can also choose to leave the dog behind if annoying Fallout dogs aren't your thing (and nobody will ever replace Dogmeat anyway, not even his puppies).

3) New Vegas Bounties. This is a fun one, giving you twenty something "go forth and shoot that asshole" type missions to play around with. You go see some guy in a shack who tells you about the target and a general idea of where to go next, then off you go to slaughter what appears to be Robin Williams from his spot in Night at the Museum. The humanity.

The missions take you to lots of locations that originally screamed "horribly underused". Like this one.

The loot is pretty interesting too, with custom guns and off the beaten track clothing. You're not just stomping around shooting people, either - the structure resembles typical NV quests, talking to various characters to pick up more info as you go. The voicework seems pretty solid, with only one character so far sounding like he was voiced by a 14 year old squeaking into a microphone.

There's a second mission pack once you get through the first lot, available here.

4) Nordic Gear. I missed the old "find this awesome armour loot" missions from FO3 (did NV even have any of these? Can't remember) so this one fills the spot nicely. The loot is found in various locations across the map, with some of the best bits hidden in a certain location which I've yet to find.

I bought this for Cass.

It's really quite badass.

Flee! Flee from Darkseid!

Yeah, I'm pretty taken by this coat in case you hadn't noticed.

..uh...anyway. Coats.

5) FO3 has a better radio than NV. Mr New Vegas is nowhere near as interesting as Three Dog, and I now have a pathological aversion to Johnny motherfucking Guitar like you wouldn't believe. This mod here is a port from FO3, complete with scripted radio presenter and a whole bunch of public service announcement warnings from, uh, people.

Unfortunately, the search for a decent NV station continues. 2 hours 20 minutes of classic music is only a good thing if it isn't 2 hours 20 minutes of the same four songs over and over again. You may fare better with it than I did, so good luck.

6) 100 outfits. If you're bored with everybody dressing the same, then this is a good mod to have. It seems adding this causes characters to change their own clothing, but I haven't seen this happen yet. When installed, some of the shops will start trying to flog you different kinds of outfits, all of which come with modifiers to things like perception, agility etc. I kinda like this one:

You also end up with some old dude in the Goodsprings store. He doesn't say much, but he does sell combat jackets that give you bonuses to shooting and survival.

Remember how much you liked the roving trader outfit but hated having to remove it due to it not having any damage resistance at all?

Yeah, this will fix that little problem.

There's helmets too, and of course it all comes in different colours. Thanks, weird old man!

7) Pimp my scarf. This one lets you pick up a snazzy face wrap / scarf and, uh, wrap your face with it. They come in "face hidden" and "face not hidden" varieties.

Of course, the smart cookie will ensure they optimise for all out stealth and combine the right scarf with the right set of custom clothing.

I am going to die swiftly and horribly.