And even if you get the BoS to help the NCR, your superior at the NCR will be PISSED!

I find my ballistic fist fixed his problem.

I find that my new army of securitrons, backed up by alliances with the BOS, Great Khans, and the Boomers, as well as my position as the head of state for the Independent City-State of New Vegas, sufficient for me to be able to say "Shut the hell up, leave my Mojave, and tell your replacement not to be such a rampant dick when he gets here" ... and get away with it.

...

Shame the game doesn't give you the option to actually DO that, eh?

You could always throw Oliver over the dam...

Always do, if I can help it.

Also, Pax, did you forget the Remnants as well?

The intro quest is pretty pointless. Thats not so much helping the BOS as not getting killed.

No, to help the BOS means replacing their leader, and once you do that, the NCR demands you kill them.

You don't have to replace their leader, you can just go digging in some other vaults for parts.... copy/paste from the wiki

You can also avoid destroying the BoS if you side with House. It requires you to join the brotherhood and have a pretty high speech skill to get House to accept it.

I've finished it yesterday, first by siding with House (curious to see where it would go) then by taking control (because from what Courier had seen, big organizations led to many problems while small communities were pretty ok). I won't bother with the DLC, I've spent about 70h on that game, and while I had some good times, I was happy to see it end. It got pretty uninteresting after some time, when most quests were just "fast travel to point B, talk to people there, return to point A" with nothing really interesting happening.

@Blade
The best part of fallout New Vegas is the start. Because you have one big target to get to and a pritty interesting way to get there.
Primm, Outpost, Nocac, Launchsite, then a bit more wasteland, some deathclaws to stay away from (but a cute injured mole rat) and finally NEW VEGAS.

But at this point it starts getting annoying to find other sidequest. (Oh, there is a guy hiding, who would give me a quest...Yeah.)

@Irion: Totally agree.

Honest Hearts is rather similar to New Vegas. I'd put down NV for six months, and so when I picked up Honest Hearts, I enjoyed it, but around the three quarters mark it felt like the same 'go here, do a quest' recipe. There's a lot of killing at the end, if you enjoy that sort of thing (I do!)

Dead Money though is ... a very different sort of adventure. At times I hated it because it was so intense and draining, but when it was over, I ALMOST wanted to play it again.

I kicked up F3 again and installed a bunch of mods. My original thought was that I haven't played this game in four years. But those mods ... I'm now tripping balls across the wasteland in my canvas bag clown mask, chopping people up with my flaming junk metal blade or chainsaw on a week-long bender of amphetamines and crippling paranoia.

... which I always like to do anyway. Typically some decent loot and/or XP down in those things.

Heck, once, I already HAD the parts they needed in hand, because I'd already BEEN to the vaults required. They were like, "Oh we need you go go somewhere dangerous and try to find some p-" (Me) "You mean these?" (them) "Uuuuuuh ... sure, yeah, those'll do!"

Vault 11. *Shudders*

Vault 69 <3

Yeah, I'm still calling bullshit on Legionaries' superhuman toughness. No amount of pain tolerance or training gives you the ability to shrug off plasma bolts to the face.

I also still hate the fact that you can't bring Christine back to Veronica. I'd do it even if it meant losing both of them as companions. Maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic.

something i never tried . . if she is into women . . could you do something with that if you play a female character, or does she go straight then?

Been playing again. I didn't actually finish the game the first time, so I'm kind of agreeing with what people are saying here as I play further. The beginning of the game was really strong, exploration is really strong, atmosphere is really strong, but the main storyline is a little bit running around and looking for the right NPC to talk to. Also, if you explore a lot you can apparently mess up some potential quests, so it's kind of like you have to decide if you want to focus one exploring, or focus on trying to do all the quests.

I'm kind of amused because I decided to just go around exploring, and was totally excited when I found Hidden Valley, because of course this is a real place I'm somewhat familiar with. I stumbled into the Brotherhood of Steel. I hadn't been planning to fight them, but when they demanded everyone strip down to their underwear, I kind of serrendipidously ended up having to mass kill them, which actually isn't too hard if you have a weapon that ignores armor. So, there goes a whole bunch of quests and NPCs. Serves me right for exploring I guess.

And then my whole game became about making multiple trips to and from vendors to sell off all the gauss rifles and power armor (since I don't have "power armor training") and inventory management with my NPC companions.

Sometimes i wonder how those games play for people that actually live where the games take place . .
The old Joke about the american playing with an arabian guy Battlefield or Call of Duty and the Arabian guy tells the American where to go on the first day of the game after release. So the American asks how the ariabian guy already knows his way around the ruins of a city they are fighting in and the arabian guy goes:"simple, i used to live here"

Fallout NV is different in that it's not accurately modeling the streets and so on of Las Vegas, so it's more on the level of having a general knowledge where the highways go and where major landmarks and small towns are in relation to one another. For anyone taking a trip to Nevada, I do recommend really really going to Goodsprings and having a beer at the Goodsprings Saloon, which exists both IRL and in the game.

Wandering around in the desert IRL didn't mean necessarily knowing exactly where stuff was in the desert in F: NV, because they didn't model the game area based on topo maps or anything like that. Thinking about it, though, it would be badass if they actually went and did that in a future project, although I imagine it would be a huge amount of data to manage and integrate into the game.

My other thought is that desert navigation in NV is basically really easy, because you can see really far. You basically just need a topo map and compass, but you don't need to navigate by dead reckoning or use any of those kind of semi-advanced techniques because usually you can just look around and orient yourself based on landmarks like mountains, old mines, roads, etc. I can only see dead reckoning or star-based navigation coming into play when you're in a forested area, such as on Mount Charleston; I believe you could really get lost in the mountains if you get turned around and are stuck in a bunch of big hills and trees that prevent you from seeing far.

So, in a sense, for most areas in the game, local knowledge would be less helpful than a game engine that has renders the landscape really far into the distance, so you can navigate in the desert realistically!

I guess it would sort of make the game into a sniping game, too. Melee combat sort of doesn't make sense when you could theoretically start engaging someone from a kilometer away.

I work in DeeCee and got a blast out of Fallout 3. Of course, they shrunk it down, so the block with my office building disappeared. And the map stopped about a mile short of my house My only disappointment is, aside from tourist spots, they didn't keep a lot of the DeeCee landmarks.

One reason I liked Fallout: NV so much was because walking around in the desert with military pattern rifles and other weapons is something that many people already do in Nevada. It's hardly a stretch to imagine a heavily armed post apocalyptic society in Nevada where people maintain and continue using all kinds of old rifles, and keep reloading ammunition, because the knowledge to be able to do these things exists very much as cultural knowledge. Today, some people use blackpowder weapons as a hobby or for hunting, so the co-existence of vintage weapons like lever action rifles with energy weapons didn't seem like a stretch either. Rather, I felt like they really nailed a good snapshot of Nevada culture at the time that the game was created.

In Fallout 3, the idea of the heavily armed society was a little bit more of a stretch since DC is very anti- second amendment, being an urban area and all. I felt like I had to engage in more suspension of disbelief in Fallout 3, if that makes sense.

Paris from le Saboteur was shrunk down and outside of the landmarks it only tried to get a Parisian feel rather than recreate existing neighborhoods. So knowing Paris was only useful to be able to navigate from one landmark to another without having to look at the map.
The biggest WTF was leaving Paris and seeing "now entering Normandy". There's supposed to be some area between the two.
I haven't checked Paris from Assassin's Creed.

The Paris area from Deus Ex was completely made up, but they used actual pictures of the subway map for the subway. The problem was that the map was already outdated IRL when the game came out. The Hong-Kong area was nothing at all like Hong-Kong.

And while discussing Hong-Kong I haven't played Sleeping Dog, but their take on Hong-Kong is quite interesting. They more or less moved Kowloon to the Hong-Kong island, putting it at North Point (replacing the boring residential area of IRL North Point), and they got rid of most of the non-urban central area of the island. It's probably in the best interest of the game, but you shouldn't use it as a reference if you ever travel to Hong-Kong.

Fallout NV has the theme of decentralized armed groups being leery of centralized control. The game devs really seemed to have a sense of some of the Western desert culture, because in real life today, the Cliven Bundy affair continues to make headlines: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationw...1027-story.html

If you think about it, Cliven Bundy is about as Fallout as it gets.

Brought dozens of weapons and hundreds of pounds of ammunition, but forgot to pack food?

Yup, that's exactly how I play Fallout too.