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Update 28 ? Some Flaws

At this point I remembered about Veronica's quest being shitty and buggy so I jumped on it to get it done. You need to get two "triggers" to make it work ? there are several more fixed ones than are required now so it's easy ? but surprise surprise it bugged a little on me and didn't fire wholly until I had three. Whatever!

The first trigger I use is inside the main doors of the McCarran Terminal, at Camp McCarran. Note that there are three sets of triple doors into the terminal. Facing them from the outside, you can use either the left or the middle set ? the one on the right end doesn't have the trigger on the inside. It's a simple matter of walking until Veronica is near enough for it to work, but this is most easily accomplished by entering with one of the two good sets.



She promptly, uh, didn't talk to me yet but that's okay. We'll make progress. Another is in Westside, the other slum area of New Vegas. They are mostly doing okay despite greater proximity to Fiend territory than Freeside and lack of the Kings or Followers. They formed a militia and things are okay.



Heading over there I get a nice shot of the Sunset Sarsaparilla factory. We'll be back.



I also derail into this area.



This is the real playthrough where I took Bloody Mess at some point. It's a solid perk with 5% extra damage in all scenarios, as well as bringing back the goofy level of explodey gore you could have in Fallout 1 & 2.



This lady is about the only notable thing in the Monte Carlo suites because she carries a .44 in really high condition. Other than that there's just assorted Scorpions and some minor loot.



Also this cigarette was floating in the air so I screenshotted it.



The Thorn is near Westside ? it's an arena type of thing and has some quests associated with it. I will probably visit eventually.



Westside!



I stop into Klamath Bob's liquor store. He has all the mouth the dealer last update doesn't! Not much else interesting about him besides being from Klamath in Fallout 2.



Westside also has this guy.



He is pretty chill and likes the people of Westside, especially Klamath Bob who was nice to him years back. Mean Sonofabitch had been captured and tortured by some NCR troopers (who cut out part of his tongue, leading to his speech impediment ) and Bob tried to buy his freedom unsuccessfully.

He mostly wanders around Westside and smashes the fuck out of Fiends.



Anyhow, we are in Westside to find Tom Anderson, who lives at the Casa Madrid Apartments.



What do you do here?



The souil and the hot, dry environment don't make it easy, but we get by all right. We've even got our own food store, the Westside Co-op, complete with basic refrigeration.

Tell me about the co-op.



Do you have a problem with the NCR?



The bottom line for NCR is productivity and growth. Politicians back in Shady Sands are completely detached from the people actually living there.

Veronica's first thing that was supposed to trigger back at McCarran triggers now



We just don't adapt like we should. Used to be that all you needed to get your way was a suit of power armor and a laser rifle. Now... people are armed and organized. They're not afraid. But we still stick to our old approach, because it's all we know.

The Brotherhood is living in the past. Eventually they'll have to change.



But I get the feeling if I don't take matters into my own hands, the change won't come in time to make a difference.

THIS is Veronica's response to Anderson.



The thing fires properly now. Yay!



Our training is top-notch, our technology gives us an advantage, but when it all comes down to it, we're losing because we shun the outside world.



Why don't you do something about it?

I don't know. I'm still thinking about what kind of role we could take on that would give us the best chance of survival. But I think things are starting to come together.



Incidentally the first time I did this it didn't trigger right, but I talked to Tom when he was standing and got this nice shot of his Pip-Boy:



He is one of the few characters you will meet that wears one so I thought that was worth noting.

At this point things don't trigger so I take a wandery way off to the next permanent trigger location. Along the way I encounter New Vegas Steel:





Let's kill some fuckin' robots.



Mr Steel is only found here (in the main game). This whole area is mostly unremarkable loot-wise, there is a Star cap to be found and between the assorted robots there is a bunch of flamer fuel if you use flamers.

There is one vaguely remarkable thing though:



There are three such terminals in areas that Mr House had holdings in pre-war times and a quest used to need you to visit all of them and engage this override. This was eventually cut and you can just do the quest straight-up, it's pretty quick to do but the NPC that gives it to you doesn't seem to have shown up yet so yeah. The terminals and the option still exist though so that's cool.

The last trigger I use is the entrance ramp down to Vault 3, so it's back to Fiend Territory.



Explosive .50 mg rounds are fuckin awesome. All those fiends, one shot.





What is it?

The Brotherhood is failing. I've always known that. If we don't change course, we're going to fall apart or... fade away. But until recently I haven't understood where we went wrong, or how to fix it. I think I need to go home.

I'll take you back there, first chance I get.





Hey look! It started properly! Theoretically you only need two triggers but ehhhh.



Get her there and she slowly walks up to the Elder. Whoever that Elder may be.



We'll know in a second. I wanted to talk to you.

Veronica, tell me this isn't about-



We've been through this.

The things I've seen now. Other groups succeeding where we fail. It's not too late for us.

We've outlasted the end of the world. We'll outlast these upstarts.

Waiting in a hole for everyone else to die.



This is a dead end for us.

I see no evidence of that. Nor do I see anyone out there with a solution to our problems.

How could you? You're too scared to look.



Well that went poorly. Let's get out of he-



GODDAMMIT GAMEBRYO SHE'S ENTIRELY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF A WALL

Plus he used to make excuses to get me out of my punishment when I'd slept through Head Scribe Taggart's lectures. Figure I owe him for that. He means well.

Good intentions don't justify marching the Brotherhood to its death.

No, but it does make it easier to forgive him. He's just misguided. It's not too late to change his mind.

You think the Elder will listen at all?



seriously just ugggghhhhhhhh gamebryo

If he sees some indisputable sign we're on the wrong course, he won't ignore it.

What could we bring to him that would change his mind?

I don't know. I don't know. We'd need something that shows the Brotherhood will fail. Or that it can do better a different way. The only thing that'd get his attention in technology.



not even a little bit, at least not by the time we met him

Father Elijah?

Our Elder before McNamara. He had a nose for recovering lost technology. He'd send Scribes out into the desert chasing whatever leads he found. There were a few he only trusted me with. I can think of at least one that'd prove my point, if it still exists. There's a comm terminal not too far from here I'd use to access messages from him. If we go there I can pull up his research on it.

Let's head out.

I'm with you. Being around here isn't the same anymore.



I'd be angry at you for interrupting me again but at least I can see you





And then they leave!



This terminal in Gibson's Shack from last update is now unlocked.





Although maybe the rangefinder could work too. And it looks like the NCR was onto some miracle farming technology.

What's a pulse gun?



But they were building it as a countermeasure to power armor, which they feared the Chinese were developing. Supposedly a prototype was being housed at Nellis. Imagine what it could do to the Brotherhood. We'd be on equal footing with any idiot with a gun.

Farming technology?



Guess somebody isn't very good at keeping secrets, either. We'd never pursue it because it's not a weapon. But self-sufficiency is fundamental to us. If it works they'd see the value of an alternate course.

Tell me about the rangefinder.



We held HELIOS One for a time. Lost a lot of people defending it. Too many. All for this weapon they never got working.



Let's pursue the pulse gun.

Yeah, maybe they'll think twice about engaging the NCR if they know one of those could be floating around.



Let's go find it.

I like the way you think.

Apparently this is a 100% okay trigger for ED-E too so bring him along why not.



Navarro outpost scientists, I am glad that ED-E has reached you. You will find several databanks of information on this machine.



There are also several databanks with information on my research into Poseidon Energy and some projects they were working on in the Mojave area.

Well okay then.

Anyway, let's get off to Nellis.



...idiot.

Inside Pearl's Barracks there are a couple filing cabinets.



One has what we want.



Oh ew Vault 34.



Let's go, I guess.



Mothafuckin golden geckos.







Vault 34, if you remember, is where Chris was from. Everyone he knew turned into ghouls! Ghouls with bullets on them.



I adventure on in and find a terminal. This is A Thing in vaults you may have noticed











SO MANY FUCKIN GHOULS



Glowing Ghouls will still do the annoying radiation bomb. They seem to be particularly happy with it this time around, actually.

Vault 34 is home to a series of questionable design choices, actually. The first is the massive number of (respawning!) feral ghouls. The other is a quest that I honestly don't like and will go into when we get there.



There is just a ton of skill mags and assorted guns lying around where people hid them/died/whatever. It's a theme in the area.



These guys are trapped on the other side of a door that opens later on when I do a thing.



Let's... not swim through the irradiated sludge water unless we absolutely need to.



Correct progress involves going through the clinic ruins.



This auto-doc is a possible solution to a quest we do not yet, and may never, have.



The wall safe in the clinic has a ton of radiation meds. We have a ton more, but whatever, we will take them.



I LOVE IT WHEN I DON'T SEE GAS IN A ROOM (No seriously I find it pretty fun )



Another awkward choice is the fact that these exist and look like regular ruined junk books that you would ignore if you didn't mouse over them and realize they're actual things. Everywhere else in the game this sort of thing will have the holotape object.






There are a couple such terminals around. There are bypasses to the Science check in the form of passwords but we have 100 Science so whatever!





This has drained a nearby area.



In which we kill some ghouls.



Also there is nothing on this guy.



We DO wanna go through here though.



This area is pretty goddamn linear and ends here.



Cool.



Bloody Mess on Glowing Ones is always satisfying!



This door is now unlocked as you can guess.



Oh yay. Goo.

There's some minor loot but the way we need to go is through this desperately failing to close door.





I'm sure this won't be too ba



motherfucking turrets



The Overseer is a special variant of the Feral Ghoul Reaver featuring a whopping 900 HP (which is still 200 less than the regular ones you encountered in Fallout 3 had ) They still have a pretty tough and irradiating melee attack but gone is the bullshit radioactive gore grenade. A rather large improvement.



Seriously though he's pretty tough. At this point some assorted feral ghouls of the type you have been fighting this whole time will spawn in behind you as well. It's a pretty tough fight honestly



Once he is down you can either loot the password to his terminal from his corpse or hack it. I chose to hack it.










Oh thank christ. We can get in there now!

Also here is the other paper journal we picked up:






Let's head under there though.



Yay more radioactive water to wade through.



Vault Technicians are basically just glowing ghouls.



Keep on truckin', find this terminal.





See, this appears to be an intended moral dilemma. HOWEVER! Since it completely and utterly fails to give any indication as to when this was written, the player has pretty much no reason to believe whoever made it is still alive. Like, at least put a goddamn date on it. Write it so that they have monitored your progress somehow, I don't fucking know.

Basically just give any goddamn sense that this wasn't written years ago. The entire vault went to shit! Everyone is a feral ghoul, the entire vault is dilapidated and brown and rusty with shit collapsing everywhere!

This is a complete failure as a moral dilemma, basically. The only indication that the people are alive is that if you transfer the terminal control, then at some point they will show up at an NCR refugee camp I haven't been to yet.



Anyway we need to open the reactor door to go any further so we do that.



Nice reactor.



A second terminal inside is the one that lets you make the choice.

We seal the vents because Courier doesn't have the out of game knowledge that the people are alive. Also it stops this place from leaking radiation which is a good thing. This gains us some NCR fame and ends a quest we haven't even started yet.

Anyway we head back up to the first floor and find another fuckin' door.





I got mobbed to fuck by feral ghouls and ended up burning some turbo to shoot the hell out of them. Drugs are cool man. Drugs are cool.

There is just a ton of assorted guns and ammo around here but there are really only two I am interested in enough to show.



This is the first one! Since we have the key from Nellis AFB we can just use that, but otherwise this has a Very Hard lock.



Cool, cool.



(Actually this C-4 is kinda handy too but it's not unique to the area)



This is the other thing! Note that you don't wanna use explodey things in this area too much because of physics making it potentially clip through shit and be gone forever.



It's the unique variant of the (honestly pretty rare) Marksman Carbine. It's much better than its regular counterpart due to extra ammo capacity, damage, etc, and a longer-range scope.

(I haven't used it yet)

Let's clear the fuck out. Note that the ghouls I mentioned at the beginning that were behind the glass are free now as a final fuck you

Llllets get back home.



I brought you a present.



wait WHAT

What? Wonderful news!



what the fuck god damn it new vegas

In the hands of the enemy-



The quest even started at the other stage so I didn't just skip it that way why are you talking about this other thing Veronica. Why. I WENT THROUGH GHOUL INFESTED HELL FOR THIS FUCKING PULSE GUN

We couldn't have known. We fought for what we believed in.

And nearly died for it. Tomorrow you'd do it all over again, having learned nothing.

Are you trying to shame me?



We need to engage the outside world. We can't win without new recruits.

What does the Codex say?



We do not help them, or let them in.

But -

We keep knowledge they must never have.



I'm sorry.

We'll die out.







Well at least you're not talking to me through a metal wall this time. That's an improvement!

Maybe if we make a stronger case, he'll change his mind.

No. Our case wouldn't be any stronger if tomorrow they all died when their energy weapons backfired. I just didn't expect that. There was no getting through to him.



Would someone else listen to you?



The hell of it is he's one of our most progressive members. If I can't get him to agree, it's hopeless.

Where does that leave you?

I... I don't know if I can stay. Maybe it'd be better for everyone if I left. Spent my life... somewhere else.



Or I can stay here with the people I care about and do... whatever I can, until it comes to a slow or sudden end.

This is your home, and these are your friends. You should stay.



I'd always be reminded of this day. How I wasn't strong enough to stand by them. So I guess I'll stay. Won't be easy, but at least I won't feel guilty about the choice.





Lllet's go.



Oh what do YOU assholes want










I don't think it's ever gonna be the same for me in there. Knowing no matter what I do, it's gonna end badly. But they're all I have.

Are you still going to travel with me?





Woooo that's over. And it didn't (fatally) bug out!

This is by far the worse outcome for her, upgrade wise. It gives +4 DT. The other option, where she leaves the Brotherhood, gives +30% Unarmed attack rate.

This doesn't matter though because I am probably never going to use her again once we are done with the Brotherhood so take that Veronica, you not-Boone and your getting in the way of my shooting!