#fallout loot crate

[chocmoon-latte]

I swear, Hancock constantly gets done so dirty outside of the game. PLEASE JUST LET HIM LOOK NORMAL FOR ONCE!!!!!

[atonalginger]

WIP Wednesday

the lovely and talented @fangbangerghoul reminded me it was WIP Wednesday and I have something to share! Thank you for the reminder and tag!

I am going to extend the tag/invitation to any of y'all who see this and think, "hey I got something to share!" No pressure, just a general invitation.

My excerpt is a rough snippet from the Fallout 4 universe with Dawn, my current sole survivor. I'm still working on the Dellarov fic too but the chapter I wrote was an extended, hella downer and I'm letting it sit before I continue on...So for now I'm writing action and danger in the Commonwealth!

“Should we keep looking?” the raspy voiced raider asked near the road.

Dawn laid on her left side, curled in the fetal position with another empty stimpak clutched tightly in her hand. Her armor and utility suit, or what was left of it after the initial flames went out, was soaked in blood. The sticky residue of the napalm spewed from the incinerator still smoldered on her suit and skin. Her mouth tasted of blood, bile, and the lingering tinge of stimpak and med-x. She prayed the bush she’d crashed behind was enough and the raiders were too hopped up on psycho to notice the blood trail that would lead them straight to her.

“No, bitch is probably dead by now.” The one in the hellfire power armor said, the creaking of the frame telling her they didn’t know how to maintain their rare treasure.

“What about the loot?” the raspy one asked, “looked like they had a bag weighed down with shit.”

“Shit is what it’ll be alright, after we torched them,” the sound of metal hitting flesh popped in the distance, “get back to your fucking post.”

“All right, all right,” the raspy one whined, “don’t have to be so fucking rough.”

“Keep talking and I’ll send you to meet that toasted bitch.” Heavy foot steps were moving away from her location.

Dawn tried to pull herself closer to the old listening post. It would be safer to wait inside the bunker than risk mongrels, mole rats, or ghouls finding her before the Minutemen. Her body was in full revolt, her vision blurring, ears ringing, and limbs barely cooperating. She gave up, pawing at her radio on her left shoulder and squeezing the button down with all her remaining strength, “Preston? This is General Faulkner.”

“General?” Emmett Mallory answered near immediately, “you sound rough.”

“I am,” she choked out and coughed, “chems are the only thing keeping me alert. I need…you need to…”

Emmett was yelling to Preston off in the distance from the ham radio set up at the farm house in the Hills. She heard him say it was time to go. Preston had already prepped a team, it would seem, waiting for her eventual call. Soon Emmett was back with her on the line, “can you flip on the tracker on the radio? We can locate you quickly that way.”

They’d delved back into vault 111 and pulled a dozen unused pipboys from storage crates near the back, assigning them to those Preston and Dawn deemed responsible enough to lead. Preston didn’t like wearing his but admitted it made work easier.

“I…think…” Dawn struggled to find the tiny gray switch, “Tell Preston…tell him he was right. Tell him I’m sorry for…”

She knocked the switch on, the force knocking the radio out of her hand. Her vision swirled, the static chaos in her ears drowning out Emmett’s voice. Lieutenant Harkins always told me my arrogance would be what did me in, she thought as chills started to set in, and her vision went dark, should have just died in the vault.

[red-flare]

Hey Fallout friends! I'm selling some of my Fallout Loot Crate merch on ebay cuz I'm running out of room to store & display all my stuff, lol. 😅

I also have some vintage 90's Disney stuff that my roommate & I found in the garage we're selling, so in case anyone is interested, check it out! https://www.ebay.com/usr/red-flare3

[peterlorres21stcentury]

unpopular opinion: mods should enhance a game, not make it suck less

also sprach Lorrethustra, the endlessly reincarnated

And yet here I am, making some desperately needed improvements to a game that, while fun at first, needed some serious thought and maybe another year in development.

So far I have made the following changes to Starfield with the help of the amazing Bethesda modding community, because I don't have a fucking clue how to create my own mods so I offer naught in return. Notice how entirely simple these problems are:

-Doubled the experience gained from any action (thanks to a second mod, having the well-rested perk from sleeping will quadruple it!)

-Multiplied the amount of credits for each vendor by 10. Because enormous, interplanetary juggernaut corporations of the future only trust their vendors with 5k in virtual monies in a 48 hour period. 🙄 Seriously, it should be 100x that, but I'm trying to be reasonable here.

-Made it so that random quests are not shoved into my mission log just because some guard made a passing comment while I was near. I always hated this method of quest-giving. It felt invasive and annoying even in Skyrim, as it assumes that every character would be willing to delve in that cave or join the Thieves' Guild or make deals with a daedric prince or whatever, but in Starfield it is an absolute plague. If I want your quest I'll ask around for it!! Stop force-feeding your players this bullshit!!

-Furnished the Starborn ship with such extravagant luxuries as: a few chairs on the bridge, and one (1) bed. Because even though I don't use the ship that often, it's still part of my fleet, so I might as well make it a livable space instead of the iphone store-looking, sterile white void we got (seriously, the modder just added some decorative assets that were already present in the game files and intended to be used on the ship. Bethesda CHOSE NOT TO USE THEM WHYYYY

That's about all for now. I was thinking of finding something that increased the storage capacity for outpost containers from 600 units to... something a lot MORE THAN THAT. Why would you make outpost extraction rates so high if you can barely store it all? How can I realize my dreams of becoming an interstellar freight/resource tycoon if my base is nothing but walls of stupid shipping crates (which don't share inventory automatically and need to be connected through a mess of wires even when they, you know, snap together and ought to logically share inventory?? but that's a separate issue)? If the dev team understood their player base at all they'd understand that we are greedy rapacious loot goblins who need moooooooaaaaaaar, damn your hide 👿

I don't know if these decisions were intended as some kind of meta commentary on the nature of your character or what (the Starborn is reborn into new universes chasing their fruitless quest for some vaguely defined power, therefore the meaning of life is suffering and so the player gets diminishing returns on their repetitive journey? Is that what they meant?) but as *cough* deeeeeep and philosophical as that may be, good game design it ain't.

To think I wrote this much all because I wanted a way to level faster than the default pace of "not at all." Because despite the game having no level cap, the game literally does not offer you enough activities to grant the necessary ~500,000 cumulative xp points to reach level 100. Even going through a new game+ multiple times and repeating every single quest will not be enough unless you have literal days of free time. I never felt so starved for perks in Skyrim or Fallout 4, ever, despite the xp rewards being roughly similar. But you spend higher levels in Starfield so very hungry for xp because the curve of points earned per level is, as far as I can tell, near exponential. And the rewards do not scale with your level, nor with game difficulty. A level 90 enemy will always grant something like 120 xp, and you have tens of thousands of xp points to go.

Sorry, but this especially is truly boggling my tiny mind. Not to rant about something so trivial; I am only too keenly aware that this world is filled with actual pain and suffering, but I'd really love to know what they were thinking when they designed such an abominable leveling system. A grindy MMO this ain't, my friends. That next perk point should be a rewarding goal, not an impossible waste of time. It's like one team carried over the xp rewards that would be comparable to Fallout 4 (you get about the same per average enemy, anywhere from 50 to 200 points per kill, I think) and then a separate clueless team said "I mean, it's one level, Michael. What would it cost? A hundred thousand xp?"

I could go on, but I have other things to do today. I want to make it clear: I do not hate this game! A lot of it is incredibly absorbing, and I wish there was more to it (outpost building, crafting, surveying planets). But there should never be this many annoyances and pointless barriers to make these mods a necessity.

[zydrateacademy]

First Impressions - Once Human

So what we have here is an open-world survival-crafter that shares its bones more with the likes of Ark and Fallout 76 than it does Division, which was sort of the impression I got from most gameplay clips whom apparently like cutting out all the tree-chopping and rock-mining. But here we are.

I get Division vibes in the town by town gameplay but once you warp back to your custom built base, it becomes another new age Minecraft clone in a hurry while you smelt ingots and craft ammo. They've even tossed in some kind of minipet/Palworld type function which I admittedly have not engaged with to any severe degree beyond letting some paper airplane fly out of my backpack to do supplemental damage for me.

So quite frankly there's a bit of an identity crisis here, a game that's going for a wide appeal but instead taking the blandest element of each in order to hit a live service market. There's of course a shop here but I haven't seen so much as "pay to win" as "pay for cosmetics and some various currencies that help increase dungeon loot pools. Not so much a "pay to skip progress" as "pay to lighten the grind".

The story isn't much to talk about on its own. The usual eastern RPG fare of giant monsters spreading corruption and ended the world as we knew it. I am not sure if it's because of bad writing or translations but not much is really made very clear, I'm not even sure if we're in some pocket dimension, parallel realm, or if this is a full blown post-apocalypse. I'm going to be honest, my mind checked out of the story pretty quickly and I think the Devs did to. I can handle our protagonist having no voice, but when you click some basic four word response during a quest and it cuts to our character pantomiming some reaction it really breaks the reality of how people speaking to each other work. Through almost no prompting every NPC seems to recognize our PC as a "Mayfly", which we're apparently one of the last of. It all just feels so awkward and clunky when we step into town to say four words and have a short story spun at us which ends up amounting to a quest: "Active 5 pylons in this zone, then defeat the big boss".

So where's the merit, here? Honestly, the gameplay loop remains satisfying. If you're a veteran of Ark, Conan, FO76 and that general open world builder type of genre, then you will already understand the basic, fundamental flow of the game. After that, it's really just a matter of prioritizing your schematic tree and figuring out what that beeping noise from your backpack means, and I've never had a question gone unanswered from the world chat.

I can't explain it but it's so viscerally satisfying to continually upgrade from one tier to the next. You fumble with copper weaponry and bullets for a few hours but when you move your base zone by zone, moderately near resource nodes, the upgrades can come flying in. You can move your base for free (with a ten minute cooldown) so you can have your stronghold move from zone to zone as you progress through tiers, which has been very satisfying. In other games of this genre you usually have to dismantle you're entire base and rebuild from scratch.

I do wish this game leaned heavier into its Division feel. Some of the most fun I have in this game is exploring each township, dotted with enemies and moderately hidden gear crates. There's even Souls game-like messages left from other players (the identity crisis pops up yet again) which can help you find the more fickle of hidden chests. Strewn about the world are minor items to be easily disassembled later, which reminds me of my time on Dying Light and Division, grabbing electronics and wire which feed into schematics and crafting later. It's a loop I don't hate, I just typically don't enjoy returning to base and being forced to semi-AFK while hundreds of ingots smelt over the course of twenty minutes.

It's one thing that this genre in recent years doesn't understand. The only reason I bought into Conan Exiles was because it let me customize my experience. Whether on a single player server or with various mods and addons to give me more decor, armor, and weapons. I miss being able to tweak the harvest value to cut down the wasted time of watching my PC chop trees. Over. And over. And over again. Yet the call of cash is too tempting over making an actually comfortable experience.

The monster design is interesting, except ten hours in I already tire of the same zombies shuffling around every street. Every so often you run into a properly unique enemy, like a giant with balloons that you need to shoot as they light up or a floating woman with an umbrella for a head. In fact there's a lot of "head is just some object actually" in terms of design. The game's mascot is this walking bus with arms in its undercarriage but that just seems to be an environmental thing that walks along the path, that's far too easy to just drive by and ignore.

This is a lot of negative for what might eventually be a thumbs up. So what does this game do better than others of its ilk?

I can't say. I am still yet drawn to the game over time that I might eventually have a solid 50 to 100 hours dumped into, but I'm not sure it will hold me as Conan Exiles did or shake me off as Fallout 76 did. I got ~1800 hours on Conan because logging in never felt like a chore. Meanwhile FO76 and other games it's always: Do these tasks/dailies or you'll miss out on a special currency to buy special items, cosmetics, or actual game-fixing features like being able to recharge your fusion cores. Time till tell if Once Human walks this road, but for now I am still enjoying the general gameplay loop and tier progression.

[veryflirtytransportalate]

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"What? No honor among thieves?" - Hancock, a mayor who dresses like a guard

More fun in Goodneighbor, which I've discovered has no space in the name. Today, after spending an evening having Piper take salacious photographs of me on a camera but it's rusty with a bunch of random garbage glued to it, you know, a post-apoclypti-camera, everything in this place is designed like that, but anyway, after we did that and snoozed and got a snack and went back to Sanctuary and then took another nap, I made a timely trip to Goodneighbor's underwhelming mayor's office. The mayor wanted to talk to me, which everyone in town made seem like it mattered. Last time I saw him, I was standing under a balcony, thinking about how great an opportunity this would be to loot the entire town, and he was actually the guy on the balcony at the time. He said I was a cool guy for breaking into but not robbing his big "supply cache", which I gotta be honest, I totally did rob his supply cache! Opened every crate and box in the joint! The man collects garbage so valueless that a person who's inventory has a tab for JUNK could make no use of it. Whatever was of value in that room was a mystery to me, but because I thought he had trash taste, his... assistant? Friend? Who even is this chick to him? Whatever, look, I went and talked to him on some fuckos behest (the huge gun she threw me was an excellent bribe, and risky, considering I'd already once turned Goodneighbor upside down and shaken out all the coins), and Mr. Handycock just keeps going on and on and on: "I used to be cool. Now I'm not cool. I'm still cool, right?" And I'm like, "Dude, you are one of the worst dressed people I've ever met - but you're hot with ripping sideburns, so stop complaining, do a drug, and go funk someone!" He didn't listen to me. It was like everything I said went in one ear and was translated to, "Yes." So, since he is a collectable, I said he could totally party with me, and he literally dropped everything, I mean guy hardly catches his breath before he goes out on his balcony (which I guess is as close as this place gets to a news room), and just starts telling everybody that he loves them a whole lot. How they're a cool town. It had the vibe of a manager being like, "Who's the best Dunkin' in Fremont? We are! Everyone cheer together now!" Some dude is like "oh I love you" so I guess they like being treated like that, I don't know, I wasn't paying much attention (I had accidentally slipped off the rail and cracked my ankles on the ground, so I'm pounding back Stimpacks this whole time like OH MY LEGS and shit). Then, when the crowd is dispersing and my legs work again, I wander back inside and he's just like, ready to go. Doesn't have to... talk to anybody. Get any stuff. Just, ready to rumble.

I told him to go to the Red Rocket where I keep Strong Mad and McGravy. Look, I don't even think this guy is really the mayor, he just seems like a weirdo with friends who don't know how to break the news to him. Apparently his brother is a mayor. Hm. I see. Doesn't that explain the whole thing.

Great bar though. Third Rail is probably like, top bar in the whole of Boston. I guess it's his bar? Does this town have ownership laws? I mean I went to steal his shit and the response was, "Please don't." Can I just take the Fatman by the robot who wants to funk me or will that robot really funk me? You know, to death. The robot can totally funk me not to death, but I do wanna stretch first.

(Outfit credits, my thoughts, and a few more shots below the cut.)

I could take pictures of this outfit all day - the earrings are from iamtenspeed's Earrings of the Commonwealth (opens in new tab), and the choker is from BlunderFury's People Collars (opens in new tab).

Digital photography in Fallout 4 can be a real slog sometimes because of the body shapes. I'm vaguely aware that they have shapes and presets and... look. Fallout 4, by default, has two bodies: male and female. As a non-binary, you can imagine my frustration. The bodies aren't as sexist as they could be, but you get the impression that if this game had traditional stats all women would get a -1 to STR. If it was a spectrum it's halfway between "everyone is a genderless mannequin" like character creation in Demon's Souls and "are these even the same species" like the line up in League of Legends. I'm... kind of stuck like that to be honest. Two bodies to work with. Very few sliders. Makes The Sims 4's impressive suite of customization features look like a far off dream.

So, you go online to get mods, but ah! You will stumble into the same rabbit hole I have! The outfits are almost all based on CBBE! And if you thought vanilla could be bad, you haven't seen some of the things people will put on the Internet. However! It comes with Body Slide, a tool that allows us to customize the included retextured body to be a bunch of different shapes! Tons of sliders! So you can just customize the bodies, right? Issue solved? Well... sort of? It's really dense: there are what feel like thousands of options to tweak and touch and pinch and at some point you feel weird staring intently at a naked body on the screen, especially when you try a preset and it turns out to be... I'm going to have to go with a really deep frown and a quietly hissed, "exaggerated." Plus after you save it, you have to basically write the body slider positions to every new item, and a problem you run into is that outfits are designed with certain body shapes in mind: usually you notice this because the boobs on the outfit will be honkytonk nonsense, or the waist is nonexistant, or both. I do the best I can to offset this, but when you're interested in this rowdy and rough pin-up & glam rock inspired aesthetic it becomes tough to find things that don't make you feel kind of gross about the entire affair.

So! That is the reason I'm so into the Handmaiden set I've featured in so many pictures - just look at Sizz'el! She's got actual muscles! A body! Arms! Do you know how hard it is to give a woman in these games some funking arms?! It's far from perfect, but I'm finally getting somewhere with this! I should really rebuild the outfit and make it her default. Not... BodySlide rebuild like I explained before, I mean, like, she should put her shirt back on if she's gonna go get shot.

[tipsythrifters]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: new 🌟 loot crate • fallout stash box and stickers.

[startselectscreen]

My Top 10 Game of the Year List

10. Dredge

Imagine a fishing based game that actually is as fun and immersive as this one but with a horror twist to it. Yes, you fish in this game but there’s more to it, a sinister feeling to it. There’s a minigame involved each time you fish in the vast ocean in this game, its a frogger like game condensed into a circle where you avoid the gaps to retrieve a fish and sometimes get a scary-looking unique fish that looks mutated. Aside from that your inventory plays a role too, it’s reminiscent of Resident Evil 4 where you try to fit pieces whether its fish, valuables or shipwrecked items and try to tetris the whole thing. There’s also upgrades to improve your fishing, your engines to sail faster and implement lights to combat the nighttime. At night, you can catch rare fishes but watch out for evil dwellings that will affect your sanity like Cthlulu like creatures that will wreck your ship.  The music in this game is fantastic, it just fits right in this game and its immersive world.

9. Theatrhythm Final Bar Line

Do you enjoy listening to Final Fantasy music? Well this game has it all, in fact all FF titles that are currently released are in this game for you to listen to. Theatrhythm is a rhythm-based game that has some RPG essence to it and it’s just plain fun. The game is like this, you must match the corresponding buttons to the rhythmic moves, it's like a rhythmic highway that scrolls to the right and matching it on time nets you a combo chain. The rpg part of it is each FF title that you start when you unlock it, level up your characters each time you complete a song and can learn abilities/spells that will help you during the song level. You get damage each time you don’t match the right controls to the rhythm note highway and it reflects on your score after you finish it. 

8. Hitman World of Assassination

Freelancer mode just hit Hitman 3 and it’s very addicting. Freelancer mode is, it’s not really a rogue-lite but if you fail in killing your syndicate target, especially the leader showdown then you need to do it again back to the first campaign block and at the cost of losing merces which is currency to purchase weapons from vendors in each map.  Each block starts from easy mode to very hard mode, making it four different blocks where you have to kill your targets which are random in each level and escape. To start with advancing your block, each block tier you need to pick what style of combat you prefer from doing melee kills, to sniper and assault weapon kills and so on, each of them are unique and while it isn’t necessary to do them, you can just kill your target anywhere you want, it offers more currency for you do accomplish it that way. The final block is where you confront the leader of the syndicate. Now, here’s where it gets interesting, this part is like you have to find their leader, and it’s not highlighted red based on the description that Diane says whether they’re wearing earrings, a hat or different coloured hair to being a foodie or a bookworm. You really need to observe and stalk each target in total of six possible suspects that one of them is the leader. To do this you have a camera that displays the description of the person you want to eliminate and you need to match it with what they look like and are doing when in a map. Also after you complete each level whether fail or win, you get a supply crate which contains a useful tool that will help you and when you complete a block, you get another big loot crate that gives you a weapon. This mode overall, is just fun and addicting and seriously a great idea from io interactive.

7. Starfield

The wait is finally over and Starfield is here! The gameplay is mixed with combat like Fallout 4 (without VATs) and space combat and exploration like Freespace 2 and other space combat games. Space exploration kinda feels like Mass Effect and No Man Sky with each system map to explore planets and you can fast travel to other systems and planets. You can commandeer other ships regardless of level and make them your own home ship, provided that you have a higher piloting skill. You can customize your ship to improve the ship's combat. It’s not a Bethesda game without some bugs and there are several.  Persuasion checks are done differently than other games unlike Skyrim, you can turn an entire situation into peaceful means and such. It’s a out of five or more checks depending on the difficulty and you need to accumulate up to five and more to pass the persuasion check. I like that they solved the encumbrance issue by letting you run instead of walking slowly but you still can’t fast travel. Fast travel is improved in this game as now you can fast travel while inside a cave or a installation or inside a building, you can fast travel to different systems and planets. 

6. Cyberpunk 2077 - Phantom Liberty

When this game came out three years ago, I wasn’t interested in it, the game was basically broken and I didn’t get attached to the game with its immersion. Just recently the 2.0 patch came through and fixed and improved the game a bit more. Sure there are still some bugs but this DLC and recent patch enticed me to play. The combat is improved without any issue, choosing an arsenal of different playthroughs to choose from, like from picking a melee loadout or guns, the gameplay is improved since this patch. Night City and with this new DLC, Dogtown has never looked so pretty, the neon lights and graphics impress me and the environment as you dash around the city feels bland at first but gets livelier later on. Sure the driving is still bad, the handling feels less like GTA and more tank controls but it feels like a learning curve to surmount on. The story was at first a hit or miss for me but as it progresses it is more interesting while you interact with a wide arrange of characters and dialogue choices.

5. Resident Evil 4 Remake

Much like the previous iterations of Resident Evil Remakes, this one is terrific. There are subtle changes between the original and this and its just amazing. For those who don’t know about the story or haven’t played the original, you play as Leon S Kennedy who is trying to rescue Ashley Graham, the president’s daughter in rural Spain where something is afoot. It’s such a blast to replay this version of RE4 just like the Dead Space Remake earlier this year. Granted, solving puzzles in this game seems to be challenging and rewarding in the end. The shooting tends to be kinda challenging at first but it gets better throughout the game with new upgrades from that iconic merchant and new weapons that will help you for your troubles. Unlike the original, Ashley, your companion seems to be much better at not being a nuisance and better yet, there’s no health bar for her either. There’s some babysitting her but it’s not really that hard to make sure she’s safe. From the rural village European towns to a medieval castle and then an army base, these locations you traverse with are still not showing its age and fun to wander in. As a horror game, it’s can be intense from running away from las plagas attacking you to being unarmed and just running away from infected knights who will kill you in one hit. It’s just edge-of-the seat stressful to have parts of the game in a horror-action game.

4. Final Fantasy 16

As the developer states that this isn’t an JRPG rather an action, hack and slash game proves to be true.  Elements of the combat are fun, its basically a traditional hack and slash with special dominant powers at your disposal. Your character, Clive, who is a dominant, can absorb each eikon’s essence powers at the end, utilizing its ability from key characters throughout the story. Performing mid-air combos and attacks is satisfying especially having a wide range of abilities. It’s cool and breathtaking to see towering summons from other FF games in this one, from Ramuh, Shiva, Ifrit to Odin and such  You clash against rival eikons like those described and it just feels epic in so many levels. The game draws many parallels to Game of Thrones with a Final Fantasy twist, the settings, story and its medieval political aspects to it.

3. Alan Wake II

Remedy has done it again with the recent release of this game, Alan Wake 2. Like its predecessor, the immersion, atmosphere and story really just sucks you into its world. I don’t remember much of the previous game but there are a few additions to this game and the combat feels a bit better for a change. The use of your flashlight and gun combo to stun your enemies and then whip up your gun to finish them is still satisfying. You first play as FBI agent Saga Anderson who is investigating a string of ritualistic killings by the Cult of the Tree and later finds out that writer, Alan Wake who is missing for ten years suddenly appears near the beginning.  Like Remedy's other games, there are FMV and they are still impressive and interesting to say the least. One of the new features is the investigation mode as FBI agent Saga, you are required to investigate what happen to the killings near Bright Falls, this mode has cases to solve and you need to put pictures and evidence and string it up into a web and there is your intuition mode where you are thinking the killer’s motive and gives you clues where to go to next. The game has jump scares from time to time which can give you stress on your edge of the seat vibes yet not repetitive or annoying at all. Each chapter ends with a song and most notably there’s a chapter all about musicals called “Herald of Darkness” and it is really cool. 

2. Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man who Erased His Name

The Kiryu Kazuma’s saga continues as it picks up three years after Yakuza 6 and runs concurrently to Yakuza: Like a Dragon. The combat is still satisfying and the same but you still can’t deny just smacking someone or wielding a weapon to severely injure someone. Just using your combos to never end fists of fury upon those who opposed you and unleashing deadly moves is the bread and butter of a Yakuza game. Kiryu or Joryu gets some cool moves in this game such as flying drones, a grapple spider hook and a cigarette that blows up, many of them are in your arsenal against your opponents. The story is great once again, as you play Kiryu who is believed to have died at the end of Yakuza 6 to bury the secret of Hiroshima and yet there are people who you fight that know you in the first hour of the game. Yet the game starts off as a bodyguard for an agency that protects the outside from knowing Kiryu’s identity and after your first job has gone bust and an attempted kidnapping, Kiryu must find out who this new threat that looms among him.

Baldur's Gate III

Running from the Divinity Original SIN 2 engine, one might say this is another Divinity game with Dungeons and Dragons rules with it yet it is. The influence from D&D is apparent in this game, everything is a persuasion check or any other d20 check, you get to roll the dice to beat the dice to check whether it's successful or not. These checks impact the story, dialogue and the whole game as choices and consequences affect it. The dialogue is essential to the storyline, as you could turn a battle with the wrong choices or get out of one if you have been chosen the right one. The combat is styled like DOS, very tactical role-playing, you take turns moving or attacking as indicated on the top bar. The graphics look impressive, the environment and the detailed areas take my breath away. The characters you encounter are very detailed and the writing for them is very D&D like. 

[sindri42]

In every cyberpunk (or post-cyberpunk) setting that I've read/played in, the writers are very clear that the vast majority of the population is in fact 'wage slaves' who just do whatever their corp tells them to in exchange for shelter and some measure of security.

In general, their entire life is micromanaged by the corp; in stupider settings this is to make sure they aren't having any unauthorized fun or wasting potential work time on extravagant things like eating entire meals when the nutrient paste is faster. In less stupid settings, they're provided with comfortable housing and quality entertainment, but it's all within facilities owned by the corp they work for, calculated to maximize efficiency by increasing morale and eliminating unproductive concerns about the troubles of the outside world. The package usually includes a good education for the worker's children too... partly because well educated kids will make better workers a few years down the line, and partly because by getting in early with the indoctrination you can make the tykes so loyal that they won't even consider working for your competitors!

But all that is just background, because a cyberpunk story is always going to be about the Punk. The protagonists aren't quiet people with real jobs living quiet lives, they're bold independent rebels who, more often than not, go to extraordinary lengths to make life worse for anybody who submitted to corporate control instead of demanding freedom at the cost of everything else.

But going back to bethesda games, yeah the population numbers just don't make sense. Fallout 3 is the worst offender; the number of raiders you have to kill to take a fifteen minute walk is larger than the population of the biggest city in the capital... so who the fuck are they raiding? For that matter how does anybody eat when nobody produces food and all the ruins that you're pulling ancient canned goods out of have been getting looted for two hundred years straight? Where even do bullets come from if nobody has any manufacturing capability and you spend three crates of them every day?

bethesda loves to make a game world where the vast majority of the population are nebulous criminal thieves

[solesurvivorkat]

Coming Soon: Fallout Loot Crate Merch for Sale

Husband & I went to the dentist this past weekend. Longer story short, we need thousands of dollars worth of non-cosmetic work done between us. Not hundreds, thou$ands (fillings replaced, root canal, new crown/crown replacement, etc). Urgh. (We take care of our teeth, I swear - it’s just been a little while since we could go to the dentist, between finances and our son. Sigh)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking of selling some of the Fallout stuff I’ve gotten in past Fallout Loot Crates. It’s all in excellent condition. Not only could I use the money, but I’m also trying to declutter my life a bit, and half of it just sits around taking up space. So... win win, I guess?  :-/

At any rate, I’ll let you guys know what I’d be selling soon - but if you could spread the word around to anyone you think might be interested, I would very much appreciate it. Thank you!

[vacl]

Fallout Crate #2 came in today. Includes some pretty good items. Definitely gonna sport these shades once I can get rid of the horrible chemical smell. Maybe I’ll stick them inside the screenshots box (You can probably get high sniffing the inside of it). Not pleased that 5 of the notebooks are graph paper (3 cubed, 2 dotted) and only 2 are line ruled. If you missed out on the first crate you can buy the first piece of the Power Armor Build-A-Figure from the Loot Vault. It’s a whopping $15 plus s&h. Not worth it. Probably going to sell my torso piece. Staying subscribed for crate number 3!

[radiationgroove]

1) This box is massive. 2) I’m obsessed with this hoodie.

[comradesmooches]

If I see you wearing a vaporwave fallout tee I'm dunking you in the nearest toilet

[themostfinalofpams]

Filmed and uploaded this earlier today. It's my second ever unboxing video!

[silentmagi]

Late again, I have @lootcrate‘s Shadows.

[littlevampie222]

Who else loves Fallout? ( :