#megh plays new vegas

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Fallout New Vegas - eerie morning views near Camp Searchlight

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You should talk about your fnv playthrough 👀 and about the sad bald sniper

Ahhh so today has been aggressively bad, this made me giddy and happy to find in my inbox. I will take this invitation to ramble nonsensically and run with it thank you!!

FO4 was my first Fallout, but I’ve played enough RPGs before to kind of get the gist of some the mechanics in New Vegas that weren’t in 4 (like the skills tagging and repairing weapons etc.). Enough to get it, and do it badly, that is.

I know I could have looked a bunch of stuff up and gotten a happier (or...more complete) result with the game, but I sort of enjoy throwing myself into RPGs and seeing what sticks and what blows up. (Same way I ended up with half my squad dead in ME2 WOOPS). It makes for interesting stories! So, with very few exceptions, I didn’t look up how to do quests or get a particular result. 

With that preamble of Megh Does Games Badly out of the way, here’s some random brain soup about my playthrough & Sad Bald Sniper:

My courier (Aubree) maxed Luck and Charisma, but she dumb as bricks.

BUT 10 Luck paid off harvesting infinite caps from blackjack. Got kicked out of Gomorrah for making too much in one sitting. Woops. 

For skills, she focused on guns, sneak, lockpick, and speech and very little else, which....sort of nerfed a lot of options in various spots throughout the game. Also, healing was hard.

Boone was really the only companion I hung out with (I did technically recruit Lily, Rex, Arcade, and Veronica) because I wanted the potato to tell me his secrets. He wouldn’t.

But Liam O’Brien was the real companion honestly.

BUT BACK TO BOONE NOT TELLING ME THINGS. I fucked it up?? He told me most of his stuff, but nothing ever triggered about Bitter Springs. Other people told me about Bitter Springs in front of Boone. And I was like. HEY. BUDDY. You wanna tell me about your war crime?! The NCR loved me to pieces and the Legion was sending kill squads after me, so I figured I was right up his alley. But I never did get that actual quest from him that I, yesterday, looked up and watched on YouTube. I don’t know if, maybe I advanced too far in a questline, or maybe he didn’t actually like me all that much. (Unrequited love). 

The thing I fucked up the most, though, was the Great Khans. I didn’t realize there’s sort of an “order” to how you should do the quests if you want optimal results (or at least the most available choices). Basically, I was vilified by the Legion and had no hope of getting back to the Fort to get that slave ledger and prove to the Khans they were being conned by the Legion. And I tricked Karl into getting himself shot by the Khans, so they didn’t care about his journal after that. Which means the only avenue left was....literal genocide.

I thought, MAYBE NOW, Boone will say something (nope).

Aubs really leaned hard into aligning with the NCR purely because the Legion seemed so objectively evil, and so in comparison, the NCR really seemed like the Good Guys. But she did use diplomacy where possible with other factions (except for the Great Khans).

One thing I was very happy to have pulled off: peace between the BoS and NCR!!!

So, Colonel Moore at Hoover Dam ordering me to just, kill all these factions....that’s about the part where the lightbulb of “You’re not...Good” came on. But I did want to see the NCR ending and at that point, I think in Aubree’s mind, she was too far down this path to turn back.

BUT MAYBE IF HER GOOD FRIEND BOONE HAD SAID WAIT DON’T DO A WAR CRIME I DID IT AND IT’S BAD--

Anyway, even though I failed to get Sad Bald Sniper to open up, the part that really made me soft for him is hearing him be soft when he talks about Carla. He talks about his wife like seeing her was the first time he ever felt the sun on his face. Like he’d been cronching along through dry grass and saw a flower for the first time. And yes, he’s sad and dark and twisty and has some huge trauma to process through that won’t ever really go away. But I’d like to believe that, given a little time, he can feel those things again. Baked potato. Soft inside.

OH also, I had the “petite frame” (might be called something else) trait, which delighted me to picture Smol Courier running around with the anti-material rifle. And “Wild Wasteland”, though nothing ever seemed to come of that one, sadly.

So, even though I’m particularly unhappy with the Great Khans result, and the lack of Realness from Sad Bald Sniper....I have some one shot ideas buzzing in my brain that could have come from that conversation I was hoping would happen before Aubs went through with it. And a lot of fix-it headcanons. And a lot of angsty make-it-worse headcanons. 👀

I think those are the big things I wanted to scream about, but I am down to yammer literally anytime about it, thank you for enabling me!! :)

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I just finished New Vegas for the first time and I have a lot of feelings. Some of them being:

-Wow, I really did not know how to play this game and did all of it incorrectly 🙃

-BOONE (I have such a sniper problem dear god)

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Was anyone gonna tell me that apparently stealth boys can cause schizophrenia, or was I just supposed to stumble upon this creepy mountain lodge eerily reminiscent of The Shining (which I was just talking about!!) myself?!

EDIT: Okay no hedge maze in the back so we're safe there. Apparently the correlation between the stealth boys and schizophrenia is mutant-specific and doesn't apply to humans.

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Well....shoot. I think I ship Boone and Aubree (my courier). Did not plan on this. 

I have a thing for snipers maybe?? Petition for the next Fallout to have a lady sniper??

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Crackship: Yes Man and that glitchy Nuka Cola bot from Nuka World

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Maybe one of my favorite things in FNV is getting to hear Liam O'Brien say the line:

"I don't give half a dick what you think!"

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Okay I have just encountered centaurs for the first time in New Vegas and omg that is...quite horrifying wow. 😮

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This morning's struggle is "set Benny free with the stealth boy and try not to get instantly murdered by Legion".

It turns out, I'm not very good at video games, so there have been ~many~ failed attempts.

BUT I've now switched to the "rob the Legion blind before even triggering that shit" method and I'm sensing a lot of promise here.

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Most people have a tendency to sprinkle bits of themselves into their characters. I certainly do.

In the weird pocket dimension where my OCs are all aware of each other, I imagine Nat is just pissed right about now.

Like, I gave my SoSu (Nat) all of my anxiety/abandonment issues. 

But Bree (Courier Six)? She got my smol. And the purple/berry hair color that I tried (and failed) to achieve with overtone. 

Poor Nat was fleshed out during my Bojack Horseman viewing. Bree is catching me in a She-Ra phase.

I literally left Nat in the middle of an emotional crisis/dealing with her trauma in my fic to go build a posse with Bree in New Vegas. Nat’s just flipping a table somewhere like what gives?!

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This weekend's New Vegas play has included accidentally leaving Boone in Vault 22 for several days and having to sort through where in Vault 22 I left him. Finally found him, my bff, my only companion, and he still won't tell me wtf happened at Bitter Springs. I came back for you, man. We have matching berets! Sheesh.

Shortly thereafter, the game aggressively crashed. Feels very on brand 😂

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I've only had Veronica for five seconds but I think I would die for her?

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Wrote 3.5k today so now I'm DOIN' THE DAMN THING.

It's New Vegas time baby. First playthrough, here we go!

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As a Smol Person, I really appreciate the "small frame" trait in New Vegas. And just the existence of traits in general. And that you can pick two or none.

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A friend of mine is playing New Vegas for the first time and keeps texting me (delightful) updates.

"Megh, I'm having a crisis, this armor is the best I have but also it's so ugly, I don't want a fishbowl head."

"Megh, I met this sniper dude. I think he has tragic backstory dead wife disease."