I heard that Dead Money is also quite good. On the other hand I heard that Honest Hearts is horrible. I don't care though. I'm waiting for the time when they'll all be for sale in one bundle (with huge discount preferably) and then I'll buy them and replay New Vegas with melee legionist, ha.

Good to know, maybe I'll pick it up some day.
I've a mixed feelings of DLC's in general, mostly they don't seem to offer enough that I'd play the game again just for a few hours of diversion at some halfway point.

I have the two earlier New Vegas DLC's already, (steam summer sale, $2,99 a pop).


With FO3 I got the GOTY pack, and realized I'd have been just fine with the base game. Point lookout was fun enough, that chicago bit was average, anchorage and nasty aliens were horrible waste of time. Broken steel was the only part that was sort of a must buy, and even that's debatable.

With Dragon Age, I picked the base game from a sale, then picked the Awakening + all expansions from another sale. Total of $40 or so, a fair price for the experience.

Planning on getting Mass Effect 2 DLC's at some point, when there's either a sale on GOTY or a general steep discount on all ME2 stuff. Which will probably happen just before ME3 is released, which would be an ideal time for a replay anyway.

Basically I always aim to get the game + DLC's for less than the original asking price for the base game. Usually this also means I'll have to wait until the worst bugs are ironed out. Works for me...

I will attest to this...shadow broker is so brilliant that I have no clue why it was left out of the regular game...it seriously feels like a quest that should already be in the game

go ahead and ignore everything else...maybe pick up Kasumi, cuz the SMG is sweet....but yeah, overlord is stupid, arrival is stupid....

Not to resurrect a thread that finally seems to be dying, but you know what annoys me most about the plot of Fallout 3? Who is your dad and what does he want?

The second question is easier to answer: he wants to purify the water so that everyone can be all right, blah blah blah. I don't buy that. In a world where you can either hide out or kill to survive, where altruism is a bunch of cannibals learning to survive on blood instead of flesh, I don't buy this line about how he's doing it for noble reasons, especially since he doesn't survive to get the credit. The only thing that I can think of is that he wanted so much to spite the Enclave that he was willing to sacrifice everything to do so.

As for who he is, I don't think it is ever mentioned anywhere, which bothers me. The only thing I can think of is that he was an Enclave scientist that fled, probably right after you were born.

Some people do work to make the world a better place and are willing to make great sacrifices.

Someone who grew up in a vault like the one the protagonist's father in FO3 came from would be well educated and have a good grounding of history and, I would assume, philosophy as well.

Heck, people knew that they would have to make changes in the world to make it inhabitable and able to support a new civilization when they came out of the vaults. That's what G.E.C.K. was for eh?

I thought that the plot tied together rather well.

This is easy. He did the math and realized that people were more likely to kill each other, and him as well, if they were miserable. Giving them clean water made them less miserable, and thus less likely to kill each other.
You're telling me that if you found a button that said, "Push me to make everybody healthy," and you knew it wasn't a fake, you wouldn't press it because you prefer everybody miserable?

That was more like "Push me and spend lifetime and then some on research, and overcome many difficulties, and bury the wife, to make everybody healthy". Seems legit.

Being motivated by unselfish reasons is really so hard a concept to grasp? :D
Like doing relief work in a third world country, risking death by pissing off a hostile warlord, without promise of any profit! Silly buggers.

Well Fallout 2 took place 80 years after the original and New Vegas is something like another 100 years after Fallout 2, so the fact that society has begun to rebuild makes sense. In fact, the rubble in Fallout 3 is a little inconsistent with the time period. Wouldn't people have at least started getting their act together by then? The only place that made much sense was Megaton to me. Even in the first Fallout the cities were at least organized on a basic level. In Fallout 3 the people seem happy making a settlement among the rubble, but afraid to touch it as if it is holy. If they would have written that as a story aspect of the game, it would have made it much more interesting to me...

That's SO un-fallout-ish. :P

I agree. Perhaps the only jarring thing is the way Caesar's Legion is presented in New Vegas (I don't just mean the outfits\non-ballistic weapons either).

In a world like the one Fallout takes place in? Hell yes it's a hard concept to grasp. That is what I'm trying to figure out, what possible reason could he have, given the world he lives in, to believe in redeeming/helping/not harming his fellow man?

Exploring the game world, you see example after example of people coming up with new and interesting (even old and boring) ways to screw each other over. The only really functional societies you encounter are small, cloistered, and usually xenophobic (e.g. Megaton, Rivet City).

I'm not really seeing anything that would encourage the grand scale Helpy Helperton kind of attitude that the Lone Wanderer's father seems to possess.

Given the way these things seem to play out in third world countries, especially with the advent of microloans, I'm starting to think the unrealistic factor is that the heroic father figure trying to save them all is male. Seems it's usually females who know how and where to put their money and effort to make things better under such desperate circumstances.
I know that sounds sort of hippy, and I'll own that if I must, but I'm just saying that's how it seems to play out in the real world.

Anyway, seems to me the whole thing is really about bringing the benefits of civilization to the Wastes. As that Escapist Magazine writer was saying in his article comparing Red Dead Redemption and Fallout: New Vegas, it's really just a modern video game's take on the philosophy of Hobbes that the state of nature for man is harsh, brutish and short, and that civilization produces the best that mankind can offer.
You'll notice James spent some time in a civilized setting...

My main dislike of FO3 is that the world doesn't make sense. Surely if the raiders actually decided to do their job the 'civilised' people around DC would be wiped out within days. I've long since decided that everyone is a cannibal as there is almost nothing else to eat, besides some mushrooms and radiated cows. If they'd set the game much closer to the actual war it wouldn't be such a problem that.