Upgrading ED-E and my Xbox 360 in time for Fallout 4

It’s crazy to write this, but Fallout 4 comes out this week. I’m under no embargo, so I can totally say that out loud without fear of retribution. In fact, on Wednesday, I’ll be joining the next generation of gamers–a.k.a. the current gen–with an Xbox One and a retail copy of Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic take on Boston. Yeah, I know the game releases to the public a day prior, but my bundle won’t arrive until Hump Day. That all said, I’m totes excited.

I fired up Fallout: New Vegas over the weekend because the reality is this: once I can deep-dive into Fallout 4, it’s going to be hard to return to any of the prior games. That’s fine when it comes to Fallout 3 because I saw and did nearly everything possible, but there’s still a handful of things to do and Achievements to pop left in Fallout: New Vegas, and it seems like I haven’t touched my console copy of the game in about three years. A couple of them still seem too much for my waning heart, like completing an entire run on the “hardcore” difficulty or getting banned from all the strip’s casinos. However, I noticed that there were two left unpopped from the Deathclaw- and radiation-heavy DLC Lonesome Road. Hmm. Off to the Divide!

My first focus was on upgrading everyone’s favorite floating eye-bot equipped with battle theme music ED-E with all five performance enhancements. I guess I missed one or two the only other time I played the DLC, which meant I opted to have a guide open next to me as I both meandered through the irradiated land and listened to Dave Lang coin future Giant Bomb phrases like “get monked” during his Extra Life 2015 stream. I was able to get four of the five upgrades for ED-E, which do stick in the robot permanently when you return to the Mojave Desert, but one required a Science skill level of 75 or up to hack a terminal and open a locked door. I’m guessing I didn’t have the skill high enough before. Well, as luck has it, I did not have a great Science skill with this character either, so I grinded out some XP and used a magazine to hit 75 on the dot. Check it out:

ED-Ecated (20G): Find all of ED-E’s upgrades in the Divide.

The other Achievement that I was juggling progress towards as I outfitted ED-E for the future is Warhead Hunter, which tasks the Courier with detonating all of the warheads in the Divide. There are thirty in total, and by the time I had spoken Ulysses down from unnecessary violence–thank you, 100 Speech skill level–I had twenty-four taken care of. Then I hit up the Courier’s Mile for two more, which is a really tough section full of radiation and Deathclaws; I kind of zipped in, used the laser detonator, and got out faster than you can say wasteland omelet. That means I have four left, and I’m not sure exactly where they are, nor do I feel like retracing every step I took to unearth them. Kind of a bummer, but my fault for not following a step-by-step guide.

If anything, this brief return to Fallout: New Vegas has reminded me of what I’d like to see greatly improved in Fallout 4. Combat can still be chaotic and clunky, and sometimes you can mash on the Pip-Boy button only for your character to never bring it up, leaving you open to the deadly swipe of a Deathclaw. The menus themselves continue to be a struggle to get through. That standard Bethesda jank will never go away, seeing as I had enemies doing cartwheels through walls during slow-mo V.A.T.S. moments, but I’d like to see less of it on an enhanced engine.

Considering my Xbox One bundle comes with a digital version of a backwards compatible version of Fallout 3, there’s hope down the road of Fallout: New Vegas also getting the same treatment. If so, cool. Perhaps by then I might be in the mood to return to Brown Town and finish up the remaining six Achievements. Until then, I have Fallout 4‘s ruined Boston to explore, which is doubly interesting to me seeing as I visited the real-life city back in August and expect to recognize several locations. Hopefully one of them is the fake Cheers bar. It’s gonna be wicked.

Games Completed in 2011, #31 – Fallout: New Vegas, Lonesome Road DLC

Fallout: New Vegas‘s side-stories had to end somewhere, and I guess the Divide, a landscape ripped apart by frequent earthquakes, violent storms, and heavy amounts of radiation, is rather fitting, especially since it plays home to the original courier tasked to deliver the Platinum Chip, the one that put a hole in your head. All throughout the vanilla game’s adventure and earlier DLC packs, hints have been dropped about this mysterious Ulysses, forcing curiosity upon the cat, making us wonder just why he refused that infamous job. When Ulysses actually reaches out to the Courier via a Pip-Boy message, one certainly feels compelled to head after him and get some freakin’ answers. So long as you can survive the journey there, that is…

It’s easy to call Lonesome Road linear, as that’s exactly what roads are–lines from one point to another, with guardrails and medians to prevent you from getting off track. Unfortunately, the Fallout franchise is at its worst when its restrictive; compare Operation: Anchorage to Point Lookout, Dead Money to Old World Blues. Walking forward is never thrilling, but unfortunately that’s the only way to get to Ulysses. So off you go, but you better have plenty of medicine for radiation and a healthy stock of weapons as the denizens of the Divide are truly nasty. Deathclaws, marked men, and tunnelers will keep you on your toes, and there’s a lot of rads to deal with. The DLC is recommended for higher level players, and that’s definitely some astute advice to follow. Luckily, you don’t have to go alone; while you can’t actually bring your New Vegas companions with you, shortly into the Divide you do pick up a modifiable ED-E, and while he’s not stellar during combat sessions, his upbeat/downtrodden beeping at least keeps you grounded. Also, you learn that you’ve probably been pronouncing his name wrong this whole time.

My biggest complaint about the DLC is with the big man himself, Ulysses. At several checkpoints, he will use ED-E to talk to you, and these chats can seemingly go on for hours. His cryptic dialogue and odd, slow drawl are to blame; some of what he has to say is important, but only if you can read between the lines. It’s like pulling teeth, and towards the end of Lonesome Road I was so fed up with these parts that I began rushing through dialogue trees so that I could shoot him in the face. Whereas the Burned Man in Honest Hearts was a disappointment for not talking enough and living up to the legend, Ulysses digs his own grave–slowly, methodically, fatefully.

The package felt a lot like this: walk forward, shoot some dudes, listen to Ulysses, repeat. There are not many nooks to explore, and there is only one way to go. The final battle was a little unfair too, but that might be because I picked to hurt Ulysses instead of team up with him. Might try that on my next stroll through, whenever that happens.

Lonesome Road‘s best perks are the updates to ED-E, the +5 to your level cap, and that your gear is not stripped at the beginning of the add-on. Other than that, it’s certainly missable DLC, much like Dead Money, and considering most of it is story-vital and not gameplay-vital, just read what happens on a wiki and be glad you didn’t have to deal with all that laborious listening.

At some point, I’ll talk a bit about Gun Runners’ Arsenal, too, as I’m now on my fourth playthrough (go, Rhaegar!) and am trying to go after some of that DLC’s challenges. Which are freaking insane. Kill adult Mojave Wasteland Deathclaws with .22 Pistols, Switchblades, Boxing Tape, Recharger Rifles, or Dynamite? Me thinks not!

Achievements of the Week – The Welcome Home Edition

Oh look, another week at Grinding Down coming to a close. These things just sort of creep on me. Like creepy creepers. Like your hairy uncle that drinks too much at family gatherings. Um…

Right, moving on. Did I play more Deus Ex: Human Revolution and scour China for all of its secrets? Nope. Did I continue on with Mafia II to sneak into some government building and steal gas stamps? Nope. Did I get back into Bastion after going silent on the game for many, many weeks? Nope. Did I play the latest DLC for Fallout: New Vegas? You bet your sweet buttocks I did. And that’s basically all I played. Still dealing with a lot of stress and lack of time/energy. Hopefully, after the next few weeks, that will all be in the past. Hopefully.

From Fallout: New Vegas…

Condemned to Repeat It (20G): Decided the fate of all the Divide Dwellers

Hometown Hero (30G): Completed Lonesome Road.

So far, until more FAQs come out and the wikia is expanded, there are two ways that I know of for dealing with Ulysses, the final boss of Lonesome Road. And they are…

::SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS::

You can talk your way through it, first needing a speech skill check of 90, and then who knows what else after that. Or you can kill him. But to do so, you must first deal with a swarm of medical eyebots that are constantly healing him and constantly respawning, as well as a seemingly endlessly attack from marked men. Chances are you have ED-E with you, but he goes down very fast. Trying to take on Ulysess, two to three eyebots, and at least two marked men at once eats up a lot of stimpaks. There are machines that will stop the eyebots from spawning, but you need a 100 in either Repair or Science to do so. Guess which three skills my character Kapture neglected to focus on during this playthrough? Speech, Science, and Repair.

Basically, I was screwed, and this became even more evident after failing the fight over ten times and trying every tactic in the book. Actually, there was one final tactic left: I changed the difficulty from Normal to Very Easy. Sigh. Not ideal, but it worked; I used Pew Pew to weaken Ulysses farther than ever before and then turned him to ash with a well-timed V.A.T.S. headshot.

After that, there’s some choices involving a nuke, which, even though I clearly labeled this section as spoilery, I will not go into. Maybe another post. They’re pretty interesting, and from what I can tell, actually have a lasting effect when returning to the Mojave Wasteland.

But yeah, between Ulysses and Deus Ex: Human Revolution‘s Barrett, I’m not having a great time with boss battles lately. Why can’t we all just eat cake and talk about how great The Beatles are and then end the night with songs around the campfire? I mean, really.

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That’s it from me. How did y’all do this week? I’m guessing many of y’all played Gears of War 3 since that was the big name to drop recently. Let everyone know what Achievements you unlocked in the comments below!

The best road to progress is the Lonesome Road in Fallout: New Vegas

It was with great excitement and muted sadness that I purchased Lonesome Road last night, downloaded it, and then loaded up my character Kapture, a creepy man sitting pretty at level 34 that loves his Energy weapons. This hardened weirdo has conquered the Mojave, visited a grand casino, met the Burned Man, and obliterated a bunch of crazy brain-obsessed robots. And now, he has one more adventure, a road, dangerous and unpredictable, riddled with bombs and monsters, and he must walk it alone to find the answers of his past.

I played for about two hours or so last night, and it was a good time. Fun new weapons and the wonderful gift of a newish companion. A little scary, a little too much talking, and a little tough in certain parts. And yes, I also died probably nine or ten times, but that’s not my fault. Nobody told me there would be Deathclaws. Anyways, you get a Pip-Boy message, alerting you that a man named Ulysses is looking for you. Supposedly, this is the courier that was originally meant to deliver the Platinum Chip. Seek him out and discover his reasonings for turning the job down. Once in the Divide, you’ll follow a fairly linear path, all while Ulysses talks to you. And he talks a lot. Unfortunately, while the subject is interesting, listening to him is not; he has this slow, odd way of speaking, drawing every word and phrase out longer than it needs to be. There was a ton of chatter in Old World Blues, but the writing was much more surprising there; here, a lot of Ulysses’ thoughts are easy to guess before even picking the dialogue option, and then waiting for him to finish up his dramatic drawl about homes and roads and Old World blah blah blah is like torture.

But yeah, new locales, new weapons, new perks, new items, new recipes, an increase of +5 to the level cap (now sitting mighty at 50), and new enemy types. It’s what one now expects from a DLC pack for the Fallout franchise, and I’m enjoying it so far. I don’t want to rush through it too fast, seeing as it is the final hurrah until Fallout 4 or Fallout: New Jersey. Granted, I still need to do a Hardcore playthrough…

I didn’t realize I was doing this, just finishing the quest The Launch, but here ya go, the first Achievement unlocked in the Lonesome Road DLC:

Condemned to Repeat It (20G): Decided the fate of all the Divide Dwellers

I also learned from our last story-driven DLC that I was pronouncing ED-E wrong in my head. For some reason, I was calling our little trumpeting eyebot eee-dee-eee, not ed-dee. Like Eddie. Turns out, the dude who made him, well…calls him Eddie. I get that now. However, my brain still refuses to get it right. Oh wells.

And now, some random gameplay tips:

• Make sure your lockpicking skill is decent, at least 50+ with some skill magazines to help from time to time. There’s a lot of lockpicking so far.
• Watch out for glitches where Deathclaws randomly appear inside a ruined trailer and smack the skin off your character. It happened to me, and Tara is a witness. She thought it was a dinosaur at first. I then came up with a new song, which I sang all the way through that Deathclaws-infested stretch of road.
• Pack a lot of Rad-X and/or RadAway. Heck, bring along a Radiation Suit just to be safe. The Divide is not a place one wants to take a deep breath and smell the roses.
• Auto-Inject stimpaks are brilliant; pick up every one you can.
• Don’t stand directly in front of a not-yet-detonated nuke and shoot it. DON’T DO IT.

Good luck, fellow Couriers!

Two couriers to finally meet in Lonesome Road DLC

Are those…reskinned Trogs decorated with Christmas lights? Well, we’ll find out soon enough, as Lonesome Road, the final story-related DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, releases simultaneously on all platforms on September 20, 2011. This one has been building for quite some time now, with references to the original Courier that opted out of the Platinum Chip job appearing in the main game and then getting some more hints in Dead Money. The previous DLC, Old World Blues, also revealed more about Ulysses and was the best package yet, with amazing characters, hilarious dialogue, and a lot of neat weapons…hopefully this last hurrah can be even better.

Some leaked Achievements for Lonesome Road hint at the possibility of letting players–for the first time–bring companions with them, namely ED-E. If so, f*ck yes! If not, f*ck off. Curious to see how that works.

That said, check out the new trailer: