So now we leave Megaton, and head to DC to find our dad. I have a feeling that things are going to be easier said than done.
Not shown: Me grabbing the strength bobblehead and a hunting rifle from Lucas Simms house.
We got south east to get to the city. We need to go through the metro tunnels to get to GNR. They're a mess to navigate, more on that later.
You can see the ruins of the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument in the distance. For being a game from 2008, the scenery in this game still is pretty impressive, it's rough in some areas. (Broken down buildings up close) Of course, the actual NPC animations in this game are terrible.
We come across the ruins of a house and this when things get weird. I don't know if this is some sort of botched random encounter or a glitch, but I was confused as hell for awhile and freaked out. Wasn't able to get as many screenshots as I'd like because of it.
There is a skeleton in the bathtub inside this house.
A wastelander attacks and kills a bloatfly nearby. A weird sound goes off, like the sound of an energy weapon reloading...
And out of nowhere, that wastelander promptly explodes. Before I had enough time to react, I was ambushed by a group of raiders with good weapons. One of them even has a flamer.
And I didn't have the firepower to fight them all off, so I died. With the glitchiness of the Gamebryo engine, it's hard to tell whether something random is done on purpose or not. I think this was meant to be a random encounter, but something messed up the scripting somewhere along the long, as there was no reason for that Wastelander to explode (No bomb collar or gunfire nearby) and for that weird energy weapon sound to play. (Wastelander was wielding a baseball bat). Who knows. Not shown: Me walking all the way back to that house again.
I returned to house, staying cautious of any nearby raiders. That wastelander nor those raiders appeared this time around. That house had a stealth skillbook, and that was about it. Skill books are nothing to scoff at though.
Someone approached nearby, but it turned out just to be a scavenger. The scavenger didn't have much, so we just don't bother buying anything. I have a habit of saving up caps early on in the game.
We can see the Super Duper Mart not too far from here. There's some nice stuff in there, let's check it out.
More hanging corpses. Sometimes this gives me the impression that they don't want us to go in there. Ah, well.
Our aim could be a little better, but with a decent guns skill you can still be effective enough. We could still use a bit more firepower though, I think the hunting rifle will fix that particular problem until we can repair the pistol to a decent level.
VATS helps alot with these fights with multiple enemies. The huge amount of damage reduction you get makes you practically invincible, and you can do quite a few stupid things and still get away with it. (Like close range grenade throwing.)
Apparently this random mook has a Chinese Officer's sword on him. Wonder how he got it. Oh well, it's ours now. Our melee skill is only like 17 or something though, so it's pretty useless for us.
We sneak into the Super Duper Mart. The raiders have set up camp here, with a person walking on top of the shelves patrolling the place. It's an easy shot for us with our new hunting rifle.
Oh, shiny laser pistol. Our energy weapons skill is pretty crap as well, but shut up.
Why is it... glowing?
The refrigerator has some food that is surprisingly still edible even though it's been two centuries since the Great War. I bet those potato crisps are stale as hell.
One of the other major problems I have with the setting this game takes place in, is that people are still scavenging for food. There are no farms, they have Brahmin but there doesn't seem to be any grass for them to eat. All you can buy at stores is the 200 year old stuff you find, somehow still edible. Hell, in Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas there are farms. And guess what?
Those games took place is fucking
deserts. The Capital Wasteland should be much more fertile than that.
Mmmm. That's good, presumably freeze dried, 200 year old Salisbury Steak. With a hint of a radiation.
The Super Duper Mart has got some nice stuff, loot-wise. Have to be careful for raiders though, there's more than you would think here.
I try to be sneaky and shoot this raider from behind. A shelf or something is obscuring the view, I don't know.
More raiders pour out of the rooms to greet us. They're easy to take down one at a time, they don't have much armor. Super Duper Mart probably took me a few reloads on my first time through the game. If you run through here and grab the attention of all the raiders, you're screwed.
Okay there is something
definitely wrong with that laser pistol.
When I looked into it, there was a problem with a texture from a mod I thought I deleted. Was an easy fix, my bad there.
Somehow we still manage to sneak around even though there just was a loud gunfight in the middle of the room. Either these raiders are too drugged up to notice, or this game's AI is extremely dumb.
I'm willing to bet on the latter.
Two direct shots in the head from the sawed off shotgun take this guy down. A shame we are almost completely out of ammo here, but we can always find more ammo for it. (We'll be getting the much better combat shotgun soon anyway.)
Apparently all the raiders slept in the bathrooms.
I didn't even remember how early you could get a hunting rifle in this game. While it nearly isn't as powerful as it is in New Vegas, it's still a weapon that has high damage, is easily repairable, and the ammo is numerous.
1 shotted the raider, and I wasn't even in sneak.
Ugh hacking. I really don't like hacking with a low science skill. Unlike lock picking, it can take awhile and isn't very fun. Here's a few screenshots of my failed attempt to hack the door.
You find any complete brackets (Like (), [], etc.) you can eliminate one of the passwords. I'm not sure that's how hacking actually works, but what do I know.
Eventually I just say screw it and try to lockpick door. Unfortunately, my lockpick isn't high enough. Ah well, we'll probably want to return here for the Nuka Cola Quantum sidequest anyway, so we can move on for now. We level up be picking the lock of a random nearby box.
Currently, speech and repair are our highest skills. That's what you guys wanted, right?
One thing I do like maxing out on is potential skill points. This gives another skill point for skill books, and we already have quite a few skill books in our inventory anyway.
I fail to see the purpose of a bottlecap mine. That's good money your wasting, there are plenty of frag mines scattered around the wasteland.
At first I thought it was a C4, but then I remembered this game didn't have any. I play too much New Vegas.
The Super Duper Mart was an interesting detour. It's related to a couple of sidequests, namely Moira's book and the Nuke Cola Challenge, both quests which we'll hopefully get to later.
There's a metro tunnel that will lead us to Galaxy News Radio across that river. Should be a simple task. There's a group of raiders set up on the other side, maybe I can ambush them.
Before I could attack though, the raiders were attacked by something else. I couldn't tell from this distance... Wait...
Are those super mutants?
Took out the remaining raiders before dealing with the bigger threat.
We have to sneak up on them. at least one of them has a minigun. That will chew us up if we cross the river the quick way.
But we're interrupted by Talon Mercenaries. The fight between the raiders and super mutants always happens, but I've never had Talon Mercs interrupt the fight as well. Things got... interesting.
They were fighting us in melee combat, and we didn't really have a gun suited to it. Pulled out the Chinese sword and started slashing.
As you can see, it was still pretty effective. VATS really breaks the game at times. It's not so much the stop time thing, is that it's the "You only take 10% of normal damage" that does it.
Talon Combat Armor is pretty good armor that is easy to find (You continually get attacked by Talon mercs if you're a good character.) and repair. Let's hold onto it.
I try to surprise them with a frag grenade, but it doesn't do much at all.
Pictured but hard to see: A hand grenade sailing gracefully through the air
Well, it says they are super mutants, but they don't look like super mutants. And I thought the super mutants were mostly wiped out by the Vault Dweller, most of the surviving one would be on the other side of the coast. I'm confused. (Yes, I know it's explained later on, I'll get to that when it comes up. It's still an ass pull so that they can justify Super Mutants being in this game though.)
Like I predicted, the minigun chews us up
badly.
Not pictured: Me using a couple of stimpaks to heal up.
He eventually goes down though, falling into the river below. The ragdoll physics in this game are silly most of the time, but taking down bigger enemies does feel pretty satisfying.
The Super Mutants have some pretty decent stuff on them.
The raiders didn't stand a chance, they were attacked on two sides.
The raiders in this game are kind of weird. They don't really seem to form factions of their own and it feels like there's just one huge group of assholes in the capital wasteland, working together to make everyone miserable.
There's a medkit and some ammo in that little alcove down there. Worth going through the fight with the mutants/raiders.
As night falls, we stand in front of the entrance to the metro. We need to go through here to get to GNR and meet Three Dog.
Let's hope it's worth it.
