Best day yet. No problems, more time to play. Hell, I probably played for four hours last night.
With nothing to complain about, this'll end up being short.
As expected, my first destination was to go get a residence. The motel was right where I thought it would be, so I gladly handed over 100 caps and now I've got a nice motel room that I can't redecorate. But at least I can store my stuff without worrying that it'll disappear. Because I've got a lot of stuff.
And now that I've got a place for my stuff, my habit of compulsively collecting things has taken over. In Fallout 3 I collected a bunch of stuff: Nuka-Colas, teddy bears, pre-war money, things like that.
This time, I'm collecting all of those, but I'm also collecting Pre-War books. The doctor at the beginning has a ton of them, and you're free to take anything of his that you want. I don't expect they'll be worth as much here as they were in FO3, but they're still something I'm gonna keep my eye out for. It's a shame I don't have a bookshelf in my motel room, but I'm hoping there will be one in the place you get in Vegas, because I look forward to stacking them all nice.
More mismanaging of my skill points. What happens is that I'll find something I want to do that will require a certain number of skill points, I'll level up that skill too much, do the thing, and realize that it so wasn't worth it. My lockpick and science skills are probably too high at this point in the game, simply because I wanted to get through a locked door or hack something I didn't need to.
I now have two factions after me, which kind of sucks. At first, just the Powder Gangers (is that what they're called?) hated me, since they're the ones that attack Goodspring in the beginning. I had a chance to improve my reputation with them by saving a couple of them from the Legion, but apparently it didn't take, because now they still hate me, but so does the Legion.
Fortunately, simply "hating" me isn't enough for them to attack me on sight, though apparently I'm still going to be occasionally hunted by assassination squads.
I'm also way less concerned with Karma in this one. I guess it doesn't mean as much relative to the Faction Reputation system. So I'm more willing to steal crap. Though of course since I haven't been putting ANYTHING into Sneak, stealing isn't that easy just yet.
Ammo hasn't been as big a problem as it was in the early stages of FO3, and I've also had no trouble finding enough weapons to keep my favorites well maintained. I'm also finding more valuable stuff to sell, so money isn't too much of an issue either, except when merchants don't have enough caps.
On the other hand, I'm finding that stimpacks are tougher to find. None of the merchants I run into seem to have more than a couple, and I'm someone who likes to stockpile those. So I'm at the point still where I maybe have 20-30, and I hate using them because you have to use two or three just to get back to at least most of your full health. Because of this, I've started using the randomly placed beds more to recover health.
So far, one of the things I'm liking the most about New Vegas is that things are much closer together. I've heard the overall map is smaller than in FO3, but there are more locations. You don't have to wander endlessly to get to the next destination, which is nice. I'm also hoping that this game has skipped the ridiculous subway mazes that were in FO3. Those made travelling kind of a chore.
After a slow start where I didn't know what to do next, the game is picking up, and I'm looking forward to travelling aimlessly, stumbling upon new destinations and hopefully new sidequests. Just flipping through the guide, it looks like once again there are fairly few main quest missions, but a TON of sidequests.