For the first time while blogging this series, I feel like I've been playing Fallout the "true way." Which is to say I did precisely nothing of note for the past few hours. I just went from location to location, searching for personality discs for my various furniture friends. This involved poking my nose into ruins and fighting monsters and picking up more useless junk than I could reasonably carry.
The AI appliances in your home base are kind of evil that way. They seem designed explicitly so you'll be able to get some use out of the random cruft that litters the map. For twenty five hours of the game, I passed by coffee cups, secure in the knowledge that they were just dead weight to a hardened wasteland traveler . . . and then I met Muggy.
I would absolutely own Muggy in real life. I'm not sure what use I'd be able to get out of a robot that took coffee mugs and dishes and rendered them down to glue and empty syringes, but Dr O thought it would be hilarious to build a tiny, neurotic securitron, and he was right. It's just so adorable the way he obsesses over these incredibly minor items. I find myself collecting coffee mugs purely for the gratification that comes from hearing his thanks.
I'll grant, it's possible (and, indeed, likely) that I'm getting too emotionally invested in these appliances, but having these things around has really exacerbated the virtual hoarding problem this game usually inspires (I must have at least a hundred guns stashed away, despite the fact that I'm a melee character, and that doesn't even touch upon all the chainsaws and blades I never get a chance to use). I know, logically speaking, that I shouldn't worry about it. My plan is to move on to another game after I finish the main plot of Old World Blues, and thus I'm not even going to have a chance to need all that stuff, but, you know what if I need it?
Maybe, one of these days, I'll just break down and play a full-on hoarder/crafter character who collects all the junk and actually builds the funky weapons and cooks the weird-sounding recipes (the first thing I cooked in this game - the Bloatfly Slider - has got to be the most disgusting-sounding food I've ever encountered). It's an approach that would well-suit my sense of order (finally, all that clutter can be cleaned up and put in cabinets where it belongs), but I'm kind of worried what that would do to the size of my save file. Also, if I'm really going to focus on gathering and crafting, would it not be better to just play a crafting game? I've got a couple on my list already.
Obviously, practically speaking, I should not become a virtual Mojave hoarder. I should learn to actually use my collected items (I have so many steaks, it's not even funny), because finishing the game with 50 unused stimpacks just means you wasted 50 stimpacks (that being said, the stealth suit's automatic stimpack usage is not the solution - automatically popping one at a certain hp threshold, regardless of tactical considerations, is not an efficient use of resources).
And if I remember correctly, I'm pretty close to finishing. The actual plot of Old World Blues is pretty short. It's the distraction of exploring this bizarre new world that really eats up the time.
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