Modifications

Fallout: New Vegas 2017 Soft Touch Modification Guide

Martyn Zachary 46 Comments

To celebrate Fallout‘s 20th anniversary, I figured it would be fun to completely start from scratch and tool the Bethesda Fallout game series for new, fresh playthroughs. Since I have now spent an evening’s worth of catching up on, and customizing, each of the Fallouts, I figured I might as well put my lists out here. In fact, I have actually written an article on Planescape: Torment (hilariously obsolete today, with the new Enhanced Edition out) before, and it’s a ton of fun to share this type of info!

I’m personally a fan of a “soft touch” style of modding, so the purpose here was to create a list of

  1. recently updated,
  2. light, and
  3. simple

modifications that work to make Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas more playable. Modding Bethesda games is pretty fun, as there are so, so many options. If you get too trigger happy, however, it can also be quite frustrating – much like the games themselves!

If you do want to follow this tutorial, either as your setup, or as a basis for adding on more modifications, for the purpose of playing and/or purchasing Fallout: New Vegas, I recommend the Steam Ultimate Edition version. Unlike Fallout 3, New Vegas works quite fine on Steam.

This tutorial operates under the assumption that you are on Windows, have all the DLC, and are running Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition version 1.4.0.525. (more…)

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Fallout 3 GOTY 2017 Soft Touch Modification Guide

Martyn Zachary 2 Comments

To celebrate Fallout‘s 20th anniversary, I figured it would be fun to completely start from scratch and tool the Bethesda Fallout game series for new, fresh playthroughs. Since I have now spent an evening’s worth of catching up on, and customizing, each of the Fallouts, I figured I might as well put my lists out here. In fact, I have actually written an article on Planescape: Torment (hilariously obsolete today, with the new Enhanced Edition out) before, and it’s a ton of fun to share this type of info!

I’m personally a fan of a “soft touch” style of modding, so the purpose here was to create a list of

  1. recently updated,
  2. light, and
  3. simple

modifications that work to make Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas more playable. Modding Bethesda games is pretty fun, as there are so, so many options. If you get too trigger happy, however, it can also be quite frustrating – much like the games themselves!

If you do want to follow this tutorial, either as your setup, or as a basis for adding on more modifications, for the purpose of playing and/or purchasing Fallout 3, I recommend the Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition on GOG.com – simply because it doesn’t have any of the Steam or GFWL dependencies.

This tutorial operates under the assumption that you are on Windows, have all DLC (i.e., the GOTY edition), and are running Fallout 3 version 1.7.0.1. (more…)

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Top Five Left 4 Dead 1/2 Custom Campaigns

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

In August 2010, Chet Faliszek announced Valve would begin to rotate biweekly custom-made campaigns on the official servers of Left 4 Dead 2:

Every two weeks we are going to feature a new community campaign on our servers. We will feature one campaign at a time to make it is easier to find games. We’ll be keeping it featured for two weeks so people can familiarize themselves with the maps for competitive play. 1

Though we wholeheartedly agreed with Valve on their choice to start their campaign off with 2 Evil Eyes, their subsequent picks have not been as bold as we had hoped, as the team has since gone on to pick Detour Ahead, City 17, Haunted Forest, Dead Before Dawn, One 4 Nine and I Hate Mountains. Now that the slow trickle of maps seems to have dried up – sans Cold Stream, of course, which is still a river running wild – we wanted to introduce to old and new players alike a list of five great Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 custom campaigns – that is, the best maps Valve is yet to highlight.

We applied a loose criteria to this list of Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 maps. First and foremost, each level was to be available for both games. Second, we expected proper playability on the “expert” difficulty setting. Third, all these levels enjoy a degree of popularity in the community, so as to make finding servers and players easier.  Fourth, we did somewhat consider artistic merits like overall look and feel, setpieces, setting and brushwork.

Fifth, we also sought out campaigns that would adhere to the gameplay standards and Left 4 Dead fiction as defined in practice by Valve. This meant no nasty surprises, traps, or major changes to campaign flow. The reason all the campaigns below have been tested and completed on the “expert” difficulty level is because we found that this particular setting best reveals the extent of balancing (or lack thereof) in terms of campaign length, pacing and structure.

(more…)

References

  1. http://www.l4d.com/blog/post.php?id=4194[↩]

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Dear Esther Review

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

2008‘s Dear Esther, a Source modification developed by thechineseroom, originally a research project group at the University of Portsmouth, was perhaps the most singular game release of that year. In a sense, its arrival brought with it some degree of legitimacy to modifications with narrative and writing in mind.

Encouraged by the game’s overwhelmingly positive reception and feedback, and the initiative of esteemed level designer Robert Briscoe, writer and designer Dan Pinchbeck set out to remake the original, which has now been released on Steam. At the end of 2011, Dear Esther’s popularity and anticipation had reached a deserved fever pitch due to Briscoe’s amazing visual work, and indeed, just a mere six hours after release, the developers had already successfully recouped their investment from the Indie Fund.

Yet here I stand, a review copy in hand, feeling a puzzling hesitance over reopening the metaphorical wounds inflicted by the original. Certainly, I had nothing short of thrusted the ghostly modification upon all my videogaming friends, toting its expert writing and unrivalled narrative exposition. Nabeel Burney wrote about the specifics of the mod here on the Slowdown.

Like Nabeel, I too enjoyed – if that be the word (probably not) – the game immensely. That was not the problem.

(more…)

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UDK Hat Trick: The Ball, The Haunted and Sanctum

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

Ever since Epic Games announced the Unreal Development Kit in November 2009, with UE3’s market penetration, a $99 starting price and comparably modest licensing terms (0% royalty on $5,000 and 25% above $5,000), the big step for aspiring mod teams to take in moving over to the commercial side of video game development has considerably shrunk.

In fact, there are already three promising Unreal Tournament 3 mods that have not only made the jump over to the UDK but also gone commercial, and curiously, UDK is not the only factor that binds all these three projects together. Each these teams also took part in the Make Something Unreal 2010 contest arranged by Intel and Epic Games. (In fact, two out of three of the above projects are included in the UDK showcase.)

(more…)

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