I found a cool piece of power armor in a certain, bug-filled cave. Not being trained to wear such things, I put it in Boone's inventory to hold for later. I was quite surprised when he put it on!

How does an NCR Ranger have power armor training? I thought the only people in the Fallout universe who had that were the Brotherhood and Enclave. If the answer is a spoiler, I'd rather not know, but I don't think it is, so I'm curious.

Hi!

Yeaaaaa... welll not to seem weird or nothing about it, but what ever armor you give to your companions they can wear
except for animal companions. Dono why!>!

Ahah, well hope I helped a little bit!

Peace out fellow Valterian!




Wolf.

Actually more to the end of the game I saw NCR troops wearing some sort of power armor. Looked like a less advance version of the BoS/Enclave kind, but still PA.

It make sense that the NCR got their hands on some Power Armor at some point and they do have the means to study, understand and then produce it.

The actual story of NCR Power armor is that in California, when the NCR fought the Brotherhood of Steel they would ultimately find BoS power armor on their fallen soldiers. When they got these suits the soldiers couldn't wear the suits as they did not have power armor training. The NCR would experiment with the suits so that they would not require training by putting energy packs onto the back of their Power Armor.

and stripping out the joint servomotors.

Are you sure all companions can wear power armor (well, all those that can wear any armor, that is)? I could've sworn I tried to give Raul it and he wouldn't wear it. Gannon would, but I have my suspicions about him... I'll have to try Cass, though that'll mean doing a bunch of stuff for Crimson Caravan I've been putting off.

That's kind of silly if they can.

That NCR armor is technically un-powered power armor, or at least I think I read that somewhere.

all human companions can wear nonfaction PA. its just a part of the game i guess. oh and lilly cant lol

I always wanted Lily/Fawkes with power armor

Or Dogmeat/Rex and E-DE with power armor

If lily could she would be Frank Horrigans mommy.

Companions will drop it if it's marked "Brotherhood Power Armor," but yeah, there are NCR soldiers who can wear it, and human companions are pretty much all "trained" for it.

yah when companions chuck out armour cos they don't want to wear it i'm like rrrrrrrraaaaaaaageee i didn't ask you to wear it you cretin i asked you to hold it for selling to that vendor over yonder!

ED-E is practically wearing Hellfire already.

But yeah, Supermutants with power armor. We might have to wait for an entirely new faction to be introduced before we see that.

It was like this in FO3 too. Any human PC can wear PA too.

The answer is simple...

Inconsistency. Veronica doesn't level up for the same reason.

I'm beginning the see the major reason behind the bugs, the anomalies and a number of the other issues, and that's lack of 'polish'. It's as if the attitude of game development was really keen in putting it together, but when it came to quality checking and reviewing the work an attitude of 'whatever...' crept in.

Yep...it's just a convention from FO3 that they didn't fix. For whatever reason the player character is the only one that needs training to wear PA.


Or maybe it's that it's a leftover from FO3. Even simpler and most likely true.

Yeah..... like some kinda... Enclave......

And that's an even sadder indictment on their project management, because it indicates laziness. Seriously though, it's really basic stuff, and these folk have been in the industry a long time.

You're talking about Bethesda here, right?

Kidding aside, with all of the things they did improve and re-balance we're really going to criticize them for the things they didn't get to given the amount of time they had? Sounds like we're just looking for things to be down on them about TBH. :shrug:

If you've never managed a software development project I don't see how you can criticize. I've been developing software professionally for over 13 years and I can tell you that things sometimes just get cut in favor of things that are more important. Projects like this often have a set timeline and budget.

Blaming something like that not getting changed on "laziness" is a sure sign that you don't have a clue what's involved in developing a piece of software. Nothing personal, but that's just a baseless insult to the people that obviously put a lot of thought and work into other aspects of the product. You might not agree with the way they prioritized their project, but that's not grounds for that type of jab. If you know something about their work ethic that we don't then please feel free to share, otherwise please don't presume to know why some things got done and others didn't.

Okay I'll bite. What "things" do you think were more important than working on identified bugs from the previous game that used the same engine and about 80% of everything else from the previous game? Do you think it would have taken an inordinate amount of time to get a three year old list of identified bugs and see if there's a way to fix them? It appears they haven't. It's like saying their priority was to put out a product quickly with known bugs letting their consumers deal with the headaches than it was to hammer out the bugs before release.

In short release date was more important than quality. I wouldn't want to work for a company, team, boss etc. with those priorities.

I don't know, perhaps making the rest of the game, the unnamed number of other bugs they had to find a squish during there production and betas that you never see.

First of all, who said it was a bug? How do you know they didn't just make a decision (or were asked by Bethesda) to make it so human companions could wear power armor and perhaps it's not practical to give the PA training perk to NPCs? Seeing as it's more of a continuity issue than a bug and may even have been a requirement I don't see why changing it would have been made a priority over other changes that have a more significant impact on gameplay.

80% of "everything else?" What does that mean?


So, you think that Obsidian should have spent their very limited development time fixing bugs in Bethesda's engine? Why didn't Bethesda do that, knowing full well that Obsidian had a very limited time frame to build their content, limited staff, and less knowledge of/experience with/no ownership of the tech? :blink:

Inordinate amount of time? No, but the little things add up. When you're working on a software project you often start out with a design doc that is distilled down to a "to-do" list. The list is then pared down and prioritized based on time and resource estimates. The fact that something is large or small has little to do with where it ends up on the list. If it's prioritized under things that are considered more important and you don't make it far enough down the list to hit it it just doesn't get done. It doesn't matter if it's a 10 minute job or a 10 day job. There's not time for it among the 100's of other things to do. If you're on someone else's budget you have even less control.


Bethesda controlled the release date. Bethesda managed QA. Typically this is the decision of the publisher, and the developers get whatever they can done in the time they're given. The fact that a day 1 PC patch was released tells us that they were working on fixing bugs and ran out of time. Bethesda had the power to push back the release date and chose not to.

@softnerd:

I can criticise because I bought the product...their failings are not my problem. IT is no different to any other product, despite the IT industry thinking it is.

One day, governments and consumer advocates are going to wake up and the IT industry is going to go through hell when it actually has to deliver a quality product under the same rules as any other industry.

And I should remind you that you were the one that raised the power armour anomaly was a 'leftover' from F3, which is funny because a lot of the graphics bugs in this game are as well.

I may not know much about software development, but I do know quite a lot about project management and product delivery...and I refer back to my first statement in this post: Their failings are not my problem.

Edit:

I suggest we take this discussion off forum, before it develops into a flame war and one or both of us get a holiday.

I'm not saying there aren't failings, buddy, or that you're not allowed to point them out. I'm just saying you're making assumptions about the reasons and the direction the blame should be going that aren't correct, fair, or based on any actual information. Even worse, you're voicing your blind assumptions in the form of a personal attack.

For example, I do my best to deliver what is wanted/needed within the constraints of the time and resources I'm given. There's always a chance that the project wasn't estimated/budgeted with 100% accuracy in any industry...not sure why you're singling out IT. If the higher-ups in charge of the budget place more importance on the release date than everything getting done there isn't much I can do about that as a developer.

If I develop a piece of software within the parameters of established standards and practices and someone else doesn't, and at some point my software is installed on the same machine as their software causing my software to malfunction there's not much I can do about that as a developer. (That isn't a statement about NV so much as a statement about your comments about the IT industry. How many industries can you think of that people's products regularly interact with so many variables that can't be predicted ahead of time?)

Sorry I should have clarified. I wasn't talking about the Power Armor. I don't think it's a glitch I think they chose to give the player a chance to keep their companions well armored even though the player can't use the armor yet. I was talking about the legacy bugs both Bethesda and Obsidian chose not to fix. Finger pointing to whom's responsible doesn't fix the problem it still got passed on the the consumer. A consumer with no recourse after spending the money except to vent on forums such as this one.

As for the 80% number I'll admit I'm pulling that out of thin air as a guesstimate of what Obsidian had ready made before they built NV. As a consumer I hoped someone would spend time (money) working on fixing legacy bugs since 80% of the heavy lifting was done with FO:3 plus expansions. After a little digging I'm guestimating they worked on FO:3 for close to 4 years before release then tweeked it for another year releasing DLC for a total of five years of work.

Close to two years later FO:NV was released. As a consumer I'm wondering why they didn't spend some of the time, 7 years total, fixing the majority of game crashing glitches. Is that too much to ask?

Ok, just a misunderstanding, then. I don't disagree with any of this. I was just taking exception to the blame being placed on Obsidian directly when the majority of the bug issues were really under Bethesda's umbrella, both when it came to legacy bugs in the engine as well as the QA process and the release schedule of the game. As far as I know Obsidian was contracted to create new content, not to bug fix the existing game engine. I personally think that the release date should have been pushed back until the majority of the bugs had been fixed given plenty of evidence that many of them were known well before the game went gold.