Also, I'm just throwing this out here: Spaceman Scott did a recent analysis on Dust, and I believe his point about The Divide creates a perfect narrative justification why it was kept separate and not an ending. In the divide, after the Tunnelers start migrating, people leave the Mojave and escape into the Divide, most notably the tribes of Zion. The survivors are sheparded by a character who helps them rebuild into successful tribes and ends the infighting. As well they become the most prosperous society to exist during Dust, healing from the Divide's creation event. But then it happens again, and they are all nearly wiped out. But they survive. This time, they wall off all entrances, including locking that door. There are notes that say if anything comes through that door to kill on sight for their survival. You stumble out of there thinking it's where the key might be to leave. So you trek the Divide, and as you go up you slaughter all of these people who managed to rebuild their lives three times for your own sake. No one's fault here. You couldn't have known, and neither do they know that you're (potentially) harmless. Their trauma has made them kill first act questions later. And you've likely endured a hell of a lot to get to this point, so you won't quit now. But eventually, you reach the end of the Divide and realize there's no exit. The preacher who, seeing you murdering everyone he considered family on your way to get through to the end, decides he'd rather give up and kills himself than try and rebuild again. He leaves you a note on his body, condemning your destruction as even being worse than the courier, for it had no purpose, and you gained nothing. But you don't know this....until after you've already done it. And suddenly you have to reflect on it, because you can't take it back. Putting the key here, as though to justify your actions, just wouldn't fit with the rest of the narrative. I think the Divides inclusion and placement was very purposeful and follows the mods whole ethos of: there is a story here if you want to find it.
I definitely agree. The story of the Divide works here because there is literally no reason to go there. If there was any reason, then it wouldn't make the player reflect on their actions, but instead blame the game for "making" them become a monster.
@Mauro Serra Maybe I'm just arguing semantics here, but a Thermian Argument is only such when the person is attempting to dismiss criticism via the existing explanation in the lore of the medium. In the video, he stated that his opinion was that Lonesome Road should have been an ending route instead of a dead end area which seems to serve no purpose. This is fine and I've really nothing to argue against cause that's their opinion. I simply provided what another creator had brought up which served as a really neat way to contextualize the whole area and why it worked better to not be an ending. I'm not arguing against there being criticism (or opinion in this case), because there's nothing in what I said that would have any merit for explaining why it wasn't an ending route.
@@CamaradaDoppio The Thermian Argument is the dismissal of criticism of a story's themes and messages because of in-universe logic. This isn't that, as its replying to lime with an explanation of how making the entirety of lonesome road pointless serves the greater themes in dust.
it's hard to see the dust walker stuff as anything but a lame excuse to avoid programing a friendly settlement. their hostility is really dumb regardless of the nonsense excuse from their history
Fun fact: the Divide isn’t supposed to be an endgame kind of location. It’s purely accidental that the survivor shows up in and through notes, is attacked by all the current residents of the divide.
That's probably one of my favorite series of his even to this day, holy shit it was hilarious and awesome. One of my favorite moments was when he accidentally pushed that little girl off the cliff. I love how the more insane his character became, because he was butchering whatever's left of the Mojave, the more insane he acted (and probably frustrated lol). Even carrying around a chainsaw (because of his overencumbrance) and started talking to it was hysterical, that series was fantastic
On Tunnelers: there is a bug, much like Nuclear Ghandi, where their perception was set wrong and *when you sneak* they have perfect perception and will detect you as soon as they load into the worldspace. This is fixable with a mod if one so chooses. Additionally, there is a mod where killing enough Tunnelers, determined by the version you download, makes them "fear you", at which point they become neutral. This can be a rather large, and therefore resource-expensive number, and for realism I carried around 5 Tunneler queen pheremones (I think that's the item name?) to justify the new passiveness.
Ghost people are the ones with infinite perception, unless the tunnelers have that prob too & i just never noticed. At most i remember theyd auto detect you when burrowing for a sec
@@mfspectacular Interesting, I looked into the Tunneler fix mod: apparently their detection chance was tied to their (very high) level, and that's how they find you on load into the world. Good to know.
fun fact: The infinite perception glitch is a misconception, testing has zone that having 0 perception does not glitch out the game and result in infinite perception. It's better than 1 perception granted, but its worse than 2 perception. The real reason why the Ghost people have such good detection is because they are some of the highest level enemies in the game.
I like to make the character in the mod my Courier from the base game, like he's dreaming or something and this is his _Luke Skywalker fighting Luke Vader under the tree_ moment in his journey, like he's realizing how much pull he has and how badly it's possible for him to fuck everything up
30:24 Not sure if it's been changed in later releases but in the original mod Festus is still around and you can talk to him and even finish his quest by turning in the star caps. I remember it feeling very surreal talking to him after several hours of fighting and murdering in silence.
I missed the part of who the Wendigo was supposed to be. I guess he wasn't joking that time with "I will find you... ...God willing, you will not leave this valley."
The idea of Butch, *Butch* of ALL people making his way across the United Wasteland to reach Nevada is just so damn unlikely it’s almost hilarious. This is a guy who was too scared to save his own mother from giant cockroaches. Sure, he may have had a phobia specific to radroaches, but I don’t think he’d suddenly find courage to fight shit like Super Mutants, entire gangs of Raiders, or hell, MORE radroaches and scorpions and all the other giant bugs. But sure, he made it all the way across the country.
The Vault Dweller, without any kind of experience about the exterior world, ventured the wastes and came like a champion. Same applies to other PCs, like the Lone Wanderer and the Sole Survivor (the female, Norah, don't know a thing about combat, mind you). So, besides how idiotic Butch is portrayed on Fallout 3, it doesn't seem so unlikely of him to reach that far, learning what he must as he braves the Wasteland as he goes forward. I mean, he made it to Rivet City, so he couldn't be a complete waste of humanity.
You know even though dust is supposed to be “what if everything went to shit” It’s still fallout in its spirit lol, I kinda like it for the fact it’s just funny
"Hard hard hard hard hard. It's like listening to people who have never played Dark Souls tell you about Dark Souls" Subscribed simply because of how much I felt this line as a Souls fan.
I honestly was worried when I reached the end and was afflicted with insanity; I kept on thinking I was going to have a hallucination and though I escaped the Mojave Hellscape, the Hellscape didn't leave me entirely.
IIRC the reason the Divide was included but seeming has no content was because in an older version you had to get the key to the vertibird off a dead NCR squad near the hopeville missile silo. So that meant you had to go through every DLC to get what I assumed the mod author intended as the "true ending" of the mod. He probably realized that was stupid and just moved the key to Camp golf and added the grand staircase ending to the long dark instead.
on one of my first playthroughs of dust long ago I left spawn and was immediatley beseiged by a pack of tunnelers. I ran and tried to hold my ground on a cliff. Got knocked off by a particularly huge tunneler and fell into a warband of tribals. I hid behind a rock but they soon stopped shooting at me and at the tunnelers instead. One of them threw a bomb and when it went off, I peeked up and saw everyone dead. It was then I fell in love with the mod.
You and Warlockracy are providing genuinely thoughtful analysis on topics I've never seen discussed outside of Nexus and NMM topic threads. Thank you so much ✨
I’m pretty sure that tunnelers were meant to have no perception like the ghost people were but it somehow got subtracted and gave them infinite perception.
the infinite perception glitch is not a thing, its a misconception, the real reason for their high detection capabilities is their high level, that's it.
I've been playing DUST on and off for about a few years and it's probably my favorite mod, to the point where I like it way more than the base game. I agree with a ton of stuff here, but there's a lot I disagree with, mostly to the end. The NCR didn't originally get the cloud from looting the Madre. Father Elijah actually gifted it to them via the tribals the NCR traveled with. He ended up being right, as Royst and Lydia ended up destroying a ton of the Mojave with it. I'm also surprised you didn't mention just how cruel the NCR ended up being after their takeover of the Mojave. There's a few notes around that hint at this, such as Sarah and her new family including children are executed in the street by NCR in order to set up operation in Vault 21. While Butch's inclusion can be comparable to fanservice, there's a lot more depth that you didn't mention. He has journals all over the canyon, detailing how he's been traveling across Zion and helplessly trying to escape to the point he even worked with the NCR. And by the time you find him he's just narrowly escaped Zion with a friend, about to head out into the Mojave to find a better area to settle; until you gun him down. I kinda felt attached the original character in 3, but killing him and then learning about the sheer struggle he went through, only for his progress to be ended for nothing was heartbreaking for me, like how a previous commenter mentioned the Divide's tribals. You complained about the Wendigo being annoying, but once never mentioned the Spore Carriers, which I found a bit puzzling. Maybe it's because the infinite ammo flare gun exists, but Spore Carriers are basically Tunnelers but jacked up to 10x strength, speed, and health. They're the most annoying part of the mod and I thought they'd at least be brought up, seeing as to how you critiqued Tunnelers. Also, on a second playthrough, the design of Zion becomes way more simple in DUST, since the escape route is first going North, then going East to the Fork Bridge. Although I'm guessing this is more indicative of the fact you don't like Honest Hearts. I know this is a review solely covering DUST, but I think a segment where you recommended certain mods for it would've been neat. I think DUST feels near unplayable without JAM's hitmarker/crosshair, and patches like DUSTed DUST and DUST Tweaks are super vital in fixing tons of bugs and a lot of core stuff with the mod. A modder named TomSkele has also made a ton of patches for other mods with DUST and some tweaks of his own, including skeleton/plague victim variety, NCR tweaks, etc. I agreed with mostly everything else though, I'm still really glad you said you liked the gameplay because it's one of my favorite parts of the mod. People usually dismiss DUST as having bad gameplay but good lore, but I don't think these people have played it long enough. It's a huge game of trial and error that's super satisfying to get past, constantly thinking of new strategies with the little equipment and ammo you have. My only real complaint with the gameplay is I wish that enemies dropped less regular ammo, but way more junk ammo. Even with a mod that basically makes everything into a glass cannon, I think junk rounds have significantly less damage to the point it's noticeable. Thanks for this review, I really like seeing this mod analyzed by anyone.
"Until, of course, he's gunned down mercilessly by you." I'll respond to the rest of this later when I have time, but good lord I'll nip this one straight in the bud. Butch isn't mercilessly gunned down by you, the player. He, like almost 100% of the npcs in this mod, attacks you on sight. In his case, when you enter the Honest Hearts entrance cell. No warnings to leave, no requests to let you pass through the canyon (why would he prevent you from entering?) if you let him and his friend live (why would he aggressively engage someone random if he just went through hell, he cares about his friend, and as you said, he worked with the NCR to survive; why fight someone unprovoked after all that?) , and no warning of what's in the canyon (only reason to prevent you to go, thanks Butch you ass). It's not merciless to defend yourself against someone trying to kill you with a gun. It's harder to care about Butch when his NPC is just like every other human NPC that aggros on the player's mere existence. And before I get the typical counter "everyone distrusts everyone, shoot first", yes you will and should be wary of everyone else, but only if it's necessary and the person is aggressive. You have limited ammo and almost no medical supplies, getting into a firefight with every person you see is just plain stupid. Especially in Butch's case when he just went through hell, why get yourself killed after all that? Point your gun at the Player, warn them, and then try to get out of this new situation without having to fight. He's worked with strangers already so he shouldn't be wary to the point of bloodlust and he has his friend's life to consider, not just his own. Even if I'm wrong about his aggression, you cannot argue that the Player killing him is merciless since he is programmed to attack you on sight. At best you can RP that you were merciless if you shot him before he aggros.
Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment, the main reason I wrote that is due to my personal first playthrough. I spent a ton of time exploring several settlements like Novac, Primm, etc, so I was conditioned to gunning down everyone on-sight, including the various non-hostile survivors who have basic gear (the ones who replace the traveling merchants,) due to the fact they all, for the most part, have useful supplies that off-set the little ammo used on them, so when I got to the Zion trail, I assumed he was gonna be friendly. I didn't really even pay attention to the compass sign and just shot him down instantly. I assumed a lot of other people had that kinda experience, that's mainly why I wrote it like that. I could have worded it a bit better. I think the whole encounter would've worked a lot better if Butch wasn't hostile from the get-go and had some dialogue, but voice acting would be hard to replicate for an already canon character.
It is a shame that the endings are so abrupt. If you were to spend the entire game killing every person you meet, only to finally encounter some normal, sane people. Maybe even a few of the canon characters but older. It would feel like you really did something significant. Like crawling through all that mud and blood was finally worth it in the end.
I think this is probs one of the few things this mod could benefits massively from and I'm glad to see someone else bring it up. Even if a few choice characters could chat for a bit and give you an idea of how much things have changed and how it impacted the existing world & New Vegas
Someone like an older Daniel greeting you at the Grand Staircase and like ramble said just asking the simple question of "You look like you have had it rough, are you okay?" i could imagine that that entire time literally having only a handful of 'friendly' interactions with people having someone just ask if your okay having the hugest sense of relief and highest amounts of emotion.
@@thebob5240 dude Daniel would be amazing to counterbalance the pure evil that is the Wendigo (who is actually Joshua Graham). Great idea and I'm sure they're could be a few other great ideas like that
@@thebob5240 maybe if you’re insane you will get a bad ending where you tried killing everyone and ended up dead after trying so hard to get out of the Mojave, if your sanity is good though you will get the good ending
You know that would require ? Voice acting. Given the modder's resource that seem kind out of the question at the time of making that mod. I mean we have AI voice now but it still feel emotionless sometime, not to mention copyright strike. I think most problem with video games and fan base were down to people thinking making video game is like making magic. They don't know how stuff happen they just wanted it their way.
08:18 Oh right, I remember. That was one of Dusts Strongpoints. While there were no quests, there still were quests. Hidden quests if one like to call it. Certain areas to get in and out requieres certain stuff and some other stuff. Everything were really neatly and naturally interwoven, making a seamless gameplay experience like dark souls there, I said it! It's the Dark Souls of NV Mods! I know where the door is!
Just discovered your channel, wanted to say this kind of analysis for mods, especially New Vegas mods, is something I've been looking for for a long time and I really enjoy and appreciate it. So much of how I look at mods and games as a whole has been influenced by these mods, and it makes me happy to see discussion on them a bit more in-depth than a reddit post or a nexus comment.
This is a good video, but I think you may be missing a few points. I'm pretty sure the spore stuff was ALREADY in New Canaan in the base game, in some of the caves. According to the wiki, the spore plant pods were literally added in Honest Hearts. I'm not sure if it was anything the NCR did, unless I missed some note. Also, I'm pretty sure that the honest hearts ending is a troll. The key to the exit and the note are in a literal pile of rubble that is super easy to just walk past. I think in most of the lets plays I've seen people just walk passed it. The only thing worse than going through Zion is going through Zion, killing everyone in the divide (which is described in lore as a society that had actually managed to drive off the tunnelers and rebuild, IIRC some guy curses you for that at the end), only to realize that you have to go back through Zion and that you massacred the divide for nothing. It's even better when you see how chipper the key's note is. "First day in the Vault! I'm excited to begin my work as Overseer! According to the documents Vault-Tec has provided me, Vault 74 is unique (lucky me!). Unlike the other vaults, THIS vault is equipped with not one, but TWO doors. One is the giant, 20 ton monstrosity that everyone knows about. The other door is a secret passageway (how exciting!), located right behind my desk! This false panel slides aside to reveal a much longer tunnel, to be used in times of emergency only. This tunnel leads east to a number of regions Vault-Tec assumes will be mostly untouched in the event of a nuclear exchange. Zion National Park... Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument... I went there on vacation once. It was quite nice. Grand Canyon National Park... Heck, this'll be fun! A bit of camping, some fishing. I can't wait for this 'emergency'!"
yes, the canon is that survivors from vault what-it's-number went to zion and a few places in-between, with the biggest group reaching the former before throwing waya everything from their past/dying. with everything hitting the fan, it wouldn't surprise me if the plant just decided they wanted to expand
21:03 Pacer also kinda ruined things cuz he caused a fight at jacobtown which ended with his and marcus death, without Marcus around the super mutants that were taking care of most of the freeside habitats that were there go insane and go violent and cannibals. about the divide: the divide is supposed to be a punch in your gut, the lore of the divide shows that the marked mens have become strong and not longer fuel of hate, they survived the attack of the white legs and the leftovers of the sorrow/dead horses, and so, they marked the tunnel from where the player came as cursed, evil, everything that comes from it must be killed, cuz otherwise it will kill them. and so we do. the player kills a whole tribe that technically is just minding its own business, and does the whole DLC trip backwash, just to find out that there isn't exit, you can't even go to the Mojave from the vanilla enter cuz it's blocked so you have to walk back, seeing the corpses of the marked men that just wanted to protect their home from the aggressive Mojave. And us, the player, killed them cuz well that's dust for you!
Long time no see man! Great to see you upload another high quality video. Seriously I appreciate your in depth review of DUST so much because I’ve been wanting to play it for so long.
The unfortunate thing about Dust is that, in a way, it's unfinished. Sure, the mod author went on to create FROST for Fallout 4, but DUST doesn't really have a proper conclusion to it's narrative like Frost does as far as I'm aware. It just shows the player a grimdark version of New Vegas, but doesn't really do anything with it. Everything has gone to shit and there's nothing to be said about this. There isn't a point. What do I mean by this? Well in another Grimdark game, Warhammer 40k, there's a link that connects the various grimdark aspects of the setting, at least if you're examining individual factions within that setting in a vacuum. For example, the Imperium of Man is a dystopian version of humanity that has indulged in its worse parts of itself. Religious zealotry and fascism primarily has led to a version of humanity that is simultaneously one of the most technologically advanced yet the most ignorant species in the galaxy. It's because of its reverence of The Emperor that they rely on the Adeptus Mechanicus to understand their technology for them because they're to set on their own beliefs to understand it themselves. Meanwhile their fascistic belief that humanity is superior to all other forms of life has led to mankind at perpetual war with all other forms of sentient life in the galaxy, meaning all of their resources are poured into anything and everything you can think of related to warfare. Meanwhile in Dust, the east-coast Brotherhood of Steel, a version of the Brotherhood that is generally speaking a lot more altruistic and well-meaning finds themselves in a setting that is practically designed to crush this version of the brotherhood underneath its foot. So what happens? Nothing. They're just there and they don't really do anything. The setting seemingly doesn't have an effect on how the faction behaves or their approach to other wastelanders. Dust introduces this grimdark version of New Vegas, shows off all the dead but recognizable faces of characters from vanilla New Vegas and Fallout 3 and doesn't try to tell a story beyond the bare minimum needed to know what exactly caused the Mojave to collapse after the vanilla game. There isn't any thematic or in-universe link that connects the setting, the countless dead, the unimaginable suffering together to tell a complete story.
what about Lonesome road? That place was great for the things you mentioned. Everything that happened there makes sense. Even the ultra-hostility does. Its just a shame that you have to deal with Zion to get there.
There is a bit more to the lore of the East Coast Brotherhood team that most people miss. If you kill the leader of the group, you can find a holotape/note on his body wherein he laments the current state of the Mojave region and vows to help anybody he and his soldiers come across. That's presumably why they don't immediately attack you when you approach them. Still, their presence in the area could've been a lot more compelling; plus, having them do basically nothing is a major missed opportunity.
A tad narrow-minded (ironically) to attribute the state of WH40k's Imperium of Man to 'Religious Zealotry and Fascism'. The state of the Imperium is due to humanity's hubris, more than anything else. The Emperor was, for all intents and purposes, an all-powerful, virtuous messiah figure who singlehandedly dragged humanity into a golden age of technological, innovation, prosperity and expansion. Naturally, the government was entirely under his control, yielding this absolute power to secure this prosperity against a galaxy of hostile factions (note: the galaxy is full of factions hostile to humanity). He then sought to force humanity off of religious beliefs as a whole and any kind of superstition, intent on making humanity better by making them more objective and pragmatic. When he made his 'children', though, some of them were eventually the ones to betray him (the Horus Heresy) as they believed that it was only logical to worship the emperor as a deity due to his accomplishments, ignoring the Emperors' own wishes. *This* is the reason that humanity is fucked in the 40th millenium. They rejected the words of a messiah, believing in their hubris that what they knew better. Humanity is far from the "most technologically advanced" species of the galaxy. The collapse resulting from the near-death of the emperor has resulted in a dark age of lost knowledge, and the mechanicus are arguably the only ones that actually _can_ decypher their more esoteric lost technologies. No other world or human faction would be able to. Their 'fascistic' belief is not that humanity is superior to all forms of life... exactly. It's that humanity's existence depends on the extermination of the xenos, which is objectively true. The Tau are a bizarre stratocratic hive-mind/communist dictatorship. The Eldar are a band of nomadic ascetic-psychos who are constantly on the edge of being slightly annoyed and suddenly going insane and joining the dark Eldar, the space version of Himmler's darkest fantasies. The orks are a violent fungal infection of untold proportions and unspecified psyonic power, the Tyrranids are a devouring swarm coming from all edges of the galaxy and Chaos is an insidious, eternal threat that continuously nips at the borders of the Imperium and threatens to destroy entire planets from within at the smallest of missteps. The existing structure of the Imperium is a result of humanity's hubris, but it is also simultaneously now the only way they can remain alive as a species.
Wow I'm surprised to see someone doing a video on this, I actually did some work on it. A lot of it is still on an old hard drive with stuff that was never implemented, I even had a lame new intro for it that I voiced lol, glad that never made it in. You can probably still find my comments way back on the mod page years ago talking to Nagurim about helping on it haha. Anyway, I dig the video; it's so cool to see everyone enjoys this mod after all this time. Thanks for your time on this and to all you people out there keeping Dust and Frost alive still
The biggest gripe about the tunnelers is that reloading the game duplicates/respawns them. Not sure if other people experience this issue, but it's extremely frustrating to load a save from right after you kill the tunnelers, and they somehow revived themselves from the dead.
@@gratuitouslurking8610 yeah that's a common issue with fo4, and i think it does it with hard saves as well as quicksaves. And similar to the tunneler bug, is the hunger/thirst system in NV not restoring your hunger/thirst to it's original level when you load a save. Although I think the hunger bug was in the original game, unlike the tunneler one.
@@spoonsareoccasionallymadeo5728 I've only had the issue with hard saves when the game auto-loads it as a result of a death, if you load it up manually it'll remember trap set states. I'm guessing it's some hickup with the trap coding itself in this case but I'm nowhere near knowledge of how creation engine works at the best of times.
Zion's story is brutal, heart wrenching and honestly one of the best written pieces in Dust... unfortunately it's design is basically "Remember Alien Isolation? Let's do that but make it infinitely more unfair to the player by giving out horror creature literally fucking super speed alongside utter invincibility and balance it out with a fire scares it away mechanic that barely fucking works and will surely frustrate the player?" It sucks is what I'm trying to say.
I feel like the balance overhaul and all the changes to the world and new lore should've been left as two separate mods, they're two very different things that have different goals. I'd love to try the rebalance in the vanilla game, I'd love to try the overhaul to the world as it's own thing, but together it just seems like a miserable experience
Theres a version of this for Fallout 4 made by the same team called "Frost". It's honestly the only way I play fallout 4 now, since it leans into the few things that fallout 4 is actually good at, namely exploration and being a looter shooter.
This comment is a bit late since the video already out for a months but i want to expand abit on why the Divide was blocked off and only have one entrance (spoiler): - The Marked man of the divide actually manage to resettle the divide after the event of the DLC, with no Ulysses to guild them and no Courier to vilfied for their struggle, they were lost. Till one day a enlighted markedman (i forgot the name im sorry) appear and guild the markedman to rebuild and resettle the divide. They manage to build up quite a community and live quite peacefully till a strange tribe attack from the same entrance you enter the Divide from. - The White legs fleeing Zion move into the Divide via that tunnel and fought with the Markedman (now call themselves the Dust Walker), The Dust Walker won and try to rebuild again but only 10 years or so later more tribal came back for the Divide again, this time it the Sorrow (a more evil version of them anyway), they plunder the divide but the Dust Walker manage to resist and push the Sorrow back to their home and slaughter all of them. - the Dust Walker consider anything coming from that Tunnel to be evil and only exist to try destroy what they build up so they attack it regardless. This is where you come in, since you enter from that tunnel they automatically assume you are there to end them and so they attack. You trip around the divide is basically you massacring the resident of the Divide till the very last person. At the end of the map you find the corpse of the enlighted markedman i mention at the start, he wrote that he can hear the sound of fighting below and know his fate, he damm you for destroying the progress of the dust walker and curse you to never find safety as you have destroy the very last bastion of it in the mojave. - After finding the body you can climb a ladder that lead to a dead end, right on top of where you enter. The game force you to back track and look at what horrible thing you have done as you go back the tunnel to find safety one more.
Just another example of why giving the players the tools to craft their own experience in-game makes for some of the most fun you can have in a gaming experience. New Vegas is very special to me for many reasons, but the main reason is because of it's modability and flexibility. Honestly, just like Minecraft, it's become more than just a game. It's a platform that can be used to create new virtual experiences. The fact that Bethesda gave us the dev kit to the game is the exact reason why this game is still alive and sucking people into it to this day. I love Dust because of all the reasons you explained, but also because it takes what people never knew Fallout was capable of and gives us a brand new experience within the same universe. THIS kind of stuff is that I feel like (and correct me if I'm wrong), the Fallout fanbase is really hungry for. The ones who really appriciate what Fallout is anyway. Loved the video dude, love your style.
I think learning Dust is massively overstated due to the challenge of changing your mindset. You see guy, you shoot You don't recognize he's got a rifle, or you haven't got cover, or only twelve bullets, or the two other guys right behind him, or your slightly damaged health, or that you don't have many healing items on hand, or the fact that you're breathing manually now. Gotcha
Thanks be the algorithm for showing me this. I haven't seen your recent videos and this was a great one to get recommended. I've always meant to try out Dust and this was a good preview into it.
Man I just love your videos. They cover a niche topic (fallout mods) that I love and give a more critical review and discussion of the mods themselves. You and Warlockracy have given me videos/analysis that I think subconsciously I have wanted for a long time. Keep up the good work, can’t wait for your next video
I love the idea of Dust, NV establishing a new apocalypse coming between the fog, the tunnelers, and the monstrosities being spit out by big mountain all converging was always a terrifying thought and a challenge I wish we could've faced. The only thing I truly HATE about Dust which I believe is fixed in modern versions and was fixed easily in older versions was that gun enemies had unlimited ammo while being able to kill you with a bullet, then when you killed them they had 1 or 2 rounds on them. I also don't much care for sanity because of how comically easy it is to go insane.
this was a great video man. love to see an actual review style video on dust considering while being one of the most well-known new Vegas mods it has little creator content-based videos besides lets plays
Somewhat fitting for his character, but I prefer joshua to be alive and well continue to grow as a character after sparing the white legs leader, rather than just becoming a monster.It feels too much like an alien.Three scenario for me.
Another total overhaul mod that could be interesting to look at is Obscurum pandemic, just a warning though: if you thought dust was difficult, this one is straight up just unfair
I see moss like this and I imagine the creator(s) that have the skill and drive but no budget or prevalent equipment, and I hope that they make it big in the game development world.
From your opening explanation, I knew your content was worth watching, thank you for such a well explained topic where all I heard before was only the difficulty
Only two gripes from me. When you got to Zion the Spore carriers, wendigo and fog were the results of a vault 22 expidition that happened like a decade b4 the game starts and it was kind of implied in the game that ya it was going to spread. Someguy just made leaned into the worst possible ending here. Second is the key in the vault for the last ending, I'm pretty sure that key was an easter egg. It's the second key that makes your journey an even bigger black pill. The first key and the only one you should think exists is at the other end of the divide. The only place to survive relatively unscathed and form its own civilization. The gut punch is that you wipe it out and right at the traditional entrance to the divide on the last "enemy" is the key to get out. Then you have to walk all the way back through the one peaceful and surviving place in this hellish version of the mojave, that you just genocided out of existence. Great video, love to see Dust get some love! I played a ton of it 3 years back!
Loved the video, Ramble. It'd be cool to see a follow up video about mods specifically for DUST (mostly because I've made several). There are many mods for DUST dedicated to bug fixes, such as DUST Tweaks, DUSTed DUST, DUST Big MT Water Fix, and Fallout DUST Tunneler Detection Fix. The biggest mod I've made for DUST; DUST Expanded Locations, unlocks several blocked locations in DUST (such as the Lucky 38, The Fort, and Big Mountain), as well as re-introducing several characters from New Vegas. I'd love to see you check it out :)
Dust is an absolute beauty of a pain in the ass but an excellently replayable one. Though I have always wanted a mod that would bring the mechanics, weapons, armor, and backpacks into actual New Vegas. I adore fallout but I've always wanted a difficult and more satisfying playthrough. That and you'd think a post apocalyptic world like New Vegas though populated would have less resources than what the game actually provides. That being said if there is a mod that gives us the dust mechanics and difficulty while still in the new Vegas playthrough please let me know lol.
I acknowledge your points, but I do have a counterpoint. Dust, for first time players and those without the knowledge of what to do, what choices to make, and only the knowledge of F:NV and/or F:3, sometimes have exceptional difficulty in the game just figuring out what to do, surviving, or anything else. Switching player choice from standard RPG mechanics to a choice of tradeoffs or survival is all well and good when you know what your choices are. Case and point, Mikeburnfire's playthrough of the game. Zach and Mike don't have a stealth or Strategic bone in their body, and Zach has no idea what the mod even is. As such, they just found the whole thing depressing and pointlessly difficult. They couldn't enjoy any of the positive points you mentioned, because they couldn't figure out how to play the new game it was. I personally don't have a problem with Dust, but I find it difficult sometimes for the sake of being difficult. Also the NCR is stupidly evil? Like evil for no good reason. The NCR isn't evil for no reason. They are imperialist, but everything they do they do because they genuinely think they are helping. Those taxes and soldiers for them are helping. I just didn't like the fact that they turn into basically just some mindless "We experiment with everything and oppress for no reason!" faction.
Yeah I'm not a fan of how the NCR's portrayed in this mod, they do a lot of messed up stuff but usually it's because of incompetence and stupidity rather than genuine malice, like Bitter Springs
I have to say: I appreciate you, ramblelime. I’m so glad I randomly found your channel a few months ago. Being a fan of the Fallout mod community and a fan of the video essay/in-depth game review, I think you’re filling a niche that needs filling. You’re like Hbomberguy and Al Chestbreach’s beautiful baby and I’m here for it.
Glad to see you enjoyed Dust a lot, it's honestly one of my favorite mods for FNV. You should try out Frost sometime, Naugrim (the creator of Dust and Frost) gave control of the development his mods to a small dedicated community who have continued to develop the mod. They've done a good job with the story and implemented some really cool features into the insanity system. Anyway, thanks for the review!
Just got recommended this video! Sorry if someone already brought this up, but the Tunnelers are broken for some reason as they will see you better the stealthier you are (stealth boys makes things worse). There is a fix on Nexus that restores the normal operation, so that it is possible to sneak by them as they are in Lonesome Road
I would also like to add: you can get a glimpse of the unfinished story stuff in the Fort and at Big MT by using the console to unlock the permanently locked doors. The Big MT notes in the Think Tank are laughably unfinished, but the stuff in the Fort's main tent is near complete. No clue why Caesar's tent was closed off when it is fully finished. DUST is the kind of mod that I think deserves to be a full game. It is a great set up, and side steps all of the problems of a potential New Vegas sequel.
Dude, I jsut found your channel and binged literally every one of your videos. Holy shit, you're an amazing UA-camr and critic, and can't wait to see where you go from here. You're gonna explode, I just feel it
Damn you earned a sub in the first minute just from how expertly and succinctly you described the vapid and shallow discourse around Cyberpunk and The Outer Worlds.
Whilst I absolutely do not doubt that this mod is difficult and a compelling survival experience. I cannot help but have a small giggle to myself due to the various STALKER mods that I have played over the years that take this concept and run a marathon with them. As in the complexity and difficulty of the average STALKER mod that doesn't even particularly focus on being a survival simulation would seemingly eat this mod up for it's electrolyte and protein content, and as such I cannot help but laugh at imaging the kiniption fit the people complaining about the difficulty of this mod would have attempting to survive in something like Misery (which is admittedly leaning more towards the more extreme end of the complexity/difficulty/survival sim spectrum of things). Having said that, I am very pleased to have had this mod brought to my attention. Thank you so much for making such an involved video about it, you have 100% more than earned (not the exact word I was looking for but eh) a new subscriber. I look forward to seeing what else you have covered. Wishing you all the best dude, and thanks again for all the hard work that went into making this video.
Thanks for such kind words! More on the way. P.S I am one of those people who gets chewed up and spat out by STALKER mods. I'm not even that proficient at getting through vanilla STALKER. I need to get good. It's a problem. Thanks again.
I felt the divide was meant to be an absurd "decoy" ending, that you'd go through the whole area slaughtering the gathered tribes which happen To be the most stable and successfull societies you've seen so far to find out in the end that it did'nt lead anywhere and you've massacred dozens of innocents in vain, ironicaly fulfilling their endtimes prophecy for no reason.
my personal issue with DUST/FROST isn't it's extreme difficulty (as long as I can do the same thing back I'm fine, so if an enemy can one shot me I should be able to one shot them) but rather the way the Sanity system works in it, it makes 0 sense that you would lose sanity for DEFENDING YOURSELF when that had literally been happening in the Mojave long before the events of DUST, attacking and killing passersby who don't attack you on sight or before they can (like the people living in the tunnels in FROST that actually tell you to back off and that they don't want any trouble)should but not when they are actively shooting/charging at you with the intention of killing you and stealing your stuff
To be fair, even when it is in self defense, the act of killing another human being would put a heavy mental strain on a normal person (especially if you fo it every single day) and neither of the mods make you out to be a stoic survivor that isn't affected by the environment or the actions they carry out. Quite the opposite, you either wind up as a crippling alcoholic/thorazine abuser to cope with the fact that you're doing terrible things or you give in to the insanity.
I am so glad I found this video. Singlehandly makes me want to try making a video myself on DUST, purely cause how interesting it is. Also on the note about the tunnerlers, its a bug that makes them be able to see you no matter what. There are ment to be sneaked around, but due to mod issues, it cant really work.
On my binge of consuming fallout lore I've stumbled upon this channel and watched basically every video you've released! I await the next one with anticipation. I have a question if you've got the time sifting through comments. What do you think a Fallout game that takes place in Canada would be like in your mind? Seems like a lot of potential there for a cool mod if we're talking about referencing to the annexation by the US and how that's progressed post war. I ask because I've got a concept I've been working on as a little fun thing to pass the time and I'd love the perspective of a fellow Canadian brother in arms! Once again, great job on these videos my dude keep this shit up and if you don't feel like answering my question at least know you got an admirer (no homo).
I've always considered out-of-US Fallout content to be a little bit unnecessary where the franchise is right now. There are plenty of really interesting US states the series could go to (New York, Lousiana, Florida, Illinois, Arizona, California again) so Canada or any other country wouldn't seem like a priority for any mainline game. That being said, I've always thought Canada would be a fun location for DLC or mods as long as they use it creatively and don't just make snow deathclaws and maple syrup-based healing items, you know what I mean? Anyway, thank you for the kind words man!
Your beginning criticism of how often people criticize media, specifically games even, with buzzwords or it is just them trying to relate their topic to something people already know so much about rather than describing the media in itself, is something that I wish people could see more and would actually try to work around. It is very annoying to see and I commend you for pointing it out.
Stealing also INCREASES your sanity for whatever reason when I first played Dust I went through Zion, I didn't find the key to the Grand Staircase in the vault, so I thought the key was in the Ulysses boss room, the Divide was fun to play through but I was upset I missed the key when I did find it
I literally just logged into my Google account to say that seeing a Meltdown reference in a New Vegas mod video REALLY caught me off guard and gave me a good laugh. I have no idea if anyone else got the joke but I appreciate you.
the tunnelers may be a lore thing from the game itself, new vegas lonesome road mentioned they were slowly coming into the mohave from the divide, i have not played dust, but it sounds like a fun version, is it a rougelike style mod, or a single world you learn things from each area?
Don't play it it removes the good bits of new vegas like the characters every one will invoke the same reaction as the powder ganger when you first approach nipton
Good stuff good stuff, would love to see a video like this on honest hearts reborn! I just finished it myself and I have many thoughts Also, this channel is a little bit of a dream come true isn't it. It is genuinely great and unique content. It's super cool to see someone highlighting the gems of the modding community with the same keen eye and good humor that the plethora of (also great) video essays about regular base new vegas do. But this balance of content and humor, and the kind of humor? *chef's kiss*. I am thoroughly enjoying binging this channel, nice work :)
Seeing in-depth analysis of New Vegas mods is something I have wanted, and even considered doing myself, for years. Dust (And Alchestbreach's playthrough of it) was extremely impactful and dare I say even formative for me. I'd love to see you go over other older, big narrative mods for New Vegas. I feel that so many of them, as well as mods and fanfiction in general, are underappreciated and underanalyzed due to being fan creations.
Most mods and fanfictions are deeply unappreciated because they are laugh-out-loud terrible quality. There are a million shit mods for a single good mod and a lot of the stories told in low quality mods are indistinguishable from first time bad fanfiction.
@@ClonesDream And? Sturgeon's Law. 99% of everything is garbage. For every amazing, artistic movie that comes out there is 100 pieces of soulless, corporate schlock. The same goes for fanfiction. For every piece of fanfiction that is better than most novels coming out, there are 100 pieces of self insert near-porn fanfiction littered with spelling mistakes. This does not mean the good pieces of fan fiction are any less valuable, just like how great films are not less valuable because of the schlock which accompanies them in their medium.
Thanks for the analysis, great video. I started playing Dust mod a while back, but quickly got frustrated with the lack of ammo, going critically hungry/thirsty several times within the same day (or whenever sleeping), and of course the carry weight situation. Eventually I realized that in order to play the "right" way, in which I was most likely able to survive, I would be crouch-walking the entire play-though and making my kills with improvised melee weapons or explosives, and always having not-enough-ammo against enemies that could hang for five minutes in a firefight because their ammo supply never ended. So, I turned on God mode after about 4 hours of game play (and dozens of deaths). Boy I am glad I did: I played through every single ending and saw every area- EXCEPT the Courier's space; thanks for mentioning that!- available, meaning that I was enable to enjoy the environment, design, lore, etc. without any of the severe hardships that was definitely within a hair's breadth of driving me completely away and uninstalling. Making all of these accomplishments without God mode would've taken me five or six times the amount of play time (and frustration), and my life is busy enough that this was a HUGE benefit for me. Again, you did a fantastic job and I heartily agree with your overall analysis and conclusion...now to go find that area where the Courier left his mark...
So it's like playing stalker except everything is more static, crappy and yellow and the former does so much more (but oh boy I'm gonna played it, the things I love...)
I am trying to find a mod with realistic bullet damage, not just something that is difficult for me but one that's more like rainbow six siege, where headshots are instant and bodyshots can be a double tap, not like this mod where its one bullet to kill me and 20 for the enemy
it's such a personal experience. all the small choices and micro-managing, the options you weigh up for yourself. how you approach a fight, do you even approach the fight, once the fight goes wrong how do best use your resources and salvage it? the quiet moments spent inbetween where the quiet dread sets in, and you just feel like the last person in a world gone mad. where you can see how far gone things have gone, comparing them to how they were in the original game. discovering the new stories the factions and groups left behind. it's such a simple twist on the formula, but manages to do so much with so little.
Fantastic review. Definitely my favorite fnv mod of all time too. And props to you for sticking it out and playing on hardcore mode. A lot of people play on normal mode and re-add compass tics etc. I feel like you have to have your soul crushed over and over again by playing ‘vanilla’ DUST before you can really appreciate getting things right, because SO much is always at stake. Got my sub
That shit with the blackout state telporting you to the shack surrounded by cazadores happened to me in my first playthrough. I was going to Goodsprings to craft something I needed to reach an ending (won't say it in case it's a spoiler), and the exploding illusion guys popped up. Did not realize at the time the different doors made you go to different spot, as I opted to reload my save and sneak attack all the illusions from far away so the explosion wouldn't reach, and I was too far away so they wouldn't go after me. They can't hurt me but I can kill them, very fair.
On a more funny note: Karma is reversed (hence while killing drains sanity). So doing bad stuff raises sanity. Like stealing. There's a mod on the nexus page that removes ownership of items. So no stealing. Means getting sanity up is way more difficult so that's my final comment. If I keep this up, most comments in this section are from me D: edit: not sure if it fixed now but back then when I played I think the tunnlers AI was a bid buggy and spot from far away when they shouldn't. Could be only if you in stealth mode/crouched but I don't remember it exactly
I love the world of Dust. It captures overwhelming dread perfectly as the very capital of the wasteland is now an exclusion zone that's practically unlivable.
I really like dust. It's coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere.
Hey I got a question, what's your favorite game mod?
@@freddyarm7927 Enderal by a longshot.
Yes Anakin skywalker YES
But not like here
You have a bad take and bad taste if you like this.
Its not Fallout its just a shit show of a mod
Also, I'm just throwing this out here:
Spaceman Scott did a recent analysis on Dust, and I believe his point about The Divide creates a perfect narrative justification why it was kept separate and not an ending.
In the divide, after the Tunnelers start migrating, people leave the Mojave and escape into the Divide, most notably the tribes of Zion. The survivors are sheparded by a character who helps them rebuild into successful tribes and ends the infighting. As well they become the most prosperous society to exist during Dust, healing from the Divide's creation event. But then it happens again, and they are all nearly wiped out. But they survive. This time, they wall off all entrances, including locking that door. There are notes that say if anything comes through that door to kill on sight for their survival. You stumble out of there thinking it's where the key might be to leave. So you trek the Divide, and as you go up you slaughter all of these people who managed to rebuild their lives three times for your own sake. No one's fault here. You couldn't have known, and neither do they know that you're (potentially) harmless. Their trauma has made them kill first act questions later. And you've likely endured a hell of a lot to get to this point, so you won't quit now. But eventually, you reach the end of the Divide and realize there's no exit. The preacher who, seeing you murdering everyone he considered family on your way to get through to the end, decides he'd rather give up and kills himself than try and rebuild again. He leaves you a note on his body, condemning your destruction as even being worse than the courier, for it had no purpose, and you gained nothing. But you don't know this....until after you've already done it. And suddenly you have to reflect on it, because you can't take it back. Putting the key here, as though to justify your actions, just wouldn't fit with the rest of the narrative.
I think the Divides inclusion and placement was very purposeful and follows the mods whole ethos of: there is a story here if you want to find it.
I definitely agree. The story of the Divide works here because there is literally no reason to go there. If there was any reason, then it wouldn't make the player reflect on their actions, but instead blame the game for "making" them become a monster.
but this is a Thermian Argument
@Mauro Serra Maybe I'm just arguing semantics here, but a Thermian Argument is only such when the person is attempting to dismiss criticism via the existing explanation in the lore of the medium. In the video, he stated that his opinion was that Lonesome Road should have been an ending route instead of a dead end area which seems to serve no purpose. This is fine and I've really nothing to argue against cause that's their opinion. I simply provided what another creator had brought up which served as a really neat way to contextualize the whole area and why it worked better to not be an ending. I'm not arguing against there being criticism (or opinion in this case), because there's nothing in what I said that would have any merit for explaining why it wasn't an ending route.
@@CamaradaDoppio The Thermian Argument is the dismissal of criticism of a story's themes and messages because of in-universe logic. This isn't that, as its replying to lime with an explanation of how making the entirety of lonesome road pointless serves the greater themes in dust.
it's hard to see the dust walker stuff as anything but a lame excuse to avoid programing a friendly settlement. their hostility is really dumb regardless of the nonsense excuse from their history
Fun fact: the Divide isn’t supposed to be an endgame kind of location. It’s purely accidental that the survivor shows up in and through notes, is attacked by all the current residents of the divide.
I remember watching Alchestbreachs playthrough of dust. Watching go insane and creating the Breach Doctrine was an amazing moment
That's probably one of my favorite series of his even to this day, holy shit it was hilarious and awesome. One of my favorite moments was when he accidentally pushed that little girl off the cliff. I love how the more insane his character became, because he was butchering whatever's left of the Mojave, the more insane he acted (and probably frustrated lol). Even carrying around a chainsaw (because of his overencumbrance) and started talking to it was hysterical, that series was fantastic
Gotta go back and watch it again. It’s been years.
@@tylerjohnson7204 you sound either unemployed or it*lian to be honest
@@nagger8216 THAT'S BREACH DOCTRINE BABY
@@warden-commandercousland shoots heads off corpse and yells breach doctrine !
On Tunnelers: there is a bug, much like Nuclear Ghandi, where their perception was set wrong and *when you sneak* they have perfect perception and will detect you as soon as they load into the worldspace. This is fixable with a mod if one so chooses.
Additionally, there is a mod where killing enough Tunnelers, determined by the version you download, makes them "fear you", at which point they become neutral. This can be a rather large, and therefore resource-expensive number, and for realism I carried around 5 Tunneler queen pheremones (I think that's the item name?) to justify the new passiveness.
Ghost people are the ones with infinite perception, unless the tunnelers have that prob too & i just never noticed. At most i remember theyd auto detect you when burrowing for a sec
@@mfspectacular it's the ghost people
@@mfspectacular Interesting, I looked into the Tunneler fix mod: apparently their detection chance was tied to their (very high) level, and that's how they find you on load into the world. Good to know.
fun fact: The infinite perception glitch is a misconception, testing has zone that having 0 perception does not glitch out the game and result in infinite perception. It's better than 1 perception granted, but its worse than 2 perception.
The real reason why the Ghost people have such good detection is because they are some of the highest level enemies in the game.
@@mfspectacularthe ghost people actually have such a high perception because the entire Madre is, in the game engine, extremely well lit.
I like to make the character in the mod my Courier from the base game, like he's dreaming or something and this is his _Luke Skywalker fighting Luke Vader under the tree_ moment in his journey, like he's realizing how much pull he has and how badly it's possible for him to fuck everything up
😨😨😨
Fun fact: The courier is in the game, they've been turned into a ghoul and they live in some heavily trapped cave
And it feels stupid to mention this cause I forgot the video already does
30:24 Not sure if it's been changed in later releases but in the original mod Festus is still around and you can talk to him and even finish his quest by turning in the star caps. I remember it feeling very surreal talking to him after several hours of fighting and murdering in silence.
I missed the part of who the Wendigo was supposed to be. I guess he wasn't joking that time with "I will find you... ...God willing, you will not leave this valley."
I don't think God had anything to do with his transformation this time...
The idea of Butch, *Butch* of ALL people making his way across the United Wasteland to reach Nevada is just so damn unlikely it’s almost hilarious.
This is a guy who was too scared to save his own mother from giant cockroaches.
Sure, he may have had a phobia specific to radroaches, but I don’t think he’d suddenly find courage to fight shit like Super Mutants, entire gangs of Raiders, or hell, MORE radroaches and scorpions and all the other giant bugs.
But sure, he made it all the way across the country.
The Vault Dweller, without any kind of experience about the exterior world, ventured the wastes and came like a champion.
Same applies to other PCs, like the Lone Wanderer and the Sole Survivor (the female, Norah, don't know a thing about combat, mind you).
So, besides how idiotic Butch is portrayed on Fallout 3, it doesn't seem so unlikely of him to reach that far, learning what he must as he braves the Wasteland as he goes forward.
I mean, he made it to Rivet City, so he couldn't be a complete waste of humanity.
honestly any vault dweller would be healthier and likely more intelligent than people born outside the vaults in the wasteland..
@@TheTheRandomShow1234 Yeah... Tell that to the dwellers from Vault 3.
Hey man, everyone loves an underdog story. Butch was the real hero all along haha
You know even though dust is supposed to be “what if everything went to shit”
It’s still fallout in its spirit lol, I kinda like it for the fact it’s just funny
"Hard hard hard hard hard. It's like listening to people who have never played Dark Souls tell you about Dark Souls"
Subscribed simply because of how much I felt this line as a Souls fan.
I honestly was worried when I reached the end and was afflicted with insanity; I kept on thinking I was going to have a hallucination and though I escaped the Mojave Hellscape, the Hellscape didn't leave me entirely.
IIRC the reason the Divide was included but seeming has no content was because in an older version you had to get the key to the vertibird off a dead NCR squad near the hopeville missile silo. So that meant you had to go through every DLC to get what I assumed the mod author intended as the "true ending" of the mod. He probably realized that was stupid and just moved the key to Camp golf and added the grand staircase ending to the long dark instead.
on one of my first playthroughs of dust long ago I left spawn and was immediatley beseiged by a pack of tunnelers. I ran and tried to hold my ground on a cliff. Got knocked off by a particularly huge tunneler and fell into a warband of tribals. I hid behind a rock but they soon stopped shooting at me and at the tunnelers instead. One of them threw a bomb and when it went off, I peeked up and saw everyone dead. It was then I fell in love with the mod.
You and Warlockracy are providing genuinely thoughtful analysis on topics I've never seen discussed outside of Nexus and NMM topic threads. Thank you so much ✨
I’m pretty sure that tunnelers were meant to have no perception like the ghost people were but it somehow got subtracted and gave them infinite perception.
You are correct. I believe there is a mod on the Nexus to fix their perception.
the infinite perception glitch is not a thing, its a misconception, the real reason for their high detection capabilities is their high level, that's it.
I've been playing DUST on and off for about a few years and it's probably my favorite mod, to the point where I like it way more than the base game. I agree with a ton of stuff here, but there's a lot I disagree with, mostly to the end.
The NCR didn't originally get the cloud from looting the Madre. Father Elijah actually gifted it to them via the tribals the NCR traveled with. He ended up being right, as Royst and Lydia ended up destroying a ton of the Mojave with it. I'm also surprised you didn't mention just how cruel the NCR ended up being after their takeover of the Mojave. There's a few notes around that hint at this, such as Sarah and her new family including children are executed in the street by NCR in order to set up operation in Vault 21.
While Butch's inclusion can be comparable to fanservice, there's a lot more depth that you didn't mention. He has journals all over the canyon, detailing how he's been traveling across Zion and helplessly trying to escape to the point he even worked with the NCR. And by the time you find him he's just narrowly escaped Zion with a friend, about to head out into the Mojave to find a better area to settle; until you gun him down. I kinda felt attached the original character in 3, but killing him and then learning about the sheer struggle he went through, only for his progress to be ended for nothing was heartbreaking for me, like how a previous commenter mentioned the Divide's tribals.
You complained about the Wendigo being annoying, but once never mentioned the Spore Carriers, which I found a bit puzzling. Maybe it's because the infinite ammo flare gun exists, but Spore Carriers are basically Tunnelers but jacked up to 10x strength, speed, and health. They're the most annoying part of the mod and I thought they'd at least be brought up, seeing as to how you critiqued Tunnelers. Also, on a second playthrough, the design of Zion becomes way more simple in DUST, since the escape route is first going North, then going East to the Fork Bridge. Although I'm guessing this is more indicative of the fact you don't like Honest Hearts.
I know this is a review solely covering DUST, but I think a segment where you recommended certain mods for it would've been neat. I think DUST feels near unplayable without JAM's hitmarker/crosshair, and patches like DUSTed DUST and DUST Tweaks are super vital in fixing tons of bugs and a lot of core stuff with the mod. A modder named TomSkele has also made a ton of patches for other mods with DUST and some tweaks of his own, including skeleton/plague victim variety, NCR tweaks, etc.
I agreed with mostly everything else though, I'm still really glad you said you liked the gameplay because it's one of my favorite parts of the mod. People usually dismiss DUST as having bad gameplay but good lore, but I don't think these people have played it long enough. It's a huge game of trial and error that's super satisfying to get past, constantly thinking of new strategies with the little equipment and ammo you have. My only real complaint with the gameplay is I wish that enemies dropped less regular ammo, but way more junk ammo. Even with a mod that basically makes everything into a glass cannon, I think junk rounds have significantly less damage to the point it's noticeable.
Thanks for this review, I really like seeing this mod analyzed by anyone.
Hey, this is TomSkele. Wasn't expecting to get mentioned here, thank you :)
Omor
"Until, of course, he's gunned down mercilessly by you."
I'll respond to the rest of this later when I have time, but good lord I'll nip this one straight in the bud.
Butch isn't mercilessly gunned down by you, the player. He, like almost 100% of the npcs in this mod, attacks you on sight. In his case, when you enter the Honest Hearts entrance cell.
No warnings to leave, no requests to let you pass through the canyon (why would he prevent you from entering?) if you let him and his friend live (why would he aggressively engage someone random if he just went through hell, he cares about his friend, and as you said, he worked with the NCR to survive; why fight someone unprovoked after all that?) , and no warning of what's in the canyon (only reason to prevent you to go, thanks Butch you ass).
It's not merciless to defend yourself against someone trying to kill you with a gun. It's harder to care about Butch when his NPC is just like every other human NPC that aggros on the player's mere existence.
And before I get the typical counter "everyone distrusts everyone, shoot first", yes you will and should be wary of everyone else, but only if it's necessary and the person is aggressive. You have limited ammo and almost no medical supplies, getting into a firefight with every person you see is just plain stupid. Especially in Butch's case when he just went through hell, why get yourself killed after all that? Point your gun at the Player, warn them, and then try to get out of this new situation without having to fight. He's worked with strangers already so he shouldn't be wary to the point of bloodlust and he has his friend's life to consider, not just his own.
Even if I'm wrong about his aggression, you cannot argue that the Player killing him is merciless since he is programmed to attack you on sight. At best you can RP that you were merciless if you shot him before he aggros.
Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment, the main reason I wrote that is due to my personal first playthrough.
I spent a ton of time exploring several settlements like Novac, Primm, etc, so I was conditioned to gunning down everyone on-sight, including the various non-hostile survivors who have basic gear (the ones who replace the traveling merchants,) due to the fact they all, for the most part, have useful supplies that off-set the little ammo used on them, so when I got to the Zion trail, I assumed he was gonna be friendly. I didn't really even pay attention to the compass sign and just shot him down instantly. I assumed a lot of other people had that kinda experience, that's mainly why I wrote it like that. I could have worded it a bit better.
I think the whole encounter would've worked a lot better if Butch wasn't hostile from the get-go and had some dialogue, but voice acting would be hard to replicate for an already canon character.
Have you played Fallout 4: Frost?
I believe made by the same lead and same ethos.
It is a shame that the endings are so abrupt. If you were to spend the entire game killing every person you meet, only to finally encounter some normal, sane people. Maybe even a few of the canon characters but older. It would feel like you really did something significant. Like crawling through all that mud and blood was finally worth it in the end.
I think this is probs one of the few things this mod could benefits massively from and I'm glad to see someone else bring it up. Even if a few choice characters could chat for a bit and give you an idea of how much things have changed and how it impacted the existing world & New Vegas
Someone like an older Daniel greeting you at the Grand Staircase and like ramble said just asking the simple question of "You look like you have had it rough, are you okay?" i could imagine that that entire time literally having only a handful of 'friendly' interactions with people having someone just ask if your okay having the hugest sense of relief and highest amounts of emotion.
@@thebob5240 dude Daniel would be amazing to counterbalance the pure evil that is the Wendigo (who is actually Joshua Graham). Great idea and I'm sure they're could be a few other great ideas like that
@@thebob5240 maybe if you’re insane you will get a bad ending where you tried killing everyone and ended up dead after trying so hard to get out of the Mojave, if your sanity is good though you will get the good ending
You know that would require ? Voice acting. Given the modder's resource that seem kind out of the question at the time of making that mod. I mean we have AI voice now but it still feel emotionless sometime, not to mention copyright strike.
I think most problem with video games and fan base were down to people thinking making video game is like making magic. They don't know how stuff happen they just wanted it their way.
08:18 Oh right, I remember. That was one of Dusts Strongpoints. While there were no quests, there still were quests. Hidden quests if one like to call it. Certain areas to get in and out requieres certain stuff and some other stuff. Everything were really neatly and naturally interwoven, making a seamless gameplay experience like
dark souls
there, I said it! It's the Dark Souls of NV Mods!
I know where the door is!
@@eleven99 we call them rad as hell is what we call them
Me watching everyone that I cared about in nv fall victim to horrible fates that I can do nothing to change: damn this really is like dark souls
Just discovered your channel, wanted to say this kind of analysis for mods, especially New Vegas mods, is something I've been looking for for a long time and I really enjoy and appreciate it. So much of how I look at mods and games as a whole has been influenced by these mods, and it makes me happy to see discussion on them a bit more in-depth than a reddit post or a nexus comment.
This is a good video, but I think you may be missing a few points.
I'm pretty sure the spore stuff was ALREADY in New Canaan in the base game, in some of the caves. According to the wiki, the spore plant pods were literally added in Honest Hearts. I'm not sure if it was anything the NCR did, unless I missed some note.
Also, I'm pretty sure that the honest hearts ending is a troll. The key to the exit and the note are in a literal pile of rubble that is super easy to just walk past. I think in most of the lets plays I've seen people just walk passed it. The only thing worse than going through Zion is going through Zion, killing everyone in the divide (which is described in lore as a society that had actually managed to drive off the tunnelers and rebuild, IIRC some guy curses you for that at the end), only to realize that you have to go back through Zion and that you massacred the divide for nothing. It's even better when you see how chipper the key's note is.
"First day in the Vault! I'm excited to begin my work as Overseer! According to the documents Vault-Tec has provided me, Vault 74 is unique (lucky me!). Unlike the other vaults, THIS vault is equipped with not one, but TWO doors. One is the giant, 20 ton monstrosity that everyone knows about. The other door is a secret passageway (how exciting!), located right behind my desk! This false panel slides aside to reveal a much longer tunnel, to be used in times of emergency only. This tunnel leads east to a number of regions Vault-Tec assumes will be mostly untouched in the event of a nuclear exchange. Zion National Park... Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument... I went there on vacation once. It was quite nice. Grand Canyon National Park... Heck, this'll be fun! A bit of camping, some fishing. I can't wait for this 'emergency'!"
yes, the canon is that survivors from vault what-it's-number went to zion and a few places in-between, with the biggest group reaching the former before throwing waya everything from their past/dying. with everything hitting the fan, it wouldn't surprise me if the plant just decided they wanted to expand
21:03
Pacer also kinda ruined things cuz he caused a fight at jacobtown which ended with his and marcus death, without Marcus around the super mutants that were taking care of most of the freeside habitats that were there go insane and go violent and cannibals.
about the divide: the divide is supposed to be a punch in your gut, the lore of the divide shows that the marked mens have become strong and not longer fuel of hate, they survived the attack of the white legs and the leftovers of the sorrow/dead horses, and so, they marked the tunnel from where the player came as cursed, evil, everything that comes from it must be killed, cuz otherwise it will kill them. and so we do.
the player kills a whole tribe that technically is just minding its own business, and does the whole DLC trip backwash, just to find out that there isn't exit, you can't even go to the Mojave from the vanilla enter cuz it's blocked so you have to walk back, seeing the corpses of the marked men that just wanted to protect their home from the aggressive Mojave. And us, the player, killed them cuz well that's dust for you!
Long time no see man! Great to see you upload another high quality video. Seriously I appreciate your in depth review of DUST so much because I’ve been wanting to play it for so long.
The unfortunate thing about Dust is that, in a way, it's unfinished. Sure, the mod author went on to create FROST for Fallout 4, but DUST doesn't really have a proper conclusion to it's narrative like Frost does as far as I'm aware. It just shows the player a grimdark version of New Vegas, but doesn't really do anything with it. Everything has gone to shit and there's nothing to be said about this. There isn't a point.
What do I mean by this? Well in another Grimdark game, Warhammer 40k, there's a link that connects the various grimdark aspects of the setting, at least if you're examining individual factions within that setting in a vacuum. For example, the Imperium of Man is a dystopian version of humanity that has indulged in its worse parts of itself. Religious zealotry and fascism primarily has led to a version of humanity that is simultaneously one of the most technologically advanced yet the most ignorant species in the galaxy. It's because of its reverence of The Emperor that they rely on the Adeptus Mechanicus to understand their technology for them because they're to set on their own beliefs to understand it themselves. Meanwhile their fascistic belief that humanity is superior to all other forms of life has led to mankind at perpetual war with all other forms of sentient life in the galaxy, meaning all of their resources are poured into anything and everything you can think of related to warfare.
Meanwhile in Dust, the east-coast Brotherhood of Steel, a version of the Brotherhood that is generally speaking a lot more altruistic and well-meaning finds themselves in a setting that is practically designed to crush this version of the brotherhood underneath its foot. So what happens? Nothing. They're just there and they don't really do anything. The setting seemingly doesn't have an effect on how the faction behaves or their approach to other wastelanders. Dust introduces this grimdark version of New Vegas, shows off all the dead but recognizable faces of characters from vanilla New Vegas and Fallout 3 and doesn't try to tell a story beyond the bare minimum needed to know what exactly caused the Mojave to collapse after the vanilla game. There isn't any thematic or in-universe link that connects the setting, the countless dead, the unimaginable suffering together to tell a complete story.
what about Lonesome road? That place was great for the things you mentioned. Everything that happened there makes sense. Even the ultra-hostility does. Its just a shame that you have to deal with Zion to get there.
I'd excuse it for the fact that DUST was made by one person as a hobby project, so he wasn't the biggest loremaker genius out there
There is a bit more to the lore of the East Coast Brotherhood team that most people miss. If you kill the leader of the group, you can find a holotape/note on his body wherein he laments the current state of the Mojave region and vows to help anybody he and his soldiers come across. That's presumably why they don't immediately attack you when you approach them. Still, their presence in the area could've been a lot more compelling; plus, having them do basically nothing is a major missed opportunity.
Lol
A tad narrow-minded (ironically) to attribute the state of WH40k's Imperium of Man to 'Religious Zealotry and Fascism'. The state of the Imperium is due to humanity's hubris, more than anything else. The Emperor was, for all intents and purposes, an all-powerful, virtuous messiah figure who singlehandedly dragged humanity into a golden age of technological, innovation, prosperity and expansion. Naturally, the government was entirely under his control, yielding this absolute power to secure this prosperity against a galaxy of hostile factions (note: the galaxy is full of factions hostile to humanity). He then sought to force humanity off of religious beliefs as a whole and any kind of superstition, intent on making humanity better by making them more objective and pragmatic.
When he made his 'children', though, some of them were eventually the ones to betray him (the Horus Heresy) as they believed that it was only logical to worship the emperor as a deity due to his accomplishments, ignoring the Emperors' own wishes.
*This* is the reason that humanity is fucked in the 40th millenium. They rejected the words of a messiah, believing in their hubris that what they knew better. Humanity is far from the "most technologically advanced" species of the galaxy. The collapse resulting from the near-death of the emperor has resulted in a dark age of lost knowledge, and the mechanicus are arguably the only ones that actually _can_ decypher their more esoteric lost technologies. No other world or human faction would be able to. Their 'fascistic' belief is not that humanity is superior to all forms of life... exactly. It's that humanity's existence depends on the extermination of the xenos, which is objectively true. The Tau are a bizarre stratocratic hive-mind/communist dictatorship. The Eldar are a band of nomadic ascetic-psychos who are constantly on the edge of being slightly annoyed and suddenly going insane and joining the dark Eldar, the space version of Himmler's darkest fantasies. The orks are a violent fungal infection of untold proportions and unspecified psyonic power, the Tyrranids are a devouring swarm coming from all edges of the galaxy and Chaos is an insidious, eternal threat that continuously nips at the borders of the Imperium and threatens to destroy entire planets from within at the smallest of missteps. The existing structure of the Imperium is a result of humanity's hubris, but it is also simultaneously now the only way they can remain alive as a species.
Wow I'm surprised to see someone doing a video on this, I actually did some work on it. A lot of it is still on an old hard drive with stuff that was never implemented, I even had a lame new intro for it that I voiced lol, glad that never made it in. You can probably still find my comments way back on the mod page years ago talking to Nagurim about helping on it haha. Anyway, I dig the video; it's so cool to see everyone enjoys this mod after all this time. Thanks for your time on this and to all you people out there keeping Dust and Frost alive still
Love to see such in depth analysis on really niche stuff like this that I'm interested in. You're awesome and just got a sub.
The biggest gripe about the tunnelers is that reloading the game duplicates/respawns them.
Not sure if other people experience this issue, but it's extremely frustrating to load a save from right after you kill the tunnelers, and they somehow revived themselves from the dead.
The closest I've seen is actually in reverse, where quicksaves in FO4 wouldn't reload mines that were triggered in a past life.
@@gratuitouslurking8610 yeah that's a common issue with fo4, and i think it does it with hard saves as well as quicksaves.
And similar to the tunneler bug, is the hunger/thirst system in NV not restoring your hunger/thirst to it's original level when you load a save. Although I think the hunger bug was in the original game, unlike the tunneler one.
@@spoonsareoccasionallymadeo5728 I've only had the issue with hard saves when the game auto-loads it as a result of a death, if you load it up manually it'll remember trap set states. I'm guessing it's some hickup with the trap coding itself in this case but I'm nowhere near knowledge of how creation engine works at the best of times.
That intro was so spot on, and exactly what annoys me about criticism surrounding so many properties. Very well put.
I LOVE the insanity system in Dust. It’s like you’re living in a David Cronenberg movie
Zion's story is brutal, heart wrenching and honestly one of the best written pieces in Dust... unfortunately it's design is basically "Remember Alien Isolation? Let's do that but make it infinitely more unfair to the player by giving out horror creature literally fucking super speed alongside utter invincibility and balance it out with a fire scares it away mechanic that barely fucking works and will surely frustrate the player?"
It sucks is what I'm trying to say.
I feel like the balance overhaul and all the changes to the world and new lore should've been left as two separate mods, they're two very different things that have different goals. I'd love to try the rebalance in the vanilla game, I'd love to try the overhaul to the world as it's own thing, but together it just seems like a miserable experience
Theres a version of this for Fallout 4 made by the same team called "Frost". It's honestly the only way I play fallout 4 now, since it leans into the few things that fallout 4 is actually good at, namely exploration and being a looter shooter.
Oh shit, my favorite citrus reviewed my favorite post-post apocalypse
This comment is a bit late since the video already out for a months but i want to expand abit on why the Divide was blocked off and only have one entrance (spoiler):
- The Marked man of the divide actually manage to resettle the divide after the event of the DLC, with no Ulysses to guild them and no Courier to vilfied for their struggle, they were lost. Till one day a enlighted markedman (i forgot the name im sorry) appear and guild the markedman to rebuild and resettle the divide. They manage to build up quite a community and live quite peacefully till a strange tribe attack from the same entrance you enter the Divide from.
- The White legs fleeing Zion move into the Divide via that tunnel and fought with the Markedman (now call themselves the Dust Walker), The Dust Walker won and try to rebuild again but only 10 years or so later more tribal came back for the Divide again, this time it the Sorrow (a more evil version of them anyway), they plunder the divide but the Dust Walker manage to resist and push the Sorrow back to their home and slaughter all of them.
- the Dust Walker consider anything coming from that Tunnel to be evil and only exist to try destroy what they build up so they attack it regardless. This is where you come in, since you enter from that tunnel they automatically assume you are there to end them and so they attack. You trip around the divide is basically you massacring the resident of the Divide till the very last person. At the end of the map you find the corpse of the enlighted markedman i mention at the start, he wrote that he can hear the sound of fighting below and know his fate, he damm you for destroying the progress of the dust walker and curse you to never find safety as you have destroy the very last bastion of it in the mojave.
- After finding the body you can climb a ladder that lead to a dead end, right on top of where you enter. The game force you to back track and look at what horrible thing you have done as you go back the tunnel to find safety one more.
11:58
I love this line so much. It's subtle yet very chilling.
The intro was perfectly articulated I've been thinking about this for a while
Just another example of why giving the players the tools to craft their own experience in-game makes for some of the most fun you can have in a gaming experience.
New Vegas is very special to me for many reasons, but the main reason is because of it's modability and flexibility. Honestly, just like Minecraft, it's become more than just a game.
It's a platform that can be used to create new virtual experiences. The fact that Bethesda gave us the dev kit to the game is the exact reason why this game is still alive and sucking people into it to this day. I love Dust because of all the reasons you explained, but also because it takes what people never knew Fallout was capable of and gives us a brand new experience within the same universe. THIS kind of stuff is that I feel like (and correct me if I'm wrong), the Fallout fanbase is really hungry for. The ones who really appriciate what Fallout is anyway.
Loved the video dude, love your style.
Did you see that warlockracy shouted you out in his last video? You two are the best Fallout mod reviewers on UA-cam at the moment, congrats
Been mutuals with Warlockracy since his channel was barely 2,000 subs bigger than mine. Time flies. Cool guy
Another note. Tunnelers are really easy to kill but do so much damage. Headshots are insane on dust and help so much
I think learning Dust is massively overstated due to the challenge of changing your mindset.
You see guy, you shoot
You don't recognize he's got a rifle, or you haven't got cover, or only twelve bullets, or the two other guys right behind him, or your slightly damaged health, or that you don't have many healing items on hand, or the fact that you're breathing manually now. Gotcha
Thanks be the algorithm for showing me this. I haven't seen your recent videos and this was a great one to get recommended. I've always meant to try out Dust and this was a good preview into it.
Great analysis. I'm kinda glad there are UA-camrs or commentary channels covering mods for fallout new Vegas.
Love this video. I've been vouching for you to do a DUST review right from the very beginning when you made your first mod analysis and review video
Man I just love your videos. They cover a niche topic (fallout mods) that I love and give a more critical review and discussion of the mods themselves. You and Warlockracy have given me videos/analysis that I think subconsciously I have wanted for a long time. Keep up the good work, can’t wait for your next video
I love the idea of Dust, NV establishing a new apocalypse coming between the fog, the tunnelers, and the monstrosities being spit out by big mountain all converging was always a terrifying thought and a challenge I wish we could've faced.
The only thing I truly HATE about Dust which I believe is fixed in modern versions and was fixed easily in older versions was that gun enemies had unlimited ammo while being able to kill you with a bullet, then when you killed them they had 1 or 2 rounds on them.
I also don't much care for sanity because of how comically easy it is to go insane.
this was a great video man. love to see an actual review style video on dust considering while being one of the most well-known new Vegas mods it has little creator content-based videos besides lets plays
The wendigo being a mutated joshua is terrifying
Somewhat fitting for his character, but I prefer joshua to be alive and well continue to grow as a character after sparing the white legs leader, rather than just becoming a monster.It feels too much like an alien.Three scenario for me.
Another total overhaul mod that could be interesting to look at is Obscurum pandemic, just a warning though: if you thought dust was difficult, this one is straight up just unfair
I see moss like this and I imagine the creator(s) that have the skill and drive but no budget or prevalent equipment, and I hope that they make it big in the game development world.
From your opening explanation, I knew your content was worth watching, thank you for such a well explained topic where all I heard before was only the difficulty
Only two gripes from me. When you got to Zion the Spore carriers, wendigo and fog were the results of a vault 22 expidition that happened like a decade b4 the game starts and it was kind of implied in the game that ya it was going to spread. Someguy just made leaned into the worst possible ending here.
Second is the key in the vault for the last ending, I'm pretty sure that key was an easter egg. It's the second key that makes your journey an even bigger black pill. The first key and the only one you should think exists is at the other end of the divide. The only place to survive relatively unscathed and form its own civilization. The gut punch is that you wipe it out and right at the traditional entrance to the divide on the last "enemy" is the key to get out. Then you have to walk all the way back through the one peaceful and surviving place in this hellish version of the mojave, that you just genocided out of existence.
Great video, love to see Dust get some love! I played a ton of it 3 years back!
Also it seems you completely missed the ending inside New Vegas ;) Loved this mod, hope you can go back and find that one!
Loved the video, Ramble. It'd be cool to see a follow up video about mods specifically for DUST (mostly because I've made several). There are many mods for DUST dedicated to bug fixes, such as DUST Tweaks, DUSTed DUST, DUST Big MT Water Fix, and Fallout DUST Tunneler Detection Fix.
The biggest mod I've made for DUST; DUST Expanded Locations, unlocks several blocked locations in DUST (such as the Lucky 38, The Fort, and Big Mountain), as well as re-introducing several characters from New Vegas. I'd love to see you check it out :)
Dust is an absolute beauty of a pain in the ass but an excellently replayable one. Though I have always wanted a mod that would bring the mechanics, weapons, armor, and backpacks into actual New Vegas. I adore fallout but I've always wanted a difficult and more satisfying playthrough. That and you'd think a post apocalyptic world like New Vegas though populated would have less resources than what the game actually provides. That being said if there is a mod that gives us the dust mechanics and difficulty while still in the new Vegas playthrough please let me know lol.
I acknowledge your points, but I do have a counterpoint. Dust, for first time players and those without the knowledge of what to do, what choices to make, and only the knowledge of F:NV and/or F:3, sometimes have exceptional difficulty in the game just figuring out what to do, surviving, or anything else. Switching player choice from standard RPG mechanics to a choice of tradeoffs or survival is all well and good when you know what your choices are. Case and point, Mikeburnfire's playthrough of the game. Zach and Mike don't have a stealth or Strategic bone in their body, and Zach has no idea what the mod even is. As such, they just found the whole thing depressing and pointlessly difficult. They couldn't enjoy any of the positive points you mentioned, because they couldn't figure out how to play the new game it was.
I personally don't have a problem with Dust, but I find it difficult sometimes for the sake of being difficult. Also the NCR is stupidly evil? Like evil for no good reason. The NCR isn't evil for no reason. They are imperialist, but everything they do they do because they genuinely think they are helping. Those taxes and soldiers for them are helping. I just didn't like the fact that they turn into basically just some mindless "We experiment with everything and oppress for no reason!" faction.
Yeah I'm not a fan of how the NCR's portrayed in this mod, they do a lot of messed up stuff but usually it's because of incompetence and stupidity rather than genuine malice, like Bitter Springs
I have to say: I appreciate you, ramblelime. I’m so glad I randomly found your channel a few months ago. Being a fan of the Fallout mod community and a fan of the video essay/in-depth game review, I think you’re filling a niche that needs filling. You’re like Hbomberguy and Al Chestbreach’s beautiful baby and I’m here for it.
Glad to see you enjoyed Dust a lot, it's honestly one of my favorite mods for FNV. You should try out Frost sometime, Naugrim (the creator of Dust and Frost) gave control of the development his mods to a small dedicated community who have continued to develop the mod. They've done a good job with the story and implemented some really cool features into the insanity system. Anyway, thanks for the review!
One of my inspirations for my channel, video was great cant wait for the next.
Absolutely love these mod analysis videos can't wait for the next one
I hope someday you do an essay on Fallout 3: Obscurum Unnatural Selection or New Vegas: Obscurum Pandemic, that'd be really impressive to see.
the moment you showed the nightmare realm and spawned on top the train i IMMEDIATLY thought about pathologic... that and the walking.
Can’t Believe you didn’t talk about the sewer section
You put a Pathologic and CCRU reference in the video, as a pseudo intellectual who loves New Vegas I’m obligated to subscribe
man I love your videos this is fantastic i wanna see your take on pathologic now
10k subscriber special soon. hehe
Just got recommended this video! Sorry if someone already brought this up, but the Tunnelers are broken for some reason as they will see you better the stealthier you are (stealth boys makes things worse). There is a fix on Nexus that restores the normal operation, so that it is possible to sneak by them as they are in Lonesome Road
I would also like to add: you can get a glimpse of the unfinished story stuff in the Fort and at Big MT by using the console to unlock the permanently locked doors. The Big MT notes in the Think Tank are laughably unfinished, but the stuff in the Fort's main tent is near complete. No clue why Caesar's tent was closed off when it is fully finished.
DUST is the kind of mod that I think deserves to be a full game. It is a great set up, and side steps all of the problems of a potential New Vegas sequel.
Dude, I jsut found your channel and binged literally every one of your videos. Holy shit, you're an amazing UA-camr and critic, and can't wait to see where you go from here. You're gonna explode, I just feel it
Amazing video, thanks for this! This mod deserves more acknowledgement
Props to the UA-cam algorithm for getting me to this video and channel. Instant sub, love the content, and thank you for the interesting overviews!
Damn you earned a sub in the first minute just from how expertly and succinctly you described the vapid and shallow discourse around Cyberpunk and The Outer Worlds.
Ive just binged all of your fallout cotnent and goddam these are best video essays Ive seen, insane that you are only at 1k rn
so in this world The bullet the Courier took to the head logically changed him and made him into a Phineas Gage
Always wanted such a video for this mod! Great stuff, loved it! Keep it up.
Whilst I absolutely do not doubt that this mod is difficult and a compelling survival experience.
I cannot help but have a small giggle to myself due to the various STALKER mods that I have played over the years that take this concept and run a marathon with them.
As in the complexity and difficulty of the average STALKER mod that doesn't even particularly focus on being a survival simulation would seemingly eat this mod up for it's electrolyte and protein content, and as such I cannot help but laugh at imaging the kiniption fit the people complaining about the difficulty of this mod would have attempting to survive in something like Misery (which is admittedly leaning more towards the more extreme end of the complexity/difficulty/survival sim spectrum of things).
Having said that, I am very pleased to have had this mod brought to my attention. Thank you so much for making such an involved video about it, you have 100% more than earned (not the exact word I was looking for but eh) a new subscriber.
I look forward to seeing what else you have covered.
Wishing you all the best dude, and thanks again for all the hard work that went into making this video.
Thanks for such kind words! More on the way.
P.S I am one of those people who gets chewed up and spat out by STALKER mods. I'm not even that proficient at getting through vanilla STALKER. I need to get good. It's a problem. Thanks again.
I felt the divide was meant to be an absurd "decoy" ending, that you'd go through the whole area slaughtering the gathered tribes which happen To be the most stable and successfull societies you've seen so far to find out in the end that it did'nt lead anywhere and you've massacred dozens of innocents in vain, ironicaly fulfilling their endtimes prophecy for no reason.
It absolutely is and I completely misread it.
my personal issue with DUST/FROST isn't it's extreme difficulty (as long as I can do the same thing back I'm fine, so if an enemy can one shot me I should be able to one shot them) but rather the way the Sanity system works in it, it makes 0 sense that you would lose sanity for DEFENDING YOURSELF when that had literally been happening in the Mojave long before the events of DUST, attacking and killing passersby who don't attack you on sight or before they can (like the people living in the tunnels in FROST that actually tell you to back off and that they don't want any trouble)should but not when they are actively shooting/charging at you with the intention of killing you and stealing your stuff
To be fair, even when it is in self defense, the act of killing another human being would put a heavy mental strain on a normal person (especially if you fo it every single day) and neither of the mods make you out to be a stoic survivor that isn't affected by the environment or the actions they carry out. Quite the opposite, you either wind up as a crippling alcoholic/thorazine abuser to cope with the fact that you're doing terrible things or you give in to the insanity.
Me like: this is really cool
Me also: forgets I have new vegas
Me also: realises I have new vegas 😊
I am so glad I found this video. Singlehandly makes me want to try making a video myself on DUST, purely cause how interesting it is. Also on the note about the tunnerlers, its a bug that makes them be able to see you no matter what. There are ment to be sneaked around, but due to mod issues, it cant really work.
This mod is the most creative, metal, awesome fan creation I have ever heard of.
On my binge of consuming fallout lore I've stumbled upon this channel and watched basically every video you've released! I await the next one with anticipation. I have a question if you've got the time sifting through comments. What do you think a Fallout game that takes place in Canada would be like in your mind? Seems like a lot of potential there for a cool mod if we're talking about referencing to the annexation by the US and how that's progressed post war.
I ask because I've got a concept I've been working on as a little fun thing to pass the time and I'd love the perspective of a fellow Canadian brother in arms!
Once again, great job on these videos my dude keep this shit up and if you don't feel like answering my question at least know you got an admirer (no homo).
I've always considered out-of-US Fallout content to be a little bit unnecessary where the franchise is right now. There are plenty of really interesting US states the series could go to (New York, Lousiana, Florida, Illinois, Arizona, California again) so Canada or any other country wouldn't seem like a priority for any mainline game. That being said, I've always thought Canada would be a fun location for DLC or mods as long as they use it creatively and don't just make snow deathclaws and maple syrup-based healing items, you know what I mean?
Anyway, thank you for the kind words man!
Your beginning criticism of how often people criticize media, specifically games even, with buzzwords or it is just them trying to relate their topic to something people already know so much about rather than describing the media in itself, is something that I wish people could see more and would actually try to work around. It is very annoying to see and I commend you for pointing it out.
Stealing also INCREASES your sanity for whatever reason
when I first played Dust I went through Zion, I didn't find the key to the Grand Staircase in the vault, so I thought the key was in the Ulysses boss room, the Divide was fun to play through but I was upset I missed the key when I did find it
Appreciate the pathologic reference.
I literally just logged into my Google account to say that seeing a Meltdown reference in a New Vegas mod video REALLY caught me off guard and gave me a good laugh. I have no idea if anyone else got the joke but I appreciate you.
the tunnelers may be a lore thing from the game itself, new vegas lonesome road mentioned they were slowly coming into the mohave from the divide, i have not played dust, but it sounds like a fun version, is it a rougelike style mod, or a single world you learn things from each area?
Don't play it it removes the good bits of new vegas like the characters every one will invoke the same reaction as the powder ganger when you first approach nipton
Good stuff good stuff, would love to see a video like this on honest hearts reborn! I just finished it myself and I have many thoughts
Also, this channel is a little bit of a dream come true isn't it. It is genuinely great and unique content. It's super cool to see someone highlighting the gems of the modding community with the same keen eye and good humor that the plethora of (also great) video essays about regular base new vegas do. But this balance of content and humor, and the kind of humor? *chef's kiss*. I am thoroughly enjoying binging this channel, nice work :)
Seeing in-depth analysis of New Vegas mods is something I have wanted, and even considered doing myself, for years. Dust (And Alchestbreach's playthrough of it) was extremely impactful and dare I say even formative for me. I'd love to see you go over other older, big narrative mods for New Vegas. I feel that so many of them, as well as mods and fanfiction in general, are underappreciated and underanalyzed due to being fan creations.
Most mods and fanfictions are deeply unappreciated because they are laugh-out-loud terrible quality. There are a million shit mods for a single good mod and a lot of the stories told in low quality mods are indistinguishable from first time bad fanfiction.
@@ClonesDream And? Sturgeon's Law. 99% of everything is garbage. For every amazing, artistic movie that comes out there is 100 pieces of soulless, corporate schlock. The same goes for fanfiction. For every piece of fanfiction that is better than most novels coming out, there are 100 pieces of self insert near-porn fanfiction littered with spelling mistakes. This does not mean the good pieces of fan fiction are any less valuable, just like how great films are not less valuable because of the schlock which accompanies them in their medium.
Thanks for the analysis, great video.
I started playing Dust mod a while back, but quickly got frustrated with the lack of ammo, going critically hungry/thirsty several times within the same day (or whenever sleeping), and of course the carry weight situation. Eventually I realized that in order to play the "right" way, in which I was most likely able to survive, I would be crouch-walking the entire play-though and making my kills with improvised melee weapons or explosives, and always having not-enough-ammo against enemies that could hang for five minutes in a firefight because their ammo supply never ended.
So, I turned on God mode after about 4 hours of game play (and dozens of deaths). Boy I am glad I did: I played through every single ending and saw every area- EXCEPT the Courier's space; thanks for mentioning that!- available, meaning that I was enable to enjoy the environment, design, lore, etc. without any of the severe hardships that was definitely within a hair's breadth of driving me completely away and uninstalling. Making all of these accomplishments without God mode would've taken me five or six times the amount of play time (and frustration), and my life is busy enough that this was a HUGE benefit for me.
Again, you did a fantastic job and I heartily agree with your overall analysis and conclusion...now to go find that area where the Courier left his mark...
So it's like playing stalker except everything is more static, crappy and yellow and the former does so much more
(but oh boy I'm gonna played it, the things I love...)
"Too fanfictiony" yeah because this whole ass game totally isnt literally fanfiction
this and “stalker: anomaly” are my favorite mods in recent years
Did not expect Nick Land, thought i was hallucinating due to drowsiness
I am trying to find a mod with realistic bullet damage, not just something that is difficult for me but one that's more like rainbow six siege, where headshots are instant and bodyshots can be a double tap, not like this mod where its one bullet to kill me and 20 for the enemy
it's such a personal experience. all the small choices and micro-managing, the options you weigh up for yourself. how you approach a fight, do you even approach the fight, once the fight goes wrong how do best use your resources and salvage it? the quiet moments spent inbetween where the quiet dread sets in, and you just feel like the last person in a world gone mad. where you can see how far gone things have gone, comparing them to how they were in the original game. discovering the new stories the factions and groups left behind. it's such a simple twist on the formula, but manages to do so much with so little.
I clapped when you mentioned STALKER
Will you cover the Overseersers quest mods?
Fantastic review. Definitely my favorite fnv mod of all time too. And props to you for sticking it out and playing on hardcore mode. A lot of people play on normal mode and re-add compass tics etc. I feel like you have to have your soul crushed over and over again by playing ‘vanilla’ DUST before you can really appreciate getting things right, because SO much is always at stake. Got my sub
That shit with the blackout state telporting you to the shack surrounded by cazadores happened to me in my first playthrough. I was going to Goodsprings to craft something I needed to reach an ending (won't say it in case it's a spoiler), and the exploding illusion guys popped up. Did not realize at the time the different doors made you go to different spot, as I opted to reload my save and sneak attack all the illusions from far away so the explosion wouldn't reach, and I was too far away so they wouldn't go after me. They can't hurt me but I can kill them, very fair.
On a more funny note: Karma is reversed (hence while killing drains sanity). So doing bad stuff raises sanity. Like stealing. There's a mod on the nexus page that removes ownership of items. So no stealing. Means getting sanity up is way more difficult
so that's my final comment. If I keep this up, most comments in this section are from me D:
edit: not sure if it fixed now but back then when I played I think the tunnlers AI was a bid buggy and spot from far away when they shouldn't. Could be only if you in stealth mode/crouched but I don't remember it exactly
i’d still like to see someone review Obscurum Pandemic
I love the world of Dust. It captures overwhelming dread perfectly as the very capital of the wasteland is now an exclusion zone that's practically unlivable.
Didn't know about this mod or you, but in two minutes and forty nine seconds, you've convinced me to try this blind. Thanks!