Part 56: The Dakka Way: Update 3

The Dakka Way - Update 3



If you arrive at the Ghost Farm at the right time you'll run into the guards and gets an ultimatum. We could completely ruin them at this point, but it's much more fun to go along with them for the moment.



If you're curious, this is what happens if you offer Jonny candy or do anything else the least bit suspicious. For this initial run it doesn't really matter, but once you scare him you don't have an option to complete the quest normally.



Talking to Jonny before you go back to deliver the message gives you a new dialogue option. I've never actually used this one before, but let's see what happens...



Applying the right leverage results in a posse heading out to the Ghost Farm to put a stop to their shenanigans once and for all.



All of the men in Modoc show up, and actually have the upper hand even without a power-armored monster assisting on their side. The actual result is that I have to chase down a bunch of runners, since it's easy to lose line of sight in the corn field.



After our participation it looks like things got a bit out of hand. You don't even get Jonny back, suggesting that he was a casualty during the attack. As a result you don't get the experience for saving Modoc or for saving Jonny. It's probably the best demonstration of the general thrust of an evil play through: you can do whatever fantastically fucked up thing the game will allow, but you usually get a dramatically reduced award for it.



So, in the experience of not losing several thousand XP we'll go with the other route instead. Unfortunately, I somehow missed talking to Karl in the Den and had to make a trip back and forth between the two. You have 30 days to get the information, and walking to the Den and back takes a total of 24. If you don't confirm that the bodies are fake at the Ghost Farm you also have to visit there, adding a couple of extra days. It's tight, but unless you screw around it's doable.



To satisfy our desire for petty evil we can go ahead and tell Cornelius that Farrel was the thief, even though we know that he wasn't responsible.



Cornelius will go off to beat the crap out of Farrel, but he's likely to be foiled by the automatically closing doors in the bed and breakfast. In my play through he managed to get himself stuck just outside of his room, just as one would expect from a senile old man.



After that, there's not much left to do here but we can investigate Rose's "chicken." You have to kill a few dogs to get there, and you need some dynamite to get inside the actual coop.



Rose's chicken is actually a Deathclaw, although she's both weaker than a regular Deathclaw and definitely doesn't talk. A single burst is enough to tear her apart, and a normal group at this point wouldn't have too much trouble either. That ends our dealing with Modoc, so we can move on to Vault City...




Where we can be cruel to a small child and tear apart his beloved toy right in front of him. Muahahahaha! Hahahaha!



You even get an experience award (half of what you'd get for just handing the doll back over) for giving him a valuable lesson about life. I love this game.



As far as getting into Vault City, we could talk ourselves in with our claim of an important mission, but we can also claim to be merchants who need to do business. This one seems a bit harder to pass, especially since we don't have any obvious merchandise...



Or do we? Sorry, Sulik. You've been a good pack mule.



Or maybe not. The Servant Master only offers $100, and that's an insult. Sulik gets to stick around. From here things progress as normal...



Until we get to Gecko. For maximum bastardry, we have to find ol' Hank here and talk to him about coolant reports.



We need the copy from Harold's room, but with that we can convince Hank to go ahead and shut off the coolant. The scary part is that I can only assume he's the most qualified individual to run the place outside of Harold, which means everyone else is somehow even worse.



Melting down the plant gets you a flat 2500 experience points versus 4500 for the best solution, and you obviously can't optimize it so you lose out on another 2000 points. Villainy doesn't pay...




But it does royally piss Lynette off, and isn't that its own reward?



If that's not enough, asking for compensation pisses her off to the point where you end up in a fight and get to murder her. Despite what you'd expect, other people in Vault City object to us killing her and you pretty much have to fight your way out of the city. There's actually a special ending for Vault City if you murder the entire place, but that wouldn't really be productive so it's time for a rewind.




Instead, we'll monkey around on the computer before we fix everything. Somehow, 160 years after the end of the war the power plant is still hooked up to a functioning internet. We have to work through a security access code sequence, but it's easy enough to get by trial and error.



Most of the sites are closed, but Enclave looks interesting. If you're following the normal progression of the game this is the first chance you have of seeing the villains of the piece. And I do mean seeing...




Since logging on actually patches us in to a comm tech in power armor. We can bluff about mechanical difficulties, but it's pretty transparently clear that we have NO idea what we're doing.




The President gets name dropped, and evidently doesn't have much of a sense of humor…and this also explicitly explains that we're dealing with the remains of the United States government, which isn't really confirmed until near the end of the game if you miss this particular conversation.




Eventually it all goes sour and our new friend sends a kill squad after us, but nothing actually happens. Even if it did, we'd be long gone before they could show up, making this Gecko's problem and not ours. If only being a villain were a bit more feasible...