More or less, I said that. Yeah.

I dunno if anybody else is experiencing this, but since my science skill became super huge it seems like there's fewer keywords on the hack screen to choose from.

That would make sense. Makes it so you can choose the correct one easier since your character is now a super hacker cuz smarties are nummy.

Hey does anybody else find that the super mutant's tentacle doggies are just the most adorable things ever to sprout too many appendages? One time I had one just walking around me all chill like and then its master showed up and then it tried to give me hurty kisses. I had to put it down. :(

Finished it last night at level 19 along with a bunch of the side quests (screw Tenpenny Tower, more like Speech Tower).



My favorite moment in the game though was:



All in all it was enjoyable...I have a save close to the end, so I can do the rest of my side quests, but I'm not sure if I enjoyed it as much as Oblivion. Less than 10 quests in the main story line? Bleh.

This doesn't even matter, quicksaving+quickloading is the easiest way to take care of the problem, just pick the first four options every time then quickload it's faster than figuring the puzzle.

Dunno if any of you realize this but if you just choose three and then quit the console and open it up again it let's you do it from scratch once more. It's only until four failures that it locks up on you. So I just guess three times, exit console, access it again, double click, guess three more times, repeat until I figure out what the password is. Not too difficult. Most I ever have to do it is 10 times. Goes by quickly and they do tell you how many letters in the password you got right out of however many letters there are. It's not as unfair as you make it out to be.

I don't quite understand the issue with the hacking game where people have so many problems.

I'm going to go find a terminal in the game right now and hack it.

Okay, I found a Very Easy terminal, but the principles still apply.

These are the words I see:

The first word overall doesn't matter terribly. The game is good at choosing a group of words that, no matter which one you choose, share letters with most of the others. Let's take TWIGS and go from there.

Lucked out and got 3/5 correct there. Let's see what that eliminates...

Well, damn, this actually worked really well. We have two possible words and three guesses left. For the sake of completeness, let's choose TRIES...

DING!

Now that the answer has been established, let's assume we didn't make such a good word choice. Like FARMS. That would've matched 1 letter. Eliminate all the words that share any number other than 1 letter with FARMS.

This is where looking ahead comes in. If we were to choose TANDY, we'd have to get lucky and hope that's the password. If it isn't, it gives us no information because all the words remaining begin with T, and none of them share anything else with TANDY. We'd get another 1, and the only word eliminated would be... TANDY.

I'd personally choose one of the words that fits in T _ _ _ S. Choosing THUGS at this point leaves us with TRIES and THREE, and 2 guesses left. Another guaranteed win. Choosing TWIGS leaves TRIES, and choosing TOMES also leaves just TRIES.

Be warned, though. The seven-letter and eight-letter words later on throw a lot of monkey wrenches into this, and you have to be extra careful. The upside is that with more letters comes more opportunities for the words to differ from each other; I've had more trouble with 5-letter terminals than 7-letter.

I will admit that there is some luck in the opening choices that factors into this. As you saw, I randomly picked TWIGS and it guaranteed my win. Picking blindly, or worse, picking based only on your most recent guess can doom you.

Maybe I'm just too much of a word geek, but I find this hacking game to be quite fun.

HEY LOOK IT'S A TUTORIAL ON HACKING, GUYS

Oh sorry, I glossed over the link because it said GameFAQs.

Still leaving mine up.

Additional Spam:
The biggest complaint I keep hearing (from Skills lol) is that luck factors into it, and to a certain extent it does. The right initial word choice can guarantee victory, and the wrong initial word choice can make it a lot harder.

You can still minimize the effects of luck by looking ahead and using strategy, but I guess some people just want to mash A real quick.

Seriously, it wasn't until much later into the game that I actually read the side bar beyond YOU HAVE THIS MANY TURNS LEFT BEFORE I GO APESHIT AND BY APESHIT I MEAN LOCK UP ON YOU UNTIL YOU LEAVE THE MAP to see that it gave you hints on how many letters out of the word you got right. I completely went at it by guessing and thinking what words looked interesting while using my process I told you about before. It isn't really hard. Just takes a bit of time.

Did you listen to my problems with the thing or not? I had issues with many more aspects of it than just "luck lol".

I know you dislike the lack of effect that the stat has on the game. I was trying to focus on the game itself.

Regarding PC version: I lucked out for about 17 hours and had only the occasional CTD when I was already quitting, or a random crash here or there, but it seems like they're increasing in frequency now.

Codec Investigation Project - Bethesda Game Studios Forums

Bethesda says they think it's codec related, but the bottom line is that no one's isolated the problem yet, so us PC users are getting the shaft for now. :(

There's a patch up that claims to fix some of the CTD issues, but by no means all of them.Hopefully that thread helps some of you that are having problems.

I hear the patch has nothing to do with fixing the crashes?

Patch release notes are neat!

Fuck I was just guessing words from terminals that related to the area that the terminal was in. It sure seemed to be working for the most part. Now I can do that and guess what the word is from the number correct thing. =D

I like how a detailed explanation of the hacking minigame takes up an entire page of the manual

Hilariously incompetent pirates ITT

Seriously? Seriously?

I'm playing the PS3 version, and I haven't so much as glanced at the manual once. Christ on a bike, it even offers you an explanation of how it works the first time you start it up.

Well dude, I didn't really think that I was wrong, and wasn't having any major issues so manual wasn't necessary and I don't even recall reading the hacking tutorial. Anyway, the passwords do tend to relate to setting.

Anyway, I don't sometime look at the manual right away anyway, especially for rpgs which sometimes gives away characters and minigames that I would like to come across while playing before knowing about.

share your manual.pdf on saxypunch tia

No need, friend! The manual is already freely available to any yahoo who wants it.

http://store.steampowered.com/manual/22300/

The hacking is pretty bloody annoying, but I eventually figured out that when it says, say, "4/9 correct" it means both correct letter and correct position. Which helped quite a bit. Still didn't like it much (if at all), though.

Would you guys shut up about the hacking already? Seriously even if your Science skill is low it's fucking easy. Try 3 times, figure out which words that have a lot of similar letters, let the letter position hints guide you as you select words, on third failure power the console down, and just repeat all of this until success.

You know what actually kind of pisses me off? The fucking lack of bobby pins lying around. Sure I guess you wouldn't find them just everywhere but god damn was I ever low on them throughout the game.

I actually had quite a large amount of bobby pins left over by the end of the game. And I picked quite nearly every lock I came across, too.

In theory you should never need more than 1 bobby pin, since (like the hacking game) if you quit your attempt after three missteps you get a fresh start.