Character Customization

You can still see the Hollywood sign! Most of it…

RPG nerds like myself will find the bevy of skills to master and stats to tweak a real “grande buffet”. So much so, that they might be tempted to spend the considerable amount of time it takes to create all four of their starting characters from scratch.

Being somewhat impatient myself, I elected to round out my team with three of the premade characters after handcrafting my main. I ended up creating a silver-tongued Southern belle with strong leadership skills and a penchant for falling back on submachine guns when words fail. I also made sure she had a boatload of charisma to assist in her butterin’-people-up endeavours, a goodly amount of perception so she could spot a threat before it spotted her team, and enough intelligence so that she would pick up new skills quickly.

As a Fallout veteran, I figured there would probably be an abundance of old-world machinery that might need hacking, so I picked up a computer skills specialist, and set her up with some energy-weapon proficiency for turning hostile robotic types to scrap metal. I also picked up a medic who could fix just about any battle wound in the field, and even heal major injuries given the time, though she wasn’t much in a fight. Our heavy hitter, and general all-purpose problem solver was a sniper by the name of Cold Eye, and he proved his worth many times over when things looked the most dire.

The term "urban jungle" has never been more appropriate

None of the above choices were easy, though. There are just so many skills to choose from, with so many potentially-lifesaving uses that having to make sacrifices can be agonizing. Not knowing exactly what I was going to be stepping into, I tried to make the most pragmatic-seeming choices I could, but I later learned that even outlandish-sounding skills like “toaster repair” could come in handy; to say nothing of skills like “animal whisperer”, which can be used to summon the ravenous beasts of the wasteland in your hour of need.