You're a Star, Baby!

I picked up the Explorer perk in Fallout New Vegas the other night.  This perk shows all locations on the World Map, whether you've been there yet or not.  (You cannot fast travel to them until you've actually discovered them for yourself, but it's still incredibly useful to see where everything is.)


In Fallout 3, after I got that perk I spent several hours simply walking around the Capital Wasteland exploring each and every site until I had scoured every inch of the map.  That's probably my favorite thing to do in Fallout games.  If I recall correctly, I finished the main storyline of the game in 30-ish hours.  My total playtime on Fallout 3 is well over 40 hours, and the difference in time is all exploration.  (I'm sure I made a post about it here somewhere.)


I'm to the point now where I'm just about ready to do the same thing in the Mojave Wasteland -- all I have left to do in the game is the final bit preceding the war over the Hoover Dam, and the two DLC packs that I've yet to take a look at.  I planned on actually doing one of those two things, but something last night drew me into skipping right to exploring:  the Sunset Sasparilla Star bottle caps.


Anyone familiar with the Fallout universe knows that the currency in the game is bottle caps.  These are found everywhere in the world -- in desk drawers, in crates, on dead bodies, etc.  Also, if you drink a bottle of Nuka Cola, you get a bottle cap, of course.  Fallout New Vegas introduced a new drink to the game -- Sunset Sasparilla.  Drinking a bottle of this also yields you a bottle cap.  No big deal there.  However, there's a 1 in 20 chance that you will get a bottle cap with a bright blue star on it.  They do also count as currency, but they go into a special place in your inventory and you don't spend them normally.  The first time you get one, you're left wondering what special significance these might have.  


This is one of the reasons why the Fallout games appeal so much to me.  I really enjoy the whole idea of there being all this stuff out there that I have no idea about, and have to discover on my own.  I think this is one of the reasons why WoW has lost as much of its appeal for me as it has.  The mystery is gone.  You know how to kill a new boss before it even reaches the live servers, because it seems like everyone and their mother has done it on the PTR and made a video or wrote a guide about it.  And if you don't watch those videos or read those guides, you're considered a noob because you don't know what you're doing.  Your fellow raiders will be angry at you for holding them back.  How dare you slow down their income of digital purples!  You have to make a conscious and rather tricky effort to keep new quest line secrets unknown to yourself, because the information appears EVERYWHERE, and you will seriously have difficulties not getting it spoiled for you unless you unplug your internet connection until the patch is live.  Hell, Blizzard is even adding a journal into the game to tell you what every boss does.  I'm not saying this is a BAD thing, but it's become EXPECTED for you to know what's going to happen in the game before you actually experience it for yourself.  I don't like that.  I like being surprised.  


WoW is still a game I enjoy.  I'm simply saying that if I want to be intrigued by mystery, by unknown places, finding items that I didn't know about, doing quests where I don't know the outcome...I'm going to play Fallout.  Because in that game, it's single-player, and no one cares if I keep myself ignorant to the information before I actually do it myself.


I sort of went off on a tangent there.  Back to the topic of these Star bottle caps, I was quite intrigued the first time I picked one up.  I had no idea what they were all about, and I sort of let that one sit in my inventory.  A little bit later on, I came across two people in a shootout.  The winner explained to me that they were fighting over a couple of Star bottle caps.  I asked her if she'd give them to me, and she started to shoot at me.  So I killed her and took her caps.  A little bit after that encounter, I was approached by an old man who said he used to collect them.  After reminiscing and saying he was getting too old now to continue the hunt, he gave me the few he had and strode off.  


From that point forward, I started finding a few of these special little caps in hidden places.  It became rather neat when I found one, because the little blue star on the cap really glowed, and you got that feeling that you found something pretty special when you looked in a crate and saw it shining up at you.  Nice presentation.  


My curiosity of their purpose reached a head when I got a quest to visit the Sunset Sasparilla bottling factory.  My quest was to go there and dismantle a bottle cap machine, because apparently some crooks were using it to create counterfeit bottle caps.  There was a little robot in a kiosk near the reception desk when I first entered the factory, and the robot told me a small bit of information regarding the Star bottle caps, and also gave me a quest to return to him when I had "enough Star caps".  He said there was treasure to be had when I had the proper amount.  Ok.  Now I'm interested.  


If I was a crazy son of a bitch, which frankly I tend to be sometimes, I would have set out to explore the entire map in search of these bottle caps.  I'm not THAT crazy, however.  Have you seen the size of the map in Fallout?  So, I went online to gather two pieces of information:  Exactly how many Star bottle caps was "enough", and a list of all the places where I could find them.  


The answer to the first question is 50.  Looking in my inventory last night, I had a total of 23 Star caps.  Not bad.  So the first thing I set out to do was visit all the places on the list that I'd already discovered -- meaning I had been there and simply missed the Star cap's hiding place.  When I logged out last night, I was up to 30 of them.  20 more to go, and I get me a treasure!  I did not look up what the treasure actually is -- like I said, I enjoy being surprised.  Given this quest is quite similar to the Nuka Cola Challenge in Fallout 3, though, I'm certain it won't be utter crap.  So I'm not too worried about that.  Besides, I love a good scavenger hunt.  That's really reward enough for me.