Nos' RR Companions

No, not a new release.

The weirdness, you see... it continues.

I still haven't gotten around to finishing up testing on Neil's Brooke and Bernie. Been actually playing the game a bit.

Decided I'd cut my party back, make things more... intimate. Switched back to only having one companion nominally.

We had walked from Fort Bannister (which is no fun at level four.), clear up to Raven Rock, past the Riverside Mansion, past Fort Constantine, and to the Satcom arrays. Picked up Mai and Sabine to drag back to the Vault so they could stop living in a tent, and start lounging by the pool in skimpy outfits.

Decided to hit the arrays with them along.

Any of you who have tried it will know the part I'm talking about. I hit the section where you have to move across the boards, between dishes, to get into the middle tower. The boards aren't navmehed, or something, because companions will not follow over them no matter what I do.

Fought my way through the middle tower alone (Benelli M1S90 for the win...), and by the time I moved into the third array, the game engine had opted to just warp the companions to me, as it usually does.

Two of them, anyway. My actual companion didn't warp in with Mai and Sabine, no matter how many cell-changes I made.

We fight on, clear the place out, and get back into the wasteland. Still, she's nowhere to be seen. I kick over to the tracking entry for her, and move towards the marker.

I eventually find her, around a mile south. Wandering aimlessly? No. Stuck on some bad navmeshing? Nope. Suffering from a frozen AI? Not even close.

Where do I find her? Crouching behind a fallen tree, using her favorite S&W 500 magnum to beat on some super mutants.

She got tired of waiting for me to come out of the array, headed in the opposite direction, and went looking for something to kill. And never had an interruption of her follow package! I didn't have to reissue the follow order. Once we found her and the muties were dead, she fell right back into line like a good girl.

And people wonder why I have no interest in taking up Dragon Age or World of Warcrack or MW2.

I know I joke about it a lot... but some days I really do wonder if I've fucked around and had a hand in creating some form of mutant artificial intelligence. Is Skynet someday going to raise an army of blood-eyed, soulless killing machines with short red hair and fangs?

...Well, there are worse ways to go.