Last night, while playing some Fallout: New Vegas, I found out how good I am at walking around, stumbling into numerous locales, and unlocking trivial amounts of XP:

Master of the Mojave (25G): You Discovered 125 locations.

Yowza. That’s a big number. And because the world is full of magic, it’s also the same number of comments I currently have over at this Freshly Pressed post (I’m sure this coincidence won’t last long as this link linking to it will count as a comment as well, thus pushing it to 126).

But yeah…discovering locations. It’s an addicting thing, especially in a world as expansive as Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. The hooks are twofold: one is seeing a light gray mark on your HUD, indicating an undiscovered location is nearby, waiting for you, hungering for you…and the other trick is simply seeing a glimmer of something in the distance and fully knowing that you could walk over to it and see what’s happening. And one’s reward for discovering a location is a tiny bit of XP and the ability to fast-travel to it in the future. My favorite part, however, is the sound Obsidian added to finding a location: it’s a deep, low boom that can put nerves on end. I love hearing it every time. In Fallout 3, it was a ka-ching kind of sound, which worked, but does not create the effect of uncertainty and gloom that the Mojave Wasteland loves to ooze.

125 locations is the cap for Achievement purposes, but I suspest there’s still a good number of places left to discover. Haven’t even ventured into Deathclaw territory yet, such as Quarry Junction. Just need Jareth (who is really a Bono clone) to repair his Chinese stealth suit, and then we’re good to go.