Discussion: FO4 is a great game, but a bad RPG

[NoGround]

Let me take the Thicket Excavation as an Example. It's a place you usually get to very early, and was the first time I really noticed the lack of options.

Additionally I keep the spoilers to a minimum. I could pull out a lot more examples, as it goes pretty much through all the game, but lets just take this one.

 

Basically you get there, there's this guy Sully, who wants to get rid of the water in the quarry.

If you look around a bit, before helping him, you can find his Journal, which indicates, that his targets are trade-caravans, and indicates strongly

that he might have ill intentions.

You as a player now have only the choice of helping him or simply ignoring the quest.

So either playing the naive dumb farmboy who can't imagine any ill intends (despite being a War Veteran/Lawyer) or someone who doesn't give a crap.

How about saying for example extorting him for a cut. Or let me say to him, if I found the Journal "Hey, I know what you are up to,

and I won't let that happen (and thus preventing the quarry from getting pumped out and being a raider base later in the game).

Maybe even an option of talking him out of it could be imagineable, for a high enough charism char, possibly even turning the quarry in a

possible new settlement site.

But no, you are stuck to do the quest in exactly 1 way. And this is something even earlier Bethesda games were much better at, and what leads me to the

Conclusion I put as the title.

 

You know... you could just kill Sully. You did find out he's a raider, after all. It "fails" the quest, but you still get a result you wanted. (and here I am not realizing 3 pages of posts have been made. Forgive me if this was pointed out.)

 

In terms of the game being an RPG, I tend to agree that RPG has become subjective of an over-arching genre in which we have at least some choice. Let's face it, complete control and blank slate are very difficult to achieve, the only place I know where that actually exists is classic table-top RPGs (Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, etc), where characters are made by the players from scratch, with their own history and own personality made by the player and scenarios are presented by another person, with that person having to react to the player's choices, which essentially leads into almost limitless options for each situation. Within a video game, we are restricted to whatever scenario the developers present to us. One way or the other, it depends on the individual's view of what an RPG is in order to define the genre. In the end, I feel as if we are expecting a bit too much. The major crutch on the amount of scenarios available to us though is Bethesda's biggest mistake with FO4 though: the 4 option dialogue wheel. It screwed with too much.

 

I mean... we can take most RPGs and fit them into the "Adventure" genre, or replace the genre tag all together. Subjective.

[Ernest Lemmingway]

To me, RPG carries a connotation of two things: a strong story and multiple choices resolving quests. FO4 has neither; the story is water thin and our choices of resolving given quests is binary with no third or fourth options. No dialogue options based on skills or perks (no skills at all, really)? And "reputation" with factions is likewise limited to earning the right to buy things at given ranks and earning the ire of opposing factions. Everyone else just doesn't care if you've been a hero or a villain or who you side with. They even got rid of the karma system. That's a core of the Fallout series that helped to differentiate it from other games like it. I'm not even comfortable calling this a "Fallout" game; where's the moral fallout of our actions?

 

FO4 to me is a sandbox that (poorly) hybridizes RPG and simulation. Not that it's a bad game, but I went in expecting a half-decent RPG. What I got was a first-person settlement simulator with coloring by the Fallout paintbrush. The mod toolset can't come out soon enough. If this game is a soup, then mods will be the salt that helps heighten what muted flavors exist. Or add new ones.

[Aria]

Let me first leave this link here:

Skallagrim ranting about some things he dislikes about FO4 partially touching on this threads topic at around the 5 minute mark.

I thought it might be of interest to some.

https://video-fra3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hvideo-xaf1/v/t43.1792-2/12313404_1085120881520461_27200778_n.mp4?efg=eyJ2ZW5jb2RlX3RhZyI6InN2ZV9oZCJ9&rl=2076&vabr=1384&oh=b5b686c44c19e7f16781d6523c5c1c65&oe=567194B9

[DocClox]

I will say, this game is finally starting to grow on me. I can see a lot of potential depth in the interactions of perks, crafting and settlements. Piper and Nick Valentine have both been fun to have around (and I say that as someone who usually avoids companions like the plague)

The sticking point is still the player's backstory. I had an interesting discussion about this on Beth forums.

Part of the problem, I think, lies in the pre-war origin of the player. There's not really anything you can bring from that time to motivate your character. Your friends, your nation, your job ... all of that is pretty much irrelevant in the Commonwealth.

The exception being, of course, your child. And that's the other half of the problem. The issue isn't so much that the background stops you from role-playing. The problem is that the emotional impact is too big. It's not that it stops you roleplaying so much as that, if you do decide to role-play, then the only sane response is for the Single Parent to chase down little Shaun to the exclusion of all else. I mean what else can possibly be important? It's really sad that the Minutemen have been whittled down to a single idiot in a silly hat and all, but you've got more pressing problems. As for tracking down radio distress signals, or missing lockets ... sorry, not happening! Busy here|

That in itself wouldn't be a bad basis for a playthrough. The problem is that it's the basis for every playthough. Well, you can play a sociopath who despite appearances to the contrary didn't care at all for his wife and child, or you can dye your hair green, wear purple trousers and laugh a lot; clearly personal tragedy has driven you completely insane freeing you to commit random acts of violence around the Commonwealth.

Even so though, it doesn't sound like a lot of scope for repeated playthroughs. Which is a pity, since I doubt I'm going to explore all of those interesting perks combinations with one character.

Still, at least they seem to have stopped beating me over the head with reminders about what I'm supposed to be doing. I mean they still come down hard on the subject of family at every opportunity. "Oh gee, Piper! You absolutely should be nice to little sister because nothing is more important than family, and wouldn't it be awful if you were to lose her without having had a chance to tell her how much she means to you..." Yeah, yeah, we get the point already! Give it a rest, will ya?

Of course, linking everything back to the central theme would, in just about any other context, be considered Good Writing. You have story you want to tell, and you want the story to be about X and so everything that happens gets to be considered in the light of X and anything that doesn't work in that context gets cut or rewritten until it does.

Now personally, I'm not convinced that the gaming world has been eagerly awaiting a game that gave us a deep, sensitive exploration of the Importance of Family Values while Bloodily Murderising Any Adult That Gets In Your Way... but I can accept that they might have been trying to do something good here. Obviously, I don't think it worked particularly well, although if they'd pulled it off it could have been awesome. That's not what keeps niggling at me.

The thing is, Beth get a lot of stick about the quality of their writing. I've never really felt that was entirely justified. I mean, they write stories that are intended to proceed at the player's own pace and are designed to interleave with side quests and random exploration and whatever internal narrative the player wants to place on events. That demands a certain style of writing, and I think they've generally given us excellent stories within that framework. What you don't do is start you off telling you that your toon is a an orphan of a great war hero, raised by your aunt and with a hopeless crush on your cousin's snooty best friend even though she clearly despises you, and who you nevertheless hope to impress by going into the forest to gather her favourite sort of mushroom since the village shop has sold out of them only while you're about your mission...

I think if you are used to that style of story telling, it might be quite hard to see the story-telling in Beth games at all. And so they get a lot a criticism, and so they keep trying fix something that was never broken. That was how Oblivion got the endless fake urgency that's haunted Beth game design since (not so much in FO4 to be fair) and that I think is why we got the player voice acting, the over-strong characterisation and the relentless linking to the theme in FO4.

 

[Ernest Lemmingway]

I will say, this game is finally starting to grow on me. I can see a lot of potential depth in the interactions of perks, crafting and settlements. Piper and Nick Valentine have both been fun to have around (and I say that as someone who usually avoids companions like the plague)

 

The sticking point is still the player's backstory. I had an interesting discussion about this on Beth forums.

 

Part of the problem, I think, lies in the pre-war origin of the player. There's not really anything you can bring from that time to motivate your character. Your friends, your nation, your job ... all of that is pretty much irrelevant in the Commonwealth.

 

The exception being, of course, your child. And that's the other half of the problem. The issue isn't so much that the background stops you from role-playing. The problem is that the emotional impact is too big. It's not that it stops you roleplaying so much as that, if you do decide to role-play, then the only sane response is for the Single Parent to chase down little Shaun to the exclusion of all else. I mean what else can possibly be important? It's really sad that the Minutemen have been whittled down to a single idiot in a silly hat and all, but you've got more pressing problems. As for tracking down radio distress signals, or missing lockets ... sorry, not happening! Busy here|

 

That in itself wouldn't be a bad basis for a playthrough. The problem is that it's the basis for every playthough. Well, you can play a sociopath who despite appearances to the contrary didn't care at all for his wife and child, or you can dye your hair green, wear purple trousers and laugh a lot; clearly personal tragedy has driven you completely insane freeing you to commit random acts of violence around the Commonwealth.

 

Even so though, it doesn't sound like a lot of scope for repeated playthroughs. Which is a pity, since I doubt I'm going to explore all of those interesting perks combinations with one character.

 

Still, at least they seem to have stopped beating me over the head with reminders about what I'm supposed to be doing. I mean they still come down hard on the subject of family at every opportunity. "Oh gee, Piper! You absolutely should be nice to little sister because nothing is more important than family, and wouldn't it be awful if you were to lose her without having had a chance to tell her how much she means to you..." Yeah, yeah, we get the point already! Give it a rest, will ya?

 

Of course, linking everything back to the central theme would, in just about any other context, be considered Good Writing. You have story you want to tell, and you want the story to be about X and so everything that happens gets to be considered in the light of X and anything that doesn't work in that context gets cut or rewritten until it does.

 

Now personally, I'm not convinced that the gaming world has been eagerly awaiting a game that gave us a deep, sensitive exploration of the Importance of Family Values while Bloodily Murderising Any Adult That Gets In Your Way... but I can accept that they might have been trying to do something good here. Obviously, I don't think it worked particularly well, although if they'd pulled it off it could have been awesome. That's not what keeps niggling at me.

 

The thing is, Beth get a lot of stick about the quality of their writing. I've never really felt that was entirely justified. I mean, they write stories that are intended to proceed at the player's own pace and are designed to interleave with side quests and random exploration and whatever internal narrative the player wants to place on events. That demands a certain style of writing, and I think they've generally given us excellent stories within that framework. What you don't do is start you off telling you that your toon is a an orphan of a great war hero, raised by your aunt and with a hopeless crush on your cousin's snooty best friend even though she clearly despises you, and who you nevertheless hope to impress by going into the forest to gather her favourite sort of mushroom since the village shop has sold out of them only while you're about your mission...

 

I think if you are used to that style of story telling, it might be quite hard to see the story-telling in Beth games at all. And so they get a lot a criticism, and so they keep trying fix something that was never broken. That was how Oblivion got the endless fake urgency that's haunted Beth game design since (not so much in FO4 to be fair) and that I think is why we got the player voice acting, the over-strong characterisation and the relentless linking to the theme in FO4.

 

 

 

This is pretty much what I was going to say in my previous post before LL logged me out for no apparent reason and then the copy I made just in case that happened (it's happened before) wouldn't copy. But my central point on the story was that it has been done. To death. In novels, movies, comics, manga, other video games, the list goes on. I've lost track of how many different variations on "parent searching for their lost child" and "importance of family" out there right this moment. I'm trying not to compare this to Skyrim, but story-wise that game had an interesting central plot that wasn't so closely connected to the player. Fallout 4 chose a plot that is intensely personal and thus a very poor fit for open world. They can't make it feel important without "hitting us over the head with it," but "hitting us over the head with it" goes against the modality of a sandbox game. It was a lose-lose choice on Bethesda's part. I'm not blaming the writers who got saddled with making the central storyline work. As an amateur writer I've had to deal with the same thing. In my case the designers came up with the central premise and forced the writers to make it work. I'm sure the writers did the best they could given what they were forced to work with. A trite, poorly chosen premise given the nature of the final product.

 

My other main complaint, and this ties in strongly with the plot issues, is the overemphasis on settlement management. As an optional component without the need for constant watch, that would have been an excellent flavor element. Instead it comes off as a dissonant clash between searching for my son or helping adults who need help going to the bathroom without being shot. Not to mention the dozens of other complaints others have posted about the Settlement Workshop. It just doesn't fit with the central story that we should micromanage multiple settlements. The character isn't out to change the world, just save their child. Having a couple of safe places to take them after all is said and done makes more sense than building up a trade network.

 

Overall it just feels like the main plot was selected as an afterthought. Unless there's DLC that brings more about it to the game, to me it feels like a management-driven decision to add something that "makes it look better." Or alter it "because it will appeal to a broader customer base." I apologize if my inner Dilbert is coming out. Painful experience has shown me that 99.9 to the tenth power percent of the time, if a product fails to live up to its potential, you don't look at the people who worked on it. You look at the managers who meddled with it.

[DocClox]

 

I apologize if my inner Dilbert is coming out. Painful experience has shown me that 99.9 to the tenth power percent of the time, if a product fails to live up to its potential, you don't look at the people who worked on it. You look at the managers who meddled with it.

 

Nah, I tend to agree with you. There's a lot about this game that has that microsofty "the marketing department writes the specs" feel about it.

[JerseyWalrus]

To me, RPG carries a connotation of two things: a strong story and multiple choices resolving quests. FO4 has neither; the story is water thin and our choices of resolving given quests is binary with no third or fourth options. No dialogue options based on skills or perks (no skills at all, really)? And "reputation" with factions is likewise limited to earning the right to buy things at given ranks and earning the ire of opposing factions. Everyone else just doesn't care if you've been a hero or a villain or who you side with. They even got rid of the karma system. That's a core of the Fallout series that helped to differentiate it from other games like it. I'm not even comfortable calling this a "Fallout" game; where's the moral fallout of our actions?

 

FO4 to me is a sandbox that (poorly) hybridizes RPG and simulation. Not that it's a bad game, but I went in expecting a half-decent RPG. What I got was a first-person settlement simulator with coloring by the Fallout paintbrush. The mod toolset can't come out soon enough. If this game is a soup, then mods will be the salt that helps heighten what muted flavors exist. Or add new ones.

I disagree with you somewhat. Though there is a lack in skill-check dialogue options, they do exist. Whether or not you'll be able to convince someone to not shoot a tied up ghoul is one instance I remember off the top of my head. Also, it takes a while for people to take into account of who you side with but when you choose a faction to back in the end, half to three quarters of the other factions will go hostile, depending on your chosen faction. Lastly, the Karma System after Fallout 2 went in a steady decline. Fallout 3 was the last one that used it in a semi-functional way by having bounty hunters chase you depending on whether or not you were good or evil, while also giving you a little daily reward. However it was prone to being broken, with everyone's example of "Nuke Megaton, then Donate Water to be Very Good again." In New Vegas Karma was useless as it was essentially broken, making it extremely difficult to even get to neutral karma. Killing raiders always gave you Very Good karma and there were a fuckton of those people in Vegas. 

 

However I agree that there should be more options in how to handle quests and dialogue. 

[junkacc]

No! FO4 is a great game. You're just holding it wrong. Here's why it didn't receive GOTY:

 

 

 

 

 

[McPinkerton]

Im on my 3rd character in fallout 4 but its like Batman Arkham Origins, its a good game but not a good "batman" game, fallout 4 is a good game but does very little to innovate, it actually took some steps back (not in terms of bugs or actual game integrity), honestly I hope Obsidian gives there engine a whirl, and make it so choice returns to the fallout games. 

[Ernest Lemmingway]

Im on my 3rd character in fallout 4 but its like Batman Arkham Origins, its a good game but not a good "batman" game, fallout 4 is a good game but does very little to innovate, it actually took some steps back (not in terms of bugs or actual game integrity), honestly I hope Obsidian gives there engine a whirl, and make it so choice returns to the fallout games. 

 

If it's a lot more stable than FONV was, then hell yes! The sheer number of "unofficial patches," tweaks, and other fixes is a pain but they're worth it for the kind of depth Obsidian brought. Especially since they're willing to touch on issues that Bethesda is apparently too politically correct to go into: prostitution, drug running, pretty much everything about Caesar's Legion, the list goes on.

[AlericoftheNords]

 

 

With fallout 1 you were always the vault dweller out to get the sacred water chip

 

with fallout 2  you were always the descended of the vault dweller

 

 

But those are things that happen to your character - but doesn't necessarily inform you on anything about who your character is. Similarly, in Fallout 3, you are always a vault dweller who searches for your dad. In New Vegas, you always start as a courier. But in both instances, right from the very start of the tutorials, you're presented with choices that let you shape what kind of character you will be. When Amata is getting bullied by Butch, is your character the kind to help her out? Do they mind their own business and let them continue? Do you fight Butch? Do you join him and pick on Amata as well? Just because you were born in the state you were, in the country you were, in the time you were, to the family you were - does that mean your personality is set from birth without you being able to define yourself as who you are? Of course not, and it's the same in an RPG. 

 

You can't generally have a TOTALLY blank slate - because you need some starting point at which to inject the player into the world. A totally blank slate has nothing to grow off of. The trick is to create as blank a slate as possible in order to allow the player to define their own character as the story evolves, while still providing enough of a hook to get the story started and the player invested in it.

 

 

The thing is, I could probably live with the game telling me 'who' my character is to start.

 

The -problem- in FO4 is what happens next.  You are basically forced to play a very good guy in almost every scenario.  There is very, very little room to actually build a character for yourself.  Everything comes back to being a concerned mother/father looking for their kid, and all of the Faction Quests basically revolve around this point.

 

Want to be a ruthless merc or raider?  Nope, not even an option.

Want to forget you ever had kid and just be a wastelander?  Nope, can't do that.  

Want to 'just' be a Railroad Agent or Brotherhood Knight?  Nope, got to find the kid.  

Want to just screw the wasteland over and join the Institute?  Nope, got to find the kid to do that.

Want to join a Raider Faction or the Gunners?  Not an option.

 

In Skyrim, you could at least ignore the main story and join one of the factions to be a Thief, an Assassin, a Warrior Companion, or even a Vampire.  In FO4, there are no such options since everything is tied to the main story.

[vram1974]

[...]

Next, with NPCs being named, it should be possible to introduce some kind of "radiant quests" from them, missions that are occasionally randomly generated, to be done at random locations.

 

So, you'd get more named NPCs and generic missions. Sounds like an improvement to me?

 

Ugh. I went into FO4Edit, found all the "radiant" quest markers and moved them to miscellaneous. Now I never see them and never do them. Radiant quests are horse shit and lazy. Like Dark Brotherhood Forever missions, killing random people over and over for no reason. LAME!

 

Sadly generic NPCs is much more common in Fallout. This practice has been annoying for a long time since Fallout 3. Even New Vegas had it. And what makes it worse is that these generic NPCs tend to have the same dialogu and no real emotions. Just dull walking AIs in each settlement.

 

It's the worst! The Skyrim equivalent of "Hm?" "Yes" "Need something?" But at least those people had names!

 

Even worse, sometimes a major character assigns you a quest. You want to speak to them about something else BUT UNTIL you finish that quest they keep repeating the same phrase ad infinitum. That's terrible RPG. The worst!

 

Agree fully. I've played through the main story, with what I think can be the most common one: Minutemen and then the brotherhood. The brotherhood story line is meh, and the minutemen and Preston fucking Garvey is just pure awful grinding crap. Minutemen are AIDS and I hope there come a well done quest mod where the plot line is to eradicate the minutemen just because they are stuck up, high horsed assholes. The last boss is Preston fucking Garvey where the moder have included some torture element or really evil choice in the end. 

 

Don't forget Marcy Long. Sweet Jesus, the shit I would do to her...

 

YOU CAN'T BE EVIL! You can be sarcastic, that's about it. I want to be able to be evil.

 

Even when you try and act evil you shoot somebody in the head and they sit down for a second and go into that essential bleedout BULLSHIT that Beth has foisted on us for every single RPG.

[Content Consumer]

I got Fallout 4 for Christmas this year, which I did not ask for and did not actually want, at least for a few months or maybe even until the GOTY edition. But hey, it's a gift, whaddya gonna do? Complain? Take it back to the store? "No, I absolutely will NOT play with this toy until it has been vetted by an approving council of other players and fixed by the modding community!" Nope.

So now that I have it, I feel compelled to play it. I mean, OBVIOUSLY. I'm not expecting to really appreciate it, neither am I expecting to hate it. Hopefully it'll end up being a sort of tsundere situation here.

 

Overall, a lot more shallow than Skyrim or even Fallout 3. But still really quite fun, if you like FPS combat. Whatever you do, don't go into it thinking of it like an RPG. It's a shooter with stat-building bolted on. A good shooter, a fun one, but disappointing if you were expecting anything else.

 

Occasionally, as I was playing, I took some notes (wall of text incoming):

 

Oh, good. Install 4gb from the disk, install the other 26gb from Steam. I'm sure Beth has a number of very good reasons for this, which I totally agree with and approve of. Yay team.

 

I guess I should have looked this up before installing, really. 22 hours later, still downloading, and my enthusiasm for this damn game has already palled and I haven't even started playing yet.

 

Character creation is easy to make a generic, neutral-looking male or female, or even a sort of androgynous character. Hard to make a pretty one, though. But really super easy to make a horrifyingly disgusting character.Character creation: Looks like they took Racemenu and made it an integral part of the game. I'm sort of worried about body type mods - Unlike Skyrim, where weight is one-dimensional (low/high), body type is two dimensional here. I'm not certain, but I believe it might make it harder for modders to make body mods. Mesh, that is - texture mods should be just fine, in fact probably quite a bit easier in the scars/tattoos/blemishes market.

 

I guess this must be partially due to all the large number of Skyrim mods - you've got dozens that make for blemish-free, smooth, plastic-skinned NPCs, and on the other hand a bunch of mods that add scars, moles, etc. So when the devs look to the modding community to make their next game better, that's what they see. I'm not complaining, mind you, just wondering.

 

Okay, it looks like turning anti-aliasing off is a bad idea. Still, my old GTX 580 doesn't complain as much when I turn the settings down, so I guess I'll live with it.

 

This dialogue wheel is interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about it. Not enthralled, I guess.

 

My baby looks like a doll. Why does my baby look like a child's toy? Am I actually just mentally unhinged and I think this doll is my child?

 

My robot butler speaks my name. I liked that in Black and White, it's pretty cool here too.

 

I wish I could explore my hometown. I mean, before it's blown up. Ah, well.

 

Sprinting is a tad hard to get used to. I'm used to Skyrim, where you sprint by holding down the button. Here, you toggle sprinting on and off, which is messing me up.

 

I'm really starting to dislike this stupid dialogue wheel.

 

Dialogue between characters is slightly improved. Not enough, though. You still get that blank-eyed stare, but the game at least tries to distract you from it now by moving the camera about, and allowing you to move around as long as you don't get too far away.

 

This is not an RPG. This is not even as limited-RPG as Skyrim. This is a shooter with some RPG elements attached. And not very in-depth ones at that.

 

This is... uh, actually, an okay shooter. The combat mechanics have been improved quite a bit.

 

This is harder than Fallout 3, NV, or Skyrim out of the box. I mean, it's harder to sneak unnoticed until you level up quite a bit, enemies are tougher in combat, etc. Not immeasureably so, but maybe one tick higher on the vanilla difficulty slider.

 

Compared to Skyrim, the AI is a bit improved. About to the level of heavily-modded Skyrim, actually. Still not Tomb Raider 2013 level (the only other modern-ish game I have for reference), but not bad.

 

MOLE RATS CAN BURROW! And move around underground! And come up elsewhere! That is AWESOME!

 

Holy fucking shit, batman. Bloodbugs are instant killers. Stay away, use vats, shoot them from a distance, or you're dead.

 

Enemy groups have very little to differentiate between individuals. I mean, in Skyrim, if you run across a bunch of bandits, there will be one hammer guy, one sword guy, a bow guy, a mage... some will be wearing light armor, some heavy, they'll be different races, different genders... not here. They all look the same, mostly.

 

The enemy differentiation comes through in armor and weapon mods, mostly. Kill a bunch of bandits, and you'll get eight or ten copies of a couple of weapons, and about half will have random weapon mods attached.

 

Hey, this pet dog is pretty nifty. Dog = Dogmeat?

 

The dialogue wheel is a travesty and needs to be removed from the game with a meat cleaver.

 

Armor/clothing slots: Looks like the default game takes better advantage of multiple items. Kind of more like Oblivion than Skyrim. A bit.

 

Of course, this does just prove the untruthfulness of that profoundly stupid "fewer armor pieces means we can put more NPCs in the game" shit Bethesda spouted when they made Skyrim and people complained about merged armor.

 

Mines and explosives are FUCKING NASTY. If you hit a mine, as soon as you hear the beeping sound, you're dead. There's nothing you can do... run away, dive behind a wall, run forward... you might as well just load the most recent save as soon as you trigger one, it'll all be the same in a couple of seconds.

 

The settlement crafting system is pretty cool. I have yet to dive very deep into it, but it looks real nifty. Like, Sims in Skyrim kind of thing. I think when I start really getting into it I'm really REALLY going to like it.

 

Compared to Fallout 3 / New Vegas, hacking is easier. Lockpicking is about the same as in those games and Skyrim. I could just be imagining the differences though, I suppose.

 

This game is in dire need of an alternate start mod. DIRE NEED. The vanilla start sucks donkey balls.

 

The dialogue wheel needs to be blown up with a mini nuke. And then buried, and the ground sown with salt.

 

I'm not thrilled with the fact that the player character is voiced. For one thing, mods are going to be a bit more jarring. In Skyrim, NPCs are unvoiced, which is a little off when all vanilla NPCs speak, but suddenly losing player voice for a mod might be a bit off too.

 

Then again, I'm also of the opinion that the first mod (well, second mod actually) I'm going to try is one that gets rid of the player voice. Although this is not an RPG, I'm still not happy that my character now has her own personality, not one that I can give her. The VA is mostly good quality, but sometimes really emotionless. I haven't played a male character yet though, it might be a little different.

 

My gods... there's actual WEATHER in this game! I... I think I might cry...

 

Like all recent Bethesda games, hitboxes are often bigger than the objects they're on. If an enemy is crouching behind a wall but you can see his head, that doesn't mean you can actually shoot his head, you're likely to have a lot of bullets bounce off invisible walls.

 

The way the game does radiation is better than previous Fallout games. Simplified, but more fun this way.

 

Actually, that phrase - "simplified, but more fun this way" - pretty much sums up the differences between Daggerfall/Morrowind, Morrowind/Oblivion, Oblivion/Skyrim, and FO3/FO4.

 

Followers are just as annoying as they were in previous games. Jumping in front of your gun, triggering mines and traps, nothing's changed there. Here I am lauding the AI and it has to go and do this crap.

 

There's... so... much... junk... so many items of the caliper-and-tong variety. I don't know what's important!

 

A lot of the cursed dialogue wheel options lead to the same result. This is stupid and a waste of time.

 

The "twist" in the main plot is so obvious it's actually sort of painful. If you meet a huge man on the street covered in scars wielding a machete and screaming incoherently at passersby, you will be more surprised if he actually attacks someone than you will be by the SURPRISING PLOT TWIST. This is way beyond eye-rolling here.

 

Caveat: I haven't played through the main quest all the way yet, so I haven't gotten to the AMAZINGLY UNEXPECTED PLOT TWIST yet, but I can STILL see it coming a mile off. This is really kind of sloppy writing.

 

I swear, if the expected plot twist doesn't happen, it will actually BE surprising. There's always hope.

 

Where the hell is the quicksave button? If you have to open the menu to quicksave, it's not a QUICKsave, it's just a regular save.

 

Oh, there it is... never mind, quicksaving is fine.

 

The voice acting in general is okay. For the most part, you feel like you're talking to southies. Player VA is good quality, but as I've said I'm not a rabid fan of the concept.

 

Voice acting for NPCs range from mediocre to pretty good. Nothing outstanding in either direction so far.

 

Having a high Charisma is... magical. I mean that in a bad way. No matter how charismatic you are, you should not be able to persuade a psychopathic maniac to put down the weapon and take up the priesthood in a single sentence.

 

This fucking dialogue wheel. I am going to mod the SHIT out of this game to get rid of this piece of nauseating crap.

 

I know many people have a problem with the inventory, but it seems to be okay to me. Not ideal, certainly, but not a finger-severing abomination either. Granted, I haven't been playing for long, and maybe the crafting system is going to be irritating with this inventory...

 

Power armor is amazingly awesome. It's also amazingly easy to come by. Power armor fuel is pretty hard to find, though... and why the hell does power armor require fuel now? I mean, taken as a mechanic without context (i.e. if you ignore the previous games and the lore), it's a good one, especially considering the huge advantages they gave to power armor. It's no longer just "combat armor, but heavier" and there are actual advantages to using it, so they had to limit it somehow, and fuel seems a good way to do so.

 

Bandit-equivalent groups are always structured the same way. 8-12 lower level grunts you mow through, and one boss dude who mows through you. It's like they took the grunt+boss makeup of Skyrim bandits and turned the knob up to eleven.

 

Okay, I get you have a system for enchanted weapons in Skyrim, and I get you don't want to redo the engine for a new game. But do you have to apply magic effects to guns? Huh? Can you not? Why do I have a tire iron... or ANY WEAPON, but PARTICULARLY a tire iron... that magically does more damage at night? Sheesh.

 

The fade in/fade out when using scoped weapons is distracting and a bit disjointed.

 

Fuck you, dialogue wheel. Fuck you right in the eye socket.

 

Okay, the AI isn't really as great as all that after all. Still often very stupid.

 

Most of the things I had assumed were improved AI are actually preset animations, nothing more - but still pretty cool. And the AI is a little better, I must admit.

 

This really REALLY needs an Alternate Start mod. One that surgically excises all references to Shaun or "my baby" from the game.

 

Are there any level-up perks that aren't combat-focused?

 

The minutemen have a SERIOUS personnel problem. I mean, I do ONE QUEST and now I'm the grand-high leader? How desperate do you have to be to make an unashamed thief your leader?

 

You know,the mole rats were fun at first. They look better than they did in Fallout 3 and they used to be an interesting fight. But I'm being attacked every other damn step by the stupid things. Mole rats are the Skyrim wolves of Fallout 4. Give me something else, will you?

 

NPCs really, really, really, really like to repeat spoken lines. A lot. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. A lot. They like to repeat spoken lines. Over and over again. A lot.

 

I'm really digging the settlement building thing, but I'm wondering how it all works. I mean, I've fortified Red Rocket with a dozen turrets and traps, walled it all off, and I WANNA SEE A RAIDER GANG ATTACK AND WATCH SOME PEOPLE GET SWISS-CHEEZED! Maybe it's because I don't have any settlers?

 

Speaking of which, how the hell do traps work? I built a flame trap, and it activated as soon as I attached it to the generator, no way to turn it off, no apparent trip wire or pressure plate I could set as a switch. I want it to roast invaders, not fire at nothing.

 

This dialogue wheel could not be worse if it was powered by the souls of dead puppies.

 

Regarding my previous comment about mole rats - I'm sorry game, I didn't mean it, please don't be angry. No more of the sentry bots, okay? I'll stick with the mole rats.

 

I'm not totally repulsed by the inventory system, but I do have one major gripe - alphabetical sorting for misc items only? Seriously? Notes and voice files count as inventory objects, not data items?. You'd think that sorting by most-recent-first would be something the devs would have done on their own, dammit. I mean, they already HAD this in Fallout 3! This is some seriously blatant laziness, Bethesda obviously saying "let's shove it out the door and let the modders fix it." Don't give me that "holotapes are items in the game" excuse either - it can't be that hard to make items added to the data list removable so you can eject a holotape and put it in a container.

 

Holy crap. I just barely noticed - all medium and long hairs have active physics. Nifty.

 

Heh. Now that I'm paying attention, it looks like some of the clothes have physics too. That's probably going to be harder on medium and low-end systems.

 

Tangentially related to the dialogue wheel problem and dialogue in general - I don't like how the camera keeps switching around between my face, NPCs face, and first-person, like some sort of cricket on heroin. It's jarring. It was fine at first, but it's getting on my nerves.

 

There's a serious disconnect (the popular term I believe is ludonarrative dissonance) between gameplay and story. Specifically, (spoiler alert) this woman (or man - the player), her spoken lines, and main storyline deal with a quest to find your missing son. Which would be fine for a linear game, but this open-world contains hundreds of deliberate distractions from that. So we've got this ostensibly crushed woman desperately seeking her long-lost progeny, and first thing out of the bag the game tries to get you involved with house-building and restructuring the political landscape of the world. "I'm so afraid of what happened to my baby! Have you seen my baby? Does anyone know where my baby went? Where's my baby? I will never stop until I've found OH! Hey, sidequest! Let's go! And there's some stuff I need to complete my house decor!"

 

Not really related to gameplay, but I did a little internet searching and found that there are a lot of helpful things added now that weren't in Skyrim. The addkeyword script command, for example. Eventually I feel that a lot of this stuff will make life easier on modders.

 

Look, I know I have plenty of time to do things in VATS, I just panic and quick-shoot shit anyway. I'm not sure that Real-Time-With-Pause gameplay translates well into Real-Time-With-Slightly-Slower-Time gameplay.

 

At this point, I took a little break. For a couple of days.

I didn't intend to, I just stopped playing it, and picked up Starcraft 2 LOV.

It wasn't a conscious decision, I just wasn't that enamored with Fallout 4. I mean, it's a servicable game, sure enough, but sort of thin. Maybe it's because I spent so much time crafting weapons and settlement building, I got a little burned out?

All in all, so far I'm feeling mostly just "meh." More or less just how I was feeling when I started. I'd hoped things would improve, but not so far.

I'm pretty sure I'm just not giving the game a fair shake yet. I've spent most of my time crafting, settlement building, and randomly wandering about exploring, with only a couple of actual quests under my belt. Maybe I should go for the main questline?

Anyway, when I got back to it:

 

Two settlers now in Red Rocket. How does Happiness work? How do I increase it? What causes attacks? How will I know if there's an attack? Can I give new weapons and armor to my settlers? Can I force them to use power armor? Can I force them NOT to use power armor? Does having a food surplus mean anything? Water, power?

 

I keep getting the nagging feeling that this game was primarily designed for male characters. There's nothing definite I can point to, except maybe the opening video, but beyond that nothing. No evidence. But still I keep feeling that the devs intended the player to pick a male PC.

 

I just noticed that my pipboy light is the same color as my UI. Along with the UI color customization, I no longer need to install 2-3 mods just to get the color I want! Mods for previous games entering the new game = nice.

 

Delays in terminal use are a bit irritating. I mean, to do anything you've got to go through several submenus, okay, but then why pause for several seconds when making a choice? There's no reason for it. I've stated before that although a couple of seconds isn't a long time, making players wait for something in an action-focused game is not a good idea.

 

More setpiece stuff. Ghouls climbing through windows. Nifty, and it makes the game feel like it's got better AI without actually having better AI. Good design.

 

Why is ammunition so damn hard to find? Must I carry six different main weapons just in case I run out? Is this game primarily designed for melee and unarmed play?

 

I've encountered several bugs (like radroaches - rimshot), but nothing too terrible. Weapons staying down after entering a building, disappearing weapons, sneaking while cell switching causing weapon switch delay, the occasional radscorpion burrowing underground only to fall out of the sky, dead - but only averaging maybe one CTD per ten hours of play. Certainly much improved over the nastiness of Fallout 3.

 

Loading screen times vary considerably. It's actually kind of a pain - I've had very long load times, very short load times, and everything in between. I'd like some consistency - I'll take long ones, as long as I can predict it. I need to know if the game has frozen or if it's just a long loading time, here.

 

Long animations are the bane of my existence. It's been that way since Oblivion. Skyrim in particular had a nasty habit of this. I'm thinking particularly of trying to grab an item off a table, and accidentally hitting the table itself (because the goddamn box size issues), then sitting and waiting for ten seconds to actually sit down and stand back up again. Come on, people, don't do this to me. I never actually want to sit down in the game anyway, much less by accident. Hopefully this doesn't end up happening when I'm sneaking about trying not to be noticed, ejecting me from stealth and causing enemies to go hostile, killing me while I'm STUCK IN A CHAIR UNABLE TO MOVE.

 

Along with the long animations is a problem that's been increasing for a while, and that's the devs trying to make realistic movement animations. When an NPC tells you to follow him, he needs to start walking off, not stare blankly at nothing for a second, slowly turn in place, pause, then start walking, only to hit a pathfinding error and redo the whole thing.

 

And seriously, how hard is it to use a freaking DOOR? Give a line of three or four people trying to get through a door, and the first one will go through fine, the others will be stuck there, unable to move, for at least ten seconds or so. No use trying to force them through either, and forget about using the door yourself until they're all through, because it'll just freeze on you.

 

Jumping has been much improved over previous games. Well done, Bethesda, you've managed to do a decent job on something a lot of other devs have been doing for years.

 

OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS AN ASSAULTRON! I thought the goddamn SENTRY BOTS were bad.

 

And that's where I am right now. Level 13, almost all perks put into lockpicking, hacking, and crafting, and I'm getting freaking OWNED by the monsters of the wasteland.

I have to say, I'm really digging the combat mechanics. It's less of a slog, and feels more ?realistic? or at least more fun to play.

But the game overall? Meh.

 

[Ernest Lemmingway]

 

I got Fallout 4 for Christmas this year, which I did not ask for and did not actually want, at least for a few months or maybe even until the GOTY edition.

 

 

That was assuming FO4 would earn anyone's GOTY title. Going by the compiled data on Metacritic the XBOX One version ranks highest at #23 (PS4 #42 and PC #84) in terms of rankings for 2015 video game releases, it's not likely it will earn that. It was handily beaten by The Witcher 3 in the RPG genre, which is what it was billed as by Bethesda (action-RPG, technically). Other action games have beaten it in terms of critical and user rankings. It's still too soon to say for sure but clearly there are already better candidates. And given how well TW3 was received, it's obvious what I'll be playing for a while we all wait for the GECK.

 

I ask everyone here this question. Has Bethesda gone from mod-friendly to mod-reliant in its games? It's just something that's been eating at me since I first played FO4. Especially given their track record since even Oblivion (universally silent voices was the best thing that happened to that game).

[Content Consumer]

I ask everyone here this question. Has Bethesda gone from mod-friendly to mod-reliant in its games? It's just something that's been eating at me since I first played FO4. Especially given their track record since even Oblivion (universally silent voices was the best thing that happened to that game).

 

 

 

 

That depends on what you mean by mod-friendly vs. mod-reliant.

I mean, the game works just fine without mods (for me, at least) - few crashes, and few bugs I've noticed. In fact, it works better than, say, apropos of nothing, off the top of my head, picked randomly, Fallout 3.

 

Does Bethesda require modders to fix their games? Again, it's a technicality. Yes, Beth releases games that range from mostly-okay to oh-my-god-can-it-get-any-worse broken, which the community eventually fixes. But, for most people, their games work out of the box. I know we don't have the CK yet, but we do have xedit, and of all the mods available (on Nexus, for example), there are very few that I would term actual "fixes." Mostly texture replacers and nude mods. So Fallout 4's been out for a while now and people are playing it, and beating it, successfully.

 

Does Bethesda require modders to make their games? If you're talking about the mods from previous games entering the next game, I'm not sure it's a case of require, but it certainly happens. Mods from Morrowind made it into Oblivion, mods from Oblivion made it into Fallout 3 and Skyrim, mods from those games made it into Fallout 4. This isn't necessarily the case of the devs relying on the community to fix their game, it's probably just the devs playing the game and downloading mods for themselves, saying "oh, this is nice" every once in a while, and remembering it for next time.

If you're talking about the fact that Bethesda games seem to be getting a bit more shallow as time goes on, I can say yes, they do, absolutely, and modders often take up the slack. But again, I'm pretty sure that's not deliberate.

 

I'm really not sure this is a case of Bethesda deliberately slacking off as much as they are operating under increasing deadlines - time, money, and marketing demands. Marketing, in fact, is probably most of the problem. That's my guess. I tend to say "bethesda" when railing against the game, but in all actuality it's probably just "bethesda's marketing." EDIT: Or Zenimax, probably more accurate... I dunno.

 

I know I haven't definitively given my opinion as either a yes or no to your question, but that's all I've got - I'm not in there with the devs, so I can't say for sure that they don't sit around a table saying "let's release a broken game and let the community do our work for us!" I mean, I can't imagine that any group of people who ostensibly got into the field for the love of it does that. I'm sure it comes up, possibly fairly often, but I can't say it's a core design philosophy. I tend to imagine more that they sit around a table saying "okay, we only have a limited time to make this game, and we're operating under a huge list of restrictions and requirements, so let's do the best we can with what we've got, and pray it isn't too bad."

 

But what do I know? I'm not in there.

 

 

 

 

That was assuming FO4 would earn anyone's GOTY title.

Oh, I'm sure it will earn someone's GOTY title. Even if Zenimax has to buy out some podunk media outlet.

[Guest]

My 2 cents.

 

Fallout 4 is not really a RPG.

It has something taken from a RPG, but is in not supposed to be a pure RPG.

 

Is Bethesda relying on mods to improve the game?

Nope. Their point (and I like it) is that if you make the game moddable, then you earn way more money in the long run. Skyrim is still selling about 200 copies a week on Steam.

How many people are buying "Destiny" right now? Few.

 

I agree on the position of @Content Consumer, globally. Maybe different tones, but I agree with him.

With my colleagues at work, we play Fallout 4 (each one for him/herself) a total of 19 people that I am in contact with.

How many of them are modding FO4? Just me.

How many of them are playing on PC and NOT consoles? All o fthem except one.

How many of them are happy about the game? All of them (me included. I had very good time playing it to the end.)

How many of them are stupid? [Except one, or probably two] all of them are extremely skilled and intelligent people.

 

[Ernest Lemmingway]

 

 

 

 

That was assuming FO4 would earn anyone's GOTY title.

Oh, I'm sure it will earn someone's GOTY title. Even if Zenimax has to buy out some podunk media outlet.

 

 

That's exactly what I'm afraid they'll do.

[DocClox]

Been meaning to reply to this for a while now...
 

Overall, a lot more shallow than Skyrim or even Fallout 3. But still really quite fun, if you like FPS combat. Whatever you do, don't go into it thinking of it like an RPG. It's a shooter with stat-building bolted on. A good shooter, a fun one, but disappointing if you were expecting anything else.

Looks like we're more or less on the same page regarding this one. There's a mix of genius, cock-up and half-assed compromise at work, I'm starting to think. Course, you could probably say that of most Beth games, but there's rather more cock-up in this one than I'm used to.

 

This dialogue wheel is interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about it. Not enthralled, I guess.

...

This dialogue wheel could not be worse if it was powered by the souls of dead puppies.

More or less my evolution of opinion as well.

I'm starting to think that someone badly underestimated how much voice acting was going to be required for the PC, and that they ended up having to reuse a lot of lines. And the only way to do that without making it look stupid from the outset was to hide the redundancy behind that wheel. I can't think why else they'd do it.
 

MOLE RATS CAN BURROW! And move around underground! And come up elsewhere! That is AWESOME!

The don't burrow. They teleport and leave giant dog turds when they reappear. No way they can move that fast underground and leave no clue as to their passage. That's even more fun when you find the ones with surgically implanted landmines. (Although I forgave them a lot of that when I met the crazy cannibal lady who makes them. She hangs out in an underground car park somewhere near Fanny Hall).

Later on you get teleporting giant radscorpions. They don't call them teleporters either; apparently they're "stalkers". Where "stalker" means if you see one on the far horizon and bounce a .50 shell off its carapace from concealment, the next second the damn thing will be in your face and meleeing you. Because of stalking, apparently.

Moments like this and I imagine the whole thing was designed by some pimply faced 14 year old GM. Hurr-hurr-hurr, they'll never expect this. It's like making headshots ineffective on a great many enemies to keep things fresh, I assume. I mean I can cope for robots, and I can accept that Deathclaws maybe have a heavily armoured cranial carapace. But ...
 

Holy fucking shit, batman. Bloodbugs are instant killers. Stay away, use vats, shoot them from a distance, or you're dead.

... there's no way a bloodbug should be carrying that much armour plate. I hit its head with a bullet and it's head is armour plated to that extent, all that's going to happen is that its head is driven through it's abdomen. Either that or all the techie groups should be researching synthetic bloodbug chitin as a top priority.
 

This game is in dire need of an alternate start mod. DIRE NEED. The vanilla start sucks donkey balls.

This really REALLY needs an Alternate Start mod. One that surgically excises all references to Shaun or "my baby" from the game.

Yup.
 

I'm not thrilled with the fact that the player character is voiced. For one thing, mods are going to be a bit more jarring. In Skyrim, NPCs are unvoiced, which is a little off when all vanilla NPCs speak, but suddenly losing player voice for a mod might be a bit off too.

Then again, I'm also of the opinion that the first mod (well, second mod actually) I'm going to try is one that gets rid of the player voice. Although this is not an RPG, I'm still not happy that my character now has her own personality, not one that I can give her. The VA is mostly good quality, but sometimes really emotionless. I haven't played a male character yet though, it might be a little different.

I think the VA is responsible for a lot of the problems with the dialogue wheel as well. I have a nagging suspicion that someone drastically underestimated how much voice acting the PC would need and they realised that if they were ever going to get the game released anywhere near on time and inside the budget, they were going to need to re-use so many lines it was going to look stupid. Hence the dialogue wheel to hide the cases where all four options give the same spoken line.

I can't think why else they'd do that.
 

The way the game does radiation is better than previous Fallout games. Simplified, but more fun this way.

Actually, that phrase - "simplified, but more fun this way" - pretty much sums up the differences between Daggerfall/Morrowind, Morrowind/Oblivion, Oblivion/Skyrim, and FO3/FO4.

Unlike many of their simplifications, I quite like this one. Gives me a strong urge to get the problem fixed without losing anything from the previous games.
 

The "twist" in the main plot is so obvious it's actually sort of painful. If you meet a huge man on the street covered in scars wielding a machete and screaming incoherently at passersby, you will be more surprised if he actually attacks someone than you will be by the SURPRISING PLOT TWIST. This is way beyond eye-rolling here.

Caveat: I haven't played through the main quest all the way yet, so I haven't gotten to the AMAZINGLY UNEXPECTED PLOT TWIST yet, but I can STILL see it coming a mile off. This is really kind of sloppy writing.

I swear, if the expected plot twist doesn't happen, it will actually BE surprising. There's always hope.

Spoiler Alert: The AMAZING PLOT TWIST happens, pretty much where and when you'd expect it to happen. Prepare to be underwhelmed.
 

I know many people have a problem with the inventory, but it seems to be okay to me. Not ideal, certainly, but not a finger-severing abomination either. Granted, I haven't been playing for long, and maybe the crafting system is going to be irritating with this inventory...

It's all right up until you pocket a holotape without playing it and then realise it was important. Best of luck finding it in amongst all the misc crap when there's no indication of what you already played and can't remember the exact title. Creating comic racks in a settlement helps, but that section badly needs some more sub-tabs and/or sort options. Oh right, you get to that later
 

The minutemen have a SERIOUS personnel problem. I mean, I do ONE QUEST and now I'm the grand-high leader? How desperate do you have to be to make an unashamed thief your leader?

I could cope with that while Preston was the sole surviving member and the Single Parent was just humoring a weirdo in a tricorn hat. But then Preston says "I'm going to put the band back together again" and you think, "hang on - why did you need me to do that?"
 

Regarding my previous comment about mole rats - I'm sorry game, I didn't mean it, please don't be angry. No more of the sentry bots, okay? I'll stick with the mole rats.

OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS AN ASSAULTRON! I thought the goddamn SENTRY BOTS were bad.

Just wait until you meet the assaultron dominators. Double-swordy assautrons with burning heads that can nevertheless turn invisible, spot you stealthed, run really, really fast while and decapitate you while my VATS based gunslinger is trying to remember which part of a grenade is the bit you pull and which is the part you throw. Rather than kill her, it utrned out to be easier to wipe out an entire town full of Gunners just so the combat would spill into her area and lure her out of the building she was guarding leaving me free to sneak in from the rooftops.

I need a better way to deal with those things. Seriously.
 

There's a serious disconnect (the popular term I believe is ludonarrative dissonance) between gameplay and story. Specifically, (spoiler alert) this woman (or man - the player), her spoken lines, and main storyline deal with a quest to find your missing son. Which would be fine for a linear game, but this open-world contains hundreds of deliberate distractions from that. So we've got this ostensibly crushed woman desperately seeking her long-lost progeny, and first thing out of the bag the game tries to get you involved with house-building and restructuring the political landscape of the world. "I'm so afraid of what happened to my baby! Have you seen my baby? Does anyone know where my baby went? Where's my baby? I will never stop until I've found OH! Hey, sidequest! Let's go! And there's some stuff I need to complete my house decor!"

Yup.

I've said this before, but the problem I have is that the Single Parent doesn't have a backstory so much as a Secret Origin. It's as if they start you off as a 12 year old in Gotham City. You get to play through the scene where you witness your parents being gunned down in a mugging gone bad, get an extended tutorial where you study the martial arts, have a big cinematic cut-scene where you swear to dedicate your life to fighting crime in Gotham City, and then they give you a cape, a cowl and a bat-utility belt and then tell you that you can play any character you like.

It's just too much. Once you get past the early stages where everyone keeps reminding you of who you're supposed to be the game gets a lot more enjoyable, but that has to be the worst backstory ever.
 

Look, I know I have plenty of time to do things in VATS, I just panic and quick-shoot shit anyway. I'm not sure that Real-Time-With-Pause gameplay translates well into Real-Time-With-Slightly-Slower-Time gameplay.

Yup. Keyboard short cuts help a lot though. "Q" for VATS, (who thought "q" rather than "v"? I mean really?) "QQQ" to line up three shots, "A" or "D" to change target, "QQQ" to queue some more shots and then "E" to execute. The VATS engine selects the body, so they'll all be body shots, but then headshots are nerfed on so many opponents that it doesn't honestly make that much difference. And it's heaps better than spending 10 seconds trying to select the body part of choice and having the deathclaw eat your head while you'd fiddling with the mouse.

You can use "W" and "S" as well to cycle through body parts. Not as useful though since every time the target moves, the area under the cursor changes and the selected target resets to that. Can be handy if you're quick though.
 

I keep getting the nagging feeling that this game was primarily designed for male characters. There's nothing definite I can point to, except maybe the opening video, but beyond that nothing. No evidence. But still I keep feeling that the devs intended the player to pick a male PC.

Yeah. The guy gets the power armour training. The girl is a lawyer (who also knows how to use PA - maybe trial by combat made a comeback?)

On the other hand the MQ starts as parcially a chickflick. You know the sort - the made for TV horror movie that gets shown about 2am featuring some one-time a-list actress. She's alone in a cabin in the woods and the trailers always suggest that there's going to be some serious sex involved, but the plot generally boils down to her four-year-old son getting lost in the woods and her getting really stressed about it.
 

More setpiece stuff. Ghouls climbing through windows. Nifty, and it makes the game feel like it's got better AI without actually having better AI. Good design.

The set pieces ARE nice.
 

Why is ammunition so damn hard to find? Must I carry six different main weapons just in case I run out? Is this game primarily designed for melee and unarmed play?

Scrounger perk. One level of that, and an occasional visit to Arturo or K-L-EO and I'm sorted. Mind, I mainly use 10mm, but keeping a buffer of 200-300 rounds isn't hard, even when Deliverer can spit the whole clip into a target in a single VATS session.
 

I have to say, I'm really digging the combat mechanics. It's less of a slog, and feels more ?realistic? or at least more fun to play.
But the game overall? Meh.

mmm... I'm liking it a lot more than was. Once I got past the Single Parent backstory and started doing some quests for someone other than Preston Garvey, things got a lot better. But the big problems (and they are HUGE) are the incredibly annoying character background and the dialogue wheel/player VA.

[Content Consumer]

I'm starting to think that someone badly underestimated how much voice acting was going to be required for the PC, and that they ended up having to reuse a lot of lines. And the only way to do that without making it look stupid from the outset was to hide the redundancy behind that wheel. I can't think why else they'd do it.

 

Sounds reasonable.

 

The don't burrow. They teleport and leave giant dog turds when they reappear.

Yeah, I got that. What you were reading there was stuff that popped into my head as I was playing, not stuff I edited later.

So yeah, I'm not that impressed with the mole rat burrowing/teleporting any more. Often their burrow holes (dog turd is a fairly accurate term) sort of levitate above the ground, and I've found that if you move up to a recently-burrowed mole rat, you can stab the air above the burrow and kill it.

 

Later on you get teleporting giant radscorpions. They don't call them teleporters either; apparently they're "stalkers". Where "stalker" means if you see one on the far horizon and bounce a .50 shell off its carapace from concealment, the next second the damn thing will be in your face and meleeing you. Because of stalking, apparently.

About half the time, the radscorpion burrows, teleports forward as expected, and then teleports straight up into the air, falling down and dying on impact.

Other frequent flyers include deathclaws, yao guai, and the occasional raider dog.

 

It's like making headshots ineffective on a great many enemies to keep things fresh, I assume. I mean I can cope for robots, and I can accept that Deathclaws maybe have a heavily armoured cranial carapace. But ...

 

My gods, that is super annoying. If I shoot something in the head, I expect a little reaction, you know? But no, everything and everyone shrugs off headshots even more than torso shots.

No, the best thing is to shoot everything in the leg. Human enemies have reduced armor there, and everything slows down.

Almost as annoying as the fact that if you shoot at a target multiple times in VATS, and one of the shots staggers the enemy, all subsequent shots are paused until the enemy has finished the stagger animation. Why? WHY?!?!?

 

... there's no way a bloodbug should be carrying that much armour plate. I hit its head with a bullet and it's head is armour plated to that extent, all that's going to happen is that its head is driven through it's abdomen. Either that or all the techie groups should be researching synthetic bloodbug chitin as a top priority.

 

I never had a problem actually killing bloodbugs. At early levels, they died quite easily from shots to any part of the body.

My problem was the prebaked attack+animation. At a low level, it drained like 3/4 of my health with one shot. Not even the deathclaw grab+roar+slam does that much damage.

 

I think the VA is responsible for a lot of the problems with the dialogue wheel as well. I have a nagging suspicion that someone drastically underestimated how much voice acting the PC would need and they realised that if they were ever going to get the game released anywhere near on time and inside the budget, they were going to need to re-use so many lines it was going to look stupid. Hence the dialogue wheel to hide the cases where all four options give the same spoken line.

I can't think why else they'd do that.

The more I play, the more I'm getting used to the voiced protagonist. I still hate the dialogue wheel (and have removed it via mod), and the all-roads-lead-to-rome approach bothers me, but the voice itself, I'm okay with.

 

Unlike many of their simplifications, I quite like this one. Gives me a strong urge to get the problem fixed without losing anything from the previous games.

In Fallout 3/NV, I never felt the need to do anything about my radiation damage. I'd play through heavily irradiated areas for hours before casually noticing that I was about 75% glowing, and only then would I do something about it. Stat penalties don't bother me much... but HP penalties? They're death.

And even assuming they aren't, it's at least noticeable, in your face on the screen. Background stuff is very important in an RPG, where you really have to watch that stuff, but in a shooter like this, or in some mutant failed hybrid like Fallout 3, you need to add stuff that immediately affects the player. Slow speed, reduced HP bar, blurry vision, wild aim, that kind of thing.

 

Spoiler Alert: The AMAZING PLOT TWIST happens, pretty much where and when you'd expect it to happen. Prepare to be underwhelmed.

I just met Kellog, and he keeps hitting on the "your son will be a little older than you expected" bit. He even says "I guess you figured that out by now" which is pretty obvious lampshade material there.

There must be a phrase indicating that the player's intelligence and the character's intelligence are at odds. If you haven't figured out that your son is older than you or possibly dead the moment you get out of your freezer, there may be something wrong with you. The fact that your character is still in the dark about this is as bad as those stupid teenage girls in horror films going into the dark basement when the audience is shouting at them to not be so damn idiotic.

I'm quite gullible, and I often fall for whatever game writers throw my way, but this is too painful.

 

At least it's still better than the writing in Fallout 3.

EDIT: Then again, "it could be worse" is another too-used cop out. Yes, it could be worse. But it could be a lot better, too.

 

It's all right up until you pocket a holotape without playing it and then realise it was important. Best of luck finding it in amongst all the misc crap when there's no indication of what you already played and can't remember the exact title. Creating comic racks in a settlement helps, but that section badly needs some more sub-tabs and/or sort options. 

Yeah.

And what happened to the keyring? They had that in Fallout 3/NV, right? That hides all your keys? Why did they ever get rid of that? It seems such an obvious, great thing to have!

 

I could cope with that while Preston was the sole surviving member and the Single Parent was just humoring a weirdo in a tricorn hat. But then Preston says "I'm going to put the band back together again" and you think, "hang on - why did you need me to do that?"

I decided to stop the minutemen and settlement building for a while. Right now I'm trying to get through the main quest - I find it less... ?emotionally draining? than settlement crap.

 

Just wait until you meet the assaultron dominators.

Kinky!

 

Double-swordy assautrons with buring heads that can nevertheless turn invisible, spot you stealthed and decapitate you while my VATS based gunslinger is trying to remember which part of a grenade is the bit you pull and which is the part you throw.

Oh. Not so kinky.

 

I need a better way to deal with those things. Seriously.

Try shooting for the head! 

 

I've said this before, but the problem I have is that the Single Parent doesn't have a backstory so much as a Secret Origin.

I was okay with that in New Vegas. Maybe it was that I could convince myself that I'd lost my memory (later undone with dialogue re Utah and the divide), maybe it was the quick entry into the game world. Maybe it was the more linear nature of the game that helped, I dunno. But whatever the reason, I'm less tolerant of that here.

 

I keep telling myself - this is not an RPG, this is a shooter where you can level up. You can role-play here, but the only role you can play is that of a grieving parent. You're locked in, circumscribed, put in a linear path - and then handed an open world to explore.

It's almost like this game was designed by two different teams working in tandem rather than a single team with an overarching goal.

But hey, I felt the same way (for different reasons) in Fallout 3, New Vegas, and even Skyrim at times. Maybe that's how Bethesda is doing things these days. Maybe it's marketing rearing its ugly head. Maybe I'm off my nut. Whatever.

 

It's just too much. Once you get past the early stages where everyone keeps reminding you of who you're supposed to be the game gets a lot more enjoyable, but that has to be the worst backstory ever.

See, that actually bothers me a bit. Not a lot, but... I keep telling people that I've been frozen for two hundred years, since before the bombs fell, and everyone is very casual about it. "Oh, you're pre-war? That's amazing! Oh well, back to work. Sorry about your spousecicle." The cavalier attitude is a little off-putting. It would seem more reasonable if everyone was constantly on edge, where survival or death hands by a thread, where the fact that you are a vault dweller and 200 years old to boot is a moments curiosity and nothing more. But I'm not getting that vibe from the game. You hear about people going missing, the depredations of the Institute, the Minutemen send you out to defend settlements against raiders a bunch, but I never get the feeling that any of that is really important to people. There's plenty of food, water, shelter, etcetera, enough time and wealth for people in the low income brackets to spend a lot of money sending you out to, for example, find baseball memorabilia, nobody acts like survival is a big deal. 

 

The VATS engine selects the body, so they'll all be body shots

Which is fine except when you're trying to kill a mirelurk, and you keep hitting its shell for little damage.

Then again, I did manage to blow the shell clean off a mirelurk with a frag grenade, leaving the poor naked wretch to scuttle toward me while I laughed uproariously, but still...

 

You can use "W" and "S" as well to cycle through body parts. Not as useful though since every time the target moves, the area under the cursor changes and the selected target resets to that. Can be handy if you're quick though.

Looking forward, I see there are perks that apparently allow you to shoot through obstacles without accuracy loss or your shots being stopped. Not sure that'd work for body parts hidden behind other body parts, but why not?

 

On the other hand the MQ starts as parcially a chickflick. You know the sort - the made for TV horror movie that gets shown about 2am featuring some one-time a-list actress. She's alone in a cabin in the woods and the trailers always suggest that there's going to be some serious sex involved, but the plot generally boils down to her four-year-old son getting lost in the woods and her getting really stressed about it.

Dude! That's what this game is, a low-budget horror film!

"Watch out for the eeeeeevil SYNTHS, they steal people in the night!"

"The Super Mutants will take you and dip you in green stuff!"

"Look at that person who was affected by radiation! Now he's a monster who will charge at you and keep coming even after you blow his limbs off!"

"Stay away from the Dunwich place! You'll go mad! Maaaaaaaaddddddddd!!!!"

"Don't go into that goddamn basement you stupid bitch!"

 

Scrounger perk. One level of that, and an occasional visit to Arturo or K-L-EO and I'm sorted. Mind, I mainly use 10mm, but keeping a buffer of 200-300 rounds isn't hard, even when Deliverer can spit the whole clip into a target in a single VATS session.

I'll take it, next level up. The shotgun is my favorite weapon, and I never get to use the damn thing for lack of shells.

 

mmm... I'm liking it a lot more than was. Once I got past the Single Parent backstory and started doing some quests for someone other than Preston Garvey, things got a lot better.

That's what did it for me. Dodging, weaving, shooting around a corner, ducking back, lobbing a grenade, then sprinting out to the next cover, I felt like some character in an action movie. Combat in Fallout 3/NV and even Skyrim always felt a bit of a slog to me, but here I occasionally pause and notice that I'm quite enjoying myself.

I took some time watching the AI too. NPCs have absolutely no concept of squad-based tactics, but individually they're pretty good, moving up, taking cover, popping up for a few shots, ducking back, that kind of thing.

Like I say, it's not quite the level of AI you get in a game like Tomb Raider 2013, but it's close.

 

And then, what should happen but six raiders, one by one, jump off a building to their deaths while pursuing me.

It's not all peaches and light. 

 

But the big problems (and they are HUGE) are the incredibly annoying character background and the dialogue wheel/player VA.

Just do what I do - keep telling yourself that this is a shooter, something like an attempt at Half-Life and not an open-world RPG at all.

It hasn't worked for me yet, but I keep thinking that if I tell myself that often enough, maybe it'll sink in.

 

EDIT: Of course, that argument is perilously close to the "you're just not playing the game right" one.

The point should be that if you're not enjoying the game, you're not part of the target audience. And a game that is ostensibly aimed at roleplayers, from a developer that makes RPGs, and marketed by a company that aimed all its marketing tactics at RPG players, alienating those very RPG players is a pretty big misstep.

 

 

EDIT: And... http://www.loverslab.com/topic/56067-im-a-synth/

[DocClox]

Yeah, I got that. What you were reading there was stuff that popped into my head as I was playing, not stuff I edited later.

Yeah. That was just me venting rather than a criticism of your comment

 

About half the time, the radscorpion burrows, teleports forward as expected, and then teleports straight up into the air, falling down and dying on impact.

Other frequent flyers include deathclaws, yao guai, and the occasional raider dog.

This thing was like half a mile away. Then it burrowed that distance instantaneously. I don't know why the institute bothers with teleport technology. They should just give their coursers shovels. A far more energy efficient solution, and you can use it in the battlefield as well.

 

No, the best thing is to shoot everything in the leg. Human enemies have reduced armor there, and everything slows down.

I used to joke about that in F3. If you want to kill something, shoot it in the leg. It was funny then, mainly becuase it wasn't always true.

 

I never had a problem actually killing bloodbugs. At early levels, they died quite easily from shots to any part of the body.

I may be unduly prejudiced. I think the first couple of attempts I died when I still trying to focus vats for a head shot.

 

I do notice that wing shots tend not to kill them (which I can cope with) and that they keep flying afterwards (which I can not).

 

The more I play, the more I'm getting used to the voiced protagonist. I still hate the dialogue wheel (and have removed it via mod), and the all-roads-lead-to-rome approach bothers me, but the voice itself, I'm okay with.

I'm never going to like it, but the VA by itself isn't as bad as I'd feared it would be. Still a step backwards from imagining my own tone of voice for these responses, but ... meh. I can live with it. It's going to be a pain when modding though.

 

I just met Kellog, and he keeps hitting on the "your son will be a little older than you expected" bit. He even says "I guess you figured that out by now" which is pretty obvious lampshade material there.

It was, I kid you not, the first thing I thought when I heard the rumours about cryosleep and missing babies. "Hey woudldn't it be cool if it turned out your son was older than you and running a bad-ass gang of raiders somewhere...?" I just under-estimated the size of the gang a little ...

 

 

Just wait until you meet the assaultron dominators.

Kinky!

 

If only...

 

I tell you, as soon as there are pose mods available, I want to get four assaultrons lined up on a stage wearing white miniskirts and with electric guitars. Then up front I'm going to stick Nick Valentine wearing slacks-and-suspenders, give him a microphone and see how much I can make him look like Robert Palmer.

 

Oh. Not so kinky.

Alas.

 

I need a better way to deal with those things. Seriously.

I got VATS a critical to the head from stealth using a pretty decent gauss rifle. I have all better criticals quite a lot of rifleman perks. I took about 10% health of the thing. Then I died. They're tough.

 

I'd have shot for the legs, but she was inside a building and I couldn't get a sight on them without her seeing me, and me dying before I could take the shot.

 

 

I've said this before, but the problem I have is that the Single Parent doesn't have a backstory so much as a Secret Origin.

I was okay with that in New Vegas. Maybe it was that I could convince myself that I'd lost my memory (later undone with dialogue re Utah and the divide), maybe it was the quick entry into the game world. Maybe it was the more linear nature of the game that helped, I dunno. But whatever the reason, I'm less tolerant of that here.

 

The thing with the Courier is that you didn't spend half an hour playing through his earlier life as an insurance salesman in Shady Sands, experience his pain as a messy divorce forced him to seek a new career as a courier and only then see him get shot in the head. You just had to decide if he was the vengeful type or if he just wanted to get on with his life. My problems with NV are more the way the game channels you down the same route for every play through. Lord I got sick of Primm and Nipton.

 

But hey, I felt the same way (for different reasons) in Fallout 3, New Vegas, and even Skyrim at times. Maybe that's how Bethesda is doing things these days. Maybe it's marketing rearing its ugly head. Maybe I'm off my nut. Whatever.

I know what you mean. Then again, I'm a big fan of Beth games and I've never before felt myself so at odds with the character's background, or so alienated from the protagonist. I mean I heckle my own character in this game...

 

 

It's just too much. Once you get past the early stages where everyone keeps reminding you of who you're supposed to be the game gets a lot more enjoyable, but that has to be the worst backstory ever.

See, that actually bothers me a bit. Not a lot, but...

 

I'm just glad when they finally let me forget about it and start being me again.

 

Which is fine except when you're trying to kill a mirelurk, and you keep hitting its shell for little damage.

Then again, I did manage to blow the shell clean off a mirelurk with a frag grenade, leaving the poor naked wretch to scuttle toward me while I laughed uproariously, but still...

I sort of mouse around and tap "Q" whenever the face lights up. Failing that, shoot the legs

 

Looking forward, I see there are perks that apparently allow you to shoot through obstacles without accuracy loss or your shots being stopped. Not sure that'd work for body parts hidden behind other body parts, but why not?

Apparently so. I've read reports of people shooting the fusion core out of a suit of power armour from the front. Alas, I skimped a little on perception, so it's always needed a little more work than I've been willing to invest to take that perk.

 

 

On the other hand the MQ starts as parcially a chickflick. You know the sort - the made for TV horror movie that gets shown about 2am featuring some one-time a-list actress. She's alone in a cabin in the woods and the trailers always suggest that there's going to be some serious sex involved, but the plot generally boils down to her four-year-old son getting lost in the woods and her getting really stressed about it.

Dude! That's what this game is, a low-budget horror film!

 

Yeah! But it's supposed to be a Fred Olen Ray cheesy-going-on-sleazy low budget horror. Not a lame made-for-TV, get-the-oestrogen-flowing low budget horror. Ick.

 

That's what did it for me. Dodging, weaving, shooting around a corner, ducking back, lobbing a grenade, then sprinting out to the next cover, I felt like some character in an action movie.

How do you do the shoot around corners thing, anyway. I read it was doable, but forgot how.

 

Combat in Fallout 3/NV and even Skyrim always felt a bit of a slog to me, but here I occasionally pause and notice that I'm quite enjoying myself.

The way I always saw it, the combat wasn't the important thing in F3/Oblivion/Morrowind. It was necessary to resolve conflict, but it wasn't supposed to be the interesting part of the game. Which was fine with me, since it was never the bit I was interested in. I was always quite happy to use VATS to explode raider heads, occasionally resorting to some iron sights sniping or panicked spray and pray as the situation demanded. Generally, when they've tried to make combat more interesting it's been at the expense of something I did care about. Like being able to play a mage and still have an intereting character.

 

Still, I don't mind combat in F4 at all. Might even get to quite like it.

 

And then, what should happen but six raiders, one by one, jump off a building to their deaths while pursuing me.

It's not all peaches and light. 

On the other hand, I've seen super mutants fan out to cut of my retreat. One of the USAF sites: snipers up on the towers, hounds closing to keep me busy, suiciders following on the hounds and the rifle types fanning out to either side, away from the nuke and ready if I bolt left or right. It's still more squad design than actual AI, but I was impressed for all that.

 

The raiders jumping off buildings ... I'd blame that on all the chems they keep taking and call that a feature, personally

 

The point should be that if you're not enjoying the game, you're not part of the target audience. And a game that is ostensibly aimed at roleplayers, from a developer that makes RPGs, and marketed by a company that aimed all its marketing tactics at RPG players, alienating those very RPG players is a pretty big misstep.

 

I do worry that this one will come back to haunt them. I mean they're doing a lot right here, but they also seem to be alienating their core userbase with a determination usually only shown by Mozilla Corporation.

 

Meh. We'll see how things look once the CK is released.

[Ernest Lemmingway]

Well, it's now official. For once Bethesda did not win Game of the Year for one of their titles, beaten out by The Witcher 3 and MGS V in every major video game press site. 36 fan sites voted it GOTY, and it did win "Best Setting" from PC Gamer, but as far as mainstream press goes it consistently ranked third or fourth. Check out http://gotypicks.blogspot.com The Witcher 3 got 170 votes, damn near five times as many. As far as financial success (the only thing any corp cares about) I can't really say yet. Hard figures on copies sold beyond 12 million copies at release is not yet available. But that's still less than half of the 25 million copies produced. Never mind how long it takes for retailers to start selling their copies at discount, the real measure of a game's long-term success.

 

Here's hoping the GECK injects some life back into this disappointment. And that the DLC is half-decent, for those of us that have a "season pass" for buying the Collector's Edition. I've really got to learn not to bother with Bethesda games until after a CK is released...

[DocClox]

You know, I was thinking about this the other day. It occurred to me that, in these days of digital distribution, the number of copies shipped is really, really meaningless.

 

I mean it works for things like the latest XBox or Wii since the stores have to use scarce shelf space to store the physical items. With hardware the number of copies shipped is at least a measure of how much confidence the retails place in the product.

 

But for software? I could write a game, send one physical copy to Best Buy and then give Steam a single installer image and a licence to sell 999,999 digital copies. Hey Presto! One million copies shipped. There will be a non trivial number of physical copies for F4 of course, but the chances are its far, far smaller than the shipping figures published. Digital distribution give a company the means to inflate the figure as much as they like.

 

The only thing shipping numbers measure for software these days are how gung-ho the companies marketing department is feeling.

[Ernest Lemmingway]

That's another thing I haven't found solid data on beyond "two million digital copies sold at release," Doc. Bethesda's Marketing Dept. is holding the numbers close to their chest on all fronts. It's likely they're still compiling for the 2015 Fourth Quarter fiscal report, but it's still possible they grossly overestimated how well this game would do and they're trying to save face by not admitting anything.

 

I'm also not looking at the numbers shipped. I'm looking at the numbers sold. And net numbers, not gross. That's what I can't find real numbers on just yet. Only the hyped "12 million physical copies and two million digital ones sold at release."

[Content Consumer]

I do notice that wing shots tend not to kill them (which I can cope with) and that they keep flying afterwards (which I can not).

Never tried for a wing shot, always the body. The thorax, not the abdomen, which despite being larger than the thorax is somehow harder to hit. Go figure.

Hopefully some intrepid modder will add a bloodbug walking animation (which they seem to be missing) so if you do shoot the wings, they'll drop to the ground and scuttle around.

 

I tell you, as soon as there are pose mods available, I want to get four assaultrons lined up on a stage wearing white miniskirts and with electric guitars. Then up front I'm going to stick Nick Valentine wearing slacks-and-suspenders, give him a microphone and see how much I can make him look like Robert Palmer.

There's a location, I think it was called something like "robotics park" or something, with four protectrons in their cells. You can let them out, and they go on parade to a nearby stage.

I was seriously hoping for some sort of barbershop quartet singing, but alas, all they did was tear a glowing deathclaw a new asshole and wander back to their receptacles.

 

I got VATS a critical to the head from stealth using a pretty decent gauss rifle.

Where do you find one of those? I'm making a collection.

As far as I can tell, there are only like eight or ten distance weapons in the game. Pistol or rifle, sniper or shotgun, the actual type of weapon depends entirely on your mods, and I'm looking for some new blood.

 

My problems with NV are more the way the game channels you down the same route for every play through. Lord I got sick of Primm and Nipton.

Oh, yes. NV had some serious railroading there, from hundreds of mid-map invisible walls preventing you from climbing hills, to more subtle barriers like superpowered cazadores and deathclaws blocking any attempt to go off-script.

 

How do you do the shoot around corners thing, anyway. I read it was doable, but forgot how.

First-person mode only. You smash your face against a corner, then aim down your sights. You'll peek around, and can fire in a fairly decent arc while still in cover.

Third-person, it doesn't work for some reason, which is really too bad. I don't often play in third person (even more so in Fallout 4 due to the truly terrible animation segues from walking to running to moving side-to-side, etc), but I'd like to see my character pop in and out of cover like some sort of demented whack-a-mole game gone wrong.

 

The way I always saw it, the combat wasn't the important thing in F3/Oblivion/Morrowind. It was necessary to resolve conflict, but it wasn't supposed to be the interesting part of the game.

Then, according to Bethesda, you're playing it wrong.

At least, as far as I can remember... I remember reading an interview (I think with Todd Howard, but maybe some other big muckety-muck) about Skyrim, he was talking about how the developers really focused in on the combat aspect, since that was what players were most interested in.

Couple of problems with that assumption there, but hey, whatever.

 

Generally, when they've tried to make combat more interesting it's been at the expense of something I did care about.

Did you ever play the original Fallout or Fallout 2? Those had a lot of interesting ways to get around combat, ever. And when I say "get around combat" I don't mean that you had to really work at it - pacifist, stealthy, or other routes through about 90% of all quests, locations, etc. were built-in. It wasn't a matter of trying to beat the system, it was a matter of trying to find a route through the system that best exemplified your character.

 

Reminds me a bit of Morrowind in some ways - for example, there was a Thieves Guild (or possibly Camonna Tong, can't remember) quest where you had to steal a diamond from a shopkeeper. But "steal" was only one of the ways to complete the quest - your boss didn't care how you got it, you just had to get that diamond. Steal it, buy it, kill the shopkeeper and take it, anything worked. I think there may even have been a way to convince the shopkeeper to give you the diamond free and clear.

 

The raiders jumping off buildings ... I'd blame that on all the chems they keep taking and call that a feature, personally 

I thought it was raining.

I was standing in a corner out of the line of fire watching dogmeat keep jumping out and growling at a turret, apparently trying to defeat it with telepathy or possibly hoping for a couple of lucky ricochets off his skull, and one after another six dudes just fell off the building above me. There's a pile of corpses on that corner now, it looks like some bad-ass soldier of fortune took on the whole raider gang, but all that really happened was a stupid dog and a half dozen even stupider humans had a party while one bemused vault dweller looked on.

[DocClox]

Never tried for a wing shot, always the body. The thorax, not the abdomen, which despite being larger than the thorax is somehow harder to hit. Go figure.

Hopefully some intrepid modder will add a bloodbug walking animation (which they seem to be missing) so if you do shoot the wings, they'll drop to the ground and scuttle around.

That always seemed to be the easiest way to kill bloatflies in 3: shoot 'em in the wing and presumably the shock kills the fly. I was always mildly disappointed, since I'd hoped to be able to laugh at them as they crawled across the ground

 

There's a location, I think it was called something like "robotics park" or something, with four protectrons in their cells. You can let them out, and they go on parade to a nearby stage.

I was seriously hoping for some sort of barbershop quartet singing, but alas, all they did was tear a glowing deathclaw a new asshole and wander back to their receptacles.

I'd take that as an acceptable alternative, personally. I did notice that there's a speakeasy when you do the Eddie Winter quests with a stage and and a mic and everything. A little cleaning up and that'll do fine. I just need to work out how to make an assaultron wear a mini-skirt. I have a feeling buying her flowers isn't going to help

 

 

I got VATS a critical to the head from stealth using a pretty decent gauss rifle.

Where do you find one of those? I'm making a collection.

 

I bought mine from Ronnie Shaw at the Castle. She has a unique called The Last Minute. It's fully upgraded and does extra limb damage.

 

 

The way I always saw it, the combat wasn't the important thing in F3/Oblivion/Morrowind. It was necessary to resolve conflict, but it wasn't supposed to be the interesting part of the game.

Then, according to Bethesda, you're playing it wrong.

At least, as far as I can remember... I remember reading an interview (I think with Todd Howard, but maybe some other big muckety-muck) about Skyrim, he was talking about how the developers really focused in on the combat aspect, since that was what players were most interested in.

Couple of problems with that assumption there, but hey, whatever.

 

I suppose it's more accurate to say it wasn't really the part of the game in which I was interested.

 

Mind it depends on what you consider combat I suppose. I mean my Morrowind fights generally involve my toon bouncing around like a demented flea and fireballing the ground from the top of the arc. Or whizzing madly around a tower pursued by a mob of angry Telvanni and every now and then stopping to catch a straggler and pummel him silly. I always found combat in Morrowind to be varied and entertaining.

 

The trouble is that there wasn't a lot there if you were a heavy armour sword-and-board type, the sort who think magic is cheating. Then all you can really do is trundle slowly up to the target, and then spam the mouse button until someone falls over. Of course the folks who were happy (like me) didn't say much, while the unhappy ones moaned a lot, so they tried to make it better for the trundlers. Hence most of the non-fighter builds have been nerfed in favour of fighters until we get to Skyrim which has some mildly interesting swordplay mechanics and most of the cool things about playing a mage have been turned into shouts so the tanks can use them without feeling like they're cheating.

 

The same thing happened with story telling. Everyone said "Beth can't tell stories", and so they pushed the boat out trying to make that crowd happy, and we end up with the abortion of an opening sequence in F4 with all those oh-so-tender bonding moments wif liddle baby Shawn. D'awwww...

 

Not that I'm bitter or anything, obviously

 

Did you ever play the original Fallout or Fallout 2? Those had a lot of interesting ways to get around combat, ever. And when I say "get around combat" I don't mean that you had to really work at it - pacifist, stealthy, or other routes through about 90% of all quests, locations, etc. were built-in. It wasn't a matter of trying to beat the system, it was a matter of trying to find a route through the system that best exemplified your character.

Yeah, I know. I used to really enjoy trying to find either the non-violent solution, or failing that the smooth talking one which would let me pull a fast one and get away with it. There's some of that in F4, but there's still an undercurrent of frustration there. My inner smart-arse is feeling unfulfilled.

 

I was standing in a corner out of the line of fire watching dogmeat keep jumping out and growling at a turret, apparently trying to defeat it with telepathy or possibly hoping for a couple of lucky ricochets off his skull

That sounds like any number of dogs I have known. Who says the AI is broken?