Can one reasonably conclude that many important modding advances will never make it to FO4?

[Fredas]

Brief personal background:

 

I hadn't been as hyped for a game since the first expansion to Everquest, 15 years earlier.  Bought the Season Pass sight unseen.  Created literally dozens of mods (mostly aimed at making the voiced protagonist tolerable).  The game's various shortcomings/contentious design choices dragged my enthusiasm through the mud until I couldn't take it anymore and I finished the game with my least-favored ending.  I only played one DLC for about three minutes to make sure a mod was working.  I had page upon page of changes and fixes I had intended to eventually implement, but I abandoned it all.

 

Since then, I have been waiting.

 

• Waiting for someone to mod out the settlement system, first and foremost.  (Answer: One mod gets you partly there, but it's not the full-automation I was holding out for.)
• Waiting for a Skyrim-caliber character creator.  (More on this below.)
• Waiting for physics hacks to catch up to what Skyrim's enjoyed for many years.  (As everyone here already knows, the only thing that's been accomplished in two years is a hijacking of the limited clothing physics, which gives poor results.)
• Waiting for certain modders' resources to get ported over from Skyrim so I could start porting over some of my more intricate mods.  Most particularly, NiOverride.

 

We're two years in.  I hate having to look like I'm highlighting any one modder, but the reality is that half of the things I listed above effectively depend on the efforts of a single person.  In two years, he has developed the only FO4 character creator worth glancing at, but it is nothing comprehensive like RaceMenu or even ECE - without control over vertices, faces continue to have that vanilla patina.  And of course no NiOverride.  This isn't a complaint; I point this out only to suggest that his lethargic approach to modding FO4 seems to be in natural agreement with FO4's modding community as a whole.  I myself, after all, literally abandoned the game at a certain point.

 

Same deal with physics.  Maybe something's being done, maybe not.  If it's being worked on, they're keeping very mum.  But my suspicion is that there is no push to get good physics because, however worthless it may be, a system does exist, and the sentiment may be that such a result is about all the effort a game like FO4 merits.

 

Maybe I was being too hopeful, but I really thought that after two years, people would be making jaw-droppingly gorgeous characters in FO4 just as painlessly as they do in Skyrim, there would be full world NPC overhauls to put an end to the "every woman in the game is over 40" phenomenon, and, you know, basically the game's entire experience would be made easier on the eyes in ways that LL does best.  The fact that everything looks exactly the same as it did two months after release instead forces me to consider that none of this may ever happen.

[ketiax]

RaceMenu was made 3-4 years after Skyrim release, I believe. Sexlab was made about 5 years in, and settlement-like mod was made about 3-4 years in as well (forgot the name though since I can't use it, if I do my laptop explodes).

 

I think you need to give it more time. 2 years is not much at all considering a solid foundation for modding is not found yet. It took 6 years for HDT to come out, and the moment it did, all mods related to it came out super quick. Give it some more time.

[Fredas]

24 minutes ago, ketiax said:

RaceMenu was made 3-4 years after Skyrim release, I believe. Sexlab was made about 5 years in

[...]

It took 6 years for HDT to come out

RaceMenu's comprehensive iteration (2.0+) was out 1.5 years after Skyrim's release.  Enhanced Character Edit, which gave the world the first vertex-control character creator, was out a mere four months after Skyrim's release.  HDT took about two years, but it was enabled by important preexisting assets, specifically a proper skeleton with fully controllable breast/butt/etc. nodes, which Fallout 4 still doesn't even have after years, even though at the very least, the hand-animated breast physics system used in Skyrim before HDT was miles better than the limp physics FO4's currently stuck with.

[Veladarius]

What exactly are you looking for in a settlement system? While Sim Settlements may do some of the work for you personally I prefer my settlements to be fortresses able to fend off any attackers themselves than looking like some shanty town, I didn't install a dozen different settlement item resources for nothing. I will admit that I cheat my ass off when making them (no caps on construction and unlimited resources to build them) but a generic system like Sim Settlements won't give me what I want and I doubt any generic system could. Now once I build a settlement I like and have proper defenses I save it using Transfer Settlements so I don't have to spend hours rebuilding it again next time I play.

 

 

As for why there has not been as much development I think there are a number of reasons:

1 - FO4 is not as popular as the other FO games or Skyrim so fewer modders are interested in it.

2 - Some development tools are either difficult to use, expensive, can't do the job well or (again) lack of interest to learn how to set things up for FO4.

3 - Most of the clothing and armor that has been released has been for Bodyslide which is another thing that some modelers may not want to bother with. While they can release their work for a set body and someone else will likely make a bodyslide conversion for it some modelers just don't want to bother with it at all.

4 - The dialogue system is completely different and is now part of scenes (which a lot of people never used in Skyrim). The limit of 4 options makes things difficult but it can be gotten around somewhat but is still limiting in many ways. There were many times I could have used this in constructing Captured Dreams and made things so much easier for me.

5 - F4SE instability due to the constant updates to FO4 because of the Creation Club Crap (CCC). While I only have a few mods that use F4SE they are rather important mods in my lineup. This is not intended as any sort of insult to F4SE but the constant releases means F4SE requires updating and then the mods that use it require updating for the new version of F4SE. This won't end until how the CCC system works and is no longer tied to the game itself.

[NNS10]

I'm pretty surprised as well. Fallout is 2 years old and it really doesn't have all that many groundbreaking mods. When Skyrim was that old, it was the golden age of modding with tons of great stuff coming out.

 

The character creation mods are also indeed disappointing. Not many good choices for body textures, and the LooksMenu mod hasn't changed a whole lot since the beginning. It still hasn't implemented numerical values which are important for people that spend a lot of time on characters and need the consistency of numerical values on sliders.

 

Though maybe this is limited by F4SE, which is still not at v1.0. And the time it took for F4SE to develop and the time it took for an MCM to show up probably all have to do with the type of gameplay mods we have. But given how FO4 is an inferior game to both Skyrim and prior Fallout games, maybe modders already moved on by the time the frameworks were in place.

 

[Fredas]

8 hours ago, Veladarius said:

What exactly are you looking for in a settlement system?

Before dropping FO4, the rough draft I had in my mind went something like this:

 

1. Every interaction with the construction system would be handled through the workbench.  There would never be a need to enter the construction mode.
2. In cases where quests (radiant or otherwise) call for X turrets and Y food, checkboxes would be available at the workbench.  As long as they weren't grayed out (due to a lack of relevant materials stored in the workbench), checking the box would cause the mandated creations to appear in predefined or idealized locations, fulfilling the quest's objective.
3. Other checkboxes would enable self-automation of settlement upgrades as more settlers pour in, again in predefined/idealized configurations, and again provided the workbench had all the necessary parts; the latter concern would be effectively the only upkeep the player would be responsible for.
4. The clearing out/sprucing up of locations is a facet that would require a bit of care.  But as an example, Sanctuary would have had multiple checkboxes for eliminating each individual house, enabling the player to exclude their old house from the process.
5. Special cases, like the "perk" that arbitrarily enables one to set up their own merchants, would be handled on a case-by-case basis.  For example, in the case of that perk, the likely solution would have been to change the perk's function so that it causes preexisting merchants to improve their inventory appropriately, not unlike Skyrim's various merchant perks.

Sim Settlements does have some aspects of this vision implemented as a foundation, but it still requires the player to do the majority of everything manually.  Obviously this is because the push behind that mod was to enhance settlement building, as opposed to minimizing it.

 

Clearly you don't share my disdain for the entire system and what it represents in the game.  Plenty don't.  Bethesda wanted to gain a new audience (Minecraft), and they saw an opportunity to do this by shoehorning in this particular kitchen sink.  It worked, for all that it also sacrificed resources for other concerns like quest variety and world fleshing.

 

8 hours ago, Veladarius said:

1 - FO4 is not as popular as the other FO games or Skyrim so fewer modders are interested in it.

I knew this would be a problem but I considered it insignificant; the simple fact that FO4 is by far the newest game with the newest engine probably outweighs this consideration on the whole.  That having been said, what is definitely missing from FO4's modding scene is support from the Japanese community, who tend rather uncannily to bring some of the best resources generally earlier than one might expect (ECE being a prime case in point).  Imagine how much longer it would have taken to see non-pseudo-vanilla faces in Skyrim if the first shot we got at it was with RaceMenu2.0.  And I feel that the flexibility of character creation is one of the most important factors in subsequent modding enthusiasm.

[Veladarius]

2 hours ago, Fredas said:

Before dropping FO4, the rough draft I had in my mind went something like this:

 

1. Every interaction with the construction system would be handled through the workbench.  There would never be a need to enter the construction mode.
2. In cases where quests (radiant or otherwise) call for X turrets and Y food, checkboxes would be available at the workbench.  As long as they weren't grayed out (due to a lack of relevant materials stored in the workbench), checking the box would cause the mandated creations to appear in predefined or idealized locations, fulfilling the quest's objective.
3. Other checkboxes would enable self-automation of settlement upgrades as more settlers pour in, again in predefined/idealized configurations, and again provided the workbench had all the necessary parts; the latter concern would be effectively the only upkeep the player would be responsible for.
4. The clearing out/sprucing up of locations is a facet that would require a bit of care.  But as an example, Sanctuary would have had multiple checkboxes for eliminating each individual house, enabling the player to exclude their old house from the process.
5. Special cases, like the "perk" that arbitrarily enables one to set up their own merchants, would be handled on a case-by-case basis.  For example, in the case of that perk, the likely solution would have been to change the perk's function so that it causes preexisting merchants to improve their inventory appropriately, not unlike Skyrim's various merchant perks.

Sim Settlements does have some aspects of this vision implemented as a foundation, but it still requires the player to do the majority of everything manually.  Obviously this is because the push behind that mod was to enhance settlement building, as opposed to minimizing it.

 

Clearly you don't share my disdain for the entire system and what it represents in the game.  Plenty don't.  Bethesda wanted to gain a new audience (Minecraft), and they saw an opportunity to do this by shoehorning in this particular kitchen sink.  It worked, for all that it also sacrificed resources for other concerns like quest variety and world fleshing.

 

I don't mind setting up settlements but I really have to be in the mood to do it. The idea of directing the settlers in setting up the settlement is a good one though a pre-determined settlement plan would need to be used so they would set it up properly (at least for me) as my settlements defense ratings are over the maximum value shown on in the construction mode (usually close to 1200, more on the larger settlements). Here are 5 settlements I have made, which location is which should be pretty obvious:

1 - Oberland Station - I kept this one compact due to the spawn point that is within the settlement area and left one side open but still defended.

2 - Graygarden - this is the only settlement that I don't add settlers to as there is little for them to do. The end by the railroad tracks is completely open due to how close the plants are to it so when I put up walls the robots would go outside of them and work on the plants through the wall. I do have some things there for personal use though.

3 - Starlight Drive In - heavily fortified all the way around, doubly so at the entrance at the standing entrance 'wing' of the building. Probably one of the more luxurious settlements as well as there are about 22 individual rooms so each settler gets their own room. There is a central atrium with trees (center glass area) and a greenhouse where the crops are (offset glass area).

4 - Tenpines Bluff - Another heavily fortified location with room to add merchants still (concrete building up front and lower left side of rear building are empty). The middle level of the rear building is for settlers to sleep in, the top level is for me and has a powered door going outside.

5 - Red Rocket Station - This isn't so much for settlers as it is for me. The entrance is at the right side where the angled wall ends, going counter clockwise from there is: single level area where my collectibles such as magazines and unique armor are displayed - tower at the far right corner has a living space on the lowest floor, floors 2 and 3 have rooms for followers (5 total), 4th floor is mine, roof floor is a public space and place for a vertibird to land (using the personal vertibird mod). The elevators from the roof landing area go down into the Power Armor factory. I have a mod that adds construction modules that can make the armor pieces for the 4 kinds of power armor. The entire factory is run from one point, construction modules and controls on the upper floor and storage of parts and power armor frames on the lower one. The long building on the left side is my workshop and power armor storage (first floor) and individual rooms for 8 settlers (who I send personally, no beacon here).

 

Note: because of some of the mods I use every settlement has a working kitchen area and full working bathrooms (showers, tubs and toilets). In my tower, the view from my bathtub lets me see Abernathy Farm and the lights from Diamond City.

 

I think these give an idea as to why I was not happy with Sim Settlements and what it produced.

 

I don't think a mod like you are suggesting needs to go quite this far but I generally build like this so I don't get calls for help from settlements who are under attack, if I do I just show up and watch the light show generally.

 

[Fredas]

1 hour ago, Veladarius said:

I think these give an idea as to why I was not happy with Sim Settlements and what it produced.

Impressively elaborate.  Definitely underscores the limitations of what I was aiming at with my hypothetical mod.

 

The underpinning goal of the mod would be to put settlement building out of sight and out of mind, without actually eliminating it as a facet of the game, since taking things that far would unavoidably wreck too many other things.  Therefore everything that the mod would implement would be of a strictly minimalist nature.  You need two turrets?  You get two turrets, here and here; nothing more.  The idea would be to maintain, as much as possible, the post-apocalyptic look of the game, and decidedly not to build things up dramatically.  I intend no offense, but when I look at your screenshots I am freshly discouraged from entertaining the idea of playing FO4 again, because the completely unnecessary and unasked-for construction mode, especially given that it is a literally unavoidable part of the game's DNA, is, despite many promising contenders, the single biggest thrill kill of the entire experience.

[Veladarius]

4 minutes ago, Fredas said:

Impressively elaborate.  Definitely underscores the limitations of what I was aiming at with my hypothetical mod.

 

The underpinning goal of the mod would be to put settlement building out of sight and out of mind, without actually eliminating it as a facet of the game, since taking things that far would unavoidably wreck too many other things.  Therefore everything that the mod would implement would be of a strictly minimalist nature.  You need two turrets?  You get two turrets, here and here; nothing more.  The idea would be to maintain, as much as possible, the post-apocalyptic look of the game, and decidedly not to build things up dramatically.  I intend no offense, but when I look at your screenshots I am freshly discouraged from entertaining the idea of playing FO4 again, because the completely unnecessary and unasked-for construction mode, especially given that it is a literally unavoidable part of the game's DNA, is, despite many promising contenders, the single biggest thrill kill of the entire experience.

I have over 3000 hours in FO4 so I have had a lot of practice in building settlements and it soon became a chore for me just as their constant call for help was. These are some of my more elaborate locations but all of my settlements have one thing in common, tons of turrets (some over 100) and take defense to the extreme. Once I have a design I like I use Transfer Settlements to save it and when it is time to build a settlement after they join up I clear the area of obstructions and import the settlement. These take hours to build manually, one I didn't show was Murkwater construction site, it takes up the entire plot (except where the ruined house is) and is all concrete and ringed with turrets.

 

Truthfully, when I made these I was in the mood to do something extravagant and enjoyed building them even with the time it took. These sites are the result of multiple builds and figuring out ways to get around some of the limitations of the construction items. Tenpines Bluff is an example of this due to the bend in the middle of the settlement. I figured out how to get concrete walls to overlap so there was no gap or putting things at an angle where unused space was left over.

 

The Red Rocket build was multiple sessions where I would build a bit at a time and it is a frame rate killer, it drops me from 60 to 12 generally due to everything there. Bethesda really should have included occlusion planes within their solid walls.

 

A lot of my early builds used the junk walls instead of concrete with scaffolding to put turrets on. I still have some settlements like that (Jamaica Plains is one) but the buildings also have turrets where possible. As I added more and more mods that added items for use in construction some of my builds (like these) became more elaborate.

 

 

With a generic building system where it is automated you will need to pre-build a settlement and have it built in parts in the game. If Sim Settlements had an option for building an outer wall with defenses (1 x 2 or 1 x 4 sections and corner pieces) it would be something I would consider trying again in some locations but some of them don't have the space necessary for Sim Settlements to be able to set up enough plots to be effective.

[Veladarius]

If you use Transfer Settlements this will give you an idea as to what all went into building the RR station.

[Vuulgar]

Does Transfer Settlements have a build over time option? It would be interesting to be able to load a few prints that build over time when certain population goals are met, I am sure it doesnt have something this elaborate. If it had a build priority and job assignments...and a way to figure resources available. It would seem like the settlers actually did for themselves then. Hell I like the build system but I would use something like this once in a while for a change.

[ercramer69]

7 hours ago, Fredas said:

Impressively elaborate.  Definitely underscores the limitations of what I was aiming at with my hypothetical mod.

 

The underpinning goal of the mod would be to put settlement building out of sight and out of mind, without actually eliminating it as a facet of the game, since taking things that far would unavoidably wreck too many other things.  Therefore everything that the mod would implement would be of a strictly minimalist nature.  You need two turrets?  You get two turrets, here and here; nothing more.  The idea would be to maintain, as much as possible, the post-apocalyptic look of the game, and decidedly not to build things up dramatically.  I intend no offense, but when I look at your screenshots I am freshly discouraged from entertaining the idea of playing FO4 again, because the completely unnecessary and unasked-for construction mode, especially given that it is a literally unavoidable part of the game's DNA, is, despite many promising contenders, the single biggest thrill kill of the entire experience.

I have to disagree with you're position on this.  It is easy to avoid settlements building in FO4 if you don't go the minuteman route in the game.  I've got 1629 hours playing and even when I went more the minuteman side I really didn't do a lot of settlement building.  Nor did I do a lot of the hurry up and defend the settlement quests.  If I was close to a settlement that was under attack sure I'd go lend a hand, but other than making sure there were enough beds, food, water and some defenses I didn't do much more for my settlements.  If I answered every time there was an attack on a settlement I'd spend more time on that than other quests it seems.

 

Now for some people, as evident by the number of you tube videos out there, building up settlements is awesome, but for me I found it to be tedious and time consuming.  Now I might try out sim settlements to see if it will help out any settlements if/when I start a new playthrough, but like you said why do I have to build up everything they need, especially when there are 20 people living in the settlement.  I mean seriously, they can't figure out how to plant new crops or build a bed on their own.  I personally think after the pigeon holing of the main quest the settlements part of the game is the second worst feature.  I mean sure they don't explore so they need me to bring back junk from my travels they can break down to build stuff, but do they really need me to build everything as well?

 

Sorry rant is over, back to your conversation.  

[ecto1]

I don't think it's fair to say that Fallout 4 isn't as popular as the other Fallout games. If you look at the stats on Nexus, Fallout 4 has nearly as many downloads as Fallout 3 and New Vegas combined. I would say it is quite popular.

 

If if had to guess why the release of mods for Fallout 4 has suffered compared to Skyrim, I would say it's likely because of the number of missteps on Bethesda's part since the release of Fallout 4. First you had the terrible roll out of Bethesda.net then you had their first try at paid mods and now the Creation Club. Skyrim didn't suffer from any of that while Fallout 4 unfortunately has.

[Fredas]

4 hours ago, ercramer69 said:

I have to disagree with you're position on this.  It is easy to avoid settlements building in FO4 if you don't go the minuteman route in the game.

I feel I should clarify.  There are two reasons why I came to my conclusion about which FO4 failing was in my opinion the worst.  First, when I play an RPG of standard Bethesda scope, I always do everything the game has to offer, in as thorough a manner as the game allows.  For example, if a given quest can start in any of several different ways, I always go out of my way to do the very first step first, so that I get to experience everything.  Apply this philosophy to FO4 and we have a problem, because the settlement system is inherently a limitless feature, due to both the freeform construction mode and the unending settlement defense mechanic.  Now add to that the fact that entire perks and half of the DLC is settlement-focused.  The whole thing is impossible to ignore.

 

Second, while I have quite a shameful list of things FO4 got wrong, the only item on that list that I can honestly say I haven't at least somewhat come to grips with is the settlement system.  After two years, it's clear I will never stop hating it.  So it "wins" by default.  Other things on the list:

• Voiced protagonist - specifically the fact that the female voice actress sounds like a 45-year-old chain smoker.  Mods can somewhat alleviate this.
• Player character is thoroughly predefined; zero roleplaying / personalization potential.  No matter how many "alternate start" mods you shake at it.
• RPG elements reduced to an afterthought.
• Every character, NPC and PC, shares the same face, causing every character in the game to uncannily resemble one another, especially men.
• Miserable quest count.
• Woefully unrealized content and underdeveloped world.
• Conversations are gender-unaware.
• "Ruined" city looks more pristine than some cities currently in use.
• Famously poor dialogue system.  Ironically, the game's dearth of meaningful quests/side-quests limits the impact of this shortcoming.
• Every item respawns.  (To be corrected once settlement building is rendered a non-concern.)
• No roleplaying perks (or traits, for that matter), due to inflexible perk grid.
• No end-build perks, due to inflexible perk grid.
• No major personal upgrades (perks) to be found in DLC and brought back to the game proper, due to inflexible perk grid.

[ercramer69]

Oh I am with you 100%, I completed the game with three of the factions and unlocked all 84 achievements.  I haven't tried to do a run through using the minutemen to complete the game yet.

 

I didn't like the way they pigeon holed the characters beginning or that at least 90% of all npc's try to direct you down the main questline.  If you play as a male PC it makes sense that you can pick up any weapon and kick ass with it, but Nora was supposed to be a lawyer but there aren't really many options to talk you way out of things, its usually shoot first and survive the fight.  

 

But to be honest, I think with the huge modding community out here, Bethesda figured and in many cases were correct that modders would put out massive overhauls to make it so all the npc's didn't look the same.  There is a mod out there that adds the ability to have more than the four dialogue options (not sure how many modders are using it yet, but it is out there).  In the DLC (at least Nuka World and Far Harbor, can't remember if Automatron had one) you can get perks not on the perk grid, but you are right they aren't really game changers.

 

And while I agree compared to the capital wasteland or the Pitt, the commonwealth is almost pristine to begin with, however there are mods out there that clean it up even more.

 

My point was that the settlements, depending on the course of action you take don't have to be a major part of the game.  If you tell Preston "No" when he asks fo more help, which if you think from a RPing perspective actually makes sense if going with the main story (afterall wouldn't finding Shaun be higher on the priorities list then going to some settlement way out in BFC instead of going downtown to the Great Green Jewel for help), then you don't become involved with the minutemen which is where the settlements really come into play.

[Fredas]

2 hours ago, ercramer69 said:

Oh I am with you 100%, I completed the game with three of the factions and unlocked all 84 achievements.

I bailed out on the game when I finally admitted that it was not living up to expectations.  Saved all those achievements and my preferred ending for the far-flung future when most of my complaints had been addressed by modders.  (WIP.)

 

2 hours ago, ercramer69 said:

modders would put out massive overhauls to make it so all the npc's didn't look the same.

The truth here is that it feels like almost nobody else out there has even acknowledged that this is a problem.  I see no NPC overhauls.  Well, of course I don't, because the tools for generating those overhauls do not exist - the focus of this thread's OP.  But, I mean, look at that image I posted.  I call this the "Tom Hanks conundrum".  If the male face texture was basically just a stretched photograph of Tom Hanks, every man in the game would look like they were a sibling of Tom Hanks, no matter how thoroughly their facial features differ, how much hair is present or absent, or what skin color they have.  That is the problem with Fallout 4's character creation and correspondingly every NPC in the entire damn game.

 

2 hours ago, ercramer69 said:

In the DLC (at least Nuka World and Far Harbor, can't remember if Automatron had one) you can get perks not on the perk grid, but you are right they aren't really game changers.

The main giant flaw with the perk poster - the fact that it locks every meaningful perk into an inflexible grid, guaranteeing that the DLC would be literally unable to offer anything truly new - is one I was braced for since before the game released.  Bethesda has never been good about this.  In New Vegas, quite possibly the single most exciting thing about the DLC is the ways in which the player character is able to power themselves up through technology or strenuous trials or whatever, and then bring those unique powers back into the game proper.  Bethesda seems content to limit this potential to weapons and armor, if even that.  There are a smattering of upgrades in FO3 and FO4, yes, but as you've already noted, they are trivial.  DLC misses the mark when the entire experience is meant to be a bubble separate from the rest of the game.

 

(The other major flaw with the perk poster is that every perk has to be meaningful, leaving no room for perks that serve more purpose as roleplaying traits than functional advantages.)

 

2 hours ago, ercramer69 said:

And while I agree compared to the capital wasteland or the Pitt, the commonwealth is almost pristine to begin with, however there are mods out there that clean it up even more.

The pristine nature of the entirety of FO4 is a disgrace.  Fallout 3's chief advantage over the superior New Vegas is that the post-apocalyptic nature of the world is in strong evidence.  Buildings are almost universally shattered and every water source is irradiated.  Fallout 4 is literally on the other side of the spectrum.  Somehow, a major city has shrugged off the ~500kT detonation exhibited in the opening sequence.  There is only a single pocket of radiation (that I ever discovered), not counting the frankly irrelevant outer region.

 

2 hours ago, ercramer69 said:

If you tell Preston "No" when he asks fo more help

Hopefully obvious that this approach is incompatible with the philosophy of doing everything the game has to offer.

[mantaman]

Is anyone working on Settler AI and/or a traveler/visitor system? It would be nice if settlements could raise income with inns

[Gameplayer]

@Fredas

 

"Voiced protagonist - specifically the fact that the female voice actress sounds like a 45-year-old chain smoker.  Mods can somewhat alleviate this."

No it doesn't sound like a chain smoker to me.

 

"Player character is thoroughly predefined; zero roleplaying / personalization potential.  No matter how many "alternate start" mods you shake at it."

Fallout 3 by the same developer was the same way, we all knew what we were getting into.

Games by other developers for that matter are not better or worse for defining or leaving undefined the main character (Player).

This sentiment seems to be coming over from players of the Elder Scrolls Games, such as Skyrim.  Cant say this breaks or makes the game that much worse this has more to do with blank slate role playing and replayability...This is the sort of thing that may not even go over real well with mainstream crowd of people that play games something that a large game like Fallout 4 needs to even see the light of day.

 

"RPG elements reduced to an afterthought."

"Conversations are gender-unaware."

"Famously poor dialogue system.  Ironically, the game's dearth of meaningful quests/side-quests limits the impact of this shortcoming."

"Woefully unrealized content and underdeveloped world."

This is not 4 separate points but saying the same thing four separate ways.  I cant disagree, sure Bethsada Games Studio's doesn't produce grand dialogue systems, but I cant find much that is as stellar as players want me to believe in other titles such as Witcher which although slightly better isn't the bounds and leagues better they make it out to be.  Of course players will also point at other titles in primarily text based systems as if the two games are interchangeable when they are not.  Fallout 4, does suffer from writing that should have gotten another dev pass but as far as presentation and who they are presenting it too well they're not presenting it to fans of the original 2 Fallouts so much as presenting it to today's generation, you know the younger people who don't know what the fuck Fallout 1 is.

As a side note the next Fallout game will be in like 7 to 10 years, put that into perspective will those guys care about how people who played Fallout 4 felt?  Nope.

 

"Every character, NPC and PC, shares the same face"

This has a lot to do with randomly generated NPC's all drawing on a list of a 10 to 12 faces.  So that's settlers, raiders, and other randoms....Happened in every TES game too....For Damn sure happens in other "superior" games.  We haven't dealt with that as much with previous titles as was or should have been mentioned a mod(s) came out that addressed that issue for long term play.

There are of course mods that address the issue but from my experience they are not built properly and some of them even induce noticeable amounts of Stutter.

 

"Ruined" city looks more pristine than some cities currently in use.""

 

Ok, well that's subjective...Others might feel its fine as is and Im sure they do.

 

"Every item respawns.  (To be corrected once settlement building is rendered a non-concern.)"

Same way in every BGS title, for a lot of the fans if this did not happen it would be weird.  Also there are mods that already address that, although you gotta be careful as one or two of them were made with zEdit rather than in TesEdit or Creation Kit.

 

"No roleplaying perks (or traits, for that matter), due to inflexible perk grid."

"No end-build perks, due to inflexible perk grid."

"No major personal upgrades (perks) to be found in DLC and brought back to the game proper, due to inflexible perk grid."

 

Saying the same thing in 3 different ways....

The previous rendition of leveling was very confusing for players, you literally had to plan out your progression before you started playing the game and you did fuck yourself out of nice builds due to simply being locked in both by your Skill Point Selection, Attribute allocation, and what perks you picked while leveling....I've also seen this refered to as dumbing down the game, and people pointing to how look now that lazy players that don't want to pre-plan their character before starting the game that makes the game worse.

I can point to another genre by another developer, how about the difference between Gary Guygax 2nd edition DnD and 3rd edition DnD?  I like 3rd edition no more bullshit numbers game figuring out THACO and Saving Throws. 

The scary thing is that players that bring it up ignore that the new system is still very much like the old system.  The new system just does a better job of not only hiding stuff but also presenting what the player needs to fucking know to successfully build an end-game character.  What stumps me is how someone can say that building an end-game PC is not possible. Its entirely possible to build your end game character.

Then you follow it up saying no DLC perk upgrades....Im sorry what are magazines?  Ya those things that's how they decided to introduce powerful DLC perks, if you didn't find them and make use of them than well I'd say that you are so entrenched in "game bad" that you overlooked those.

 

Now back to what you started with,

"Waiting for someone to mod out the settlement system, first and foremost"

 

An entirely useless and not needed endeavor.  You can literally play through the entire game and only touch the settlement building if your going to access the Institute...So your going to have to keep waiting until you pick up the Creation Kit and do it yourself.  That should be more than enough to address this, its pointless putting more thought into it.

Now if you want to discuss how mods have evolved the Settlement System and made it really a lot of fun and interesting that'd be different but Im kinda tired of reading well thought out statements of how bad a system is that people don't want to play that is entirely voluntary and not needed to actually play the game, cause it underlines how little the poster thought about how hey you "don't have to play the settlement system"...Its like people that post that don't even understand the game they are playing.

This is one of those things that held me back about posting at all seeing as its just exhausting reading this crap about the settlement system, when players don't have to do anything with it, its entirely optional.

It only gets worse when they are into modding and completely overlook all the fun things that are happening with that system now, and all the fun sexy stuff that has happened and will happen with that system later.

On ‎11‎/‎25‎/‎2017 at 4:49 PM, Fredas said:

We're two years in.  I hate having to look like I'm highlighting any one modder, but the reality is that half of the things I listed above effectively depend on the efforts of a single person.  In two years, he has developed the only FO4 character creator worth glancing at, but it is nothing comprehensive like RaceMenu or even ECE - without control over vertices, faces continue to have that vanilla patina.  And of course no NiOverride.  This isn't a complaint; I point this out only to suggest that his lethargic approach to modding FO4 seems to be in natural agreement with FO4's modding community as a whole.  I myself, after all, literally abandoned the game at a certain point.

Awesome just discovered the new quote system for this board.

Alright so its like this,

1) Mod User base grow by a mega shit ton, this scared off a lot of mod authors....Caused a lot of friction, not sure I should have to elaborate on this...

a) Theft

b) Disrespect

c) Creation Club

There take your pick.

2) Tools changed....

3) A lot of Mod Authors said, let someone else do it.  <----Probably really overlooked but a lot of Mod Users seem to think that the very same Mod Authors have to make all this shit.

They don't consider the amount of time it took to make the stuff in the first place for the other game they made a mod for...Heck Im still doing stuff for the first time in Skyrim cause the mods I made take so much time to fucking make.

--->So that leads to....NEW PEOPLE have to step in and make it, this experience has been less than stellar....

I'm particularly unhappy with CBBE Bodyslide, the textures don't match up as well as I'd like and for the most part the vanilla Replacer sets that are available are not as awesome as whats available for Skyrim.

On ‎11‎/‎25‎/‎2017 at 4:49 PM, Fredas said:

Same deal with physics.  Maybe something's being done, maybe not.  If it's being worked on, they're keeping very mum.  But my suspicion is that there is no push to get good physics because, however worthless it may be, a system does exist, and the sentiment may be that such a result is about all the effort a game like FO4 merits.

 

I know right....I heard that Hydromancy got put into prison in her home country cause sexy mods are illegal over there in Asia...Could be untrue but the point is Hydromancy is not available to make that happen.  Someone new will have to step up.

 

On ‎11‎/‎25‎/‎2017 at 4:49 PM, Fredas said:

Maybe I was being too hopeful, but I really thought that after two years, people would be making jaw-droppingly gorgeous characters in FO4

That's the trouble with having such a developed mod base for a game like Skyrim 32-bit.

It casts a shadow over all the other games coming up.

Fans expect the authors to put in the same amount of time developing content for all the future titles for free. <---lets say that again....For Free....I want you to put in the hundreds to thousands of hours for free. 

I've talked to some mod authors that have finally gotten established and one of the funny revalations they bring up with me is how "you know this one guy keeps badgering me about how I gotta build this and that....On the phone and in discord....And I tell him, pay me....And so this guy gets all flustered and mad on the chat like its my duty to stop building the stuff that makes me happy and make what makes him happy cause I have the skill set to make it.....what gives if he wants me to stop doing my thing to do his thing he should you know pay me for my time."   <---I hear that a lot more than a lot of mod users want to believe.

 

So fans don't really understand that the current practice or perceived belief is not sustainable or rather it all relies on new people stepping up....

So long as you have new people stepping up to the plate than sure its all going to be fine.  Now I cant say the quality will be up to your standards, I know its not up to mine...I get sick of looking at the clipping in Bodyslide Outfits, but I don't feel like putting in hundreds to thousands of unpaid work hours....So I use whatever is close enough.

 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

So overall some things that Fallout 4 is up against in the modding scene.

 

1) Precombined Meshes

 

This system of PM, is there to speed up the game or basically make it faster than it would be if the meshes were all cached separately.  There is some sort of process that is done in the CK to cache all of them together as a single entity so it makes the gameplay in those areas faster...This has a direct impact on your FPS while you play.

Downtown Boston is a great example of why its important for content creators to implement the process.

See downtown Boston had guys working on it after the Precombined Mesh sweep was done, so there were a lot of objects not included in the sweep which had a direct impact on your FPS.  There is a mod that claims it corrects this called BostonFPSFix....Im only trying it out right now so I don't know how effective it will be.

 

2) Face Textures

Simply put these all have to be the same size....Otherwise you end up getting black face bug randomly.  So if you download a ton of different changes from a bunch of different people yes its entirely too easy to end up with black face too often.  This is an issue, it happens frequently enough that a lot of mod authors have to mention it in their descriptions, it may seem small until your faced with it.

This can also happen due to installation of NPC Overhauls.

Not to mention that if those NPC overhauls and face textures are not built properly you can end up with noticeable Stutter in your gameplay which is a bitch to identify, and much more annoying than black face bug.

 

3) We don't have a proper Vanilla Outfit/Armor Replacer for females.

Not enough polygons for proper Bodyslide.

Could just be that its time consuming to add them in Blender and port it to a compatible Fo4 file.

Skyrim of coarse has half a dozen or more great vanilla replacers right now.

 

4) Skyrim mods are just superior to Fallout 4 mods.

Its not just that Skyrim had time.  Fallout just isn't as popular as TES in the modding scene...It really is that simple.

There are some big names in Fallout modding that are just not working on Fallout 4 though as well.

I expect that with TES 6 though that Skyrim's big modder names wont move onto TES 6 so not sure that means a lot but seeing as people are all like well Fo4 should be better(er) maybe its worth saying.

 

So I'd say that those 4 issue's are related to why you don't have all the stuff you want to see.

You have to have a decent Vanilla Replacer for the Outfits we don't have it.

You have to have easy installation of new Textures what we have isn't satisfactory.

You have to have those to get decent npc replacers.

 

Precombined Meshes are related cause this already comes as an issue in the Vanilla Game which impacts desire more than likely for many to start creating assets in earnest.

It may very well be that the mod I mentioned solves the issue, I just haven't had enough time with it.

[Fredas]

52 minutes ago, Gameplayer said:

No it doesn't sound like a chain smoker to me.

She may not sound like the old woman who provided the voice for E.T., but if you were to create a spectrum of female voices for the apparent age of Nora (40?), the voice they got would sit very confidently on the low end of that spectrum.

 

56 minutes ago, Gameplayer said:

"Player character is thoroughly predefined; zero roleplaying / personalization potential.  No matter how many "alternate start" mods you shake at it."

Fallout 3 by the same developer was the same way, we all knew what we were getting into.

No.

 

Never before in a Bethesda RPG has the player character been predefined like this.  When it comes to roleplaying, everything hinges upon what choices the player is allowed to make vs. what choices they are forced into.  In Skyrim, the player gets a completely blank slate.  In Fallout 3, the only choice that has been made before the player gets the reins is their friendship with Amata, which incidentally can be sabotaged even during the tutorial.  Fallout 4?  The player character has chosen to marry, to be hetero, to have a family, to care for their child, to join the army/become a lawyer.  During the game proper, Fallout 3 requires you to locate your father if you wish to actually finish the game, but the game does not demand your emotional attachment, make you suffer through many sequences of melodrama, or unceasingly beat you over the head about how important it is you attend to the main quest.

 

Somebody at the very top of Bethesda looked at the success they had with Wolfenstein's dramatic storytelling and decided this would be a brilliant thing to shoehorn into another of their properties.  Fallout 4 was the victim.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

"RPG elements reduced to an afterthought."

"Conversations are gender-unaware."

"Famously poor dialogue system.  Ironically, the game's dearth of meaningful quests/side-quests limits the impact of this shortcoming."

"Woefully unrealized content and underdeveloped world."

This is not 4 separate points but saying the same thing four separate ways.  I cant disagree, sure Bethsada Games Studio's doesn't produce grand dialogue systems, but I cant find much that is as stellar as players want me to believe in other titles such as Witcher which although slightly better isn't the bounds and leagues better they make it out to be.

Then allow me to elaborate.

 

RPG elements.  It will suffice to say "skill points" and, correspondingly, "skill checks in dialogue."  Fallout had a tradition of utilizing these, needlessly eliminated in FO4.

 

Conversations are gender-unaware.  By this I particularly mean that every romance is arbitrarily open to both genders without the barest hint of a change in dialogue to reflect whether the NPC is addressing a man or a woman.  This gender-transparency is hopelessly lazy, and a real turnoff.

 

Famously poor dialogue system.  This seems to be the focus of your counterargument.  I really don't have to elaborate this point because to casual FO4 players it is possibly the most obvious failing in the game.  But the chief tragedy here is that having only four responses means that every single interaction with NPCs has had to be designed around this limitation, so for example there was extremely limited flexibility available to quest-makers for scenarios like when the player uncovers new dialogue options for NPC1 by getting a clue from NPC2.  In FO3/NV, of course the new line of questioning would just be added to the list, but in FO4, you have four choices, full stop.  This unquestionably discouraged quest creativity and contributed to the popular opinion that quests in FO4 are limp and uninteresting.  All Bethesda had to do was not fix a non-broken thing.  The consolation is that this is one failing that they have acknowledged.

 

Woefully unrealized content and underdeveloped world.  Think Easy City Downs, the race track that looks like it should lead to an interesting quest but ends up just being another raider shooting gallery.  Or how about Strong's follower quest, Milk of Human Kindness?  Oh, right, that never happened.  As for the world, there just isn't enough dungeon crawling.  How is it that Fallout 3 has more interior exploration?  How does that happen?

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

"Every character, NPC and PC, shares the same face"

This has a lot to do with randomly generated NPC's all drawing on a list of a 10 to 12 faces.

I don't see how one can come to that conclusion.  Look again.  Every one of those faces has different proportions in every respect.  The fundamental issue is that they are all using the same face texture, and that particular texture has so many facial details locked down that no matter how thoroughly you fiddle with FO4's nose, jaw, ears etc. settings, it's still going to look like the Sole Survivor, Nate.  As I described to another poster, it's like if you took a photo of Tom Hanks and used that as your face texture - no amount of fiddling with FO4's limited facial tweaking would ever make the guy stop looking like Tom Hanks.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

"Every item respawns.  (To be corrected once settlement building is rendered a non-concern.)"

Same way in every BGS title, for a lot of the fans if this did not happen it would be weird.

It only makes sense because of scavenging's role in the similarly unlimited activity of settlement building.  That does not suddenly make it not stupid.  So you clear out some dilapidated building, taking everything of value.  Three days later you revisit the building, and voila, all that junk is right back.  You think you're experiencing deja vu.  That is the magnitude of the immersion-kill.  I remember passing by a soda machine and noticing a Nuka-Cola Quantum - one I had already looted a few days ago.  Absolute rubbish.  Past Fallout games did not respawn 90% of items because they did not need to.  Anyway, as I said, an easy fix for a world of limited settlement interaction.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

The previous rendition of leveling was very confusing for players, you literally had to plan out your progression before you started playing the game and you did fuck yourself out of nice builds due to simply being locked in both by your Skill Point Selection, Attribute allocation, and what perks you picked while leveling....I've also seen this refered to as dumbing down the game, and people pointing to how look now that lazy players that don't want to pre-plan their character before starting the game that makes the game worse.

You've argued both sides of this, so there's not much more to say.  It is true: Level cap mandates builds, and no level cap makes things dumbed down.  Both scenarios can be viewed as either positive or negative, depending on who you ask.  Therefore, on paper, neither solution is superior, and although I will definitely attest that planning out a game-breaking build within the confines of the vanilla experience gets more enthusiasm from me than the no-stress scenario of unlimited leveling, I will also say that I'll take Fallout 4's vanilla system of leveling over any modded effort to force FO4's levels to a hard cap, because the game was simply not built around that.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

The scary thing is that players that bring it up ignore that the new system is still very much like the old system.

This seems like a good time to reiterate the two major shortcomings with FO4's new system, specifically with how everything has been shunted into a 7x10 grid.  With every one of those slots needing to be meaningful, there is no room for fluff perks that the player might pick for roleplaying reasons.  Perks like Thief, Child at Heart, Cherchez la Femme... Perks that have some functional utility but are really mostly there in order for the player to define their character.  The entire system of "traits" in New Vegas falls under this category, and indeed this issue could have been solved with a similar system in FO4.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

Then you follow it up saying no DLC perk upgrades....Im sorry what are magazines?

You're equating the upgrades provided by magazines, almost universally just incremental boosts to certain types of damage, with the gobsmacking variety of the perk chart.  Not really certain this isn't sarcasm.

 

Just in case, I recommend you take a look at the DLC-added perks for both Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and fairly gauge whether we are even talking about the same ballpark.

 

2 hours ago, Gameplayer said:

"Waiting for someone to mod out the settlement system, first and foremost"

 

An entirely useless and not needed endeavor.  You can literally play through the entire game and only touch the settlement building if your going to access the Institute...

You have a fundamental misapprehension of my hangup with the settlement system, despite your insistence of having digested what I have to say on the matter.  I don't want to ignore in-game content outright.  If an NPC says "Hey, could you do this?", I'm not going to deny that NPC just because I find part of the game tiresome.  Now, what I will do is find ways to do as little as possible so my exposure to that disliked mechanic is minimized.  And my idealized scenario is the mostly-automated system I've already described in earlier posts.  It would enable me to take advantage of the game's content in a thoroughly minimized fashion so I can enjoy what the game has to offer without it ever getting to a point that I wish I was doing something else.

 

Let me put it another way.  You know those radiant quests in Skyrim and FO4?  They are infinitely-repeating, but the total unique content they represent is finite.  I have always felt that the best approach to those quests would be to mod things so that the pool of radiant quests steadily dwindles as the player uses them up, and when every one of them is finally completed, no more radiant quests.  In this fashion, the player loses no access to the game's content, and yet is also spared the tiresome scenario of repeating the same content in a different skin.

 

2 hours ago, Gameplayer said:

3) A lot of Mod Authors said, let someone else do it.  <----Probably really overlooked but a lot of Mod Users seem to think that the very same Mod Authors have to make all this shit.

They don't consider the amount of time it took to make the stuff in the first place for the other game they made a mod for...

I am factoring in two important considerations: 1. It's already taken longer for this stuff to appear in FO4 than it did for it to appear in Skyrim. 2. Regardless of how much of a given mod needs to be reconfigured to work in FO4, that number will never be 100%.  For example, the mods I want to port over from Skyrim would probably only take about 1/5th as much time to get working as they did when I first made them.

 

2 hours ago, Gameplayer said:

That's the trouble with having such a developed mod base for a game like Skyrim 32-bit.

It casts a shadow over all the other games coming up.

And yet I make my observation from the perspective of knowing that ECE came out four months after Skyrim released; within weeks, faces were already more or less what we now associate with the game.  From that perspective, the two-years-and-counting for Fallout 4 is really hard to defend.  Yes, the difficulties you outline explain why we're still waiting, but I still have to conclude that the problem is mostly that people just aren't as enthusiastic about a game that has so many incontrovertible shortcomings.

 

2 hours ago, Gameplayer said:

Skyrim of coarse has half a dozen or more great vanilla replacers right now.

Off topic but related, I recently found an NPC overhaul that tackles all the non-named NPCs in the game, so finally, every single woman in Skyrim avoids that vanilla long-faced look that I always hated.

[Gameplayer]

10 minutes ago, Fredas said:

No.

 

Never before in a Bethesda RPG has the player character been predefined like this.  When it comes to roleplaying, everything hinges upon what choices the player is allowed to make vs. what choices they are forced into.  In Skyrim, the player gets a completely blank slate.  In Fallout 3, the only choice that has been made before the player gets the reins is their friendship with Amata, which incidentally can be sabotaged even during the tutorial.  Fallout 4?  The player character has chosen to marry, to be hetero, to have a family, to care for their child, to join the army/become a lawyer.  During the game proper, Fallout 3 requires you to locate your father if you wish to actually finish the game, but the game does not demand your emotional attachment, make you suffer through many sequences of melodrama, or unceasingly beat you over the head about how important it is you attend to the main quest.

 

Somebody at the very top of Bethesda looked at the success they had with Wolfenstein's dramatic storytelling and decided this would be a brilliant thing to shoehorn into another of their properties.  Fallout 4 was the victim.

 

Right I get that,

 

In Fallout 1, the choice is made for the Player that you fit one of three characters, after all you  have to pick one of either 2 men or the female character before you can leave vault 13.

Not a one of the 3 characters has any military or lawyering experience.  In fact the only thing you know about your character is that your 18 years of age and don't know any better than a teenager worse still you have literally no useful skills realistically since your from vault and if anything everything you have been taught to use to survive would more than likely get you killed.  Actually that was a big part of the charm really that your starting as a character that has no reason to be doing what you wind up doing.

 

Witcher comparisons are really weak sauce too because it overlooks how the players really want an undefined role that has Witcher like options in the RPG department but that sort of thing requires a lot more work on your writer(s).  Come to think of it I'm not entirely certain there are any games that would qualify for dreams that some people post about for as of yet undeveloped super RPG.  For some clarity Witcher works really well because its a fully developed world with fully realized entirely defined characters and that most certainly includes the main character Garault of Rivia....What amazes me the most is just how significant of a player base doesn't seem to fully comprehend just how the whole story and its characters are based entirely on a fully fleshed out series of books.  It would be like playing a game called, "Game of Thrones" and then not realizing the origins of that game saying that all video games with RPG elements must be as fully realized as Game Of Thrones the video game or they are just not good enough.

 

The thing is that even though you are still correct, your character is more fleshed out than ever before...You still have control over their future, their sexuality, and their final destination.  The real take home from this is that BGS needs to conclude that as far as who the player character is before the player has control of said character needs to be off limits.

For some reason the company only does so in The Elder Scrolls and I just don't know as if that will change.

23 minutes ago, Fredas said:

Then allow me to elaborate.

 

RPG elements.  It will suffice to say "skill points" and, correspondingly, "skill checks in dialogue."  Fallout had a tradition of utilizing these, needlessly eliminated in FO4.

I don't think your going to find many people who don't miss skill checks in dialogue outside of a Charisma score.

 

24 minutes ago, Fredas said:

Conversations are gender-unaware.  By this I particularly mean that every romance is arbitrarily open to both genders without the barest hint of a change in dialogue to reflect whether the NPC is addressing a man or a woman.  This gender-transparency is hopelessly lazy, and a real turnoff.

I think you will find a shit ton of people that don't give a crap about it.  Take a look at Mass Effect Andromeda and Mass Effect 1-3, I think you will find that there is a significant amount of the player base that could care less for gender awareness sensitivity, in fact there is a strong amount of threads around that claim that SJW's killed the series.

I'd say that by not allocating resources and development here BGS at least avoided potential issues with the fans of the game making similar claims or posting hate threads pushing the other way.

27 minutes ago, Fredas said:

Famously poor dialogue system.

I haven't disagreed or defended this, Im just saying that as far as their games go I already knew it would be an issue before my purchase.

I would say that I haven't found other games that have a strong dialogue outside of say the Witcher Series that Im particularly interested in, also since I mentioned it again I will say it again, Witcher works cause it has an enormous amount of books that serve to predefine how things are, this wouldn't sit well with Fallout 4 or Skyrim fans at all.

31 minutes ago, Fredas said:

Woefully unrealized content and underdeveloped world.  Think Easy City Downs, the race track that looks like it should lead to an interesting quest but ends up just being another raider shooting gallery.  Or how about Strong's follower quest, Milk of Human Kindness?  Oh, right, that never happened.  As for the world, there just isn't enough dungeon crawling.  How is it that Fallout 3 has more interior exploration?  How does that happen?

They really did simply run out of time or were told to finish it withen a deadline time no more exceptions.  Open the Construction Kit, bust out the BSA's you will find unused assets and other stuff that go a long way to suggesting that is the truth.

At the end of the day, the money to get the staff together came from a company that expects to have a product that goes to market to keep bringing in money. 

I know I get it, that's unacceptable...Games should be from the heart and free and all that jazz.  The world should run on well wishes and lollipops too.

 

Thing is, just like Arthmoore built mods that redeveloped cut content in Skyrim, there does seem to be a serious lack of mod authors jumping at the opportunity to do the same for Fallout 4.  Im sure they have their reasons, so Im not going to speculate.

37 minutes ago, Fredas said:

 

3 hours ago, Gameplayer said:

Then you follow it up saying no DLC perk upgrades....Im sorry what are magazines?

You're equating the upgrades provided by magazines, almost universally just incremental boosts to certain types of damage, with the gobsmacking variety of the perk chart.  Not really certain this isn't sarcasm.

 

Just in case, I recommend you take a look at the DLC-added perks for both Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and fairly gauge whether we are even talking about the same ballpark.

 

Im saying a magazine perk is just as good as getting a perk off the old tree.

Open your Pipboy go to the perk section, there's your DLC magazine perk...Its right there, that's your powerup for the DLC and you get to take it back to the commonwealth main area of the game.

 

They are still there, its merely presented differently.

39 minutes ago, Fredas said:

3 hours ago, Gameplayer said:

The scary thing is that players that bring it up ignore that the new system is still very much like the old system.

This seems like a good time to reiterate the two major shortcomings with FO4's new system, specifically with how everything has been shunted into a 7x10 grid.  With every one of those slots needing to be meaningful, there is no room for fluff perks that the player might pick for roleplaying reasons.  Perks like Thief, Child at Heart, Cherchez la Femme... Perks that have some functional utility but are really mostly there in order for the player to define their character.  The entire system of "traits" in New Vegas falls under this category, and indeed this issue could have been solved with a similar system in FO4.

 

Fluff Perks suck ass.

Considering that Fallout New Vegas wasn't really that big, there were way too many useless perks...A lot of those perks were in fact useless and did nothing for your character, they all had to be corrected and Im not certain if they ever were fixed in Unofficail Patches as I recall I had to make those corrections by hand myself just so I felt like it was cool to take perks at all in FNV....It was not nearly as bad in Fo3, I know this cause Ive modded both games.

43 minutes ago, Fredas said:

3 hours ago, Gameplayer said:

"Waiting for someone to mod out the settlement system, first and foremost"

 

An entirely useless and not needed endeavor.  You can literally play through the entire game and only touch the settlement building if your going to access the Institute...

You have a fundamental misapprehension of my hangup with the settlement system, despite your insistence of having digested what I have to say on the matter.  I don't want to ignore in-game content outright.  If an NPC says "Hey, could you do this?", I'm not going to deny that NPC just because I find part of the game tiresome.  Now, what I will do is find ways to do as little as possible so my exposure to that disliked mechanic is minimized.  And my idealized scenario is the mostly-automated system I've already described in earlier posts.  It would enable me to take advantage of the game's content in a thoroughly minimized fashion so I can enjoy what the game has to offer without it ever getting to a point that I wish I was doing something else.

 

Let me put it another way.  You know those radiant quests in Skyrim and FO4?  They are infinitely-repeating, but the total unique content they represent is finite.  I have always felt that the best approach to those quests would be to mod things so that the pool of radiant quests steadily dwindles as the player uses them up, and when every one of them is finally completed, no more radiant quests.  In this fashion, the player loses no access to the game's content, and yet is also spared the tiresome scenario of repeating the same content in a different skin.

 

First Para,

We have a mod for that, its called Sim Settlements....It works really well and its actually extremely easy and fast to set up a cool looking town or fortress provided you have some extra stuff like "place everywhere" 

All around its a really bad assed mod set that you should take some time to play around with.

With Transfer Settlements you wouldn't even have to do that you could just download one.

 

Second Para,

So what if Radiant Quest's can infinitely repeat, if these didn't that would mean that players would just run out of stuff to do.  This is actually a sand box game afterall....When all is said and done its like one of those things that I guess has to be said.  Sandbox RPG.  <---said it.

 

49 minutes ago, Fredas said:

3 hours ago, Gameplayer said:

3) A lot of Mod Authors said, let someone else do it.  <----Probably really overlooked but a lot of Mod Users seem to think that the very same Mod Authors have to make all this shit.

They don't consider the amount of time it took to make the stuff in the first place for the other game they made a mod for...

I am factoring in two important considerations: 1. It's already taken longer for this stuff to appear in FO4 than it did for it to appear in Skyrim. 2. Regardless of how much of a given mod needs to be reconfigured to work in FO4, that number will never be 100%.  For example, the mods I want to port over from Skyrim would probably only take about 1/5th as much time to get working as they did when I first made them.

 

3 hours ago, Gameplayer said:

That's the trouble with having such a developed mod base for a game like Skyrim 32-bit.

It casts a shadow over all the other games coming up.

And yet I make my observation from the perspective of knowing that ECE came out four months after Skyrim released; within weeks, faces were already more or less what we now associate with the game.  From that perspective, the two-years-and-counting for Fallout 4 is really hard to defend.  Yes, the difficulties you outline explain why we're still waiting, but I still have to conclude that the problem is mostly that people just aren't as enthusiastic about a game that has so many incontrovertible shortcomings.

 

Right, well I would say that its clear that a lot of people have some real hang-ups about Fallout 4.

I'm still going to stick by what I said about not wanting to mod Fallout 4 cause it takes a whole lot of time to actually build nice things.

As far as people transferring stuff over directly from Skyrim, I was pretty sure that it had been covered in detail here on Lovers Lab about how the two games are still fundamentally different.  Are there not threads explaining why Sexlab didn't get ported over to Fo4?  Are the threads on porting animations from Skyrim to Fo4 gone....That stuff has been pretty well covered and generally the answer was not possible at this time.

 

I suppose that outfits and textures could and have been ported over.

Thing is a lot of the stuff we would want like Sexlab or Devious Devices or Arroused or Blush when Arroused or MFG console....That stuff is not a direct port into Fo4.

54 minutes ago, Fredas said:

3 hours ago, Gameplayer said:

Skyrim of coarse has half a dozen or more great vanilla replacers right now.

Off topic but related, I recently found an NPC overhaul that tackles all the non-named NPCs in the game, so finally, every single woman in Skyrim avoids that vanilla long-faced look that I always hated.

:D nice!

 

Im using NPC's of Dibella with SBF all in one loaded after...Next time I play I'd like to try something else.

 

 

___________________

 

Ya I don't have much in the way of uplifting things to say about Fo4 modding.

 

I'd like to say its just around the corner.

 

Sim Settlements does make settlement building a whole lot faster.

[Fredas]

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

I don't think your going to find many people who don't miss skill checks in dialogue outside of a Charisma score.

(I assume you mean do miss.  If not, ignore this.)  Considering that this was a missed opportunity that Bethesda went conspicuously out of their way to correct in the DLC's dialogue, I'd say this assessment is inaccurate.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

> By this I particularly mean that every romance is arbitrarily open to both genders without the barest hint of a change in dialogue to reflect whether the NPC is addressing a man or a woman.

I think you will find a shit ton of people that don't give a crap about it.  Take a look at Mass Effect Andromeda and Mass Effect 1-3, I think you will find that there is a significant amount of the player base that could care less for gender awareness sensitivity, in fact there is a strong amount of threads around that claim that SJW's killed the series.

 

There are two things to say about this argument.

 

First, the Mass Effect series (and also Dragon Age 1 at least) are perfect examples of approaching this matter non-transparently, which prevents things from being a lazy cop-out obviously intended to prioritize satisfying everyone at the expense of nuance.  In DA1, for example a female player character initiating romance with Leliana first specifically broaches the topic of Leliana's past relationships, including with other women; the game doesn't skirt around the subject or effectively hide it by having all conversation be identical regardless of player character gender.

 

Second, I am not talking about "gender sensitivity" or anything political.  In fact my feelings on that matter are pretty blunt: Political activism destroyed Bioware.  This isn't about that; this is about ensuring that PC-NPC romantic dialogue has the badge of legitimacy by not being literally the same regardless of gender and thus lacking important nuance.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

They really did simply run out of time or were told to finish it withen a deadline time no more exceptions.

And I argue that this happened in very large part because the settlement system sapped resources.  A call from on high said, "Put in Minecraft!" and what followed was the most manifest truncating of a game's potential in Bethesda's history.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

Im saying a magazine perk is just as good as getting a perk off the old tree.

But it just isn't!  You can't point to any magazine and say, yep, that right there is the functional equal of the ability to lock in a crit, or regenerate health over time, or cause bullets to hit the attacker.  No, the magazines are on par with, say, Fallout 3's DLC perk Covert Ops (+3 to Science, Small Guns and Lockpick) or Pitt Fighter (+3% RAD resistance and DR).  Perks you basically have to parse in order to gauge any actual effect.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

Fluff Perks suck ass.

Considering that Fallout New Vegas wasn't really that big, there were way too many useless perks...

See, you share the opinion of the majority, which I get, I really do.  You're still just absolutely missing the point, though: Those "useless perks" serve a roleplaying purpose.  If the player doesn't want to spend a couple of perks roleplaying, they can pick other perks.  This is possible and this is harmless because the perks aren't stuck in a 7x10 grid that assigns equal worth to everything.

 

Incidentally, you suggest that FO3 didn't have all that many roleplaying perks.  This is inaccurate.  Particularly early on, the game had ton of perks that literally did nothing functional other than redundantly award a few extra skill points (Daddy's Girl, Thief, etc.).  Later you get Contract Killer and Lawbringer - the epitome of roleplaying perks; yes you get a little bit of money but the real point is to solidify your character's status as a do-gooder or a bad guy.  In Fallout 4?  Sorry, every perk takes up a precious spot in the grid so it needs to do something useful to justify its existence.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

We have a mod for that, its called Sim Settlements....

Well, I've been over that.  It doesn't go far enough because that was never really the drive of the mod.  That having been said, if I have any hope at all that someone will take it to the point that I'm after, that hope probably rests on this mod.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

So what if Radiant Quest's can infinitely repeat, if these didn't that would mean that players would just run out of stuff to do.  This is actually a sand box game afterall....When all is said and done its like one of those things that I guess has to be said.  Sandbox RPG.  <---said it.

You are talking from the perspective of someone who intends never to actually finish the game they're playing.  This is not most people.  In fact, most people don't even want to do 100% of what a game like Fallout 4 has to offer; generally people are content to do most of the quests, level to whatever personal goal they had in mind, and that's the end of that.  I fit into the 100% category; I just happen to know exactly what I want out of radiant quests and other things that are designed to be unlimited content (settlements), and that's to get them done, but only once.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

Im using NPC's of Dibella with SBF all in one loaded after...Next time I play I'd like to try something else.

Hoo boy.  My load order for Skyrim is something even I would have to label as insane.  Over 1000 mods.  And I don't go crazy with lore-breaking crap; vanilla experience is too important to me.  No crashes ever, of course.  My NPC replacers are a heady, customized mix of elements from NPCs of Dibella, GCE NPCs, SOGS, Donyaakin, The Ordinary Women, SBF, Bijin Wives/Warmaidens/NPCs, and the non-named replacer I found just recently.

 

I'd pay 50 bucks if someone would fix the way the player character has to face forward in third person every time they stop moving...

[Gameplayer]

1 hour ago, Fredas said:

See, you share the opinion of the majority, which I get, I really do.  You're still just absolutely missing the point, though: Those "useless perks" serve a roleplaying purpose.  If the player doesn't want to spend a couple of perks roleplaying, they can pick other perks.  This is possible and this is harmless because the perks aren't stuck in a 7x10 grid that assigns equal worth to everything.

 

Incidentally, you suggest that FO3 didn't have all that many roleplaying perks.  This is inaccurate.  Particularly early on, the game had ton of perks that literally did nothing functional other than redundantly award a few extra skill points (Daddy's Girl, Thief, etc.).  Later you get Contract Killer and Lawbringer - the epitome of roleplaying perks; yes you get a little bit of money but the real point is to solidify your character's status as a do-gooder or a bad guy.  In Fallout 4?  Sorry, every perk takes up a precious spot in the grid so it needs to do something useful to justify its existence.

Those perks in Fallout New Vegas,

The Fluff perks,

Are useful in like 1 to 3 scenes tops....Not sure that's a real great trade off compared to what Perks should be.

Top that off with this....A lot of perks in not only the base game of Fallout New Vegas but also its DLC are in fact broken as in they don't work, by that I mean there are perks that in fact do nothing at all...This can be checked on the Wiki....Again at the time that I played New Vegas these were not fixed by Unofficial Patch, that may not be the case anymore.

I've personally spent time making my own patches to play that game, but there Im sure Im not alone.

 

Fallout 4's perks can be seen as better simply because its not just a perk that allows a one time response in a singular conversation that in the most likely sense will be completely and unknowingly missed by the vast majority of the games audience.  Im saying that for the most part people will never even realize that they missed the opportunity to have a different outcome due a perk that they may not of even known existed due to fact that perks in FNV and Fo3 are all hidden unless you meet the requirements.

 

That's not a good design decision for a few reasons,

1) Player may not even know about the perk

2) Player doesn't make the connection that the encounter and the way it plays out would be significantly different had they selected the perk

3) due to there being relatively few encounters for that specific perk to be useful you will have many more players simply opting to never select the perk in the first place

Bottom line your better off not having those as perks when those same perks usefulness is going to be weighted against significant perks that fill the role of always being useful at all times to the player.  So player goes to the bathroom in Vegas is being a Lawbringer as useful as having Toughness?  A joke question I know but in Vegas you can get your ass shot off so.

 

Not sure how pointing out the short comings of those fluff perks puts me in the majority but whatever.

1 hour ago, Fredas said:

2 hours ago, Gameplayer said:

Im saying a magazine perk is just as good as getting a perk off the old tree.

But it just isn't!  You can't point to any magazine and say, yep, that right there is the functional equal of the ability to lock in a crit, or regenerate health over time, or cause bullets to hit the attacker.  No, the magazines are on par with, say, Fallout 3's DLC perk Covert Ops (+3 to Science, Small Guns and Lockpick) or Pitt Fighter (+3% RAD resistance and DR).  Perks you basically have to parse in order to gauge any actual effect.

 

Off the top of my head in Nuka World DLC, there is a perk that can grant a significant amount of damage boost to players that carry less than a thousand caps.

There are of course quite a few more than just that in the DLC's.

 

 

________________________

 

That's about all I got in me right now to say on the forums...Im trying to actually play some Far Harbor right now.

Just got an encounter with a dying man, I got three options that popped up...

1) Cure him with 8+ INT

2) Cure him with Medic 2+

3) Use mysterious Serum

 

I picked 3 was all I qualified for however I could have improvised a medication which would have killed him.

 

It would be great if there were more of those situations in the base game rather than only seeing them in the DLC's mostly.

 

From what I understand though there are quite a few quest mods for both Fallout 4 and Fallout New Vegas...I think there is a mod called the New California Project for FNV that might be worth a look.

[Fredas]

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

Those perks in Fallout New Vegas,

The Fluff perks,

Are useful in like 1 to 3 scenes tops....Not sure that's a real great trade off compared to what Perks should be.

You're getting it, though.  That's the point exactly.  Terrifying Presence, right?  Who in the world would pick a perk that only lets you satisfy a half dozen particular dialogue moments in the game?  The answer is simple: Someone who wants to roleplay a character who has, well, a uniquely intimidating aura, and could make use of a built-in mechanic that legitimizes their persona.  The dialogue checks are just bonuses to what is, in its purest essence, strictly for roleplaying.  There is literally no other way to justify that perk.  It's there for the ones who want it, and it's skippable for the ones who don't, without affecting anything else in the game.  Take it out, and you've rendered a lesser experience and a lesser game.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

perks in FNV and Fo3 are all hidden unless you meet the requirements.

Not sure where you're getting that info from.  The exact opposite is the case.  When you level up, every perk you will ever have access to (from leveling up) is available to see in the list, along with their prerequisites.  The ones you're not ready for are grayed out and listed beneath the ones you are.

 

1 hour ago, Gameplayer said:

Just got an encounter with a dying man, I got three options that popped up...

Yep, as I pointed out earlier, this is one misstep that Bethesda were quick to acknowledge and begin implementing in DLC.  This does, unfortunately, end up making their total absence in the main game all the more obvious.

[Varithina]

21 hours ago, ercramer69 said:

I didn't like the way they pigeon holed the characters beginning or that at least 90% of all npc's try to direct you down the main questline.  If you play as a male PC it makes sense that you can pick up any weapon and kick ass with it, but Nora was supposed to be a lawyer but there aren't really many options to talk you way out of things, its usually shoot first and survive the fight.  

 

 

 

Considering the whole pretty militant and been at war for some years with the chinese, I pretty much assumed that nora even though it is not said has had at least some basic nation guard/state militia type training at some point or other, power armour considering how common it appears to be in the boston areaI would have assumed would be enough to move it around and not hurt themselves or others, pretty much like I would have assumed any adult and probably most teens did for anybody in that type of world would have had considering the world background.

 

True nothing is explicity stated, but there are clear views of extreme patroism and such going on in america at that time period, if you are not too sure what I am think off look at Germany during the late 30's early 40' but before the war started.

[Chosen Clue]

Well, it's only never if Fallout 4 doesn't attract the modders willing to add in the stuff you want, like HDT.

 

For me, Fallout 4 isn't as good as skyrim, but still holds a special place for me because it has post-apoc stuff and things I love like ghouls and supermutants and schuuting. But I think for LL, Fallout 4 is just not something every LL Skyrim modder is into, so mods aren't being ported.

 

Coupled with the many problems like creation club and skyrim modders nagging skyrim mod makers to port over their mods to SSE, AND how SSE has it's SKSE64, I bet the main SKSE mod makers are quite busy right now or just aren't involved with modding anymore.