Moira is oddly sexy but her accent would get old quick 
When I first went to register at Nexus all I saw were payment options. I missed the button at the very bottom which allowed you to bypass that.
My newly modified vault suit thanks you.
I finally made my way into the Institute. The first time, once I had the option, I quicksaved and then went on a killing spree which was fun. However, obvious plot stuff aside, my immediate thought was They made synths out of my son’s DNA which means Curie is like my granddaughter or something. Let me just compartmentalize that bit of data…
It’s very silly how a lot of the perks are laid out in terms of their stat requirements.
You would think unarmed combat would be the most strength-dependent thing in the game, right? But you can become a master of punching people to death with 1 str. With endurance, if you want to be super tough and get +50 DR, you only need 1 endurance. So now you can be Rocky Balboa with literally the lowest Strength and Endurance you can possibly have. Scrawny, weak little Rocky Balboa that can beat things to death with your bare hands while they shoot you in the face.
Similarly, with 2 charisma you can sweet talk shopkeepers into selling you shit cheaply and sweet talk the opposite sex into following your will, but you need 3 charisma to be a loner.
So 1 str, 1 endurance, 2 charisma - you’re well below average in these stats, near the bottom of what’s humanly possible, and yet you’re a Rocky Balboa punching tank that can instantly melt panties.
Maybe I should make a “walking contradiction” run. 1 str, 1 end punching machine.
Yeah, I ruminate sometimes about the stuff you can unlock right away if you start with your stats on the high end. I hadn’t even thought about the low end. Good point. It’s weird. Possibly even weirder than in previous Bethesda games where you optimally wanted to pick starting skills you were not actually going to use.
Why the hell can’t I get Drinking Buddy to move? He’s standing out in a melon patch behind my Power Armor farm. I can send him to other settlements, but what I’d like to do is have him stand around the main drag of town.
I apologize if this was already posted and I missed it but here is an interesting take on changes in Role Playing in Fallout 4 Vs. earlier incarnations. As a person who has only started I will say it implies some spoilers but nothing terrible. What I liked is it articulates what I think I have found lacking with the game (which over all I have found fun but vaguely disappointing) in that past Fallouts let you play a character within the game whereas this allows you to express yourself as a player (by customizing your Town and weapons etc.) but you aren’t really playing a character. It is a subtle but noticeable difference.
It’s not subtle at all. It’s a big neon sign of obviousness. Fallout 4 is not really a role playing game. You’re playing the narrator. You’re going from place to place accomplishing the objectives the game gets you with no real choice in how you achieve them, only choice in the order in which you do them. Your character’s individual strengths and weaknesses never play a role in how you can solve quests, you can never make real character choices through dialogue.
It’s a first person shooter with some character-design elements. It’s Borderlands with a fallout aesthetic.
Except this probably wouldn’t work. Your +50DR won’t mean much if you have the hitpoints of a 1-endurance character. With 1 endurance, your total hitpoints are going to be an anemic 85 + 3/level. Not super useful for a build that involves running up to super mutants and punching them repeatedly.
Meanwhile, the Iron Fist perk is a multiplier, not a flat bonus. That means that at max ranks, it’s going to be doubling your 1-strength attacks.
And of course, you’re going to have to be pretty high level to max out either of those ranks, so it’ll be a while before you get to ‘full effectiveness’ with your “Scrawny Balboa” build.
An unarmed build is probably going to want to get to strength 9 for rooted, and maybe agility 9 for blitz (and just lots of punches in vats). The high agility would also let you build for stealth, which you’ll want for avoiding long-range gunfights.
I don’t really agree with some of his points. He claims that, in Fallout, you started with “average” states and then had to take away from them to make other stats awesome but that, in FO4, you start average in all stats. But both use a 1-10 scale and the only difference is that Fallout preloaded five points into everything and in FO4, you need to start from a puny “one”. “One” isn’t average just because that was your starting point, “One” is the minimum. So then when he says that you can’t make a low perception, high luck character… you can do exactly that. Leave “Perception” at one and load up your points into Luck.
Likewise, the SPECIAL/Skills/Perks system has undergone changes (as it did for FO3 and NV) but I think he exaggerates them. Yes, you can theoretically max out everything but that requires you to grind extensively outside the story. If you’re running through the main plot, you’re not going to be level 100 when you finish it. He brings up level locks on perks but previous perks were effectively level locked behind skill levels – You couldn’t get Jury Rigging in New Vegas until you had a Repair skill of 90 (and level of 14).
Speech I largely agree with. I pity the console people who have to wait until you can at least read your responses. The “Dialogue wheel” was an immediate “Dislike” for me when I played Mass Effect after DA:O and its inclusion into the later Dragon Age games has been a disappointment. I don’t know why it’s become the way to do things – are gamers illiterate these days? I don’t want to blame consoles since DA:O, FO3 & NV all managed to have real dialogue options on consoles. Also, I agree (and mentioned way upthread) with disappointment that your skills/perks don’t have more effect on the dialogue. Very rarely can you bypass a mission by having a skill – healing a sick person with Medicine rather than seeking out a cure or using your Science skill to wedge a penny into a fusebox rather than getting a new fuse from Raidersville. There’s a couple times I’ve seen it in FO4 (not counting Charisma checks in lieu of old Speech checks) but it’s very rare. So, the new system allows you to just save-scum what Charisma checks there are where the old system had a hard “You must have 85 Repair points to use this option”.
His last major point I’m agnostic on. I have no problem relating to my character as a character and my impression of her as a smart, charismatic woman with poor luck and the inability to bring in groceries without breaking a sweat. But I’m not him and points like Perks are objective and “I felt like my character” is subjective. If he says he doesn’t feel it then I guess he doesn’t feel it.
Anyone else finding that there’s an awful lot of stuff under the sea? Yet I didn’t see even one creature there, we can’t even get out hands out.
Would you consider the F4 shaders to be physically-based rendering? They remind me of it yet they’re sometimes a little too plastic-y, even with the copious amount of bump/normal mapping.
Anyone else having difficulty getting LUT mods and higher color vibrancy mods to work? They don’t seem to be plug & play like the rest of the Nexus mods.
One of the early Minutemen quests required me to clear out Hangman’s Alley in Boston and set up a recruitment beacon there. That beacon apparently attracted all the stupid settlers in the immediate area.
Hangman’s Alley is a tiny little courtyard with a couple of narrow entrances off of it – just what you’d expect from something called “Alley”. Yesterday a “Defend Hangman’s Alley” quest popped up on my Pip-Boy, so I zoomed over there and helped fight off some raiders. That’s when I discovered that there were nine settlers and one cow crammed into this tiny space – and of course they were unhappy because there was no food or water or beds (or defense for that matter).
Since I couldn’t figure out any way to send them to one of the other settlements (like Sanctuary Hills) where there’s oodles of open space, I had to start cramming pumps and crops into the little space that was actually dirt; scrapping walls just to add beds (that were now in the open rather than under roofs), and building a feed trough so that stupid cow would stop blocking the one doorway.
Is there a way to sent settlers to another settlement? I know that you can assign them to supply lines, but that’s not going to address the population issue in a settlement that’s not much larger than a one-bedroom apartment.
My biggest complaints about the game:
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As mentioned before, skills should play a role in choices. The code already supports it since there a few of them scattered around, so it makes zero sense that they wouldn’t add more.
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There are definitely fewer dialogue options and choices than in previous games. This is an unfortunate lack. I disagree that it means FO4 isn’t a “roleplaying game,” because I’m still playing a character who is experiencing a definite story arc, and I am still making a certain number of choices that dictate the way that story unfolds. I’d agree that as a roleplaying game it is a very shallow experience, though.
On the other hand, I’m not the kind of person who cares too much about “feeling” like my character in online RPGs. I play tabletop RPGs to get a true sense of freedom of choice and characterization. Video games are never going to come close to even approaching that, and I don’t look for them to.
New stuff that I enjoy:
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The new perk system is good. Games which require you to invest percentage points in skills are fading away, and even some CRPGs are foregoing the concept. The problem is that it lays the bones for a potentially great system and then fails to utilize it, particularly with the aforementioned lack of ways to earn in-game benefits from perk levels. It would also be cool if there were perk trees that weren’t tied to stats.
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Crafting. Have previously talked about how much I enjoy the junking/crafting system in this game. It’s kind of a shame that it’s so easy to break the system open with the purified water trick, but any game will have its exploits.
Go into workshop mode and highlight the settler. There’s a command to send them to a different settlement. This doesn’t work with named characters who have story-based ties to a place.
I gentrified the heck out of Hangman’s Alley. I leveled all the shanty-shacks I could, and build up new foundations and built up three stories. The food (which apparently doesn’t need sunlight to grow) and water is all in the basement, and beds and such are on the upper floors. I built up high enough that I can actually climb up onto surrounding rooftops.
Eventually, I think I’m going to build a mega-hotel on Settlement Island. I’ve already got a boardwalk and picnic tables. I’m clearly going whole-hog on the building of settlements thing.
I guess there might be different definitions of “role playing” in this sense. If you are playing an established character of some sort, but get to make some choices as to exactly how he goes about talking to people or solving problems, are you roleplaying? Yeah, I guess, but it’s a different kind of role playing than if you get to decide who you are.
In previous Fallout games, you decided who you were. You had dialogue options to approach a problem in many ways. You could give your character legitimate strengths and weaknesses.
But in Fallout 4, you’re not playing the character you imagine. You’re playing the guy they give you. The guy who was in the military before the war, or the girl who was a housewife. The person who voices your narration. The person who severely limits the number of ways you can approach the conversation because you’re saying what they might say, not what you might say. The characters aren’t very fleshed out, and yet they’re still limiting all the same. It’s the worst of all worlds.
As far as choices go - I’m not that deep in the game, I get the impression you can make choices like choosing what factions you can support - but you have almost no choice ever in dialogue or how you handle a quest. It sometimes gives you the illusion of choice - but try quicksaving before engaging in a dialogue and do your best to make it come out some other way - most of the time you can’t. Somehow “Yes, I’ll help you” or “No, fuck off” end up giving you the same quest/reaction/whatever.
Frankly, that doesn’t seem dramatically different than “You’re a Vault Dweller with a scientist/doctor dad who had to flee the vault and now needs to find their daddy” or “You’re the courier who got shot in the head and left for dead and now needs to learn why”.
I’m not you so, if you think there’s a significant difference there, I’m fine with calling it a difference of opinion. But just saying “Soldier/lawyer looking for their kid” doesn’t seem that much of a strict mold to me. I’ve let the concept guide me but it hasn’t restricted me.
[I did have an amusing – to me – moment when I hit Diamond City and changed up my character’s hair from some attractive coif (“elegant” maybe?) to one of the chopped and messy styles figuring that, by this point, she had enough of the Wasteland and shooting raiders to give up on keeping her hair neat]
Yep, I agree that FO4 is way, way weaker in this regard. I just don’t think there’s any useful definition of “roleplaying game” that would exclude FO4 without excluding lots of other games that are clearly RPGs, since non-linear choices are definitely not a requirement for a game to be an RPG.
It’s been interesting to see people praise Witcher 3 as an RPG when it literally gives you a completely predefined character/history with zero character creation (aside from picking skills along the way) while complaining about FO4. I suppose it’s all in what you’re looking for – W3 does give considerably more options and choices while you’re playing it even if you’re just driving someone else’s creation; much more so than FO4.
I think the effect comes more from the voiced protogonist. Both because the voiced protagonist makes you feel less connected to your answers because they’re so vague - you don’t even know what you’re choosing to say - and then you get to hear them in your character’s voice, which further reinforces the idea that it’s someone else saying these things, and you’re just sort of along for the ride.
But also, obviously, because the extremely dumbed down dialogue system means you can’t really ever choose what you’re going to say as a character. Fallout 3 didn’t have the depth of 1 or 2, but there were conversations in which you’d at least have 6 or 7 ways of handling a conversation. The Fallout 4 dialogue constitutes “Yes? Yes. Yes (sarcastic) and No (yes)” with no real influence on the outcome of a conversation - it may as well go to a cutscene and speak for you.
Other games have done the “steering a pre-defined character” better, like Mass Effect or Witcher, but then they find other ways to allow you to make meaningful choices about the world. Fallout 4 just sort of doesn’t. They got rid of the old system of defining your own character, and didn’t add enough to make it feel like you had meaningful choices playing an established character. It’s the worst of all worlds.
I play with the dialogue mod so “not knowing” doesn’t apply to me although I agree that it was a poor design choice. They could have just as easily done the up/down menu system from the previous titles. And I don’t really defend the dialogue system in general – I’m on record about it a few posts up.
But I don’t feel as predefined as you seem to so, in that regard, it bothers me less. Or maybe they defined the character closely enough to what I’d do on my own that I don’t notice/care. I certainly feel more invested in my Unfrozen Wasteland Lawyer as a character than I ever felt in Geralt (aka Ren Faire Batman).