I have zero desire to replay Fallout 1 because even with the patch* the ending was always “you dicked around too long and everybody in many towns was killed by super mutants.” Fallout 2 improved on it in every way.
*It made it so that there was no time limit to beat the game, but individual locations could still be wiped out.
Yes, I just said I did. They are both still on my auxillary hard drive. My version of 2 uses the user-made patch that restored a vast amount of dummied out content. 1 and 2 were basically glorified text games.
My recollection from Fallouts 1 and 2 was that everything was a series of self-contained binary choices. You were presented with an awful lot of “this or that” options that didn’t affect anything outside of a particular area. When you beat the game, you were given a cinematic that told you the results of all your actions, but they didn’t really tie together in any meaningful manner.
It was still very well done, though.
Well, FWIW, I was mostly on about FO3 and FONV. There were a lot of context-dependent extra conversation options to convey more than just a functional intent. You could insult, argue, scold, commend… the writing was broad enough that you could trigger the in-game action (the functional intent of NPC conversations) while also expressing your character’s emotional message (the RPG emotional immersion intent).
On simplest level, just switching the scripting among different outcomes is useful, but a well-written game will allow you catharsis. Telling President Eden he’s a genocidal madman and a gravely flawed AI before blowing up Raven Rock is important!
Often in the fondly remembered old games, the agency in many of the quests was an illusion caused by the relatively much more complex dialogue trees. If you saved just before dialogue you often found that the same responses were given for different dialogue choices. The difference was mostly in how your choice of how you got there changed the flavor of the exchange. Also, in the original Fallouts, the NPCs changed their expressions depending on their moods, so that the exact same recording of dialogue took on a different undertone just by having a different expression on the speaker’s face. Few other games seem to take advantage of this use of variable facial expression to vary how the same reading of dialogue may be perceived by the player. Maybe L.A. Noir did it?
Anyway, the thing with Fallout 4 is that it mostly strips away the illusion that you are meaningfully influencing how NPCs react to you when there are clearly only four choices (my own variant of the formula mentioned above): 1) Yes, 2) Sarcastic Yes, 3) Maybe Later and 4) No, but really Yes. Sometimes 3 is actually “tell me something I damned well already know”.
I got the game about at the beginning of NYE weekend, so I played it for basically four straight days and most of my after-work time since. I’m trying to avoid the main quest line for the most part since I’ve heard that
If you finish it you can’t do a lot of subquests. I did it pretty quickly up to where you go to the Glowing Sea and talk to the Institute runaway, then did a lot of subquests before hunting down the courser (yesterday).
One big question I have is how you get people to go to your settlements. I have tons of food and beds and defense and power in Sanctuary but no matter what I do the population is stuck at 11 (most of whom are my unused companions). The only increase I’ve seen recently was when I “hired” the drunk guy in Diamond City to go there. I have a beacon doohickey operating all the time.
As far as where to start if you haven’t played before, I would definitely begin with FO1. It was a fantastic game for its time and the prior games do a better job of explaining what Vaults were supposed to be like. Plus there are lots of in-game references to events from prior games, which I’d be sad to miss. That said, FO5 is very self-contained storywise and I am much more attached to my character than in any prior game. My main problem with FONV was that the Courier wasn’t trying to save anyone, just fuck up the guy who fucked with him. Other than that, I enjoyed it far more than FO3; that game had way too much crawling through subways freaking out about ghoul noises, at least until you unlocked enough of the map to fast travel everywhere.
Did you short yourself on charisma? A settlement’s population limit is 10 + your charisma. Also, you didn’t mention water. You have to have enough water pumps or purifier capacity to support your population. Is the settlement supplied adequately? Did a synth infiltrator turn off your water purifier?
My charisma is up to 8 or something, so it’s not that. There is plenty of water - a pump, a purifier, and an industrial purifier. I think it’s producing 20 or so. I didn’t even know the thing with the synths could happen! Won’t that “turn down” the amount of water shown in the workshop?
After poking around on some guides, I think it might be the lack of decorations. I basically scrapped everything that wasn’t immediately useful including all the rugs and wall hangings.
How do you upgrade it? Whenever I go to an armor bench with only the Shroud costume it says I have no upgradeable armor (and yes, I finished the quest already).
In Fallout 2 you learn that Jet is derived from mushrooms grown in brahmin shit, so I guess the closest real world analogue is psilocybin mushrooms.
At levels… 25 and 35? 35 and 45? You can go back to whassisface and he’ll upgrade the costume for you. It can’t be manually upgraded.
Ah, that makes sense.
Found a bug, or more accurately I found it and googled for a solution.
Some of the Laser Musket barrel mods disallow a muzzle. But I had one that didn’t and still couldn’t change the muzzle. The problem is that if you are carrying multiple muskets, **any one **that has the no muzzle barrel it makes it so that none of them can have it. As far as I can tell if you put one on and then pick up another musket, it wont’ change the one you currently have attached.
Okay, so which quests are autogenerated radiant quest garbage?
Obviously the “go help this settlement”, “go kill these raiders harassing our settlement”, and “go rescue this person for this settlement” quests are randomly generated, right?
But I didn’t realize at first that the Brotherhood of Steel quests you get from the people at the police station were also just autogenerated crap. I thought maybe I was earing my way up through the BoS and the technology I gathered was going to lead to something or something or other. So I felt cheated when I realized that it was just randomly generated fetch quests.
I don’t like busywork quests giving me the illusion of getting somewhere. What other types of quests should I be wary of?
Railroad has the PAM/Courser quests (Go kill this Courser) and the MILA quests (go fight to the top of a location and place a MILA device). There’s actually a finite number of the MILA quests (11) but they don’t lead to anything.
You need to do one or two PAM quests to unlock ballistic weave but, after that, it’s just busywork.
Tinker Tom has had MILA units for sail since I did the MILA quests. What point would there be in buying one?
None. They just wind up in his purchasable inventory for some reason.
You can place them around your house like any other bit of bric-a-brac if you want a MILA sitting on a table for some reason.
What? You don’t want a weather station at your settlement? It’d be bitchin cool if you could see the current weather report for a settlement on your Pip-Boy. “Gotta check in at Sanctuary Hills… Oh, wait, heavy radrain. Maybe I’ll hold off a few hours.”
Last night, while simply on walkabout, I started using some of the more exotic weapons that I had simply hoarded up to this point. Some early impressions:
In the end, you could go through the game with a silenced gauss rifle and, perhaps, a silenced 10mm to use as a “fly swatter” and never miss a beat.
I haven’t actually had to use it yet (since it’s so fucking heavy I leave it in Sanctuary in the expectation that I’ll go back and get it when I have to fight something huge, which is never actually practical) but ISTM that the Fat Man is pretty useful.