My interest was starting to wane when I finished the game over the weekend. Usually that happens in FO games because by the end I’m a towering juggernaut of destruction and can casually swat any remaining threats, but the bad guys level pretty well in this one. There’s just not a lot of payoff for the settlement-building and radiant missions. Like, I can only get about 20 people in each town, and most of them are close to that mark, so why bother?
I’m holding out for DLC before I play 4 any more.
In the meantime, I have gone back to my true home in the Mojave. With the monster maker and someguy2000 mods installed and the difficulty cranked up, there is a truly vast amount to do and none of it easy or boring.
Been thinking about doing a runthrough of 3 too.
Every Bethesda open-world game follows that arc for me. Although I start the plot, go wandering, go wandering some more, feel the burn-out coming and power through the plot just to “finish” the game.
FO4 wasn’t quite the same – I was more concerned that I was running out of side material and decided to finish the main story first on my own terms. I never got into settlement building though and the first time Preston begged me to lead his loser group, I flipped him off and went to kill radroaches so I never had the radiant “A settlement needs your help” thing going on.
I just started my hardcore melee run. I almost got killed by Trudy at the Drumlin Diner, as that was the first quest I had planned out. I failed her speech check and she immediately went hostle and shot me up. I bashed her head in with a tire iron, but she almost killed me. Almost game over right there. After that I went and got the power armor to the northeast of Sanctuary near the crashed vertibird. I’m not sure where I’m going next, I don’t think I can help Preston because the deathclaw will kill me for sure. I need to level up though before I head into Diamond City. I’m not going to grind levels by crafting though, that’s too boring.
Tale of Two Wastelands. “I heard you like Fallout, so I put some Fallout in your Fallout so you can fall out while you Fallout.”
This project converts your Fallout 3 content into DLC for Fallout New Vegas, complete with a train that will take you between Mojave and Capital Wastelands (hence, the name).
Mechanically, it’s FO:NV, and you’d play in on your FO:NV characters, but 99.99% of the stuff in the Capital is there. (For instance, all ammo types in FO3 are converted to their nearest equivalent in NV, so .32 ammo becomes .22.)
Anyway, it’s a lot of fun, although the conversion and installation process is somewhat daunting.
Yikes! Fallout 4 Season Pass is going to jump in price from $30 to $50 on March 1st to supposedly reflect the additional amount of content being added:
Dying Light did the same thing recently, saying that their DLC expansion wound up larger than originally expected and thus bumping up the Season Pass price accordingly. Setting aside the whole argument about pre-purchases and season passes, etc – If you WERE planning on buying it, buy it now. Or pencil it in on your calendar and see if GMG runs a blanket discount coupon code in the next two weeks or something.
I already have a season pass from when I bought the game in January. Is it expiring on March 1st, then? What good was it? There doesn’t seem to have been any DLC available to date.
No, no, no… The “season pass” (I hate that term but that’s what stuck) gives you all of the upcoming DLC. I think the first FO4 DLC comes out on March 1st. It’s just a term that means “Pre-purchase bundle of upcoming DLC”
If you own the SP now, you’ll get all the DLC as it comes out. The PRICE of the season pass will increase on March 1st because they looked at how much content they have in the works and realized that $30 was undercutting themselves. But you’re unaffected.
Probably also worth mentioning what the announced DLC so far is:
Automatron (March 2016, $10) - Quest line involving stopping “the Mechanist” and his robot army, including a system to create your own robot companion
Wasteland Workshop (April 2016, $5) - Looks like a minor settlement upgrade DLC. Capture and tame creatures to make battle arenas and decorative settlement upgrades such as nixie tube signs and taxidermied beasts.
Far Harbor (May 2016, $25) - Looks like this is the big one if the price tag is any indication. Travel with Nick Valentine off the coast of Maine in search of a missing young woman and secret colony of synths. Promises a wilder, feral landscape more radiation-soaked than the Commonwealth. Says it’s their largest DLC land-mass yet with new faction quests, creatures, dungeons and more.
That’s $40 out of an advertised $60 worth of content so it remains to be seen if the missing $20 is another larger DLC or more like Automatron & Wasteland Workshop again.
The Automatron stuff sounds cool, although I could have sworn I killed the Mechanist in FO3. One thing I disliked about the DLC from the last games was that it took place off the existing map.
Ah, thanks!
Incidentally, I just signed up to be a beta tester for the DLC. Hope I get picked!
The Mechanist? I neutralized that guy in FO3… umm… decades before FO4? Hell, I still have his cheesy armor.
Cute, and cheap, so possibly worth it. Let me capture and tame cats as companions and I’ll be sold.
Ah, Point Lookout with synths. I suppose.
All they have to do to fix the “value” problem is inflate the prices of the announced content to over the $60 level. It’s not like they need anyone’s permission to set any price point they damn well please, right?
Well, no. Why would they? That said, since they already announced pricing for the three listed DLC, I would assume that they will be adding $20 “worth” of additional DLC.
They also announced the pricing on the Season Pass, which they’re changing. So both variables in this equation are fully independent, and driven entirely by revenue-versus-marketing calculations by Bethesda. It’s a deal because they said so.
They are altering the deal. Pray they do not alter it any further.
To make my point more explicit: to claim the Season Pass is a deal is to believe the clerk at the checkout who tells you you saved $60 dollars (by spending several hundred). It’ll be a deal when the GOTY edition with all DLC comes out in the next 18 months for less than the price of the current game now.
Man, I really fell hard out of this game. That whole thing with my son took the wind out of my sails. But at least that last bit of expansion DLC might bring me back in.
Yes, because it’s supposedly getting extra content. Unless they’re adding extra content to “Automatron”, it seems unlikely that they’ll just increase the price for Automatron to get closer to $60. They certainly COULD, but I doubt it’ll happen.
In any event, if anyone is looking to pick up the Season Pass before the price increases, you can get it for $24 from Green Man Gaming with coupon code FEBURY-SVINGS-20PERC
That’s less than the cost of the Far Harbor DLC! 
Fallout 4 is only 10 years after Fallout 3. Hence why Maxon and Maccready are in their 20s.
A theory I’m hearing is that this is going to be connected with the Silver Shroud and the Mechanist is a robot programmed to think its an old villain from the comics.
I want to capture Raiders and rehabilitate them.
If you recall, the FO3 Mechanist had a fanboy, who was about MacCready’s age.
Yeah, the kid in Canterbury Crossing, the nephew of the town’s mayor. I forgot about him. So he could do a MacCready and show up as an adult in the Commonwealth. Of course, Bethesda could say that canonically, the Mechanist was dealt with non-lethally in FO3, so maybe his non-crazy alter ego could be here instead (or too). He’d be about 50 years old.
I hate myself for it, but I grabbed the season pass. I really dislike the buy stuff on faith before you know what is business model. But, from past experience many mods for Bethesda games require you to have all the DLC for them to work properly, and Bethesda tends to be pretty stingy with putting their DLC on sale. So, it made sense to get it before the price increase. I feel dirty.