Haven’t played the Elder Scrolls games (have them, just haven’t played them) I mostly agree on your rankings of Fallout. I would move F1 up right below F2, though.
I’m further in and have more thoughts. Well, more of a negative experience with progression.
I reached a quest in the main story called “The Molecular Level”. I have to get the Courser(Terminator) chip analyzed to figure out how to warp into the Institute. OK, I got it.
Wait. There is no map/compass beacon for me to go to for this mission. Hey, that’s OK, maybe I need to play around some more to figure out what to do. I played countless sidequests(I like some of them pretty good*). Nope, still no idea what to do.
I looked it up online. I have to do the Freedom Road quest. Hey, I have that quest in my list of quests, but I didn’t realize it was related to the Courser Chip analysis. It sounded neat, but I did not ever pursue it. Note: It also did not have a start point in the compass/map system, so I did not know where to begin it as a (I thought) sidequest.
Turns out you go to Boston Common. I found the Freedom Trail beginning and followed the red line. Struggled a bit keeping with it, but found it. I found the Railroad group and got the chip analyzed.
I know people complain about modern-Skyrim-like-games telling you where to go all the time, but I think at the bare minimum, Fallout 4 should have indicated which quests are “main” and which are sidequests. Beyond that, a start point for a quest is nice to have a compass beacon for.
*I loved the Silver Shroud storyline. I liked the Salem Witch Museum. Others were only OK.
Have you been to Graygarden? The whole place is run by robots.
I can’t completely disagree, solid list. I’d put Morrowind higher as though the gameplay is dated, it’s one of the more unique gaming experiences ever.
Fallout 4 “dumbed down” the leveling system and it was mostly for the worse. The only thing I did like is that the earlier games required a bit of looking at guides and such if you wanted the perks that had stat requirements.
Skyrim also dumbed down the leveling system and I think it’s mostly for the better. The earlier games had a nonsensical system where to make say the best warrior in the long run, it was better to pick non-warrior skills as in-class skills would level you too fast. Skyrim removed the stats but kept the skills (FO4 did the opposite). I never played Arena but Daggerfall was full of cruft like a skill for Centaurish language or something like that. Plus multiple identical guilds.
I thought the Skyrim main quest and a few others had a pretty good plot, but many of the guild questlines kind of sucked. The Thieves’ Guild plot twist was nonsensical. Mage’s Guild didn’t really require you to actually know magic. The Bard’s College seemed completely unfinished.
I went for the first time a little after the game came out. That was fun, got to do the Freedom Trail - less rubble IRL. Swan’s Pond is much bigger in real Boston.
I also never got the settlement building. It was neat at first to put together all of the stuff and then… it just sits there and generates copy-pasted quests to rescue the person who got kidnapped. There is a ton of stuff and you can spend a ton of time on it, but it doesn’t do anything and trying to make a good layout is pretty pointless. It very rapidly became a drag on the game to me.
Liked the game pretty well, but it definitely wasn’t a classic like New Vegas. The main plot line has a lot of stuff that doesn’t really make sense, and the interaction with Shaun is weird and abrupt. The fact that quests are so linear makes it more of just a game than an RPG to me - notably your dialogue choices almost always boil down to “yes, Tell me more then give me the yes option, yes but I’ll be sarcastic or snide, no for now but I’ll come back later and say yes”.
I am also struck how many raiders and feral ghouls are constantly attacking me. I don’t think my memory is incorrect to say that I used to walk around Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3 without being constantly shot at. I feel like almost everywhere I show up in FO4, there is a group of bad guys shooting at me.
It’s just so much more action vs. role playing. :shrugs:
I’m currently replaying Fallout 3, and it definitely feels like I am constantly being attacked by raiders, animals or (especially in the capital region) super-mutants.
Oddly enough, I prefer Fallout 3 and 4 to Fallout: New Vegas, which I thought was very linear in terms of exploration (Goodsprings -> Primm -> Nipton -> New Vegas) and wasn’t as funny. To be fair, I have all of the DLC for 3 and 4 (and none for New Vegas) and I have been to real-life DC and Boston (but not Las Vegas) so maybe it’s just me.
I guess. My wife has been watching me play this game and she likely thinks of Fallout as an action series. I keep telling her it isn’t, but the game just sends me in to so many shoot-out situations.
I’ve been playing Skyrim as well and while you do fight a lot, it doesn’t feel the same.
You can go Goodsprings-Primm-Nipton-New Vegas, but you don’t have to by any stretch. You can branch off into side quests really early on and go join up with NCR or Legion quests. Or you can rush to New Vegas early on and skip Primm-Nipton entirely. Also, treating ‘New Vegas’ as one destination is like treating ‘Boston’ as one destination in Fallout 4 or ‘DC’ in Fallout 3, there are a lot of subsections to New Vegas - going and doing the ‘fight the raiders’ quests for the NCR is pretty distinct from going in to meet Mr House and exploring the casinos, or doing all of the ‘slum’ area quests.
How do you do that? Isn’t there a mountain in the way? (Or maybe deathclaws if you head north from Goodsprings?)
I managed, once, to go north to NV right out of the gate. If I remember, you have to have a good sneak skill and really thread the needle just right.
On PC, one can use a mod to turn off NV’s invisible force fields and head around behind the quarry.
You don’t literally go in a straight line, but there’s several ways to do it. You can go through the path in the northwest, but you’ve got to do a lot of running and sneaking (and save-load) because it’s got cazadores. I’ve done this route before and it’s not hard if you get lucky, but you can end up with critters that you can’t avoid. You head to the east and northeast and follow railroad tracks and old highways. You’ve got to do a decent amount of dodging stuff, but it’s not super deadly or luck based, and is something you can poke into without following a script.
This guide has directions for getting into New Vegas Medical Clinic without leveling up at all (so you can have the INT implant for every level):
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/xbox360/648891-fallout-new-vegas-ultimate-edition/faqs/65292?page=3
I do remember taking a long time to get to New Vegas, but I kind of appreciated it more that way. Fallout 4 took me straight to Diamond City. Neat, but you get right to the main famous area right away.
Then again, I think in Fallout 3, you are right away in some major DC locations. I have been to DC and have fond memories of it.
Vault 101 would be very close to the intersection which separates Arlington County addresses between N/S & E/W so, yeah.
Old World Blues is both one of the best DLCs in the series and also hilarious.
Agreed. Although I liked all of them except Lonesome Road, and even it wasn’t bad, just frustrating and plagued with a touch of a Marty Stu. Better than dreck like The Pitt, or offensive as hell likePoint Lookatthat.
The main DLC I hated was the one where the poison fog hurt you everywhere you walked. Miserable.
Definitely.
Are any of the DLC for FO4 worth it? I have them all.
Dead Money is definitely a love it or hate it kind of experience. I’m a pretty deliberative player, so checking and rechecking everything before I moved wasn’t that bad. I can easily see why people hated it though.
I’ll once again plug the Dust mod for NV. Albeit given it’s an alternative future where The Cloud gets into New Vegas, you probably will detest it. Ball-crushingly hard in parts, but fun.
I still need to play 4, LOL. I know the general plot, just never got around to it. Shooting Garvey in the face right off the bat is frowned upon, right?
Far Harbor is quite good. Nuka-World was not bad. The design-your-own robot stuff was okay, but not too exciting.