Seems fair enough.
I did the new “When Pigs Fly” quest at level 7…I seem awfully overpowered now with all the loot I got.
But as usual with many quests in RPGs…I have no real idea what happened. Met friendly guy, went off to kill bad guys, came back…friendly guy was under attack (as i saw from afar)…mini nuke goes off. I go to see friendly guy and pick up Piggy Bank mini nuke launcher and baseball launcher. All just lying around, I assume from the bad guys killing themselves.
Friendly guy says “Thanks”. Quest complete.
I don’t recall that one. But I hope you enjoy your new baseball launcher!
Eh, that’s always been a problem for the Bethesda Fallout DLC content.
In F3, if you made a beeline for Operation Anchorage (fully doable around level 12ish) you had the best weapons and armor in the game (along with PA training!!!) and the rest of game was EZ mode.
In NV, you could fast track HH or DM by 15-20 and again, depending on build, have some of the best stuff in the game (DM mostly giving you nigh-unlimited meds, repairs and ammo), again EZ mode. Although the stuff in the Big MT would be even worse in some ways, getting there and getting it all really did require a higher level to survive w/out a lot of rezzing.
If anything, F4 DLC was slightly less broken previously!
I guess my timing was a little better on the new “When Pigs Fly” quest. I got back from killing the bad guys on the roof and getting the Chinese grenade launcher schematics to Suggs in time to kill the bad guys around Suggs’ place. I thought I was saving Suggs, but It sounds like Suggs can take care of himself. He is a weapons merchant, so probably someone you don’t want to mess with.
BTW, where can I get ammo for the Chinese grenade launcher? I was all ready to play with my new toy, but the ammo in the launcher specs on my Pip-Boy says ‘frag 0’ and I thought I had plenty of frag grenades. Is it a special type of frag grenade? Does Suggs have some, and I overlooked that?
The new Halloween-themed “Mysterious Signal” quest was kinda fun, though slight. I like the spooky quests, like the Lovecraftian one in the main game and a couple in the Far Harbor DLC.
According to Reddit: it’s a 40mm grenade and, yeah, he does. You’ll probably need to wait for his inventory to update.
Reddit also says Tinker Tom and Cleo are known to have the grenades in their inventories; they can also be found as loot in places such as the National Guard training yard.
Nice, thanks for the tips.
I’ve been playing the Fallout: London (FOLON) mod for the past few days and it’s a pretty mixed bag for me. I’ll probably give it another day or so to see if the magic happens but it’s not there yet.
To start with the positives, the team who made this obvious put a ton of time and love into it. New map, new assets, animation, items, voice acting, British twists on things like the Pip-Boy, etc. It’s pretty insane the amount of stuff they managed to create or modify then give away as a free mod. Dogmeat’s been replaced by an English bulldog companion named Churchill! Neat!
However, for the last three or four days, I’ve yet to get hooked. I’ve mainly felt like I’m wandering semi-lost through a map hostile to the player with tons of dead ends, maze-like bits and oh so much radiation looking to semi-permanently sap away your health bar (Rad-Away, et al has been in extremely short supply). Fighting against the map has left me feeling like I’ve accomplished very little from the main story and not because I’ve been happily exploring and finding neat things; in fact I’ve barely seen any of the map at all.
But it’s not entirely the map. I think part of the sluggish feeling just comes from the creaky Bethesda engine. It’s not good. Many of the graphics look sludgy and unappealing (and not in a post-apoc way, just a bad image way) and the UI is terrible. I’ve forgotten how unintuitive the UI is since I last played FO4. There’s also engine bugs that plague the mod but are really Bethesda’s fault like how I had to turn off God Rays from the FO4 launcher to stop crashing every ten minutes. Now I only crash hourly.
Weirdly, one of the things many people have mentioned was that guns were super rare (it’s Britain, not Yankee-Gun Land!) but I’ve already collected an arsenal of pistols, revolvers, flare guns, shotguns and assault rifles by level four. An early (mandatory?) quest gives you a named revolver.
Based on what people SAID about the guns, I started with a strength build vs my usual Charisma Sniper and you do get a butterfly knife early on which can be easily upgraded quite well (I think mine is now 25 damage, Fast attacks). Unfortunately, when you have it out you constantly do this flipping/twirling animation with it that pushes you away from NPCs or items you were interacting with including out of dialogue range mid-conversation.
They included a race of mutants along the Thames who are like Black Lagoon-esque fish folk. Pretty cool. They all speak like phlegmy asthmatics and are your first main hub so you’ll be talking to them a lot. Uh… less cool.
Mostly though, my memories of previous Fallout games has been exploring and constantly coming across interesting new locations often with their own self-contained stories and history. I haven’t really felt that from FOLON so I haven’t really been having the same fun. Maybe it’s just me or maybe I went right when I should have gone left early on and that made all the difference so far. If you’re interested in it, it’s worth trying for free. The FOLON team put a lot into it and maybe you’ll get more out of it than I’m getting and be more charitable to the weaknesses of the geriatric Bethesda game engine.
Great post, thanks! I’ve been wondering about FOLON. When I picked FO4 back up earlier this summer, I was amazed how many quests and locations I had missed during my first play-through— it really is a huge game world. But now it’s increasingly starting to feel like squeezing the last of the toothpaste out of the tube.
Do you have to start FOLON at level 1, or can I bring my leveled-up self with my favorite weapons to London, as with the Nuka-World and Far Harbor DLCs?
You start as a new character and the opening plot line revolves around your origins. FOLON overwrites your entire FO4 install so there’s no switching back and forth (though I suppose you could have two separate game installs if you have the space and inclination).
Someone who last played FO4 a month ago versus 8-9 years ago may have a more charitable response versus some of my overall UI/Game engine/General vibe impressions.
No, and I blame Bethesda 100% for it. I made this comment on Starfield as well (which I did not buy, but watched a lot of streams) - but you’ll be seeing something in a “modern” Bethesda game and you’ll see the exact same animation used in a 20 year old game.
The engine is beyond old and creaky, it is positively undead - it was barely functional for F4, and they should have switched at that point. AFAICT they’ve just kept the original baseline and keep bolting on the new stuff over and over, which means that none of it is well optimized for modern cores, processors, RAM etc.
I run F4 on a system beyond the dreams of even Musk-level wealth when it was New, and it still has delayed load times. And that’s leaving out how badly Bethesda did their hi-quality texture packs - I’m running mods for it instead and it’s much better performance AND quality wise.
I did snag FOLON, and I’ll probably play it if/when it’s compatible for the main build, or if I get really bored and do a second install. For all it’s (many) flaws, FO4 is one of my “chill” games, that I’ve played so often it’s easy, but relaxing to revisit.
And even then, I run with 40ish mods that make it a LOT more playable and fun. I don’t think I could put up with a lot of the vanilla options any more, and FOLON has a lot fewer (more every day though) mods.
Last night I stumbled more into the thick of things and found locations with a more “normal” enemy/place density than what I had been doing. So that was fun having places to poke around in and dudes to stab with my stabbity-stabber.
Less fun was that I had more crashes and issues than I have had in days. Installed BuffOut4 mod which seems to have helped? A lot of fast travel crashes (saw recommendations to turn off save-on-travel) and a location that you couldn’t exit without using the console commands to turn off clipping, walk through the doorway and finally get the Exit prompt. Then you turn clipping back on, fall through the floor and re-pop with the exit prompt available. Ooookay then 
Despite that, I’m feeling more optimistic than I was a day ago.
Thought I’d give another update, probably my last one since I think I have a decent feel for the FOLON mod/game unless something greatly significant happens. I’m still trucking through it which says a lot right there. Probably 1-2 hours a day but I started it three weeks ago so that’s a good amount of content. I’m also not near complete judging from the map and what I know about how many major factions there are, etc.
With patching from the FOLON team, it’s a much more stable experience now though I still sometimes crash when exiting a location back into the open world. I’m playing on their first major patch so maybe that’s gotten better and I need to re-patch again (Googling… Looks like another patch is being worked on but the one big one was the only major one so far). There ARE still a number of bugs and at least one quest I did was broken and required looking up a console command solution on Reddit so I can’t recommend it if you’re not comfortable/willing to use console commands.
Settlements are pretty busted. I don’t know if there was ever a time I’d claim that FO4 settlements worked correctly but they feel extra broken in FOLON in terms of getting/retaining settlers and settlers functioning correctly. I could personally do without the settlement experience so I just have one zero pop settlement for my own crafting and another one I send my companions to which has a population of 2 despite 80% happiness and plenty of beds, food, defense, etc. If playing Suzie Homemaker is important to you, FOLON will likely leave you disappointed or frustrated.
Companions are good. So far I have my English bulldog, an upper class tax collector who is a ghoul, a big dumb guy, a woman treasure hunter who claims that I’m her sidekick and some dumb street urchin who just runs around waving his arms during combat. Romance isn’t an option by design; you’ll get friendzoned if you try and I expect they’ll leave if you push it (said treasure hunter says she recoils at sexual contact for past reasons and, while you get the option to press it, I’m not that much of a jerk to find out what happens). I looked later and the devs straight up added no romance options. This doesn’t bother me since the FO4 system was nothing special and I mostly fished for it to get the mechanical buff benefit of canoodling.
I mostly enjoy the factions. My favorite dudes to hang around with so far are a bunch of “mod” blokes who just want to look sharp and work on their scooters (scooters not in game, sadly). My favorite enemy faction are the Beefeaters who are cannibals dressed like the dude on the gin bottle. Ok, so there’s a historical basis there but I’m an American so my thought was “Guy on the gin bottle”.
The world building is ok-ish. The actual core stuff is pretty good, it explains some differences in-game (no power armor 'cause the Yanks didn’t share the fusion tech, your ATTA-Boy is a reverse engineered PipBoy, etc). The random locations feel a bit vacant; I remember more of the “real” game locations having a self contained story or mystery and most of these are more a place to brain ghouls, stomp radroaches and collect crafting scrap. I previously mentioned the lack of artfully placed skeletons which seems like a weird thing to complain about but I did notice it, after all. But there are a lot of places to poke your head into, almost every pub has a stat/perk-boosting coaster to find and I still mostly enjoy it.
All in all, if you liked FO4 and would be content with maybe 80% of the same experience at the cost of mucking around in the console now and then, I say go for it.
Thanks for the update! That matches 80-90% with what I’ve heard elsewhere, and sadly, there are notorious questlines (Silver Shroud, I’m eyeballing you!) in the Base Game that break all the damn time and require console commands to get around, so … yeah. 
Still going to give it a few months before I consider it, maybe longer. I have a huge backlog of amazing games I’ve gotten on Steam that I should be doing first.
I got FO4VR with my Vive years ago and played it quite a bit. Picked up a Quest 3 this winter and been playing F04 a lot recently, enjoying the much improved resolution of the quest.
FO4VR received its last patch in 2018 and was spared the nextgen update. It still crashes sometimes, particularly in the build menu, but it sounds like its more syable than flat.
A couple folk have been tweaking it to get FOLON working, but I think thats a long way off.