Yeah, I think you’re right-- those two did sound familiar. They’re from the last update. So the only new quests are ‘Tale of the Beast Hunter’ and ‘Sea Scavengers’. And ‘TotBH’ as I mentioned, seems like a very short quest.
Yes, the notes when I downloaded ‘Tale of the Beast Hunter’ said something like “made for Bethesda Studios by [Gaming studio name I forget]”.
So I just finished ‘Tale of the Beast Hunter’. It was enjoyable enough, but yeah, it did turn out to be pretty short. And interesting in a ‘lore’ sense, but not very challenging. Not much to it. I went back into the Creations menu and looked for more stuff-- I had heard that in addition to ‘Sea Scavengers’, ‘Become a Bounty Hunter’ was free, and it looked good in a video I watched earlier today. But BaBH is 600 credits, and Sea Scavengers is 500-- credits being 500 for $4.99, 1000 for $9.99, and so on. I don’t mind paying a few bucks for quality added content, but it is kinda feeling like a sloppy money grab by Bethesda.
So, I don’t know…might be time to move on to another video game. Maybe try picking up FNV again? Or something completely different.
Which was pretty much the reaction of almost all players when the “purchaseable” mods first came out for Skyrim (famously, the “Horse Armor” complaint fest) and then later for FO4. It’s now so much a part of the modern gaming ecosystem that I sometimes want to vomit. In many games though (eyeballing F76 and a few others) there is a substantial amount of pay to win involved though for others it’s more-or-less successfully kept to cosmetic geek ups.
As for what to play next, I did FNV again in the last 12 months, and loved it (again) but the aging graphics did distract me semi-frequently. As we mentioned in your other thread though, you could always do Outer Worlds again, though I’ve never bothered getting the much-maligned “Spacer’s Choice” edition, having the base game and all DLC. Sure, I’d like better graphics and a higher level cap, but with all the bugs and minimal fixes past the first few critical patches it just doesn’t seem worth even the $10 it would cost to upgrade.
Wow, I didn’t know that there was a IRL named ‘Spacer’s Choice’ game package option. I wonder, is that a bit of a ‘FU’ to fans of the game, or just a meta in-joke, since the game is a satire of corporate greed and excess… “It’s not the best choice, it’s Spacers’ Choice!”.
It was intended to be a meta-in-joke, but LOTS of buyers considered it to be a big FU to the players.
Obsidian (who wasn’t directly involved in the remaster) had to come in an apologize after the initial release, and some of the major bugs were patched and performance issues were improved, but seriously did not get past the “good enough” point according to a friend who also plays the game.
Again, I did not buy because the initial roll out was craptastic, but again, it felt like paying the extra $10 was too much after that snafu. Plus, my prior system was working to play the game well at medium, so I didn’t want to stress it. And of course, with high levels of completion, it didn’t make sense to upgrade just to play it again. So YMMV.
It was supposed to be a little haha, but apparently the developers actually meant it unironically.
It’s time for another edition of everybody’s least favorite gaming thread, wherein I review quest mods for a 10 year old game that’s among the least loved of its sequel franchise!
When last we left off, I had been dismayed and frustrated by the botched rollout of the 10th Anniversary update, in which any mods that relied on the Nuka-World and Far Harbor DLCs were broken. I even said, maybe it’s finally time to hang up the power armor and move on to another game.
But Bethesda patched the DLC problem, and gosh darn it, I just couldn’t stay away. So here are my reviews of my latest quest mods:
Ransacked Relays and Shuddersome Subways
This is an old mod, only a year or so newer than the game itself. And it’s very short, almost a demo or proof of concept mod. Can easily be finished in one gaming session. Despite the plurals in the name, there is only one Ransacked Relay and one Shuddersome Subway.
I really liked the Ransacked Relay part- the gameplay, which involved jumping gaps and timing your jumps to avoid laser pulses, reminded me of an old-school game in a good way, like a Half-Life 2 (or even a real old-school game like a Donkey Kong).
The Shuddersome Subway part involved a very powerful enemy that can’t be killed by conventional weapons, so creativity is involved in taking it out. It was a fun but not too difficult puzzle.
Some minor notes: I had Piper as a companion during this, and I’m pretty sure she said some things she had never said before, so I think the mod writer somehow added some extra NPC dialog. Speaking of the mod writer, he also created a DLC-sized quest mod called ‘Maxwell’s World’, a haunted amusement park, which sounded great and I definitely wanted to play it after RRaSS, but for some reason I couldn’t get it to install.
Fallout Vermont
This is a newer DLC-sized quest mod-- only a couple years old. I had high hopes for this one, but it turned out to be a disappointment.
It’s a beautiful-looking mod-- forested, hilly, with splashes of Fall color here and there. Nice views from the hilltops.
The gameplay is a little different. There are no marked quests that pop up to guide you along. You basically explore and get clues as to what to do by talking to several NPCs and finding notes along the way. You start with a map that’s a blank slate, and locations show up on the map and can be fast-traveled once they’re discovered. In theory, I kind of like this approach. Instead of being hand-held and guided along, it encourages exploration and discovery.
But in actual practice, at least with this mod, it was pretty frustrating. I think this mod really needed a better gameplay designer. Basic gameplay is talking to various NPCs that give you clues, but you have no interaction with them. They’re basically just ‘info kiosks’. So there’s no RPG element whatsoever, no real choices. It’s just a big puzzle. The other way to get clues is by finding notes, that have keys next to them. The note tells you the name of the place that the key opens. And the place (like a cabin in the woods) that the key opens leads to another note and another key to something else. So it’s like a treasure hunt game. There’s a bunker that, once I got a key to the door, there’s another door. Then I get a key to the 2nd door, and there’s a third door! So, third time’s the charm, right? No, there’s a fourth door 
And the thing is, some of these keys are aptly-named, like ‘Joe’s Cabin key’, but others are randomly named, like ‘Gnome Key #3’. So if a door says ‘Needs Gnome Key #3 to open’ you have to remember that when you finally find ‘Gnome Key #3’. If I had known this, I think I would have created a separate spreadsheet of places and key names to keep track of it all. I finally gave up on this mod maybe 7/8 into it. It was just too confounding.
The fighting is pretty lame, at least as far as I got. Enemies are just random roaming ghouls that are easy to kill.
Fusion City Rising
Another DLC-sized quest mod, and this one has a lot going on. Several locations-- Fusion City itself, Fusion City University, and Club Fusion. Many and varied quests to solve. Some pretty challenging battles. And a very detailed storyline involving corruption and blackmail, referencing several FO4 characters. Very steeped in the lore. I’m not exaggerating when I say if you scraped all the expository text from all the terminals I read, it would be a novelette. The mod writer is clearly a huge Fallout nerd (in a good way!). This mod was a lot of fun, and I’d highly recommend it.
I think this is supposed to be an ‘R-rated’ mod-- a lot of the expository text contains sexual references (usually involving the aforementioned blackmail) and several of the female NPCs are very skimpily dressed, wearing teeny tiny thong bikinis. A weird thing about the NPC females in the thong bikinis I noticed was that the skin they were showing was a patchwork of different colors, as if a ‘bride of Frankenstein’ had been stitched together from different skin shades. I was wondering what the heck was going on with that-- were they mutations? Were those NPCs supposed to be damaged humanoid synths? Then I dressed Piper with one of the thong bikinis I had picked up, just for giggles, and she adopted the same patchwork flesh thing. So I’m guessing the game has some sort of algorithm that prevents NPCs from showing too much skin, and the patchwork effect was a work-around.
It’s amusing how these mod writers mix in little favorite refs and Easter eggs to other things they like-- this writer was clearly a big fan of the movie ‘Office Space’-- at one point (taking out Ini-Tec, a Blackwater-style security force who functioned as the ‘big bad’ faction) there were boxes of TPS reports everywhere, and a loudspeaker voice-over imitating the office manager guy repeatedly saying stuff like ‘mmmkay, gonna have to ask you to die now’.
Toward the end of the quest you get a funny ‘dance gun’ weapon-- perfectly harmless, except any humanoid you shoot will put their hands in the air and shake it like they just don’t care. And it goes on for a long time-- I didn’t time it, but more than just a few seconds. It will totally incapacitate an enemy-- they will stop shooting and just start gettin’ down. You can literally walk right up to them and take them out without a fight. I had fun wandering around and trying the gun on different things. Animals? No. Have yet to try on a Deathclaw. Supermutants? Yes! Seeing a dancing supermutant was pretty amusing. Robots? No (at least, not Ada; haven’t tried a Protectron). Humanoid synths? Yes! Haven’t tried it on a robotic synth though, like Nick Valentine.
Misery Island
Another big, ambitious DLC-sized quest mod. Nice looking mod, lots of things to do, interesting storyline, a series of challenging pitched battles. Just a really, really well-designed quest mod. Gameplay-wise it feels a lot like the original game; also in the details and little lore-friendly touches. And this mod writer adds his own little Easter eggs, like a scenario (that already happened, not actual gameplay) straight out of the movie ‘Saw’. I’m not going to write too much more about this, partly because I haven’t finished it yet, though I think I’m 90% done, but also because this thread is getting way too long and I have to do other stuff. But highly, highly recommended, and I’m going to miss this mod when it’s done. I think I heard that this is one of a series of quest mods from this mod writer though, so I will definitely seek out more of them.
It’s very possible (I’m not familiar with that mod) that they used “cut” dialog that’s still in the game. There’s a lot of partially coded stuff, including lines that can be found in the code, for questlines that were cut for time, length, or otherwise abandoned.
I did that one, and didn’t get as far as you. Sure, I don’t need quite as much handholding, but I also didn’t want to get a Master’s in Psychology to try to immerse myself in the creator’s POV to figure out what they intend and where.
I’ve done Fusion rising, and a few of the other works by the creator. Yes, it’s very well done, yes it’s VERY “R” rated, and that did distract me a bit. The color issues you’re experiencing is probably because it is built around one or more of the custom body mods (CBBE is the oldest/most famous) which you may or may not have installed/configured properly.
Yeah, Fallout Vermont, woah was that frustrating. I got to the point where I had gone just about everywhere I could and wasn’t finding any new locations to discover, and I was still missing several keys. When I finally opened door #3 of one of the bunkers and there was a fourth door, I think that was the final straw that broke me. And what was up with the ammo set up everywhere as individual bullets? Put it in a damn box or ammo crate fergodsake, like everybody else! Picking up dozens of single bullets is not fun gameplay.
Thanks! Now that you mention it, I think the mod notes did mention that installing CBBE or something similar improved the experience. Maybe I’ll try that tonight.
Good to know. I’ll take a look for those other mods. And if you ever get back into FO4 quest mods, for old time’s sake or whatever, I highly recommend Misery Island. Besides Fourville, it may be the best quest mod I’ve played yet.
I am soooo behind on my games that it’ll be a while yet. But yes. Eventually I’ll be back to the Wasteland!
Cool. Stop by Sanctuary if you’re in the neighborhood— I’ll keep a bottle of Bobrov’s Best on hand.
How’s your Outer Worlds gaming going? Have you started OW2 yet or are you still on your 100% run- thru of OW1?
OW1 is done, though I finally forced myself to fast track it rather than going down endless rabbit holes.
OW2 is waiting until post Hanukamas, when I install my new intel ARC B580 to replace my aged AMD Radeon RX 6600. Start it fresh with the improved performance. Yeah, not super amazing, but a good value, and since I’m a 1440 gamer, should be right sized for my system and monitor.
Sounds like the designer has been spending too much time in 76.
I have not ventured into FO76, or any other multiplayer for that matter. I’ve heard poor to mixed reviews of it. How does a multiplayer Fallout work-- are there NPCs in addition to real player characters? Are there structured quests, or do you team up with others and make your own adventures? Are you constantly getting frustrated by other player characters yoinking all the good loot, or cleaning vendors out of all the good ammo before you can get to it?
I have never understood the hatred FO4 got. It’s at least as good as New Vegas.
Ranking the games is hard, but I’d rank all the Fallouts like this:
But all are good. That’s the thing. For me, it would be like ranking the three Lord of the Rings movies. Uh, I can but all are good.
I’ve not done very much with 76 myself; just didn’t grab me, even after updates. Good thing I waited for a steep discount!
Yep. However, there were no NPC quest givers at first, only kiosks, which prompted my comment.
This. Some of which are issued by instanced NPCs; took 'em a while to add those.
Last time I played was long before the fishing update, though, so I don’t know if a quest builder was added.
Hardly ever saw anyone else away from the Vault. Only remember one player in power armor who ran past me while I was trying to do an annoying military obstacle course quest. Issued by a computer terminal.
Don’t recall encountering vendors.
Question: is that a common term, calling NPCs that only give info, not quests, and can’t be interacted with “information kiosks”?
I thought I had invented the term to describe the 'Fallout Vermont" NPCs in my earlier post upthread, but after I had posted that, I was back in the Fusion City Rising quest mod and one of the NPCs said to me, without my even trying to talk to it “What do I look like- an information kiosk?”.
No clue. Your use of the term reminded me of the early days in 76, in which quests and info were only obtained from holotapes, terminals, notes, and the occasional robot.
Ah, so you took my term and ran with it. The Fusion City NPC saying that to me must have been just an odd coincidence, then.