Fallout 4

I seem to be locked out of completing the quest "The Lost Patrol". Damn game. I did things maybe not in the proper order. But I had to put the Lost Patrol on the back burner to get my level higher to deal with Super Mutants. Which involved moving the main quest to a certain point that changes some things with a certain faction. Maybe I can complete it later if I remove the quest giver as my companion.

And Yes I am working for those guys. I'm just glad I'm not forced to work for them as in Fallout 3. The problem at least for me, is with the lack of dialogue and background info in this game. Maybe they assume you played Fallout 3. But seriously, why should I follow this faction? They give me no reason to other than to say there is a dire threat to the wasteland and they are here to stop it. At one point in the quest line I didn't even have the option to refuse being in their organization (although I suppose I could shoot them). I was forced to agree to their plan for the Commonwealth. Very well. I would have liked it if their leaders really told me what their faction is all about, and convinced me to join their organization.

And very annoying being in the castle trying to get into the armory and overhearing the radio and having quests added to my quest log. I'm trying to avoid having my quest log fill up with radiant quests. I hate radiant quests with a passion. It's the reason we have silly respawning loot (explain how all this pre-war junk magically appears again- it was manufactured before the war). I'm one of those people who are anal about completing quests in my quest logs. So now I have at least 2 radiant quests I have to complete.

edit: Can someone explain how mines work in this game? Sometimes my character can see them, and they don't seem to go off, and I can easily disarm them. Other times I can't see them and they go off maiming me. Is it a perception check or something? And sometimes when I reload and go into the same area, the mine doesn't go off. I don't understand this system.

What I hate - in addition to other 100 things ever present in Bethesda sandbox - is the whole building / crafting / sustaining of settlements. It's not that it breaks immersion for me or anything, it rapes it to death. Clunky, ugly, ridiculous. Implementation BAD. Why I find it worth mentioning? Because it's new.

1. Starting from beginning, the whole introduction, the idea of the quest is... well Bethesda level. "Oh look this guy / gal just massacred whole gang of raiders and a deathclaw as a bonus. She / he is obviously death incarnated. How about you plant food and get water for us and while you're at it, build us some beds will you? That's obviously the role for you! Why can't we do it ourselves? We have our hands full! We gotta sit there and stand over there, walk around aimlessly a bit. You know the usual. I thought you wanted to help?!"

*Sigh... alright, let me brake down the whole freaking village to it's foundation.

2. If I'm the God of creation, why is that I a damn bed or sofa I'm building from scratch can't look new? Why are they all dirty, burned and covered in piss? Everything is burned, dirty and covered in piss on raw material level? Post-apocalyptic to its very atom (lol)?

3. Waving around objects trying to get it green and "clip" in first person... Ugh...

Here's an idea how they could implement it:

It could be a separate "mode". Like you could come to a certain village to the workstation (or via the main menu) and the game would take you out of "THE GAME" to the "BUILD MODE", pausing "THE GAME". Then proceeding to build with a proper RTS camera view with proper zoom levels and overall in peace.

All that implying that it's actually the village whole doing the building and crafting, villagers acting as your resources. The more villagers, the more you can do. This "build mode" also having a proper menu with all villagers listed, their assignments, available assignments and available resources, as in what you can build with current number of villagers. Possibly being able to assign them to their beds / homes and equipping with gear.

All that effectively creates a nice additional game with impact on "THE GAME" without polluting "THE GAME". Current building mechanic feels like some kind of "developer console command mode" or something and takes me "out of the game" in a totally wrong way. Obviously IMO, some... probably many prefer the current mechanic and would beat me with sticks for the idea. Now the weapon / armor / etc. I like the way it is.

Disgustipated: You mean the gentlemen in big suits who had a ghoul problem? I said no right after we cleared certain facility (the one with damn elevators). So I don't entirely understand how you had no opportunity to say no?

Mines change their position or disappear altogether upon reload.

Disgustipated: You mean the gentlemen in big suits who had a ghoul problem? I said no right after we cleared certain facility (the one with damn elevators). So I don't entirely understand how you had no opportunity to say no?

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Well even though I feel their philosophy is flawed (which New Vegas really showed), I still wanted to join them. Because I can be a completionist in these games. The point where I couldn't say no was aboard their special "base". Although I didn't realize you could just easily fast travel out of there. I was thinking I would be stuck up there if I decided to kill everyone. Jumping off from that "base" isn't very pleasant LOL.


So it seems there is no level cap in this game. I was planning on getting to 50 and finishing things off. Unless I'm wrong, no perks actually have a requirement over level 50, right? So any point in exceeding level 50? I suppose you could fill in more points in SPECIAL stats and back fill in perks you missed. But that really would make your character good at everything, and limits replay. At least that's how it seems. I haven't gotten that high yet. It may require too much xp anyways.

Errant Signal just released his review of Fallout 4:

Link to video.

Not a particularly controversial opinion, all in all but I still thought he laid things out quite poignantly.

I think the biggest disappointments I've had with FO4 so far is how samey playstyle is in it compared to FO 1 or 2. Sips did a FO1 playthrough about 6 months back in which he decided to play as Mike Tyson, the 1-INT max strength bruiser who wanders around punching things with his brass knuckles. As anybody who has played FO1 knows this is perhaps the single worst archetype you could possibly play. Melee gets wrecked in the lategame when everyone has chainguns, lasers, and power armor, and with no intelligence, he's locked out of nearly every quest in the game. But the wonderful thing about the playthrough is he stuck with it and made it work. It wasn't easy and he probably used every mentat in the game, but that build was technically viable.

Errant Signal talks about this in his video. You don't really have "weaknesses" per se in FO4. Just things you aren't particularly good at YET. The thing that I really loved about FO1 was that everything was theoretically serviceable and the game told you nothing. Sips had no idea when he started that putting his character at below 2-INT locked him out of 95% of all dialogue options. Not just the "coerce/bribe/charm options". Every dialogue option in the game. There was no hand-holding to let him know that he essentially turned the game up to the highest difficulty. Compounded with this is the game lets you play out your terrible decisions. For example FO4 could have FO1's low-intelligence garble text. But it would probably view permanently locking you out of dialogue options as unfair and therefore would give you a chance to fix this and go back and do any quests you might have missed. FO1 for its part does give you the option of fixing your intelligence. But it's late in the game and costs a butt-ton of money. Not only that, but with many NPCs (including vital mainquest NPCs) it's possible that you talked to them as an idiot too much and now they hate you and no matter what you do they will NEVER talk to you again. That sense of permanence is interesting. That you can irreparably break the game and put yourself in a no-win scenario adds weight to any and every choice you make. You have to think about everything you do; no only that you have to think about everything you don't do.

One of the most memorable aspects of that playthrough was when Sips befriended Dogmeat. He has a real way of humanizing NPCs in his Let's Plays and this was certainly true of Dogmeat. You watched him make his way through the world of FO and gradually become more and more attached to this dog companion. And then one day he finally hit a wall where he couldn't get through an encounter because melee is terrible in the lategame. And in this encounter dogmeat died. Not like in FO4 (or Skyrim) where your companion sits on the ground with 1 HP. Dead. Dead and gone. He must have reloaded that save like 10 or 15 times trying to find a possible solution where he gets out alive and dogmeat survives. There was none. Watching Sips go through the 5 stages of grief before finally accepting that Dogmeat was dead and there's no bringing him back was both heartbreaking and the absolute highlight of that series.

Which is something Campster touches on briefly but I don't think really talks about. It's something definitely feel is relevant to his point. This sense of permanence and consequence to action is what really gives you that sense of FO as a ROLEPLAYING game rather than FO4 as a playerplaying game. Companions die. ANd you can't bring them back. You can kill key quest givers and NEVER get those quests. Even with mainquests. You can bring the game into a state where it is impossible for you to beat the game because you killed a key NPC and the game NEVER TELLS YOU YOU HAVE DONE THIS. In Sips' playthrough his character was too stupid to ask anybody anything about the water chip, and only succeeded in that quest (the main quest in the game which GAMES OVER if you fail to complete in 250 days [or whatever it is]) because he wandered around the wastes and stumbled upon the vault by complete accident, and without even realizing he had done it.

tl;dr a good RPG effectively hides the mechanics of its game from the player, which creates a sense of immersion. This game (much like Skyrim before it) has too much handholding (which by its nature lays bare all the inner-workings of the game) and it kind of ruins any attempt to get immersed in the game or otherwise inhabit the role you've created for your character.

I have to agree about the hand holding. But like it or not, that's a major feature in games now days. Dragon Age games have become the same way. The Witcher games had a little more difficulty to them, but the third game seems impossible to mess up.

I'm not sure I'd call that true role playing though. That's more of a game mechanic. The original X-com had the same thing with permanent death, and that's not a RPG. That was the norm in the 90's. I haven't watched the review yet, but it seems most of what he's talking about is game difficulty. But it's good he got so attached to dogmeat. I was upset when Puppy died in Wasteland 2 in the final battle of the game. I kept him alive all the way to the end. It isn't easy since melee attack NPC's can be pretty dumb in that game, and charge into a group of 5 or more enemies. Puppy will be remembered.

Role play to me is to have options. Options to be the kind of person you want to be. And the reviewer is very right that Fallout 1 and 2 had those options. I felt pretty happy with Role play in New Vegas as well. I liked having the ability to shape what happens to the Mojave desert region. This may actually be in Fallout 4. I do believe near the end you will get a chance to support one of the factions. There is small amounts of role play in Fallout 4. And I do like the Diamond City Blues quest because there are consequences to your actions in that quest. Unfortunately, that's the only quest in the game I seen like that. Maybe I'll find more, we'll see. Fallout 4 is more of an open sandbox game full of first person combat and exploration with some light role playing elements. The game is damn addicting, and I find myself wanting to play it. So I'd say they done a good job. But the role playing options (especially in dialogue) are limited.

It will never have the unique qualities of older Fallouts. And I know people miss that and are nostalgic about that, but there's nothing we can do. Bethesda simply does not have the story telling quality that Black Isle had. It's beyond their abilities to make a game like that. We have to accept the game is now theirs to do as they choose. We can choose to play the game or not. Ideally I'd like to see them contract out unofficial Fallout titles to Obsidian again, and keep the official Fallout numbered titles their own. Best of both worlds. But I doubt that will happen.

I was going to watch Campster's latest video when it popped up in my subscription feed, but I haven't finished the game yet, so I've held off for fear of spoilers.

LOL. I watched the video, just wanted to add a couple of things. First off all beware some people, there look to be spoilers in that video. I'm trying to pretend I didn't see some of those things. Maybe they aren't what I think they are. I think I can forget about those. Edit: Oh, I just noticed spoilers was in the title. I guess I can't criticize people for their reading ability any more.

That was actually very timely of you to post that video review of yours right after my question of having no level cap in this game. He makes a really good point that you can become god like in everything in this game. There are no sacrifices to make in this game. If you wanted, you could specialize in every weapon (although I choose not to play the game this way).

I agree with him on dialogue. It is insulting to their audience. "Let's not make them read too much, or we'll scare them away". That's what I was trying to get at a few pages ago.

He makes a good point about the game shifting away from a player character, to doing what you want to do in the game.

And LOL at the dialogue conversation in the middle of an intense battle. That hasn't happened to me yet.

And my favorite quote of the game so far is in his video. "Listen dumb***, that's not how baseball is played". Of course for me, after I said that, I chose the option to tell him baseball was even more violent than that. One of the better dialogues in the game. Unfortunately there are so few dialogues like that.

EDIT: One Question. I think I know the answer, but do the SPECIAL stats even do anything in this game other than open up perks? Does having higher agility make you sneak better? Does higher strength make you hit harder? SPECIAL stats don't seem to do anything other than open up perks.

My favorite NPC is the noodle protectron in Diamond city. Most colorful and rich character.

No I wouldn't say permanent death in of itself makes an RPG but permanent death in a customizable game like FO enables you to better embody your character, the role you have staked out for yourself. It makes it feel like the choices you make are genuine and impactful. When this is coupled with a dialogue system that isn't straightforward, and a general approach to game design that shies away from telling you what to do and what will happen when you do x you start to think less in player terms (if I do x then my faction/good points/renegade points/whatever will go down and then I won't get to do y) and more in roleplaying terms. You start to see your companion less as some faceless NPC named Saddlebags McBodyshield and more as an actual COMPANION that you want to keep around and have accompany you on your journey.

Plus I mean the fragility of life is usually a big theme in Postapocalyptic/Zombie games, so I feel like having a world where you can lose companions fairly easily if you don't pay attention (or even if you do pay attention you can lose them on some stupid chance) makes for a more thematically impactful game.

1) hate newspapers

I didn't realize the videos at the beginning were different each time. I've been skipping them. Just watched the Intelligence video. I like those little videos before the game starts.

And does money do anything in this game? Other than buying bullets, I haven't found a need for caps.

I did find an answer to my earlier question here:
http://www.windowscentral.com/special-fallout-4-character-stats-builds-and-perks-list
so maybe I do have an incentive to max out some stats. I still need to find many bobbleheads as well...

Well since there's no other good way to spend caps, I buy all the special versions of weapons that are available from different merchants. Maxed out special something will be always better than maxed out ordinary version of that weapon. "Legendary" items from "legendary" enemies were mostly crap or meh.

I only found myself once without essential ammo. First 14 or so levels I was mostly using .308 and 10mm and when I suddenly run out right before not so fun battle with a bunch of ghouls attacking certain police station, I had to improvise A LOT. Got addicted to all kinds of chems in that battle. What I'm constantly running out of is laser rifle ammo and it's ridiculously expensive to buy from merchants.

Disgustipated said:

It will never have the unique qualities of older Fallouts. And I know people miss that and are nostalgic about that, but there's nothing we can do. Bethesda simply does not have the story telling quality that Black Isle had. It's beyond their abilities to make a game like that.

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Mmmmmmmm pretty close. There's really two things at play here. First, Bethesda's current writing staff are not even close to being up to the task. This means you are technically correct that it's "beyond their abilities to make a game like that", but it's not like the CAN'T do it, they would just need to hire new writers who know what the hell they're doing. Not exactly an insurmountable obstacle.

But the second problem is their design philosophy, and that's not so easy to replace. As both you and Owen have pointed out in your own ways, Bethesda's current design philosophy is to try and be everything to everyone. Your character has to be able to do everything in the game, because everyone knows that modern gamers don't have the attention span to play a game more than once. This has been their philosophy at least as far back as Oblivion and arguably even Morrowind... it at least had token requirements to join and advance in guilds, those requirements tended to be pretty easy to meet, but it took some effort at least, unlike Skyrim where a dude in heavy armor with a Sneak skill of 5 can easily become head of the Thieves Guild. You can't let players kill important characters, because that would lock people out of content. You can't let companions die permanently, because permanent consequences make sad panda sad (and a more cynical person would say it also exposes their terrible companion AI to harsher criticism, although I haven't played FO4 to know if that is improved yet). This is why I expect both FO and TES games to continue being less and less RPG like as time goes on. Bad writers can be replaced if Bethesda decided to invest in it. This "no mistakes can ever be permanent" design philosophy is the real cancer and I don't see it getting cured easily or soon.

Ugh, more bugginess. It seems that if a NPC is used for more than one quest, and you are in the middle of one quest, the other quest won't be able to progress. I'm mainly talking about a female NPC in The Memory Den. I think I can get past this by advancing the main quest, which I didn't want to do. But that should free her up to do the secondary quest- The Silver Shroud.

I had a similar problem with Paladin Danse. Although in that case, him becoming your companion makes you unable to complete a quest.

Hmm, so I bought it, tried it, can't say I like it. Maybe I should have expected it, being Bethesda, but the engine is too old and poorly optimized for me.

Choppy framerate means aiming down the iron sights is a pain in the ass. Movement frequently means bumping into things or overshooting stuff. Graphics quality is fine, but nothing to justify the taxation on my fps. I did turn godrays to low and shadow distance to medium before I even launched it. Didn't help.

Combat was just a real pain since I couldn't do anything smoothly. Did I mention I have a FreeSync monitor to take care of fps instability? Still no help. Requested a refund, maybe I'll try it again in 2016 winter sale.

Mustakrakish said:

And that is relevant how exactly?

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Because you said :

Mustakrakish said:

What I mean is they take a very safe approach with their 2 giants, TES and FO. They improve them a bit everytime, very minor and all in all not that memorable changes. They never do anything truly crazy or revolutionary (but very much like to market those little tiny changes as "revolutionary" pre-release).

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As if FO was a long-standing Bethesda giant and they always went the safe way with it.
Despite Fallout not being a Bethesda franchise to begin with, FO3 being a stark change (2D isometric turn-based to 3D real-time action-based) and FO4 finishing to change Fallout from a RPG to an action shooter.
That's pretty big changes from where I'm standing.

Oh and BTW despite NV being made by Obsidian (or Osbidian or whatever) I still consider it being the same, same crappy engine, slightly better characters, slight unmemorable changes here and there, same crappy game.

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If you consider NV unmemorably similar just because it uses the same engine...

What can I say ?

I do have to give the dialogue system a failing grade upon further reflection. My score is F. NPC's not being able to handle more than 1 quest at once is another example of backwards technology I referred to several pages ago (along with not being able to name your save games). This is something you'd see in an 80's video game. And here it is 2015, and your interactions with NPC's are horribly locked into 4 choices with no ability of the game engine to improvise.

I may as well give my informal review. I know I'm only around halfway done with the game, but unless things change drastically (although I hear the main quest gets more cinematic and dramatic), this will be my feelings for the entire game.

Gameplay: A+ All these complaints about an aging engine? Are graphics everything people care about? The graphics are fine. No frame rate issues that I know of (I don't have a frame rate monitor). I am running a Geforce GTX 970, but the rest of my computer is 7 year old technology that I haven't upgraded.

Combat: in the past I've rated this separately. But it really does tie in to my gameplay score this time mainly because this game is like 95% combat LOL. A+ Okay I'm dramatizing the 95% combat. More like 60% combat, 30% fumbling around in your inventory, 9% messing around with settlements, and 1% dialogue. I only pause killing people to pick up those precious desk fans for their precious screws. Need more screws...

Graphics: A As mentioned above they aren't that important to me. I think they are damn impressive. Like when I looked over the little bridge over the stream in the beginning of the game when the world still looked pretty, it looked really good. Although you'd think there would be more trees growing 200 years after the bombs fell. They could make the game prettier, but that's the artistic choice they made.

Sound: B+ I'm mainly referring to sound effects, I have a separate category for music. Nothing really stands out, but I do love the sound of my sniper rifle, nice and loud. Can't give it an A though, there isn't that much attention to detail

Music: B Music has always been the weakest part of Fallout game. They were always designed with atmospheric type music. I'm also including radio station music in this score, which brings it up. The classical music station is awesome. Killing baddies with a beautiful classical piece running in the background is very sublime. The other radio station has some pretty good tunes as well. As well as classics like Maybe and I don't want to Set the World On Fire. I'd listen to the Minuteman radio station more if I wasn't afraid it would give me more quests. But the music on that station seemed really cool too.

Role Play. D I'm giving it a solid D. You do have freedom to do many things in this game. But Dialogue system really brings down this score. Yes I am scoring dialogue separately, but it also ties into the role play. Quests don't offer enough choices for multiple ways of completion (with only one exception I've found so far). Violence is always the answer in this game. You can role play the different ways of killing someone I suppose. Although I did find one other quest that has a little bit of variation, that is Silver Shroud. Along with Diamond City Blues I mentioned above. Too few and far between for me. Perhaps the main quest will pick this score up later, we'll see.

Dialogue: F As mentioned above. It's currently broken as far as I'm concerned. The new dialogue system prevents an NPC from being able to help you with another quest if that NPC's dialogue is "LOCKED" into another quest already. Even worse, the dialogue lacks humor except in rare cases such as the Swatter guy. The sarcastic responses are usually very bad, although much of this blame lies with the voice actor. Funny sarcasm isn't easy to pull off, they'd have to get David Spade as a voice actor.

Characters: B There are some memorable characters, and some are funny such as the swatter guy. But the lack of dialogue and deep, meaningful conversations is a drag. But they did at least try with your companions, and you can get into some deeper conversations with your companions as they start to trust you. But it still seems a little shallow. I give them props for a much better companion system than their past games (although not nearly as good as New Vegas).

Stability/bugs: B- Only one crash to desktop for me. There are other bugs such as the dialogue bug mentioned above. I also have weird issues with subtitles occasionally, and often the lip syncing during dialogue is messed up. I'm not the best at spotting bugs, that's all that really stood out to me so far.

Interface: D+ Better than past games, and better than New Vegas as well. Not being able to name save games I'm always going to criticize, there's no excuse for such shoddiness. Especially since your auto saves and hard saves look exactly the same. Good luck finding a save from 10 or 20 hours ago.

10 categories averaged out comes out to 81.4 B- I usually have a category for story/plot, but it's not fair to rate that yet.

Come on. While landscape, vegetation, light effect and such are nicely represented characters are mediocre at best and faces are simply horrible.

So after reading this thread too much I broke down and got the game yesterday, clocked a good 4 hours into it. Early impressions are that I'm glad I waited a bit, being able to read other people talk about the game set the right expectation so I knew what I was getting.

Pros: Combat is fun, guns feel satisfying to use. The new perk system seems pretty cool, I still miss skills but the perk tree is easy to understand and offers a lot of choice on how to play your character right from the beginning. Modifying weapons is really cool and combined with the settlement system makes looting more interesting than ever. But...

Cons: Settlement system has a very crappy interface, so much so that I've given up on it after 10 minutes. I tried to build a proper settlement at Sanctuary but the interface is so bad that I gave up and just started plopping food, water pumps, generators, and turrets wherever, no organization or planning. I am going to have ugly settlements because I can't be bothered trying to fiddle with this mess. Dialogue is bad, but everyone knows that already. I can't comment on the main plot obviously as I've only just left Sanctuary but the beginning of the game was too rushed to leave any emotional impact on me. It also didn't leave any emotional impact on my character, apparently, because I'm playing the wife and most of her dialogue about what happened is delivered in a flat monotone. Codsworth has more emotion. I'm tempted to restart the game and play as the husband instead because the female lead's voice actress is not working for me at all, she's just flat.

The settlement interface is probably my major complaint...It's like the developers were really lazy and barely made any effort to implement it. I don't like the clipping of objects, you put a floor tile and the plants or debris under it are still visible...I would have made some sort of overhead view instead, like a Sims style design interface...

This and the dialogue system are bad because they are made for consoles....Sadly we PC gamers pay the price...I hate when this happens...Companies are catering more and more to consoles and mobiles instead of making a God-damn proper game for PC, with a decent user interface, no locking up FPS or lack of graphics settings...They ruin franchises to cater to casuals and newcomers by dumbing down the skills system as well... I understand the financial gain from doing this, but it' still really disappointing to see games that originally started on PC to go down this path...