Fallout 4

They seem to be paying attention…

I fired this game up again and is it just me or is the start of this game just …very punitive, difficulty wise. Like the first 10 lvls or so. Mainly centering around a Minuteman quest to take a factory. Might just be my gameplay style but I don’t recall having issues in the other Fallouts.

P.S. Also stealth seems to suck and doesn’t work well at all. I guess you’re meant to find and collet Covert Ops mags to raise your hidden un-detection stat which is a horrible design…
P.P.S. Pipe weapons are literally garbage and I hate their very existence

The factory is tough, though there are several ways to reduce the difficulty through careful use of, well, overwhelming force and cheesy gameplay tricks IIRC. Stealth is weak early but later on becomes IMO very OP. You can build a VATS-focused hyper-specialized stealth killer who can initiate combat, hit VATS, and wipe out an entire screen of bad guys in the blink of an eye. This becomes even more trivial with any of the modern weapon mods, but even vanilla it’s effective. And of course once you get a good sniper rifle, long-range clearing of whole areas isn’t much of a feat. Again, this is my recollection from many hours of play a long time ago.

But pipe weapons do suck. The only thing I used them for, once I had anything better, was for chewing through .38 ammo with auto pistols or rifles for clearing out trash mobs.

I already know by end game it’s a cakewalk as the difficulty curve completely collapses. Just the opening 10-15 levels are pretty difficult relative to the others. I was sort of taken aback.

And I forgot how the main quest instantly sends you to Diamond city. I guess they wanted you to either A) use the power armor as a crutch, or B) Do base building activities or something.

Isn’t it more that the main quest points you towards Diamond City? I always get side tracked with tons of other things before getting there.

Yes, but I guess outside of exploring, it’s just Minutemen all the way down which leads to some hard stuff. Just wondering, again, the early first 10-15 levels what people did to progress?

Do you follow along and just endure that horrible factory? Basically this game has one of the roughest starts depending on how you level your character and progress. It’s all water under the bridge later.

It’s not even a crutch, the entire game is designed on the assumption that you have the power armor and are using it. Higher difficulty levels are simply impassable early game if you do anything else.

Well if that is the case then no fucking wonder. I sort of prefer not having to use power armor at such low levels but I guess Bethesda had other ideas.

You can chalk this up to “not playing the game right”. I now think Fallout 4 is a lot worse than before…

Me too. I ended up being able to adjust and still enjoy the game, but I regard it as the weakest of the Bethesda Fallout games for this and other reasons (settlements, ugh).

How this game handled power armor is definitely one of my big knocks against it. I liked it as high end late game gear that worked like any other armor. Having it be like, a vehicle you get into and runs on power cells but that you have from 15 minutes into the game and is balanced around using it? No, thank you. my current Wabbajacked playthrough I messed with it for a little bit of the early game and then ditched it and haven’t really looked back. (Though partly that’s because one of the mods installed does visors for the various helmet types that massively restrict your field of view and make it very unpleasant to play the game. I think there’s a way to turn it off but I can’t remember what it is.)

Or C) ignore the main quest until like level 50. That’s what I do for every run after the first…

I would push back against that to say what did you even do? The call to action is pretty limited and towards the Minutemen which can end up sending you on suicide quests early level.

Yup. In my vanilla survival playthrough (the new survival, not the release one) I did it at level 10-12, and it was hell. Me being a full melee build of course contributed to this. But as is normal with Bethesda games, even modded, at some point the difficulty cliff curve reverses. By the end I was a terminator, teleporting and one-two shotting everything with a knife. It was ridiculous, but also very satisfying.

I never use the power armor except when you first find it to kill the beast in the street. After that I don’t touch it.

I usually explore to the west end early on, and die often.

I also ignore the minuteman stuff until later.

Admittedly, I was modding some stuff, after the first few runs, but even before that I just wandered around, gaining levels, getting gear, exploring. I’m pretty good at this sort of game–non-PvP, open world, FPS style–and have been playing Fallout in all its varieties since day one, so I have always found them pretty doable.

Personally, I always just walked past Concord like, “Whoa, there’s a battle going on over there! Better stick to this side road and get outta here.” Then i hit the diner, find out about Diamond City, and continue on. Along the way i can hear the BoS call and go help them and get sidetracked, or there’s any number of things to do to not deal with fucking Preston Garvey and his band of idiots.

Yeah - you don’t have to use Power Armor the entire game. I used it twice (sort of) - at the beginning in Concord to get rid of the Deathclaw, and whenever I visited the Glowing Sea (thus the ‘sort of’ twice). Outside of that, didn’t bother.

The worst thing about power armor for me was when you use it to go under water…and can’t climb out.

Yeah, I hated what they did with power armor. Introducing it early, making it take batteries, and like every raider camp had one dude in power armor. There is much to dislike about Fallout 4. I have no idea when the next fallout game is going to come out, but I hope its much closer to New Vegas or Fallout 3 rather than Fallout 4.

OTOH, the game world is great, and in the many playthroughs I did I always was finding something new each time.