2816

Pick both. Half of the perks are worthless or uninteresting, in any case.

2817

I agree with this. I am using both, if you dont do the settlements combat seems the way to go.

I seem to be playing this more as an FPS explorer game with modding weapons and armor

2818

It’s also my opinion you can ignore all the VATS related perks. The shooting is good enough as to prefer doing it myself instead of using VATS (in fact I can do more headshots than with the % chance). And the ones that give you money or extra shit (in charisma and luck) as you don’t really need it if you go for serious looting.

Meanwhile in PA

i-zntqm8q-1050x10000.jpg1050×526

2819

A couple comments on FO4 damage resistance. First, there is a very good write up on it on the wiki here. The main point of the write up is that once your DR is > greater than the damage potential of the weapon there is a fairly rapid diminishing returns.

A 20 point auto weapon being shot at guy with 100 DR deals 5.5 damage vs 2.2 somebody in Power armor with a 1000 DR.
A 200 point sniper gun does 130 points against a 100 DR, but only 55 damage against a 1000 DR. So if your rate of fire is high enough the automatic maybe a better weapon even against highly armored target. You add armor piercing recievers and I think the auto weapons would do very well.

Ammo consumption clearly is a problem for the higher end guns, although maybe at the end you find or can buy large quantities of 5/5.62 MM ammo, I am not sure.

For the final two ranks of commando, rifleman, and gunslinger I think what is most important is the exta effects. Commando gives you an increasing chance to stagger your opponents given the quantities of bullets you are putting up I think this would be devestating. Gunslingers ability to disarm, would be almost as effective, while extra limb damage including crippling of a limb for rifleman i think is the least effective.

So do a large extent I guess it matters how effective these perk are in the game, and not having reach those levels I don’t know yet.

I do know that sniper perk of knocking opponents down is really great, not so much with a real sniper rifle but rather with something with a decent rate of fire like a combat rifle, for medium to short ranges, or even a scoped pipe gun at long ranges. The sniper perk synergizes very nicely with the rifleman line.

2820

Is there a way to find certain items quickly in a huge list? IE: Store all junk, and now I want to get my pre-war money back without scrolling forever through my settlement’s junk inventory.

Does anyone have experience with jump jets and power armor? I would need to invents a lot of perks to get the tec to build them and before I go through all that trouble, I would like to know how high you can jump. If the max is something like jumping on the roof of a single story building, then they are not worth it.

2821

You hit the nail on the head. You can jump from the base of the castle and just make it over the crest of the wall with a jet pack. I’ve enjoyed playing with my power armor perks, but in hindsight they aren’t really needed. A fully upgraded set of X-01 armor will pretty much allow you to stand at ground zero of the next strike and not be killed. It’s over the top ridiculously safe in there. Hence I hardly ever wear my suit anymore, unless I’m feeling the need to go postal on some raiders for the fun of it.

2822

It is true that the game is pretty stable, but i’m talking about actual bugs.

For example, one of my settlements randomly loses power for absolutely no reason when i am not at it. If i’m at it, it is fine and has power, but the second i leave, it has 0 power and loses the defense from powered defenses.

Then pretty frequently placed food resources become unselectable and i can’t interact with them anymore, ever.

There are cases where npcs give the wrong response. A placed storekeeper will sometimes (often) give you a generic settler response instead of the store response. A quest npc will sometimes give you a generic response instead of progressing the quest.

There are cases where i’ve been micro teleported, kind of like if you’re really lagging in a mmorpg and it rubberbands you. Basically i’m just walking along and i end up a few car’s length in a random direction.

Certain quests to recruit settlements regenerate. IE i’ve done the same quest to recruit one specific settlement four times now. This might actually be (bad) design instead of a bug though, but the quest text makes it sound like i’m recruiting them for the first time.

Note that these are all things i’ve personally encountered, but all of them except the strange rubber banding i’ve seen reported by others as well.

Obviously if you’re playing this on the PC, you aren’t happy that Bethesda gave zero shits about you either, but that is a different issue.

2823

Speaking of skylines in Fallout (above), it occurs to me that Pittsburgh was done up in one addons years ago in Fallout 3. Seems like it had a skyline left even. And Miramon as far as I can tell year wise, its supposed to be 2077 (I think or thereabouts) when the bomb explodes so Boston would naturally (I guess) have a larger skyline than it seems to have. The 50s vibe is just the deco.

Which brings to mind one thing I have always appreciated about Fallout: the fact that is clearly an alternate universe. I recall seeing some of the history in the Smithsonian in Fallout 3 and it was definitely not ours. Maybe the wikki explains when the timeline verged. I may check.

Finally I’ve always wondered just how many structure do, in fact, survive thermonuclear blasts. Seems like there might be a little less standing than we usually get in these games…

2824

I guess is an indication.

Compared to:
Firebombing:

and I guess with more wooden structures (or heavier bombing)

Firebombing-of-Tokyo-Mar-1945-1-Wiki-PD.jpg1000×769

So in that sense, the Fallout terrain seems like they didn’t use very heavy bombs.

2825

Just to give you 100% confirmation rate, I’ve had the rubberbanding, and have seen it reported by others as well. In my case, and the case I read about, it happens occasionally when you scope in on something. I’ve never had it happen when I wasn’t using my scope.

It’s about the only bug I’ve had, but a lot of yours seem to be settlement related and I assumed that would be buggy as heck in the beginning so I didn’t bother to do anything beyond the initial quest. The only other problems I’ve had are my weapon going invisible which oddly enough is fixed by zooming in with any scoped weapon (or quicksave/quickload if I don’t have a scoped weapon on me) and one occasion of a paper wall where it looked like I couldn’t proceed with a quest but one of the walls is a fake texture that isn’t actually there and could be walked right through.

2826

I haven’t had settlement or rubberbanding bugs, but I’ve certainly had my share of other ones. For starters, I’d have to restart the game 4 out of 5 times whenever I dared try to use a terminal. I could use it fine, but the game would never let me exit it. Turns out the bug is related to high frame rates. That’s apparently been a long-standing bug in Bethesda games, from what I read, so certainly they would provide an option in-game to cap your FPS, right? Wrong. I had to go download some third-party utility that let me mod the Nvidia driver profile for Fallout 4 and cap the FPS at 60 from there. That was fun. If you guys that are suffering from rubberbanding are playing on PC, it might be worth a shot to look at. Supposedly playing over 60 FPS can wreck all kinds of havoc with the engine. The problem with the terminal was that the game was thinking it was successfully playing out the “exit terminal” animation, when it wasn’t. This would leave me in some weird stuck state. Perhaps rubberbanding is similarly related to some parts of the engine outrunning the rest of the game.

I’ve also had countless quest bugs and glitches. It took me a solid 90 minutes to fix the Castle quest. I went around and destroyed all the eggs, and nothing happened. Reading online, that quest is very, very glitchy for a lot of people. After an hour and a half I finally figured out how to get the quest to proceed. What needs to happen is your friendly NPCs need to walk into the courtyard, and that triggers the next phase. Well during the lets-go-break-some-eggs portion, the friendly NPC walked off the wall and landed on a small overhang in the courtyard. It took me 4-5 attempts, but I was finally able to bash him off the overhand with the butt of my rifle (it took that many attempts because I had to find a way to knock him off without doing enough damage that everyone turned hostile on me). As soon as he hit the ground, the quest proceeded.

Yeah, the game’s been stable for me, but the interface is atrocious and I’ve run into an unhealthy amount of bugs (some more excusable to me than others). I get that a game this size is going to have bugs, but lets not pretend like it’s a polished piece of software with nothing that needs fixing.

2827

My gun becoming invisible at random times is the most annoying bug. Sometimes, it will just disappear. A fast travel or interior load will usually bring it back, but it’s still damn annoying.

2828

Yeah, I have this as well. And sometimes my gun just won’t fire. I have to repeatedly left/right click and swap weapons. Eventually one of them will fire and I just have to hope I didn’t accidentally switch to a fatman when a weapon finally decides to go off…

2829

I “finished” last night. “Finishing” is a relative term; I arbitrarily chose one of the factions, and then steamrollered my way to one of the endings. There is a GIF out there of a cockatiel standing on a toy tank, with the caption PEACE WAS NEVER AN OPTION. Print that GIF out and paste it above your monitor, and you’ll feel better about FO4’s terminal faction quests.

So that’s all I have to say about that. Other random thoughts:

  • The UI is an abomination that still had me hitting the wrong keys 30 hours in.
  • The crafting and settlement building stuff is brilliant, in terms of a designer sitting down, writing these systems as script within the construction kit, and then actually having them work.
  • The usual Bethsoft Jank is strong in this one… but it very rarely completely breaks the game, which is poleaxed-steer surprising. I had a few quest glitches and whatnot, but nothing that wasn’t fixed by a reload. Zero crashes (!) Bethsoft’s Gamebryo games have always looked and felt like a loose conglomeration of barely-working systems patched together and constantly threatening to fly apart, but they’re getting better.
  • I am going to be the one guy who doesn’t bring up The Witcher 3 in a FO4 chat because I recognize that TW3 is a special, unique snowflake that honestly shouldn’t even exist. Oops, I brought up TW3.
  • Bethsoft’s level designers, the guys actually plopping the polygons down on the map, are the best in the business. You can go damn near anywhere on the huge map and figuratively hear the voice of an invisible level designer saying, “ok, now this would look cool THERE, and let’s just tuck this under THERE…”

I had a hell of a time with the game. I’m in a cooling-off period with it, then I plan on rerolling a new character just to check out places that I might have rushed past… and although my map is thick with icons, there’s TONS of nooks and crannies I didn’t check out.

2830

On that you are wrong. Extra food/water produced at one settlement can support a settlement that is deficient in either if you have trade routes set up.

2831

That’s more of a magically connected resource pile as opposed to the trade I was thinking of, but okay. So what are the gameplay implications of that? I’m fine with role-playing, but the game needs to put forth the barest effort on its part for me to engage. Putting crops/water at each settlement is trivial. In fact, the majority already start with a surplus.

2832

Ok, chameleon armor really sucks.

  1. The NPCs seem to see you just fine. I am on a perch in a quarry npcs on alert [ Caution ] have no trouble finding me ( on the same level they do with normal stealth). I think this is purely visual effect and I can’t tell the difference between having it on or off. Perhaps it is just because the Bethesda stealth system is totally borked.

  2. You can’t aim down your sights when stealthed. You want to know why? Your sites are invisible along with your gun. Scopes are fine though.

  3. You can’t use your pip-boy either. Why? It too is invisible.

  4. Why is “stealth” combat armor much worse than normal combat armor with the same upgrades?

2833

Switching between third person and first person view always fixes it for me.

2834

Oh, the Chameleon armor definitely has a dramatic effect, although it doesn’t make you literally invisible.

But with a reasonably high stealth rating, My guy is effectively invisible now when he’s chameleon’ed up. To the extent that I can sit there and shoot guys in the face from right in front of them without them being able to find me, as long as I’m using a suppressed weapon and don’t move (and as long as I don’t have my pip-boy light on, and am in a relatively dark area, of course).

The limitations you describe though are definitely annoying… although they’re also the only downside to it. I think they’re kind of necessary in order to prevent it from being even more dominant.

2835

Invisibility would have some downsides. I think they did a pretty good job balancing Chameleon. The one annoyance I had to mod out was the blinding glow every time you enter it.