2856

By modding your guns and armour alot.

2857

See at this point I have 8 heavily modded guns and 2 melee weapons all for different situations (not to mention efficient use of ammo). I have several armour sets also for different situations, not to mention powered armour and heavy weapons. And since I am still levelling up and unlocking increasingly better mods, I need a lot of adhesive.

My adhesive shortages were cured by farming, but now with the level 3 mods I am hitting an aluminum shortage.

2858

Plant mutifruit, corn, and tatos and you’ll have infinite adhesive no matter what, even if you don’t bother picking it up.

But yeah… early on, adhesive was a limiting factor. Now I’ve got a few hundred of it, and don’t even make the vegetable starch any more.

2859

Those who think settlements are ‘pointless’ are simply missing that point. Some people enjoy creating them. Take a look through https://www.reddit.com/r/falloutsettlements to see how flexible the system is.

Everyone agrees that documentation is poor and the UI is terrible. We know that settlements don’t have a major impact on gameplay. But some folks love this dash of Minecraft. And, again, we can depend on modders to take that system in multiple interesting directions. That’s part of the genius of Bethesda games. They’re mod-friendly, so those basic systems will become all kinds of crazy things in time.

In the meantime, creating cool stuff is its own reward, at least for some.

2860

The people criticizing Fallout 4’s settlments appear to to enjoy this in other games. For - zomg - intrinsic and extrinsic reasons. The criticism isn’t us missing this point.

2861

I absolutely love the settlement stuff. The UI is very… combative… towards my progress in building things up, but it is still really fun. I really enjoy how it makes the “fancy tool chest” that you fast travel back to feel like home. That is what I love about the gun modding and re-naming, and the settlement building. I am building the Fallout 4 game, and making it unique to my play style and experience. Nobody’s sanctuary is going to look exactly the same. Nobody will be carrying the same guns. It adds a unique-ness to the game that I really appreciate. And while there is no specific to the numbers in game benefit to the settlements, that isn’t really the point though? In minecraft you can survive in a 10x10 box without windows to craft in… but why would you? The fun is the building of stuff. I think that the crafting/building interface is really bad, but it isn’t un-usable. I have found that a lot of my sessions revolve around managing my settlements, and there is something I really enjoy about them, broken as they are. It is because I created them, I placed that shack there, that turret up on a little tower. It feels like it is my place, which adds value to me. It is my commonwealth I have created.

As someone who has always been in to building and exploration games (played minecraft since alpha) and hundreds of lego sets built in my youth, this game does enough to scratch that itch of building. When you play minecraft, you don’t build things to be 100% functional. Sometimes you will just spend an entire evening perfecting the roof on your house. It is kind of one of those things that you either like or you don’t like. I have friends that say “what is the point?” of minecraft, to me, it is an incredible game that I have poured thousands of hours into, and some people don’t get it or play that way. That is fine too.

What is great about this game IS the fact that it is completely ancillary to the overall experience. If you don’t like that kind of thing, you aren’t forced into deep management of the settlements, as you don’t need them to play in a meaningful way. But, if building stuff and managing settlements is your bag, you can do that too. I think Fallout 4 does a great job of letting the player create the experience they want to have. Having played a ton of both Fallout 3, New Vegas, I am just plain in love with this game.

2862

Those who think settlements are ‘pointless’ are simply missing that point. Some people enjoy creating them.

I think it’s much more a matter of perspective than ‘missing the point.’ Once you go down that ‘make your own gameplay’ rabbit hole it gets hard to define things. I could wander through Skyrim determined to collect every book in the game and then read them and keep a blog critiquing them all, and that could be a very rewarding gameplay experience. But I think that’s also distinct from the core challenge-reward mechanisms and gameplay loops that keep most people interested in an Elder Scrolls game (loot, leveling, combat, exploration, story: the usual suspects).

If the settlements in Fallout have to be approached kind of like the books in an Elder Scrolls game (OK, it’s not a perfect analogy, but I hope my meaning is clear), or if they are meant to be a true and absolute sandbox a la Minecraft, well, OK. But I think a lot of us (myself included) were expecting some more compelling sense of purpose in terms of gameplay mechanics. The fact that the game (as far as I can tell) utterly stops holding your hand re: settlements after you build a few beds and a water pump, or whatever, is pretty offputting too.

But then, I have apparently barely scratched the surface. I planted some stuff and cleared up a bunch of trash and assigned a few people to crops, or something. (My GOD is the assigning/commanding interface awful.) Cottage vegetable starch industries? Wow. I just keep dashing off to do more quests so have evidently missed a lot.

Of course we all find our fun in odd places. I spent a lot of time once playing Half-Life and coming up with different ways to blow up a Barney by surrounding him with tripwire mines. I mean, I probably burned an hour or two on just that. /note to self re: next therapy session

2863

Right there with you Jon. This game has been a pleasant surprise this year!

-Todd

2864

So ran into a interesting…thing. I got out of my suit of armor when I was retaking the castle as the nuclear battery was getting low. Then one of the minutemen jumps into my suit?! Couldn’t get him to get out of it. However when the queen attacked that Minuteman died, I collected all the pieces of my suit back but I can’t figure out to actually have my suit reappear as a usable device. I just have all the pieces in my inventory. Anyone have any suggestions?

Its little things like this that make me both hate and love this game. Lots of emergent events, but no way how to navigate them in context of the new system they created. Like a empty homestead that joins but no one is coming with the radio powered for attracting recruits, beds, and food…something else I need to do? I don’t know, just a lot of resources spent on building a homestead where no one lives and no one is coming…

2865

There are some modest gameplay benefits to settlements

  1. Healing: purified water is my goto healing, and vegetable soup is nice also.
  2. Adhesive
  3. some ingrediants for drugs, and other things like cutting fluid
  4. Caps from selling excess water and fruits/vegetables
  5. Other scavenged material.
  6. Caps from stores

One of the mistakes I think Bethesda made in the game is not having. A settlement production summary, showing everything that was made by a settlement in the last day.

Having that would have a gone a ways in making people care more about them.

2866

I agree with your distinction. It is a matter of perspective, the degree to which one values activities beyond combat, questing and leveling.

I would add that FO/ TES games encourage people to head down rabbit holes. The “side-games” have always seemed just as important as the “core” experience. But then, I’m in the “ignore the main quest and go nuts with eight billion mods” camp, and these games suit that style well. I also read all the books in TES games and every email in FO4 terminals ;)

2867

I know I’ve been critical of the settlements in Fallout 4, but it’s not because I think they’re stupid. I just want them to be more. It’s so cool conceptually that it ends up being frustrating when they (from my personal POV) fall short of what they could be.

Like I said initially, though, I can’t wait to see the epic mods that come out utilizing them. I think there’s a lot of potential there for some really cool stuff.

2868

  1. Always remove the fusion cell from your suit when you leave.

  2. You add/remove components to your suit by facing the frame and pressing R.

2869

I like to imagine it less as a settlement and more of a forced labor camp to satisfy my needs for adhesive and clean water to sell. “Oh those turrets aren’t to keep the raiders out. They’re to keep you from leaving. Now go tend to the mutfruit!”

2870

I personally like to think of the shitty settlements that I have as the place where the peons live, and the true higher caste of settlers live in Sanctuary or the Drive-in. The true metropoli of my commonwealth.

2871

Well, they wanted to make it optional. The first thing I read a number of people say, “Do I have to do this - I’m really not interested”. If they made more of the settlement building, then you would hear people complaining about it being required or too important. To me what they’ve done (ignoring the horrible UI) is the best of both worlds given that they want to give people choice - if you want to build settlements you can, and you can create your own stories, reasons and purpose. But for those that aren’t interested, they can totally ignore it. They can totally ignore Preston and his goal of rebuilding the Commonwealth. Given that it’s optional, that’s probably the best they could do.

2872

Once someone dies in a power armor frame, that frame is gone forever. I suppose it’s for the best, since it’s now haunted.

If you want to cheat then open the console, select the corpse, then use the “resurrect” command.

2873

I’m enjoying this more than any of the other Fallout games. And, my 10 year old is all over the settlement thing, being a minecraft nerd. He does not look during combat as he hates seeing “ketchup” but he loves the building aspect. He wants to create a game like this one where it’s multiplayer for just me and him with all the building in it with no combat.

2874

You should dress all your higher caste in nice suits to emphasize their prominence.

2875

Oh, I totally applaud that it’s optional. The UI is painful and the whole thing is half-baked, so I appreciate the fact that I can ignore it.

Except…

In the context of the story as presented is it optional? Sure, like any Bethesda sandbox RPG, you can totally ignore the main quest and run off willy-nilly, but in the greater story of rebuilding the Commonwealth into a safe home for the people, it’s not really a choice. The game assumes you’re doing it, just like Skyrim assumed you cared about the conflict between the Imperials, elves, and Jarls. If you ignore it, the game is just perpetually waiting on you to stop dinking around and get back to the urgent need to help Settlers #21 and #22. That you can hold off doing it essentially forever is part of the charm of these kinds of games, but this game really has only one story to tell and that’s how you rebuilt the Commonwealth while trying to save your son. Allying with a particular faction is part of that, but those strings have little to do with anything else.

That’s why it annoys me. I get what they were going for, but this misses the mark for me. I never get the sense that I’m rebuilding a pocket of civilization. I’m just tacking together buildings to feed the loot-craft-build cycle.