I’ve only had a small handful of crashes, but I’m running into a lot more broken scripting and other little problems that may not cause me to lose a ton of progress, but probably sap my enjoyment and enthusiasm far more. I’d say in the majority of cases, it takes me multiple attempts to initiate dialogue with major characters. I interact with them once, they say their opening line, and… nothing. I interact with them again, and they’ll repeat the opening line and stop. Then on the third or fourth attempt, with the same dialogue as the first two, the conversation menu will pop up and things proceed as they should. It’s turning interactions into a chore.
DeepT
3617
Mods can’t fix the problems with Fallout 4 unless it is some kind of total conversion that totally scraps the original game. IE: Quests need to have multiple solutions most of the time. You actions need to have a real world impact (farms do not count). Conversation options need to really matter. Where are the companion quests? The vaults in Fallout 4 are dull as dishwater. The only thing of real consequence in fallout 4 that you can choose is which faction to support.
I do not see any mods really fixing those issues. Perhaps they can address the nearly useless or utterly boring perks. Perhaps they can add a lot more interesting weapons and such, but the core gameplay problems? I do not think so.
I love how this game has been so divisive. I’m still over the moon with it and have been having a really different (i.e. Thoroughly enjoyable) experience with my 80+ hours.
I adored Far Cry 2 as well.
In both cases the long list of negatives people offer are actually pluses from my perspective. That’s what makes gaming great though.
-Todd
The lack of multiple solutions is far and away the biggest disappointment for me, but I think you’re comment about the vaults nails another reason I feel let down. Maybe it’s just the ones I’ve come across so far, but the only one I’ve come across so far that was at all interesting ended up feeling like a wasted opportunity.
In re Vaults, I sort of wish they’d do one of these games with a lot more detailed Vault stuff. Maybe playing on what NV did, but even bigger, with the whole first quarter of the game, maybe, being in your vault, and then having many of the key locations be other Vaults, each with different agendas, layouts, etc. The whole Vault-Tec subplot would work well with that sort of thing. Then again, I like Vaults as settings.
JeffL
3621
If a game requires a lot of mods to be a great game, it ain’t a great game. And for the huge number of people who play on console, that’s not an option.
I played Fallout:NV and hundreds of hours of Skyrim on the 360, playing W3 on the PS4 and will probably get F4 for the PS4. Fallout:NV was a really good game, IMO, and Skyrim was a masterpiece. Without mods. I went back and played Skyrim again about a year after I finished playing it on the 360, this time on my laptop, with 93 mods, just to revisit the world, and I loved the mods, so don’t get me wrong - I love mods. But Skyrim was one of the top gaming experiences of my gaming life (starting back in 1981.) Without mods.
I haven’t played F4 yet, so no judgement on the game, but to say it’s cool it has a lot of flaws because the mods will fix them is not the same as saying it’s a great game.
100% this. I spent 170 hours in Skyrim. By the time DLCs and good mods came out, I was done with it and never wanted to go back.
I spent 140 hours in Fallout 4 and the same applies, except I liked the game even less than Skyrim. Only thing that would probably convince me to go back is if Bethesda did some really really really good expansion similar to Shivering Isles or at least Point Lookout (both of which I liked a lot).
Really ? Things like lack of interesting quests with multiple solutions, lack of consequences, lack of logic and consistency, are pluses for you ? Would the game be worse for you if it had these things ?
Well I haven’t really noticed the absence of those things or if I did they were inconsequential to my enjoyment and appreciation of the game. The game works for me in the state it is in.
-Todd
I also find amusing the level of heated discussion and division that provokes the game. I played the game, enjoyed it for what it is even if it has obvious areas where it could be better, finished it, uninstalled it. I didn’t explore everything, but I did play enough to feel satisfied and not wanting to go on playing, because at some point it’s just more and more of the same. Now it’s time to pass to other games.
Well it is a game discussion forum, most of us of who’ve been playing games for many decades. Plus there are lot of folks who work in the industry, so passionate discussion about AAA title is expected. :-)
I use to play a lot of games for modest amount time per game so I completely understand where you are coming from. Now days, I either try a game for a couple hours or I play them for more than 100, with very few games in between that extreme. State of Decay was a rare exception.
I fully expect to put another 100 or maybe even 200 hours into Fallout 4. So it is important to me if the mod community/Bethesda fixes the game.
A good friend of mine, who has explored every spot in FO:NV hasn’t even bought the game. He is waiting till next year after its been bug fixed, patched etc. to have a better experience. I’m in a similar situation.
I think you hit on something here that explains why I like this game–I love more of the same. Hell, I’ve been reading the same types of books (in some cases, the same exact books) over and over again for, um, forty years. Literally. I hate change.
Bateau
3627
More of the same is cool, I really enjoyed Mad Max for example and that’s probably one of the best examples of such design, but Fallout 4 is loooooooooooooong. It’s a 100h+ game easily and unlike Mad Max (or other such games) you constantly have to manage things, either your inventory, your quest log, your settlement…it adds up. A good grind/checklist game minimizes these elements so that the player is constantly exposed to action and new things and then concludes its affairs before it gets too much. For me that number is usually at 40-50h and that’s already pushing it.
Don’t get me wrong, I like FO4 as a game but I get almost physically tired when I think about visiting and thoroughly exploring all those 200+ locations again. If the game had more variety or at least good story incentives like The Witcher 3 it would go a long way to breaking up this monotony. I’m hoping that some survival mods will change things up a bit but the truth is, games on this scale are really really hard to balance. I’ve mentioned this before in some other thread I think - even Requiem, which I love, couldn’t pull it off with Skyrim, the game’s just too big. Requiem has a pretty good power/difficulty curve up to lvl 40-45 and then you become so strong that outside of unexpected oneshots nothing really poses a challenge anymore. And then you look at the map and see you still have roughly half of it unexplored.
JeffL
3628
I’ll be interested in how F4 feels to me (gotta finish W3 first, so probably be a couple of months before I get to it.) I’m kinda unusual, I think, in that all I’m really looking for is a huge, interesting, alive world that supports my role playing itch.
For me, I’d be happy without any real “main quest” other than explore and survive and thrive in a huge world with a ton of backstories going on. For example, in Fallout 3, when I walked into a school and slowly discovered what had gone on in that school, children locked up in cages and horribly treated and murdered, etc. I couldn’t wait to find every raider in that school and kill them. I even switched from my favored stealthy long range weapons to my sawed off shotgun because I wanted to kill them as brutally as possible. I didn’t need an official quest of “Can you find out what happened in the school house located south of here?” for that emotive experience. Same for the much mentioned lighthouse in Skyrim - that unfolding story stuck with me much more than just about every “official” quest in Skyrim.
I’d love a F4 world in which I could just discover situations via exploration that supported my role playing itch, where my main goals are those in my mind. Building settlements actually sounds cool in that regard if I could see a change in the world around them as a result.
I am one of the biggest fan of Skyrim (unmodded, 360) on earth, because it gave me such a great world to explore and discover and role play in. And I considered the main quest line something I “had to do” to get certain shouts, etc. I wanted, not a highlight of the game.
Oghier
3629
This is exactly how I play Bethesda games. It works great in FO4. The best writing is, as usual, buried in notes, terminal logs, overheard conversations and side quests. I’ve learned to expect Bethesda MQ’s to be overly restrictive, poorly written “only you can save the world” nonsense, well worth ignoring.
Unfortunately, you can’t completely ignore the MQ in FO4. It does get pushed into your face from time to time, and it unlocks some parts of the game you will want to see (companions, areas). But you can still spend 98% of your playtime doing everything else.
Well they should just bite the bullet and bloody well scrap it then.
The lighthouse story in Skyrim only stood out because it was the only attempt at narrative in a sea of mediocrity. The Companions? What is that like a male escort agency? I don’t care if you can turn into a werewolf, you’re still part of the Superfriends or whatever the fuck. What happened to the good old ‘Fighters Guild’? No Spartan bonding in the good old ‘Fighters Guild’.
I didn’t even bother playing the MQ since it was so dull. Rode the horse around for a while so I could see the world these guys spent 3 years creating, only to fill it with inane fetch quests. Brave new world eh lads?
Razgon
3631
It really wasn’t the only place with great stories, but I can tell its not something you are going to change your mind on. So lets agree to disagree. I have about 200 hours in Skyrim that tells me that I enjoyed the non-main quests immensely, since I never completed it.
I played, dunno, maybe 30? That’s still a lot of time to play xbox.
Sometimes I get these crazy voices in my head that say things like, ‘why not put your best writing into the main story as a showpiece?’, but I come to my senses soon enough.
Razgon
3633
Well, its never been the main attraction in Bethesdas Elder Scrolls games. Its always been about a massive world, with tons of exploring to do. If you go into these games expecting something else, you are bound to be disappointed. I mean, you can probably complete the game in 10 hours, but then you have kinda missed the point of the game.
The recent fallout games have been in the same vein. I must admit, I can’t remember fallout 1 and 2 correctly anymore, so I don’t know if they are the same.
Yeah I played them back in the day. I just wasn’t aware it was now a feature. They should have a word with marketing for the sequel, something like ‘now with even shitter main quest!’ plastered on the box.
As for the Fallouts, I wanted to try them but my laptop won’t take floppy discs. Sucks I know.
Razgon
3635
Well, at least know you know, so you can avoid disappointment the next time around!
