Yeah, that’s the thing. Things like quest markers and fast travel are more deeply embedded in the design of the game than you can fix by just modding the game to turn them off.
And the radiant stuff, while ok in general, is really too random. I mean, if settlement X says raiders are harassing it, they should be somewhere near settlement X, not half way across the Commonwealth.
Chiming in, I’m still mid-game on my Fallout 4 playthrough, but I stepped over to replay some Skyrim with the new SE edition.
Glad to see you’re having fun, @JeffL
I’m one of those playing the stealth pistol build. I enjoy it a lot, but there are limitations, and to be honest some are the same limitations with any build.
There are so many small moments that I’ve loved. The hotel and subsequent quest in Far Harbor were quite fun, and that was a very unique location too. The storytelling at the bowling alley was touching. I also enjoyed the quest tracking down the lost BOS patrol back in the main game. The storytelling was played out in how the locations were found and the area around them, as well as small notes or terminal entries, and finally an NPC to round it out. Bethesda excels at putting you in locations and letting you build your own role play.
I think I heard one of the developers speaking to it once. Something along the lines of, “we could just force a quest to take you to a stream where you see something,” versus, you stumbling on the stream, finding a small item, which might lead you somewhere else, etc. There there is this quote from Todd Howard:
I’m a believer that players are good self-directors, and I think one thing that’s good about video games is they can direct their own experience. As opposed to saying, “Here’s all of the beats that you must hit.” They know if they want action, or they want downtime, or they want to talk to characters.
I think it’s up to us to make all of those avenues meaningful for what they are.
Hi-Res texture pack coming for PC. PS4 Pro getting 1440p resolution, longer draw distance, and better godrays.
Hi-res textures will take an additional 58GBs of space and requires 8GB VRAM!
Ouch!
RE: All the comments about finding those little things that make Bethesda open world games so fun, I found one of the articles I had only vaguely remembered commenting on it, from Joel Burgess @ Bethesda.
I’m clipping a couple of small exerpts that talking about signs of life and sound leading the player to new things.
On distant sights:
First, and most obvious, are distant visual landmarks. The classic example here is Cinderella’s castle, now a standard feature copied by themeparks everywhere. It’s one of the first things anybody sees arriving at the park and guests naturally head towards it. The interesting part about Cinderella’s castle in particular is that it’s not a ride or show. Primarily it’s a landmark to help you orient yourself in the park. It’s also a planning hub, because from the area in front of it you can see many other landmarks you might have missed before, sprinkled throughout the park.
These other landmarks are basically doing the same thing as the castle, but on a local scale. Consider the screenshot from Fallout 3. These satellite towers are the main distant landmarks in this part of the Capital Wasteland, but check out the little landmarks nearby. There’s a small factory, and also a water tower will become visible as the player nears that initial landmark. We’ll talk about this kind of distraction and its utility later.
On sound:
It’s also important that we remember the power of sound. When we play games, we typically only have two of our senses at our disposal. Vision is already doing the heavy lifting. Probably the best use of sound to draw players in Fallout 3, as it happens, was an accident. As the player explores the world in that game, we’re constantly streaming in new area ahead of them. This means AI that was running in the background will start processing in realtime, and random encounters will spawn. This also meant that combat breaking out on the edge of the loaded area was quite common. This was the same as it was in Oblivion, except that Fallout combat is loud. What we observed was that players would be walking along in the wasteland and hear muffled, distant gunshots and explosions, and almost always turn on a dime to investigate. Lucky for us, this usually brought the player to something interesting we had set up. We’ve taken that insight with us into Skyrim, a world more visually dense than the Capital Wasteland, where players can easily walk right past a POI we set up without seeing it. Now we’re cognizant that the crackle of a campfire, the crash of a waterfall, or the ringing of an anvil might draw you to what you can’t yet see.
Does the PS4 Pro’s newly added 1GB of normal RAM store the system and the game? It doesn’t use the VRAM for that at all?
Yeah this has been a cool feature. Hearing small arms fire and then a big boom. Not sure if it’s just a car going off or a super mutant suicider.
Those suiciders are such a rush. My heart races everytime I hear them. What a cool use of sound within the game environment.
Oh man, yeah. Especially when you can’t tell exactly where he is, but he’s getting closer, and you know if he detonates you’re gonna croak…
Been trying a few mods, most notably the unofficial patch, which I can’t really tell anything about whether it’s doing anything, and the Modern Firearms, Tactical Edition, which, well, adds a lot of funky boomsticks and stuff. I’ve also installed a weather mod that has very impressive storms with great lighting and sound, and a minor mod that allows you to hang up weapon racks and display your excess inventory of weapons.
The only one that actually affects gameplay much (the weather one supposedly influences sneaking, and you can get ghoul hordes in storms supposedly but I haven’t seen any yet) is the Modern Firearms. I like it, but it’s sort of clunky because the game engine is, well, clunky. Switching from full to semi-auto, say, requires some odd convolutions and makes heavy use of an additional hotkey mod. There’s a vending machine that takes pre-war money too, that offers stuff from the silly to the potentially ludicrous, like jump jets. But the guns themselves are reasonably nicely modeled, though they stick out like a sore thumb in their clean lines and sharp definition compared to the stock weapons. In action, yeah, finding one of the new weapons early can really change the dynamics of the game. I found a H&K full auto SMG and a semi-auto rifle chambered for Russian 7.62.x39 very early on, and then shortly after a 5.56 assault rifle that I can’t recall the name of but which is freakin’ brutal.
Of course, I’m approaching 500 hours in this game so I’m not at all worried about having a “balanced” experience at this point.
Oh, I also installed that mod with the Wastelands stories or whatever extra quests and NPCs. The NPCs I’ve run across are pretty well done, and funny.
I have one of the weather mods and it is hit or miss, NAC (Natural and Atmospheric Commonwealth.) At the time I installed it, it was a requirement for the Vintage Film Looks ENB mod. The things I enjoy about it are when you get some insanely crazy stuff in the middle of nowhere, but it’s all visible. One such weather pattern was like a nuclear storm that gave a clear but red streaked sky with lightning and light flares followed by awesome sounds similar to gigantic meteor strikes or something. It was intense! Contrast that with the times it has extremely dark AND FOGGY night time, when it’s so dark and foggy that your pip light or power armor light don’t even show you a couple of feet in front of you.
And that’s when I go and pull it up on the pip boy and change it, every single time. It’s just too damned dark for me.
Speaking of the ENB though, as cool as those effects and visual differences were, I hated that it took 5 times longer to launch the game and 2-3 times longer to transition through building or location load screens. It was too impacting on immersion.
Which weather mod did you use?
I’ve been back playing again and picked up a couple mods. First was the mod that lets me have a companion plus Dogmeat in my party. The other gives you craftable resource collection beacons. I keep running out of resources and was getting sick of all the running back and forth to take junk to a settlement. So with this mod I can loot a location, fill up any container there with all the junk, weapons armor etc you find then place a beacon inside and choose which settlement you want the goods to go to. That settlement then sends out a person to collect the items and take them back and deposit them in the workstation. Has really been a nice time and stress saver.
Speaking of this, can anyone tell me if the items you put in the workshop are broken down as needed or do you actually need to scrap things to get them broken down correctly?
Example, I go out and bring back a battered clipboard as loot (1 spring, one wood.) If I scrap it, I get those parts and I can place them into the workbench and use them individually on things I make or modify.
But what if I just put the battered clipboard in the workbench. Then I modify something and need 1 spring. Does it force scrap the clipboard? Do I end up with 1 wood in the workbench, or is the workbench then empty (meaning it used the whole item for the spring, but the other parts are gone?)
I keep scrapping everything, and I agree with you the lug home/scrap stuff is very tedious. I know I can put stuff in the workbench, but I’ve been terrified they may get used as parts and not fully scrapped.
As you craft, the game will auto-break down any junk needed to make whatever you’re crafting. So you don’t need to break it all down yourself. What I don’t know is if that applies to weapons and armor in your workbench or just junk items.
That is very good to hear. So is that mod you mentioned, which will help with the lugging of things.
One thing I have started to do is break down crappy armor and weapon loot when I run across the scattered armor and weapon workbenches. At first, it seemed strange, here you are in the middle of a raider location and then you see a weapon workbench. Then it dawned on me that would help me loot the crap stuff I was leaving behind and still get some use out of it. Then I’m only carrying home the parts.
I picked the Taffington boathouse to build my home base. It only took me a few trips with a companion to clear out my Sanctuary workshop of the most needed materials i.e. cement, wood, steel, glass etc. I had to do it manually since I’m a low intelligence (no local leader perk) idiot savant…sort of like in real life :)
I thought about using mods but I’ve stuck with vanilla because I just wanted to see what I could do with the settlement without them. Despite Taffington being a notoriously difficult place to fix up because the roof is so jinky, I did a really good job building a glass warehouse ceiling on top of it. Also built a nice cement security wall around the place.
Now I have a home base and I’m getting back to exploring. I know it’s greedy of me but I really wish they would add some more Far Harbor type DLC. My son has played twice through with 2 different characters and feels the same way. I guess we just have to see whether the Obsidian New Vegas 2/New Orleans rumors will pan out.
Nope, weapons and armor have to be broken down (scrapped) specifically, by you. At least, that seems to be the case in all my playing.
So I thought you were supposed to get really cool loot when you killed one of the bad guys/monsters with a skull next to their name? I’ve managed to kill two deathclaws with skulls next to their names, very hard fights, and all I got was death claw meat and a death claw hand. :(
Skull means they are at least a couple of levels above you. You want the the “Legendary” versions that have the star next to them. That’s when you get the legendary traited items most of the time…depends on the difficulty level I think.