4820

I guess that is true, however, now that I think about it, there is a very important distinction between F4 and other fallout games with regards to story.

In the other fallout games you are a participant in those stories where as in F4, you just read about how some raiders found a stop to rob caravans or how they hate some other raider guy in another location.

Again, going back to F:NV because it is more fresh in my mind rather than Fallout 3 or the other ones.
The powder gangers: You start off neutral to them and can even join them or become their enemy through a series of missions.

The giant ants: This is a story in progress and you can affect the outcome.

The drug running raiders: Initially hostile, there is a quest line where you can become friends with them.

There are dozens and dozens of stories in fallout 4 that you participate in, and it is rare for you just to go somewhere and your only interaction with a story is to read about it on terminals.

By contrast in fallout 4, there are just a few stories you DON’T just read about on terminals (not counting the main quest stories).

4821

I just finished up the main plotline and I enjoyed a ton of it but the final third or so fell very flat.

I think that one thing really missing is settlements evolving on their own. I don’t mind (read: I am compulsively wired to) collecting all the junk of the commonwealth to dump into workstations, but actually building all the buildings and stuff just isn’t interesting to me. It really undercut the idea of rebuilding society. I don’t think that it had to be drastic at all but even just the settlers fixing up a building or two and maybe painting something.

I also thought that the Institute was so ludicrously comic book villain at times like they were desperate for you to nuke them. You need to kidnap an uneducated adult to help optimize your nuclear reactor? And you need to kill a ton of people and force him instead of just offering him a spot in your paradise? And I think that the cancer plot point is a total copout. And why do we need to set off yet another nuke? We just killed everyone. Shouldn’t we at least salvage all that food and medicine?

Overall I enjoyed it and I think that the 4 powers dynamic worked well as a game system but the writing/story couldn’t keep up.

Also most of the companions seemed boring.

All that said, I loved the actual game world, exploring, etc.

4822

My second run at this game is stalling out after about 25 hours–which is too bad because I never even got to the DLC I purchased. I enjoyed it more than I had initially, once I’d put some distance between it and my expectations based on prior games, but ultimately I just didn’t enjoy the combat much. I think there was something about the movement speed and patterns of enemies (particularly ghouls and and insects that immediately get up close) that just made me feel clumsy and was more frustrating than fun. Granted, I am playing with a controller, but I’ve put a lot of hours into other FPS without issue so it’s not just that.

Exploring was fun, but just not rewarding enough on its own. There were some cool bits like quarry (I’m surprised they didn’t lean harder into Lovecraft) but as was pointed out above, so much of what was good in the story was just shown to you passively in terminals rather than experienced. And the vaults were the biggest disappointment! I didn’t find a single one interesting.

I never got into modding or crafting, so that might have helped, but it’s not an aspect of games I enjoy all that much.

I guess I got my money’s worth out of it, but I think I’ll likely pass on future games in the series unless I hear they’ve changed direction.

4823

@DeepT my first 20 levels I ran across actual story quests for Preston Garvey and the Minutemen in Concord, the Brotherhood of Steel in Cambridge, the Pillars of the Community in their little theatre, which also lead to the Cabot family, then Piper in Diamond City, then multiple stories in Goodneighbor and one in Covenant. This doesn’t include the mini stories for Abernathy Farm and Drumlin Diner.

I mean sure, the wasteland isn’t chock full of stories everywhere, but then again, it’s not unlike Skyrim where most of the stories and resultant quests were around areas where people were.

I get you though, F:NV drew you in more quickly with things, while FO4 seems … slower?

4824

Sure, I get that. For me, that participation was not terribly deep, or enjoyable. I never played NV as much as I’ve played F4, even though I was more a principle character in the stories in that game. The Powder Gangers? There was never a game reason to not wipe them out. Ditto for pretty much all the other non-main quest storylines. There was usually a clear choice to make in terms of benefits in-game, and no real incentive to do otherwise. And even if/when there was, I never felt it mattered all that much. I’d rather focus on roaming, fighting, looting, and stuff, which NV did not do as well as F4 does.

In short, yes, earlier Fallout games have more role-playing type quest stories where you are a factor. For my part, it doesn’t matter, because those things are not why I play these games. For others, it might matter more.

4825

Yeah, if you can’t get into the shooting the game will blow, for sure. I’m on PC with a mouse+keyboard, and I like the combat, but there are some issues with pacing, movement, clipping, aiming, and the like for sure.

I agree, too, that they could have done a lot more with the Lovecraft and other weird stuff. It’s a problem, though, with the source material (Fallout source material, that is). It is neither wholly serious, or wholly camp, and it is hard to really take it seriously in any fashion. A good example is the way the ghouls are treated. They’re “not zombies,” we’re told, yet, gee, they always inhabit graveyards and other zombie-preferred places, and they act like movie zombies. So, we could have some cool supernatural and scary shit like STALKER but generally we don’t get that.

4826

I found the size limit to be the biggest pain. I understand the goal is to make it so everything runs smooth, but I really wish they didn’t bother.

That said, I tend to over-defend … and it’s kind of funny when I get the “join in the defense of ___” mission, and I show up to see the enemy getting slaughtered mercilessly with lasers and explosions going off everywhere and the settlers calmly going back to work after it’s all done.

“You showed up just in the nick of time!”
“Um … I shot a dog. You guys killed the rest before I could target them. But you’re welcome, I guess.”

4827

Since I didn’t really enjoy building the buildings myself, I basically would just leave them all alone except throw down a few turrets so the value/defense ratio or whatever they used just meant no one ever bothered to attack them.

On one side I really like the idea of being a positive force and helping to build things in a game given all the blowing stuff up, but I don’t actually want to try and f’ around with placing walls and rugs and night stands and stuff. But if I could have popped in and seen anything positive happening while I was gone that would have gone a long way.

4828

I did have a settler steal my power armor when Sanctuary was attacked and I was at the workbench; afterwards, the head was missing.

To me, the flaw in this game really is that there is a huge disconnect between the way loot and rewards level up and the way you actually play the game. If you’re one of the few who plays the way the developers apparently thought you should play, hitting each main quest stage as you reach the level it seems to want, and thus finishing the main questline at around level 30, the loot is fine. Playing on after that gets hit and miss, but that’s not the big problem. The big problem is that no one does this, after the first time through. Even the first time you play, the lure of the open world is thrust in your face with far more force and power than the main quest stuff, and certainly for me it made me explore a lot more than it made me beeline to Diamond City.

And, um, if you explore, and take your time, by the time you get deep into the main quest, there’s nearly nothing left to find that will improve your combat ability. Between modding, quest loot, and legendary drops, you rapidly hit a point where none of the weapons or armor you find is interesting. The DLCs help, but even they can’t counter the fact that with leveling and perks, modding your weapons means that you will almost always have something better than what you find.

This is exacerbated by the dreadful weapon hierarchy they have in the unmodded game. Pipe weapons suck, and there’s zero reason to ever use them after about the first hour of the game. The .38 ammo-using stuff is totally useless, and thus .38 ammo is only useful to sell. Many of the variations on weapons, like .45 sniper rifles, are useless too, as .308 or .50 weapons are much better. The lack of suppressors for the .44 pistols means that pistol builds (which will inevitably be based on stealth/suppressed weapons) can’t use them. The 5.56 weapon is some bloated stovepipe Lewis gun thingy, and the minigun is a waste of space.

Every game where I’ve not used a weapons mod has ended up with nearly identical weapons loadouts, because there is no effective variety. To me, this is a far more serious problem than the role-playing or narrative flaws. If this game had a better weapons system and more useful weapons choices, it would be damn near perfect as an open-world shooter.

4829

I had this happen as well. That was the day I moved them either into the underground cellar there in Sanctuary or over to the nearby Red Rocket station.

4830

Just make sure you don’t leave a fusion core in them.

4831

I did but I have plenty at this point. Does that hurt them?

4832

NPCs will take power armor if it has a fusion core in it, but won’t take them if you remove it.

It doesn’t matter otherwise.

4833

Yeah, I always take the cores, but in this case, I was working on repairing the armor at the time, and we were attacked. I exited the power armor workbench and engaged the attackers…and that’s when it got hot wired.

4834

Fallout 4’s story issues are basically the same story issues every Bethesda game has. They’re awful at it. They make neat open worlds and then utterly fail to make them seem like a real place. New Vegas was so amazing because someone took their neat world and made it a real place. They don’t seem to be inclined to ever do it themselves though.

4835

While I’d agree with this in some respects, I’d suggest as well that NV is much less appealing as an open world game than Fallout 4, probably because IMO you can’t really mesh the two goals–story and freedom–very well, not within practical limits. Story centered games inherently limit player agency. Open world games inherently retard narrative coherence. You can’t square the circle, and we shouldn’t keep thinking you can. You either get a narrative game with some freedom, or a free-play game with some narrative. You can’t have both I don’t think.

That “real place” of New Vegas is not very compelling to me, in terms of spending a lot of time there once I’ve exhausted the main narrative. The Commonwealth of Fallout 4, while lacking anything like the coherence of the New Vegas setting overall, is a much more hospitable place for me to play around in. YMMV, but 600 hours or so in F4 vs, what, 227 in NV tells the tale for me.

4836

I’d strongly disagree. The open world was as good as anything Bethesda put out. I mean most of Fallout 4 is just “encounter nodes” that you run into where some randomly selected group or groups spawns and then fights you/each other.

Bethesda puts more forced narrative into their games than anyone. You literally have to follow the railroad tracks they set out to get anywhere with the main story. You have to talk to Important NPC and they have to Do The Thing. Every time. In New Vegas you could kill everyone you met. Like… everyone. No NPC to do a thing, you could just do whatever. It was a smaller overall area in some ways, but that was partially technology as well.

Once you start seeing the Bethesda Pattern their games get less and less interesting imo. It’s just random procedural stuff in a big map and then forced, often painfully bad, story sections you must endure to make progress. Almost nothing ever makes sense, it’s just about the spectacle and random interactions of AI’s that run into each other randomly.

4837

Excellent tip, @Lantz, thank you!

4838

To each their own, sure. I hear you, but I disagree in turn. New Vegas was pretty gated; you try going one direction from the starting town and the giant bugs eat you. Another, deathclaws get you. You were channeled in a particular way from the beginning, and you had to pretty much do the whole defend the town from the Powder Gangers thing each and every time you started a game. So to me, it wasn’t much if any “freer” than F4. And the factions weren’t any better, either, IMO.

Now, I loved NV. 227 hours in it according to Steam, and I went through all the DLC a couple of times too. But it’s the vagueness and randomness of F4 that keeps me coming back to the Commonwealth, and not the Mojave. To me, “encounter nodes” with “randomly selected groups” is pretty much an accurate simulacrum of a wasteland cityscape, and I enjoy playing in it.

4839

I just want to interject that this is one of my favorite threads on Qt3. My favorite kind of thread too. For years now, the thread has been used to discuss the released game’s different aspects and gameplay and concepts and limitations and strengths. It typifies exactly the kind of discussion I’m hoping to read at Qt3.

I guess it also helps that the game is so huge. That means the discussion keeps going and going instead of dying off! So partial thanks to Bethesda and Obsidian for their parts in making this thread great.