Fallout 4

If I do a 2nd playthough I will start with this. I wish I would have started with it on my first playthrough!

It’s pretty neat. And the mod author hacked together a nice voice-acted intro with Codsworth, too, if you chose not to be Vault Dad. It’s clear that you’re being accosted by a malfunctioning Mr. Handy.

Basically, you need this mod if you simply want to wander the wasteland without having SEAN!11!!! hanging over your head.

Fallout 4 will be free to play this weekend on Steam and Xbox One (not PS4). Mod access will be available too. You can potentially see a lot of the content if you cancel all other plans and keep a bucket by your chair.

Should be on sale as well.

I love this whole Free Weekend stuff. It feels like I have something free to play on the Xbox nearly every week sometimes.

I wonder if I should continue my game from launch, or if I should start a new character and try out Survival mode.

Actually, my old character was playing on the old Survival difficulty at launch. I wonder how that will be handled? Will I get the choice? Or will I automatically be on the new Survival now?

So I tried a dual-pronged approach:

on PC:

I started a new game on Survival difficulty. I really like the part that there’s no fast travel, and that I had to build a bed in Sanctuary to save my game. Well, I later found out that when I slept on the mattress, that also saved my game, it’s just not satisfying because my tiredness didn’t go down enough from sleeping on a mattress. So beds are pretty important.

What I also expected was drinking water regularly so I’m not thirsty. That’s a pretty cool part of the game too. Purified water is really important.

What I was not expecting is that I have to eat regularly too. And the only things you can find in Fallout 4 at the beginning is radiated food. So you eat, but that adds to your radiation levels, so your max health keeps going down the longer you play, which means Radaway becomes pretty darned important. I’m not sure I like being forced into that situation. I’m assuming later I’ll find a way to procure food that’s not radiated.

On Xbox:

I continued my saved game, and it immediately told me that since Survival difficulty had changed, the game had changed my difficulty to Very Hard now, but I could manually change it back to Survival if I wanted to. For now I stayed at Very Hard and got my bearings. I was 40 hours into the game. I was at some factory taken over by people with flame throwers and grenades. Holy shit. I remember this now. I was having a hell of a time with this battle. The flame thrower people are SO HARD to beat. If they close in on your position, you’re dead. So you have to use VATS a lot, and grenades, and mines, and everything else.

I missed this game. I’ll have to find my Bethesda.net login so I can try out some mods on both versions of the game.

I bought this during the last big Xbox sale, so I’m looking forward to checking it out. After I play Deus Ex Mankind Divided. And Titanfall 2. And wrap up Witcher 3. Sigh.

I like the idea of the free preview weekends leading me around, telling me what to play each weekend. When you’ve got a big backlog, it’s nice to have someone else make the choice for you.

I am new to this game, and I started right off the bat on survival mode. I’ve played survival on F:NV so I’m not totally blind. Let’s see how it goes.

So far (1-2 hours in) it is exactly what I expected: tough but fair. I’m outside the museum and just about to go in.

And I know for a fact that once you really get going, you will be swimming in resources anyway so I will probably ride out any initial rough patches.

This sounds interesting …

Help me enjoy Fallout 4, someone, anyone.

I tried to start playing with my 360 controller, but trying to use it to scroll menu items in terminals and whatnot was useless–moves too fast.

I tried play M+K, but the even touching the mouse makes view jump and jiggle like crazy, and that’s making me ill.

Is there some way to turn the sensitivity of these down? (Yes, I’ve tried turning down mouselook in the options menu. Doesn’t seem to do jack.)

Enable vsync, disable mouse acceleration (if such an option exists, I don’t remember). You can also try to disable Steam Controller profile for Fallout 4 in the Big Picture - I’ve had issues in some games and the symptoms were similiar to what you’re describing - duplicate inputs on controllers etc.

Do you not have a mouse with adjustable sensitivity? Any Razer can do it on the fly, for example.

Here I am, a month later I am still nowhere near ending the main quest. Mostly because there is a lot to explore. The main quests are very linear, and it is stuck perpetually waiting for player input, so there is absolutely no hurry to pick a side. They put everything that made Skyrim great into Fallout 4, and made everything bigger and better.

The only complaint I have is with the (lack of) dialogue choice. Options are opaque and don’t give the expected results. ME series did that much better.

Dion DiMucci, the singer/songwriter of The Wanderer, is suing ZeniMax/Bethesda for their use of his song in ads for Fallout 4. He contends that the ads glorified violence and immorality thereby damaging his brand. The crux of the suit is this:

[quote]
According to the suit, DiMucci entered an agreement via UMG Recordings to license the song for the “Fallout 4” commercials.

However, the suit says, under the agreement DiMucci had the right to separately bargain with ZeniMax for a better rate, and to prohibit the use of the song unless his terms were met first. The suit says that ZeniMax failed to separately bargain with DiMucci, and failed to obtain his advance consent before the commercials ran.[/quote]

I think this is the ad:

Nice ad.

Glorified immorality? The wanderer roams from town to town, philandering with abandon. Why, he hugs women and squeezes them…because to him they’re all the same.

Does Dion know how hard it is to advance a companion to a romantic relationship? It’s much more difficult than hopping into that car of his and driving around the world.

Ok I’m not nearly done with this game (still have Far Harbour and Nuka World to go), but I finally bothered enough to finish the main quest with the Minutemen, and it was monstrous. There is no other way to describe the moral repugnance of blowing up the Institute. All the knowledge, all the people, gone. If you have gone far enough with the Institute quest line before going hostile against them, then it is clear that they want as little to do with the surface as possible. The only cause of belligerence, though it is a really big one, against the Institute is with their treatment of synths. But the nuclear option is clearly the wrong response.

IMO all four main factions are flawed, and therefore their main quest line need not be bothered. Brotherhood this time is borderline anti science fascist, choosing to destroy anything they don’t approve of rather than study it. Assuming the human synths are by all intents and purposes human, except with an off/reset switch, The Railroad is right to liberate them, but surely not at the expense of other humans. Think of the technological advancement they can achieve if they focus a bit more on agricultural science and less on fighting the Institute. The Institute tactic of replacing humans with synths is wrong, and treating the human synths as property is as wrong as slavery. The only thing the Minutemen did wrong is to call for the nuclear option against the Institute.

All the criticisms that this game glorifies violence is right. With dialogue options being dialled down to bare minimum, there is little option to resolve things peacefully in a varied way. For example, take Diamond City Blues. By sticking up for a wimp you accidentally bust up a drug deal, with no option but to kill your way out rather than given the chance by the game to walk away or resolve the conflict peacefully.

A lot of dungeons you simply can’t sneak your way in, so you ended up being a bloody imperialist, intruding other people’s territory, then kill your way out and grab the loot from dead bodies rather than through e.g. trade. Raiders and the Gunners are by definition bad, because they are labelled red. Never mind that they may be just holed up in their little bunker minding their own business.

Bethesda are continuing their track record with shit main quests but impressive world. I want to roam the post-apocalyptic world they create all day long, just like Skyrim. Just don’t ask me to do their structured quests. And fast Travelling via vertibird is the best fast travel system ever. Other than the pop-in because of the limit in draw distance, the view from above is impressive.

Yeah. The main quest resolution is awful. Most reasonable folks would find a middle ground; i.e. a solution that didn’t involve completely murdering one or more of the factions. Bethesda has never cared about reasonable or non-scorched-earth, nor the consequences of what you’ve done after the main quest (see Skyrim’s “I killed the big bad but nobody really noticed” deal).

Yes, the main quests are really bad. In the institutes defense, they simply do not believe they are capable of creating sentient life. This is not quite the same thing as a slaver faction which know they are enslaving free-willed beings. As for the institute ending, it is my assumption that as its leader, you can change their direction and resolve the ‘slave’ problem. Of course Bethesda can’t be bothered to give you any real choice in the game. You have no real impact in the game world other than which of the 4 factions ‘win’.

I have a tremendous amount of contempt for fallout 4. So much so, that I was recently considering a kill everyone play-thought (except for Nick Valentine because he is cool and the institute). Id love to kill the minute-men, brotherhood and punish the railroad for their horrendous short-sightedness.

I spent some time trying to figure out mods to facilitate this. One problem is that so many npcs are invulnerable. Id love to kill Strong, for example. Another is that you can break a lot of quests by killing people (Like Preston).

Id also like to greatly reduce if not remove respawns. I am looking at you Corvega Car factory.

Maybe Ill do something again later. I currently do not have any DLC though. Its still not cheap enough. The real reason I do not own any of it is that I do not want to give Bethesda any more money because of the horrendous job they did on Fallout 4. It, at best, is a very generic, bland, open world game. You have almost no impact in the real world other than picking which ending the game will have.

Does the nuka-world expansion let you join the raider factions outside of nuka-world? Id love to take out diamond city with an army of raiders, if that were possible.

You’ll hate the raiders too. It’s pretty uninspired, top to bottom.