Nah. I mean the writing is what you’d expect from a Bethesda game (has a particular style, not necessarily bad, just up to the player if he likes it or not), but those conversations are a relatively minor part of the game, 99% of the time you’ll be running around shooting stuff up, and that’s always fun.
I’ve actually been meaning to mod the game and replay it myself. Has anyone tried out the Horizon mod? I got pretty hyped reading about it, but then I read somewhere that it makes enemies very spongy. If anyone tried it, please tell me how it really is, because the new Survival combat made the game 100x more fun and I’d hate to throw that away.
Modern Firearms is a great mod that makes everything decidedly not spongy, just because of the damage involved. By proxy you also become way less spongy.
Yeah, this weekend I continued my Survival saved game, not my older save that got turned into Non-Survival. What really tickled me pink was the fact that I was going through Boston suburbs, going house to house, desperately looking for a bed.
Oh no! This house is boarded up. Next house: after carefully exploring it for 10 minutes, I found no bed. I accidentally jumped off the 3rd floor balcony down to the street (and survived), and ate some food to heal up, and went to the next house to look for a bed. When I found a sleep bag it was such a triumphant moment.
I’m really tempted to try it out, but on the other hand I’m afraid I’d want to play with assault rifles then, and I’m determined to play a charisma/luck gunslinger character this time ;).
Also, default Survival combat is great as it is, it doesn’t have to be any more lethal.
I played more of Fallout 4 with Horizon installed than without it. The depth of the changes are staggering and I thought they were all for the better.
Enemies aren’t spongy, but it can seem like they are. The mod author changed combat for all of the enemy types (I believe), requiring a different approach for most. For instance, Super Mutants are now vulnerable to headshots and soak up bullets if you shoot them anywhere else. Synths seem impossible to kill unless you focus your fire on their limbs. I thought it made the combat much more interesting and tactical, but YMMV.
It’s worth noting that lots of other stuff changes too. The first few hours of the game are much more difficult as you don’t have any means to cure the sicknesses you’re likely to pick up. You might have to make a run for Diamond City or another location with a doctor to get patched up.
I especially loved how it made all the resource gathering you do in the game feel more purposeful. You need resources for everything in Horizon, and most recipes have been changed to require more resources and include a rarer resource so you can’t make tons of any one particular thing. Getting a purified water production line up and running and producing enough water to keep me from getting thirsty all the time felt like an accomplishment.
Horizon includes a fast travel system that lets you move between settlements and the Railroad HQ, Prydwen, Diamond City, and Goodneighbor. You just have to spend resources to use it.
Everything the mod author did made Fallout 4 a more interesting experience to me, including slowing down the leveling so you don’t get to a place where you’re insanely overpowered as you near the end game. I liked that a lot, but once again YMMV.
This has been the biggest surprise to me so far on the new Survival difficulty. Back at launch, on the old “Survival” difficulty that wasn’t really Survival, all enemies were huge bullet sponges. And that wasn’t necessarily all bad. It required a different kind of tactical thinking. But so far, on the new survival, I’ve been so shocked to kill things in one shot when I get a headshot, for example. Honestly, it makes the new Survival feel like a cakewalk compared to the old Survival difficulty (so far).
It goes both ways though. I played a melee character last time and it was quite hard in the beginning because I had to sneak up enemies. Armor made a ton of difference in the end, and I even took some DR and health perks because I actually felt that I needed them.
Whole experience really reminded me of Skyrim’s Requiem mod, and it made Fallout 4 the first Bethesda game that I legitimately enjoyed unmodded.
I’ve read the feature list a little more thoroughly and I’m convinced this is the mod for me. Three questions though - do I need to install SIMS separately? Any other must have mods besides Horizon? Ideally I’d like to keep my mod setup light, but since I’m already modding I might as well go all in. And three - should I start on Outcast right off the bat? I like hard games (Misery, Requiem) so that’s not an obstacle, but if it’s possible to change from vanilla to outcast later on I might go with that option instead.
And as a bonus, how viable are pistols in Horizon? I used rifles to complement melee in my last playthrough and was thinking of doing a luck/charisma build this time. Speaking of which, just how useful is charisma in Horizon anyway?
SIMS - I may be a total idiot here, but I’m not sure what that refers to. Is that part of the Horizon mod? I only ever installed one mod.
Other mods - Horizon is so all-encompassing that you don’t need any other difficulty mods. However, if you want more challenge you could always try War of the Commonwealth, which adds a shitload of spawn points and makes the game far more challenging.
I think Sim Settlements is a must have mod if you’re going to do any of the settlement building stuff. I always found building such a pain in the ass, so I love that I can have my settlers do it using the Sim Settlements mod. Plus, the author just released a version that includes city plans so you can just click a button, go away for a while, and come back to find an entire settlement built up. Horizon includes a compatibility patch for Sim Settlements that makes them work well together.
I always install a save anywhere mod too. This is mostly because I use so many mods (50+) that the game crashes with some frequency. I also use a mod that gives me more carry weight because I find it insanely irritating that the game encourages me to pick up everything and then survival mode punishes me for wanting to do that by forcing me to walk back to base constantly. Horizon has a system where you can call robots and fill them up with crap to send them back to base, but I’d rather just have lots of carry weight and not worry about it.
Other mods are up to you. I haven’t felt the need for any other major gameplay or difficulty mods though.
Outcast - I’ve only played Horizon on the Survival difficulty. I could see playing on Outcast being great or being extra frustrating. With enemies doing 3.5x damage I could see dying a whole lot playing on that level. On my most recent playthrough I had a hell of a lot of trouble doing the first Brotherhood mission (following Danse to Arcjet Systems) because the damage and toughness of the synths is amped up to such a degree (I actually died several times). That one mission was more challenging than anything in my first playthrough of the game, which is why I love Horizon so much. I don’t know if it’s possible to adjust the difficulty after you’ve started the game.
Pistols - In my experience, every weapon is viable in Horizon because it has to be. Most of the time I don’t have enough ammo to stick to one gun for very long anyway.
Having picked up the GOTY edition of FO4, have to say that I’ve never had more trouble figuring out a game as much as this, and I’ve played all the other FOs. It’s almost as if they decided they don’t need to explain anything and everyone would just stumble into it. As an example, I’ve gotten a job to help some folk in Sanctuary make themselves some beds/shelter, but hell if I can figure out what I’m supposed to do with the workshop to make them. It’s not just choose items, it looks like it wants me to find a place and set them down, too. Except there’s an entire town of space and I really don’t want to walk around setting up walls and floors and roofs and beds and the like. Is there a way to tell it to just put a full house over on top of that other house?
Now I know why that turret I built up at the workshop was placed on the other side of the wall on top of my armour workbench. I didn’t realize I was placing it at all and thought the game was choosing a location for me. I can’t see through the wall. Frustrating.
No wonder mods for FO4 are in such high demand. I usually try to play without them for as long as I can, but I think I may need to do something to fix this settlement crap before I get too annoyed.
Yeah, I think when the game came out, someone posted a really nice video in this thread. So I watched that right before playing, so I kind of knew how their interface worked before going in. They sure didn’t explain it well within the game.
Great, I went and found myself a video that showed what I’m supposed to be doing in Sanctuary. Well, apparently I can scrap anything I find in that town and use it to make beds I can then place in houses that are otherwise standing and can be entered. Um, that’s pretty easy. Why, Bethesda, could you not just tell me to do that? Would have saved a lot of annoyance. Back at it.
Settlement stuff is still really fucking fiddly even when you understand more or less what you should be doing. Lots of crafting individual items and placing them manually.
Or get Sim Settlements and find the mod items and place beacons to have something auto-built, but with very little aesthetic control and a resulting structure that doesn’t interact with the building mechanics at all and, at least in my experience, a tendency to not align with the ground.
I still prefer the latter to the former, but it’s also not quite what I was looking for. I’ll have to fiddle with it more at some point. I think one of the addon mods lets you assign people to build stuff over time as part of a general development plan, which would be the almost entirely hands-off approach I’d most prefer, but if it does I haven’t figured that stuff out yet.
