Some miscellaneous comments
-I liked how the game handles choosing your gender, taking the role of the mother or the father and changing who takes the child depending of your choice.
-But I had 0 empathy for them, once the real game started, it was time to explore and scrounge the wasteland, screw my son.
-The graphics can be pretty purdy, mainly in the Wasteland itself, the new outdoor lightning is much better, and especially if there is fog or rain, light bloom, sunsets, etc, also the detailed environments helps a lot. The interiors are worse, and most reminiscing of what we had in the previous games, they are more like a slight improved version of them, except sometimes with fancy f/x like screen space reflections. In fact I could swear some of the art assets (ruined tables, computers, debris) are from Fallout 3, in fact. Some of the npcs also look like taken from Skyrim quality wise, and that’s a game from 2011.
-Speaking of recycling content, the computer UI, the hacking minigame and the lockpicking minigame are fully taken wholesale from Fallout 3, 0 changes. I suppose we could say “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but ehh.
-Reaching Concord was a bit of a disappointment, only 1 in 15 houses were enterable!
-Loading times/fast travel times are relatively long, after playing games like Witcher 3.
-Even on pc with 16gb RAM, 4gb of VRAM and a SSD, there was a time where the game needed 4 seconds to load up a detailed texture for the ground, after exiting a interior area and returning to the Wasteland. I suspect their streaming tech is inefficient, or just plain old buggy.
-The game impressed me when it was time to play with the settlement interface, as it shows you how much of the landscape are manipulable objects, not static stuff. Entire trees, ruined houses, big piles of tires, all could be interacted and recycled.
-But I did the minimum work for Sanctuary, I can place stuff on the ground but I doubt I’m going to bother building entire houses, placing wall to wall, door to door, stairs, ceiling, etc. In fact I tried it just to see how it was and it was confusing as hell, I couldn’t finish the house :P.
-Combat is better than before, as we expected, but still not as good as desirable.
-But I liked now it can be hard, it’s perfectly 50%-100% harder than in Fallout 3, which was basically a joke.
-Now, people that says there is little meds and ammo and you have to be conservative… they aren’t searching well enough. I never had problems with the supplies.
-Writing isn’t very good for now, with some dips in laughable territory.
-The new conversation system is… well, surprise surprise, it isn’t good. Lots of the times it feels constrained, artificial, forced, as your choices are very similar in different conversations with different people. Up option is “repeat word with interrogation at the end”, like “raiders?” “farm?” “Diamond City?” etc. Then you have “yes”, “no” in the down and right options, and “maybe”/“sarcastic” on the left. Funnily sometimes it feels artificial not because there are -only- 4 options, but because sometimes it doesn’t make sense to have four options as there is really one way for the conversation to go, and you can notice how they are filler or they would go to the same sentence.
Once the resulting conversation was super confusing as we were talking about issue 1, I used one option to ask about another thing (issue 2), they asked me back so I answered, but then the npc replied as if my answer was from issue 1, not 2.
