1955

Maybe if they take an extra year they can accomplish what modders can throw together in weeks.

This game as a whole has accomplished what none of the prior Bethesda catalog could. It’s made me fed up with their clear lack of ability to improve. It’s been a long time since I felt like so much of my time has been shit on through complete incompetence.

I guess there’s always Dishonored 2 unless they somehow manage to ruin that as well. At least for now I have far more confidence that Arkane still knows how to make a game but whoever is responsible for this mess has completely screwed the pooch imo.

1956

This game sets the record for most times I’ve accidentally pulled up the game menu by hitting Esc at the wrong time.

1957

Yes, I was raging at this earlier. if you have a window/interface open ESC should never overlay the game menu on top. Ugh.

I hate the dialog user interface too. Text prompts appearing and disappearing as the stupid NPCs move around or just rotate while talking. Just stay in one place god dammit!

1958

Wow, this thread and this game. It seems like people who love Fallout will love the game, but a neutral observer would find it mediocre.

1959

I’ve managed to do it approximately 400 times so far on the controller, too!

1960

To me, it’s like the difference between fun and quality. Faulkner is quality (and, ok, for a Southern nerd like me somewhat fun) but generally not light reading. Jim Butcher is fun, but face it, ain’t gonna win the Nobel for literature. Fallout 4 is fun. Much of the criticism is spot-on, and the game could be vastly improved in many ways. But it’s still compelling, interesting, engaging fun for a lot of folks too. I’d not stack it up against, say, Skyrim in a critical sense, as it’s nowhere near that level. But I’d easily recommend you buy it if you like this sort of gameplay, warts and all.

I’m not sure New Vegas had that much better dialog or stories, either. Yes, they were definitely better. But, for instance, Lonesome Road; that story line is incomprehensible. Half the interactions between people in the Mojave around the different factions are bizarre and confusing, if not contradictory. It has the advantage of a much more integrated thematic context, around the competition for hegemony in the region, but at the micro level it still boils down to some very simple decisions on your part. But I agree even that simplicity of context makes the gameworld more alive. I’m early yet in F4 but it does seem to lack that level of coherence.

And I do share the feeling that a lot of the game world seems plopped down to satisfy a bullet point somewhere, rather than crafted in a Morrowind or Skyrim sense. The lore book for Morrowind was massive (I remember seeing it when I visited the develper when I was a journalist); I get the impression the lore book for F4, if there is one, is about the size of one of those comic books you read in-game for stat boosts.

Still, I can’t share the feeling some have that it’s a mistake to get it or that it’s a bad game. It isn’t. It’s simply not a great game. With, um, an epochally bad interface.

1961

At the end of Faulkner, though, you’re provided with gratification and satisfaction for having put up with unreliable narrators, odd dialects and everything else. You can see why it was done that way.

In Fallout 4, I’m not sure that gratification awaits, or if the payoff will be worth it. And no, I can’t see why it was done this way.

1962

I will try to remember to do the experiment in the next quest.

I think it’s the other way around?

1963

I hope my somewhat longish post does not give the impression that I think the game is really bad, or that people aren’t allowed to have fun - of course they are. If the game had had any other name, and was developed by any other developer, I think I would have enjoyed the game, and its reception would have been very different.

The thing is - names carry with them expectations, and there are at least three names that accompanies this game, and carries with it importance and expectations - Fallout (Of course), Bethesda, AND Skyrim. The setting is Fallout, the engine is Bethesda, and of course, Skyrim is the last game in the genre from Bethesda, and as such, I think many people expected an iteration on Skyrim, and not just Fallout. What we have, is a lot more an iteration on Fallout than Skyrim, and thats a damn shame in my book - It could have been so much more.

Now that I’ve settled my expectations somewhat, I’m sure I’ll play it a bit more, but there is no way I’ll get the mileage out of this, that I got out of Skyrim, and as someone said earlier - it will be interesting to see how long Fallout will be on Steams top 10, since Skyrim was there for quite a few years, on-off.

1964

Is this the quest you first get from the Minuteman guy in Sanctuary? If so, that’s really strange because the settlement I encountered had people with names. They also had a nice garden they were tending?

1965

Really? I had one guy - named Settler, in a shack that looked more or less like the pre-fab squares you can make. Are you sure you aren’t thinking about the farm that is in the other direction?

1966

yeah I had this outcome, when i returned to complete the mission his wife was there but it really didnt feel like a settlement

1967

FWIW, I’m still liking this well enough, but yeah, we’re going to need UI and needs mods to help out I think. I’m having plenty of moments of great enjoyment in FO4, which is probably why stuff like the interface is such a drag when you encounter it. But, I sort of suspected that might be the case going in.

1968

Fwiw, I was somewhat disappointed as I was exploring the area around Sanctuary but once I started making my way south things improved somewhat. That said, I’m about to enter Diamond city and I’ve only done 2 or 3 quests that can actually be called quests. It’s a little…alarming. You’re also right on the money regarding worldbuilding, it’s nowhere near Skyrim’s level and it’s the one thing about the game that really bugs me. Then again, I’ve already found so many unmarked places that look like some major work went into them. It’s really making me look at the game world instead of my minimap and I gotta say, I like that. There’s lots of “see that X? You can Y” here and I keep getting sidetracked on my way to the objectives, highways in particular are fun to explore because you often have to find a way up first. The further south you get the more this is amplified as you enter more urban areas with lots of buildings and basements to explore.

1969

Here’s a question, that I never thought about until just now…

Once you’ve set up supply lines, then you can share all the parts and crap between your different settlements. That’s cool.

But does it work for ANYTHING you put into your workshop? And can you put anything in there?

I never really considered doing that, and have been storing other junk into different containers… But I’m kind of loaded down with things like chemical ingredients and stuff, which are not considered junk… so they don’t automatically go into the workshop storage when you hit the junk button.

But i’m wondering if I just put everything into the workshop inventory, if it’ll then be accessible from any crafting or cook station? Or at least from the ones that are in connected settlements?

1970

I just had idiot savant trigger when I turned in the farmers quest, I ranked up 2 levels! :D

1971

Never forget Settler. He lives within all of us.

Fun is fun but time rules all. Which amazing games could I be playing if I skipped this?

1972

Man, this game does such a terrible job of explaining the crafting and workshop system. Coupled with the shit U/I, the whole settlement gameplay is just about the worst survival/builder I’ve played.

I get that they didn’t want to bog things down with some long tutorial, but come on, Bethesda!

For two hours last night, I was futzing around in Sanctuary and I was bashing my head against the wall, trying to figure out how to assign a settler to a workstation. The little pop-up in the left corner kept telling me to do it, and I’m like “Okay, game. How about you fucking spend some of that precious text by telling me what the fuck to do!?” The solution, of course, turned out to be the most inconvenient and obtuse one. You have to select the NPC while you are in building mode, then select the workstation/defensive position you want them to be assigned to, being careful to not double-select the station and “store” it in the workshop because fuck you Bethesda.

1973

Yeah, excessively long tutorials/hand-holding can get on my nerves, but a little effort would have really gone a long way here. I eventually figured it out, but it was through blind trial and error.

And I’m still not entirely sure what resources it takes to plant food. I initially was able to plant enough to produce 3 food, but I needed 5. No idea what it was consuming from my inventory, since the game didn’t seem to want to tell me, but I figured it was from harvesting plants. Alright, so I head out, harvest a bunch more mutfruit and some gourds and return to town to plant… except I can’t plant anything. Why not? No idea. So I just go out, do a couple missions and pick up whatever I find along the way, and now I can plant plenty of food. Okay, I got it up and running, but I still have no clue what I did. And then the game tells me to build defenses… okay. Am I trying to protect a small area of town? Do I put turrets around the perimeter, or do I just place them at important buildings (the crafting stations)? Does it matter, as long as the Defense stat keeps going up? I.e. is this simulated, or are there going to be actual battles at Sanctuary? No idea.

I’m having a lot of fun with the game (well, once I worked around the “get permanently stuck at every computer terminal you come across” bug, which appears to be due to high framerates), but I think I might shelve this for a few weeks until they drop a couple patches and/or something along the lines of SkyUI comes along. I know the Skyrim UI got a lot of flak, but I found it functional and it didn’t get in my way too much, it just wasn’t optimized for PC. Fallout 4’s UI, though… damn, what a hot mess that is.

1974

I also have one question when it comes to difficulty. I bumped it to Hard and I generally like how damage comes in (except when I got to Corvega and they started tossing endless streams of one-shotting molotovs and grenades), but everything feels like a ridiculous bullet sponge. Is this because my weapons suck and/or I’m under-leveled for an area (is there a way to tell?), or is Hard just very bullet-spongey?

I don’t necessarily need a level number, but some sort of color code to indicate I’m out of my depth would be nice.