Snatch1414 wrote:I'm only a few hours in but I'm getting my ass handed to me all of a sudden. I hate my guns right now.
gotta spend some time modding shit out. i put a lot of perks into Gun Nut and Science and Armorer and then spent like an hour modding stuff and i'm virtually unstoppable in combat. legendary enemies go down in like 4 shots. it's nice.
Yeah...
Let's just say I got the platinum and sunk 100+ hours into this, and barely spent a penny. I think I bought some random helmet at some point and that was it. Literally never bought anything.
Modding/Crafting is 10x more important in this than money.
I've completed the main storyline. Sided with the minute men. Kept the peace with the Brotherhood and Railroad for quests and stuff. Story is whatever. All Bethesda games have subpar main story. By now it should be known that the side quests and general world are the key players. Fallout 4 is no different.
Now I have focused on settlements. Redrocket is fully decked out with a supply line to Abernathy Farm and Sanctuary is a work in progress. They have a supply line to Redrocket. I'm getting shops and defenses going.
At first I was against the whole settlement nonsense. Now I love it!
So I finally took the plung and got it on PC thanks to sells and rewards points. With Best Buys $50 sale, my 20% off with GCU, and the $20 in rewards points that I ended up getting it for $20 which was my price point for the base game. Kind of glad I didn't pay much more then that.
While the world is interesting I'm not a huge fan of all the changes. Overall if you were wanting Fallout to be more of an FPS action game and you really enjoy crafting items and areas this game will be a huge step forward for you, but if you liked the RPG and survival elements from the previous games a lot of that has been dumbed down.
Pros:
1. Graphics
It looks nice and a lot of the animations are much improved. Aside from the main character who still looks like he has crapped his pants as he waddles around .
2. Vats
I actually like the VATS slow mo I miss being able to freeze time but that was really a crutch that drained a lot of the difficulty away. That being said it's easy to understand why the time freeze was there the engine has a really hard time trying to figure out what you are aiming for when the enemy is moving at least when using a keyboard.
3. Map Size.
It's a nice big map as usual so there is plenty of stuff to explore and do so you shouldn't have any trouble getting your moneys worth out of the game.
4. New/Improved Enemies
The enemy behavior, look, and animations are much improved. The monsters feel a lot more realistic and creepy which is great. I kind of miss some of the old character models for 3 and NV though especially the ghouls who have undergone a massive change. Ghouls now look and act just like the infected from I Am Legend which is a huge change and leaves me wondering what the regular ghouls are going to be like if there are even any none ferals in the game since I haven't encountered one yet.
I'm nit picky as hell because I had high expectations .
Cons:
1. New Control Layout
It sucks if you liked the old control scheme from the F3, and Vegas. Other then quick tips that flash at the top of the screen there isn't really much of a tutorial or guide to ease you into them either. They have also mapped multiple commands to the same keys which is a big no no in my book. For instance grenade/throwables are mapped to the melee key as opposed to having to be equipped as your main like in previous games. In order to use them you have to hold the melee key down for a second or two till you hear a clicking noise before you can actually throw them though which leaves you vulnerable and usually lets your enemy get close enough that you wouldn't want to use them anyways.
2. New Leveling System
Each level grants you a new perk or you can spend the point towards your SPECIAL(no restrictions as far as I can tell I've already maxed 3 of them).
Skills seem to be gone or at least hidden deep in the menus and you don't really have a ton of interaction with them aside from the boosts from choosing your SPECIAL. I was really hoping for something along the lines of Skyrim where use = progression with the skill but if that is happening it's not obvious and there is no perk tree. Also skill books now just give you a specific perk with multiple tiers.
3. Scavenging
Scavenging kind of sucks now literally everything has value thanks to the scrap so there is no point in being picky anymore and there are plenty of perks that boost your carry weight as well as the extra bump from the power suits(that you get within an hour of playing ) so you can carry around a small building worth of supplies from the get go . Plus if your carry weight isn't enough they throw companions which have a near infinite carry weight at you from the start as well.
Another change is no longer do you open drawers/containers instead you walk up to them and a little window opens up that lets you scroll through their contents. This is nice in that you no longer break immersion by having to wait for animations and then a paused screen to look through a container. However the scroll window gives you absolutely no information about the item aside from it's name. I blame the new crafting system and the ridiculous amount of weight you can carry for this scavenging feels so half assed now that you might as well just pick up everything you see there is no point in being picky since even trash like tin cans have a use now.
Also thanks to the new build your own settlement feature there isn't really much bartering at all at least not until later in the game when you can build your own shops which I'm hoping you can barter with as opposed to being able to just give/take inventory for free like you do with settlers. I haven't progressed very far into the story so there are probably a few cities I just haven't bumped into yet however I have explored probably 10-20% of the map so far and have only ran into a single caravan trader who only had maybe $500 caps on him and anything he had worth trading for was in the 3-4k zone and wasn't much better then what I could craft with the mountain of scrap I have laying around and the single point I have invested in the armor crafting perk.
4. Settlements:
They are fun to build at least at first. Plus there are a ton of resources that you can harvest once you've built it up shops give you revenue, you can harvest plants, they can scavenge scrap(I think this works but there is no clear notification ), and etc. You also get to build your community over time which is cool although I have noticed some characters simply wander off and never come back(maybe a glitch).
Settlements are also huge time sinks if you want to do them correctly. You will spend 15-30 minutes just walking around breaking down all the trash in an area each time you find a new settlement and then another 30+ minutes building a wall around it since you have to do so one panel at a time and the larger fences don't stick together so you have to build them very carefully so as to avoid leaving gaps that are to big between them.
You also have to command people to do even the most simple of tasks and there is no good menu for this you simply walk up to them in build mode select them and click on an object such as a plant which will assign them a specific job harvesting, security, and etc. however they are very limited each person can only be assigned to six tasks but there is no way to tell what tasks they already have. Luckily settlers will fill up their own task list for instance if you set a farmer to a single plant he will automatically select 5 other plants to harvest which you can observe by looking at him and seeing the objects he is assigned to light up.
5. Balance
Spoilery
This game has balance issues like crazy. Within the first hour of the game you are already in a power suit with a minigun fighting death claws . Power Suits are also freaking ridiculous the only thing keeping you from euthanizing the entire waste land without taking a more then a couple scratches is the fact that they run off fuel sources which are semi scarce.
That being said I left mine behind because they demolish the difficulty in 90% of the situations you run into. However every now and then the game decides to bend you over at random if you aren't wearing one. For instance in the 10 or so hours I've played I've already encountered Death Claws, Securitrons(which are now basically tanks), Raiders with Power Armor and Fat Mans(Mini Nukes are an insta kill even if they splash you from 10+ feet away )
6. Crafting
This game is heavily focused on crafting whether it is building a settlement, upgrading guns, building armor, or etc. While crafting is really well done I kind of miss the simplicity of the previous games I feel like Skyrim and New Vegas had a pretty nice grasp on what was just the right amount of crafting. Here it's ridiculous the amount of stuff that can be done to pretty much any item there are so many options that you are left drowning in a pool of slightly different items trying to figure out which one is truly the best.
That being said I feel like the city building is really shallow. There are a lot of assets that you would have expected to be there like picket fences and etc. that are missing from the build menu.
7. Atmosphere
I'm just not feeling the atmosphere as much here. It feels like they focused so heavily on giving the player the ability to build the world around them that they didn't put as much effort into crafting interesting environments.
Honestly for the first time I raided a vault and was utterly bored by the story they tried to portray.
8. Speech
It's nice having voice actors but they really cut back on the dialogue options and the speech checks are color coded now so it's hard to tell what you % of success are so far I haven't failed a single one anyways . Most of the responses are kind of confusing as well since instead of the whole dialogue option like in previous games you are given a 4-5 word summation of what the character will say and what he actually says doesn't always line up with what you were thinking.
9. Tutorial
In what seems to be becoming a trend with a lot of newer games there is little to no tutorial. Really outside of some quick tips that pop up very briefly on the screen there isn't much direction as far as controls and crafting goes. If you want to get the most out of the game you are going to need to go to the wiki or watch some videos on you tube explaining how to perform certain tasks.
10. Saving
You better watch your own ass this time around auto saves are few and far in between. In the menu I think there are only options for auto saving when fast traveling/entering buildings, waiting/sleeping, and going idle in the pipboy for a set amount of time. So unless you are saving/quick saving frequently by yourself it is easy to get screwed since the map is really open and if you are just wandering around the game will hardly ever save for you. I've already lost an hour of play time on one occasion thanks to this I figured it was saving each time I found a new location, but for whatever reason while it appears to show an auto save indicator at the top of the screen the save doesn't always seem to take . So now I'm pretty much saving my game after each encounter since I never know when a cheap death is waiting around the corner thanks to the occasional fat man popping up and/or the new suicider super mutant which caught me by surprise.
Altogether I think this game would have been much improved if the controls hadn't been "improved", if the crafting were more refined, and if they had built a better build menu that didn't involve the character having to walk around and build/manage everything in first person view.
I don't have a problem with the big changes they've made at all but I'm ignoring some of them. I'm just happy to travel around a new wasteland and discover stuff. I have little interest in the power armor because I'm confused as to how to effectively store it so I'm pretty much just leaving it alone. Crafting in general usually doesn't interest me very much and in this game other than mods it doesn't really do much for me.
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Yeah really I will probably end up sinking a huge amount of time into the game just exploring the environment. I just kind of miss the old combat system and I feel like for every settlement tossed into the game we missed out on a unique location to explore. While some of the settlements do have mini stories to be uncovered while clearing them most of it is very shallow when compared to the last to games in the series.
As for the power armor I'm just leaving mine at base now I feel like it ruins a lot of the combat it's like piloting a mobile suit into battle now as opposed to being just really beefy armor like in the previous games.
I was still picky with scrap. Mostly going for things with screws, copper, ceramic, tin, and radioactive material.
There ended up being not much incentive to build walls. Just built a few outposts and turrets.
Some city building stuff is added from certaim magazines, funnily enough they are called Picket Fences.
Mine autosaved for fast travel and whenever I opened PipBoy. Were you trying to quick load or pick a save from the list? Quick load only loads your last quick save, wont load autosave.
When I lost my hour of play time I had been wandering around for quite a while and had gone through 3-4 locations the drive in and a few of the areas around it. Well anyways I was minding my own business when a mini nuke came out of nowhere and blew my legs off so I sat there waited for the game to reload thinking it should have auto saved at some point since in the previous games they auto saved for just about everything but no luck it sent me back to my last manual save. Went into the manual load screen hoping for something but no luck so I've been quick saving frequently ever since.
In the settings it has the option for saving when the pip boy is up but it doesn't save unless you stay in it for at minimum 5 minutes according to the settings.
That being said I think finding new locations is supposed to count as travel and auto save like it used to but I don't know how reliable it is. Autosaves also don't seem to appear in my load menu anyways unless they aren't categorized differently then regular saves so I'm leery of them in general now anyways.
Out of curiosity I checked the lvl cap for Fallout 4 since I've been advancing so fast kind of surprised to see there isn't one. At least according to the wiki . Guess i don't have to worry about picking my perks carefully either was a little worried that I would hit a wall since I'm progressing a 1-2 levels each hour.
Fallout 4 does not have a level cap[1], although after the level 65535 the game crashes.
Yeah, they went with the Skyrim style of leveling. Personally I found that I tended to be waiting for a particular level to get a perk I wanted; there weren't too many cases where I wanted to get multiple things on a level.
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) so you can carry around a small building worth of supplies from the get go 
