StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Bethesda games are vast and beautiful, but I find the gameplay to be intolerably repetitive and bland without overhaul mods like Requiem for Skyrim. I poked around a bit on NexusMods, but couldn't get a sense of whether F4 has mods that meaningfully change the gameplay and have the kinks worked out. For someone who cannot stomach vanilla Bethesda games, is it a good time to pick up F4 or should I give it another year?

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:Bethesda games are vast and beautiful, but I find the gameplay to be intolerably repetitive and bland without overhaul mods like Requiem for Skyrim. I poked around a bit on NexusMods, but couldn't get a sense of whether F4 has mods that meaningfully change the gameplay and have the kinks worked out. For someone who cannot stomach vanilla Bethesda games, is it a good time to pick up F4 or should I give it another year?

I'd advice you wait till you can buy the whole packet cheap, maybe the coming sale will see the price drop but I'd totally wait. I like previous Fallout games with New Vegas being my favorite so I bought the base game when I deemed it cheap enough but as someone who likes the series I feel disappointed by F4, mostly for reasons that have been in the reviews of the game. So if you don't like the vanilla games I don't see any reason to get it before it gets a bit cheaper.

-Gunhead

There's nothing like Requiem or Project Nevada out for F4 yet. Closest thing I can think of is Arbitration. With the Survival mode added in, people just lean on that.

If you haven't played Fallout 4 on Survival and are looking for a challenge, well, that MIGHT do it for you. Ammo has weight, you have to eat, no fast travel, no saving unless you sleep, deal AND take increased damage, among a few other things. It's not easy, but the difficulty curve is exactly that of the regular game: things are ROUGH for a certain amount of levels. Then you get the right perks and mod out your weapons right and it becomes easy mode again. This is all, IMHO, because Beth's AI is clinically retarded. Arbitration did help with that when I was using it.

You can search by most popular, filtered by non-Adult, because (and I try to keep up), there's nothing non-boobie related under Adult for F4 unlike Skyrim. Really, it's not even the boobs that annoy me, it's that I can't filter out "BODYSLIDE PRESET, I changed something slightly!" or "here's my companion with large boobs, a vanilla face, and anime hair." Because shit like that should have been uploaded to the recycling bin, not the Nexus.

The Bethesda mod site is pretty good too, and those mods are plug-and-play. I'm currently running the Resurrection: Forest Edition mod, and it's amazing. Aside from greening up the Commonwealth (as it should be after two centuries of biosphere recovery,) all the foliage forces one to rethink how they play. With so much visibility obscured, ambushes are alarmingly easy. Both to set and spring.

I was rolling around in my lovely TES-51 Power Armor (another mod, check it out, it's awesome) and, used to being able to spot anything dangerous, got complacent. Getting jumped from behind by a pack of raiders led by a legendary that I'd have spotted in the vanilla landscape led to a death and respawn. And now wooded ares look amazing during the day, and outright spooky at night. Like "I know there's no spawns on this side of Sanctuary, but I'm building turrets here anyway" kind of spooky.

Another good one I run is "Radio Nam." New radio station that plays Vietnam-era rock music, complete with commentary from Robin Williams' Good Morning Vietnam. Rocking to Freedom Son as I hang out the side of a Vertibird, spraying very well-disciplined synths with minigun fire on my Brotherhood playthrough scratches an itch I didn't know I had.

Now I'm looking for mods that clean up the waters and get rid of the radiation (again, as would happen after 200 goddamed years) and let me scrap all the ugly-as-sin and non-repairable houses in Sanctuary.

Highlord Laan wrote:The Bethesda mod site is pretty good too, and those mods are plug-and-play. I'm currently running the Resurrection: Forest Edition mod, and it's amazing. Aside from greening up the Commonwealth (as it should be after two centuries of biosphere recovery,) all the foliage forces one to rethink how they play. With so much visibility obscured, ambushes are alarmingly easy. Both to set and spring.

Does the foliage actually affect AI LOS? Or is this some Farcry levels of "I'm completely obscured in bushes but I'm still getting shot with pinpoint accuracy?" I can't find much as the mod description is in Russian and the user was banned off the Nexus. Either way, I did have some fun with other AI "overhauls" such as Search and Destroy (increases AI engagement range and search time) because Bethesda cannot balance stealth and higher difficulties are almost always suicide without relying on said broken stealth.

The game is shallow enough, but there was more than enough fun to be had in drawn out battles, but the dumb as hammers AI continues to ruin it. Skyrim's AI overhaul (I can't even remember which one I'm running) is ok. The bandits attack as a group, will bash, etc, but melee is generally easier to work with. I just wish the AI would try to flank me but they fight like Stark and his men at the Tower of Joy.

An AI mod for Fallout that works the flush you out with grenades (not just spam them) then conserve ammo by shooting when you are out of cover would be aces. I wonder if Take Cover has seen any good improvements. But he might still be waiting on animation assets.

Fo4's AI actually markedly improves as you get higher in level. It's not enough to compete with a human player, but it's enough to not be window-licking retarded and use actual tactics. Raider groups will attempt to flank, they'll take cover, and yes, they'll use grenades to flush you out. Or, they'll stop shooting at you and instead shoot the car you've foolishly stopped near enough to be caught in the blast radius.

I've also seen Brotherhood patrols in my total-war Minutemen playthrough attempt proper small unit tactics using covering fire and only moving from cover themselves as their power armor units advance. But my Minutemen character is level 123. so it may just be absurd-level gameplay. Most of the time the AI flubs it though. I've see a BoS commando hit a Paladin in the back with a missile several times.

One thing I'm doing is deliberately not min-maxxing, and attempting to level up organically. Which is why my (female) Minutemen character, with her background in Law rather than war, has markedly higher intelligence and charisma (both 11), and lower combat power, than her former-army husband that I play in my BoS game.

In my experience the Fallout 4 AI is a marked improvement over original Skyrim's AI.

I've seen things like tactical retreating, suppressing fire, use of proper cover (i.e. not hiding behind an open railing or a stool), heavy weapons staying back as support, etc. compared to Skyrim's where even at high levels and high difficulty most bandits would charge at me one by one and archers would just stand in the open and wait for me to walk up to them and kill them.

The only issue in Fallout is that despite what are imo vast AI improvements, it doesn't matter because even at high difficulties you can just walk right through them once you get past the early levels and the handful of mid-level equipment buffs enemies will get.

You guys must have noticed something more than I did. While the F4 AI is leagues above Fallout 3, Raiders and Gunners still give up cover to engage me out in the open. Certain mobs seem primed not to do so, but that seems to be because they are linked to a certain area and don't want to leave it. They will, however, sit in a small area and be nade bait.

Engaging, then falling back a bit, is a great way to get melee to charge outside to hit you with a board. After they are dead, the ranged NPCs finally get there because, even though they wanted to rush you, their AI package makes them constantly move from cover to cover, so it just takes them longer. However, once they have LOS, they'll stand there and immediately engage you, even through you're in cover. Sure, they'll dive for cover after a few bullets, but that seems only because their AI package is specifically set to "Gears of War" mode.

Note: whether random or not, I HAVE had a raider round the corner and say "Shit!" then dive into cover. This was both hilarious and a one-time occurrence.

If NPCs flank, it's almost always likely because their packages force them to move to new cover and that cover isn't available in front of them. FEAR did this same thing, but it worked much better because it was combined with better map design and an AI director. I can bug out melee on ramps all the time because Beth AI just doesn't like elevation changes. In fact, I think the only reason NPCs don't charge down from the top floors directly to me is because they just don't know how since their AI pathing is hilariously bad.

The Brotherhood looks much cooler in action and I'm willing to bet because most all of it is heavily scripted and/or relies on a basic AI pathing package with demands to use available cover combined with smart aggression settings to make it look like they are functioning as a group. It is still years behind something like HL2, Halo, or FEAR.

This is a bit of a necro, but it's still on the front page and I'm annoyed, so sorry either way.

I remember bitching about "The Combat Zone" because you could tell it was setup to be something more than an interior cell to kill Raiders and recruit Cait. So, Combat Zone Restored comes out and I can't tell you how much it pisses me off when shit like this gets cuts to put in more.... I don't fucking know.. workshop bullshit?

Gist of the mod:
You walk in after killing the exterior "guards."
Tommy asks you to fight Cait.
You beat Cait up (well, I did, easily, for reasons I'll go into).
Then you get a new (shitty) place to crash and can fight whenever you want.
Or (and this is important): You can bet on fights, sit the fuck down, and watch the violence unfold.

It's content like this that makes a game feel like a living (if not horrifically violent) world rather than point A,B,C through Z where you shoot red dots on your minimap. You know, the whole "video games are art" bullshit line? To me, this is the "art" part because it's world-building. It makes me feel like this is an actual place where Raiders (the lowest scum on Earth) kick back after a hard day of murderin.' Because: "Hey, this guy/gal in Raider Leathers must TOTALLY not be a scumbag like me because I know the face of every other raider in the Commonwealth. MURDER HER!" actually made my highlight list of "This is moronic. Someone should have stopped this from happening."

Some programmer thought about this, put it in the game, and I have to assume was tarred, feathered, beaten, THEN fired by Todd Howard and his gaggle of Beth boardmembers while they screamed "Here's your Combat Zone you little bitch!." Then after the poor bastard crawled out of the building, bloodied and broken, the following exchange happened:

"Hey, you know, that's actually not a bad idea."
"Yea, let's do that and sell a shittier version of it as DLC."

And that's how Wasteland Workshop was created.

The whole thing is voiced by the vanilla actors mind you. There's a few bugs, Tommy calls you "Mr." in the first dialog no matter what and for some reason Cait wouldn't attack me, this is a known bug. The bartender has dialog, but won't sell me anything (no idea if intentional). But this also means everything was basically done and it got cut. I get shit gets cut all the time in games, but damn it, in an open-world murder-fueled shithole like Fallout: little set pieces like this add so damned much to the game. Much more than cash-grab settlement, babies first mod, DLC.