Fallout 4... is coming (10 Nov 2015)

[Jub]

I could just say Beth was stupid lazy, but considering their pre-order numbers (which are likely astronomic) and they way they have seemed to setup their DLC and new mods system (and the hostility of the current mod community to pirates): they could just not care as they will still be making all the money and pirates who want updates, DLC, and mods are probably going to have it as rough as those who pirated Skyrim.

I pirated Skyrim for a while - I did eventually buy a legit copy once I was finished with being a broke college student - and honestly the pirates had patches up pretty quickly. I didn't exactly do much moding though so I don't know how much of a pain keeping up with mods would have been, especially if you wanted to keep up with the Jones' in terms of being on the latest patch with the latest mods.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Every study that used credible methods has come to the conclusion that most people pirate when they don't have discretionary income and stop pirating when they get a job, so the vast majority of pirated downloads are not lost sales, and that pirated copies are actually a form of marketing. The pirate's friends see him playing the game and some of them end up buying a copy. Unlike many companies in the industry, Bethsoft has understood this for many years and so they haven't shot themselves in the foot with heavy-handed DRM.

[Mr Bean]

Having a good deal of fun already, it's a brand new Fallout and most important of all, I don't know what will happen next.

[Mr Bean]

First of the patches have been released, fixing audio crashes.

In time I'll find fault with this game, but now? I'm having to much fun to notice imperfections.

[TheFeniX]

Also, if you go to GreenManGaming you can get Fallout 4 for $48 with the voucher code SAVE20-NOVEMB-GAMING ($24 for the season pass with the same code).

A late thanks as I just recently purchased. Voucher is still good, key was good. Man, I hate Comcast, but the new bump they just did means I'm pulling 10.5MB/s off Steam. I'm holding off on the Season Pass as 90% of my fun has always been through the main game. Hell, I just got around the beating Dragonborn and that was a snooze-fest, side-quests aside.

[bilateralrope]

Unlock Frame Rate, Change FOV, Skip Intro Video, Unlock Console, 21:9 Support and Remove Mouse Acceleration + Other Fixes

Two things stand out as being unusual:
- Adjusting FoV requires multiple tweaks to variables that sound like they should always have the same values.
- Seems some people are locked to 30fps, others locked to 60fps. Usually when there is a framerate cap it's the same for everybody.

[Gandalf]

I'm a few hours in, and this is already wonderful fun.

My only real complaint is that it's hard to align stuff when building towns. My water pumps seem so... untidy.

[Mr Bean]

So the meta plot is go save (Redacted)
But I'm sorry I'm having far to much fun playing Fallout Settler Tycoon 2277... sorry (redacted) but Papa Reynolds needs to rebuild civilization by retaking apart the remains of a dozen towns and putting together a multi-layered death field.

Sure I detoured to the nearby car plant but that's because I need more resources, industry does not build itself! (Note I found a nice suit from a trader caravan I just need a top hat monocle and a blatant disregard for the common man and anything related to safety standards)

[TheFeniX]

4K can't keep up more than 34FPS (unless staring at the ground). Game doesn't touch my CPU (20%) even in the most hostile environments. I can keep up 60FPS at 2K with Ultra everything. It's all on the GPU. Seems like I'll have to wait for performance enhancements before 4K is a thing, but the game isn't much better looking at that resolution right now anyways.

But I'm sorry I'm having far to much fun playing Fallout Settler Tycoon 2277... sorry (redacted) but Papa Reynolds needs to rebuild civilization by retaking apart the remains of a dozen towns and putting together a multi-layered death field.

Man, if not full co-op: building a town with a few buddies would have been awesome. Probably going to pound through the main story at this point, then go back either on that character, or a second one.

I will say I do not like the building UI making me use arrow keys, nor can I figure out why my character consistently turns 180 during conversations. Whatever, it's Beth.

EDIT: Haha, oh man. My entire friends list is nothing but "Fallout 4."

[PREDATOR490]

Been playing it and am significantly underwhelmed. The map seems vastly smaller than Fallout 3 and some of the most lazy ass map interiors did not impress me at all. If they have tried to increase density then I do not see it ending well. The first encounters already demonstrated awful flaws in AI pathing.

Magic vault that is supposed to preserve civilization is smaller than a house - It is not even as if the placed had doors to nowhere. Of which I am seeing a lot of even in the first town.

Base building - UI implementation has always been shit with Bethseda games but throwing this into the mix is even worse. Placing things is awful and the arbitrary ability to demolish X trashed building but not Y is kinda silly. Not to mention the actual prefab, building options are woefully limited.
Having to individually click every damn object is once again established as a bane of Bethseda games.
Oh but they added the ability to sort the list which was long overdue. Would have been nicer to throw in the kind of sorting systems that most modders have been putting in Beth games for decades.

I have not even left the first area due to messing heavily with the base building just to see what it was worth. I can see this game being good if the mod community manages to start chewing it up but as it stands the game started poorly for me.

[Enigma]

Installing the game now but I do have a question. Does this game continue kicking the BoS down? They started out great but descended down to mediocrity.

[Jub]

Does power armor in this game seem a bit flimsy to anybody, or is it just me? I've had a fully repaired and ready to go set of level A armor and after a single fight, and likely a bit of bad luck, I came back to my base missing the armor for one of my legs. I understand that they wanted to make the power armor a bit more of a luxury in this game, but it just seems a tad annoying that the armor itself has durability when nothing else in the game does.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

That obsolete junk-heap T-45 set breaks a lot, yeah. On the plus side, maintenance is easy for it, requiring little more than a bit of steel. I got my hands on a T-60 set, and while the maintenance is a lot more complicated, I've yet to have a single piece fail on me, and I even took it into a straight up brawl with a few dozen super mutants. So it's all about having higher-tech pieces.

Installing the game now but I do have a question. Does this game continue kicking the BoS down? They started out great but descended down to mediocrity.

I'm only part of the way through, and spoiler tags don't work right now, so all I'll say is that the Brotherhood of Steel knows how to make an entrance. And they're quite joinable.

[Gaidin]

Hell I'm still running around rallying the Minutemen...that takes a while...

[TheFeniX]

This game seems to have some wild difficulty ramps. Are they expecting you to run power armor all the time? Like, the fight with a certain mercenary is a pretty brutal one. Even leading up to that: narrow hallways and enemies that can melee the shit out of you. My build is probably shit right now, playing the long-haul into another energy sniper, but I need to take early perks such as weapon/armor/science modding, etc because those are useful for the camp.

Like, at one point a baby Yai-Guai (sp) shows up, and charges the shit out of me. Killing him and getting mauled in the process, two Super Mutants show up, start throwing grenades and are doing shit-tons of damage with pipe-rifles while I'm just trying to put myself back together. Getting low on Stims here. But, I expect random encounters to have difficulty spikes, but I also don't expect a small cave right off an early main story quest to have a Deathclaw in it that can insta-death-cam kill you.

Don't get me wrong, I like hard games. In fact, this is making me ignore the many issues I've run into. But I was expecting kind of an easy early-game and a slow-ramp, so I took some perks early I probably should have put into combat perks. I don't know what I was thinking though: Fallout 3 was hard at the start, then got stupid easy as you put on some levels. I need to sit down and bang out some armor and modify my weapons a bit.

But based on what I've played: melee builds have to be getting railed right now. Or maybe I just suck, always a possibility.

[PREDATOR490]

Did a bit of wandering into the nearby areas - Getting my ass kicked by Legendary Mole-rats that drop 'Legendary' Items when they die. One Mole Rat dropped a walking cane that freezes enemies on critical hits. Another legendary dropped a laser that has infinite ammo.

Building system is awful and only gets worse after it turns out the player is supposed to mine-craft the entire map with terrains that are awful and NPC pathing that has a Deathclaw stand helplessly in front of a player with a minigun because it is stuck on the other side of a window. Connecting power systems via the wires is especially turning out to be a pain due to the mechanics of placement.

[Mr Bean]

Building system is awful and only gets worse after it turns out the player is supposed to mine-craft the entire map with terrains that are awful and NPC pathing that has a Deathclaw stand helplessly in front of a player with a minigun because it is stuck on the other side of a window. Connecting power systems via the wires is especially turning out to be a pain due to the mechanics of placement.

By contrast

Man building is fun, Sanctuary One the future capital of the Boston wasteland is proceeding nicely, the concrete wall is finished and manned with over a dozen heavy machine gun turrets. There are manual gates (I hope for powered gates when I get high enough level) and over ten settlers. Food production remains a problem but thanks to the massive amount of salvage brought back I've got two dozen houses ready to move into and room to grow quite a bit of food set aside. I pity the raiders that try raiding Sanctuary One because Operation "A chicken in every pot, and an auto-turret on every garage" is just starting to kick off gearing off the second wave of defense. I'm still deciding which house to scrap to make room for Bunker Prime.

[Gandalf]

I've only got a few hours of play in, and Sanctuary is growing well, though I'm having a fucker of a time finding food to plant. But the old scrap has been cleaned and we've resources to build our way to a bright future.

But sweet fuck do I wish it was easier to arrange stuff you build. I like neat lines in my towns.

[Mr Bean]

Just to give an idea here's the old stage 1 defenses for Sanctuary One
Five turrets and concrete walls

[TheFeniX]

Didn't take long. Couldn't keep my hand off the ~ key. But I'm not waiting/re-rolling to mod my laser, so I just pulled a point out of STR and gave it to Int so I could perk into Science. I was like "Man, I need a Laser Rifle, don't care to mod this Laser Pistol." Then I smacked myself. "BZZZZZAP" is back and ready to cornhole raiders at max distance. Sucks I got a legendary pipe-pistol that increases VATS accuracy (at higher AP cost) out of combat. Would love to have that for a Laser Rifle.

Figure I'll turn that back into a standard CQB weapon and make my Laser Musket into my Sniper Elite gun when I get one more perk into Science and can get past 3-crank. Even at 3 cranks, that thing hits hard.

So, decided to use my power armor for the police station mission. "FUSION CORE LOW" Well shit, might as well put it up. Let's see what Trashcan Martha has. A Fusion Core for 300 Caps. All-righty then.

"Certain Mercenary's" outfit is way OP. Nod moddable though. In fact, mostly only pieced armor is, which is really annoying.

Nick Valentine makes me never want to use another companion again. Only problem is:
"I wonder how deep it goes."
"I wonder how deep it goes."
"I wonder how deep it goes."
..............
"I wonder how deep it goes."

Preston's dialog is mostly delivered at gunpoint, but Nick's is stellar. Never would have figured Russel did him. Also, Mercer Frey from Skyrim (and Garret from Thief for those that care). Guy has chops.

[Agent Fisher]

Well, so far, loving it. I'm in the mid-20s for level wise, and I've already got three sets of power armor, lol. Two T-60 sets and a T-45/51 hybrid.

[FaxModem1]

I wish there was a way to tell what a companion likes and dislikes. What, Cogsworth? Am I not supposed to haggle?

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

For the most part I haven't had an issue with it... but there's been a few odd notes here and there. Paladin Danse didn't like me rescuing a hostage, even though he normally likes helping innocents... but I guess the hostage was a ghoul, so maybe that's it.

He also didn't like me delivering an experimental serum to a certain scientist... on one hand, I was helping a mutant, but on the other hand, it was technological research for the betterment of humanity and the elimination of Super Mutants, which is basically 110% of what the Brotherhood of Steel is all about.

[TheFeniX]

I wish there was a way to tell what a companion likes and dislikes. What, Cogsworth? Am I not supposed to haggle?

Yea, I've had to pass on a few speech checks as Valentine does not like the "Pay me" option.

Why does this game allow my computer to sleep when it's running? I just want to AFK relaxing on a couch while I eat dinner. Then my computer just goes all fucking crazy afterward. Beth...... A few mods are out, some updated textures for blood, water, etc. Some SweetFX presets. I loaded a few for giggles since I can always just delete out the added textures folder. Also, new gun sounds.

These run animations. This is 2015? I prefer to play in 3rd person, but this game is killing it for me. Luckily, replacers are likely to come soon as you don't need a GECK for them. Also, my character never looks into her scope during VATS. I recall this happening in F3, but not 100% of the time.

Anyways, ran into an entire squad of raiders running back through.... that first town when you meet the Minutemen. So, I sneak attack Molotov them, finish the rest with VATS goodness. Then the BoS shows up in a bird, two Knights jump out, and start talking shit "Official Business." Man, fuck you. I got shit done while you were busy not loading into the game fast enough. To Hell with your inter-faction random encounter. Maybe I should go ahead and sign up with the Brotherhood. Always been too uptight for my tastes though.

I think an Alien ship crashed last night. Was at Red Rocket and saw something exploding heading WAY South. Did they just rip the same encounter off from their own game? Man, and it's flight path, it basically ran right through the middle of the map. Going to be a fucker to find it. At least I HOPE it's actually a random location.

[Nephtys]

Finally, after some 5 fallout games, Radiation does something. Which is funny, you'd expect Radiation to be an actual important part of Fallout survival.

FO1/2/T: Did jack shit. There's only like one radiated zone worth mentioning in 1 and 2, and are utterly trivialized with the mountains of Rad-X and Radaway you have.

FO3/NV: Still did jack shit. You could get lit up by invisible rad points from everywhere but it didn't matter.
FO4: Taking a swim to finish one quest drained 4 radX and 2 rad-away and could have killed me. The trace buildup from bugs and ghouls is starting to wear me out without a few refreshers. That's pretty good.