Of Deathclaws & Radscorpions: A Fallout Thread

oh, whoops.

hahahaaha yay!

i am getting really sucked in. goodbye real world for a while pretty much

so i just spent the last 30 minutes building a basic settlement (got everything covered except for food). i guess the benefits are that you can eventually get an economy going that will supply you with caps, and plus you can build some stores/crafting machines for convenience. one weird thing, though - in order to build shit and assign people to work, you have to physically walk around and choose items and locations on your giant complex. problem is, if you're trying to build things you're probably carrying all your junk items with you, and if you're like me that means you'll be encumbered. so you sloooooooowly walk around the complex to build things, carrying all your extra shit with you because you need it to build. right? is there an easier way? almost wish it would go into full-on simcity-esque city management when you're in settlement mode, to save on pointless travel time.

I fast track back to Sanctuary just to dump everything.

Other random thoughts:

Am getting a kick out of building up proper weapons out of random crudely produced pea-shooters I found. "Oh, so _thats_ how I get a sniper rifle."

Not sure where the balance issue is at, but I feels like ammo is not nearly as plentiful in my game as the shooting controls would suggest.

Fighting the first Deathclaw was shit. My new toy ran dry before thing was half-dead.

Repairing power armor is easier than I thought it'd be(hooray, you just need steel!), but it's not as explained as I think it should be.

Adjusting the FOV does a hit on the framerate, which makes sense, I guess, since you're drawing more polygons at once.

If FO3 introduced "fast zombies," then some full on "methed-out sprinting diving zombies" are running around in this one.

You'd think the landscape would be more green. Three real world locations for massive atomic events have greenery coming back within decades, for examples, and I've driven by forests which had been decimated by fire a few years previous but already had a healthy underbrush going. Dead organic material material tends to rot, even if it's still planted.

I do really like the new colourful overhaul though.

Oops, double post from yesterday.

I find it cute that Dogmeat will crouch and attempt to be sneaky when you do. Ain't really effective, because he is a dog, but still adorable.

sequence of events that occurs way too frequently with dogmeat:

*dogmeat found something!*
*5 seconds of frantic searching ensues*
"where the fuck is dogmeat"

Yeah, they need a "whistle for animal companion" button like Red Dead had

found a little house with a vegetable patch and two people living there, who said literally nothing by way of hello before breaking into "we need your help. let me mark your map where there are raiders." so that's lame, but after i took care of the raiders (totally disinterested tone: "really? that's good news") they let me use their workbench and now i've got a generator up and i've put some lights on their tomato plants and i built a little cabin for myself adjoining theirs. it's a little zynga but it's cool. (i built nothing in sanctuary/that gas station because i did not want to talk to those people.)

sudden realizations: this is the first fallout game in which you are forced to be a heterosexual.

(or forced to be anything, for that matter.)

Hang on, I heard that you can romance any companion of any gender?

http://www.lazygamer.net/guide/fallout-4-romance-and-companion-guide-awww-yeeeaaaaah/

quick googling pops up results that you can romance the majority of your sidekicks

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/96/?

Winner for best early mod featuring Red Sox jokes.

oh, ok xp. room for an arc, there.

lol @ enhancing new england immersion:

Long Term Project Goals

#1 Make additional immersive New England attire as stand alone pieces once the tools are available.

#2 Make an Ortiz Follower and work him into a quest line to also get Cryofrozen so he has a reason to be in the future, perhaps make a separate CryoChamber at Fenway.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTk0w2iXAAA0Thr.jpg

quick googling pops up results that you can romance the majority of your sidekicks

really hoping this includes dogmeat

lol at beavis and butthead xp

i made it to diamond city before finishing last night. i read some in-progress kotaku thing (the author had only played 20 hours at the time) where she lamented that she did a bunch of side quests before heading to diamond city. so i took that advice and went to diamond city pretty early on. i'll probably go back and finish off some of the early side quests soon, though, because the area around diamond city is filled with enemies that are waaaaaay too strong for me.

i'm also a bit dismayed by my ammunition problem. i thought i was doing a good job of managing it, but i'm perpetually running low on energy cell and pistol bullets, and they're so fucking expensive at the stores in diamond city!

yeah i've been doing a pretty straight shot to the city too because my character is allegedly concerned about her infant son. once i started hitting the heavy monsters around there tho, across the river, i decided that was a good RP excuse for her to fall back, live on this farm a while, scavenge for parts in nearby ruins.

i stress myself out overthinking things like this, but i'm also wondering if i'm approaching leveling up in the right way. so far i've spent almost every single one of my upgrades on an actual perk, rather than using them to bump up one of the SPECIAL stats. now that i'm sometimes encountering supermutants i'm wondering if i should have struck a better balance. my dude seems weak.

I'm hitting a few farms first, clearing out raider problems.

Have also been dosing Mama Murphy for the exp.

Point allocation is a tricky thing, yeah; I want like a point into the major skill categories(hack/lockpick/medic), but I'm wondering if you get a bigger bang by maxing out a SPECIAL stat first

Oh, and see what happens when you trade a teddy bear to Dogmeat.

spoiler

i'm fanboy enough that i basically had a SPECIAL build in mind before the game unlocked, so i spent most of my first level-ups getting my stats up to where they would have been had i had as many points at opening as previous games have given. the rest i've put in gun-related stuff; idk, nothing's really happened to me so far besides combat.

the leveling system is a really weird union: it replaces old-style skill points with post-wow skill ranks, but unlike wow (or skyrim) there doesn't appear to be any branching, or any prerequisites for anything aside from your SPECIAL score. (maybe there are.) won't really have any idea if it works until level 30. i guess they are trying to fix the long-standing fallout (and crpg) problem of not being sure which skills are useful--of just having these vague, advertisement-like blurbs in the char generator--but the exhaustively informative chart they've drawn up instead is kind of a bewildering sprawl.

oh, yeah, i did take the "pick advanced locks" perk. skill. rank. feat. whatever.

btw i love the little educational filmstrips the game sometimes shows at launch about one or other of the SPECIAL attributes. they don't always happen and they've been different each time so far and i actually look forward to them. i also like all the vault boy animations on the skill chart, tho they do contribute to the overwhelmingly-busy feel.

Yeah, I wish they had an optional sub-sub-sub-sub-breakdown/listing of the mechanics/formulae for each stat, like something available for full-on stat freak/grognard-type such as what's accessible in a Diablo or Pillars of Eternity.

Then again, maybe it'd enable way too much mmorpg/jrpg min/maxing if one could tell precisely which aspect of the universe your decision could fiddle with.

am i the only one who has a whole character development plan worked out from the start or

Those SPECIAL animations are the same ones Bethesda posted on YT, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6QyR1qk1aQ

xps yeah pillars of eternity is a great example of how to include a truly huge amount of mechanical information in your UI while still bothering everybody with exactly as much of it as they want to be bothered by.

my first char in a fallout game is good at shooting things, picking locks, and talking people into shit. on replays yeah i plan all kinds of things, in detail: pacifist doctors with heavy fists, dimwitted mechanical geniuses, etc.

kingfish yeah they are but i hadn't seen them cuz i'd been in media blackout.

(unrelatedly, pillars of eternity also had a truly godawful number and variety of spiders. surprised but grateful that fallout's never gone in for spiders.)

Witcher 3 had big ass arachnomorphs, if you really want to trigger a phobia

http://i.imgur.com/Pfndhx9h.jpg

Oh hello useful PC tweaks:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=551069501

Oh shit, you make adhesives from vegetable starch.

I now know what to industrialize those civilians for.

^^^ oh shit, on it.

lore praise: rly into the use of the green monster in this.

re perks: one thing i can't imagine not taking relatively ASAP are the modding perks (gun nut/armorer/blacksmith/science). you can try your luck with landing modded stuff off enemies (but they're usually not great) or buying them (for a ton of caps) but really you're just gonna wanna mod stuff. it's fun and 90% of the mods are perk-locked.

and the first level of local leader

also you're gonna eventually get legendary weapons/armor and they don't come with a lot of mods. i don't know if it's obvious but mods can be moved from item to item, so if you soup up a 10mm and then get an awesome 10mm from a legendary, you can just strip the mods off the old one and stick them on the new one.

yeah, really into the exploration/scavenging/crafting part of this (i.e. most of it) -- can see why bethesda bragged about taking a Leap even if the game's so superficially similar. it makes the miscellaneous-junk aspects of f3 and fnv look like an alpha. (you could actually make a fair bit of stuff in fnv but the interface fought you every step.) also unless i'm misremembering skyrim the last bethesda game with a more granular armor model than torso/legs/head/hands was morrowind. walking around in my patched-together half-modded set of armor, w a left arm from here and a right leg from there and a bandana around my mouth so i don't have to watch my lips move, and every piece w a lil story--not to mention being able to wear stuff underneath--is getting me involved.

also this is a low bar to clear but diamond city is easily bethesda's best town ever! it has alleys!

i guess there were some cool places in skyrim, that one w the rock bridge, etc. i basically forget skyrim. idk if those places had alleys.

i don't know if it's obvious but mods can be moved from item to item, so if you soup up a 10mm and then get an awesome 10mm from a legendary, you can just strip the mods off the old one and stick them on the new one.

*waynes world voice*

I did not know that!

should clarify that you still need to have another mod available to take its spot even if it's just the "base" mod it's set to (which is still a mod that requires components, unless it doesn't). fortunately the base mods usually take very little to make.

to be really clear, every time you make a new mod the old mod will be sent to your inventory and can be freely attached to other weapons/armors of the same type after. also they don't have to be in your inventory to use them, you can put them in your settlement inventory and they'll still be available at the workbenches, which is helpful because they have weight.

basically sprinting toward cannibalism rn, maxing endurance. in three levels i am gonna eat a few dudes.

really enjoying that the detritus hunt has a tangible payoff in this game, crafting seems really well put together. wish i had more time to dive in, luckily the weekend is nigh

xp this also means that every time you kill a dude you should look closely at their weapons and armor because you can strip their mods and use them on your own guns or vice versa, including mods that are still perk-locked

crafting is fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1jGnFt78H8

gosh darn it ilx, this thread made me realize i gotta get this game to keep up. had only about 2h to play before bed last night, spent the first 45-60m making my couple look tolerable (spoiler: i failed), another ~15m getting the pip-boy app to work, another 30+ thru the intro (glad i spent all that time working on my couple!), and then i got to codsworth/red rocket/the little town at the start, died a couple times bc shooting feels weird in this game...

wondering why the fuck i do this to myself

stupid question (again):

in order to modify your weapons/armor/etc, you need to use the workshops. the workshops are scattered across different areas of the map. sometimes i want to use a certain workshop, but it's located far away from where all my Junk is stored (in Sanctuary). i know it's possible to share your settlement inventory across different settlements, but not until you establish some sort of link between them, which i'm not able to do yet. i also know it's possible to build workshop/crafting areas in Sanctuary so you don't have to travel elsewhere to use them, but i'm not a high enough Leader for that, either.

so what do you all do when you want to use a workshop that's not at your primary settlement? go to the primary settlement, load up yourself and a companion with a bunch of crap, and then go back to the workshop in the middle of nowhere, then bring your surplus junk/items back to the primary settlement when you're done? it all seems so tedious!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSTHOqO6A7Q

it all seems so tedious!

it all seems so tedious! it all seems so tedious! it all seems so tedious! it all seems so tedious! it all seems so tedious! it all seems so tedious! it all seems so tedious! it all seems so tedious! it all seems so tedious! it all seems so tedious! it all seems so tedious! it all seems so tedious!

it really does!

i haven't even gotten as far as the part you jsut said and i am dreading it. WHY DID I BUY THIS