Of Deathclaws & Radscorpions: A Fallout Thread

not being forced to navigate an endless subway system makes things a lot better imo

what kind of underground areas are there then? and are there any giant fire ants or are those native to the dc area

memory is iffy but the quest in f3 where some mad scientist living in the sewers asked you to poison/mini-nuke/spare the bus-sized ant queen was one of the best

there are some sewer and subway maps but you aren't forced to go through them to access different parts of the city (i believe f3 worked like this because the engine couldn't handle having too much city available at once)

i dreaded the metro maps in f3, they were unpleasant and 90% exactly the same and i could never remember which ones i'd already been through

in f4 they're like any other dungeon. dungeons in general are more linear in f4 which is fine by me and probably other extremely thorough players who have to make absolute certain they've checked under every nook in every room. those f3 subways (and vaults tbh) drove me nuts.

every time i return to sanctuary (i finally did double back there, after building up a fort somewhere else; it's much more defensible than my first settlement, not that i've really had any problems there either) i find a dead body or two on the perimeter. chuckled in grim satisfaction when it was raiders, but once it was just some guy in rags with a mangy dog. felt conflicted as i threw him in the river to float away with the rest.

otm about the f3 metros. classic rpg notion--city/sewers--but it was a trick; eventually you twigged that it was just a way of rendering d.c. as five or six discrete medium-sized zones with identical linear tunnels between them and rubble hemming you in everywhere else. f4 boston so far is liberating; on top of it being an actual continuous map there was very little in either f3 or fnv that had this kind of porousness between exteriors+interiors, even though there should have been because ruins. have had some fights in f4 that felt a lil like the chase scenes in the third man.

fnv had good sewers, btw: sewers that existed beneath coherent abovegrounds and could actually serve as alternate routes, or shortcuts, altho there wasn't a whole lot of reason to use them.

man, maybe it's time to go back to fnv. i can come in on f4 when it's been thoroughly wiki-ed and i am like three laptops down the line.

the game people are describing--the game of scrappy post-apocalyptic town-building and dungeon-raiding--sounds like one i would love to play as a roguelike but have little interest in playing as an FPS. is that fair?

maybe, although you can play it more like an RPG with the VATS system where you slow the action and are given a % on possible hits etc. if it was a straight FPS I probably would never have got into the series.
ran into a weird bug the other day where guns suddenly stopped doing damage, watched a dog very slowly take down 2 Brotherhood dudes who were firing their laser rifles at point blank range and missing every time. pretty funny until I had to reload a save from the day before and lost a bunch of progress.

i can come in on f4 when it's been thoroughly wiki-ed and i am like three laptops down the line.

This. And also once my 18-month-old daughter has gone off to college. Until then I live through youse guys.

maybe it's time to go back to fnv.

always imo. the only video game i own a "collector's edition" of, with what infocom used to call "feelies".

Yeah, I never got into 3 as much I did New Vegas, and when I finally went back to redo 3's main quest after beating the majority of the DLC, I had a game-ending bug where trying to enter the Jefferson Memorial for the mid-game climax with your father crashed every time. Eventually I just stopped.

The ugly monochromatic design was some mid-00s nadir for visuals, tho. Shit grey, sickly muted green, pale blue, dumb browns.

Here, for a nightmare flashback, is Dogmeat's FO3 model:

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout/images/1/16/DogmeatFO3.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120429215917

Looking back at it now, you have to wonder in what universe is this an acceptable design aesthetic?

Also, I dug how FNV would let you escape into the Oregon forest if need be

this has been covered before but f3's palette was sublime precisely because it was so bleak and tortured. the like general unease you got when you talked with a ghoul and the camera zoomed in for a close up on their melted face was helped a lot by the fact that this felt like an environment which could believably spawn something that looked so inhuman. same with the pale slimy mirelurks living in the smokey silvery tunnels. or when you first leave the vault and almost immediately run into that ragged homeless guy outside of megaton, dying of thirst and asking for some un-radiated water, that request felt entirely of place and gave some weight to what was actually the easiest quest in the game. having not played the new one i'm not sure it would have felt that way given how much more liveable the world looks.

and todays major games, f4 included, could never get away with how extremely washed out the whole thing was. a lot of games trying for similar aesthetic territory, like say bloodborne, look grim but have too wide an array of color and lighting to achieve the effect of f3, where you don't get what felt like separate levels that had their own sense of place, but rather one entire world that felt like it was the same level, no matter what part of the world you were in (that obv changed with the dlc). that feels strange to say about bloodborne which has by most standards a very defined and cohesive look, but f3, almost by accident, took the whole thing to its greatest possible extreme in an open world game.

that dogmeat looks like he's spent some time in the trenches (lol), far cry from the spirited one in f4 who comes running up to you with a shiny coat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxSw6iDSujg

what kind of underground areas are there then? and are there any giant fire ants or are those native to the dc area

i found an underground pipe that led out of a dungeon, Corvega Assembly Plant. saw some ghouls but no giant fire ants.

console command:
player.setav carryweight 1000

has been essential. i really dont care for the encumbrance in this game. it would be fine if every single piece of trash on the ground wasn't valuable.

junk should be weightless imo

definite game related lols

but thinking about how long it would have taken to produce

also lol but mostly sad

I might have to enable that weight cheat. Seems like it would allow me to concentrate on the more fun aspects

Walking through the woods at night and setting the perspective so you're looking at the stars, I got some serious skyrim vibes

Yeah, unless you're playing this on a couch like 2m away from the screen, you wanna reset the FOVs to minimum 90'

I've been playing without console cheats, but I might do the encumbrance thing because slow-moving is annoying, and the hardcore wastelander mechanic from FNV isn't here.

Also want my char to be able to visibly sling her rifle on her back, or maybe two at a time, Witcher-style

yeah weapons need to stop disappearing into your infinite pockets.

carry weight is how i structure my game; it's how i know it's time to crawl home. couldn't work without it tho yeah i do miss fnv's hardcore requirements.

Oh man, you can make armor out of _synth parts_. This is more like it.

Also, proper mod idiocy is finally taking form:

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/475/?

Have you ever sat and thought, "man, I want to launch my baby out of a catapult?". I know I have.
In retrospect, this is why my wife left me.

Anyway, this mod replaces the mininukes fired by the Fat Man (or Nuka-Launcher if Bethesda is afraid of you), with a baby. Your baby. Guess you found him.

into dutch_justice's remembrance of f3. there was a popular mod called "fellout" which basically removed the green, cleaning things up atmospherically to make things look much more like fnv (which takes place somewhere relatively unscathed in the war) but i never liked it. the green haze over the moldy grey earth gave you a feeling of the world having been changed into another one. f1 was similarly bleak and monochrome in comparison to its denser sequel. still tho in f3 this unique atmosphere did not go unviolated long--

or when you first leave the vault and almost immediately run into that ragged homeless guy outside of megaton, dying of thirst and asking for some un-radiated water, that request felt entirely of place

--as this guy quickly turned out to be a karma vendor, and also presumably unintentionally a right-wing fantasy as no matter how much you gave him he never stood up or stopped begging. a lot of gears showing in f3. not that different ones don't show in f4. and some of the same ones.

highly recommended: view from the medical center's roof in east boston. the descent (a different way) made me giddy. more fun than the last two just to explore and look at stuff in, especially if you take it slow. (i was encumbered throughout. piper's at capacity too.)

Just some thoughts:

What struck me first was how little had changed since the last two, which is disappointing in a way but I like the last few Betheda sprawling rpgs so I'm fine with it I suppose.

The graphics are great, the criticism of the graphics in FO3 are baffling since that's a large part of what gave that game such a strong atmosphere (I know I'm repeating what other people are saying with all this). As far as this one goes the enemies like the feral ghouls and deathclaws are genuinely quite horrifying and scary, and not just in the way of "oh great they killed me I'll have to do this bit all again." This game does horror pretty well.

But I'm also glad it's kept the series' kind of odd sense of humour too, e.g. the Silver Shroud stuff, and the inhabitants of the USSS Constitution...

I've just done the bare minimum to get by as far as base-building goes in Sanctuary, I don't go on Fallout to play post-apocalyptic Sims. I hope it's not something I'm forced to do it too often or at all. It's a great adition if you actually want to do some micro-managing though (I don't mean that in a a disparaging way honest).

I like modding weapons though. Stuff like that and the way that exploring is very satisfying give this a very Skyrim feel.

i just don't know if i'll ever be into modding or crafting either tbh

Modding is at least quick and fairly simple. I still don't know if I'm using anything to it's potential though. Not sure what I'm doing. Layering of armour is also kind of confusing to me but I might just be me being dim.

I like the modding here, if not always how they gate it. Being able to add sights and proper stocks to everything is fun, and I like how you can mod out random shit like rolling pins or walking canes

i just cant get over this gameplay. maybe the gunplay has improved since the last fallout but it still feels like i am shooting and occasionally hitting something and sometimes VATS will give me the chance to be more accurate and i end up clicking on people w a mouse and watching my character still miss half his shots and its just.... grrrr....

VATS got much better for me when I pointed a coupla points into guns and can headshot some at close range with a pistol repeatedly

Also, upgraded the combat rifle to the point where I now have a silenced B.A.R., which is proving to be more fun than expected.

Wandering thru the wasteland with a medical droid is a hoot.

I've just done the bare minimum to get by as far as base-building goes in Sanctuary, I don't go on Fallout to play post-apocalyptic Sims. I hope it's not something I'm forced to do it too often or at all.

don't think it's even necessary in sanctuary. a key feature here absent in earlier games is the ability to just walk away from people while they're talking to you. it encourages me not to put up with bullshit. still enjoying the basebuilding myself tho.

also appreciated is that you don't have to repair weapons like in F3

aw man i loved that

i don't miss repairing weapons at all. slowed the game down so much.

another question about base-building (sorry): can you guys walk around while in build mode? im left-handed and have my keys set up so the arrow keys serve as walk - forward back left and right. but in build mode they cycle through the options, so im stuck still and have to leave build mode to move around. is this the same for you or have i stumped myself?

i've few other key-bind issues, sick of having to use 'e' for taking items from containers when i can just press enter to pick up stuff that's lying around. are there any fixes for stuff like this? no way to change this key, and others, in options.

yeah a lot of the keys are hard-coded, presumably because it was written for a gamepad. outrageous honestly. people seem to be using this at the moment -- maybe there'll be a mod eventually; idk how easy this stuff is to fix.

Killed a legendary raider with a couple of molotovs, not too hard

i'd been away from my little village at oberland station for a while, and while i'd been away i'd weighed down and sent home two successive companions before hiring on a merc named macready from a bar in goodneighbor. he and i finally wound up back at oberland after a few days traveling through boston doing things i wouldn't want to do in front of nick or piper. (like the super mutant companion, tho, macready never seems to stop making fun of you for picking up junk.) it was around 10 PM when we got in but most of the population (10, plus nick and piper) was still awake, and seeing macready buy a drink from the settler-staffed bar while nick sipped from a coffee cup and dogmeat padded amongst the mutfruit plants with the mutt i bought for 250 caps from a traveling dogseller was very homey. i looked for piper for a long time and eventually found her standing by herself out by one of the power pylons smoking a cigarette and muttering about journalism. she was still out there when the rest of us went to bed. macready and i left early the next morning because i have a lead on some chems. he doesn't make fun of you for picking up those.

xpost, that keybind trick has done the job - thanks! crafting a lot easier now (and weirdly addictive)

Something Bioshock-y about the raider power armor designs

http://gfycat.com/ImperfectEnchantingKentrosaurus

Why cats might not be the best Fallout 4 companion

Bethesda is running a Black Friday sale with 25% off merch and God Help Me but I want tshirts of the NCR flag and the Red Rocket logo.

(And maybe a set of Vault 111 full-body pajamas to hide out the winter in)

3 and nv are $2.50 on steam

splurged ($6.50) on the nv ultimate edition cause fuck if i'm ever gonna hook my ps3 up again

Got to level 10 and decided to buy this thing. Guess I'm enjoying more than I thought I would.

Saw this for sale-
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout/images/8/80/Fallout_4_General_Chaos_Revenge.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20151113204447

aww yeah, contrarian protections gonna feel my blade +50%

watched my friends traverse the Glowing Sea yesterday. what a cool area.

http://imgur.com/a/rqS97

Just found out the brother of my first ever girlfriend did the voice of John Hancock. Help.