Of Deathclaws & Radscorpions: A Fallout Thread

Cute, found yet another Lovecraft quest. I'm digging these.

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/oa.aspx

I've also been enjoying playing the character as someone rather bemused by the weird shit she finds in the Wasteland, like the crew of the Constitution.

Weed and vidya games compromise most of John Carpenter's life these days, so it's fun to see this:

https://twitter.com/thehorrormaster/status/671881452355608576

John Carpenter
@thehorrormaster

FALLOUT 4 is incredibly addictive. RPG, shooter in a nuclear future. Very cool.

Anyone recommend any obscure perks? I've been too much of a slave to boosting crafting perks that I feel like I'm missing out on cool shit - minus mysterious stranger. Thats my fav..

I read somewhere that Luck is the best place to put all your points...I really can't be bothered with specialization. I end up focusing more on what I don't have than what i have.

I put at list one tick into Bloody Mess, Mysterious Stranger, two into ammo finding, etc.

Nick Valentine's the only companion I've seen who will react to the Stranger showing up, which is great.

Aha, sorted - my problem was that upon levelling I didn't know you could *either* increase the SPECIAL stat by one point or choose a perk from the list.

If i join the bros of steel when they ask, can I still the other factions quests? Is there a way to do all quests for all factions?

I don't want to lock myself out of hours of gameplay...

Yes you can join all the factions afaict

i was told recently that "when you get to a choice that excludes other choices, the game makes it very explicit."

meaning yes you can join the BOS and still do all of the other things but eventually you'll ahve to "pick" or whatever

Yeah, I was hesitating at this, too. "But, like, I'm already leading the Minutemen. Why the fuck I wanna be in your crew just cuz you have a Final Fantasy-wannabe airship and yet still a superiority complex?"

Am now realizing this is Bethesda's way of letting you be the head of Winterhold, the Dark Brotherhood, the Thieves Guild, etc., all at the same time, only in more Fallout-y terms.

The Fallout 4 cd for tge PC game is just an installation program for steam. I finally had to install it.

Very lame that I need steam to play games. It's just a glorified menu that slows down the time it takes for me to click on fallout.exe and play the game.

Ha, it's a bloody breeze compared to Origin though

steam is great once-ler. it's very useful when you have a large library and you don't want to keep it all installed at once.

It's an updater/launcher/online hub all in one. Honestly programming some of that shit sucks and it's nice to have a standardized way of updating

When I first played Fallout 3 on PC it required Microsoft's sync framework, too. They dropped that eventually, right?

i just realized that when you look at yr pip-boy outside in the rain droplets keep splashing on the screen

Yes, it was 'Games For Windows Live'. Recently I pirated FO3 and the sync platform was no longer required for up-to-date versions. I own FO3 on the 360.

the deliverer pistol is so op

i love this game but for some reason sometimes the controls / movement / pov gives me motion sickness. does this happen to anyone else?

apparently so:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/3sk12x/if_youre_experiencing_motion_sickness_in_fallout/

yeah game has a crazy low fov, even for a couch situation.

of interest to kingfish: currently amidst a very long quest that is basically a lovecraft adaptation.

oh looked upthread, yeah that one.

also found the alien blaster! wish i could've talked to the alien.

so i started playing new vegas last night, will report back once i get somewhere

!

advice, besides to grin and bear primm which is the second town and a nadir: don't worry about leaving quests half-finished, don't worry about antagonizing people (or entire factions). the game has an elegant way (a character who is uniquely impossible either to kill or offend) of ensuring the main plot has no failure state--tho there are unsatisfying last resorts--but it's also ruthless about locking you out of stuff, so you must be ruthless too. a different philosophy than bethesda's has been from oblivion on. (morrowind had unwinnable states, which it indicated with a cute popup--"reload a save, or persist in the doomed world you have created"--but even there you could be guildmaster of an awful lot.)

a fields of salmon post from years ago i think of every time i play fnv and am posting to get out in front of its flaws

One of the themes in the game is that these fucked-up little communities are somehow viable in their own way and submitting them to bureaucratic/managerial structures AGAIN negates the opportunity for exploring different modes of organizing groups of people that we haven't tried before...

But I rarely see anything much worth preserving. Sometimes this is more of a design/programming/AI thing, though. I felt like blowing away everyone in Primm... what a shitty way to start a game. You walk into an abandoned casino and there's a bunch of people just staring blankly or walking into walls. "Please mister, protect our town." What town? You idiots, your town is an abandoned casino. Go find something to do.

I played once, for a few hours, about three years ago. I was convinced I had somehow bypassed Primm, based on this description, and on my first encounter with it this time round, but I remember going to the Mojave outpost to the south, and I remember going to the next town along and meeting the Legion. Still nothing sparked any recollection until I read about the missing 9mm and then some neurons started rubbing together or whatever and I thought, oh, yes, I did do this; I have done this. Evidently I repressed it.

On realising this I thought, hm, you know, I'm going to go and do the thing the game keeps trying to discourage you from, and spent an hour sneaking around radscorpions and deathclaws north of Goodsprings until I reached New Vegas. It's ... surprisingly empty.

Played the Silver Shroud cosplay missions and enjoyed them. Also dug how the voice actress obviously took great pleasure in performing the dialogue options you have in character.

Bethesda seems to have learnt a thing or two from Obsidian about integrating some wider pop cultural amusing weirdness into the game.

I have occasionally taken to hitting the Fallout wikia to see if there's any particular notable loot in whatever building I'm ransacking. I'm fine with leaving a fortune in parts but miss a magazine or any unique item(bobblehead, weapon) and I'll tear the place apart.

I think it's more useful to put stat points into ammo finding than cap finding, as ammo is both far more useful and you can sell it at a good rate.

Disappointed I haven't found the in-game version of Alt.2600 yet that tells me how to reprogram turrets. Being able to change their targeting programs was great fun last time.

Found the Drinkin' Buddy, too. He seems congenial

Also, it did take me a while to realize that synths at least Replicants, Blade Runners, and Terminators go the game, and probly some Asmiovy bits hither & yon.

I have noticed that I can't talk my way out of conflicts as much in this game, which is disappointing. I always play speech heavy(having been trained on the original FOs and their Black Isle/Bioware successors), and it's a drag that I just have to rely on shooting to solve a situ rather than be given the option for (potentially) interesting dialogue and character interaction.

I do like that sometimes your interlocutor will respond better to appropriate sarcasm than just bog-standard constant niceness.

Some of the accents seem a bit more wiseguy NY/NJ than Boston working class. Yeah I know they're deliberately involving more noir, gangster, and detective aspects to the game, but let's remember the sense of place.

Never twigged until tonight that Super Mutants were created as versions of the Incredible Hulk. Seems so obvious now.

XP

New Vegas is great from a lore and writing perspective but Obsidian really botches the Bethesda engine. The main joy I got from playing Fallout 3(haven't played 4) is wandering around and running into all these unscripted battles and encounters between the various factions and creatures in the waste. That's the best part of the Bethesda engine to me; It's this big fishbowl for different AI to battle it out whether the player interacts with them or not.

By contrast New Vegas is just too empty. They set up this huge faction system but they hardly ever encounter each other in the open world outside of some skirmishes between the Fiends and the NCR outside of the city. It's mostly just Cazadors and the occasional NCR patrol.

yep, the world and the population of that world were much better on 3 vs NV. and happily, 4 kills it in this category. in particular going thru boston itself it is almost unbelievable how well they have done this environment, how big a step forward it is.

that's pretty fair, when I played through I thought it was a little too event-driven and could have used some more random encounters

good old Fallout 2 would have a lot of random encounters while traveling where you'd encounter one group gunning at another

and also a few too many random encounters where you'd just run into some plants that wanted to kill you

feel like i am not quite half the way thru 4 and i have been trying to hold off on any opinionating until i have experienced most of the game but since i have started now i might as well go all in and say i think they have totally crushed it. there is very little i have come across that they haven't got right. actually, one thing that i was v positive about before but am maybe wavering on slightly - the benefit of the aforementioned waiting to give thoughts - is that the whole settlement thing is p well put together if you want it but the game lets you do as much or as little as you want without bugging you about it. however i am now getting the 'defend settlement' alerts... but, overall, i just think everything works and they have improved so much. i love it.

Disappointed by the mega dumbed down speech "trees" in F4. Feel like no matter what you say you end up in the same place. Can you even play a bad character in this? Seems like the worst you can do is be a smartass. Story is generic and rolls out awkwardly. Lots of deadly dull, paint-by-numbers quests. Have done the bare minimum with the settlement feature. Doesn't appeal to me.

Gripes out of the way, exploration is still a lot of fun and there are plenty of neat ~atmospheric~ moments. Enjoying the weapons/armor modding too, even if it's pretty clunky.

I am like 25 hours in fwiw.

I only play about an hour a day but I like how every time I do, I come across something I've never seen before.

Ran into some Sons of Adam last night - holy crap

Glad to hear 4 kills it in the wandering/unscripted encounter category. I guess I will blowing money on a next gen console as soon I figure out how to play this without being a bad parent.

On the accent though... I gotta ask: how the fuck do people have asian/southern/french/English accents in a world where presumably continental air travel has been grounded for 200 years and the only people to talk to are local?

haven't played FO4 yet, but when groups divide and then isolate, accents based on their commonalities will pop up or reappear. really doubt it explains anything, but maybe social/ethnic groups became more insular (especially within vaults) and their accents became more pronounced?

the question just makes me ponder the English accent of Shakespeare's time and how it sounds to our ears like a weird mash of North American standard and.. Scottish or something?

they talk to a microcommunity of ~6 people? xp

Thing is, I'm asking this based on people with different accents all hanging out in the same city (diamond). Nine of them should have been in vaults, none of them appear to be isolated from anyone else... I appreciate that you guys both tried to give me a good explanation tho :)

maybe it's an affectation, like wearing a fedora and saying "m'lady"

i mean in guess in games design terms the answer is 'well, ethnic communities in the US in some cases preserve vocal traits over two centuries in a situation where they are x thousand people in a community of y hundred thousand people -- and the x people in y hundred people in this game who have these vocal traits are an abstraction of the x thousand in y hundred thousand'?

diamond city is kinda meh as a city but it's def better than vegas in NV. what are the the best video game cities? like ones that really feel huge and bustling and alive? it seems like a really tricky thing to pull off.

that's the sort of question they ask on the insert credit dot com podcast to be followed by six minutes of 'yeah, uh ... that's a real dang tough one'

the megatraveller games (and, i'm sure, various others of a similar level of technical development) had some cities in which a lot of people walked around and paid no attention if you got shot to death in the midst of several blocks of urban development, which i think is probably nearer the feeling of being in a 'huge, bustling, alive' city than games which try to actually make you give a shit

Vice City

baldur's gate not bad.

the x people in y hundred people in this game who have these vocal traits are an abstraction of the x thousand in y hundred thousand'?

this kind of thinking habitual for me w bethesda games--what you see on the screen w the towns and people is like shorthand for what is "actually" "there". as the games have gotten more and more granular in their simulation of miscellaneous inanimate objects the dissonance here has spiked.

even new vegas wasn't as ludicrously barren as vivec. megaton felt pretty good because it was dense and did not actually seem intended to have a population upwards of like 50.