Fallout 4

Season Passes

Filed under: no

The Fallout 4 Season Pass is available for $29.99. A season pass allows the player to pay one price for all DLC before it is released. The first time I saw this was with the Witcher III.

Now, instead of paying for post-release content that should have been included in the game piecemeal, players can pre-pay for the promise of extra content without any knowledge of what it might entail!

Oh good.

I can’t speak for the Witcher series, but modern Fallout games have history of story DLC releases (five for Fallout 3, four for Fallout: New Vegas) so it’s reasonable to assume it’s a “good deal” comparatively. But still. It’s the principle of the thing.

Fallout 4 Early Impressions

Spoilers, gentle friends–but not many, because I haven’t gotten too far in the main quest.

Fallout isn’t known for its character creator. I have always used a slightly modified preset and gone with it. This time, they went out of their way to do something different and featured it heavily in the demo at E3.

I hate it. It could be that I’m using a PC controller, but I found the controls very non-intuitive and finicky. I like the way the CC is in front of a bathroom mirror, swapping between characters. Beyond that, however, I found the whole setup really unappealing. The player is forced into a straight couple. During the process designing a female character, the husband kept commenting on her body and how good she looks. “You have such a cute nose.” “You have the most gorgeous eyes.” “Have I ever told you I love your cheekbones?” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the crap he kept saying to me.  I don’t mind the PC approving of her own appearance, but being constantly told how “lucky” her partner is because she’s So Attractive grated on my nerves. I made a few modifications and moved on because I was tired of fooling with it. 

Once out of the CC they do a decent job of handling the fact the player could be male or female. The female character doesn’t automatically do all the baby stuff (the spouse does, and obviously they intend the default to be Scruffy White Dudemale, but whatever).

I’ve reserved judgement on the main plot setup. On the one hand, it’s good to get back to having a family story a la Fallout 3. The Sole Survivor is looking for her (probably much older now) son. On the other, do we need to see the player’s spouse shot in front of them? Is there a better way to tell this story besides fridging the spouse?

I decided to roll a different type of character–high charisma and intelligence, medium agility and perception, 1 in strength, luck, etc. You don’t get much mileage out of charisma in the earlier games so we’ll see how much I regret that. You can level up SPECIAL every time, with no evident cap and no level cap, so respeccing a character is actually feasible whereas in previous games if made really bad SPECIAL choices you might need to start over. It looks like they’ve set up a really flexible system in terms of playing how you want, so this could make future runs interesting.

I got my ass kicked in Concord (the setup reminds me of Springvale School in Fallout 3) so I decided to scavenge around for a bit. You can’t negotiate with raiders so I guess I’ll have to learn how to use a gun for that one.

I think I like the new perks setup. They seem more useful on the whole, in the previous games there are lots of perks that end up being wasteful based on how the leveling is handled. I like that reading magazines imparts perks rather than skill points, it’s more fun to me and it means if you want to max out a certain perk you have to target those mags.

The crafting system is almost overwhelmingly intricate, but I’m slowly getting a handle on it. I like being able to scavenge and reuse all the junk in Fallout’s world, and the community system seems promising, but all this does take away from what I quantify as the Fallout Experience, which is a loner crossing the wastes with hardly a cap to their name, occasionally with the company of a silent but loyal companion. It will be interesting to see how the main plot holds up, since that tends to be the weakness in the storytelling.

Survival of the Fittest

Filed under: I Need a Fallout Icon, what’s the point in stockpiling all these pork ‘n beans if y’all don’t even care

For anyone interested in keeping score at home, the tally is Deathclaw: 5, Ren: 0

I set the difficulty at Survival because I thought it would be like the hardcore mode in Fallout: New Vegas. (Healing takes longer and food, water, and sleep are required.) I’m not quite sure what Survival mode actually is in Fallout 4, except it means more Legendary enemies, which sounds rather ominous, PC takes higher damage, and baddies are pretty spongy. That deathclaw treats bullets like chiclets.

Anyway, I’m not sure why they didn’t include a hardcore mode and I eagerly await the mod. I’m not sure how hard it is to break into Fallout modding at the moment. Bethesda will release the Fallout 4 Creation Kit in 2016 but modders have already set about doing the Lord’s work. Hardcore mode is probably too complex for babby’s first mod, but it’s the sort of thing I’m interested in working on.

I sometimes wonder if Bethesda omits or skimps on certain seemingly-obvious features because they know the community will fill the gaps with player-made content.

Fallout4.ini

I’d like my first playthrough to be comparatively vanilla, but I’ve been keeping an eye out for useful mods and tweaks and I’ve been making modifications to Fallout4.ini, located under C:\Users\Name\Documents\My Games\Fallout4\

Clean up your files with fINIp. Full .ini variable list here. There is an ini. Editor available, which is a more user-friendly way of editing for those who feel uncomfortable editing the file directly. It’s a promising utility, the things I found most useful were centering the 3rd-POV camera (additional tweak discussion here) and disabling the intro sequence and start delay, which are modified by:

sIntroSequence=0

uMainMenuDelayBeforeAllowSkip=100

It doesn’t yet include the toggle for gore, which is

bDisableAllGore=0

Someone has uploaded a console command list for on-the-fly tweaks and dangerous experiements, with things like godmode as well as the ability to auto-complete the entire main questline.

I mentioned elsewhere I’m interested in a Hardcore mode a la Fallout: New Vegas. The current state of modding, as I understand it, involves using the old creation kit in conjunction with Skyrim stuff, and that level of MacGuyvering is not my jam. At all. So I’m not going there until the new kit comes out. The community has been so prolific I anticipate someone else making one first.

Also, brief aside here, someone needs to sit Bethesda down and have a long talk about how to design an inventory management system. If I have 5 right arm armors in inventory I have no convenient mechanism to compare them all, only an indicator noting if the stats are higher or lower than whatever I’m currently wearing (but not HOW MUCH higher or lower, it uses ambiguous +++ and — symbols). The sorting options are terrible. It might actually be worse than the previous games, I can’t remember. It could be the system is the same but it’s aged so that amplifies how crappy it is.

ALSO

I would love to talk about Fallout 4, but I have no idea how far along I am in the main quest line. I assume not very, I just met Nick. I wanted to do the next part of the quest to start catching up with people but.

You ever fight a bear in Survival mode? Mother Nature ain’t playing around.

The Life of a Survialist is Often Fraught With Dying

I finally got past that damn bear. As soon as it attacked, I ran away to a guard tower and sniped it from the top. Meanwhile, brave Nick and fearless Dogmeat were thrown around like sacks of potatoes and fielded the occasional poorly-aimed round. Sorry friends.

I had to change the difficulty for the first–and so far, only–time with Kellogg, though.

I don’t know how many times I died. Once you get to a certain point in the Fort he locks you in with him, so you can’t leave to level up or switch up inventory. It got to the point where my routine was to walk into the room far enough to trigger his emergence, then back up, fire a Fat Boy critical into his face, and back down the stairs to bottleneck whatever synths were left. This took his health down to 1/3, but he regenerates. I got close to beating him once, but he went into stealth and got me–he could kill me with one hit while stealthed.

Finally, I decided enough is enough. I changed the difficulty to normal, walked up the stairs, shouldered the Fat Boy, and blasted him in the face with a critical hit mini nuke. One-hit kill. I probably should have fought him the normal way and saved that nuke, but I was so annoyed with the whole process at that point.

I think what bugged me the most is I had to kill him. I was able to talk things out with Skinny Malone and Kellogg might be a piece of crap but he didn’t seem unreasonable. He gave me many opportunities to turn back, and considering how many freaking synth were in that place, I considered it a generous gesture.

I went looking for the Brotherhood of Steel after I saw that blimp. The conversation with the recruiting officer is just dumb. She’s super aggressive at first, then she’s like, HEY WANT TO JOIN and actually becomes somewhat friendly and trusting, but the conversation loops back in a weird way, so if you don’t say the right thing she immediately goes aggro again, then it loops back to HEY WANT TO JOIN. I think she’s a safety-net NPC designed to catch players who haven’t already gotten the Cambridge distress signal.

Anyway I was taking a break from the main plot to tie up some of the faction quests and get a better picture of the regional power balance. I don’t really trust the BoS as a player, but my Survivor doesn’t know anything about them except they have big armor and a ship and probably the firepower to take on the Institute if it boils down to that.

I Once Was Lost But Now Am Found

I read a blurb somewhere about how companions are the best and worst thing about Fallout 4.

Sounds about right.

The main problem is you lose them. Easily. And often. There’s no indicator on the map for companions, sometimes they just wander off and it can take forever to track them down again. Sometimes when a quest is initiated they walk to that location. Sometimes they end up at their home base. Sometimes they decide to take a load off in a random house.

Console commands to the rescue. I tried this last night when I couldn’t find Piper and it worked like a charm. Copypasta here for my reference.

prid [ID]

moveto player

• Cait: 00079305
• Codsworth: 0001ca7d
• Curie: 00102249
• Paladin Danse: 0005de4d
• Deacon: 00045ac9
• Dogmeat: 0001d162
• John Hancock: 00022615
• Robert MacCready: 0002a8a7
• Nick Valentine: 00002f25
• Piper: 0002f1f
• Preston Garvey: 0001a4d7
• Strong: 0003f2bb
• X6-88: 0002e210a

Fallout 4: Romance? What Romance?

Since a series of desktop crashes has brought me ever-closer to resuming my DAI completionist game, I thought I’d take a moment to grouse about something that’s been bugging me.

I’m torn between being glad Bethesda decided to try a few new things with Fallout 4 and being extremely cynical about their motivations. I avoided as much buzz about this game as possible, but the two things I heard the most about were the crafting/building system and the romances.

Modders can (and are) making significant improvements on the former. I think Bethesda felt they only needed to implement the framework and let the rest sort itself out. Whatever, that’s their MO apparently, and they can’t even be trusted to make a decent inventory system so who cares.

But the romances seem like such a bait-and-switch. I keep forgetting most game romances don’t come anywhere close to the content or quality that Bioware provides. I knew Bethesda wouldn’t do as good of a job, but they gabbed about it so much I thought they would at least put some effort into it. I cannot believe there are actually Fallout 4 romance guides, as if you’d need any sort of help navigating to that point. People talk about how great it is Fallout 4 allows polyamory. Are we really gonna call this representation when it’s the path of least resistance?

As far as I can tell, the romances consist of a few different dialogue lines at the end of the last “idolization” character conversation. (And not overtly romantic ones, either.) That’s it. No extra conversations or scenes. It’s the absolute bare minimum of content needed to claim the feature.

I might even prefer ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ sequel development. Fallout: More of That is fine. I don’t like the feeling that a bunch of guys sat around a table, said, “What cool features would help sell this game to larger demographic?” figured out the minimum effort required to claim those features, and then spent half a year talking it up before release.