FALLOUT 4

[cwoy2j]

Goddammit, now I want to play this game again. Anyone using BOS mods? I was using an Improved BOS mod and BOS Workbench that let you craft Maxton's battle coat but for some reason it makes all of the BOS people at checkpoints walk around in their underwear. If you're using good BOS mods, let me know your mod order b/c I might do another playthrough.

[Death From Above]

I haven't got into faction specific stuff yet due to not having the total familiarity with the game world I would with Skyrim, yet.

[Craig H]

16 hours ago, Death From Above said:

I have to admit I find Fallout 4's combat significantly better than Starfield's. It feels far more lethal and weighty. I was honestly not expecting to love this game but at least with all the free bonus content you can pick and choose from I think it's pretty fucking awesome.

Yeah, there is a lot about Fallout 4 that I shit on before and now I find to be a much more fulfilling experience than Starfield. I love, love, love everything about space and exploration in Starfield. The problem is that there isn't much to explore that's interesting and space is flat out better in No Man's Sky. I once thought space combat was just awesome and it got to a point where it was easier than After Burner.

I'm not sure if it's the mods or what, if it's VATS, if it's the stuff I'm killing, if it's my weapons, etc., but it's just so much better in FO4. Combat is just flat out scarier and frantic in FO4 because even stupid shit like bloatflies and radroaches are small and come at you from weird angles or they scurry away. Plus they're somehow weirder that what you face in Starfield. In Starfield, the aggressive alien life is so beefy and one dimensional that you have more than enough time to wipe out everything. 

Base building is still going to be something I avoid because from everything I could glean, it's still a mess. And that's fine. It's not a necessity unless you're really into creating trade routes.

I did wind up starting over from scratch and forgot how brutal and sad the opening of the game is. I also forgot all about how scummy Vault-Tec is and remembered my hypothesis that somehow Vault-Tec manipulated the Chinese and the US to go to war to sell more vaults, to be able to conduct their underground experiments, and thinking that the Chinese and US destroying the planet would give them a chance to rebuild society better.

And the other thing playing FO4 made me think of is how much better it would be if you could use vehicles. Makes me want to consider giving Mad Max a try. I think that's free on PSN+ and/or Game Pass.

But yeah, for as much as I shit on FO4 in the past for being a broken, weird as fuck game, these mods don't give me a whole lot to complain about. 

 

[Death From Above]

On my second character I found a random legendary 12 Gauge Shotgun that never needs to reload.

lol

lmao

You can bet I'll be modding that to the moon.

[Craig H]

Holy shit, these mods make FO4 way more challenging. My god. I rarely come across bandages. I don't think I've found any Rad-X yet. No stimpacks either. My health bar is half red from radiation. Ammo is such a challenge to come by.

To put it like this, somehow these mods made the game more like Metro, but better? Better in that Metro is so. fucking. slow. like. incredibly. slow. Metro may be the slowest moving, least exciting FPS I've ever played and I think I uninstalled it after a week so it wound up being a waste of money. This though? These mods, the only ones I listed, make combat more like a puzzle to solve because of the lack of ammo and health resources. Like how can I go up against these raiders that also have turrets when I have so little ammo. Because of that, I've put a lot of points early on into melee combat and stealth so I can try to sneak around and knock people out.

I have no idea what I'm going to do if I ever run across a Deathclaw.

[Death From Above]

So, is The Mechanist the Obligatory Unstable DLC in this game? I had a ton of crashes in that area and the only fix was turning all my graphics settings to potato until I was done with it.

[Death From Above]

Far Harbour is the God Ray DLC

[tbarrie]

On 10/29/2023 at 7:34 PM, Death From Above said:

So, is The Mechanist the Obligatory Unstable DLC in this game? I had a ton of crashes in that area and the only fix was turning all my graphics settings to potato until I was done with it.

No, in my experience that would be Far Harbour. The writing in Far Harbour is much better than the main storyline, but the Island is Crash City.

[Death From Above]

Funny I've had zero issues. Welcome to video games lol

[Eivion]

There were no problems with either on consoles, and I don't recall a mass of bugs being mentioned by PC players when they released years ago. I would hazard t guess your mods probably created an issue though Bethesda could have just as easily messed them up with an update from over the years.

[cwoy2j]

On 10/31/2023 at 7:25 AM, tbarrie said:

No, in my experience that would be Far Harbour. The writing in Far Harbour is much better than the main storyline, but the Island is Crash City.

IIRC, the fog in Far Harbor was causing crashes on PS4 when that DLC was released initially. I think they fixed that though as I never had a problem with it.

[tbarrie]

11 hours ago, Eivion said:

There were no problems with either on consoles, and I don't recall a mass of bugs being mentioned by PC players when they released years ago. I would hazard t guess your mods probably created an issue though Bethesda could have just as easily messed them up with an update from over the years.

I'm playing on a Series X. The only mods I had installed are the unofficial patch, one that fixes the requirements to build crafting stations, and one that adds the XP back for Sandman kills. (I later added one that lets you save freely in Survival Mode, because The Island was unplayable without it.) The only one likely to be the culprit would be the unofficial patch.

[Death From Above]

At this point I've modded my game up where actually getting through the tutorial "Kill Raiders at Corvega" mission is Elden Ring hard.

I'm a broken person but it makes me happy.

[Craig H]

On 11/2/2023 at 7:46 PM, Death From Above said:

At this point I've modded my game up where actually getting through the tutorial "Kill Raiders at Corvega" mission is Elden Ring hard.

I'm a broken person but it makes me happy.

Oh my god, I went through the same exact thing and really, that’s every mission. Having basically nothing to gain HP, little ammo, and a ton of rads really is some Elden Ring shit. The Super Mutants near Diamond City are next level hard. And don’t even get me started on the pants shitting moment of discovering a Deathclaw at the bottom of a hospital.

I've basically had to play this completely differently than I did the fist time, putting a lot of points into strength/melee along with int/science/medic just to get over not having the right ammo and being able to create stimpacks and rad removal stuff. 

After everything I did for Vault 81, you’d think they wouldn’t charge me 400 bottle caps to reset my rads. 

I’m also starting to feel like stopping my run. I still want to finally get back to finishing Spider-Man 1, not to mention continuing to get further in Armored Core 6.

Playing with mods is the way to go though. I’m looking forward to something similar happening with Starfield.

[Craig H]

Oh, however, despite the mods fixing nearly everything, I was reminded tonight that running along the freeway/overpass is still completely unreliable and you can still fall right through the surface of the road to the ground below and die. That only happened to me 5 or 6 times before I said fuck this and stuck to the ground.

[Death From Above]

My favourite random fall I've discovered is that any time you leave Travis' Diamond City Radio trailor, your companion for some reason insta falls and goes into a death state even though it appears to be like a 2 foot drop? It's bizarre but it was oddly funny to just suddenly hear Piper shout that she can't feel her leg, god bless Bethesda.

I found a mod that apparently radically changes the ending for both the Railroad and Institute, and apparently lets you try to "reform" the institute post-main quest. I've never sided with them so I'm gonna try that and see what's what because that sounds pretty cool. Running an INT 10 but STR 1 character for it, the low carrying capacity is total ass but having access to the Nerd Rage perk is pretty nice.

[Eivion]

Do cars still rarely randomly kill you? That was always such a random and amusing bug.

[Craig H]

It’s happened to me a few times but it was due to a car randomly exploding. No enemies around or anything. Like a random bomb dropped from the sky.

That's something else I don’t remember from before. I’ll be out and about and then, boom, a huge explosion will go off in the distance. I don’t know why or from what, but someone used the fat man on something.

[Death From Above]

There's an asshole on a bridge in Lexington with a missile launcher that is a really common relatively early game gotcha and a few other set spawns with nasty stuff like that, but it's definitely not common.

By the way I've been streaming a little bit the last few days to literally no audience but hey if you're ever bored as shit and want to watch me piss around in modded Fallout http://twitch.tv/StevenX

[tbarrie]

20 hours ago, Eivion said:

Do cars still rarely randomly kill you? That was always such a random and amusing bug.

Yes, there's at least one car where you just fall over dead if you brush against it.

[Craig H]

Man, this is brutal. And awesome. I take back every bad thing I’ve ever said about FO4. One of the more striking things is that when you engage in dialogue with someone, it looks more normal. Starfield for whatever reason the characters are just dead center in the screen, staring at you lifelessly. It’s something I would expect from older BGS titles.

 I’m still playing with mods. Only 5 or 6 though and one of them is the wasteland experience or whatever it’s called. It basically makes this thing like a souls like game like we joked about earlier. Part of the problem with that is Far Harbor. Radaway is so hard to come be and in Far Harbor you accumulate so much radiation. This becomes an even bigger problem when you get to the quest to chum the water to kill a bunch of mirelurks and wind up having to fight a queen mirelurk. I may have to reload a previous save and go back to town, cure my rads, get anything for health, and buy a shitload of mini  nukes and rockets because otherwise this is impossible.

I also find there are so many more things to do and stories to play through in this  than in Starfield. While being set in space makes things feel more hollow, there just feels like there’s so much more content in FO4. I regret not playing this more when it first came out but I’m glad I’m getting to it now.

[Death From Above]

Honestly I'm just glad someone else dived in on this so I don't feel crazy for repeatedly saying "for God's sake try the mod menu, this game is actually incredible a few years on".

[Contentious C]

Random shit happens in the distance kind of all the time.  Plus, practically everything blows up in a huge inferno: mini-nukes, engines, Sentry bots.  There are a lot of random encounters all over.  I think sometimes those screw me over because it means stuff like Manta-Man probably gets merked before I can actually run into him and talk.

I was thinking earlier today that one bit of physics I enjoyed is that shooting a compressed gas tank makes it explode, but if you carefully shoot the top/release valve, it will fly around until it hits something and explodes.  And after a couple thousand hours of playthroughs, I've actually never collected all the magazine perks, which is probably a crime against humanity or something.  I should go back into the last game I had and start knocking that out.

[Craig H]

The craziest thing to me is when I first played FO4 when it first came out I put close to 150 hours into it looking at my save files. That was without doing any of the expansions. I never played the expansions until now. Far Harbor is actually the first. 

I have to be at least 100 hours in to this playthrough and it is almost entirely all new stuff I'm finding to do. Of course there are the typical Minutemen quests to go wipe an area before you retake the castle, which I never did before, but I'm venturing to parts of the map I never went to before. I loaded up my old save again just to compare map icons and my map now is flooded with so many different locations to fast travel to that I didn't have before, but also, I have yet to run into many of the locales I ran into my first time around years ago. That is awesome. Compared to Starfield, I think I did damn near everything there was to do and while I loved a lot of what I was doing, the whole being part of every faction rubbed me the wrong way. There were no repercussions to anything you chose to do. Whereas in this, if I don't attend to a town under attack, I'm not going to be as well received. And from the reading I've done, you get to a point where you're choosing a faction and from that point on you're locked out of quests for the other factions. I get how it could be annoying to have to run to another town, but it's easy xp gain and fast to do so who cares. This game is far deeper than I even knew it was.

And while the funniest shit ever is still the last flight of the USS Constitution, I did have two things happen that really made me laugh my ass off. One was going to the town with the dogtrack where robots were running races. I eventually found a computer terminal after killing a bad guy and one of the options was to destroy all of the robots. I opted to destroy all of the robots and...holy shit...literally ever robot, even protectrons, blew up. It was so epic and dumb and I kept cha-chinging xp. The other thing was seeing a giant hermit crab using a bus as its shell. I really missed silly shit like that in Starfield. And Skyrim really.

[Eivion]

21 hours ago, Contentious C said:

I was thinking earlier today that one bit of physics I enjoyed is that shooting a compressed gas tank makes it explode, but if you carefully shoot the top/release valve, it will fly around until it hits something and explodes. 

There are some neat aspects/traps set up all around like that in FO4 like various environmental ways to blow up people or set them on fire. You can also shoot out some light fixtures to make rooms darker for sneak builds though honestly if you get high enough up you are basically invisible to damn near everything like in Skyrim. I know at one point enemies were also smart enough to actually go for cover and at least try to run when they see grenades.