Fallout 4 FO4 Reviews thread

Hastar said:

Why don't you mention the main reason people play Bethesda games? EXPLORATION. I enjoyed Witcher 3 but that is not a sandbox game. Half the time it was like watching a movie with all the cut scenes.

People play Fallout and Elder Scroll games because you can do what you want and don't have to pay attention to quests that utterly bore people. Maybe it's because playing CRPG's since the 1980's I have seen all these quests before and they do not excite me that much. I would rather go off and explore and do my own thing and test my build against the monsters out there. Exploration and strategy are the reasons I love sandbox games.

Add mods to the mix and you can really play the game you want. The best times I had with Skyrim was playing a miner and blacksmith. Modded the game so the monsters were harder and added new creatures. I did not even follow the dragon story line.

Sorry but most books are better then stories in video games. Bethesda games can be played like a blank book where you are the writer and that is much more exciting to me. Don't get me wrong theme park games can be fun but there are very few well made sandbox games out there.

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See that's why I don't understand the appeal of Bethesda's games… What exactly is there to explore? From what I've seen of FO4 the environments look extremely bland, so surely it isn't to enjoy the view… Is it just all about endlessly killing monsters / collecting loot to kill more monsters? (With clunky combat and terrible enemy AI). What exactly am I missing?

And ideally what I want from a CRPG is a game similar to Age of Decadence (turn-based tactical combat that is challenging but relatively rare / often avoidable, lots of choice & consequences) but with a party that I can control in battle…. Is there a mod that can give me that for any of Bethesda's games? I don't like having to sift through hundreds of dull fetch quests to find the handful that are interesting either. Is there a mod that eliminates all of the filler content?

If not then I'm pretty sure that Bethesda's games would be a waste of my time and money.

If you can't see the appeal, it would probably be a waste of time to try to explain it to you.

Considering you want a party-based game with turn-based combat, and that you also seem to be anti-Steam, I'd say it's a safe bet that Bethesda just isn't for you.

Well, I took two days off work to play this and am thrilled to death. For a game that has been out about 48 hours this is where I stand:

Had to bump most of settings down to medium to get smooth frame rates at 30 Fps or higher. Haven't left sanctuary yet, but enjoyed killing bugs with a big stick. Plays much better with mouse acceleration disabled. Does look rather bland though. Spent way too much time tweaking my face and ini / graphic settings. Widening the fov for me was a must.

crpgnut said:

Well, I took two days off work to play this and am thrilled to death. For a game that has been out about 48 hours this is where I stand:

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I bet you were AFk half of that time

Thrasher said:

Spent way too much time tweaking my face and ini / graphic settings. Widening the fov for me was a must.

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Are you crazy?
Stop with that lollygagging and instead of playing ini file, play the actual game already!

JDR13 said:

If you can't see the appeal, it would probably be a waste of time to try to explain it to you.

Considering you want a party-based game with turn-based combat, and that you also seem to be anti-Steam, I'd say it's a safe bet that Bethesda just isn't for you.

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I was being somewhat flippant regarding the party based / turn-based combat part only because Hastar said mods could allow us to play the game any way they want. Yes, that is truly my preference, but I have been able to play & enjoy solo RPGs with real-time combat on occasion (e.g. The Witcher games).

As for Steam; it's true I'm not a fan of DRM in any form and don't like the near monopoly it has on the digital game market, but I do have an account there… all the Steam games I have were either gifted to me or KS rewards. I play X-COM: EU through Steam and sometimes play newly released KS games there because the patches are released more quickly there than on GOG / Humble. If Steam is truly the only way to play it, it's not necessarily a deal breaker (also do Bethesda's physical game discs now require you to use Steam?)

While I may have sounded like I'm trolling or flaming, I am genuinely curious what it is that makes Bethesda's fans say the games have some of the best exploration. If someone could give me an example of what makes exploration good / better than other games, or link me to a video clip that shows why it's good, I'd appreciate it. This actually isn't the first time I've asked this here and IIRC the response I received was very similar to "If you need to ask, then you'll never understand."…

The only thing I really enjoyed when I played Skyrim and Oblivion was the thieves guild quests (and the Brotherhood to a lesser degree)… Also had a few thief oriented mods for Oblivion, including one that made it more like the "Thief" games including Garett's special arrows, etc. Stealth in those games wasn't the greatest implementation I'd ever seen, but it was passable. Other than that I wasn't seeing a lot of fun to be had… And just running around exploring wasn't interesting… so I do seriously wonder whether I'm missing something.

Things that I might consider great exploration in a game would include: puzzles (preferrably those that are clever and not merely a trial & error guessing game), adventure game style use of inventory interaction, and multiple ways to get from point A to B..

Exploration in a Bethesda game is all about the 2%. You will find thousands of items in a Bethesda game, but it is finding a rare item or a really rare location that gets me excited. Also, if you find something new in a place that you've visited 100 times, that is also very cool.

My favorite finds are the holotapes and/or evidence of something truly horrific or ironic. Say you come across a suicide note of a girl who killed herself the day before the bombs dropped; that's ironic. You see the corpses of a couple intertwined on a bed and just know they decided to go out with a bang

In this game, I must have been in the first town for several hours and had traveled back and forth dozens of times before I noticed a

One thing I've noticed in the new game is that there are a ton more enemies. There is a quest that takes you to the city of Lexington that is somewhat early in the game. That complex is huge and crawling with enemies; inside and out. Even getting to the place can be quite a challenge and there are several distractions heading to the site. I ended up starting a whole separate quest, just by following the sounds of gunfire. I'm going to guess and say that there were over 100 enemies there and it was very easy to get surrounded. A couple times I had to sprint for cover as I started taking fire the second I entered a large area.

crpgnut said:

In this game, I must have been in the first town for several hours and had traveled back and forth dozens of times before I noticed a

Spoiler

cellar door leading to a cubby hole. I think it was somebody's man cave

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That's because you didn't go hold V then scrap everything that cannot be repaired (yellow highlighted stuff). If you did that, you would have noticed the backentrance.

Explore not just to explore, but explore everything.

Yeah, I scrapped the whole place. Unfortunately, I did most of my scrapping at night and just missed it. I did take advantage of a certain tree that leads to a cache of loot. If you scrap the tree too early, you might miss something. The first thing I did was move all the crafting stations so that they're all in one location. I've thought about building up the red rocket location with just a long row of turrets to protect the entrance to sanctuary. I haven't done it because I figure raids are likely to be instanced just outside of town, instead of raiders actually moving across the map towards your location.

crpgnut said:

One thing I've noticed in the new game is that there are a ton more enemies.

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Really? I was actually thinking there was slightly less, at least when it comes to the wandering variety.

I seem to remember encountering more random enemies in Fallout 3. I wonder if the difficulty level affects the quantity of enemies in the game. I played FO3 on 'Very Hard' and I'm only playing FO4 on 'Hard".

I am playing on hard too. What's the consensus? Hard is too easy? Can we change difficulty mid-game?

Yeah, you can the difficulty at any time. I'm finding it to be sufficient for now.

Alright, as long as it's always an option. I hate restarting, especially for stupid reasons like being unable to change difficulty mid game.

JDR13 said:

Really? I was actually thinking there was slightly less, at least when it comes to the wandering variety.

I seem to remember encountering more random enemies in Fallout 3. I wonder if the difficulty level affects the quantity of enemies in the game. I played FO3 on 'Very Hard' and I'm only playing FO4 on 'Hard".

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Quantity? Why would anyone want - quantity? This is Fallout, not Dark Souls.

Again, and after 30ish hours in the game, it really seems to me that Bethesda heard my cries and there is no endless mobrespawns quantity, but something else.

Instead of hords of endless respawns, beefed up legendary mobs show up. Most of these mobs are not easy to kill and when low health, they mutate and regain full health (once).
I can't wait till you stumble upon legendary mosquitos, flies and mutated dogs with low AP so you spam and spam stims.
Me? I really don't want to see a legendary deathclaw. Yet.

The difficulty level doesn't affect quantity. It affects quality. More difficult game, more legendary mobs show instead of being just "normal". That tip shows sometimes during loading.

Thumb up for Bethesda ditching their second sin from the game - mobgrinding.
Instead, they made the game as close to challenging as possible. At least on my side. I can't oneshot anything with decent loot. Can you?

@JDR-I'm talking about the number of enemies inside of the dungeons. Without giving anything away, I'll just say Corvega, which should only be meaningful if you've been there. That place is crawling with enemies everywhere.

I like that Bethesda is using more burrowing and surprise encounters. Crawling around in the sewers is a little more creepy when you know a feral ghoul might be crawling around in one of the pipes and you can't hear him because of all of the noise from machinery....

crpgnut said:

@JDR-I'm talking about the number of enemies inside of the dungeons. Without giving anything away, I'll just say Corvega, which should only be meaningful if you've been there. That place is crawling with enemies everywhere.

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Yeah, the Corvega plant was a lot of fun. It was basically one long firefight.

daveyd said:

See that's why I don't understand the appeal of Bethesda's games… What exactly is there to explore? From what I've seen of FO4 the environments look extremely bland, so surely it isn't to enjoy the view… Is it just all about endlessly killing monsters / collecting loot to kill more monsters? (With clunky combat and terrible enemy AI). What exactly am I missing?

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The problem is that FO4 is not on par in terms of exploration with other bethesda's products.

The exploration thing is self explanatory and the appeal is not so much different from the real thing so people who do not like exploration wont like it no matter what.

Usually, it happens this way: players have a general idea of the direction they must go to move to a location. While en route, hints of other locations are seen and the players, out of curiosity, might decide to re route to the other locations to find out if there is something to find out. Sometimes, there is, sometimes there is not.

FO4 world is much denser than in other products that had emptiness (that played a part in the exploration thing)
When en route to a marked on the map location to answer a call for example, it is quite common to run through two or three unexplored locations. At this level, it is no longer inviting the player to a casual detour but to sysmetical detours.
The second thing is that compared to the number of made detours, there is not so much to find out, not that many backstories to locations, not that many sides, not so many hidden locations etc

crpgnut said:

I'll just say Corvega, which should only be meaningful if you've been there. That place is crawling with enemies everywhere.

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The really odd thing is that, both in Corvega and at least one other spot I forget the name of, you're given the quest to clear it of raiders, but then you get an update that the quest is complete after killing like three of them, despite the fact that many more enemies of the same type are still alive in the map.

I can't figure out if it's a bug in the quest or a weird afterthought where they just threw in some extra mobs after the area and quest had already been designed.