Look, a playable feline race in Fallout 4!

But unfortunately, they can't pick up bottle caps in their paws ...

I love it! That cat should put Dog Meat's armor and a bandana on her human.

Fallout 4 is on sale for -50% off until October 25th. The DLCs are only -33% off however. I have been waiting for a Game of the Year edition before I buy it. But now that all the DLC is out and it is on sale, maybe the time has come to break down and get it?

It is kind of confusing though, as the Steam store page says buy it all for $80.33. But if I do my math, the game + season pass is only 60.48. But if I add up all the DLC separately with base game, I get 76.83. So I don't know how they are doing their math.

Fallout 4 mods for PS4 are coming this week:

https://twitter.com/BethesdaStudios/status/...918942492360704

That is interesting. I wonder what hondling went on behind closed doors between Sony and Bethesda to make that happen?

Oh, it's been a given since PS4 mods went live for Skyrim. I think it just got pushed back due to the SSE release.

I did not know that PS4 mods were approved for Skyrim.

Yep, happened a while back. Very limited though, compared to Xbox mods.

Steam has Fallout 4 on sale. The game + the season pass is $50. Or $70. Their pricing does not make a lot of sense to me. The 70$ figure seems to be the price of the season pass plus the price of every individual dlc added on top of it. I am thinking of buying this time.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Nov 23 2016, 10:11 PM

So I knuckled under and finally bought Fallout 4. It is almost 13 months now since it came out, and I doubt I will get a better price than $50 US for the game and all its dlc for a while.

My first thoughts were wow, this game is ugly. Fallout 3 looks better. But then I remember that Fallout 3 took a lot of modding to make look as good I am used to seeing it now. Mainly in fixing all the stupid things Bethesda did with it, like turning the entire world green. So after doing some work and disabling depth of field and motion blur in the Fallout.ini, and godrays in the launcher options menu, and using a console command to move back fog, it looks alright.

BTW. That no fog command is SetFog 1 0

The controls seem jerky, jumpy. Definitely not smooth. I am not sure if that is purely a performance issue, or if that is just the way it is no matter what. With my i7, 16 gb of ram, and Nvidia Titan X video card, I should be able to handle anything a game can throw at me. But this is a Bethesda game, and they believe in hiring only the worst coders in the business, so...

I came across a nice new feature. After installing my first mod, all my save games vanished. Then after exiting the game and starting again, my saves were back. WTF? Who made this game? A pack of monkeys?


Ok, the game is also gets blurry whenever you move the camera. Then goes back to normal when you are still. Really Bethesda? I did some digging and found out that apparently it is an issue with the TAA anti-aliasing. So I can either have no anti-aliasing, or have a blurry game. There is a supposed fix using a post-process injector called Reshade, but I found it just makes things worse. Goddess, what the [censored] is wrong with these morons?

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Nov 24 2016, 04:49 AM

Ha! Keep massaging it SubRosa.

There was a reason the game got such a low score at Metacritic/Steam forums.

It was made for console. We all know that.

If it is made for consoles (and it obviously is made for the X-Box and shoddily ported to the PC), then Bethesda must really hate console players...

What is your general opinion on the character creator in Fallout? Is there still a randomizer?

Well, I think that it was quite good. But that is considering that console gamers have never had any options in the past. So take that as a grain of salt. I could imagine PC gamers saying Yuck!

The cleavage thing was annoying- just getting the size right. Flat is annoying, Dolly Parton is too much.

If you know what I mean.

I am not sure about a randomizer. It was so long ago that I rolled a character.

There is no face randomizer. It is like Skyrim in that regard. You start with a preset and work from there.

Too bad. I really like the randomizer because when it has "good days", it can provide some good face templates.

I agree. Back in my Oblivion days I would hit the randomizer over and over, and after a few minutes something good would come up. I would use that as a base and just tweak it from there for another ten or twenty minutes.

My son just got it for 20$ at a sale somewhere online. He probably didn't get any DLC for that price. I started a game, but haven't made it out of the bathroom scene yet.

After ESO, Bethesda would really have to knock my socks off with this game to get me to play it - If the beginning set-up scenes are any indication, I don't think they will accomplish that.






This post has been edited by mALX: Nov 26 2016, 05:29 PM

I have had some time to play F4 for a while now, and have been able to formulate some opinions.

My initial reaction had a lot of negatives. I was even tempted to want my money back. There were a lot of things that just jumped out and slapped me in the face.

The way the game is blurry whenever you move if you have anti-aliasing on, or looks just atrocious with it turned off is a big one. I mean, how can this pass QA? A silly question, since we all know Bethesda does not have a quality control department.

The character creation is just plain bad. You are supposed to run your mouse over various head parts, and then you can edit those parts. But it was often a pixel hunt, where the slightest motion of the mouse sent you to another part of the face. Even when I did keep it selected, half the time I could not tell if anything was even changing or not. The "old" system of sliders in Skyrim worked very well. So they had to stop using it. Thankfully the LooksMenu mod fixes that somewhat, by giving you a list of every head part you can edit.

Then the game starts and I am forced to be married. No, I don't want to play a character who is married. Then I am forced to be married to a guy. Ewww, gross! Why not force me to be married to a garden slug? On top of it I am forced to have a kid? Umm, no. Going through the house I click on a pair of army fatigues, and hear my character say "I'm so proud of him." Him? WTF? If anyone was in the military it was me. I found it all to be very insulting. I really wanted to smack Bethesda silly.

When I finally got to playing the game things did improve. Seeing the pre war world was a nice change for the Fallout world, with everything so shiny and new. Once out of the vault and into the wasteland things were back to normal, guns, corpses, monsters, looting. Ok, this I like. The gunplay took a while to get used to. I am not sure exactly why, but I had a lot of trouble hitting things, especially the small critters that jump around, like bloatfiles and mole rats. I still do have trouble with them. I don't know if it is the iron sights (which I have never really liked), or something else.

The look of the world itself is something I love though. Finally I have something truly positive to say! It is a combination of leafless trees, brambly undergrowth, and the decaying detritus of the old world scattered all over. It isn't a desert-like world such as New Vegas or FO3. Rather it looks like November, when the leaves have all fallen of the trees, but before the bright blanket of winter's snow has come to cover the land. Also unlike FO3, the trees don't look like burned up hulks that have magically sat there for 200 years without falling down. Instead they just look like trees in late fall.

The lighting is good (well, once I disabled the god rays in the game options, and the Depth of Field and motion blur in the .ini file). The latter annoyed me to no end though. I do not know why Bethesda goes out of its way to make its games look ugly. It is like going to a car dealer and finding them intentionally throwing mud over all the cars on sale. I shouldn't have go through all these hoops to make the game look as good as it can be. But at least Beth didn't add even more insult by putting a green tint over the entire world like they did in FO3. Or a yellow one like Obsidian did with NV.

The sad thing I have to keep fixing things to make the game playable. I don't know how people can play this on a console.

The cooking is really nice. So far it looks like everything you kill can be cooked and turned into a useful healing item. Many have handy buffs as well, like more action points, or higher carry weight, and so on. So being a wasteland huntress is a good thing. I rarely use Stimpacks. It is almost always food items I have cooked. Cooking meat also magically removes radiation from it, so all this stuff is safe to eat. The only glaring omission is that you cannot cook any of the prewar food like instamash and salisbury steak. So I never eat them, as they give you rads, and have no buffs.

The crafting is mostly better than the other games. But not in all ways. A very blatant omission is that for some reason you cannot craft ammunition. You can literally build a fortress with laser cannons, but not a single .308 Winchester round. What is wrong with that picture? The other crafting is kind of odd. You can modify weapons and armor, but as far as I can tell you cannot actually create any new. In fact the only workstation that can create new items is the Chem Station. So every mod uses it to craft their items.

Most of the crafting seems to be dedicated to building settlements. The game seems to expect you do this all over the place. I personally do not give a crap. If I want to play Sim City, I will play Sim City. I play the Fallout games because I want post-apocalyptic adventure. Not civil engineering and social administration. But I understand a lot of people like the settlement building, so that is a big draw for them.

The powered armor is well done. In FO3 and NV power armor was really under-developed. It was just a heavy suit of armor with some very small buffs and negatives. In F4 wearing PA really makes you feel superheroic. For starters you are gigantic. You can jump off of anything and take zero damage, like in all superhero movies. For the most part bullets seem to just bounce off you. Though you still take some damage. You can fight hand to hand with a deathclaw and not die after the first hit, which really is saying something. To balance all this out you need fusion cores to power the armor, and they run out over time. So you cannot go crazy wearing it.

That said, there is a lot of powered armor suits in the game. I am still in the top left corner of the map, and I have already found about 4 suits of armor. I have also collected about 6 or so fusion cores. If you follow the proddings of the game and go straight to Concord after leaving the Vault you will be almost immediately be give a suit of powered armor. It makes for a very dramatic moment, you need the armor to fight off a horde of Raiders, and then a Deathclaw rises out of the street. I am not worried about spoilers here, because everyone who has seen a video of the game has seen that particular scene. They were showing it months before the game came out.

But all in all, as much as I like how they do powered armor, I think they put too much of it in the game, and give it to you too soon.

I am still getting used to the weapons in the game. Being low level I still have not seen them all. Most of what I come across are Pipe guns, which are homemade firearms tinkered together from junk. On one hand I should applaud Bethesda, because they do look like something that low lifes would cobble together in their ruined garages. But I found back playing FO3 that I prefer seeing real world weapons in my games over generic ones. That is why I replaced the generic assault rifles in FO3 with M16s. I would rather see a Raider with a Glock 17 or a Beretta 92 than a pipe with a handle taped to it. So I am becoming underwhelmed with the guns. I have found a lot of good firearm mods, I am thinking of trying to replace the vanilla weapons with them. But I still don't understand how the firearm creation works, given all the gun customization in this game.

Like FO3, this is still a small arms kind of game. I have found some energy ammo, but it is few and far between. Likewise, it took me a while to find an energy weapon. Partly that is my fault, because I avoided following the game's prodding and going straight to Concord. Instead I wandered around a a lot, and didn't find even one laser pistol. OTOH, at Concord you can a laser musket laying in the street. If you see it that is (I passed it right by my first time in the town. I had to go back for it.). Instead I did not start seeing even laser pistols start showing up in the leveled lists until I got to around 8th level or so.

There is an energy weapon right in Vault 111, but it is locked up in with a super hard lock that you cannot even try to pick until you are high level. Which found very insulting. Why did they even put it there, if we have no chance to get it?

If you want to play an energy weapons character you are going to have to use the console to start with a laser weapon. You are also going to have to create a mod to craft energy ammo, or use one that increases the amount of it you find in loot and from vendors.

As far as the world itself goes, F4 is really good. Bethesda has really outdone themselves in terms of world design. All of the small buildings you find have interiors that are part of the outdoor cell. So there are no loading screens from going through the door, and you can literally see through the windows and shoot at whatever is inside. Only the larger interior areas are in separate cells. Lexington was fantastic, with half a dozen raised highways all converging over the city, combined with tall buildings with blasted open sides and roofs. It is like a jungle where you can go up and over and down half the town without touching the ground.

Now monsters have new ways of getting at you too. Feral Ghouls will often lay motionless on the ground with the prewar corpses. Then when you get close they rise up and attack you like zombies. Worse they can climb in through windows to get you. Mole Rats can literally tunnel underground where you cannot shoot them, then pop up behind you to bite you in the back. You really have to be on your toes. I used to think Mole Rats were cute in FO3. Now I hate those blasted buggers!

They removed the skills from game, which I think really hurts it. The Special attributes are still there, but their only purpose is to govern which perks you can take. You can only choose the perks of the same level or lower of its governing Special attributes. So if you have a Luck of 5, you can only take the first 5 perks under Luck. In the other games your Special meant a lot more, and having high skills really defined your character. All of this means the game is definitely not a Role Playing Game. It is a First and Third Person Shooter with some RPG-like elements is all.

So far I am enjoying exploring the new land that the game offers, and shooting and looting and eating things. But once that wears off I don't think I will be spending much time in F4. Already I have a hankering to go back to FO3 to play Hecate there. She feels like a real person there, but not so much so in the Commonwealth.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Dec 4 2016, 09:20 PM