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Offline beardo

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Re: Fallout series
« Reply #460 on: November 10, 2015, 04:01:45 PM »
According to my stats, I've committed 3 murders, but I have no idea when or where.
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Offline Blanko

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Re: Fallout series
« Reply #461 on: November 10, 2015, 04:24:52 PM »
My first impression of Fallout 4, and a word of advice: V.A.T.S. is completely fucking awful.

I was going to roll with a V.A.T.S./crit focused build, but I quickly found out that doing so is simply not feasible. V.A.T.S. accuracy has been completely gutted, with your chances of hitting dropping dramatically with distance, and even close by the numbers don't match the previous games at all. The distance at which 3 and NV would put you at a 95% chance to score a headshot, 4 would instead put you at somewhere around 30-40%.

The critical hit meter recharges horrendously slowly, making you able to score a crit once every ten kills or so - and that's if you use V.A.T.S. constantly. Again putting that into perspective, in FO3 you could get a 100% crit chance in V.A.T.S. with just 5 Luck and a sniper rifle. In NV with its slightly more tuned balancing you could get 70%+ crit chance with a crit-oriented build.

The new time-slow-instead-of-time-freeze effect makes a very negligible tactical difference, given that you're frozen in place while your character goes through the motions of cinematic animations while enemies are free to pummel you relentlessly, leaving you defenseless.

I'm probably just going to reroll.

Offline Blanko

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Re: Fallout series
« Reply #462 on: November 10, 2015, 04:47:37 PM »
Actually, now that I'm ranting about this game, let me rant about the perk system as well. You know how a while ago I posted that Bethesda would incentivize the player to level as a jack-of-all-trades, master of none? Little did I know how true that would actually turn out to be, because it turns out that's all you can do.

What I didn't know at the time is that perk ranks above the first ones have level requirements. I know, level requirements for perks have always been a thing in Fallout, so what's the big deal? Well, it becomes a massive problem when you're replacing the entire skill system with perks. That means you have a bunch of perks that are direct equivalents to what the skills used to do in previous games. Deal 20% more damage. Hack 20% more advanced terminals. Lockpick 20% harder locks. Sneaking is 20% more effective. And so on. In previous games you could level a skill to 100 from the get-go and have a clear-cut focus for your character from the beginning of the game. In FO4, though? Have fun waiting until level 40.

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Offline beardo

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Re: Fallout series
« Reply #463 on: November 11, 2015, 07:03:21 AM »
Some faggot in Diamond City accused me of murdering his son Nelson, and I don't even know who that is. He told me I'm going to pay. Looking forward to it.
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Saddam Hussein

Re: Fallout series
« Reply #464 on: November 13, 2015, 02:00:46 AM »
Diamond City is great.  Fenway Park is now a shantytown, Green Monster and all.

Alas, it's one of the few truly great things in this game.  I don't think I've properly stressed how dumb the story is.  F3 was about a son trying to find and reconnect with his wayward father, and F4 is about a father trying to find and reconnect with his wayward son.  Yes, Bethesda, you managed to thematically connect the stories of these two games, but why?  How exactly does knowing that this story is kinda-sorta reversing the family roles in F3 make it a better or more fulfilling story?  And yes, it's "father" specifically, not just "parent," because just as Bethesda means for you to play the game as a generic good guy, they also mean for you to play it as the father, not the mother.  It turns out I was mistaken above when I described the PC as a veteran in gender-neutral terms.  The father is the veteran regardless of whom you play as, and so he's the one who gets a vaguely-heroic backstory as well as the voice-over in the introduction, while the mother is basically just a housewife.  This is his story, not hers.  I'm not bringing this up as a feminist criticism of the game (although if I were, I'd call attention to the fact that the mother is literally fridged in the introduction), but as a sad reflection of Bethesda's refusal to grant players the freedom to decide their own character and their own motivations.

What makes it even worse is that they don't really take advantage of the changes they've made and use them to their full potential.  For example, they want to give the PC a voice.  Okay, then here's an idea - why not hire someone with a distinctive, cool voice for the role?  Not necessarily a huge celebrity, but someone like, say, Keith David or Michael Ironside.  It makes sense that the character who does the most talking throughout the game should have a voice that we want to listen to.  And even the fact that they have a recognizable voice could work in the game's favor as a parallel to the fish-out-of-water setup.  Their voice is the only remnant of familiarity the player can cling to in this strange new world.  But there was no point in doing what they did, hiring a couple of people with such plain, unremarkable, "I'm just a regular guy" voices without a shred of personality or charisma to them.  If they wanted the protagonist to be a blank slate that players can project whatever personality or intentions they want on, then they could have just stuck with the text.

The same thing goes with the Cap/Rip gimmick, which is completely squandered here.  Okay, so is our hero supposed to be grieving for his lost wife and son?  Then how about his grief informs his interactions with the characters and environment to a much greater degree, rather than only coming into play when the player selects dialogue options indicating his grief for his wife or son?  If the idea could be introduced that he's blinded by his grief and desperate for revenge, we'd have the potential for an interesting inner struggle - can the hero keep true to his strong moral upbringing in Pre-War America as he tries to put things right?  And even if he can, should he?  Or, on a lighter note, they could have focused on the hero's shock and amazement at the wacky new world he finds himself in, rather than, once again, only doing so when a dialogue option indicates as such.  For example, we could hear some unique exclamations whenever he sees something crazy for the first time, like Super Mutants or brahmin.  It could help provide both immersion and humor.
« Last Edit: December 17, 2015, 11:17:50 PM by Saddam Hussein »

Saddam Hussein

Re: Fallout series
« Reply #465 on: November 17, 2015, 12:24:09 PM »
Here's an interesting review of the game I found:



I mostly agree with this, with the exception of his opinion of the settlement-building feature, which I found to be boring, clunky, and lacking any real incentive to encourage me to spend too much time with it.  But the largely-procedural quests the game inherited from Skyrim that you can't refuse, the new dialogue system, and the lack of many significant improvements over F3 are every bit as bad as he describes them.  The dialogue in particular stands out as being especially awful, because there's nowhere you can go in the game to avoid it.  You're always going to be talking to someone and wondering whether the "SARCASTIC" option will be a lighthearted joke to break the tension, or a nasty insult aimed at whoever you're talking to.  And speaking of improvements over F3:

if it turns out that, say, they've gotten rid of the reputation system and gone back to the weird karma thing, I will flip my shit.

There isn't an official system like there was in NV, but you do have to manage your reputations with different factions and make choices that exclude others as the game goes on, and there's no annoying measure of karma.  My shit is unflipped.

I suppose it's less of a stretch to have [Super Mutants] here than it was in F3, seeing how the Super Mutants' presence on the east coast has now been established...I hope there are less of them in this game.  Vault 87 only ever had a finite amount of FEV, and the mutants' numbers must have been thinned considerably in their many battles with the BoS.  And Boston isn't exactly a short walk from D.C.  Facing endless hordes of them again wouldn't make any sense.

Then I guess it's a good thing that these aren't the SMs from the Capital Wasteland!  Seriously, these guys are apparently a whole new strain, created by the Institute.  And not only are there no interesting differences between them and the ones we've already seen, they actually look even more similar to the SMs on the West Coast, having a duller shade of gray-green skin rather than the bright yellow-green of the Capital Wasteland ones.  Bethesda has seemingly decided that, just like how the protagonist must always be a vault-dweller who's entirely new to the post-apocalyptic world, SMs are simply part and parcel of a Fallout game.  When Fallout 5 comes around, no matter where they set it, they'll undoubtedly come up with a whole new batch of SMs to serve as generic ogres, as well as a vault for our protagonist to emerge from.
« Last Edit: March 22, 2016, 12:21:12 AM by Saddam Hussein »

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Offline beardo

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Re: Fallout series
« Reply #466 on: November 17, 2015, 07:27:41 PM »
Here's me shitting on all the baaaaw in the above posts.

The Mastery.

Saddam Hussein

Re: Fallout series
« Reply #467 on: November 25, 2015, 01:02:22 AM »
Why is theft so fucked in this game?  Apparently NPCs don't need to actually see you steal something to know that you just stole something.  You can be up a flight of stairs or several rooms away from any possible witnesses, but if you lift something, there's an excellent chance that every single person in the building will automatically sense what you just did and turn hostile.  And there isn't even any indication that they've turned hostile at first.  No, they just continue to go about their business as if nothing is wrong, and only once you step back into their sight do they all pull out their weapons and open fire on you.

And speaking of drawing weapons, why aren't holstered weapons visible?  It's incredibly disconcerting to see weapons popping in and out of hammerspace whenever a character draws or holsters one.  What a bizarre step backwards for the series.

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Offline beardo

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Re: Fallout series
« Reply #468 on: November 25, 2015, 06:00:25 AM »
Here's me shitting on all the baaaaw in the above post.


The Mastery.

Saddam Hussein

Re: Fallout series
« Reply #469 on: November 25, 2015, 06:18:36 AM »
Do you have anything to contribute to this discussion, beardo?

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Offline beardo

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Re: Fallout series
« Reply #470 on: November 25, 2015, 06:22:28 AM »
What discussion?
The Mastery.

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Offline Snupes

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Re: Fallout series
« Reply #471 on: November 25, 2015, 08:00:02 AM »
The discussion that Fallout 4 is a terrible game
There are cigarettes in joints. You don't smoke it by itself.

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Offline beardo

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Re: Fallout series
« Reply #472 on: November 25, 2015, 09:47:49 AM »
That's not a discussion, that's a baaw. Also, it's good.
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Offline Particle Person

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Re: Fallout series
« Reply #473 on: November 25, 2015, 03:48:37 PM »
It's bad.
Your mom is when your mom and you arent your mom.

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Offline beardo

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Re: Fallout series
« Reply #474 on: November 25, 2015, 05:29:00 PM »
Then why is it good?
The Mastery.

Saddam Hussein

Re: Fallout series
« Reply #475 on: November 26, 2015, 04:55:10 PM »
So there's this incredibly retarded quest where a ghoul kid has been trapped in a fridge for 200 years, and somehow emerges perfectly sane and healthy:



Here is Pete Hines's reaction when someone criticized this on Twitter:

Quote
not interested in discussing how realistic things are in an alternate universe post-apoc game w/ talking mutants and ghouls

Yeah, who cares about internal consistency and a universe that makes sense on its own terms?  It's just a stupid video game!  We can put whatever dumb shit we want into it!

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Offline Crudblud

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Re: Fallout series
« Reply #476 on: November 26, 2015, 05:39:43 PM »
Yeah, who cares about internal consistency and a universe that makes sense on its own terms?  It's just a stupid video game!  We can put whatever dumb shit we want into it!

My favourite part is the bit about Jet being pre-war. I can understand Bethesda's writing team making some mistakes with something as dense as Fallout lore, but how they managed to completely forget the fact that Jet was invented by a talking head and player companion in F2 is beyond me. That is of course unless they're going to say that the original games are no longer canon, in which case I don't know if I can even entertain the thought of taking Bethesda seriously ever again.

Saddam Hussein

Re: Fallout series
« Reply #477 on: November 26, 2015, 07:22:29 PM »
And his reply of "doesn't say what year that was posted" doesn't hold up.  It's clear from the context of those logs that the author works for Vault-Tec, and is dismayed that drugs are being sent to a vault full of recovering addicts as one of the many twisted experiments they were running.  They're definitely from before the war.  Now, I'd probably be okay with a drug very similar to Jet existing pre-war, and that Myron simply recreated it independently, but for them to refer to it by the same name is ridiculous.
« Last Edit: December 12, 2015, 04:27:10 AM by Saddam Hussein »

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Offline Particle Person

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Re: Fallout series
« Reply #478 on: November 26, 2015, 08:33:22 PM »
I can't believe Hines actually said that. That's the kind of moronic argument you usually hear from dirt-tier fanboys. "Oh, this plot element doesn't make sense? Well there are dragons in the game osoo haha"
Your mom is when your mom and you arent your mom.

Saddam Hussein

Re: Fallout series
« Reply #479 on: November 27, 2015, 02:12:48 AM »
The brief slideshow lists the consequences of your actions and explains what happens to the places you've visited and the people whose lives you've affected in your adventures, which I find to be a very weighty and satisfying way to end a game.  If those consequences can be shown without needing to end the game, then I'd certainly prefer it to be handled that way.  I'm just doubtful of both Bethesda's ability and desire to implement those changes in-game.

And of course, they didn't bother doing either of those.  Hey, anyone want to see the ending to F4?  It's just one quick cutscene, and the only way it varies (very slightly) is if you side with the Institute:



And no, they don't show the consequences of your actions in-game instead of telling you about them, because there are no major consequences to begin with.  Just like with Skyrim, almost all the sidequests you receive are dungeon crawls.  You're not leaving any impact on society by completing them; you're just bringing someone a lost family heirloom, or taking care of a troublesome gang of raiders that respawns after a few days.  I suppose F4 does have the settlement-building going for it, but even if I had been a fan of that - and I wasn't - it's a poor substitute for the interesting quests that let you help shape the world like the ones we saw in F1, F2, NV, and yes, even F3.
« Last Edit: January 07, 2016, 06:57:22 AM by Saddam Hussein »