Fallout 4?

[Phatose]

Thanks guys.


Honeymoon is over for me. Game has some issues. The engine seems to have serious problems with the y-axis while sneaking, to the point where stepping over a dead body is impossible. If one enemy is at fully alert, any others in the area who would be at caution instantly become absolutely aware of your location - so any reinforcements that show up will not require even a split second to locate you.

Enemy grenade speed and accuracy is stupidly high. Even basic raiders have the ability to pull out a grenade and throw it with pinpoint accuracy essentially instantly.

Dogmeat may be immortal, but he's all too happy to cause your death. For all the commands they have, something that you really need - stay behind me and stay quiet, dog - is not there.


Wondering if this is a case of superficial flaws hiding the fundamental ones that will show themselves later. Hard to tell, but so far it's buggy (fell through the solid ground to my death for no reason within the first 4 hours), and it performs badly. Which only leaves "fundamentally flawed mechanics" off the checklist of typical Bethesda releases, so I'm not especially hopeful.

[Judith]

I didn't have any bugs in my first 7 hours or so, but the more I'm into the game, the more gameplay feels like Fallout 3.5, rather than something that would justify the 4 in the title. (And no, I'm not the NMA type.) Sure, it's nice to see proper shadows everywhere, and physically-based rendering is always welcome. Still, things like awful character animations are here to stay, and the player movement model is something they haven't touched probably since Morrowind. The main story seems as cringe-worthy as in F3 (and similar to), writing and voice-acting is between average and mediocre, and quests are a typical fetch-kill thing.

Sure, there is this sense of novelty and big world to explore, but that wears off. And nothing screams confidence like 'let's put The Sims/Day-Z stuff to distract players from other sucky things we did'.

[Ostriig]

The settlement stuff would be a ton better if the workbench inventory applied to all of your settlements instead of being just local.

Wait, is that a definite? I Googled "safe storage" last night for F4 and people were suggesting using the Workshop inventory particularly so you could access it between locations. And cheers on the materials clarification.


But anywho, let me regale you with another knee-slapper from the comedy club that is Beth's UI department. There's plenty of hard-bound or nonsensical controls to whinge about, but some are more egregious than others. So you have a control defined to activate stuff, which by default is bound to E. Now, if you're like me you may want to bind that to something else - Mouse Button 4 in my case - which has been largely fine in Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Except this time, the Activate control only seems to apply to most established interactibles, like picking up single objects, opening doors, activating terminals and so on... It does not apply to some other interactibles, like climbing into power armour, activating workbenches and, most annoyingly, the new quick-loot system. No, all that stuff is hard-bound to E.

Now take a moment to consider this. Not one of the items this applies to require that the player be able to both use the "generic" activate as well as the particular hard-bound "E activate" at the same time. Effectively, the special hard-bound E should've been the same control mapping entirely. Right now I gotta train my brain to "take" cans of Pork N' Beans off a shelf with Mouse 4, but also "take" 'em out of inventory lists with E. Or give in to Beth's default layout.

This is not really the case with the other highly common hard-bound control, R. Which by default is Reload, but also doubles up as activating the Transfer functionality on the aforementioned interactibles. Now, yes, they do interfere and clearly the devs didn't think this was a problem, since one action is hard-coded and the other is set by default to the same key.

Which brings me to my main point - if both of these keys were always meant to do the same thing in the designer's vision, why weren't they built as unified controls? The Activate control would activate, open, take, or take from a list, the Reload control would either reload your weapon or open the Transfer interface when appropriate. That's just to stay within the general keymapping Bethesda's gone with, no point in dreaming up altogether different layouts.

What's most irritating about this entire affair is that it's clearly not a mere oversight. CDPR had an oversight with The Witcher 3 when the Dismount action didn't extend to the boat as well, it was hardcoded to E. But it was just that, an oversight, a bug which was later fixed. With Fallout 4 we're not talking about isolated cases, we're talking about an entire set of functions which were mangled this way and it's hard to think up of any excuses past crass disinterest.

Now, just to sweeten this towards the end, I don't have an overall bad impression of Fallout 4 so far. Quite the contrary, I ended up sinking in another two hours last night, despite my initial inclination to let it sit for a patch or two. It does seem to be just Fallout 3++, a new lick of paint, some improvements, some regressions, but I'm generally ok with that. I loved Fallout 3 and I may turn out to love Fallout 4 in the end. But I do get miffed at screwups like these because they're not grand engineering challenges, they're very basic failures that end up causing a disproportionate amount of grief.


P.S. On a separate note, surprised there isn't a bigger hullaballoo about the PC DVD, reviews have rightly tanked on Amazon to around two stars, compared to four-five stars on consoles. Technically, Hines did mention it was just one DVD, so if you knew the HDD requirements you might've guessed about how much of a DL was needed, but it was a very slippery way to put it and the Amazon listing doesn't say squat.

[Jason Moyer]

Ok, apparently you *can* share your workbench inventory between locations, but it requires a perk. If you have 6 Charisma, there's the Local Leader perk which consists of 2 levels. The first allows you to create trade routes between your settlements, which lets them share a resource pool and also pools their workbench inventories. The second, IIRC, lets you build shops and such in your settlements.

I'm fine with the default key-bindings, but Jesus the way they implemented rebinding sounds like a nightmare. Hopefully that can be patched and/or modded ASAP.

[Phatose]

I'm really, really trying to give this game a fair shake, but right now it's in 3/10 territory.

The interface is an ungodly abortion. Want to close the pip boy? Hit tab. Want to close the crafting interface? Hit tab over and over again, then hit enter. Want to close the building interface? Hit escape, not tab. Goddamnit, how about some consistency.

More problematically though, the interface itself has directly affected the quality of quest and the world. There is an awful lot of shooting - expect kill everything to be the solution to every problem. Which is actually easily understood once you realize that with only 4 dialog options available, there's not much room for testing against perks, or equipment, or items found, or quests done, locations or information you've discovered.

Especially since 1 option is always taken up by accept, and one by decline, and most of the time a third is taken up with 'repeat that explanation again'.

So far, the quests are Mass Effect 2/3 level shallow. Except Mass Effect actually had pretty good combat. This, not so much.


And then this horrible interface is used for a game about scavenging, but inventory management is beyond a chore.

Well, at least the performance is good......well, no. But the visuals are good enough to just.....no, no they're not.


I'm gonna keep trying at it for a bit, but I have zero optimism at this point and pessimism is approaching "Uninstall" pretty quickly.

[Slasher]

Wait, the dialogue system was basically optimized for a D-pad?

[Phatose]

Pretty much, yeah.

So far, I'd be hard pressed to call Fallout 4 an RPG. It plays like it was a Far Cry - very light RPG combat mechanics, but next to nothing on the social or non-violent side of RPG questing.

If I'm going to keep with this game, I'm going to have to restart since I put too many points into perks and stats to help non-combat portions, since that's where I tend to lean. I didn't realize at the time the non-combat portions barely even exist.

[henke]

Oh my those opening bits are pretty good. And holy shit CODSWORTH KNOWS MY NAME! I named my character Angela(after Angela Bassett) and was mighty surprised when Codsworth addressed me by name later on. I wonder if it's through speech synthesis or if there's simply a library of common names which get merged into the standard dialogue.

[Jason Moyer]

It's because STEPHEN RUSSELL read a list of names.

[Nameless Voice]

They said in the original E3 demo that they had recorded a huge list of common names.

When creating my character, I decided to pick a Japanese-looking guy for some reason, so I looked up a list of common Japanese-sounding names and picked one of those. Nope, they didn't think to record those.


Initial impression after wandering around the first settlement is mixed but not overly optimistic.

It initially crashed a few seconds into the intro video, but I realised I hadn't upgraded by graphics drivers in ages, and that fixed it. So, if you get those immediate crashes, you can try that too.

The character generation is a lot of fun and the intro sequence is very nicely done.

My biggest issue so far is that the UI and controls are awful, even worse than Bethesda's usual console interface.
The random keybindings that do different things and work differently in each screen from Skyrim are still there, but the slightly-annoying nature from Skyrim is amplified up to 11 since there are far more different screens. The UI is big and blocky and ugly, again. <s>The Pip-Boy seems especially bad, since you have to remember to navigate around with the movement keys and there's no quick way to hop around between sections (compared to FO:NV's function keys - and, frankly, the PipBoy in FO3/NV was a rather poor interface to begin with.)</s> [Edit: I'm blind, they are there, I just missed them as they are assigned to strange keys by default. Much better.]
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Bethesda have once again made an interface which is not intuitive. You need to spend time reading and memorising what each button on each screen does in order to use it.
Yes, I'm a PC snob, but I really hate it when a huge AAA game can't afford to spend a little bit of time making a proper keyboard+mouse interface for their game instead of trying to shoehorn a system that works for a gamepad onto keys, getting the worst of both worlds.

This is actually only the second game I've played with that strange "four really vague options" conversation style (the other was L.A. Noire), and I'm sure I'll still hate it. Having options where you have no idea what your character is going to say is not good design in any way. I expect some Noire-style "but that wasn't what I thought it meant at all" moments to come up soon enough.
I actually like the idea of having a "real person" player character who talks, though. It's an interesting change of pace for this kind of game. I just wish I could choose what he actually says.

Since I didn't get very far, I didn't get into any real combat - just fighting radroaches and bloatflies. My initial impression was that real-time combat feels a little clunky, but since it was only very brief, I'm not sure yet.


I'll comment more once I've played more.

[henke]

They said in the original E3 demo that they had recorded a huge list of common names.

Ah, I knew I'd done the right thing in not reading/watching too much about the game before playing it. That would've been a lot less exciting if I'd known about it beforehand.

Initial early impressions

I've only played it since yesterday. Got the power armor and found Dogmeat. Made it to Diamond City, cleared out a few raider camps along the way while scrounging for new fusion cores for the power armor. No complaints about the interface on PS4. Was glad to see you can actually rebind buttons, and after a bit of fiddling I got a setup which works great.

LB-switch camera
RB-VATS
Right thumb-melee/hold for throwables
circle-crouch
touchpad-Pip-boy

And everything else default.

Also the weapon/item selection system has been improved. 10 years ago Valve made the perfect weapon selection system for the XBox version of HL2, and NOONE FUCKING COPIED IT. Until now. FO4 has it and it works great.

Other stuff I like:
-the third person cam. Feels pretty much like Saint's Row 1's camera and movement when played in 3rd person, but not quite as smooth. I know that doesn't sound amazing, but compared to the 3rd person cam in previous Bethesda games it's improved by miles. Now it's something you might actually want to use.
-the combat has been improved. Little things like a melee button and grenade throwing button(even though they're the same button) make it more enjoyable. The weapon sounds are meaty and there's a lot of great little first person hand animations that really improve the experience.

What I don't like:
-all that inventory management. Really, I spend like 20% of the time starring at the Pip-boy screen.
-a compare stats function in the inventory would help a lot when figuring out what to keep and what to throw.
-there's still quite a bit of Bethesda jankiness.

[Nameless Voice]

The interface feels much less awkward one you realise that you can use E instead of Return most of the time, so you don't have to move your hand back and forth across the keyboard constantly.

I can't help but feel that this is more of a different game set in the Fallout universe, like a "Fallout Adventures" or something, rather than a real Fallout game.
It doesn't really feel like an RPG, more like a "smart shooter" combined with a collecting and crafting game.

Almost no characters to actually talk to so far, the only people I've met had a few fixed lines to say, like you'd expect in a shooter. The very few who actually had conversation options just have really vague ones where I have no idea what the options actually mean, and very few of those at that.

Having no skills at all is really weird. I don't understand this trend by Bethesda to take the RPG elements out of their games. Their older RPGs had far more RPG elements and they were incredibly popular, why do they keep trying to change everything so much?
This game even takes away the normal system of radiation poisoning and instead just uses it as damage to your maximum health, which means your health is limited until you cure it.


I haven't met all that much writing yet, but it seems awful, as expected.
One of the first NPCs I saw was a crazy old woman who claimed to be psychic - and then proved she was by predicting what was going to happen next, followed by talking about "destiny". Seriously. I know Bethesda love that poor writer's justification in their RPGs (and I hate it), but now in Fallout too?
What next, an ancient prophecy that you are the chosen one who is going to save the wasteland and banish the evils of the nuclear radiation dragon?
(I know, the player in Fallout 2 was even called The Chosen, but that was more because s/he was trained from birth to be a champion, not because of a stupid true prophecy.)

[Phatose]

I'm now 23 hours played by Steam.

I have not seen one interesting plot point, or NPC, or even a remotely interesting quest.

The game's mechanics are dull and uninspired. It's a combat heavy game and the combat isn't even good.


I'm going to just hang it up, hope Obsidian gets a license again - and that they can somehow undo all of Bethesda's terrible decisions. Modders may be able to help with the interface, but the base game is bad on so many levels I think fixing it will be beyond the abilities of the modding community.

[faetal]

Glad I didn't pre-order this. Still need to play New Vegas anyway, but have to admit that I was tempted a few times to just go ahead and get 4 regardless.

[Jason Moyer]

I can't help but feel that this is more of a different game set in the Fallout universe, like a "Fallout Adventures" or something, rather than a real Fallout game.
It doesn't really feel like an RPG, more like a "smart shooter" combined with a collecting and crafting game.

It kinda reminds me of the game I was hoping Rage would be.

[Jason Moyer]

I have not seen one interesting plot point, or NPC, or even a remotely interesting quest.

Have you met Nick? He's the first character that I kinda like so far, although part of that may be down to the voice actor. I enjoyed the whole gangster/detective noir feel of the mission where you meet him.

[Phatose]

No. He's a companion? Only ones I've seen are dogmeat, the robot and the minuteman. Where exactly do you meet him?

[EvaUnit02]

Wow, I had no idea that the key rebind situation was that bad. I found that 95% of the default binds centred around WSAD to be adequate. The only key that I rebound was quick melee/grenade throw (yes, let's bind melee and grenade throw to the same key, that's smart!!!!111 ).

[Jason Moyer]

No. He's a companion? Only ones I've seen are dogmeat, the robot and the minuteman. Where exactly do you meet him?

In the main quest. I don't want to spoil anything though.

[Nameless Voice]

That review video is good, though despite complaining for 10 minutes he still doesn't mention all of its flaws...

The only key that I rebound was quick melee/grenade throw (yes, let's bind melee and grenade throw to the same key, that's smart!!!!111 ).

I've nearly blown myself up a few times while trying to do a mêlée attack.

[henke]

As a counterpoint to the complain-o-video, here's 9 things that have been improved!



Ok, several of these I don't really care about(VANS, Hud color), but several are welcome improvements indeed(containers, sprinting, melee/throwable button, weapons modding, no weapon degradation). I haven't tried base building enough to really have an opinion about it yet.

[Sulphur]

WaB guy continues the impeccable tradition of YouTube posters being a bunch of whiny unlistenable twats, even when their complaints are justified. Here's a tip, reviewers: 20 minutes of ranting isn't entertaining unless you're fucking Krusty the Clown. Try speaking like an actual person once you've calmed down, you might actually get people who listen to ya.

[Jason Moyer]

I'm finding FO4 is a pretty good game so far despite not really feeling like a Fallout game whatsoever. In other words, it's a lot like FO3. I suspect that the last game in the series actually feeling like a Fallout game may have twisted people's expectations somewhat. FO4 is like every other Bethsoft game, you're not going to get much world or narrative interactivity and many design decisions will make you scratch your head but it also has the best environmental design and environmental storytelling of anything they've done. It seems like most of their efforts went into making the world more enjoyable to explore, which probably makes sense given that's always been the strongest point of their games.

[Sulphur]

I keep reading in the reviews that the writing is Bethesda at their best... now, it's not like I have high expectations or anything, but I suppose that means it doesn't feel like a thrown together hodgepodge of questionable narrative design any more?

[Jason Moyer]

I dunno how far into the main quest I am, but the writing seems ok so far. The usual lack of having any influence over what's happening (although it's severly hinting that there will be some OMG WHICH FACTION WILL YOU CHOOSE!!!!! aspect later on) but...well, I dunno. The main quest missions have been alright, I'm not sure if that's down to simply having good mission design in terms of gameplay or if there's something special going on with the writing. Something new that probably ties into that is that there's a lot of NOLF style ambient dialog now, with enemies in different areas having scripted conversations that you're clearly meant to listen to while you're crouched in a corner somewhere. The plot doesn't really strike me as being any different/better than Skyrim, and it's almost an inverse telling of FO3's story.

I'd say the biggest thing they improved on in FO4 is the exploration aspect. The world feels bigger and more dense than anything they've done before, to the point where I'm basically just following roads and completing quests instead of stopping everywhere and exploring like I would in Oblivion or FO3 because there's just so much there. And after 30 or so hours, I haven't started to get "wow, I've seen this tileset/level layout 50 times already" fatigue.