Anyone else play it yet? Anyone else avoiding it for whatever reason? I know a lot of people on the internet are upset with it for various reasons. I'm playing it myself and am enjoying it, though I think New Vegas was better overall.

Never really got into Fallout, although based on third party feedback, its appearently pretty good.

sooo goood. while the world isn't as large as either FO3 or F:NV it's more vertical. If you get up into the buildings there's a whole world of building-hopping parkour which you can do.

I'm enjoying the crafting system as well as the settlement building system. I'll be honest, i spent WAAAAAAAAY too much time turning Sanctuary into a fortress.

I don't know that I'm going to be playing it any time soon. It sounds like they ported over just about everything I don't like about console gaming into the PC version, and did it with the Skyrim engine which is rather bad at handling mod changes mid-game and needs regular save game cleaning to behave. Pity, I would have liked to shoot up somewhere with a temperate climate for a change.

Hell, I still haven't gotten around to playing Fallout 3...

Question for Freaky Boy since he's around: I seem to recall that you have not been a fan of the recent games (3, New Vegas and I'm going to go out on a limb and count 4 as well.) I would like to know what it is you dislike about them, or liked so much about the first two.

I've never played any of them, but my wife has recently been very into the casual game app "Fallout Shelter." I embarrassingly lost a bet when I rashly told her that there was no way the same company made both games...

Finally managed to beat the game. Felt like a punch to the gut to me, the ending.

Not as huge a fan of the base building mechanic now as I was when I first started. I still love doing it and I spend a lot of time gathering resources just so I can build nice homes for my settlers, but... there's no point to it. I have several maxed out settlements and they're not getting me anything besides places for me to sell my loot. They all feel samey, too. Very few settlements have named NPCs and the ones that do don't have much depth. This game doesn't have a Novac or a Tenpenny Towers or a Little Lamplight or Big Town. The world just doesn't feel as interesting to me.

I liked New Vegas - it's the reason I have a Steam account. Not wild about the change to an action, open-world Bethesda-style RPG, but Obsidian (who are mostly the same team that did Fallout 2) did a pretty good job with the engine they had. It helped a lot that the setting of New Vegas was the same as the original two games (more or less).

I disliked a lot about Fallout 3. The plot was stupid as hell, Liam Nesson was a colossal waste of money for a completely ridiculous role, Three Dog was a judgey-mcjudgerson that the world and mechanics completely backed up (the only thing you got so judged for in Fallouts 1/2 was childkilling), and the whole thing was a pander-fest trying desperately to convince everyone it was a genuine Fallout game because it had the trappings of Fallout without having even an inkling of the core themes of Fallout (one important one which was that every major quest had three ways through it - fighting, sneaking, or talking. Bethesda's engine doesn't really support this, and thus the games under its license fail at this).

This guy articulates a lot of the same issues I had with the game.

Fallout 4 does not insult me nearly as much. It's not clinging so fiercely to the idea "hey, this is Fallout! Remember Nuka-Cola? Fallout! Remember Robo-brains? Fallout! Remember Super Mutants? Fallout!" It still has those things (well, I haven't seen a Robo-brain yet), but it is way less in-your-face about them than Fallout 3 does. They've managed to just concentrate on having fun running around the wasteland without trying to convince you it's really the same out Fallout you knew and loved. I just pretend it isn't and we get along just fine. It references back to Fallout 3 some, but so far I haven't seen it trying to tie that back any further. It's just let it go.

I met MacCready a while ago, a returning character from Fallout 3, where he was an invincible, arrogant, snotty little brat of a kid that basically used the fact that children were completely immune to everything to shove an inherently annoying character down your throat (one you couldn't avoid, as the main quest forces you to deal with him). In Fallout 4, he's grown-up, and actually has grown-up, admitting he was a crappy kid and trying to make up for the mistakes of his past (including his failings as a father). They gave him character development, which I'm pretty sure not one single character in Fallout 3 had.

So, in short, Fallout 4 is fine so long as I ignore the fact that Bethesda really didn't need to buy the rights to one of my favourite franchises to make the game they made.

Plus, I like building settlements. Wish that system was a bit more robust, really.


Both Covenant and Bunker Hill kind of qualify for those, and both can become settlements under your control.

Ah, I never considered the notion that I might be able to run those places. I sidestepped Covenant because I had Piper with me at the time and she disliked me going there, so I sidestepped it with the intent to come back later and just never did.

That's how I expect to feel about the Stardock Star Control (they didn't secure the rights to anything that makes Star Control actually be Star Control, except the name)

As follow-up:

I think I'm probably done with Fallout 4. I'm at the quest "Battle for Bunker Hill" and just can't bring myself to keep playing because the game is too focused on giving me quests and "choices" and not enough on giving me information with which to make those choices. Like with most Bethesda games, as soon as you start looking at what they've chosen as a "main plot", things start to fall down. I'm glad that this has been a pretty good year for videogames so Fallout 4 isn't dominating all the "Game of the Year" lists, because I'm tired of Bethesda being rewarded for their mediocrity.

That's the tipping point for me as well. I'm deeply involved in both the Minutemen and the Railroad, because those are the factions that you join really early on. I went and joined the BoS and did a few missions with them then went on the main questline.

[spoiler]Then the battle of Bunker Hill happens, RIGHT after you get introduced to the Institute. Am i supposed to dump all the work i've done for the Railroad for a faction i've just met? Am i supposed to ignore all the Minutemen settlements i've built in order to play the questline out for a faction which is brand new and nominally the "big Bad" of the commonwealth? even IF SPOILER: Shawn is the leader of it?[/spoiler]

If they'd allowed you to be introduced to the institute earlier on in the game, EVEN IF they keep the reveal of who Father really is until later in that questline, it would have been an easier choice and probably encouraged replayibility. As it is i don't know if i'll have enough in me to rebuild all those settlements with a second character to play out the ending as a different faction.