This is a long post about the various aspects of Fallout, don’t read it all unless you care to. Instead, find a section and comment on that so we can have a focused discussion if you prefer.
Summary
I modded the ever loving crap out of Fallout 4 with minimal effort using the A Story Wealth mod pack . My reasoning was that on my first play through I found the world empty but I mainly enjoy stories and quests, which this modpack seemed to do. Also I didn’t have time to spend modding and didn’t want to get lost in that hellhole of doing it myself. This play through was long, about 150 hours (yikes) which is probably all the fallout I’ll need for many years to come. I also used an addon to the modpack to make the game extremely difficult with healing items. More on that later.
Mods
The mods here are really quite varied and I was surprised at how coherent they are. With Skyrim modding, I always felt that the mods are somewhat disjointed and it takes skilled modders to stitch together. Here in FO4 its impressive how stable the pack was and how well the quests worked together. The most standout mod by far is The Fens Sheriff Department which adds hours of story, actually interesting quests, and in my opinion content miles better than Bethesda’s own content. It was worth coming back just for that alone.
Story
spoiler
After seeing what mods have done, I have no good words to say about FO4 in terms of story. The entire plot revolves around you getting your son back and its all in service of setting up the surprise that he isn’t a child anymore. Its predictable, boring, etc. All of the factions are uninteresting. Minutemen are nobodies and their story is minimalist. So is the Railroad. The Brotherhood of Steel are cool in concept but can’t back up their grit at all and end up being too friendly with zero depth to them as well. The Institute makes an attempt at depth but geez, its barely deeper than a puddle. I chose to end the game with the Fens Sheriff Department and it ended up being way more interesting despite the muted ending to their plot. If you’re playing this game for story, don’t.
Graphics
I’ll spend little time here, I didn’t spend any time beautifying the game at all but it looks surprisingly good at times. But at other times, the engine is terrible. The way it handles LOD stuff is awful and graphical glitches and clipping are extremely common. And yet, I do enjoy the aesthetic. The art is charming as ever and my main and only complaint is that the wasteland itself is very one-note and could’ve used some changes.
Engine
Take it out back and kill it. I won’t blame the vanilla game entirely but mods didn’t contribute to the instability of the game much. It has always been rough. In the city, due to a lack of proper culling you will get half your FPS or worse. My rig is very well equipped and still struggled to maintain 30-40fps in the cities. Then add in the few quest bugs that I had (mostly vanilla quests too) and the large amount of physics and items bugs and this really feels barely glued together in ways mods can’t fix. This engine needs to be worked on. A lot.
Characters/Followers
I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Fallout 4’s followers. Dogmeat is great but the interaction is minimal and Nick Valentine is easily the best in my opinion. He’s one of the few with a great set of dialog that actually makes use of the setting and feels grounded. Everyone else could almost belong in a different game. As with the story, a lot of the characters are poorly written and have lackluster dialog. The DLCs fix this but the main game struggles big time to ground everyone properly. I played the entire game with Heather Casdin and that was a real treat. She is what every follower could have been and provides really unique story commentary and relationship moments. It actually feels like you get to know her well instead of her just spouting backstory at you constantly. Bethesda take notes.
Locations
One of the better noted parts of Fallout 4 and Skyrim are the random locations and storytelling within them. Only problem is, FO4 doesn’t reward you often enough with location exploration beyond loot and thats not what people play fallout for in the first place. Its a mixed back here, some of the locations are very well done and are 10/10 settings where others are bland as mayo and waste your time.
Settlements
As intrigued as I initially was a long time ago at launch with them, the settlement system really brings the game down. Its impressive, don’t get me wrong but it eats up way too much of your time to configure and there isn’t any real point in setting them up. Sim Settlements helps with this but it still misses the mark in my opinion. I hope this system returns but very diminished in terms of tedium.
Gameplay
Guns feel good, fights are great. The mods all enhance that by giving the high stakes gunfights I really enjoy. Yet the game still became too easy despite me playing on survival. Needs just became annoying distractions. And being overencombered is just… awful. Especially with scrap being a thing and I hate scrap honestly. The scrap is a cool idea but has you doing the even more annoying part of Bethesda games, looking in every nook and cranny for a desk fan or box car. Its stupid and it takes you out of the game completely. I think this could have been fine if they toned it down, not every item needs to be able to be used like this.
DLC
This was the highlight of my time because I had never played the DLC, I couldn’t afford it back when this launched. Far Harbor blew me away with how cool it was and just really showed what parts of the base game were missing. The moral grays presented here were fun to work through and the quests unique. I wish Far Harbor was its own game almost. Nuka world feels more like a lightweight DLC but still shows that Bethesda can write decent stuff and have decent art when they try. I have no idea why the quality of these DLCs is so high when the rest of the game is kind of bland compared to FO3 or New Vegas.
The Takeaways
I hope Bethesda gets their act together because FO4 was a pretty decent game. Not perfect but also very dated. Quests are mostly bland and are often fetch quests or don’t reward you with much dialog or story. And the mods just show how easy it would be to get this stuff right the first time. The lack of grit to the story is something that really sucks in my opinion. Its not a game for kids clearly, there is blood and guts and mutants abound. So why don’t any of the major characters die? Why don’t they meet horrible ends? Why not have your son meet a horrible demise if you make the wrong choices? The only time any of that happens is the end of the game. Far too little far too late. The game just has absolutely no stakes to it, no impact. At least in Skyrim the Civil War shakes things up. Thats what I really wanted from this game is to feel like my actions were doing something and the mods really helped with that.
If you made it through this wall of text, I appreciate it. I spent way too long on this but I felt like telling someone about my experiences. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun with this game but by the end I was exhausted of Fallout 4’s short comings. Let me know what you think!
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I didn’t see the plot twist coming myself, but in general I’d say Bethesda’s open world games aren’t the place to go for main story (even if Starfield’s was my favorite of the bunch so far). The idea of followers chiming in on quests from time to time being a new concept for these RPGs in 2015 should tell readers where this studio’s been positioned in the genre. Definitely not top-tier immersive story experience, even if I did like some of the follower vignettes.
I still put probably 200 hours in this game over the years–mostly settlement stuff–yet each time I started a new run I groaned at the power armor. Something about it always felt a little off to me, and most of the random loot in the game is regular armor, the bonuses on which are all deactivated when in the suit. I did builds without the power armor more often than not, and that usually meant a stealth build with frequent quicksaving. One rocket was generally enough to end a run.
I’m surprised to hear you were getting those framerates, though. I get a solid 60 FPS even downtown with Super Mutants running around, and I wouldn’t have called my rig very well equipped even when it was current (3060Ti). That’s gotta be a mod issue.
It’s never been a mod issue for me, I think it always ends up being a CPU problem. Though you’re correct that it could also be mods but I’ve had this problem throughout the years on every rig I’ve tried it on. Even consoles have that problem unfortunately. It’s not as noticeable, but it’s still there and can’t hold 60.
Power armor is weird and I actually ended up hating it by the time I was done. With the hard mods, it was kind of required in order to venture out into the atomic crater. So I’d inevitably go out there and within a handful of minutes a piece would break off. Cool, what do I do about that? Well not much, you’re just screwed.
Now it’s great and all that they put repair stations all around but I often wasn’t carry the resources to repair and they weren’t in the station. So add 5-10 minutes of walking around picking up steel and circuits to fix my armor.
In my opinion they could have had mobile repair kits craftable, the repair stations could have just repaired for no cost, and each piece of the armor really didn’t need to be its own part. Just makes them tedious to deal with honestly and unless you really need the armor, it’s just better not to use it imo.
It’s been a while since I last played fallout 4 - outside of Fallout: London, while it’s “technically” the same game, it’s not. Haven’t played the “next gen” patch version.
Anyhoo:
Right there with you about the settlements.
Building my own fortress just for the sake of it? Sure, but functionally literally a single container box, few crafting tables, bed and maybe walls if you really want to is needed. I don’t mind some settlers to make the place a bit more lively, but they have absolutely zero agency of their own. I just can’t be bothered to micromanage a bunch of idiots who seem to be starving until you literally hold their hand and make them farm the plants that were right next to them all the time. Haven’t tried sim settlements mod.
The thing that starts to really annoy me is how some settlers seem to get captured by bandits all the time. My “favorite” was this one lady who got captured on weekly basis, and was held every week in the same bunker, tied down on the same spot. After several rescues the bandits just stopped respawning, so she was just sitting in the bunker tied down and all the doors were open. I like to imagine it was her kink and not just badly implemented repeating quest. Eventually I just stopped caring, it was getting stupid - even in Fallout’s standards. In general the generated “quests” are fine, but they start to repeat pretty quickly.
My preferred method was just to mod carry weights to zero and vacuum everything scrap looking on my adventures and craft away - I know I could just consolecommand in the parts, but I’d rather do some collection on my own.
The adventuring in F4 was pretty great, I did enjoy snooping around the city and doing odd jobs here and there. I’ve played the game few times to like lvl 60-whatever but never finished the main quest - furthest I’ve gotten was apparently to start pushing the final attack to the institute but I just couldn’t be bothered. I did finish the dlc’s, tho.
All in all, kinda feels like it’s the middle of the road Bethesda-game, decent-ish on it’s own, better with mods.
That’s pretty much how I feel, they should have made the scrap very light weight or zero weight to begin with.
The Sim Settlements stuff kind of redeemed the systems, it appears to add a lot of that autonomy and you just place plots and people start working. That and it actually had an amazing set of quests to go with it, like hours of content. I was quite surprised.
That mod also adds in the ability to go to war with people and have your settlement do battle which is neat. I didn’t get that far into it but it’s an option. I just didn’t see what the ultimate goal of it was and since it doesn’t factor into the story, I didn’t really care much.
I agree with the overall sentiment but also in case you’re wondering, I finished this at over double that level. I think I was close to level 130 when I stopped, which is insane for that game. Did let me make use of the perks though which was nice.
Something I’ve not seen anyone else comment on Fallout 4 is that the voiced protagonist could have been used to fill in the world.
As in, when I visited the remains of Boston airport, it’d be great if my character could talk to themselves (or voice effect to imply thoughts) about how s/he had memories there. Give me a feeling for their life before they were frozen.
I’m very mixed on the voiced MC. In FO4 in some ways it prevents roleplaying but also never actually tells you who your character even is. They end up a boring blank slate you ignore.
They just needed to pick a lane. Either have a voiced MC and have them be a character themselves that we aren’t free to define everything about or have them be silent to give us freedom.
They chose to leave it in the middle and gave our character a voice so we could… hear the dialog we picked be said incorrectly worded and out loud? I like seeing my character in cutscenes but really we need personality options next time at the very least.
I remember myself enjoying the level designs of locations, finding all the teddy bears, and enjoying the gunplay and certain companions. But the story, quests, dialog choices and the ending ultimately made me dislike the game.
The story I hated.
I made my character based around John Coffey from Green Mile, but like he’s the bad ass everyone thinks he is. I knew I wanted to drop INT and CHA for brute strength and constitution. I was ready to do everything possible to dominate the Wastelands… But that intro… Just the character creation…
It’s like, if you weren’t drawn toward making a character bio based around the white nuclear family, you were never going to enjoy the intro at all, and you’d put off the main quest as long as possible to go do all the crazy shit you hit the wastelands for.
“It’s time to find Shaun.”
“But-”
“No. You’ve murdered everything, you’re an absolute beast. You are all that is chaotic-neutral in the wastelands. It’s time to finally start quest 2 of the main quest.”
“But I’m not a family man! He’s not even mine! I only met that bitch at the bar the night before!!”
“Well, that’s not what the game says-”
UNINSTALL
6.5/10
This was a great review, thank you for sharing. I’ve been meaning to play Fallout 4, but as someone who loved the worldbuilding of New Vegas, the story puts me off.
What I’d really like is a mod that removes the game’s main storyline, so I can either focus on the adventuring/settlement-building aspects (thus turning the game into a sandbox), or combine it with good story mods and basically have them replace FO4’s main questline. The only mod I know that does it is Fallout London. (I really need to figure out how to run it on Linux…)
Do you happen to know or recommend anything that fits with what I’m looking for?
I’m not too knowledgeable on that front but I will say that this mod pack kind of sidelines the main story content a lot. You’ll still end up doing it but I think the issue is having to do all of the story all at once and going out of your way to do it. Here I pretty much got to the point where I was just doing main quest stuff whenever I was nearby and skipping through the dialog. I put the main story off until the very end mostly. The mods create so many quests (pretty good ones btw) that I was way more interested in those anyways. You could play through this pack and barely ever touch the main story and leave plenty satisfied.
Not to mention the DLCs are actually really good and Far Harbor itself is very long. The mods also make good use of the DLCs and add to them. So yeah the main story here is a total side quest you can basically ignore if you want to. If you end it with the Fens, you only end up doing 75% of the story and skip almost all of the institute BS
https://lemmy.world/post/18456924 Here’s a guide to installing Fallout: London on linux (assuming you still need it)
Mind you, lemmy is small enough that when you send your link to three communities gamers will get it three times. I am marginally miffed.
Apologies, I do that with some thought behind it but I’m sure it annoys people.
The general thing is that you can post in a niche community, get limited engagement and only the niche benefits.
Or you can post in a large community, then the niche community suffers and appears inactive.
Or you can do what I did and cross post it, annoying people that exist in all 3 places but making the niche community active while engaging the larger community.
Is that bad? Judging by your comment, yes. I’m concerned Lemmy has an issue though with niches not appearing in those larger communities though specifically because no one cross posts. Thoughts?
Lemmy really needs to support post combining somehow so you can see the story once (and maybe even combine the threads in the UI?).
That’s a proper way to solve it, I agree.
I saw that too. What makes a review of a 9 year old game that important in the first place?
This community has had a grand total of six new posts in the past two weeks. Can we please not discourage content creation here?
Not to mention a review of a 9-year-old game is quite on-brand for patient gaming discussion.
The first part is fair. I don’t know if it’s just being “patient” to wait for 9 years though. Unless we’re talking about waiting for your partner to get out of jail or something similar.
