Vagrant0

The fallout timeline interestingly suggests that the Brotherhood has used such airships previously. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline#2254 And that he had indeed reconnected with the Western chapter. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline#2283 Which explains the airship and fleet of vertibirds.

FO4 and Skyrim are still roleplaying games. They are still games where a significant portion of the content is centered around the player assuming a role of someone in that world and making decisions based on that role that affect the story of the game. Not every decision has to be meaningful, or important to official cannon. Just deciding to head in one direction instead of another arguably means having a different experience or sequence of events from the perspective of the player. As opposed to an adventure game where the sequence of events/experiences are usually fixed or fairly rigidly defined. Or opposed to a sandbox, where the player is not given any background, or real position within the game, but is tasked with defining that role themselves. In this context, FO4 is closer to being a traditional roleplaying game (as designed) than Skyrim since the player's role is more defined and central to the game storyline. As restricting as it might feel to not be able to just kill everyone you come across, for the character that the player is playing, being a sociopath conflicts pretty strongly with being from a time before the chaos where they raised a family in a nice suburb.

Erm, you do realize that most oldschool western RPGs also had either unkillable or nearly unkillable NPCs. Baulders gate, Planescape Torment, ect had npcs which either took no damage, or which had instant kill abilities. Even in tabletop RPGs, it is fairly common for DMs to give key NPCs very high levels or other advantages to make attempts to derail the story very short-lived. Yes, it is possible to do a story without these things. but that creates other issues. For one, it means extended time spent developing story or events for things which normally wouldn't occur, or building content based on contingencies. This is development time that quite frankly, very few game companies can afford to spend the resources on, just to reward people for trying to intentionally derail the game they wanted to make. Back to the tabletop analogy, while a DM might not anticipate it and go with a player killing a key NPC for lols a few times, eventually they will get tired of having to trash their week of preparation every time because of one player. For a commercial game however, having a designed element which drops the equivalent of a Tarrasque or level 20 wizard (D&D and most other tabletop games have dozens of similarly "unbeatable" encounters for just this reason) on the party because they've gone so far off the intended path of the campaign is not an easy thing to implement. It would also have about the same amount of annoyance for the players, and only lead people to try and think that that element is something that you are supposed to defeat legitimately. The annoyance to players is actually less if they initially hit a brick wall when trying to go outside the intended path instead of hitting an even larger one several steps later. A single action can be undone or recovered from easily; realizing that something you did several hours ago just ruined your game is often much harder, and usually means playing through content... Made worse if the realization point came after spending several more hours trying to get around that wall. On a commercial game, having unwinnable conditions leads to customers who will report your game as being broken, unfinished, or just have a disappointing "ending". Even trying these days wouldn't get past an approval committee since development budgets tend to be extremely tight and limited to only those things related to the intended path of the game... With even intended and central aspects cut or toned down because of time, hardware, engine, or budget constraints. That said, is it a bit high in FO4... Not really. I believe Skyrim and Oblivion had a larger number of essential NPCs. That's actually saying something considering how much more of FO4 is strongly tied to story events.

Mostly related to AI actually. The game uses periods like waiting and fast traveling to update NPC behaviors, packages and background simulations. It's less of a problem when in interiors because when inside the majority of those NPCs are at a lower processing priority than they are when out in the world. Every settler is another persistent actor that has their actions simulated, and why most of this slowdown occurs at times where settlers are either waking up or going to sleep.

There is windpower and it more space saving. You will need a lot of space for solar panels. Not as power generation, but as a way to detect time of day. You can technically create a switch situation using a pressure plate under the food stall (where the vendor stands) that would only keep the lights and anything else wired after the plate running during daytime. But probably wouldn't be able to do the opposite.

Because in their effort to modernize and improve upon the dialogue system they forgot to look back at FO:NV and realize that the companion wheel there had alot of things which were rather important for having companions that were not constantly giving you problems.

There are switches. Just have no idea how you would automate their activation. The inclusion of switches really does feel like an afterthought. You can rig a pressure plate to turn on the remaining parts of a circuit when triggered, but cannot rig a pressure plate to turn off things. Nor can you cause one switch to trigger another switch or change the state of another object, such as generators.

Reload from an earlier save? Or sell and forget about it.

It's a fairly high damage pistol that you can get early into the game, and convert it to use one of the most plentiful ammo types mid-way through. That's kinda the big thing right there. Not everything unique in a game has to be designed to be the best at endgame.

That option only exists when first activating him.

Dunno about that... Piper has 2 printing presses, and wants the player to make her another, but her newspapers are all hand written. :facepalm:

All of that seems logical, and that's what most people are saying, but in game it seems completely opposite. The key point is that bleed completely ignores defenses, while explosion is still resisted by armor. The other part is that you're testing with a weapon that already does high damage. With a higher damage weapon, explosion will consistently do more, and more quickly by nature of the weapon damage hitting twice on every direct hit if it's an explosive weapon, but only does singular damage with a bleeding weapon. On something like an automatic pipe pistol, combat rifle or submachinegun bleed would likely deal more damage since the base weapon damage is lower and more likely to be affected by resistances, while bleed keeps up damage while reloading/ducking, shooting other targets.

What would you recommend for a minigun and shotgun? Whichever drops.

No they don't. I believe they actually released a teaser version of the OS for Oblivion before the games release though I was a little late to Morrowind modding my copy of the CS came with my MW disk. There is admittedly a mentality change from Bethesda in terms of toolkit releases. But we also aren't living in the same environment as things were in those days, the toolkit has changed significantly, and mistakes were made here and there. The original toolkit for Oblivion was buggy and missing many components that had to be forcefully removed because of software licensing issues. The version of the toolkit they released was not the version that the game was made with. These issues became more pronounced with the release of Shivering Isles, where whole features were broken by the new version of the toolkit, which was needed to open the updated game files properly. Much of this was because at the time the engine being used was not owned by Bethesda, so many of the tools they were using were either created solely for in-house work, or were built from various official Gamebryo tools or 3rd party plugins like speedtree. If anything, in those days, the toolkit was more of an afterthought, released just because there was promise from the Morrowind modding scene, and provided with little to no official documentation. The GECK for FO3 was a delayed release because they recognized the problems that occured with the Oblivion CK, and also had to adjust/review documentation. Also, with the QC issues with Oblivion, they probably had more staff assigned to bugfixing than working on a public toolkit since the former was more directly related to sales. FO:NV was essentially just an overhaul mod built with the FO3 GECK, so very few things needed to be updated, but still the NV GECK was postponed for a month or so to get everything squared away. The CK for Skyrim was a similar state, but was pushed back due to both updating it to be right for the new engine, but also to support the Steam Workshop, which wasn't a particularly well defined thing at the time. The numerous bugs that came up with the early versions likely also played a part in delaying the release, along with possible apprehension of early mods creating false bug reports. This time around, they have many of the same issues all around, in addition to wanting to incorporate the new GECK with their own in-house mod service for use on consoles. This is far from being an afterthought at this point since so much is connected with a toolset. They want it to be working, to be feature rich, have documentation, and interface with systems which probably aren't fully setup yet. When they have significant portions of their team still working on bugfixes and optimization for those people who still can't get the game to run, some things take priority over others... They just have to. The whole "mods will fix it" mentality is really the part of all this that is entirely broken here. Yes, mods will eventually be able to do some great things with this game, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the responsibility of the game maker to fix the stuff that is actually broken.

Bleeding for high rof, Exploding for low rof. Evey hit with a bleeding weapon builds stacks the bleeding effect. So more hits per second means more stacks added before stacks tick out. Bleeding also ignores defense and works even on things like robots. Meanwhile every hit with an exploding weapon does the weapon's damage within the area of effect, in addition to the explosion damage. For direct hits, the damage is done twice, once for the projectile, once for the explosion.

Selecting a container reference in console then entering in player.removeallitems <container ID> will dump everything to that container.

Didn't have grenades when I pressed Alt (to alt-tab) while moving around an empty powerarmor frame... After getting the applicable perk. Then didn't understand what the grenade warning was.

Right, that's the implication. But that doesn't work so well logically for the reasons I mentioned above. Too many things hinge on unknown variables. Finding Kellogg, killing Kellogg, being able to read Kellogg's mind, locating a scientist that just happened to have escaped, that scientist having enough knowledge about the teleportation system to draw up schematics, the player or people connected to the player being able to decypher and construct workable components... All to force you through the emotional roller coaster with the child synth. This is all ignoring the fact that Shaun has no firsthand knowledge of anything about the wasteland, believes heavily in the superiority of Institute technology, and scrutinizes you for working with the Railroad or Brotherhood in order to gain entry. If that's the case, the kid is a psychic, but definitely didn't see that bullet I (and probably most) put through his head on the first meeting.

This is arguably one of the more confusing parts of the game. Logically it has to be the synth Shaun since it doesn't make sense that Diamond city would keep Kellogg's house unoccupied for 50-60 years. Meanwhile Virgil (the person that is mentioned in Kellogg's memories) leaving the lab is a more recent event since he's still progressing with the FEV changes and has connections to Doctor Li (who was in the Capital Wasteland ~10 years ago). Even if Kellogg has been with the Institute for 70 years, and has bionic stuff keeping him young and able, the sequence of events feels very wrong. But, with this in mind, it doesn't explain why there was a 10 year old Synth version waiting for you in the institute. The institute wouldn't have known that you would go digging through Kellogg's memories since the whole process is framed like something risky/impossible. It also doesn't explain why they would have Kellogg watching over what is essentially their impressionable prototype synth for periods of time in the middle of a fairly paranoid city, just on the off-chance that you'd scan his memory, see a 10 year old, and expect one to be waiting for you in the Institute. We know that the game essentially forces you into accepting that Father is Shaun, but it all makes you wonder if this is just bad writing, or if the Institute isn't completely lying to you because you are the "backup".

I think the difference here is that when the main character first wakes up, they are thrown into a world which is very different from the one they left and don't have many clues to work from. Rather than running aimlessly around the wasteland, initially they try to get help from those groups or settlements they come across that aren't immediately hostile. But first you need to help them. Everything but the settlement stuff makes sense in this context.

From what I can tell, yes, things in a cell will stay around the same level that you were when you were near that cell. But this is more of a loose number instead of a fixed value. You won't see a sudden increase in the harder variants appearing in areas you visited at a low level, but can encounter some of the more mid-range enemies. But the value of loot will also remain low in these areas. But there are also fixed spawns near some locations as well as random encounters. Fixed spawns don't change over time, but will keep you from entering some areas at too low a level. Random encounters will mostly match your level, but vary greatly within the level range (ie, one attack on a settlement is 2-3 raiders in low level equipment, meanwhile another attack on the same one is 6-8 raiders, with 3 of them in powerarmor). As for challenge at endgame... That is debatable and in my opinion not really something that any spawning mechanic can really answer to without ending up moving into rediculous situations where you have roaming packs of deathclaws running through downtown Boston and mutants dropping down from buildings. Difficulty peaks at around level 30, but starts to go down from there since you start unlocking more perks, get better equipment, and don't have the same ammo scarcity. You start encountering more difficult enemies around this time as well, but by level 50 you've mostly outpaced them in addition to mostly having visited everywhere. Although new things start appearing up to about level 75 or so, you don't see them much unless you did heavy build-grinding early on to leave large parts of the map till later. The silver lining however is that equipment starts to cap out in terms of effectiveness, so weaker weapons using more plentiful ammo still remain useful for clearing out weaker stuff so you can save your ammo for the more difficult stuff. If anything, the rate you gain levels is really the problem. Earlier levels should take less exp, later levels should take more, with the mean being about level 40.

Powering through things straight away could prove interesting and challenging, but there are also a couple of points where it makes logical sense to try and take stock of your abilities and build up resources or connections before going further. There are certain parts where you need help from some people before you can progress.

It's the same clown car mechanic you see in FPS games. Fortunately it's not quite as bad here and mostly limited to ghouls and mirelurks (hate those egg piles), but it does completely screw up stealth play. No... The total BS spawning thing that has me annoyed is related to a pair of NPCs which spawn randomly as an event and start shooting at eachother. The problem is that both of them immediately cause any companions you're with to have "xxx disliked that" prompts just because you're in the vicinity. Killing them just makes them respawn somewhere else. Trying to start their little dialogue just makes them both shoot you, resulting in killing them and them just respawning somewhere else. Even editing them with console or FO4Edit doesn't solve the problem.

On one side, I'm inclined to agree. With the way they arranged nearly all encounters and areas there aren't even many cases where you can use even landmines. You can't just prepare a choke point littered with them since the AI gives up trying to look for you, so usually you have a cluster of 1-2 enemies that you can convince to run toward you, and that's about it. Ghouls are slightly better, but by the time you have enough mines to do anything with, you usually have a decent shotgun to make quick work of these. Even settlements don't allow you to do much of anything regarding choke points since all your settlers just rush out through the gate. The areas themselves are too setup to be a sort corridor style shooter situation instead of being a tactical shooter situation, so naturally areas just lend themselves too well to just shooting everything. But I also like the idea of more toys to play with. C4 would have an advantage over grenades since you could throw them into an area and decide when you wanted to detonate it so you can deal with those situations where an enemy is shooting behind cover, but keeps running away when you throw a grenade near them.

The fact that they don't give you an option to scrap or repair these buildings is probable one of the largest oversights (among many) with the building system. Some locations are almost virtually useless because the existing buildings take up most the area but don't allow you to really build anything into the existing structure, or the size of the building is significantly different from the platform pieces we have access to. Sure, it's less "creative" to have structures that you just click to repair, but there are around 30 settlement locations, being non-creative for a few of them would have been fine since there are plenty of others with open space for creativity.