HuemangeBeans

Plus, it's highly relevant to the topic. I'm the OP, lol. It started as my personal griping, and evolved into a discussion about what the difference really is between an orc or a super mutant, an automatron or dwemer guardian, etc. Just become it went into a theoretical space doesn't mean I'm troweling. You've got infinite amount of time to read and try to parse what I'm saying. Which is that it's entirely possible ideas, concepts, have their own intrinsic meaning, derived autonomously to controlled processes of the brain. What, I should put myself in cryogenic sleep for a couple million years and hope mankind evolves the ability to think coherently and not be unduly hostile and dismissive? np, right on it.

You essentially just said, 'i'm not smart enough to understabd this, so shut up'. nice response. you're free to leave the thread without saying anything if you don't have anything to contribute, you know?

Inexplicable phenomena are usually dismissed as unformed ideas. Until they are borne in repetition, then they become a reality that can't be explained or ignored. This morning I started playing Pathfinder Kingmaker for the first time (complete editions on sale at fanatical for $12). The early-game nemesis of our character, named Vertiloocini or something, taunts you at some point asking if he should rather 'plant a small garden and harvest cherries'. Yesterday, I spent an hour digging a plot to plant garden seeds, and three days before that I planted a north-start semi-dwarf cherry tree in the backyard. Now, with that game being out and on sale as long as it has, the chances of me picking it up to play at the exact same time all the things in my life aligned to coincide with me moving most of the way across the country to a new house where I'm currently, at the exact same time, doing the things mentioned by the character in this game, are infinitesimally small. I deal with such strange occurrences on such a regular basis that my entire life is basically completely outside the parameters of rational human existence. Such is life.

There's quite a bit more interesting consideration behind this question than may first appear. I've got one wild tangent specifically. Have you ever heard of Reverse Speech? Like playing records backwards to listen for 'hidden messages'? That's actually a real phenomenon. The interesting thing about phenomenon that are observable on a purely intellectual basis is that they become quite subjective. I've experienced numerous times, things like saying or even singing something that a let's player that I'm watching will repeat shortly after I do, word-for-word, exactly. Like some kind of subconscious prediction mechanism that most other people are probably incapable of observing because they don't experience. Telepathy is also something that I believe exists, has in a way, been proven to me as scientifically observable, but the methodology of actually reaching that conclusion is so bizarre that it's non-repeatable. Anyways, back onto reverse speech. I've studied it for awhile, and one of the peculiarities about it is that people in reverse will often refer to fantasy races such as elves, or gnomes. Referring to them as aspects, such as elves representing efficiency of the mind whereas gnomes some kind of disorder, or dementia. Perhaps orcs are referred to as well. Those kind of archetypal concepts maintain some kind of persistency in the subconscious mind. There's several theories about what reverse speech actually is. Tolkien most likely pulled from lost lore of druidic/celtic peoples to write his books, and those concepts might have some kind of permanent meaning ingrained into the mind. I don't know how to complete this topic succinctly, lol. I suspect the subconscious mind is constantly providing it's own narrative superimposed over what is consciously being spoken or thought. Most people's forwards communication is not that clear, or enunciated well, so it's leads to a lot of confusion and inconsistency in the field of reverse speech study. There's strong evidence suggesting that ideas, concepts, and words carry their own implicit and intrinsic meanings that are interpreted by our minds either semi-collectively, or unconsciously outside manual control. I'm just an amateur, but I like to think about things like this.

Harkness was the only one you encountered, though. The idea there were armies of them running amok would have been real strange in the setting established by FO3. It's real strange in any setting, but I'll admit that I'm being overly critical, and most players will not even think to care about this subject. But...if I am not correct in saying Fallout is no longer a sci fi series, explain to me what is the functional difference between an assaultron from Fallout and a dwemer guardian from TES? What is the difference between them at all, besides a mesh/texture swap? At this point, they're both depicted as golems that live forever, require no maintenance, and are magically-powered creations of a lost civilization of beings. Does it make any sense that one is from a sci fi world and the other a fantasy world, when they are the exact same thing? I'm not a rube, I know robotics and A.I. tech are at the point where androids like that are possible, now. I'm aware chat GPT exists. Fallout is supposed to be a world preserved, frozen in the technological era of pre-WW2, it's not a world-lore that's supposed to keep pace with modern advances in technology. Would you expect there to be self-driving electric cars in Fallout 5 simply because 'the agenda' wants to push people away from having vehicles that operate under their own control? Would you accept the lore of Fallout 5 being mangled beyond recognition, just to promote the electric self-driving car? That is exactly what FO4 does with it's synths, androids, and hamfisted politically biased plot.

Isn't the tagline of Fallout 'A Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi RPG'? That's not what the franchise is. Assaultrons, androids with fluid and fast movement that require no upkeep, Synthenoids that are able to exactly impersonate people, that's the stuff of fantasy. There was a lot of thought and care into the explanation behind the creation of super mutants, factions like the brotherhood, the foundations of what made fallout lore what it is, that are simply not present for elements introduced in FO4. The portals from Oblivion that teleport you into other worlds, are more sci fi than what Fallout's robo-themes have morphed into.

Sure, it's just my own personal critique. It's the best fps engine in a fallout game, but imo the design of the game is easily the worst. Incoherency in game design is everywhere. Plywood super-structures. Assaultron monster closets. Enemies that are standing in place, in a hallway, waiting for eternity on the player's arrival to ambush them. Synth colonies, synth armies, so commonplace it'd seem like all that's required is to ducktape a couple tin cans together in order to make them. You have assaultron robots literally everywhere, when before they were located to one single instance found through a simulated time travel sequence. Synths everywhere, where previously there was one single character, Harken. You have what was, lore-wise, an incredible feat of science requiring the resources of an entire country to create one of them just being scattered throughout the world as if they are literally created on an assembly line, mass-produced in never-ending amounts. All to tell this goofy plotline that defies the idea of what sci-fi is, while it destroys the lore established by the entire rest of the franchise. 3 and NV did a decent job of creating believable world-spaces, levels that looked like the interior matches up with the exterior, populated by enemies in a way that made sense for them to be there. 4 doesn't, and I just can't, can't get through it. Idk if it's because the main quest is shoved off to the side, as if somebody realized the main plot wasn't that great and made the main point of the game to just wander around, or if it's more because every part of the game just feels 'off', not put together with any concern for whether it made sense or not. I've tried 4 or 5 times to get to the end of FO4, but more than any other beth game, it feels about as well constructed as one of the old Hitman PS2 games. The most fun I've had playing it was with the Whispering Chills modlist, and that's def. what I'll do next time I play. I had the VR version all modded and ready to go, also, but I'm gonna give up before I even start on it. I mean, they put (two of) the strongest enemy in the game, in level-design wise, what's a utility closet for superstitious and primitive cultists. To create the situation where, an american-slang dirty-talking robot from the pre-war era of tech found only in the Chinese Invasion of Alaska, can pop out of a closet right next to you, knocking aside the lightbulbs and screwdrivers scattered around the toolboxes in what is, in terms of aesthetics, a freakin' broomcloset with actual brooms in it, built off a plywood shanty inhabited by mad people. What sense does that make? Minute by minute, in terms of gameplay, even if I do everything I can to totally deactivate my brain and any logical thinking, it's just too much inanity. The entire world being overrun by ghouls makes more sense. FO4 is not consistent with it's own lore.

People mistake the perspective on why games becoming propaganda is catastrophically bad. At it's peak, videogames eclipsed what other entertainment mediums were able to convey in terms of story, setting, plot, and characters. I hold 'Deus Ex', the original, to be the model of the quintessential videogame, so I'm going to use it as an example. The first Deus Ex plotline was about the government unleashing a bio-weapon on the population, and vaccines, using A.I. It basically predicted almost exactly what would happen 20 years later, after it was released. That is the heart of good sci fi, it actually depicts the future, what is going to happen and what it will look like. Does anybody even remember the plotline of the modern Deus Ex games? Fallout 4 is bad sci fi. Straight out, doesn't make any reasonable kinds of predictions, and the actual story-line plot is a retelling of events that happened almost 200 years ago, not what would happen in the future or even allegorical to what is happening today. it's totally irrelevant to anything that is occurring or anything that will happen eventually, it's totally detached itself from what sci fi even is, at a basic conceptual level. Advertisement and propaganda that exists to influence the thinking of others cannot possibly exist as a form of art, no music or movies or television shows and now videogames produced by this society qualify as art, which must exist and account for it's own existence entirely on it's own merits. It's just depressing, like watching the movie idiocrasy happen irl, where a game about a cat gets nominated for GOTY, 10 years running. The bar has been lowered, that's for sure.

I'm happy with Magnum Opus. I took the time to mod Oblivion myself, customizing everything, FCOM and OOO, it turned out really awesome. It also took about a month solid, and I got a bit carried away with changing tree meshes until my Lod trees looked different than trees with near-textures loaded in. I really appreciate Wabbajack, as it takes the guesswork out of mod conflicts, plus usually incorporates many obscure mods the author has collected over a long time. It's a great program to be able to do in one or two days what building by hand would take months or years. There's a lot of bonuses to configuring everything yourself, though. In another direction, I have to say that I wish there was more coherency in FO4's world design. Fresh off a rage-quit where after dutifully collecting garbage for 30 minutes, I was killed by a assaultron in 'bout 2.2 seconds. Charging out of a hallway, invisible, hit me with melee, point-blank face lasered me, i hit pip-boy and ate a bunch of food and meds, even turned myself invisible, but was killed by the second melee attack. I was out of power armor, kinda running around in my skivvies, lol. A deserved death, you might say. Here's the catch: This pre-war Chinese technology Assaultron robot was inside the Children of the Atom headquarters in Far Harbor. It'd be the equivalent of Ceasar's Legion throwing a souped-up Sentry Bot into the arena with you. Forgetting the inherent unfairness of an enemy that is able to use perma-stealth while combining melee, long-range, and short-range attacks simultaneously, what is the possible explanation of superstitious cultists being able to operate and maintain Chinese pre-war tech? Lore-wise, I think FO4 has effectively jumped the shark. I think the idea of synthetics that are able to perfectly impersonate humans in real-life is one of the most ridiculous ideas posited in any work of science fiction. Fallout has always been whimsical and ridiculous, but FO4's methodology behind lore is asinine. It seems like the impossibilities in FO4's world and story design, like perfect human replicants synthenoids were created specifically to push the game towards a politically-agenda driven motive to retell in a fairy-tale way a propagandistic version of real history. Bethesda's games have drastically changed from being completely imaginary settings, as seen in Morrowind, and Oblivion, dealing with totally fictional storyline and characters, to basically operating as historical propaganda. It's a major shift in direction from Oblivion to Skyrim. Oblivion has no direct parallels to any real time or place in human history, whereas Skyrim definitely does try to allude to real places, settings, and people. The Roman Gaul conflict, conquest, specifically. Ulric was clearly an allegory of the real historical person, Vercingetorix, and the legion - Gaius Julius Ceasar and Rome's legions. Prince Martin wasn't a direct parallel to a real historical person, as far as I'm aware. Videogames being repurposed as another method of propaganda dissemination is a bad sign for the artform. Whatever Fallout 5 turns into, it's going to have to include these synths and also pre-war Chinese assaultrons that previously only existed as part of a time-travel DLC, lore-wise, in their own previous games. With the intention of using these contrived elements (like a town of thieves, ghouls, criminals that have the convenience of a dirty-talking assaultron as their shopkeep) just to create a re-telling of history that is hackneyed and ideologically-biased to the point of absurdity. A brainwashing that's repeated throughout the entire indoctrination system controlled by the American system of propaganda, from education to entertainment, and religion, now has to be included in videogames. Every videogame made by every major publisher MUST reinforce the contrived narrative of the fishbowl known as American history, and it doesn't matter if they have to destroy the validity of their own games lore and render the setting and characters impossibly implausible in order to do it. I can see why certain projects went with an entire overhaul, and replaced every single character and enemy in the entire game. Vanilla FO4 in an incoherent shambles, cannot be salvaged by any mods, is seemingly in large part generated by A.I., and the entire plot narrative and setting design is cripplingly compromised by a militant adherence to perpetuate propaganda and brainwash people through alternate and absurdly contrived rewrites of history using videogames because the entire rest of the media, education, and religious systems are not effective enough, apparently.

I like that idea. There's gotta be some reason for all those competing groups to be in constant conflict, like a search for the One Ring scenario. I can see why they did it, so there's constant gunfire and explosions happening in the distance as you explore. I can also see how they really worked to recreate the Boston skyline, how the building actually look now compared to how they would appear as ruins. I can admire that, although I still get lost walking across the street. The Magnum Opus modlist is nice, also. It would take me 6 months to build a setup like that on my own. So I've warmed up to the game, it does even out a bit after lvl 20 or so with the difficulty balance. Wabbajack breathing new life into some of my fav ol' Beth games is really saving the day while the industry churns out awful games on an assembly line. Sure, 3 paragraphs griping about FO4, it's still a great game. I'm not even playing modern releases, they might as well be trying to sell snake venom.

I'd guess they had to put cheap shots like SM exploders and the ol' fast-travel into landmine fields because the firefights lack the intensity of FO3 and NV. In those games, you had to end combat in seconds, or you'd get shot to death. In FO4 the player can sit there munching bloatfly carcasses and out regen incoming small arms fire. We're probly lucky bandits don't have brahmin burgers, it'd be a stalemate. There isn't the same sense of danger from immediate death by headshot crits as in the earlier two FO's, so it's a trade-off.

'Bout 20 hours in, thinking of throwing in the towel. I miss the kill-cam from NV, where even outside V.A.T.S. you'd be rewarded with a little cinematic if you scored a nice head-shot. That's been completely removed, most likely because enemies with 10x's the HP are mixed in with regular enemies for some reason. The combat loses a lot of intensity, headshots are not as lethal to the player or to NPC's as they should be and the game feels much more slow-paced and unreal as a result. Feels like shooting targets at a range, not things that are supposed to be alive within a virtual world. Then there's the super mutants with bottlecap mines. Who are 'bout 8ft tall, and can somehow become completely invisible and totally silent to seemingly spawn out of thin-air to deliver a one-shot kill to the player after they've spent 5-10 minutes clearing out the other enemies. That's fun, right? It makes sense that super mutants put aside their feasting on human flesh while bathing in radiation to learn about the safety procedures of building and using high-explosive weaponry? You could hear a creature that big breathing from 10ft away, let alone move. The two 125lb girls following me stomp around like elephants while a giant 500lb 8ft tall super mutant just got done with ballerina practice and has been studying the ranger arts of moving silently through the wilderness for the past three decades while undergoing rigorous training in explosives and demolitions? Who does the sound design and concept creation phase of an enemy like this and doesn't see a problem, where every other game that has kamikaze enemies uses weak enemies that can be killed in a shot or two while FO4 thinks to make their totally silent and invisible 8ft tall suicide bombers into walking tanks that take a nuke to kill in time? How did this game get positive reviews when basic common-sense game design stuff is thrown out the window to create anti-fun one-shot unavoidable death, in an RPG? No logic was applied to the consistency of FO4's gameworld. I thought...magnum opus, almost 800 mods, that's gonna fix all this game's problems and it's going to be awesome. Darn. I'll probably try one of the total conversion zombie mods, instead.

This may be a controversial topic, but it's really more of a lament. I'm giving FO4, the only Beth game I haven't completed since Morrowind, another try with Magnum Opus wabbajack list. It's reminding me why I haven't ever seen the ending. The world design is confusing, interior and exterior locations both. From the pastel blue and yellow palette used, to the odd oval-shaped windows, to the too-tiny interiors where a skyscaper level consists only of a single room with hallway attached. Then onto exteriors where the tops of buildings are connected to freeways and each other with wooden planks to create a labyrinthine network that prevents the player from getting their bearings and is not believable in the slightest, every building has an extensive fire escape stairway, and groups of enemies wait in closets three stories off the ground so they can pop-out in a recreation of a light-gun shooting gallery. What gets me the most, what really kills it for me, is you have 4 or 5 competing enemy enemy factions literally sitting on each other's lap in order to ambush the player. I leave Cabot House, to have the security robots run up the street to fight Super Mutants on patrol. After clearing out the mutants on the street and the bots that aggroed me because a companion's stray shot barely nicked their health bar, I enter a building to get jumped by seven or so raiders, one with a missle launcher waiting just on the other side of the door. Clear them out, to go downstairs and use a key to unlock a door and exit, where I'm crouched on the other side of the door in sneak mode and still another group of super mutants ambush me before I can take a step. Enemy encounters are so frequent and buildings so tightly packed together and networked into each other there's no way to get bearing for direction, to make a distinction between one street or building from another. It's not the least bit believable in a real-world scenario. Gunners, Mutants, Bandits, Brotherhood, Ghouls, and Synths couldn't all coexist in this seemingly unending trench warfare from street to street for more than a couple days. Instead, the situation would quickly resolve itself and result in the scenario where each faction would have it's own section of the city warded off and protected against intrusion from other factions. There'd be a super mutant section of the city, a section overrun by ghouls, a section barricaded off by bandits. Not a situation where super mutants are guarding the entrance and exit doorways for bandits and every street is another faction embroiled in a skirmish war with each other. It's not just implausible, but impossible how enemies are distributed throughout Fallout 4's world. Even for a videogame, it doesn't take into account how the field of battle functions in the slightest. Idk how internal testing didn't catch this glaring game design problem... j/k.