Aintiarna

Not sure about Tuvoc, but the doctor on the Prydwen does say, "Please state the nature of the medical emergency." which made me do a double take the first time I heard it. It's been a long time since I watched Voyager. Also, isn't the guy who played Voyager's holographic doctor the same one who voices Alan Binet from the Institute. Robert Picardo. The one in Robotics Division who is arguing that Synths are alive. That's an ironic easter egg I suppose. So there are lots of Star Trek Voyager references in the game. I'm sure there are more but I can't recall them at the moment.

I broadly agree with most of that. If there was a mod that removed RNG legendary items and replaced them with a good variety of uniques hand placed in specific locations New Vegas style, I'd use it. It would need a replacement though and not simply a removal. Making them all look unique would require a lot of work though.

It's hard, but it is doable. Just to make some suggestions you may or may not find helpful. My current character is Director of the Institute and she has never even met Preston Garvey. I completely ignored going into the building in Concord and the main questline proceeded just fine. The only settlements I look after are the ones my character is using to serve the nefarious needs of the institute. Doing their side-quests mostly also feels quite grey if not downright evil. A lot of it is less explicit than in FO3. You have to read between the lines a bit more and you don't have the karma system telling you you're evil, but you can just look at your own actions and judge for yourself. Siding with the Institute gives you a lot of scope for RPing a fairly morally dubious character and there is no need to be particularly nice to anyone in order to get there either. I'll admit it took a bit of work to discover that though. There are are also a fair few side-quests that can be completed in "evil" ways: Cabot House and Pickman Gallery for starters.

Same thing with the Institute. You don't really become the Director. You're just the new Kellog replacement doing what the others tell you to do. You are very neatly 'groomed' by Father in that regard. And to top it all, your new quarters don't even have a bed, never mind any kind of crafting facilities. At least with the BOS, they never try to tell you you're anything other than a high ranking soldier in Maxson's army.

Really, I wish Bethesda had at least given us a reason for it. The Railroad could've done it, or perhaps an earlier, stronger iteration of the Minutemen. Hell, what if the Institute did it? Cait was a slave, so it had to be present at some point, even on a small scale. It vexes me as a quest modder because I want to know if there's a concrete reason for slavery not existing in the Commonwealth. If it was thoroughly stamped out, then re-introducing it shouldn't be a casual affair, and I definitely plan on re-introducing it. My impression, and I could be completely wrong here, is that they just don't want to complicate their central story theme which is largely about AI vs. human rights. Everything is much more subtle this time. Conversations overheard, terminals and notes to be read, etc. You can easily see the situation with synths in the institute as slavery, at least that's clearly how the Railroad perceives it, and perhaps adding human slavery to the mix would just complicate the story too much. But as a modder, adding it as part of a quest and even drawing parallels with the synth situation could work really well.

Veering a little off-topic here but... have you seen 28 Days Later? I've often thought London would make an excellent location for a Fallout game. Not only do you have underground stations with cool names like Mornington Crescent and Seven Sisters, but you've also got more historic buildings than you could possibly ever use in a game world: Tower of London, several palaces, Westminster, WW2 bomb shelters, etc. Of course, now that we've established a lore-friendly in-game way of getting to London, maybe some really ambitious modder will make it. Not me though. I've got something much more modest planned.

Well, strictly speaking she doesn't. I found her fake accent so hard to listen to I had to reload a save from before I met her. In fact, she has several things on the Irish stereotype checklist. 1. Fake accent - yes. 2. Likes getting drunk and talking about getting drunk - repeatedly. 3. Likes fighting and talking about fighting - can you get her to shut up about it? No. Does she swear a lot? I can't remember. That would be another one, but not really necessary since she's already got the classic trifecta. Of course all the companions are really annoying if you spend more than ten minutes with them. But for maximum effect, send them all to one place like Sanctuary, and then try to do stuff there, like modding or building work and listen to every single one of them commenting in unison every single time you do something. In the end I couldn't take it any more so I spawned a couple of mythic legendary deathclaws and tcl-ed myself about 20ft into the air so I could watch the fun. But back to Cait, perhaps the Institute teleported her over from Scotland and then forced her to speak in a fake Irish accent to annoy any Irish person playing the game? It's a theory.

That how game engines are used. They keep updating them as another user pointed for me. They just get updated. Unreal is almost 20 years old. Infinity was updated for the remake of BG2 as an example. But the CK was too old and badly updated already for fallout 4. Indeed. The dragon age franchise is a good example of what happens when you have to use a new engine for each iteration. You end up trying to build an RPG on a shooter engine like Frostbite where so many compromises have to be made. Seems to me it's much better to have your own in-house custom build engine and keep making it better. It also makes it easier to maintain support for modding. Anyway, Fallout 4 just needs a lot more story based quests and branching content. The kind of stuff that can be added when the GECK/CK is released. On the whole, the basics of the game world are pretty good. There's a lot there to work with and looking at it through a modder's lens it's actually quite promising.

Alright, I've tweaked it a bit and uploaded it. http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/4297/? Use at your own risk. I really wasn't planning to mod this game until the official tools came out but these things are always so tempting.

Yes there is, ever played Overlord or fable? Overlord is a cartoony game, but it karma system makes more sense, more grey and has more good/evil depth. You have the option to kill villagers you saved on the spot, or spare them, or spare them and pretty much makes use of them in the long run for more evil. The people will start hating you on "levels." the more evil/good you are to them. Becoming evil makes you stronger. Fable, also a cartoony game. Has a better system that is more suited for RP and it pretty much great already. It tracks almost all your actions, your gear and stats. It needs some upgrading and tweaking, but I have never found a game with karma system that fits RP games like Beth games more than fable. I've tried both (several versions even) and really wanted to like them but could just never get over the cartoony feel of them. That's my hang-up though, I don't blame the games for that.

I sympathise. The problem is he is ghoulrace, so showlooksmenu doesn't work. You can "setrace human" on him, but he'll still have a ghoul head underneath the human skin with the ghoul nose. In the end I had to make a mod to fix him with fo4edit. Now he looks like this: Not very lore friendly though so I'm a bit torn about it. Maybe I'll upload it anyway.

I think I'll just walk up this hill and take a look around. Oh, what's that flickering in the distance, it's moving awful fast isn't it. Looks like some kind of wasp. Veronica, I think punching it just made it angry. "Eugh, I think I'm gonna need some new limbs." Veronica has died! You feel woozy! [loading screen] Good times. :thumbsup:

As a gameplay mechanic, yes it was broken, but it was a nice roleplay feature that has no suitable replacement. I miss the way people used to react to your character based on how you chose to RP them as good or evil. NV mostly replaced it with faction reputation which again provided roleplaying angles in dialogue to let you get in character. I'm definitely missing something similar in FO4. Stealing and being generally evil just doesn't have the same thrill anymore.

"7. Deathclaws travel in packs" :ermm: "8. There is safety in numbers. Even the Super Mutant Behemoths know this." :unsure: I don't think I'm quite ready for this mod yet. My nerves definitely aren't! I'm suddenly reminded of my first New Vegas playthrough when I naively assumed everything would be levelled and thought I'd take the shortcut to Vegas. "Hold up! There are Deathclaws all over the damn place north of here." Don't worry, with my trusty varmint rifle and my leather armour I'll be fine. One of them could have finished me off easily. Four of them rushing me at once was just overkill really. :wink:

A lot of the criticism levelled at DAI is fair and I sincerely hope Bioware take it on board for ME:Andromeda and the next DA game. However, I will say one thing. If you ever feel like giving it another go there are a lot of good mods out there now that remove much of the grindy horrible busy work - like making all the war table missions complete immediately, and another one that makes the camera zoom in more when you're talking to people so you're not stuck in the rafters somewhere. As for FO4, it saddens me a little to see how many things are becoming the industry standard. Like the console style dialogue interface. I'm not opposed to it per se, except when it's used to obscure meaning, and to cut down on the overall number of dialogue choices.

Yeah, my stealth character is 'parked'. She was such an uphill struggle to play during the early levels, then I went through a short sweet spot where the stealth was a lot more effective and I was able to lure enemies over mines when they did detect me. Unfortunately a few levels later she turned into a ninja god monster and I confess I got a little bored. I found the same inconsistency in difficulty scaling with levelling on my melee character. Godlike with Jet and psycho at low level, then got killed a lot at level 25+ despite the chems. My BOS character who uses a gattling laser and power armour is the one that seems to be having the most consistent difficulty scaling both moving further south geographically and levelling up. That's the slightly tongue-in-cheek point I was making. It seems the game is most balanced for a non-stealth guns +/- power armour approach.

Was that before or after you changed your pants? I've still not encountered the fabled chameleon deathclaw yet. That will be a moment to treasure I'm sure.

It's hard to explain without spoilers. I'll try. Certain parts of the main questline are tough in the sense that they require your character to be at a certain level to get through them unless you really know what you're doing. You can steam ahead to the point where you find the baby and then stop and then take your time to do other things if you wish, but as I said, the difficulty of some of the parts of it are the only stumbling block. You also need to have gained resources, materials, people, allies, etc., which will take time no matter how fast you want to go. It's designed to be played alongside you setting up farms and such like which of course every parent would be very eager to do if their child had been kidnapped. :confused: On the other hand, you're adrift in a world you don't understand with no clue as to where to even start looking. You can explain it either way I suppose. very mild spoiler:

The only Bethesda officially approved playstyle is power armour and a big gun. You've only got yourself to blame trying to do something the game wasn't designed to accommodate. Next you'll be wanting to roll an unarmed specialist or something equally ridiculous. :tongue: Seriously though. There's a lot of 'disabled' (I mean that in a geck sense) enemies in the game that are enabled when you step inside trigger boxes (presumably, but until we actually get the CK it's hard to be sure). Some of them are even keyed to home in on the PC even if you are fully stealthed and hidden. There are also lots that appear when you loot certain containers. It's very annoying and a little unfair if you're a stealthy glass cannon. Example:

I understand. This site is better than some though it has to be said. In general, if I'm looking for an accurate review of anything to inform a purchasing decision, the first thing I do is skip the 10/10s and the 0/10s and head straight for the 5-7/10 section and look for the ones comprised of more than two paragraphs. That's served me well so far for everything from video games to holidays. :smile:

It's possible to both enjoy playing a game you've paid a lot of money for and to find fault with it. They're not mutually exclusive concepts. Bethesda have indeed produced a great sandbox FPS with roleplaying elements. I've spent many enjoyable hours playing it, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't have preferred it if they'd made a game with a much more extensive roleplaying system instead.

Roleplaying options require branches which have to be written, animated and voiced. It all costs lots of money these days. It seems that both Bethesda and Bioware are making the decision to cut back on all of that and spend the money on other things which I suspect widens the target market and ultimately sells more copies of the game. Bioware is going for MP in all of their games which since they're not going to code completely separate crafting, looting and combat systems means SP uses the same mechanics as MP which gives it that grindy MMO feel. Many people would love a game like Origins on a modern engine, but obviously it doesn't make them as much money as an RP-lite action game with multiplayer. (And I say all that as someone who still likes the game, obviously, although I probably enjoy modding it more than I enjoy playing it) Bethesda seems to be doing something similar in cutting down on the expensive stuff, like voice actors (except where it can used by marketing e.g. Codsworth knowing all those names), so dialogue options are curtailed and quests are less branching. Instead they're making things big so you feel like you're getting value from the sheer size of the game. Paying a couple of programmers to develop the crafting system gives the game tremendous longevity for many customers, and costs a lot less than writers and voice actors for 'evil' quest options that 95% of the customer base will never experience. In my experience, if something looks like a bad idea, there's usually a marketing/business excuse behind it, however unpalatable it might be.

While I having a big blast with Fo4, I would like a better RPG experience in a fallout world. It will be a great game with the updates beth made to the CK. They better make a better world though. They are s*** at it while Beth mop the floor with them. Wasteland 2 and FNV was horrible in that department, you can never make the world better even with mods. It funny how one is good at what the other is bad at. heh. I've often mused that if Bethesda, Bioware and Obsidian got together and made a game it would either be the best RPG ever or the worst abomination in the history of gaming. Bethesda could build the game world, Bioware could write the characters and Obsidian could write the quests. It could be epic. I actually quite liked the Mojave. With AWOP and a few other mods it's not too bad. On the other hand, without engaging quests, one dungeon starts to feel much like another after a while no matter how pretty and detailed they are. I have clocked many more hours in FNV than I have in FO3 for that reason. Another mod that FO4 could really do with is the equivalent of Skyrim's Interesting NPCs, although I have no idea yet how any of that is going to work with a voiced protagonist. Presumably silenced.

I've got goosebumps. Please let this be a real thing.

Because it true. There is a lot of who as themselves, more by a mile than hardcore RP players in fact. I wouldn't describe myself as 'hardcore' by any stretch, but I guess you're right. It seems to be the trend in several of the major franchises. In Dragon Age for instance. With Origins you had multiple ways to roleplay a character, then in the second game you got three: diplomatic, sarcastic and aggressive. In Inquisition it's hard to feel like your Inquisitor has any clearly defined traits and personality that exist anywhere other than in the player's own head. Someone in the marketing division of these companies clearly thinks this is necessary to bring in new business and that it won't alienate the existing customer base. Sadly, they're probably right.