Gruffydd

A quick search showed a number of places with the GOTY selling for $25 or less, or even lower if you're willing to risk less reputable dealers (although calling WalMart a "reputable" dealer is stretching things). So even if you're a cheapskate who isn't willing to pay anywhere near retail ($46 on Amazon, where FO3 GOTY is still $49.99 and FONV Ultimate is $39.99) for a game that will give you 100s or even 1000s of hours of playtime, there's a discounted copy waiting for you.

Damn, there are some cheap people here. With the number of hours of entertainment I've got out of each of the last 3 FO games, I'm paying pennies per hour. That's what I call a value, unlike other games where 20-30 hours in you're done. $40 if the DLC is included is a fair price for FO4, although you can probably find it on sale somewhere for $30.

Yeah but you're forgetting the world building. The side quests were many and character-defining, there was rich lore about things that had happened in the last 10 years, versus in Fallout 4 (and 3) where nothing interesting happened after 2077 until you come along. DLC aside, there wasn't a lot of dungeon crawl. You had five dungeons in Vegas: The Bison Steve, Repcon Testing, Repcon HQ, Helios One Tower and the Securitron Vault. Even then, the Bison Steve and Securitron Vault were mercifully short, Repcon Testing had enough character interaction to break up the monotony and Recon HQ could result in every level of security being neutralized. I don't mind exploration. I mind when exploration and looting are at the heart of the game. I don't like games where I can only kill to advance. ANd I hated the settlement system because they literally are telling you to do the world building yourself, oh but you can't create quests or new characters or train people up in their skills. I don't play an RPG to be an interior decorator. I do it to ROLEPLAY (as in the case of Fallout New Vegas) or participate in a story, like the Witcher or Banner Saga. So no, it's not the skinner box loop that's the problem, it's that the skinner box loop is the only thing this game has. It's a bog standard, mediocre FPS with poor world building, a wasted setting, no real choices and no real consequences and a settlement mode I would have hated even if Sim Settlements shipped with the game because they build the world around it. I apparently found more to do than you did, more story to experience, and more interesting people to interact with in both 3 and 4. I have not found any side quests that I found particularly more "character defining" than in 3 and 4. And I did find exploration and looting to be at the heart of the game, as with every Bethesda open-world game. It's an open world. Go explore. Find new stuff to use when you finally go deal with the big bads at the end of the main quest. If all you want is the main quest, you can do that, too, but to deny that FO:NV is about exploration is to deny 2/3 of the game. As to the rest of your opinions about the game, again, your experience obviously differs, to the point where I wonder how much of FO4 you actually played. Perhaps you have a different definition of "world building" than I do. I found a lot of lore about what happened in the prior 10-50 years in FO4. I found a lot of interesting NPCs to interact with. I enjoyed the factions more than I did in NV, where I basically wasn't given a reason to care about any of them, other than wanting to oppose the Legion. You obviously have a different definition of "roleplay" than I do, because I was able to roleplay my characters just fine, and enjoy it every time, in all three games. The only significant roleplay difference that I saw (outside of more varied dialogue choice) was that in NV there are more "evil" factions that you can be part of at one time or another, which makes sense since your character begins as tabula rasa instead of having an actual background prior to leaving the vault in the other games. Since I rarely roleplay villains (got burnt out on it a long, long time ago in tabletop rpgs), that wasn't a big issue for me.

I find it amusing when people who hold up FO NV as the gold standard complain about explore-fight-loot-repeat, because my NV game (outside of the main quest) is explore-fight-loot-return to Big MT to sell loot to pay for gear repairs, more stimpaks and more ammo-repeat. Edit: don't get me wrong, I really like FONV. But I sometimes feel like Erik the Viking, going out killing and looting to be able to pay for the next expedition. So glad they got rid of item condition/maintenance in FO4.

The main questline in FO4 is generally disappointing. That said, there are a wealth of other stories to be found throughout the Commonwealth, many of them in unmarked locations. If you enjoy exploring, FO4 and the Far Harbor addon will appeal. A lot of Boston made it into the game, and there are some great locations to find and explore. NukaWorld had potential, but as it was released is mainly for those who for some reason want to play a raider. Mechanist is fun but short. It does add new random encounters to the Wasteland, which spices things up. The remaining addons are mostly for settlement building.

Nuka World was a direct response to a lot of people whining that FO4 wasn't a "real" RPG because you weren't allowed to play a bad guy if you wanted to. Completely missing, of course, the point that you certainly CAN play a bad guy with the base game, especially if you side with either the BoS or Institute and focus on the more negative aspects of both groups. Unfortunately, the result was something that felt rushed, and almost totally lacked plotline for those who did not want to suddenly have their character go raider. I disagree with the workshop mods being "laughable", however. They simply weren't aimed at you. A lot of people really enjoy settlement creation, and those add-ons were aimed at those people. I like the fact that they made something for everyone. What I don't like was that they only did the two (one and a half?) large storyline add-ons, when the prior games had significantly more. I think there would be less dislike of the settlement add-ons by those who don't like settlements if they weren't such a major part of the "season". I put them on the same level as "Courier's Stash" and "Gun-Runner's Arsenal". I'm currently in a playthrough of New Vegas. In an honest comparison between it and FO4, I have to say that, even with mods that add a bunch of new things to find (ex: AWOP), it's still large stretches of empty/generic, with the vast majority of things to do/find at the marked locations, unlike FO4, which has a much more detailed map, where by detailed I mean that even in the areas where you aren't anywhere near a marked location, there is still likely to be something to do or something to find in close proximity. Going further, even when you do get to a marked location in NV, a lot of them are no more than a couple of ruined buildings with a few foes lurking, with no real story. Some FO4 locations are the same, but given that most of NV is only​ at the marked locations, each one that isn't fleshed out is a wasted opportunity. Even when it comes to the actual featured bits of the story, the main quest, so far I am not gripped by the main story of NV. A bunch of different factions, most of which are repulsive in one way or another, battling for control of important resources and territory, with (as usual for Bethesda) the actions of a single person dramatically changing who comes out ahead. But then, I wasn't particularly gripped by the main story of FO4 either, and by the end really didn't care about finding the kid. What I definitely like more in NV, though, is the way they handle the factions, where what you do seems to have a greater effect on how you interact with the factions, rather than simply having some key points at which factions either do or do not like you in kind of an all-or-nothing way, as in FO4. I also like the dialogue based on skills, where different things can happen if you've got a specific skill at level X than if you don't, although I wish there was an RNG associated with it as well, even if just to apply a +/-5 to your attempt. Given the lack of skills in FO4, I would have liked to see more of them doing the same thing but with different perks required for different options. I haven't played all of the DLCs yet for NV. I loved Old World Blues, silly as it was. I hated Lonesome Road, and still have not finished it. I find it boring, despise the story, and have not enjoyed the gameplay. I liked Dead Money, but found it a distraction from the main game, rather than an enhancement of it. It felt like a separate game tacked on, as it changed too much of the game play. Much the same way that some people feel about the settlement building in FO4. I have not yet played Honest Hearts. In FO3, I liked Point Lookout but wasn't thrilled by it, enjoyed Broken Steel, didn't bother with Operation: Anchorage or Mothership Zeta, and never got around to The Pitt, although that wasn't intentional, I just got distracted by other things before I did.

If you describe them that way, any DLC looks bad. It would be like saying Old World Blues is "playing around with some brain-in-jar mad scientists", or that Point Lookout is "playing around with inbred hillbillies". It dismisses by defining. Of the two FO4 story add ons, Far Harbor was excellent, and Nuka World could have been, if they'd told both sides of the story. I hated that the anti-raider plot is "shoot everything then you're done, no more to see".

I really love that about FO4, that everywhere you go, there's something to explore or discover. So much of it stuff that never once connects to a quest. Sometimes an unassuming trapdoor leads to a big area to explore, that you would never have found if you hadn't poked around where quests never went. I like discovering things that are off the beaten path, that other players may not be finding because they aren't dragged there by a quest marker. Or even the things that do guide you there if you know what to look for, like the hidden locations that can mostly only be found by triangulating on radio signals, with their attached stories. I was drawn in by the tales they told with just the scenery and the skeletons. Sometimes those stories were absolutely tragic. Although I still want to know who is wandering the wasteland posing all of those teddy bears....

There's a Korova sign in my signs mod if you ever feel like going A Clockwork Orange on it and doing milk instead of soda.... :)

Somewhat ironic, given that the voice actress is Katy Townsend, from Glasgow. It's her real accent.

Gal at the 3rd rail? Magnolia? She's not a follower without a mod. Were you thinking of Cait from nearby in the Combat Zone? I liked her story of personal redemption.

Oh, also, are you including the large chunk of the glowing sea that's "off the map"? Not sure if the guy who did the estimate did or not....

Are you counting the impassable parts of fo3 or nv, or the partitioned sections that aren't actually open world, in the estimates? If you're excluding parts that by definition can't have content in them or aren't part of the main sandbox, might be needed...

Duplicate post. Ignore.

The synths don't sleep much and have 10 energy defense in VATS.

Oh, but I am - admittedly I hear the generic lines: .. " I like the weapons " .. " I like the graphics " But ... the game is not purely Graphics and Weapons. Case In Point: ( As I pointed out in my OP. ) * The Sandbox is indeed smaller and seriously more limited then FO 3 & FO NV. * Thus: Seriously limited Quests and Places to Explore. * With the exception of a handful of NPC's ... the majority are emo-wimps ( I play in Survival - Hardest Mode ). * The settlements are buggy to seriously buggy and there too, to quote other posts I've read: ... They need their nose wiped and diapers changed & Babysat on a regular basis. < - Not my words but posts that I read Am I missing something? If so, let me know, please. Because the game should consists more then Graphics and Weapons. At least IMHO. Feel free, please to challenge my points. :smile: You didn't actually address what I wrote before, but sure, I'll try again. By the way, I never mentioned graphics or weapons. First off, no, the sandbox isn't smaller. Fallout 3 was 8.462 square kilometers, NV was 8.502, and 4 was 9.743. The person who did the estimates noted that the numbers for FO4 were on the conservative side, because it covers the world map (sandbox) area, and Diamond City is bigger on the inside than the outside. Places to explore? I found a lot more to see and do in FO4 than in 3 or NV. Much as I love 3 and NV, there's a lot of open space with not much to do in it. In 4, even in the "dead areas" between major encounters, you can find little stuff - hidden bunkers, buried loot, wandering NPCs, random quests (sometimes really random - boy in fridge, for instance), those locations you can only find by triangulating on radio signals, etc.... That said, a lot of what I found in 4 wasn't connected to a quest, so if you're looking for some questgiver to hit you over the head with stuff to do, yeah, you'll be disappointed. There are some really cool areas out there that never once have a quest involved, and there's a lot of lore and background story to find by looking at the environment, a few notes people left behind, and other such clues, and seeing what actually happened to people. NPCs: Utterly subjective, so no point discussing. I found a lot of NPCs whose stories I thought were very interesting. Sure, they're not uberhardcore warriors, but then not everyone needs to be. As I said in the prior post, to each their own. Settlements: If you do them right, no, they aren't any more buggy than the rest of the game, and you don't need to do a bunch of handholding and nose wiping. Don't like putting together your own buildings? No problem, just drop in some basic prefab buildings. Put a bed per settler inside the buildings. If there aren't crops or water there already, drop those in. Add some shops, and assign settlers, assign the rest to the crops. Add a few turrets for defense. Done. Happiness remains stable, and you can drop by every now and then to grab your generated caps, excess food, and purified water from the workbench. Just remember to turn off the beacon when your settlement is the size you want it. I've got a settlement in Far Harbor that has 1 person in it with no beacon, perfectly stable and happy, and another with 3. You are not required to develop them any more than you want to. If they're not your thing, you can mostly ignore them without affecting your game play. Regarding one of your other posts: No, Hearthfire is not equivalent to settlement building. Hearthfire is for player homes. The settlement equivalent in other games is the Real Time Settler mod, available for both Fallout 3 and Fallout NV. FO4 settlement building is basically that mod. https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/7070 https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/36922/ What was Bethesda thinking? They were thinking "225,000 unique downloads. This is really popular, and a cool idea. Let's make it part of the game." But as I have said before, to each their own. For example, I hate survival mode. For me, there's a lot of unnecessary grind to it that detracts from the fun of exploring and playing the game. In prior games, I loved the rep system, hated the karma system. Any alignment system is arbitrary, and their excessively so. If it was okay for me to slaughter every person at a location, with no negative karma, why is taking a now-unowned item from that location theft, and bad karma? How was getting the ghouls into the Tower good karma, considering what happens if you succeed? Bleah. Just let me roleplay without trying to overlay morality mechanics. I would have loved to see rep used more in FO4, but was really glad when they dumped karma. I've liked most story add-ons/DLCs that I've played, especially liking Broken Steel, Point Lookout, Old World Blues, and Far Harbor. I liked Dead Money's story, but mechanics were too different (felt like a whole different game), and I was glad when I finished. I hated Lonesome Road (it killed the game for me - boring, boring, boring, and don't tell me after I've played the whole game what my character's backstory "really" is in an open world RPG). I was seriously disappointed by NukaWorld - loved the setting, hated that 99% of it was geared toward being a raider, and almost nothing toward destroying the power of the raiders and restoring order and civilization. Okay, you killed every raider, and the merchants are back in charge. Great! And the story now is... nothing? Bleah. I hated weapon durability. Added an unnecessary grind in the name of "realism". Glad it's gone. I hated the repetitive nature of the interconnected downtown areas in 3. Not enough variety in the structures to make it interesting, and not enough story to be found. Mostly just a bunch of interconnected generic pockets linked by cookie cutter subway tunnels. Yawn. I liked the major centers in the prior games, like Rivet City, Megaton, Underworld... but too many generic NPCs with no purpose other than mobile scenery (note: same problem applies to FO4). I wasn't thrilled with New Vegas (the city) itself, as I expected more from it. It just felt... tiny. For 4, I enjoyed Diamond City. There were a lot of little stories to be found, and a fair number of quests. I âreallyâ liked Goodneighbor, and wish they'd done more with it. The depth of real world lore embedded in Goodneighbor really gave the place life. Bunker Hill felt generic to me. I like the airport/Prydwen. I enjoyed parts of the Institute, and found other parts generic and repetetive. I really liked the town in Far Harbor. On a side note, I would have loved to see some people from Rivet City show up in the Commonwealth trying to get someone to take down the BoS for them. Given that the BoS "scavenged" their reactor for the Prydwen.... However, it's lesser locations in FO4 that I had the most fun exploring. Hallucigen. The Yangtze. Treasures of Jamaica Plain. Suffolk Charter School. That weird parking garage gauntlet. Vault 75. Crater of Atom. Federal Surveillance Center K-21B. And so on. Interesting locations, hidden lore, fun battles, odd puzzles. There's a lot to find, explore, and do, if you're not limiting yourself to only what you get from questgivers, and really explore.

Idea 1: Make a level 1 shop near the edges of your settlement or in whatever the "low rent district" of it is. Put someone scruffy looking there, and decorate with scrap and rubbish. Make a level 3/4 shop of the same kind in the center of your settlement or in whatever the "high society" part of your settlement is. Put someone in clean, fancy clothes there (or a level 4 merchant), with the place decorated like a top-end store. Use a shop mod that allows use of other than the stock store for the fancy place, and give it a nice sign from one of various signage mods. Now you've got two shops of the same type, but that are very different shops. It's like comparing an inner city pawn shop to a downtown megastore. They may both sell the same category of stuff, but they're very different stores. Idea 2: Use different signage to subdivide shop types. Put in two "bars", but give one a Pub sign and one a Grill or Restaurant sign, that kind of thing. Sure, mechanically they sell the same stuff, but thematically they're two different types of stores using the same vanilla category.

Ah. You're not actually interested in discussing the games, just the small bits you're obsessed with. Got it, 'nuf said. Moving on.

Kind of obsessed with that whole "daddy" thing, aren't you? I played and enjoyed 3, 4, and nv. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Personally I hated karma, which other people love. It's completely arbitrary. Kill someone? No problem. Take their stuff now thst they're dead? Oh no! Theft! Bad karma for you! And don't get me started on the cookiecutter downtown areas in 3. Talk about a grind.... To each their own. Some people enjoy the repetitive battles of a good chunk of the map in 3. Some people enjoy building settlements and rp'ing rebuilding society. And some people are apparently only here for nude mods or more guns. That's the beauty of the FO games, especially modded, you can emphasize the parts you liked.

Seems like you'd miss stuff using that (like the locations you can only find by triangulating on radio signal). Unless you're on your umpteenth playthrough and really don't care about finding the hidden bunkers and suchlike anymore.... I'm sure that's true for some players, but I dislike most of the popup messages the game wants to show me ( so many useless tutorial messages, for example). I'd rather find bunkers by wandering into one than have the game prompt me that there might be something nearby to find. Some of them are cool little mini-stories. Nothing major, and you don't miss anything really if you don't find them, but you do get a glimpse into how people reacted to the apocalypse, and the aftermath. Some are somewhat pointless, others are downright tragic (ex: Miller family radio signal). And some are nearly impossible to find the hidden doorway to access unless you triangulate using the radio signals, or happen to get really, really lucky and stumble onto them. I love the little touches like that, the ones that don't club you over the head with a quest marker saying "go here and click", but nonetheless give you more story if you take the time to find them. I just wish that once you find them, and turn off the radio, it would stay off so that you don't have the message pop up again. Because you're right, once you've resolved what you need to resolve, the messages are just annoying distractions.

Seems like you'd miss stuff using that (like the locations you can only find by triangulating on radio signal). Unless you're on your umpteenth playthrough and really don't care about finding the hidden bunkers and suchlike anymore.... Personally, I'd love to have a mod that made it so that when you turn off a broadcast at the source, it stays off, instead of turning back on again later. My favorite lesser-downloaded mods are: ​Snappy Housekits by robboten (okay, not really lesser-downloaded, with 53k uniques, but given what it does, the fact that it doesn't have many more is criminal...) https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/11639 ​Adds in the vanilla architecture with snap points so that you can build tons of stuff, and includes fun additions like wallpapers and suchlike. A must for people who build their own settlements. Old World Plaids by Lupus Yondergirl https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/10769 Adds a bunch of new furniture, rugs, and other such fun stuff for settlement building. Really nice assortment of beds. ​Independence Radio by WhyBother123 https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/3573 ​Replaces the violin of Radio Freedom with 122 tracks of different but still appropriate-sounding stuff Most of the other mods I use and enjoy other people have also found, so I can't really call them underused, which is why Independence Radio made the list. I really don't listen to it very often, but when I'm in the mood for some Minutemen tunes, it's there for me.

Textures aren't created as a texture file, they're created in Photoshop or GIMP or other such programs. Keep your source files. If someone says it's theirs, and you have a GIMP file showing all of the different layers that went into the texture before it was converted to a .dds, with the date of last update listed, the other guy is going to have a pretty hard time proving his case over yours.

I used to code a MUD back in the day (early 90s). It was the same then. Making stuff to modify a base game (the CircleMUD code base, which has a provision of "use all you want, but you can't in any way make money from it"), then putting it out there for others to use for free, except that unlike posting mods, which are usually okay on their own once released,coding a MUD required constant maintenance. So, here you are, spending hours a week running the MUD simply because you enjoy it and for no profit or personal gain, and people would assume that because they have created a character for your game that they somehow now have the right to tell you what you should or should not do with your game. Same problem, different decade/century/millennium.

I agree on Strong... the things he likes are just wrong. But the other two aren't evil as much as damaged. That's something I really liked about the Cait quest, is you start with this broken person addicted to chems with her whole self-image shattered, and over time help her put herself back together. She's now one of my favorite companions to roam around with, because of the whole roleplay aspect of actually having been able to help someone in a significant way to become a better person, something that is usually difficult to impossible in the Wasteland. McCready has that complex backstory, plus the new backstory for what he's been doing since we last saw him, and again, he's someone you're able to pull out of the hole he's dug for himself, and get his life back together. So many others companions are already what they will always be, but those two (and Curie, in a very different way) are actually changed by having met you and followed you, which to me makes them that much more interesting.

I don't bother with the plugins. I have a freeware program that converts png to dds and another that converts the other direction. Convert to png, open and edit in GIMP, export to png, convert to dds. Quick and easy, especially compared to the problems I was having trying to get the plugins to work.