Should Settlement Building stay for Fallout 5?

[zed140]

I love having my npc micro management like a sim city but bgs need to add more option. Like creating a settlement anywhere we want and a quality of life interface to equip settlers with outfits, weapons and work.

And in a more survival play, that include or optimize cold weather, iilness, food, water, guard, good settlements attacks, good settlers that can learn defense skills. A little army. Also various working chain. A hunter, a fishing man to get food, a chef to create food, more animations, work assignment... And of course a more deep crafting system and dialog, like fnv by example. And ideally that include IA dialog and reaction like gpt.

What I think about your proposal, it is more for low pew pew players. We don't have to play sim city, it's you to have to go to a basic tps. You have tons for that. fo4 is an exception, no reason to replace it to become one of these billions of casual tps games. What I can recommend you by example is to play tomb raider, last of us, ... they are less complex games, more pew pew shooters, more adapted for you

But now I don't think bgs will create game like that anymore. Probably fo5 will by a big mac game in a post apo world in right line largely limited to be a very good guy who  save the world with a rocket launcher by exploding super mutants, molerats and bad guys to satisfy a more large public and gain more money.

 

[lordmogul]

I've spend a lot of time with the settlement building (including unlimited budget and place everywhere) and while I see it's merits, I feel like there are lots of things to improve.

• Setting up settlements and helping and equipping people should have a benefit. A return on investment if you so will. But instead the system gives the player more things to keep track off.
• A new settlement with walls and well armed settlers should be able to defend itself. And when attacks happen, the settlers should have a realistic chance to win that is factually dependent on the defenses, not some dice role. When raiders are stupid enough and attack anyway, the settlement should loot the attackers.
• Same with the kidnapping and radiant quest. The settlers are armed to the teeth, with enough turrets that even the brotherhood of steel gets scared, with armed patrols on concrete walls. With multi-layer gates. And somehow three raiders in a shed sneak in and grab someone?
• Instead of just the useless minutemen flare, why not a settlement radio to call in help. That brings in settlers from nearby settlments with the equipment you gave them. And after the fight is done, you can use their inventory to bring loot back to the settlement.
• Vendor stalls and farming crops should be populated by default. You can throw in hundreds of tato plants, and they still complain about not having food, because nobody had the idea to get something from the fields.
• Vendors are supposed to offer more stores, so more places to leave your loot and get necessary essentials like ammo, medical services, etc. but their offerings simply aren't great. Going into the bigger "towns" in the game is still more useful.
• For survival you want a bed, but you don't need people running around that constantly have issues. There is no benefit in raising a population, because that will cause more trouble than benefits.

In general settlements feel half baked. The idea is great. Becoming someone who improves people's lives, getting a certain level of fame, letting the population return favours, etc. but instead you just get more work. If they include settlement building in any form in Fallout 5, it should be more thought out.

[jjb54]

10 hours ago, zed140 said:

I love having my npc micro management like a sim city but bgs need to add more option. Like creating a settlement anywhere we want and a quality of life interface to equip settlers with outfits, weapons and work.

And in a more survival play, that include or optimize cold weather, iilness, food, water, guard, good settlements attacks, good settlers that can learn defense skills. A little army. Also various working chain. A hunter, a fishing man to get food, a chef to create food, more animations, work assignment... And of course a more deep crafting system and dialog, like fnv by example. And ideally that include IA dialog and reaction like gpt.

What I think about your proposal, it is more for low pew pew players. We don't have to play sim city, it's you to have to go to a basic tps. You have tons for that. fo4 is an exception, no reason to replace it to become one of these billions of casual tps games. What I can recommend you by example is to play tomb raider, last of us, ... they are less complex games, more pew pew shooters, more adapted for you

But now I don't think bgs will create game like that anymore. Probably fo5 will by a big mac game in a post apo world in right line largely limited to be a very good guy who  save the world with a rocket launcher by exploding super mutants, molerats and bad guys to satisfy a more large public and gain more money.

 

The Problem is, again - it's not "pew pew" mentality at all.

Their approach to SIM-CITY ... was crappy ...

The thing is they took the easy road and stopped telling stories / quests.

Yes, I will give you some examples:

- Originally Mama Murphy was so supposed to be Black. They apparently caved to the P.C. ( Politically Correct ) crowd or something.

- If they had stayed w/her in her original Race - there was a very interesting Quest that could have been played:

- Mama Murphy was Preston's grandmother, but he was unaware, due to her 'drug habit' and the family 'dis-owned' her. She knew exactly who Preston is/was ... and great quest/story could have evolved.

- Deacon, his wife was synth. What if, she did not 'die' ... but was the first synth to produce a child with Deacon and she was ... 'taken'. A trail to be followed.

- Piper and her sister: What happened to her parents, could we have a quest where they were kidnapped by the Institute or went into hiding to protect Piper and her sister from the Institute?

- Strong: The Milk of Human Kindness. A lot of fun quests could have been done there.

- Dance - what is his Synth history and how did he get into the BoS and up a high rank? What he a spy, not know it? Did the Railroad do a memory wipe? Again, fun quest could have been done.

I could pull other NPC's and present a fun Quest ... but this is where Beth seriously showed their lack of ability to tell any more Stories - Quests and went down a path they had NO CLUE what they were doing and it was mader seriously clear.

 

[South8028]

20 hours ago, exlandia said:

I really enjoy settlement building, so yes. However, in FO4, there are a lot of limitations. I use an unlimited budget mod, so I can build a fantastic settlement with every conceivable artifact from mods, but the settlers pay no attention. You can build a shack and throw down some sleeping bags, and it makes no difference to the NPCs. Whether you build a huge future-esqe settlement or some shacks, it makes no difference to them as long as they have enough amenities and a few turrets. Also, a large settlement with a lot of NPCs makes the settlement not function well; NPCs will just stand around doing nothing, in my experience. It's frustrating to build something that may take hours only to have NPCs just standing around like they're sleepwalking. In the vanilla game, you have a budget limit, yet BGS gives you some large locations like Starlight, but you can only build a few shacks, and before you know it, you've reached the budget limit. So Fallout 5 should have a much better and more powerful game engine that could handle a medieval castle and lots of maidens and knights. 

There is no building limit in fo4. It's forced. It can be disabled with many “No Limit” mods, or you can create ready-made interiors/world without a limit. The largest interiors I built were 500k x 500k. I don't know exactly how much of it I built, but it was enough that I got tired of building in two or three weeks.bgs simply played it safe by introducing restrictions on construction. If you remember, at the time the game was released, the average video card had 2k MB of memory on board and the average frequency of the nvidea chip was ~700 MHz. I remember how after the first “no limit” mods, texture mipmaps would glitch, textures would overlap each other. I think I had a gtx750ti then.

As for the ai characters, it's truly a nightmare. fo4 has the dumbest npcs of all. They depend on a bunch of helpers and the accuracy of the navmesh. They search for paths for a long time and fall into a stupor if the number of paths is reduced due to an increase in the number of npcs. AI is implemented very poorly. In ancient Stalker the npcs look like geniuses compared to the npcs in fo4.

Edited May 20 by South8028

[POETICDRINK2U]

18 hours ago, jjb54 said:

NO.

Fallout was / is not supposed to be SIM CITY.

You want sim city - go play that!

Here are my reasons:

- Beth did not think it through as they should have.

-- Auto Enemy Spawn in middle of settlement is not real. The reality is, they should have to go through the "FRONT" or "BACK" Door and good luck with that!

... They did not take into account of walls and weapons.

- The Wimpy settlers .. I often ask, " How did they live beyond puberty? They should have died, with how wimpy they are! "

- Leaving pretty much everything to the your NPC ... and the rest cannot even figure out how to eat!

.. NO - Beth failed big time on this ..

.. No - Don't tell me about MODS that "fix" this. That's the problem, Beth does a lousy job and then expect the Mod Community to save their butts.

You literally are saying you like the idea but hate the execution.

[Jazzfrezi]

I'd rather they take the resources (Dev's etc) and use that to develop a better story, gameplay and world.

[jjb54]

3 hours ago, POETICDRINK2U said:

You literally are saying you like the idea but hate the execution.

1st - The execution of the settlements, did 100% suck .. they literally had no clue what they were doing and did NOT think it through.

... Thus I seriously do not like it at all. I do use Transfer Settlement mod, just so I don't waste game time .. well wasting time.

2nd - Fallout is about Quests - Stories ... and as I posted above, FO 4 had some great Quests/Stories that could have / should have been told.

3rd - The Settlements, I can maybe see that there is a Mayor of the said settlements - and quests and such could revolve around them? But to have the main character be everything, from builder, guard, babysitter, ... is/was wrong.

[jjb54]

1 hour ago, Jazzfrezi said:

I'd rather they take the resources (Dev's etc) and use that to develop a better story, gameplay and world.

Exactly, like some of the ideas that I posted above.

[fraquar]

Leave it.    Modders will improve or extend it.

Ex.  If I have to do the whole Minuteman questline I simply do the following:

a)  Go "rescue" said settlements.   

b)  Revert ownership of that settlement back to unowned.

I just advance the Minuteman questline without having to micromanage umpteen settlements.

I still have the options to build safe houses wherever I want without having to be bogged down with settlement babysitting.

[ScytheBearer]

Not only no, but HELL NO!!!  What a colossal waste of time, effort and energy. 

Existing settlements get enough turrets to shut up the complaints about "defenses". 

New settlements get a beacon first thing, and it gets scrapped as soon as the first two settlers arrive.  Then it's enough shelter for two beds, enough  mutfruits to feed two people, a water pump, a couple turrets and "you're on your own".  Settlement gets attacked, "you're on your own".  Settlers aren't happy, tough; I got you started and now "you're on your own". 

I steadfastly refuse to travel from the Nuka Cola Bottling Plant to Dalton Farm because some weak kneed settlers can't handle a couple gulpers.