So I figured it’s about time I gave this game a shot.
I’m familiar with the series, but never really loved it, have played all previous titles but most of my time is on F3 and FNV.
I think the reason why I didn’t pick this up earlier was because I didn’t feel like going further into the Fallout universe, it felt like Bethesda were milking the golden cow.
Of course I’m trying it now as I picked it up cheap and the TV series has come along, of which in almost at the end of. It very much feels like the TV show is Fallout 4 on TV, but then I’ve never played F76.
The game is nice, very familiar to what I remember of F3 and FNV, I wonder how open it is with the perks system, or will I have to put levels into gunplay at some point?
I’m trying to stick to the main quest to start with, I’ve helped out the Minutemen, and then made a b-line to Diamond City before setting off to find the private detective so still pretty early on. Dogmeat is a fine companion for the road.
Any tips or suggesting for a good start, and play through?
There is a patch landing at the end of the month, so I haven’t experimented with any mods just yet.
This game ruined my interest in Fallout as a series. I’d played everything in the series from the isometric ones onwards but something about this one made me lose interest in the setting. Some kind of Fallout burnout maybe.
I stopped playing when it tried to force me to engage with the crafting mechanics in order to do the Institute level.
I’ve heard the Far Harbour DLC is good I guess so maybe make a beeline for that
Your comment made me realize how shoehorned the crafting is. Other modern games had crafting and base building, so just stick it in fallout! Ugh.
I’m the type to spend an extra 10 hours in subnautica collecting all the materials to make a giant and perfect self sufficient base. Fallout 4 saw me turn that first gas station into a multi-floor hotel. It didn’t really add anything to my experience though. I only ever went there to mod weapons, which also would’ve been a much better experience without crafting! Finding mods rather than crafting them would make them special.
Also being forced to find a special table just to affix a scope to a gun is fucken dumb.
Other modern games had crafting
You mean like Fallout New Vegas?
4’s crafting is a far cry from NV’s.
As a fan of F1/2 who hated 3/NV and its jank, this game got me to enjoy the series again.
I really enjoyed the base building and it felt cool rebuilding some of the wasteland, something I always questioned why it wasn’t more common in other games, it’s been hundreds of years clean the fucking rubble from your bed room and stop sleeping on a hundreds of years old, dirty, stained, radioactive mattress.
Yeah plus New Vegas has three different shitty options that cannot sustainably rebuild civilisation. Fallout 4 has the minutemen, who are just a bunch of kind hearted communists. The minutemen are the only organised faction that offer a true future to the wasteland.
If they could let player order Preston Garvey do all the minuteman job and leave the us alone.
I still haven’t beaten FO4. I lost interest. But I started 3 over again! And it’s still just as good as ever. And it’s been so long since I’ve played it, I’ve forgotten a lot of it. It’s pretty awesome.
Same, I stopped in the middle of it because I was so bored. Haven’t ever looked at Fallout 76, Fallout 4 killed the franchise for me.
Had fun playing FO4 back then, but gotta agree it had some major weak points. They didn’t improve from the FO3 and the constructive criticisms. They simply rode the gravy train Obsidian set with New Vegas. FO76 and Starfield’s failure to captivate public’s interest is a reflection of that.
Up to around level 50 or so, mobs are squishy enough that you don’t need weapons perks at all. Eventually, some super mutants become bullet sponges, and you’ll want some kind of damage boost, either weapon perks or just taking lots of combat drugs as needed.
I like to start new games with a focus on Science and Barter. With one point of Science, you can build Industrial Water Purifiers in your settlements. The excess water they produce can be sold to vendors.
Unique leg armor that increases your movement speed can be purchased in Goodneighbor and Vault 81. The Vault 81 vendor also sells the last gun you’ll ever need. I like to trade water for those ASAP.
Next, there’s a quest from The Railroad that gives a HUGE defensive boost.
The Nukaworld expansion introduced a new kind of knife, the Disciples Blade, and it is by far the best melee weapon in the game. A sneaky ninja melee build wielding a Disciples Blade can beat every encounter. The build doesn’t really blossom until the late-late game, but once it does, you’ll never need to use a gun again.
You can DM if you want to avoid spoiling OP, but what gun do you get in vault 81?
Huh, I must have missed that. I thought guns that shot twice used double ammo?
If you want to do the settlement building, get the local leader perk 2, it will allow you to share resource with all the settlement you have, provided you assign a settler to do it. Better yet, mod that perk in, i think it’s an essential feature locked behind 2 perk point and some charisma stats, since the story treat you like a high charisma anyway.
Melee is totally viable, couple with sneak and Blitz perk it you can clear an area easily. Run if you hear beeping noise coming at you.
Ah same here.The series triggered me to get the GOTY on the cheap and dive into it. Have been hooked non-stop for the past days.
As is tradition, Bethesda games are not even worth playing without mods. FO4 inv management is just pull-nails-out attrocious and mandatory to play the game at non-braindead difficulties. So better inventory management is a must for me.
And if you want to do anything with the settlements that doesn’t waste infinite amount of time, Sim Settlements 2 just dropped and it’s great!
Myself I’ve been mostly doing sidequests until now and only started going into the main quest now, still quite impressed how well the difficulty scaling holds up.
I’ve set up half a dozen settlements and spend way too much time equipping the settlers there. Hoping this will be more useful later. Haven’t had to use flares yet though, need to get into the habit of doing it instead of relying on chem and stims to get through combat.
Mods are 100% required for so many things. Inventory, crafting, settlement management, companions staying out of the way, and making encumbrance less annoying.
And if you want to do anything with the settlements that doesn’t waste infinite amount of time, Sim Settlements 2 just dropped and it’s great!
I dunno man, I installed Sim Settlements and I wasted the rest of my playtime building settlements instead!
Same. It became my goal to build fun settlements everywhere.
If you find yourself running low on caps build as many water purifiers in Sanctuary as you can power.
Water and ammo are better currency than caps.
In every Fallout game, (and now Starfield) as well, I immediately choose to use guns from only one or two ammo types, and collect the rest as just trading currency.
I can’t remember the last time I had to actually pay caps/credits for something since the transaction always comes to zero. I take your stack of med-kits and you get 476 bits of .45 caliber ammunition. Oh…you’re a medic and have no use for it. Too bad.
Something you need to unlearn if your Fallout experience is primarily from FNV is that the quest design in FO4 is far more linear. The designers of FNV did a lot of work to ensure that you could complete basically any quest in lots of different ways, including talking, crafting, thinking, or sneaking to avoid combat. The design of FO4 follows the FO3 school of thought, which is more “this is a game about fighting stuff, you’re going to have to fight stuff”
Maybe a controversial suggestion, but my advice is to ignore the Minutemen stuff until late in the game. Just don’t even go to the museum until you’ve followed some leads and want something else to do for a bit.
This is definitely not the intended way to play, but I promise the story flows so much better without it. Setting out to find your kidnapped son just to immediately get sidetracked helping some uncharismatic misfits set up mattresses is just an underwhelming start to an otherwise decent game.
Doing all this stuff later on, when you’ve actually demonstrated you’re a badass survivor and the OP gear you get free from the Minutemen quest actually feels earned, just feels much smoother. It’s a great coda that they unf put two minutes into the game for some reason.
A guy I know just started his first playthrough. He thought the minutemen line was the main quest and just kept going to settlement after settlement. He had probably 15 settlements before he even got to diamond city. He was straight up not having a good time, just playing settlement simulator and not the actual game.
Oof, I definitely did that once or twice.
It really does seem like they decided to bring this sequence up to introduce settlement building and power armor early. I get why they did it, but man, I do not think it ultimately has the effect they wanted.
Like Skyrim this one is far more playable in third person, and I really recommend giving that a try.
If you want faster leveling get the luck perk idiot savant, and keep your intelligence low.
Ammo seems far more plentiful than 3 in my experience, at least early on. You eventually get near infinite ammo anyway. One minorly annoying thing is that DLC weapons can drop in the commonwealth, but no one sells ammo for them outside the DLC.
You will eventually want to pick a weapon type and put some points in it. The bonuses are huge. Perhaps more important are the crafting perks to keep up on upgrades to weapons and armor.
There’s a lot if focus on settlement building, but it’s a huge pain and not super rewarding in my experience.
Like Skyrim this one is far more playable in third person, and I really recommend giving that a try.
Haven’t played FO, but hell, no, Skyrim (and Morrowind, and Oblivion) in 3rd person is janky AF. Bethesda games never were meant to be played in 3rd person—I suspect the option is there simply for vanity cam, screenshots and modding.
Morrowind and oblivion are awful in 3rd person, but Skyrim is really good. I occasionally drop into 1st person for looting tight areas, but 95% of the game is very good in 3rd person mode.
Modded FO4 on PC is one of the best experiences you can have. Vanilla FO4 is dogshit, lol.
Mods are 100% necessary.
I think that is a bit overboard. I modded the hell out of F04 and it still is a brain dead, choices mean nothing, game. It is kind of interesting wandering around and fighting things, but nothing really ever matters and the story progresses the same.
The second more important thing for this game besides modding, is playing in survival. Anything else is like whats the point.
The need for crafting and settlement building really turned me off of 4. That and the super dense map. This is supposed to be a wasteland but it’s got people and settlements everywhere. The emptiness of 3 and NV made them feel like an apocalypse, I’m not sure what 4 feels like, but it’s really not the same.
Like Skyrim this one is far more playable in third person
Wait, what? Fallout is much better in first person. How do you aim and shoot in third person?
I really dislike third person games to begin with, but this one just wouldnt work it unless you relied on VATS.
3rd person aim is awesome, you get a cross hair to aim with instead of whatever random sight the gun has, it changes size based on the gun’s stats and your limb damage. Guns don’t block a good chunk of the screen either. Scopes still zoom in to the same view.
Guns don’t block a good chunk of the screen either.
But YOU do! That is why I do not like third person, I do not want to see me. All immersion is lost! \
But I started up my game, moused out to third person, and the gun sight didnt change at all. It is the same cross hairs based on gun accuracy either way.
The one thing I wish I knew at the start is that regular armor/clothing bonuses don’t apply when in power armor. Unfortunately, that’s the bulk of what you’ll find from legendary enemies, so it makes loot a lot less fun. Power armor with legendary bonuses is very rare. There are many viable builds without power armor, but they are likely to be challenging for a new player.
Also if anyone knows of a mod that makes recon scopes reliable (I swear I can’t mark anything with just a damn twig in the way), or if they’ve recently patched that, I’d love to hear about it.
It’s been a hot minute since I last played F4. But now that a friend of mine roped me into F76 I’ve been itching to get some F4 action in between the sparse F76 sessions, esp. since the big update is just around the corner.
IIRC the perks system in F4 requires you to have stats in the SPECIAL -stats to open up the stat related perks, and then choose to spend the perks points to those instead of the stats. Other perks are given as rewards from (side?) quests - if memory serves, but it’s been a while.
I did enjoy the adventuring aspeects of F4, but the settlement management was pure agony. The more you build the settlements, the more attractive they become for mutant/bandit/whatever attacks. If you don’t build them, the settlers moan about not having places to sleep or food to eat. Even if you build them everything, the idiot settlers can’t figure out themselves to start farming if there’s no food, instead they require the player to specifically assign them for the task.
Other than the settlement management, the game is great, but as it’s bethesda creation it gets better with mods. I recall esp. enjoying mod which removed ambiguity from dialogue choises and just showed the actual lines instead of “snarky” or “okay” or whatever.
As far as companions go, I do enjoy “the private detective” as a companion, if I had to choose, but mostly I prefer going in alone, as the companions can be dumb as left boots. Died so many times because the idiots walk into all the traps imaginable. And the “stealth archer” doesn’t need companions, they’re powerful and broken like in every Bethesda -game :P
Last time I played my VATS got glitched and didn’t work anymore, apparently this has something to do with vault 114 & is a known issue. Didn’t bother me one bit and I kept on playing without it. IMO, the game got better without VATS.
Tips? Nah, you do you. The game turns into power fantasy regardless of what you do. But in general talk to everyone and do listen in on the radiochannels which can pop out randomly out there, there’s always something cool or funny to find.
I modded the game from the first time. Since it’s my first time playing it, I used Sim Settlements 2 out of the box, but I did try my hand at Settlement management without it (since its features don’t unlock immediately, there’s some sidequests) and it was agonizing as you describe. However with Sim Settlements 2, not only is it a breeze, but the settlements look way more interesting as well without inordinate amounts of time. I enjoy finding things to equip my settlers to fight off attacks etc.
…that actually sounds interesting, Might need to look into that. My original plan was just to mod in infinite carryweight and such and just pick a direction and go on an adventure but now I’m reconsidering.
So how does the sim settlements thing work, if I’m going with it, do I need to (or want to?) install all the chapters, or should I add those once “I’m done” to move it along?
You can follow the quests of SS2 to unlock more stuff, but I think some of them unlock on their own? Don’t have quite enough experience with it. But it provides enough out of the box that you would do the basics and then have pretty well maintained settlements anyway.
Not sure what you mean by " install all the chapters". IIRC it’s just one file.
what I meant was that their site (https://simsettlements2.com/) lists 3 different chapters as different downloads, each newer requiring the previous ones.
haven’t delved in their documentation yet, I’m assuming these are stacking changes/quests somehow, but… dunno. I’ll read into it.
Huh, I didn’t even realize. Thanks!
for carryweight you dont even need mods. open the console once, swat in a player.modav carryweight 1000 and be done with it
I enjoyed it so much more in Survival mode, but with a “save anytime” mod.
Agreed, I highly recommend survival if you enjoy higher stakes with death. I’ve never used save anytime mod, the sleep to save default worked well for me.
It’s all well and good to get a feel for things, but you know how buggy these games can get.
Once you’ve played survival for a while, you realise how inconvenient sleep to save is.
Sometimes you’re a long way from resting, and you need to turn the game off - save anytime is going to save your bacon
I thought fo4 was underwhelming, but I’m exited to play the fallout 4: london mod which is supposed to drop as soon as possible after the patch, depending on how quickly the script extender gets updated to work with the new version.
It’s set before fallout 1 I think and it won’t have a lot of fallout staples like the pip boy, super mutants or the brotherhood of steel which I think will be a nice change since it feels like Bethesda have overused them a lot. A lot of the promotional material looks fantastic and they seem to have a lot of cool ideas and a professional approach to modding.
The new vegas modding community has kind of a bad track record when it comes to large modding projects but I feel optimistic about folon, but it might be good to temper that optimism with a little bit of caution anyway.
If you have the traders set up between your settlements with the Local Leader perk, you can choose to make food and water in one place and let it get distributed automatically. . The bandit raids are based on how much food and water settlements have, so most of your settlements will get raided only rarely. There is a downside, which is that every dang settler in the other towns will complain that there isn’t enough food and water, because they don’t know to look at the trader network.
Also, raids spawn in a place randomly clean from list for each settlement. Building walls isn’t going to save you in every settlement because there is often a spawn location within the settlement. I’m not still salty about it after building a wall and turrets and lights all the way around sanctuary’s island only to have raids down in the middle of the settlement, why do you ask?
Also, I’ve never used VATS in a 3d fallout game, so be aware it’s totally possible to just skip it entirely and save your points for other skills.
Just explore and concentrate on vats. Unfortunately with the gutted dialogue system it starts to feel same but it can be fun. Concentrate on vats perks as it still has thar janky Fallout aim system:X
Interesting take. I very, very rarely use vats. My aim is much better, and certainly much faster.
Why do you have issues with the aiming system? I am making an assumption you are playing with a mouse and keyboard…
Playing with mouse and key but Bethesda has notoriously poor aim in there games.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fnv/comments/ntndzf/guns_extremely_offcenter_when_aiming_down_sights/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/22380/discussions/0/3315233099215418435/
https://www.reddit.com/r/fo4vr/comments/7po5hw/aim_down_sights_seems_off_also_vats_always/
There’s alot more as well, it was the main complaint about fallout for the whole life span…
That was two New Vegas and one VR title. Fallout 4 aiming doesn’t seem bad at all. You can manage with a sniper rifle as good as any other game. There is a slight chance that one of the mods I applied might have improved it, I havent looked through them, but it seems to me that FO4 was not nearly as bad as 3 and NV by default.
Globally it’s always been a problem, I just shared as they were the easiest to find on my washroom break xD. The aim assist is much stronger… to strong… if you turn it off same Ole though…
Piper’s affinity perk is only useful if you get it early on.
My main advice is to try to get everything you can to level up quickly, the loot pool doesn’t really get interesting until level 20 or so, you’ll find nothing but laser pistols and pipe guns before that.
