Fallout 4

That'd be cool. But setting your tribes policies would be great no matter what faction you have control over. Be it Vault dwellers, a brotherhood chapter, a village or even a (reformed) raider gang.

Pfft, start off U Nreformed and make reformation a choice. One with lots of incentive.

Has anyone messed around with the CBBE and Body Slide Mods? I wanted to play around with them but it looks very complicated and I'm totally not in the mood to bollocks anything up and spend hours trying to fix the problem.

I've been trying to work out a challenge mode for Survival difficulty (with mods of course). Unfortunately, I am the finickiest person in existence and nothing has appealed to me, except one and it's based on Hotline Miami, which I have yet to play (I'll get to it eventually).

Basically, I'm fishing for suggestions or thoughts.

I use body slide. It's actually quite easy to use once you've installed it.

You're not a Vault Dweller in Fallout 2, either, where you are from one of the tribes. Granted, one that descends from the protagonist of the first game, but still.

It fixes so many things that bug the crap out of me about the body models. I mean... look at dem feet. Body slide looks nice, but it looks like its female only though? Idk. The entire thing looks very confusing.

Most of them are female only because that's the way a lot of modders roll. I know it's that way for the other games at least.

Yeah, it's female only. And it lacks the DLC outfits. At least the version I have. There is however a different mod (Superhero bodies) that adds male body options.

Roberts and Breezes do male body models, with appropriate... bits, shall we say? They also do perma undies options for the peanut gallery who can't handle a man that has a bigger schwang than them in a video game dangling about the place. I'm not sure if there are newer models than the ones I have versions of though.

Well I probably should have known better to read this thread. Synth Shaun huh. Interesting.

Anyway, yeah I remember a lot of controversy over being forced to be stock hetero married person.

I just, kind of shrug at that. I don't really care. I like having objectives. Makes me feel like a part of the world. I can sympathize (somewhat) with being forced to be hetero if you want to be an androgynous, aromantic, transexual, bisexual, whatever - I kind of get it. In terms of having a kid though.

I don't see it as a massive narrative obstruction... well it kind of is, in that, yes, it's a little hard to justify doing anything else when a father/mother is searching for their child. I always struggle when I run into Preston/BOS/anybody, because I know joining up with them will lead to some Wasteland gold, but I don't really "believe" my character would forget Shaun and kill some Muties.

That's another thing I wish they'd done more - showing the PC's reactions to the world. There's a few conversations so far where he can react like "whoa, the world's different," and in the beginning he reacts to the fact that there are giant radroaches. Moment you're out of Sanctuary you can grab some power armor and turn Super Mutants into swiss cheese without batting an eye.

There is a rather extraordinary amount of narrative dissonance in the Sole Survivor's approach to the Wasteland. I think Bethesda really wanted players to jump in feet first and feel empowered, rather than slough around fighting giant ants until someone deigned to train them to use power armor and wield big guns. It's just a different approach.

But it does carry the problem that the Survivor's desperate search for Shaun just doesn't blend at all with the rest of the game's storytelling.

edited 27th Sep '16 1:00:53 PM by Fighteer

Eh, it kind of can, really. I've seen it in other stories. Shaun was kidnapped. When you wake up, the world's gone to shit and is so much different that you can't really just file a missing persons report, get some advice from a cop, and do some of the legwork yourself. You need to know the lay of the land so you can find out just who might know something. And for that, allies would be helpful. Which means doing shit for people.

Yeah, I recall that if you have Codsworth with you when you complete "Fire Support," he points out that this Brotherhood of Steel might have the resources to help you find Shaun as encouragement to join them. But the problem is, there's never a moment in the game where you actually need a faction's help to progress until the end of Act Two - the only thing stopping you from going straight from Sanctuary to Diamond City is your competence when it comes to surviving the encounters along the way. You don't need the Minutemen or the Brotherhood's assistance to get anywhere, and while you do need the Railroad's help to get your way into the Institute, they don't ask you to do any work for them in exchange.

So if you feel really invested in the main quest and prioritize getting your son back over anything else, you'll end up in Act Three as maybe the "general" for the Minutemen who currently control a single settlement in the corner of the map, a one-time mercenary who worked for the Brotherhood without committing to join (assuming you even picked up their quest in the first place), and a stranger who was admitted to Railroad HQ once and never returned. Which can lock you on the Institute path to the endgame almost by default, if you just go with the flow once you get there.

But that's all if you're playing the game with the story as presented. I think Bethesda was counting on players being their usual sidequesty selves and getting caught up in building settlements or doing faction quests all while their character is supposedly agonizing over the fate of their son. Like the developers were expecting the main quest not to engage people.

You could fix this with some rewrites, maybe have the Sole Survivor see terrifying Skelebots when Kellogg murders the spouse, so when s/he mentions this to Preston or whoever he concludes that the Institute was responsible. Then he could mention how the Institute is powerful and elusive and nobody's managed to stand up to them, and stress that going after them isn't the sort of task the Sole Survivor should try to do alone. Of course, that would leave our friend Nick Valentine feeling a bit superfluous, and what kind of game would Fallout 4 be without a noir android detective?

Oh hey, according to the wiki Kellogg was 108 when you killed him. Wonder if that was on purpose?

edited 27th Sep '16 8:41:14 PM by Tacitus

I recall reading in here that the main writer for Bethesda these days hates deep stories in video games. So it makes sense Beth would botch these things now.

They really just need to sit down and create a game where there's NO main quest, just the tutorial to introduce you to the world, and then nothing but miniquests to build you up and make you a force of some kind in the world.

To which I respond... Why the hell are you working on RP Gs that are literally about Epic Tales of how one person can change the world, emphasize player choice, and have historically emphasized a grand lore. That applies for both Fallout and The Elder Scrolls.

Now, I actually have a quote from Emil Pagliarulo about exposition in games: ""If you're like me, you're reading the game manual in the car coming back from the store. We want the experience to start there." He goes on to mention that he "disdains cutscenes or lengthy dialogues" as they distract from playing the game.

And yet, I'd argue his games (Oblivion, Fallouts 3 & 4, and Skyrim) were often giant cutscenes that we could run around in. Dialogue and exposition are important and keeping track of continuity even more so.

And yet, he constantly FAILS at that, at least when it comes to the central quest, which is more often than not, disappointing. Take Skyrim, his most successful game, the conflict with Alduin SHOULD be something really epic, and yet, its probably the most ignored story in the game. Alduin is BORING. What caught players attention? The civil war, which Pagliarulo actually dissed in the Bard's College storyline as something mundane. And yet that mundane thing was more interesting than a dragon god trying to eat the world. Even worse, said mundane thing was not fleshed out because he won't write a deep storyline and flesh out the concepts.

Now, I don't think he's a bad writer. Quests like The Silver Shroud, the Dark Brotherhood storyline of Oblivion, and much of his incidental dialogue is actually really good. But his insistence that the gameplay and environment should support the entire game, not dialogue makes him a poor RPG writer. He'd be better off in an MMO or MOBA environment. Being an RPG writer means you are writing a book or pulp novel in game format.

It's also the problem of overlaying a linear story path, full of set triggers onto an open world of emergent (To a point) gameplay.

There's no real life to the factions - every time through, they will hit linear story beats, driven by the player. There's no REAL conflict, no REAL impact of super mutants. That's backstory and ending slide.

Now imagine that the BOS was a dynamic presence and whilst your actions with them could impact things, they would encroach over the wasteland regardless.

Now, if he was truly into what he espouses, then there would be no questlines, just scene design and a dynamic environment.

What we end up with is an open world with story nodes, which feels less satisfying as it fails to take advantage of either method.

Mod support is coming to Skyrim Special Edition and Fallout 4 after all.

I think my heart just skipped a beat.

No external assets means no new models or textures, or scripts..... or any mod worth downlading

Yeah, that's really kinda ruined my excitement.

At that point why even bother, I have never seen an asetless mod break 1000 downloads, for a game series where hundreds of thousands is only mildly popular, the big ones have millions

I don't think any of the mods I wanted to get used those, so I'm good. All that I'd really miss are new weapons to shoot stuff with.

No external assets?! Then what's the point?! I mean, what the heck could you do with no external assets? You might as well play the base game, mod-free.

edited 5th Oct '16 1:17:43 PM by astrokitty

What mods did you want, because odds are they DID.

Change damage values, add new NPC, make an item that is a coppy of another item but with new stats.

Thats.... about it.

edited 5th Oct '16 1:42:34 PM by Imca

Well I guess they could do things with weight and damage and maybe even making it so I can add ballistic weave to all my clothes. That in and of itself would be real nice.