They didn't really remove the skills though. They simply changed the format. Instead of putting points in a skill, you put the point in a skill perk. It's the same thing.

I have had some time to play F4 for a while now, and have been able to formulate some opinions.

My initial reaction had a lot of negatives. I was even tempted to want my money back. There were a lot of things that just jumped out and slapped me in the face.

The way the game is blurry whenever you move if you have anti-aliasing on, or looks just atrocious with it turned off is a big one. I mean, how can this pass QA? A silly question, since we all know Bethesda does not have a quality control department.

The character creation is just plain bad. You are supposed to run your mouse over various head parts, and then you can edit those parts. But it was often a pixel hunt, where the slightest motion of the mouse sent you to another part of the face. Even when I did keep it selected, half the time I could not tell if anything was even changing or not. The "old" system of sliders in Skyrim worked very well. So they had to stop using it. Thankfully the LooksMenu mod fixes that somewhat, by giving you a list of every head part you can edit.

Then the game starts and I am forced to be married. No, I don't want to play a character who is married. Then I am forced to be married to a guy. Ewww, gross! Why not force me to be married to a garden slug? On top of it I am forced to have a kid? Umm, no. Going through the house I click on a pair of army fatigues, and hear my character say "I'm so proud of him." Him? WTF? If anyone was in the military it was me. I found it all to be very insulting. I really wanted to smack Bethesda silly.

When I finally got to playing the game things did improve. Seeing the pre war world was a nice change for the Fallout world, with everything so shiny and new. Once out of the vault and into the wasteland things were back to normal, guns, corpses, monsters, looting. Ok, this I like. The gunplay took a while to get used to. I am not sure exactly why, but I had a lot of trouble hitting things, especially the small critters that jump around, like bloatfiles and mole rats. I still do have trouble with them. I don't know if it is the iron sights (which I have never really liked), or something else.

The look of the world itself is something I love though. Finally I have something truly positive to say! It is a combination of leafless trees, brambly undergrowth, and the decaying detritus of the old world scattered all over. It isn't a desert-like world such as New Vegas or FO3. Rather it looks like November, when the leaves have all fallen of the trees, but before the bright blanket of winter's snow has come to cover the land. Also unlike FO3, the trees don't look like burned up hulks that have magically sat there for 200 years without falling down. Instead they just look like trees in late fall.

The lighting is good (well, once I disabled the god rays in the game options, and the Depth of Field and motion blur in the .ini file). The latter annoyed me to no end though. I do not know why Bethesda goes out of its way to make its games look ugly. It is like going to a car dealer and finding them intentionally throwing mud over all the cars on sale. I shouldn't have go through all these hoops to make the game look as good as it can be. But at least Beth didn't add even more insult by putting a green tint over the entire world like they did in FO3. Or a yellow one like Obsidian did with NV.

The sad thing I have to keep fixing things to make the game playable. I don't know how people can play this on a console.

The cooking is really nice. So far it looks like everything you kill can be cooked and turned into a useful healing item. Many have handy buffs as well, like more action points, or higher carry weight, and so on. So being a wasteland huntress is a good thing. I rarely use Stimpacks. It is almost always food items I have cooked. Cooking meat also magically removes radiation from it, so all this stuff is safe to eat. The only glaring omission is that you cannot cook any of the prewar food like instamash and salisbury steak. So I never eat them, as they give you rads, and have no buffs.

The crafting is mostly better than the other games. But not in all ways. A very blatant omission is that for some reason you cannot craft ammunition. You can literally build a fortress with laser cannons, but not a single .308 Winchester round. What is wrong with that picture? The other crafting is kind of odd. You can modify weapons and armor, but as far as I can tell you cannot actually create any new. In fact the only workstation that can create new items is the Chem Station. So every mod uses it to craft their items.

Most of the crafting seems to be dedicated to building settlements. The game seems to expect you do this all over the place. I personally do not give a crap. If I want to play Sim City, I will play Sim City. I play the Fallout games because I want post-apocalyptic adventure. Not civil engineering and social administration. But I understand a lot of people like the settlement building, so that is a big draw for them.

The powered armor is well done. In FO3 and NV power armor was really under-developed. It was just a heavy suit of armor with some very small buffs and negatives. In F4 wearing PA really makes you feel superheroic. For starters you are gigantic. You can jump off of anything and take zero damage, like in all superhero movies. For the most part bullets seem to just bounce off you. Though you still take some damage. You can fight hand to hand with a deathclaw and not die after the first hit, which really is saying something. To balance all this out you need fusion cores to power the armor, and they run out over time. So you cannot go crazy wearing it.

That said, there is a lot of powered armor suits in the game. I am still in the top left corner of the map, and I have already found about 4 suits of armor. I have also collected about 6 or so fusion cores. If you follow the proddings of the game and go straight to Concord after leaving the Vault you will be almost immediately be give a suit of powered armor. It makes for a very dramatic moment, you need the armor to fight off a horde of Raiders, and then a Deathclaw rises out of the street. I am not worried about spoilers here, because everyone who has seen a video of the game has seen that particular scene. They were showing it months before the game came out.

But all in all, as much as I like how they do powered armor, I think they put too much of it in the game, and give it to you too soon.

I am still getting used to the weapons in the game. Being low level I still have not seen them all. Most of what I come across are Pipe guns, which are homemade firearms tinkered together from junk. On one hand I should applaud Bethesda, because they do look like something that low lifes would cobble together in their ruined garages. But I found back playing FO3 that I prefer seeing real world weapons in my games over generic ones. That is why I replaced the generic assault rifles in FO3 with M16s. I would rather see a Raider with a Glock 17 or a Beretta 92 than a pipe with a handle taped to it. So I am becoming underwhelmed with the guns. I have found a lot of good firearm mods, I am thinking of trying to replace the vanilla weapons with them. But I still don't understand how the firearm creation works, given all the gun customization in this game.

Like FO3, this is still a small arms kind of game. I have found some energy ammo, but it is few and far between. Likewise, it took me a while to find an energy weapon. Partly that is my fault, because I avoided following the game's prodding and going straight to Concord. Instead I wandered around a a lot, and didn't find even one laser pistol. OTOH, at Concord you can a laser musket laying in the street. If you see it that is (I passed it right by my first time in the town. I had to go back for it.). Instead I did not start seeing even laser pistols start showing up in the leveled lists until I got to around 8th level or so.

There is an energy weapon right in Vault 111, but it is locked up in with a super hard lock that you cannot even try to pick until you are high level. Which found very insulting. Why did they even put it there, if we have no chance to get it?

If you want to play an energy weapons character you are going to have to use the console to start with a laser weapon. You are also going to have to create a mod to craft energy ammo, or use one that increases the amount of it you find in loot and from vendors.

As far as the world itself goes, F4 is really good. Bethesda has really outdone themselves in terms of world design. All of the small buildings you find have interiors that are part of the outdoor cell. So there are no loading screens from going through the door, and you can literally see through the windows and shoot at whatever is inside. Only the larger interior areas are in separate cells. Lexington was fantastic, with half a dozen raised highways all converging over the city, combined with tall buildings with blasted open sides and roofs. It is like a jungle where you can go up and over and down half the town without touching the ground.

Now monsters have new ways of getting at you too. Feral Ghouls will often lay motionless on the ground with the prewar corpses. Then when you get close they rise up and attack you like zombies. Worse they can climb in through windows to get you. Mole Rats can literally tunnel underground where you cannot shoot them, then pop up behind you to bite you in the back. You really have to be on your toes. I used to think Mole Rats were cute in FO3. Now I hate those blasted buggers!

They removed the skills from game, which I think really hurts it. The Special attributes are still there, but their only purpose is to govern which perks you can take. You can only choose the perks of the same level or lower of its governing Special attributes. So if you have a Luck of 5, you can only take the first 5 perks under Luck. In the other games your Special meant a lot more, and having high skills really defined your character. All of this means the game is definitely not a Role Playing Game. It is a First and Third Person Shooter with some RPG-like elements is all.

So far I am enjoying exploring the new land that the game offers, and shooting and looting and eating things. But once that wears off I don't think I will be spending much time in F4. Already I have a hankering to go back to FO3 to play Hecate there. She feels like a real person there, but not so much so in the Commonwealth.

One more nice thing I can say about F4 is that it includes full HDT physics. That means that the trailing end of a longcoat will flap in the breeze, hair will flow naturally, ponytails will bounce around, etc... It makes the hair especially look lively and real.

The female player voice was done by a good VA, so I don't mind the voiced protagonist. I am used to a partially voiced protagonist from the old school RPGs like Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate. I even used mods to add voices to Oblivion and Skyrim (mostly using the dialog from Baldur's Gate).

I have not looked for an alternate start mod. I should. Or just figure out how to do it myself. It was not hard creating my own alternate start in Skyrim.

It is easy doing your own Alternate Start. I just did one as a test between now and my last post in this topic! I'll start a new thread to explain how.

I disagree on that. I could put my skill points in lockpicking, and pick any lock in the Wasteland by level 5 or 6. While at the same time I could be spending my perks on things like doing more damage with my weapons, or to the opposite sex, increasing my DR, etc... In F4 I can slowly get better at lockpicking and that is it. Half of our ability to customize our characters and make them unique individuals is gone.

I disagree on that. I could put my skill points in lockpicking, and pick any lock in the Wasteland by level 5 or 6. While at the same time I could be spending my perks on things like doing more damage with my weapons, or to the opposite sex, increasing my DR, etc... In F4 I can slowly get better at lockpicking and that is it. Half of our ability to customize our characters and make them unique individuals is gone.

Ah but it also doesn't matter as much in Fallout4 because you aren't capped at lvl 30 or whatever.

The lack of a level cap is a good thing. That really hurt FO3.

The whole baby kidnapped and must find it after 200 years in a cryopod story does not grab me in the least; it feels extremely contrived.

To be honest, trying to find a baby that could have been snatched at any point over 210 years just seems utterly futile to me. Odds are that kid grew up, and even if it lived a long life, died of old age a long time ago.

I am sure it is still alive though, and an adult. My reasoning is that I have seen it said multiple times that your baby looks like a cross between what your character and your pre-war spouse look like. That does not really mean anything when it is an infant. It only matters if the kid is grown up. So I am sure if you follow the main quest you will find grown-up baby, probably older than you are (since that is the way it usually goes in these sorts of stories).

But even given that suspicion, I feel even less desire to go off in search of the kid. He or she is a grown-up, has lived in the Wasteland all of their life, and can sure as heck take care of themselves better than I can!

I restarted Hecate, and noticed something that was nagging at me since my first time playing her.

In the opening part of the game, set in the Pre-War days, the Vault-Tec salesman says some odd things. He hints that nuclear war is going to come sooner rather than later. As if he is somehow privy to the actual knowledge of when the war is going to begin. It gave me the impression that Vault-Tec started the war. Which I would not put past them.

He also says that the Player and their family have been pre-selected for a spot in the local vault. That is odd, because people had to pay to get into the vaults. But you get in free? They seem to specifically want you and/or your family. The kidnapping of your child in the intro reinforces this. Especially since the head kidnapper looks at you and says "We still have a backup." Obviously that is you. So they wanted the kid most of all, but you too, from before the war.

I am sure playing the main quest will reveal everything about the second part, and just what they (I am guessing the Institute) wants with the kid. But I wonder if the Vault Tec salesman's interesting statements ever get answered as well?

To be honest, trying to find a baby that could have been snatched at any point over 210 years just seems utterly futile to me. Odds are that kid grew up, and even if it lived a long life, died of old age a long time ago.

I am sure it is still alive though, and an adult. My reasoning is that I have seen it said multiple times that your baby looks like a cross between what your character and your pre-war spouse look like. That does not really mean anything when it is an infant. It only matters if the kid is grown up. So I am sure if you follow the main quest you will find grown-up baby, probably older than you are (since that is the way it usually goes in these sorts of stories).

But even given that suspicion, I feel even less desire to go off in search of the kid. He or she is a grown-up, has lived in the Wasteland all of their life, and can sure as heck take care of themselves better than I can!

The story is just awful. It's so restrictive. Khajiit thought before it was released that maybe you'd be able to forget about your family and use it as motivation towards what kind of character you'd be in the Commonwealth wasteland. This would've been acceptable to Khajiit, because after all, you had a preset background story in Fallout3 and New Vegas. Nope. Not only do they . Bethesda claims to learn things after every game they release. This one hopes that the lesson Beth learns from Fallout4 is that the backstory should NEVER affect what happens in the future of their open world RPGs (unless the player chooses to engage in it and is not forced into it) as it restricts player options.

My impression is that it is not just you and your family that Vault Tec wanted, but everyone in Vault 111. The staff was supposed to evacuate the vault after six months, but their orders were to never open the cryo tubes. They were supposed to just leave everyone frozen. The tubes themselves could be opened remotely. They don't way where from however. So it seems that the Vault was basically a Pre-War stash of humans. All I can guess was the idea to have the genetic material of people who had never been exposed to the radiation and toxicity of the post war world. But there might be other reasons.

My impression is that it is not just you and your family that Vault Tec wanted, but everyone in Vault 111. The staff was supposed to evacuate the vault after six months, but their orders were to never open the cryo tubes. They were supposed to just leave everyone frozen. The tubes themselves could be opened remotely. They don't way where from however. So it seems that the Vault was basically a Pre-War stash of humans. All I can guess was the idea to have the genetic material of people who had never been exposed to the radiation and toxicity of the post war world. But there might be other reasons.

I just heard a utility worker Protectron say: "This work site has gone, zero days without an incident."

I presumed that your family (urgh) was chosen because of your spouse's (urgh) military background, since everyone is so proud of Him. I think I remember something being mentioned about a meeting or event of some sort that He is getting ready for at the start of the game. Sanctuary Hills also seems like a pretty fancy neighbourhood, so perhaps all of the residents there are worth preserving.

Knowing Vault Tec, the cryo freezing was probably just some sort of vaguely scientific experiment. It's not the wackiest Vault out there.

I just figured something out. The color of your Pipboy light (which you turn on and off by holding down Tab) is the same as the color you have the Pipboy screen. You can change it in the Display Settings, down at the bottom where the three Pipboy color settings are. To make it an ordinary white light set them to the following:

Pipboy Color R = Move 9 clicks from the far right
Pipboy Color G = All the way to the right
Pipboy Color B = Move 7 clicks from the far right

Or go to your My Documents\My Games\Fallout 4 folder and edit your Fallout4Prefs.ini. You will find these three lines, set them like so"

fPipboyEffectColorB=0.6500
fPipboyEffectColorG=1.0000
fPipboyEffectColorR=0.5500

Yes it is very neat that you can change the pipboy color and light.

However, I prefer to keep the green color and instead use this mod- Tactical Flashlights to add a side mounted light that can be crafted in many colors.

That is some crazy font you have going on mALX.

Merry Xmas and happy new year to you as well.

I always leave Chorrol and head off every few months. But I always come back eventually. There are so many dedicated Bethesda gamers here that I enjoy chatting with!

I loved that quest, the Museum of Witchcraft was so spooky and tense when Alice and I first explored it.

Deathclaws are my absolute favourite wasteland creature - Alice has a pet 'Claw that keeps an eye on Red Rocket Truck Stop while we're out on adventures.

But there must have been some selection process for "better genes" if they were selected for saving. Not just any genes would be worth preserving; traits like intelligence would have to factor in.

They kind of dump a half baked story on your character without a well thought out background. It is one of the things I liked better about Obsidian's New Vegas = extremely well thought out and in depth background stories on the characters.

It's even cheaper on CDkeys.

Congrats! That is about the same as I paid over Thanksgiving. Now you can fix the game with mods!

I mean, why would the Brotherhood care about wiping out the Railroad?

I discovered something a few days ago. There are a number of little low sandbag walls in places, like the Concord main street. Those are normally static. But if you are in power armor, you can smash right through them and destroy them. That was really cool.

Holy crap! If you go off course during the intro, the bomb falls and you die!

Isn't that great! I tried that with my second character just to see what would happen.