Who the Hell put this Settlement Bullshit in Fallout 4?!?!?

[Solid Snake]

Look Bethesda, if I wanted to waste hours of my life playing Minecraft, I'd fucking play Terraria instead, because it's better than Minecraft.

But I'd play one of those games, with actual camera angles and views designed to actually intuitively build what I want, and a remotely decent interface.

You know what I want from Fallout? Exploration and role-play. I want to feel powered to conquer the wastes through a well-crafted narrative that has an actual sense of pacing. I want to make tough choices and engage in hours upon hours of dialogue with people and get to know their hopes and fears. I want to find some goodies in old Vaults and blow Supermutants to bits with crazy weaponry.

You know what I never wanted? Settlement Simulator 3000. Who needs to save anyone when we can waste hours upon hours providing Sanctuary with food and electricity using the shitty interface that for some reason isn't top-down like strategy games should be and that requires you to walk around the map just to place objects!!!

Fuck, can I just start playing New Vegas again instead? New Vegas was actually Fallout.

[pochercoaster]

But I like The Sims Fallout.

[Gregness]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

*snip*
You know what I never wanted? Settlement Simulator 3000. Who needs to save anyone when we can waste hours upon hours providing Sanctuary with food and electricity using the shitty interface that for some reason isn't top-down like strategy games should be and that requires you to walk around the map just to place objects!!!

If you ever played the old 1998 Battlezone games, they actually had a fairly cool first person strategy interface.

[Solid Snake]

Actually, I think what's starting to annoy me even more than Settlement Simulator 3000 is the complete lack of roleplaying options. Bethesda stripped the dialogue so far down that it's Mass Effect style guessing as to what tone your character's going to respond with. It's so stupid! I can barely even identify with my character because it doesn't feel like I have any meaningful input into who he is or how he thinks.

By contrast like, with New Vegas, I was able to build up entire fuckin' mythologies around my characters. They had cohesive backstories that informed choices I made and the whole world was alive around them. It was awesome!

Fallout 4 suffers from the Fallout 3 problem of: "How the hell are these random settlers still alive two hundred years after the bombs fell when they have no infrastructure and why the hell is your character the only one fucking capable of leading them?"

Then there's the huge issue of the entire pacing of the beginning of the story, wherein things happen within ten seconds of each other because Bethesda couldn't bother to actually write a decent intro.

I hate you Bethesda, give Obsidian your license to make all future Fallout games, your writers are shitty writers.

[Aerozord]

I'm more bothered by how the dialog options make playing with a mouse a nightmare as you have to move over and click an arrow. Which, big deal, they aren't even trees its yes, no, douche, and more info for basically every single conversation. Mass Effect had alot of that but it also had alot more info to gather and the renegade/paragon options

Not that its the worst its just more in your face. If you really want to talk about limiting RP options, I hope you like killing because 90% of your side quests require you to kill people. There is no stealth option to sneak in and grab something, no conversation option to peacefully solve it, not even a backstabbing dickhead option. You either kill everyone at the location or the mission is incomplete

However I do like the game. Been playing it each day, already planning out my second run through but yea this is no New Vegas, its not even as good as Fallout 3. I certainly wont replay this as much since non-combat focused builds aren't viable.

[phil_]

Originally Posted by Gregness

If you ever played the old 1998 Battlezone games, they actually had a fairly cool first person strategy interface.

All I can contribute to this discussion of the latest fancy PC video is that Battlezone also had an N64 release which kept the strategy and building intact. Not that we played the single player, vastly preferring to waste entire days killing limitless bots in multiplayer. We played enough that we even figured out how the random spawn points for bots was accomplished. Namely, they spawned outside the map and had to bash themselves against the walls until they glitched through to "spawn."

Ah, fond memories of false violence in an appropriate setting.

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

Iono, I kinda like it.

Not mine but it gives me ideas.

[Arcanum]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

I'm more bothered by how the dialog options make playing with a mouse a nightmare as you have to move over and click an arrow.

Apparently you can use the number keys for dialogue options. 1 = up, 2 = left, 3 = right, 4 = down, I think.

Either way, whoever designed the PC controls and UI was out of their goddamn mind. I did find out on reddit the other day that in the settlement menus if you hold shift you can navigate the menu with WASD instead of the arrow keys, so that makes it slightly better (albeit retarded that it is explained nowhere). But there's still the fact that bash, power attack, and grenade are all bound to the same fucking key, and nobody thought that might be a dumb idea.

[MSperoni]

What's even worse is when you're in the middle of a quest and you get a message about how a settlement of yours is under attack and then you go back and parts of it are destroyed.


However, building and maintaining them isn't too hard, and you really don't have to do it at all. It's just an option.

I like it because I can make my own house and fill it with containers (I have my little kitchen downstairs). I built a pretty large house, so big that I actually was able to stuff one of the fabricated houses INTO it (it's my bathroom).



A nice thing about settlements is that if you do build one up (and you only really need one, though I'm working four at the moment), you get traders and whatnot coming in and you're rolling in the caps and gear.

Also you can have a doctor always available.

Plus you gain XP from building. And you unlock more stuff later, like mortars. Those are useful against Deathclaw.

Bethesda doesn't do a very good job of explaining the subtleties though. I had to look online how to rig up my two-story house to have working lights, a TV, a radio, a discoball...

The last thing my character cares about is saving her son. What son?

I'm already sleeping with Preston.

[Aerozord]

Speaking of, that was another bad move on their part. If there was one thing Fallout 3 had over New Vegas it was the story. Revenge is an easy motivator but lots of reasons not to seek it and the game just assumes once you get your revenge you'd want to deal with the politics.

Three hit just the right amount of story. For one you had lots of reasons to search for your father, angry at him, worried, you want answers, heck maybe from wandering you just want the purifier for other reasons and he's who you need to talk to. There was no sense of urgency for much of it. He was alive and you knew of no immediate threat. Heck he was managing his way around just fine for awhile apparently.

This however lacks that. Assuming you empathize with a parent that lost their child, you cant really justify anything else. The only reasonable actions are either to power through story missions, or you aren't that worried in which case the main quest completely falls flat.