"We do have coming in…confirmed reports of nuclear detonations."
June 3, 2015 8:08 AM   Subscribe

Bethesda Softworks has released the official trailer for the highly anticipated Fallout 4. [SLYT]
posted by Timmoy Daen (367 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
 
Set in Boston! I repeat my comment from Mefightclub here:

If it's set in Boston, my first act in the game will be to find my house and murder the thieving fuckers that are squatting in it.
posted by backseatpilot at 8:12 AM on June 3, 2015 [42 favorites]


Dogmeat!

I'm getting super Bioshock: Infinite vibes from this for some reason.
posted by griphus at 8:14 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


YES. YES YES YES YES. YES.

YES.
posted by custardfairy at 8:17 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


There are a lot of great looking games coming out this year, but I can't help but be disappointed that all of them are sequels. I'm holding off on getting a new console or PC until I see something genuinely new that I want to play, and I've got a feeling I'll be waiting a while.
posted by dortmunder at 8:18 AM on June 3, 2015


I have been saving bottlecaps for a long time just to be ready.
posted by rewil at 8:18 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Any Fallout game that is more Dogmeat-centered is well-prioritized.
posted by joan cusack the second at 8:19 AM on June 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


I wonder if The Institute will figure highly in this one if it's set in Boston.
posted by indubitable at 8:20 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


No game franchise has given me as much enjoyment as Fallout. I can't wait.
posted by Sternmeyer at 8:21 AM on June 3, 2015


*takes sip from Nuka-cola*
+3 RADS

posted by Fizz at 8:22 AM on June 3, 2015 [9 favorites]


Jesus, that title just about gave me a heart attack.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 8:22 AM on June 3, 2015 [44 favorites]


I speak for everyone that has seen Fury Road: This better have vehicles in it.

WITNESS ME!
posted by WinnipegDragon at 8:23 AM on June 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


Are people really excited about the Boston setting? I... hmm. Boston has never struck me as a really distinctive setting based on its modern day architecture. I mean, it beats Columbus OH or something, but I don't have a real idea of what is going to be distinct about a post apocalyptic Boston vs. some other American city. Plus in terms of the environs, Boston is just surrounded by so much sprawl that you have to go a long way until you reach wilderness.

Anyway, this is exciting news and I hope that Bethesda will have finally realized the combat in their games is shit with this one.
posted by selfnoise at 8:25 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


So guys, catch me up. Has War changed yet?
posted by tittergrrl at 8:27 AM on June 3, 2015 [50 favorites]


"I speak for everyone that has seen Fury Road: This better have vehicles in it."

Well there's also the Mad Max Game
posted by Tenuki at 8:28 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


This is the month of Witcher 3 in my house, but I'm looking forward to explore any and all corners of the wastes. Boston is an excellent setting - I expect at least 50% more stimpaks. Also jazz and power armor.

Please hire competent writers, please.
posted by ersatz at 8:29 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


No! Bad Dogmeat! We don't hunt for babies to eat!
posted by unsupervised at 8:31 AM on June 3, 2015


MetaFilter: expect at least 50% more stimpaks. Also jazz and power armor.

posted by Fizz at 8:31 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Dog main PC or GTFO.
posted by kmz at 8:32 AM on June 3, 2015 [12 favorites]


Boston has never struck me as a really distinctive setting based on its modern day architecture. I mean, it beats Columbus OH or something, but I don't have a real idea of what is going to be distinct about a post apocalyptic Boston vs. some other American city.

Don't see this as a problem. The original games were set in southwest locations that were evocative but didn't relentlessly cling to prewar references as the FO3 games did. Maybe this is a return to form.
posted by TypographicalError at 8:32 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


This better have vehicles in it.

Boats and piracy, direct ripoff from Black Flag.
posted by backseatpilot at 8:34 AM on June 3, 2015


Holy crap Tenuki that Mad Max game actually looks good. Looks like the same fighting style as the Batman Arkham games, which I love.
posted by numaner at 8:34 AM on June 3, 2015


Are people really excited about the Boston setting? I... hmm. Boston has never struck me as a really distinctive setting based on its modern day architecture.

This is funny because I didn't know the game was set in Boston but figured it out from the trailer because of all the landmarks I recognized (Beacon Hill, Paul Revere Statue, I thought I saw Fenway).
posted by Elementary Penguin at 8:35 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


Huh, the tipoff for me was the Constitution with the hoverpods on it.
posted by backseatpilot at 8:36 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


Are people really excited about the Boston setting?

I saw a blasted Faneiul Hall and immediately started pricing out an Xbox One. I grew up near DC and one of the Big Funs of Fallout 3 was identifying locations I was familiar with.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 8:36 AM on June 3, 2015 [7 favorites]


Holy shit this looks gorgeous.

I never played New Vegas, but F3 ate my life for months.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:36 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


griphus: "I'm getting super Bioshock: Infinite vibes from this for some reason."

Me too. I think it's that old-timey music in the beginning.

I really loved the previous Fallout games but I'll probably wait for reviews before getting this one. Hope it lives up to expectations.
posted by exogenous at 8:36 AM on June 3, 2015


Will there be soft rains?

Please tell me there will come soft rains.
posted by bonehead at 8:36 AM on June 3, 2015 [7 favorites]


Dog main PC or GTFO.

"Look, Dogmeat, I'm not proud of asking you to do this but we need your help. Can you re-enable the broken water pumps so our crops can grow?"
  • BARK!
  • Grrrrrrr...
  • (Head tilt)
  • (Groom anus)
"I knew we could count on you, Dogmeat!"
posted by griphus at 8:36 AM on June 3, 2015 [43 favorites]


Huh, the tipoff for me was the Constitution with the hoverpods on it.

I've never been to the Constitution so I didn't recognize it #transplant
posted by Elementary Penguin at 8:37 AM on June 3, 2015


[low whistle]

Hoody hoo, I can't wait.
posted by Gelatin at 8:39 AM on June 3, 2015


I saw a blasted Faneiul Hall and immediately started pricing out an Xbox One. I grew up near DC and one of the Big Funs of Fallout 3 was identifying locations I was familiar with.

Why an XBox One? PC > console. If you have a decent PC already you're better off spending that $500 on a really good graphics card.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 8:41 AM on June 3, 2015 [7 favorites]


...I don't have a real idea of what is going to be distinct about a post apocalyptic Boston vs. some other American city.

There will probably be more street signs than there were before the apocalypse, so that you can figure out which way to leave the stupid fucking unlabeled seven-way intersections you find yourself in. You will also probably encounter people who have been lost trying to get somewhere since before armageddon.
posted by XMLicious at 8:42 AM on June 3, 2015 [15 favorites]


They seem to be using the same game engine from 2008's Fallout 3 (which is essentially the same engine from 2001's Morrowind). Not necessarily a bad thing. My computer might actually have a hope at running this.
posted by Iridic at 8:43 AM on June 3, 2015


"I knew we could count on you, Dogmeat!"

GAME OF THE MILENNIUM
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:43 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Yes, please. Drive-able vehicles.
posted by octothorpe at 8:44 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


> Well there's also the Mad Max Game

Not just a Mad Max Game, but a Mad Max Game with Mad Max's 1973 XB GT Ford Falcon Pursuit Special! I really really enjoyed the shit out of the new movie, and I accepted the general sidelining of Max, but the car's outcome was... unsatisfactory.
posted by Sunburnt at 8:45 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Also, while I am not a categorical PC > console sort of guy, for a first-person game that's going to be heavy on gunplay and inventory management? Yeah, it's keyboard + mouse time. I still can't figure out why anybody would ever willingly play any of these with a gamepad.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:45 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Driveable vehicles in Boston is practically a video game in itself. Not a particularly fun one, though.
posted by Metroid Baby at 8:45 AM on June 3, 2015 [15 favorites]


I'm hearing not bad but mediocre things about the new Mad Max game. That it's got the constituent components of Mad Maxiness but is lacking the spark that George Miller brings (plus the first trailers had a very American sounding Max means the devs just might not get it)

But if you want an Arkham/Shadow of Mordor with post-apocalyptic cars then by all means check it out.
posted by thecjm at 8:45 AM on June 3, 2015


Who knows what horrors live in the depths of the Ted Williams Tunnel? Maybe the B Line is the only train still working? Maybe Harvard has put a dome over Allston with Deathbots guarding it. Don't swim in the Charles! So excited.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 8:47 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


I often feel like I played a very different and much, much worse Shadow of Mordor than literally everyone else except the friend of mine for whom I bought it for Christmas and then borrowed it from after he was all "meh" about it.
posted by griphus at 8:47 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


There are a lot of great looking games coming out this year, but I can't help but be disappointed that all of them are sequels.

Splatoon wishes to Splatoon you with it's squidy splatty toonness.
posted by Navelgazer at 8:47 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


gunplay and inventory management?

Hahaha like Bethesda will bother to make either function decently on the PC.

Admittedly there will be mods quickly after release.

Also, judging from Witcher 3 we may be back to the era of "fuuuuuck people with reasonably specced machines, the hair must flow!"

Who knows what horrors live in the depths of the Ted Williams Tunnel?

I was actually just thinking "flooded tunnels" should and will be a part of this.
posted by selfnoise at 8:48 AM on June 3, 2015


rabbitrabbit: "Jesus, that title just about gave me a heart attack."

AND THEN YOU READ THE STORY

(TEARS OFF SHIRT, RUNS INTO STREET)

posted by boo_radley at 8:49 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Cryogenitally Preserved Ted Williams could be down there!
posted by Elementary Penguin at 8:50 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Squeee!

I like that they left the gold on the State House. Of course it would still be there. What good is gold in an apocalypse?

I've been holding off getting a new PC or console. I think this may do it. (That and I'd finally be able to play some other games I've been drooling over.)

I wonder if it was targeted by our own side? One too many days stuck in Boston traffic will leave you thinking that maybe, just maybe, the place would be better if you nuked it off the planet.
posted by Hactar at 8:50 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Love that dirty water.
posted by maryr at 8:51 AM on June 3, 2015


Ars suggests that the Mad Max game was farmed out by the movie studio independently of Miller while the movie bounced in and out of production hell.

I just started a Fallout 3 and New Vegas playthrough (or three months ago, which explains how long it takes me to do a playthrough these days). I really hope that Fallout 4 picks up the more open (geographically) world flavor of New Vegas, because dealing with Fallout 3's "can't get there from here" tunnel system is probably the worst aspect of Fallout 3.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:52 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


I still can't figure out why anybody would ever willingly play any of these with a gamepad.

Because it is way, way more comfortable to do a bunch of fat bong rips and turn into a pile of mashed potato on the sofa than to do so sitting upright in a chair. More room for spreading out the inevitable snackables, too. Also, bigger screen.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:52 AM on June 3, 2015 [12 favorites]


It accurately represents the DC Metro, though. Which is why Bethesda is the perfect team to make a game set on the Lovecraftian streets of Boston!
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:53 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


Cynicism time! I can't help but notice that Bethesda is continuing their long-standing tradition of horribly stiff, janky-looking character animations. It's the year 2015 guys, get with the program.

Holy crap Tenuki that Mad Max game actually looks good. Looks like the same fighting style as the Batman Arkham games, which I love.

Everybody's doing that these days. See also: Assassin's Creed and Shadow of Mordor. (Shadow of Mordor is in fact a totally awesome orc-murdering game unfortunately trapped inside a pretty mediocre Assassin's Creed clone.)
posted by neckro23 at 8:53 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


can't get there from here

That's basically modern-day Boston in a nutshell, so I think you might be disappointed.
posted by backseatpilot at 8:53 AM on June 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


If there are driveable vehicles, I hope they can get Storrowed, because that would be hilarious.
posted by maryr at 8:54 AM on June 3, 2015 [8 favorites]


Because it is way, way more comfortable to do a bunch of fat bong rips and turn into a pile of mashed potato on the sofa than to do so sitting upright in a chair. More room for spreading out the inevitable snackables, too. Also, bigger screen.

Every game-caliber video card has HDMI out now. PC gaming and couch gaming need not be enemies!
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:54 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


Alex Navarro is on Twitter calling for armored Duck Boats and.... yes. Yes.
posted by selfnoise at 8:54 AM on June 3, 2015 [12 favorites]


Making my first-ever trip to Boston in a couple weeks. You're damn right I'll be scouting locations for surviv... er, seeing the sights.
posted by Xavier Xavier at 8:55 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


It accurately represents the DC Metro, though.

Actually, one of my pet peeves with FO3 was how inaccurate the Metro Map was, but I was living in DC at the time and being pedantic.
posted by Navelgazer at 8:55 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Every game-caliber video card has HDMI out now. PC gaming and couch gaming need not be enemies!

You don't even need to give up your chair gaming, since Steam Home Streaming works really well. Just hook a cheap media PC up to your TV and stream it from your beefy PC.
posted by neckro23 at 8:57 AM on June 3, 2015


Okay, the actual which-stop-puts-you-where part maybe not, but it made an accurate representation of the "it's three transfers and I have to figure out which platform is for which direction on the Yellow line and oh shit did they just say single-tracking fuck it I'll get a cab" experience.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:57 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


Plus in terms of the environs, Boston is just surrounded by so much sprawl that you have to go a long way until you reach wilderness.

Fells to the north, Blue Hills to the south. I mean it's not vast wilderness, but it's enough trees to do something with.
posted by maryr at 8:57 AM on June 3, 2015


Ha, some people are apparently a little tired of the dog jokes.
posted by kmz at 8:57 AM on June 3, 2015


Navelgazer got there before me on the Metro map issue I see. I would have minded the layout issues less if the look had been right, but in fairness they probably wanted to bring something of their own to the table rather than just mimicking WMATA's already-present post-apocalypse dim gloom high-ceiling look.

Too bad the story picks up after Quilla's part.
posted by phearlez at 8:59 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


PC gaming and couch gaming need not be enemies!

Except that it's nigh impossible to use a mouse and keyboard effectively while reclining Jabba-like. I mean, cool for you if you like PC gaming; for me it's about simplicity of not too many buttons, and being able to lounge about however I wish. Diablo II is about the last run-around-and-do-stuff game that I liked on PC, and even that gets wearying remembering which buttons I've mapped to which functions. (Stuff like Sim City/RCT/etc are different of course).
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:01 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Calling dibs on backseatpilot's house.
posted by Xavier Xavier at 9:01 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I love fallout grognards for their complete ideological purity when it comes to LOCAL TRANSIT SYSTEMS. "this mechanical jingobot lasering commies is fine, BUT WHERE'S THE FUKKEN BLUE LINE BETHESDA?!"
posted by boo_radley at 9:02 AM on June 3, 2015 [12 favorites]


!!!
posted by brecc at 9:04 AM on June 3, 2015


I am wearing my Pint-Size Slasher mask and swinging my kitchen knife with glee >:D
posted by sexyrobot at 9:05 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]




From the look of the clips, Fallout 4 Boston is more heavily rebuilt than the Capital Wasteland. Which I like, and makes me wonder to what extent New Vegas and it's system of factions and general theme of civilization starting to grow back has influenced this. I also wonder if they're going to use FNV's weapons and crafting system as well. Hmmm... thinking about it, I'm not sure if I'm actually excited for this or if I'm excited that maybe Obsidian will get to make another Fallout game afterwards.

griphus: IMHO Shadow of Mordor would have been a really good generic fantasy RPG. Run around, stealth kill bad guys, environmental kills, prune the hierarchy of the evil dudes like it's the worlds most heavily armed and belligerent rosebush. All good stuff, competently executed. It was just a terrible terrible Lord of the Rings game. "The dark lord Sauron's power is insidious and will corrupt all those who seek to use it, even for noble ends" is a pretty big theme in the book. "The dark lord Sauron's power is AWESOME and we need MORE OF IT" is pretty much the theme of the game. Which is odd, because for the first half it seemed like they were competently building to an ending where the protagonists learned they were being used by Sauron, necessitating a heroic rejection of the power they had accumulated. That's not how it went though.
posted by Grimgrin at 9:05 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


They seem to be using the same game engine from 2008's Fallout 3

Fallout 3 and NV were based on the TES:Oblivion engine, I read that 4 will be based on a modified version of the Skyrim engine. So if you can run Skyrim, you should be able to run this.
posted by T.D. Strange at 9:05 AM on June 3, 2015


Never forget, never forgive.
posted by kmz at 9:06 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


If you've never played Fallout before but you've always been intrigued, where should you start?
posted by melissam at 9:06 AM on June 3, 2015


Except that it's nigh impossible to use a mouse and keyboard effectively while reclining Jabba-like.

This is why you can get USB game controllers to use with the PC, as well, should you want to do that. They've existed for years; it's not like mouse and keyboard are the only options. (you can even plug an XBox controller into a PC USB port and it'll work fine.)
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 9:07 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Even though I'm a Fallout curmudgeon that never wants to play a 3D shooter Fallout, that trailer was amazing. Much in the way that it's sometimes preferable to read a Wikipedia article about a movie than to actually watch a movie for two hours, I think highlight videos from this game will be very enjoyable. Kind of a 3D travelogue.
posted by ignignokt at 9:08 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


It was just a terrible terrible Lord of the Rings game.

There were a lot of speculation that Mordor began as an actual Batman game. Not sure if that was ever confirmed or debunked.
posted by kmz at 9:08 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


[OPEN POST]

1 Earnings clipboard
1 coffee mug
1 pack of cigarettes
Scrawled note about transit systems?

[TAKE ALL?]
posted by Happy Dave at 9:08 AM on June 3, 2015 [11 favorites]


Melissam: Fallout 3 and New Vegas are about neck and neck. The older Fallout games, at this point, will be more of an acquired taste.
posted by protocoach at 9:09 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


If you've never played Fallout before but you've always been intrigued, where should you start?

Fallout 1. It's creates an amazing sense of exploratory freedom and a really good turn-based tactical battle system. However, if you're fairly young, the graphics may turn you away. I talked to a 21-year-old recently who tried to play it but said it "just looked too old."
posted by ignignokt at 9:10 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


If you've never played Fallout before but you've always been intrigued, where should you start?

I'd recommend New Vegas. It's much more closely aligned with the flavor and mythology of the originals than Fallout 3 is, and you'll get a good feel for what all these people are so in love with. The original two games definitely show their age and require a bit of patience to get into. (I don't know how common this opinion is, but I really didn't like Fallout 3, between things like the transit tunnels actively resisting your desire to play the game and the incredible simplification of some of the interesting moral issues like the role of the Brotherhood of Steel.)
posted by IAmUnaware at 9:10 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


If you've never played Fallout before but you've always been intrigued, where should you start?

Well first you need to do some shopping. I suggest things that are easy to eat one-handed. Something like Coke or Mountain Dew is also essential. Then you need to call a guy for a delivery.

After that, book 3 months vacation off work.

This is why you can get USB game controllers to use with the PC

Well, yeah... which doesn't address the whole 'why would someone use a gamepad for this' thing, which is what I was responding to.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:11 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


IMHO Shadow of Mordor would have been a really good generic fantasy RPG.

My problem was just that the fighting system looked and felt awful. I played it on the PS3 so maybe next-gen versions were better? I love the Arkham games and this felt like a cheap knockoff of those rather than Game of the Year.
posted by griphus at 9:11 AM on June 3, 2015


Fallout 1.

I am going to start an Internet Argument and say Fallout 2 is the better starting point just because it's the more worthwhile experience of the two and a person used to current-gen stuff might get burned out on F1 and never get to F2.
posted by griphus at 9:11 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


If you've never played Fallout before but you've always been intrigued, where should you start?

Fallout 3 on PC, with the EVE energy weapons and Powered-power Armor mods installed.
posted by T.D. Strange at 9:12 AM on June 3, 2015


Oh, yeah. This is what will finally get me to buy a next-gen console. Looking forward to playing in the Fallout universe again.
posted by Blackanvil at 9:12 AM on June 3, 2015


Two things:

Firstly, the graphics look better than FO3 to me. I'm pretty sure they're using the Skyrim engine for this. Which, I should add, worked adequately on my 2012-era cheapass AMD-APU system.

Secondly, VATS is your friend if you're using a controller. Action points become much, much more important.

Also: FO3 was an amazing game. If this is just more of the same, that's not a bad thing.
posted by suetanvil at 9:12 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Fallout 2 is a lot of fun, but it is also a demonstration of how broken a game could be on release day back then.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 9:13 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


If you've never played Fallout before but you've always been intrigued, where should you start?

I thought New Vegas was the stronger of the two "reboot" games, but you could really do either I think. There isn't a ton of lore that's needed to jump into them, so if you want to go the first-person action RPG route then I would start with one of the new ones. They're also both self-contained, so you don't need to play them in any particular order.

Fallout 2 is a direct sequel to the first one, so if you want to dive into some retro gaming start with the original. It really is a masterpiece.
posted by backseatpilot at 9:13 AM on June 3, 2015


Fallout 2 is buuuuuuuuuuuuuu...uuuuuuuuugy though, or was at least until the fan patches. That car is such a mess.
posted by bonehead at 9:13 AM on June 3, 2015


Hm, some scenes are a little off (like when TV tries for New England but ends up Pacific Northwest), but this bit actually looks quite a bit like Blue Hills or the Fells. And this is definitely Fenway, right?
posted by maryr at 9:13 AM on June 3, 2015


kmz: Jesus. Those people are...interesting.

Well first you need to do some shopping. I suggest things that are easy to eat one-handed. Something like Coke or Mountain Dew is also essential. Then you need to call a guy for a delivery.

Hahaha. I should have lead with that. Fallout 3 and New Vegas ate months of my life. My college roommate texted me this morning when he saw this announcement to ask how much accumulated vacation time I had.
posted by protocoach at 9:14 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


backseatpilot: I just glanced at your link, made it about halfway through before: "It seems that the Brotherhood of Steel – or some local equivalent..." And my response was: "The Brotherhood of Steel were descendants of the US Military YOU FOOL! Those are American soldiers/Vault-Tec guards in pre-war power armor! Do you know NOTHING?"

So, I'm officially a fanboy about this game series. Thanks for helping me confirm that.
posted by Grimgrin at 9:15 AM on June 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


Yeah, that's definitely Fenway. Hell you're looking at it from in front of the Beer Works.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 9:15 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


this bit actually looks quite a bit like Blue Hills or the Fells

That was my guess, too.

this is definitely Fenway

Yes it is!
posted by backseatpilot at 9:15 AM on June 3, 2015


Also if you want to really get in on the ground floor with Fallout, start with the incredibly-fun-but-borderline-unplayable-in-the-modern-age Wasteland.
posted by griphus at 9:16 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Why an XBox One? PC > console. If you have a decent PC already you're better off spending that $500 on a really good graphics card.

I don't have a PC. I have a few years old iMac that's never done too great at games and exists mainly for pictures and music storage - 95% of our home computing is through our Chromebooks. Even if the Mac can run this game, it's up in the office with a straight backed chair near the 5 year old's room. Said 5 year old would be sneaking in to said room to watch Daddy play, as happens with Minecraft, instead of going the fuck to sleep.

So the choice is - spend ~400 bucks on new console, hook up to TV, get to play an hour or two a night after kid goes to sleep OR spend ??? bucks on Mac upgrades to get to play for 20 minutes a night while the kid tries to sneak in to see mutants explode, all over the course of 2 hours sitting in an uncomfortable chair.

I played the other Fallouts/Elder Scrolls from the comfort of my couch and aim to do the same again.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:17 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


What about Wasteland 2? Is that any good?
posted by Elementary Penguin at 9:18 AM on June 3, 2015




I honestly think the best argument for Skyrim/Fallout/Morrowind on PC rather than console is the modding scene. Skyrim without mods is very good; Skyrim with mods was one of the best games I ever played. That said, I played FO3 and FNV on Xbox and didn't regret it at all.
posted by protocoach at 9:19 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


What about Wasteland 2? Is that any good?

I'm not sad that I kickstarted it, but it's not as smooth an experience as, say, Pillars of Eternity. There's a lot of combat and a lot of it just feels like filler, which makes the experience drag pretty badly in places.
posted by IAmUnaware at 9:21 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


YMMV, of course! But Fallout 2 seemed to have a more "wacky" atmosphere at the time that I played it. Ideally, I'd replay it give you a less dusty opinion, but one of the designers seems to remember it that way too:
For writers, that means a set of boring conventions on acceptable terminology, the titling of quests and the formatting of descriptions. And then bi-weekly area reviews, to ensure any necessary course-correction happens early on.

But it’s important work. For what happens when documents like these aren’t adhered to, look at the way Fallout 1’s desert-dry humour gave way to the ‘wacky’ Boogie Nights references of its sequel.

“I think Fallout 2 suffered from not having a creative lead,” nodded Avellone. “Someone to enforce that.”
Of course, this doesn't necessarily add up to it being a less worthwhile experience, but it is a thing.
posted by ignignokt at 9:22 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


REACTION
posted by The Whelk at 9:25 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


No no no, robocop. What you do is spend that $500 on cramming better hardware into the iMac. Then $200 or so on a crappy computer to hook up to the TV that networks with the iMac through Steam streaming. Then $60 on a usb/xbox controller so you can play it from the couch. Man, I bet someone could combine all those steps into one neat little package and like... sell you a pre-built machine for $400 that could already play these games without requiring you to take a screwdriver to your computer. I wonder if Microsoft has anyone working on something like that...
posted by specialagentwebb at 9:26 AM on June 3, 2015 [8 favorites]


LOL, from one of the official City of Boston Twitter accounts:
One if by land, and two if by sea; a terrifying dirigible in the sky will be?
posted by maryr at 9:26 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Ugh. I fell into Fallout when I bought my PS3 as a Blu-Ray player because it was widely regarded as one of the best. I never intended to get back into gaming, but the retrovibe of Fallout 3 fell squarely in my wheelhouse and I was hooked. Now it looks like I need to get a next-gen console or a (ugh) PC to enjoy Fallout 4, neither of which is happening. Not surprising, but I had a slim hope for a Mac version.
posted by entropicamericana at 9:28 AM on June 3, 2015


this is very cool and I'm laughing imagining a person who sees the equestrian statue of Washington in front of Faneuil Hall and melts down screaming that it's supposed to be in the Public Garden
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 9:29 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Of course, this doesn't necessarily add up to it being a less worthwhile experience, but it is a thing.

I just realized my opinions of F1 and F2 are both over a decade old at this point and I'm not entirely sure I'd trust 20-year-old me to recommend things to adults.
posted by griphus at 9:30 AM on June 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


OMG WILD KERMIT ARMS FLAILING

Me, not the game. The game of course looks like it must be in my house and soon.

I'll be in my bunk.
posted by Mogur at 9:31 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


sell you a pre-built machine for $400 that could already play these games without requiring you to take a screwdriver to your computer. I wonder if Microsoft has anyone working on something like that...

oh man that would be pretty sweet - i'd want to show off that set up like all the time. is there any way they could throw in a pervy robot who watches everything i do?
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:32 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


SHUT UP AND TAKE MY CAPS!

Also, there'd better be some 18th century duds lying around somewhere. My character will require a tri-cornered hat. And a plasma musket.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 9:32 AM on June 3, 2015 [9 favorites]


Now it looks like I need to get a next-gen console or a (ugh) PC to enjoy Fallout 4, neither of which is happening. Not surprising, but I had a slim hope for a Mac version.

Bootcamp might be your friend here. It is apparently running on the Skyrim engine, so if your computer could handle that, you could set up Bootcamp and run it there.
posted by protocoach at 9:32 AM on June 3, 2015


I'm still on old gen (XBOX 360) but I plan on upgrading to a PC. I have several friends who have custom built their rig and it is not as expensive or difficult as I assumed and they all absolutely love their gaming experience. It might take a few weeks of waiting for parts and the like but it is worth it in the long run. As much as I have enjoyed my old gen console experience. I think I'm ready for a fast gaming PC.

I will be building because of games like this and Witcher 3.
posted by Fizz at 9:33 AM on June 3, 2015


Skyrim without mods is very good; Skyrim with mods was one of the best games I ever played.

This very much applies to New Vegas as well; really good game upfront…a couple of key mods makes it unbelievably fun. I think I've played that game through once a year since it came out; each time tweaking it slightly with some key mods. Nothing game breaking, but some of the mods are just soooooo well done.

And yeah, I play both Fallout 3 and New Vegas on a mac running bootcamp for nothing but those games…it works great (but sometimes laggy in the larger battles).
posted by furnace.heart at 9:34 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


If you've never played Fallout before but you've always been intrigued, where should you start?

If you're hardcore/have lots of free time/want the full experience, it's:
  1. Fallout
  2. Fallout 2
  3. Fallout: New Vegas plus DLC
  4. some other game as a palate cleanser.
  5. Fallout 3 and (at least) the Broken Steel DLC
If you just want to dip your toe and/or have limited free time, I suggest:
  1. Fallout 3 plus Broken Steel DLC (and maybe the others if you feel like it)\
  2. Fallout: New Vegas plus DLC
  3. Fallout, Fallout 2
Fallout 1,2 and NV all take place on a single timeline and are all set in the west coast. (They also share many of the same developers, so the feel is more consistent.) There's a reveal in F2 (the identity of the major bad guy) that later games spoil. This isn't a huge deal, but if you're hugely spoiler-averse, you may wish to plan accordingly.

Fallout 3 basically rehashes the plots of Fallout and Fallout 2, so you can kind of catch up that way. It's also set in a different part of the country so it isn't as dependent on what happens in the other games. (It's still the same universe, but there are differences that can be attributed to the change in location.)

Also, when you play FO3, you should also get Broken Steel. This is because it makes the terrible, stupid, dumb, awful ending of FO3 into just a dream and gives you a better one that also then lets you continue to explore the world.
posted by suetanvil at 9:34 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


is there any way they could throw in a pervy robot who watches everything i do?

They used to... now you actually have to do the hard work of ordering one separately!
posted by kmz at 9:36 AM on June 3, 2015


Like everyone else, I am just slightly disappointed the trailer restrained itself from the wonderful troll of revealing the title to be "FALLOUT 4: DOGMEAT'S ADVENTURE", but otherwise really excited. There's a good variety of locales glimpsed, echoes of some of the more whimsical apocalypse creativity that went into FO3 and...what's this? Rumors of color, somewhere out in the Wasteland? I'm on it!
posted by byanyothername at 9:36 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


The Great Big Mulp: A plasma musket that requires you to muzzle load energy cells! Absurd damage, but slow reload, and a bayonet.
posted by Grimgrin at 9:37 AM on June 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


this is very cool and I'm laughing imagining a person who sees the equestrian statue of Washington in front of Faneuil Hall and melts down screaming that it's supposed to be in the Public Garden

I think that's the Paul Revere behind the Old North Church.
posted by maryr at 9:37 AM on June 3, 2015


They used to... now you actually have to do the hard work of ordering one separately!

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:37 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


Witcher 3 AND Fallout 4? Somebody doesn't want me to be productive for a few months.
posted by corb at 9:40 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]




Fallout 4's Boston better include a Dunkin Donuts on every corner.
posted by backseatpilot at 9:41 AM on June 3, 2015 [9 favorites]


a Dunkin Donuts on every corner

This is only accurate if it includes all four corners of every intersection (and the additional corners of complex intersections).
posted by uncleozzy at 9:45 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


I think that's the Paul Revere behind the Old North Church.

yeah, I think you're right. brb gonna go melt down now
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 9:45 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm ever so curious, does the "Let's go, pal" at the end imply that you can actually, you know, talk?
posted by Timmoy Daen at 9:46 AM on June 3, 2015


So, can anyone do a good Tom Ashbrook impersonation? I need my proposed episode of On Point to be part of an actual mod.

(In the unlikely event it is already in the game, I will repeatedly punch myself in the face with joy.)
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 9:48 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


It'd be so great if the dog was your buddy from the start, and a really big part of the game - I'm imagining being able to teach him commands so he knocks enemies down or grabs weapons or whatever, maybe him barking as an early-warning about bad stuff, reducing the jumble-sale problem a bit by having him sniff out which boxes have actually interesting junk in them, etc. Plus if this starts with you as a kid in the vault again and you raise him from a puppy I WILL LOVE HIM FOREVER.

Also the potential for dog breed mods is huge. To me, pugmeat!
posted by emmtee at 9:48 AM on June 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


start with the incredibly-fun-but-borderline-unplayable-in-the-modern-age Wasteland.

A version that will run on modern systems is included if you order Wasteland 2 on Steam (and may be available there separately) but, like IAmUnaware, I don't regret contributing but don't know that I could recommend buying the remake. The original Wasteland remains one of my favorite games, along with the first Fallout. I replayed Fallout 1 recently and thought it held up nicely, but I am old.
posted by JaredSeth at 9:49 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


I want to see a Super-Mutant stronghold made entirely of empty Dunkin Donuts iced coffee cups.
posted by ignignokt at 9:49 AM on June 3, 2015 [9 favorites]


Maybe the dog can sell stuff for you like in Torchlight? The dog comes into town and people say, "Oh, it's the Vault Dweller's dog! Better pay for the stuff or he'll come back and murder all of us."
posted by Elementary Penguin at 9:50 AM on June 3, 2015 [7 favorites]


"Did you guys hear about that time when he blew up a whole city? What an asshole. Oh shit...the dog's looking at me. Quick, give him the caps. GIVE HIM THE CAPS!"
posted by protocoach at 9:51 AM on June 3, 2015 [8 favorites]


Also, I'm going to use this convenient soapbox somebody left here to stand on and air some grievances and talk some blasphemy real quick:

Fallout 2 is my least favorite Fallout. I want to love it. I appreciate that it's bigger than Fallout, and has more interesting locales and characters and ideas. But I don't enjoy the mechanics at all really, and I've never found a way to make it playable short of cheating. It's not just that it's buggy; it's not very well designed. The tutorial dungeon is SO BORING, the early parts of the game are way too combat-heavy without giving non-Hulk characters adequate time to prepare for that*, and they push you along paths that never really go anywhere like Vic and the pestering shaman. It just feels unbalanced and more "directionless" than "open," at least until you get a hook in, and I've never figured out how to do that legitimately. I might love it if I ever figured out how to play it, but coming to it way late, I put it in my mental "Interesting, But..." basket instead of my "Timeless Masterpiece" case.

I enjoyed regular Fallout a lot, though.

* You missed.
You missed.
You missed.
You missed.
You hit radscorpion for 1 pt.
You missed.
Radscorpion hit you for 30 pts.
You died.

posted by byanyothername at 9:52 AM on June 3, 2015 [11 favorites]


The only thing I'd want Google Glass for is to project hexes on everything and tell me what the cost in action points is to move to each one.
posted by ignignokt at 9:54 AM on June 3, 2015 [7 favorites]


Ok, so the Scollay Square shot has a place called "Memory Den" (neon, on the left) so I'm assuming there will be much playable pre-war flashback(?) (Yesyesyesyesyes!)

Also...Boston? Oh I'm dressed all wrong.
*removes Pint-Size Slasher mask*
*puts on Burton Wig*
posted by sexyrobot at 9:55 AM on June 3, 2015


Just bought a PS4. I can't wait.
posted by Legomancer at 9:56 AM on June 3, 2015


My sister went to Berklee. I'd love to show her the ruins ;)
posted by triage_lazarus at 9:56 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


There should be a Brahmin pen on Beacon Hill. That would please me immensely.
posted by backseatpilot at 9:57 AM on June 3, 2015 [8 favorites]


I do wonder if the Fallout franchise will ever head over to China or Europe and show what's happened over there. We have a few hints (Moriarty) that there's something left over there, but what survived is unclear.
posted by Blackanvil at 9:58 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Jesus, that title just about gave me a heart attack.

Especially, since it should have been "War...War never changes..."
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 10:02 AM on June 3, 2015


So if you can run Skyrim, you should be able to run this

AHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHA
HA

Man.

Anyway, for those who are talking about revisiting older games... wasn't there some kind of serious issue with Fallout 3 and Windows 7/8? I can't remember, except that it meant I didn't bother to buy it a while back. Did this get fixed? Am I just making this up?
posted by selfnoise at 10:05 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Timmoy Daen: "I'm ever so curious, does the "Let's go, pal" at the end imply that you can actually, you know, talk?"

It's just a nice moment in the wastelands between a boy and his dog.
posted by boo_radley at 10:06 AM on June 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


wasn't there some kind of serious issue with Fallout 3 and Windows 7/8?

Maybe that it originally required Games for Windows Live ?
posted by Dr-Baa at 10:10 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


wasn't there some kind of serious issue with Fallout 3 and Windows 7/8?

There seems to be some kind of threading issue, but it's fixable by editing a config file. At least, that's my experience on Windows 7. I haven't tried it on 8.
posted by suetanvil at 10:12 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


griphus: "Dog main PC or GTFO.

"Look, Dogmeat, I'm not proud of asking you to do this but we need your help. Can you re-enable the broken water pumps so our crops can grow?"
  • BARK!
  • Grrrrrrr...
  • (Head tilt)
  • (Groom anus)
"I knew we could count on you, Dogmeat!"
"

Man, first a dick pic simulator, then state of the art canine anus cleaning? This is truly the era of the gamer!
posted by Samizdata at 10:14 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish: "Because it is way, way more comfortable to do a bunch of fat bong rips and turn into a pile of mashed potato on the sofa than to do so sitting upright in a chair. More room for spreading out the inevitable snackables, too. Also, bigger screen.

Every game-caliber video card has HDMI out now. PC gaming and couch gaming need not be enemies!
"

Or, ummmm, you have a TV with VGA in....
posted by Samizdata at 10:16 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I would be very surprised if the low end of the PC system requirements was similar to Skyrim's. If it's not coming out on the 360 and PS3 -- and I don't think it is? -- then you'll probably need something a bit beefier than an entry-level Skyrim machine to play Fallout 4.

Fortunately it is cheap to upgrade a reasonably recent PC to a better-than-PS4 level, and comparatively cheap to build a PC from scratch that would be up to the task.
posted by these are science wands at 10:16 AM on June 3, 2015


I'm getting super Bioshock: Infinite vibes from this for some reason.

The presence of blue skies w/fluffy clouds-even in the present--may be why. I'm glad to see some color.

I really hope that Fallout 4 picks up the more open (geographically) world flavor of New Vegas, because dealing with Fallout 3's "can't get there from here" tunnel system is probably the worst aspect of Fallout 3.

Me too. I couldn't handle the claustrophobia of 3, yet I loved Skyrim to death. New Vegas is up on my list soon (gamely account).


My change jar currently sits at $77.10, so by the time I get enough for a PS4 saved there should be plenty of used copies of this and No Man's Sky floating around.
posted by sourwookie at 10:18 AM on June 3, 2015


Laptop on lap, mouse pad on chair arm, butt in recliner. Am I the only person who loves pc gaming like this?
posted by Shutter at 10:19 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I hope it has the *wit* and strong characters of New Vegas, everyone in the Capitol Wasteland was a cannibal.

And if it is next gen only I'll see you all in four years when I upgrade!
posted by The Whelk at 10:22 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Do you think that Bethesda has fixed the bug where it locks up on load about 1/3 of the time that you execute the thing?
posted by octothorpe at 10:22 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


am i the only person who doesn't care whether someone plays a game on pc or console, and thinks that everybody should maybe just mind their own business and let him buy what he wants to buy?
posted by JimBennett at 10:22 AM on June 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


wait how do you know exactly how much money is in your change jar
posted by griphus at 10:23 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


Because it is way, way more comfortable to do a bunch of fat bong rips and turn into a pile of mashed potato on the sofa than to do so sitting upright in a chair. More room for spreading out the inevitable snackables, too. Also, bigger screen.

BEST OF BOTH WORLDS Come over let's play
posted by jake at 10:23 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


be there in five
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:24 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


also I'm really hoping for more of the weird tiny little details. Like the shack somewhere in the wasteland with a skeleton in the tub--and a toaster. Or the chessboard in one of the satellite dish towers with pieces that were all garden gnomes and bottles of booze.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:25 AM on June 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


(from F3 I mean)
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:25 AM on June 3, 2015


jake: "BEST OF BOTH WORLDS Come over let's play"

do you ever feel like your centre speaker is a robot who watches you
posted by these are science wands at 10:25 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Yeah, I'm probably squeeing too loudly right now to think clearly.

That being said, I managed to get a surprising levels of performance out of older hardware, so it's not impossible that you may be able to get adequate game play on an old PC. It will make for an interesting experiment.
posted by suetanvil at 10:27 AM on June 3, 2015


am i the only person who doesn't care whether someone plays a game on pc or console, and thinks that everybody should maybe just mind their own business and let him buy what he wants to buy?

How do you expect us to have a platform war with you being all reasonable? Who are you, the UN?
posted by Elementary Penguin at 10:27 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


The Whelk: "everyone in the Capitol Wasteland was a cannibal."

Well, that's DC for you, am I right?
posted by boo_radley at 10:28 AM on June 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


do you ever feel like your centre speaker is a robot who watches you

Yeah pretty often, but this is in my peripheral vision basically nonstop, so I don't have to imagine that things are watching me
posted by jake at 10:29 AM on June 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


wait how do you know exactly how much money is in your change jar

Digital counter in the lid. Such a great incntive to save. Here I am, a grown man, and I get giddy watching the counter change every time I drop in a dime. If I had one of these at the age of 9, I'd be a millionaire today.
posted by sourwookie at 10:30 AM on June 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


courtesy of this thread that dog must now be known as pugmeat
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:30 AM on June 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


My PC, just over an hour ago. Me now: realising I have a hell of a lot of mods to install.
posted by these are science wands at 10:30 AM on June 3, 2015


Yeah pretty often, but this is in my peripheral vision basically nonstop, so I don't have to imagine that things are watching me

puggle mod for dogmeat

PUGGLE MOD FOR DOGMEAT
posted by griphus at 10:43 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


STRONGER THEN AN PUGGLE
posted by The Whelk at 10:47 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Fallout 4: #BOSTON2024
posted by maryr at 10:48 AM on June 3, 2015 [9 favorites]


I'm ever so curious, does the "Let's go, pal" at the end imply that you can actually, you know, talk?

Months, maybe a year ago, there was a supposed leak of a casting call-sheet for VO actors, which included male and female protagonist.
posted by rifflesby at 10:52 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Is there s'posed to be anything at fallout4.com? All I'm getting is the spinning cog of loading.
posted by Sternmeyer at 11:06 AM on June 3, 2015


Or the chessboard in one of the satellite dish towers with pieces that were all garden gnomes and bottles of booze.

All of the garden gnomes are outside my shack (so many different sizes!).
All of the teddy bears are in my bed. Smoking.
posted by sexyrobot at 11:07 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


The important thing from where I stand is that if someone wrote a mod to make the dog's ears floppy, I could play the game with a detailed simulation of my dog.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 11:10 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


YES

I too collected all the gnomes. Which sometimes required some inventory management.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:11 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Actually I'm a bit worried all this flashing back to the pre war era means we're going to have t I m e t r a v e l
posted by The Whelk at 11:18 AM on June 3, 2015


I too collected all the gnomes. Which sometimes required some inventory management.

The little room to the right of the bedroom was Dogmeat's room, and it contained a steel dog dish, about two hundred bottles of whiskey, and thirty boxes of devilled eggs.
posted by rifflesby at 11:21 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


there's a rumor that the protagonist has been cryogenically frozen since immediately pre-apocalypse.
posted by JimBennett at 11:22 AM on June 3, 2015


I found Fallout 3: New Vegas to be vastly superior to Fallout 3. Better characters, more engaging world, far better story.

Fallout 3 had Three Dog, who is awesome, but past that...meh. It felt like a good game until I found out that there was a much better version, and that version is New Vegas.

New Vegas also offered my favorite video game companion of all time. "Sssshhhh. We're hunting shitheads."
posted by scaryblackdeath at 11:22 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


The little room to the right of the bedroom was Dogmeat's room, and it contained a steel dog dish, about two hundred bottles of whiskey, and thirty boxes of devilled eggs.

Those shelves were for my Nuka-Cola Truck collection.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:24 AM on June 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


Just chipping in to say that the 100 thematically-appropriate songs on GNR mod makes those months of your life lost in Fallout 3 slightly more culturally enriching.
posted by comealongpole at 11:25 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


The Secret Stash Mod for New Vegas has all the songs the quests in NV are named for. Happy listening!
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:27 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm tempted to go back to New Vegas and play around with a weird character. I always end up building a very middle-of-the-road hero, but I should try out a hundred pound weakling or a big stupid lug or something else really extreme.
posted by backseatpilot at 11:28 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I should try out a hundred pound weakling or a big stupid lug or something else really extreme.

Try it with maxed Luck. You essentially can't lose at blackjack if you make even slightly sensible choices. I got barred from gambling at every casino on my first visit. It probably improves your odds at caravan too, but I never got a good grip on rules and strategy there.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 11:32 AM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Max Luck and almost no brains makes for a very fun smashy smash lug

I also liked playing as a straight up doctor - a high medical score helped out in a lot of surprising ways.
posted by The Whelk at 11:36 AM on June 3, 2015


I'm tempted to go back to New Vegas and play around with a weird character.

Max out Unarmed. Punch your way to victory.

Try it with maxed Luck.

This, too. Turns out you can, in fact, get booted from a casino staffed entirely by ghosts/holograms somehow
posted by GenericUser at 11:45 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


The house doesn't need to be alive to always win.
posted by phearlez at 11:48 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I kinda hope there are Caesar's Legion for me to kill the shit out of, misogynist slaving assholes, but I kinda expect given the setting that my OH NO YOU DITN'T victims will be the android-keepers at the Institute.

...but the Legion were so satisfying to murder. Ah well. FREE AI!
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:51 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


I keep Dogmeat's dish by the kitchen piled with dog meat and human flesh. The rest of the kitchen...well, it's not pretty.
posted by sexyrobot at 11:52 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Max out Unarmed. Punch your way to victory.

My favorite ever Fallout 3 character was the stupidest woman in the world who solved every single problem by hitting it with a hammer until it stopped moving. I should spin up New Vegas, recreate her, and see if I can't punch a Deathclaw to death.
posted by protocoach at 11:53 AM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


Max out Unarmed. Punch your way to victory.

I have tried this more than once in Oblivion (well, "hand-to-hand," but same difference.)

"Hand-to-Hand" is not a good skill in Oblivion.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:57 AM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


I maxed out Archery for a Skyrim character once. I lost track of how many times she died until around level 7 or something. Then oh how the tables DID TURN
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:03 PM on June 3, 2015 [8 favorites]


That's my default character path in most similar games, so I have to occasionally force myself to play someone else. Skyrim's late game in general struggled, I felt, because I had that same experience with almost every character I played. Oddly (for my D&D-tuned brain), only my mages continued to have issues at later levels, and I think that was mostly because I sucked at aiming their powers. My sword-and-board Orc and sneak-thief Khajit could slaughter everything at a point that felt way too early and way too easy.
posted by protocoach at 12:07 PM on June 3, 2015


The Bound Bow (conjuration) in Skyrim is absurd. I always hated the combat in that game and only ended up playing through it once I figured out you could have an energy bow and two Dremora Lords summoned and just wander around feathering people while they murdered everyone.
posted by selfnoise at 12:09 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I maxed out Archery for a Skyrim character once. I lost track of how many times she died until around level 7 or something. Then oh how the tables DID TURN

Archery has been OP in all the ES games. I'm getting my copy of ESO for the PS4 next week, so we'll see if that's carried over. I kind of doubt it.
posted by lumpenprole at 12:10 PM on June 3, 2015


My only play-thru of Fallout 3 that actually finished the main quest just poured skills into Small Guns. It's by far the most straightforward way to do it, but Lincoln's Repeater + 100 skill in Sm Guns is tremendously satisfying. You spend a lot of time running from everything that moves, followed very quickly being able to snipe everything that moves with the hunting rifle. And anything I didn't feel like taking on, Fawkes would mow down for me...
posted by BungaDunga at 12:10 PM on June 3, 2015


Just give me the Gobi Campaign scout rifle so that I can takeout Deathclaws from a mile away. I never did very well if one of those things got anywhere near me.
posted by octothorpe at 12:15 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Then there's the game-breaking Chinese Stealth Armor + Exploding Pants.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 12:15 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


(Dumb idea of the day, can you exploding pants a behemoth?)
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 12:16 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


My favorite ever Fallout 3 character was the stupidest woman in the world who solved every single problem by hitting it with a hammer until it stopped moving. I should spin up New Vegas, recreate her, and see if I can't punch a Deathclaw to death.

Melee in New Vegas is ridiculous. You'll enjoy it.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:20 PM on June 3, 2015


Are people really excited about the Boston setting? I... hmm. Boston has never struck me as a really distinctive setting based on its modern day architecture

Oh yeah I'm excited, and not just because I've lived in Boston. Boston is the perfect location for a Fallout game.

Setting Fallout 3 in DC was a revelation... it turns out that cloying patriotism and kitschy Americana history is a perfect fit with the degraded 1950's World of Tomorrow aesthetic that has come to define the series. Some people claim to prefer the Lonesome Western aesthetic of New Vegas. They're basically just super mutants disguised as humans. (They do realize that Old World Blues was easily the best DLC, right?)

What's Boston known for? Two major things: it's a university city, and it's America's birthplace. It has MIT and it has the Freedom Trail right next to each other. That mishmash defines the Fallout 3 aesthetic. Robots and patriots.

Plus, there are plenty of buildings that will make amazing postapocalyptic locales. The brutalist city hall is a perfect place for a slaver camp. Fenway and the Big Dig and the Fens and the Hancock Tower and Faneuil Hall and Boston Commons and Harvard Square and the Stata Center and Logan... it's so fun to imagine what they might become....
posted by painquale at 12:20 PM on June 3, 2015 [13 favorites]


I'm still waiting for Assassin's Creed set in victorian London. Climb big ben, hunt Jack the ripper, and Fagin. Prison break in the tower. Befriend Oscar Wilde, and Dickens. Fuck history, it's a game! It's not like Assassin's Creed didn't assassinate historical accuracy first.
posted by adept256 at 12:24 PM on June 3, 2015


"Hand-to-Hand" is not a good skill in Oblivion.

Which is a shame, because it was much fun in Daggerfall and Morrowind, if memory serves. But then so was levitating everywhere, and they outright took that away.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 12:26 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm still waiting for Assassin's Creed set in victorian London.

Coming this fall.
posted by longdaysjourney at 12:27 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Wow. All these comments about how much time Fallout sucked away the time, and I barely made it one hour past the character creator in New Vegas. Although I did spend a good amount of time reading up on mechanics and stats.

Oh well, it was a fun use of 48 hours.
posted by halifix at 12:30 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


They do realize that Old World Blues was easily the best DLC, right?

I mean, hiring Rusty Venture as a inept mad scientist is as good as it gets
posted by The Whelk at 12:33 PM on June 3, 2015 [9 favorites]



Plus, there are plenty of buildings that will make amazing postapocalyptic locales. The brutalist city hall is a perfect place for a slaver camp. Fenway and the Big Dig and the Fens and the Hancock Tower and Faneuil Hall and Boston Commons and Harvard Square and the Stata Center and Logan... it's so fun to imagine what they might become....


I was way more into exploring the buildings of Fallout 3 than the caves of New Vegas, so this is pretty exciting to me. I hope we get to wander around inside MIT. I hope dimensional flux has caused the Infinite Corridor to actually become infinite.
posted by rifflesby at 12:46 PM on June 3, 2015 [9 favorites]


Oh man I downloaded Assassin's Creed Black Flag a couple weeks ago for free on Xbox 360. I played it for maybe an hour before my eyes glazed over. I barely finished half of 3 after playing all the ones before to 90% completion or so. I think I'd rather go several years in between major franchise installments than Ubisoft's insane yearly release schedule of essentially the same game. Even if Fallout 4 turns out to be "just more Fallout", that will be awesome, because I haven't been oversaturated with Fallout games for the past 7 years.
posted by T.D. Strange at 12:46 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


FALLOUT 4. Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bethesda and not Obsidian. Booooooooo!

I never played New Vegas, but F3 ate my life for months.

My god. That's like saying you really liked Alien: Resurrection but never watched the first couple. FONV is superior to FO3 in every single respect. Vastly superior in most cases.

Some people say they liked FO3 better. I don't understand those people and feel like they must have suffered some sort of brain trauma as children.
posted by Justinian at 12:52 PM on June 3, 2015 [7 favorites]


I should spin up New Vegas, recreate her, and see if I can't punch a Deathclaw to death.

This character already exists. Her name is Veronica Santangelo. She is voiced by Felicia Day. And she is awesome.
posted by Justinian at 12:55 PM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


The Whelk: "I mean, hiring Rusty Venture as a inept mad scientist is as good as it gets"

and the Book Chute. And the splicing machine! Which sounds like Dean! Annnnd... I wanna say... a horny brain in a jar? is that right?
posted by boo_radley at 12:55 PM on June 3, 2015


In defense of Fallout3 over Fallout New Vegas, I live in the DC area, and just because I'm much more familiar with the area got more out of it. I've been to Vegas, but never lived there, and didn't grow up with the whole "Western" culture thing that I see in some of my relatives who live out West, so I suspect that had a lot to do with it. Game mechanics, quality of story, add-ons, just about everything about NV was better, but when I want a quick Fallout fix, I'll often turn to Fallout3 just for the setting.
posted by Blackanvil at 1:00 PM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


But... I live in Los Angeles. I'd still rather watch Escape from New York than Escape from Los Angeles. Because it's better.
posted by Justinian at 1:03 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


This character already exists. Her name is Veronica Santangelo. She is voiced by Felicia Day. And she is awesome.

And you can't bring her and Christine together.

/siiiiigh
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:09 PM on June 3, 2015


So the fortified Fenway is called Diamond City. It looks like everything is baseball-themed in there. There's a guy in a baseball uniform with a bat. Which is awesome, there's going to be a baseball faction you can join!

Also, there's a statue outside of a left-handed hitter. It's not the statue of Ted Williams. It's too skinny to be Ortiz. I don't know of any future statue-worthy lefties playing for Boston, so I'm speculating that it's actually Babe Ruth and in the Fallout universe the Sox never traded him.
posted by vogon_poet at 1:11 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I just want to know which song is going to stay stuck in my head like Big Iron. Every few weeks or so it just suddenly reappears and I have to listen to it rattle around in my head for a few days.
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:13 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Veronica: My recommendation - More punching.
Veronica: Hold on. I see something I want to punch.
Veronica: I... wish I had something to give you. I- wait! What about punching? That's the gift that keeps on giving.
posted by Justinian at 1:13 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


New Vegas may be better than Fallout 3, but Fallout 3 is better than almost every other game in my Steam catalog. The mechanics may be less polished, but everything else of that vintage just feels clunky in actual execution.

I'll put in a plug that F3 is almost perfect when it comes to set-dressing as narrative. New Vegas tends to tell you stories through dialogue, Fallout 3 gives you little tableaus of how people lived and died.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:18 PM on June 3, 2015 [9 favorites]


I prefer the game design of Bethesda to Obsidian. I found NV way too linear and way too story-driven. At the very beginning you were hemmed in by deathclaws and mountains that forced you to go South to Nipton, and then you had to circle around up to Novac afterward. It wanted to keep you following its general plot. (I mean, I'm aware you could sequence break, but the game really did not want you to do that and it made it difficult.) And the game really wanted you to choose a faction, which I found stressful... I just wanted to be free to explore and see cool sights. Fallout 3 let you wander off in any direction right from the beginning and just poke around. Most people stumble upon Megaton right away, but I didn't find it until halfway through the game. My memories of Fallout 3 are mostly of environments; my memories of NV are mostly of scripted story points on the choose-your-own-adventure branch that I chose.
posted by painquale at 1:19 PM on June 3, 2015 [18 favorites]


FONV is superior to FO3 in every single respect. Vastly superior in most cases.

You mean the crashout to frozen screen bugs actually wipe out your PS3? ;)

There are only two reasons I haven't played NV: 1) the ps3 belonged to my old roommate, so; 2) the aesthetics of FO3 are right up my alley in the same way Bioshock was.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:21 PM on June 3, 2015


New Vegas for PC (which is the only way to play) regularly goes on sale for like $5.
posted by Justinian at 1:22 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


My PC would likely give me baleful looks if I even tried. It stutters on SimCity2000 if I get too complex. Plus see above re: bigger screen etc. Someone may be gifting me a ps3 soon, though, so fingers crossed.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:24 PM on June 3, 2015


I completely agree with the superiority of Van Buren-descended New Vegas, but let's all remember Liberty Prime.
posted by The Gaffer at 1:24 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm one of the wrongheaded ones. I posted a while back in a Fallout thread about how I should get around to finishing FNV one of these days and ... yeah, nothing. I don't dislike the game! It's a decent game! (I sincerely do hate "Johnny Guitar," though. That song can eat my entire ass. ) It just doesn't spark much interest. I am a dead husk. Who'd have to go back several hours of playthrough to get around a bug in Raul's personal quest and ehh, I'm too lazy.

If there's anything like the Dunwich Building in the Wasteland, I am afraid I'll never find it.
posted by rewil at 1:25 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I do not understand you people. Fallout 3... mutter mumble mutter... how could they... mumble mumble.
posted by Justinian at 1:26 PM on June 3, 2015


> The brutalist city hall is a perfect place for a slaver camp. Fenway and the Big Dig and the Fens and the Hancock Tower and

I do think people should keep in mind that the Fallout universe, though set in the future, essentially forked off of our universe sometime in the 1950s. That's the only true answer for building the world that was envisioned by 50s sci-fi B-movies; their universe has plasma weapons and lovely Streamline Moderne spaceships, but their computers are monochrome terminals and they still use vacuum tubes in all their electronics.

So if we're being incredibly technical, anything that existed in Boston before the 1950s is likely to be depicted in the Fallout universe. Anything in our universe that was built after that point may or may not exist in the Fallout universe. Hence the Fens and Fenway and Faneuil Hall will all be there, most likely; but the Big Dig and the Hancock Center and City Hall likely won't.

And this might just be charitable headcanon on my part, but this is likely why New Vegas has a bunch of real landmarks (Hoover Dam, McCarran, Nellis AFB, et cetera) but without any of the specifics of our Las Vegas, many of which evolved after the 1950s.

This is also why I forgive Fallout 3 for depicting a DC Metro that's different from ours; our version opened in 1976.
posted by savetheclocktower at 1:30 PM on June 3, 2015 [7 favorites]


I made the fundamental error of looking at comments for the video on various fora. People are whining about the graphics. I think they are suffering under a fundamental misunderstanding of what Fallout is about.
posted by Justinian at 1:33 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


FO3 will always be my favorite because they gave my old DC suburb a metro stop that it doesn't have in real life. Also, there's nothing quite like rooting around in the rubble of your old apartment.

Really looking forward to visiting all the universities and colleges in Boston. The Institute can't have been the only one to have survived.
posted by longdaysjourney at 1:36 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


In general, I agree that FO:NV is superior to FO3, but I will say FO3's vast networks of tunnels and explorable loot-filled buildings were addictive fun. There was no equivalent in New Vegas.

Also: games are by necessity a simplified model of reality. Even if they could accurately model the DC metro, you wouldn't want them to. It'd be too big to actually be fun.
posted by suetanvil at 1:40 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


I do think people should keep in mind that the Fallout universe, though set in the future, essentially forked off of our universe sometime in the 1950s.

I realized that after I posted. Scollay Square, featured in the trailer, doesn't really exist any more.

That said, they're fudging some things anyway. I'm pretty sure they'll just put in whatever seems cool. There probably won't be a Hancock Tower (there's enough cool stuff in Copley Square without it), but I can imagine that City Hall is close enough to the 50s to merit some fudging. And The Institute is still up and running; maybe they'll have built their own post-apocalyptic Stata Center out of trash.

I do not understand you people. Fallout 3... mutter mumble mutter... how could they... mumble mumble.

Well, we're all from a Vault that had a door that didn't seal correctly. Maybe that has something to do with it?

(I just realized that the MeFi colors are Vault-Tec colors!)
posted by painquale at 1:41 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


In general, I agree that FO:NV is superior to FO3, but I will say FO3's vast networks of tunnels and explorable loot-filled buildings were addictive fun. There was no equivalent in New Vegas.

I agree, though there were seemingly endless slaver camps to liberate. That felt rewarding.
posted by lumpenprole at 1:42 PM on June 3, 2015


Although I'm partial to Fallout 3, I think that Wayne Newton / Mr New Vegas was a better radio station dj than Three Dog. But the guy from The Wire who did the voice of Caesar was really phoning it in.
posted by Mr Mister at 1:45 PM on June 3, 2015


I find this thread baffling because most of the things people are saying they like about Fallout 3 are the very things I find completely offputting about it.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:47 PM on June 3, 2015


maybe they'll have built their own post-apocalyptic Stata Center out of trash.


ways in which the Stata Center doesn't resemble a post-apocalyptic nightmare made of trash: 0
posted by The Whelk at 1:49 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Boston City Hall is so wonderfully terrible, I hope it sneaks in. That whole plaza around it, not to mention the building itself. Just so wonderful.
posted by longdaysjourney at 1:50 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I find this thread baffling because most of the things people are saying they like about Fallout 3 are the very things I find completely offputting about it.

Well I guess there are other games for you. And presumably, other threads.


I kid because I love, Pope.
posted by lumpenprole at 1:50 PM on June 3, 2015


I liked the SETTING of Fo3 more, cause finding cities on highway ramps and bombed out suburbs and grocery stores was something I'd never done in a game before and NV's Country Western desert didn't really do it for me visually -- but the characters and story and overall design in NV is much stronger. It's also damn funnier, which helps set it apart in a world of grey brown grim shooters.
posted by The Whelk at 1:51 PM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


There are a lot of great looking games coming out this year, but I can't help but be disappointed that all of them are sequels.

I tend to agree that there's a lot of sequels these days, but: No Man's Sky?

Cynicism time! I can't help but notice that Bethesda is continuing their long-standing tradition of horribly stiff, janky-looking character animations. It's the year 2015 guys, get with the program.

Dragon Age: Inquisition would like to have a word with you. Oh god, the stiffness. I think there's an inherent tradeoff between "massive open-world game" and "great character animations" due to limited art creation time and budgets. That said, I haven't played The Witcher 3 yet.

Anyways. This also reminds me that I never went back and played any of the New Vegas DLC I own. Maybe I should do that before this year is up, along with restarting my abandoned XCOM: Enemy Unknown playthrough and oh god too many games.
posted by chrominance at 1:52 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think that Wayne Newton / Mr New Vegas was a better radio station dj than Three Dog

I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but you literally cannot be more wrong than this.
posted by protocoach at 1:52 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Three Dog is terrible. SHUT UP ABOUT ME, STOP TELLING ME HOW GREAT I AM IT'S OBNOXIOUS

Mister New Vegas somehow reports on the things I do without making me THE STAR OF THE SHOW because New Vegas is a setting that the PC exists in, not a setting that exists for the PC.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:55 PM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Every DLC in NV is great cause each one is in a different genre.

The only DLC worth mentioning for Fo3 is the one set in the creepy boardwalk town full -- and that Steel one that doesn't count cause it's just continuing the main story after it arbitrarily stopped.
posted by The Whelk at 1:55 PM on June 3, 2015


FO3: better dungeons, tunnels, exploration, etc. (I like that it took a while to navigate to the mall/capitol bldg)
FONV: Best friend Tabitha say, BETTER CHARACTERS.
Hopefully in this one, the two really come together. I can also imagine the alternate reality Big Dig as being even more obnoxious (in a good way) with crazy abandoned tunnels to nowhere filled with ghouls and vaults all over the place because the whole project was totally subcontracted out to Vault-Tec, of course.
posted by sexyrobot at 1:57 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Three Dog is the greatest and Mr. New Vegas is sleeping pills incarnated as a human being.
posted by protocoach at 1:58 PM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


FO3 also had some killer concept art and set pieces. Nothing in FONV even came close for me. The writing and NPCs in FONV are much better though, for sure. (Although I really loved FO3's Vault 92.)

I think people are bitching about the trailer graphics because Witcher 3 just came out and it really is spectacularly gorgeous. TW3's textures alone are incredible. FO4 just can't help but look dated in comparison. Not fair to Bethesda, but it is what it is.
posted by longdaysjourney at 2:00 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I never went back and played any of the New Vegas DLC I own.

In declining order:
Old World Blues
Dead Money
Lonesome Road
Honest Hearts

(I want to love Honest Hearts because it's so pretty, but it's dull and annoying to navigate)

I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but you literally cannot be more wrong than this.
I just wish there was a way to actually interact with him/it, but I guess they couldn't afford that much studio time with Wayne Newton.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 2:00 PM on June 3, 2015


I was hoping a bit that the San Francisco rumors were true, with possibly a time jump to include the the perfect Bowie song for the soundtrack.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:01 PM on June 3, 2015


The only DLC worth mentioning for Fo3 is 

The one in the freaking UFO, duh! (Those aliens...so delightfully crabby)
posted by sexyrobot at 2:01 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


The one in the freaking UFO, duh!
I kinda like the swamp one too. And Operation: Alaska is worth it for early power armor training.

The Pit was...a misstep.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 2:05 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


The essential mod for this discussion is A Tale of Two Wastelands, which basically lets you package Fallout 3 as a New Vegas mod. You start at the beginning of Fallout 3, but you have access to Fallout: New Vegas systems such as NV's far superior crafting. There's a train station in DC and one in Freeside, and each will sell you a ticket for 500 caps to travel between the two worlds. (When you go to the Mojave for the first time, you wake up in Doc Mitchell's house with a freshly-healed bullet wound and start the game normally, though you keep your stuff and skills.)

This is especially handy if you've ever wanted to take a Combat Shotgun into New Vegas. Or, say, Lincoln's Repeater, and load it with hand-crafted .45 semiwadcutter ammo.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:05 PM on June 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


I think people are bitching about the trailer graphics because Witcher 3 just came out and it really is spectacularly gorgeous.

The graphics are something else. It's a really outstanding RPG.

And the franchise has gone from being offensively misogynistic to being merely tasteless, which is great progress!
posted by painquale at 2:13 PM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


Boston is just surrounded by so much sprawl that you have to go a long way until you reach wilderness.

Huh? From the heart of downtown you can be in Lincoln/Sudbury/Concord or in Dover/Medfield/Holliston (or other similar places) inside of 30 minutes by car, as long as it's not the wrong few hours of the day. New Hampshire isn't much farther. I actually love Boston for how quickly you can get to wilderness compared to many metros.
posted by rollbiz at 2:17 PM on June 3, 2015


And the franchise has gone from being offensively misogynistic to being merely tasteless, which is great progress!

The sex cards have been replaced with Gwent cards! Gwent is the best.
posted by Justinian at 2:19 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Jesus, that title just about gave me a heart attack.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 10:22 AM on June 3


You think a heart attack's bad, just wait until the... (Oh yeah, I'm going there)... Fallout.
posted by symbioid at 2:22 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Oh wait I managed to somehow forget Lonesome Road exists cause it was the least interesting I modify my enthusiasm for the DLC accordingly
posted by The Whelk at 2:25 PM on June 3, 2015


Also NV has Arcade Gannon, the only video game character I not only would marry but could theoretically* if I was not already married, living 500 years in the past, and not fictional.

*Dorian's not the marrying type.
posted by The Whelk at 2:26 PM on June 3, 2015


New Hampshire isn't much farther.

As someone who grew up in Concord, New Hampshire before the internet, I can confirm that the distance to Boston is primarily psychological.
posted by lumpenprole at 2:31 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Strontium Seltzer? Metastasis Moxie? Beta-rad cream pie? Zapple Iced Tea? Or will it be all Nuka Cola all the time?

am i the only person who doesn't care whether someone plays a game on pc or console, and thinks that everybody should maybe just mind their own business and let him buy what he wants to buy?

You want to get jumped in to the Tunnel Snakes, you better be playing it on a Pip-Boy 4000 my friend.

wasn't there some kind of serious issue with Fallout 3 and Windows 7/8?

There seems to be some kind of threading issue, but it's fixable by editing a config file. At least, that's my experience on Windows 7. I haven't tried it on 8.


On Windows 10 it froze very, very frequently until I made that threading change in the config file, then froze frequently until I updated my video card and driver (for unrelated reasons), then froze occasionally particularly when a Gatling Laser was being fired, which basically meant I never used Fawkes.
posted by BrotherCaine at 2:48 PM on June 3, 2015


Ok, so now I'm impressed.
posted by bonehead at 2:56 PM on June 3, 2015 [9 favorites]


I'll put in a plug that F3 is almost perfect when it comes to set-dressing as narrative. New Vegas tends to tell you stories through dialogue, Fallout 3 gives you little tableaus of how people lived and died.

THIS.

I described it before as "Scattered through tin shacks, drainage chambers, personal preservation shelters and power substations - fragments of a tapestry woven from guns and garbage, bones and blood stains. In so many other games these spaces would have been filled in by a random loot generator. Here, they were obviously put in place by someone who was telling a story in a very convoluted poetic style."
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 3:09 PM on June 3, 2015 [8 favorites]


But the worldbuilding in FO3 makes no sense. What exactly are the people in Megaton eating? Where is their food coming from? In New Vegas you see the farms and vegetable gardens and so on. It's an actual world rather than a bunch of set-dressing.

That set-dressing may be narrative in FO3 but it is superficial narrative with nothing beneath. Scratch the surface in NV and you find a living, breathing world.
posted by Justinian at 3:18 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I like NV cause it's post post apocalypse so Boston looking more advanced cause MIT hoarding seeekrets fits well with me
posted by The Whelk at 3:22 PM on June 3, 2015


Two of the things I love most in this world are dogs and Fallout 3, so I was an incoherent disaster for hours today.

I am so excited. SO EXCITED. Everything was so colorful! I'm hoping this means pre-war gameplay, even if it's just the character creation/training bit of the game. And a voice! And UPGRADEABLE POWER ARMOR FUCK YEAH!

But let's be real, as long as there's no "Johnny Guitar" I'll be happy.
posted by a hat out of hell at 3:23 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


I think voiced protagonists are one of the worst things to happen to gaming in 20 years. Sad face.
posted by Justinian at 3:32 PM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Just installed NV on my current Windows 8.1 box and tried to run it and it crashes to the desktop as soon as the cut-scene is over. Tried the AI threading fix, tried running in compatibility mode, tried running as admin ... nothing. Spent an hour digging through forums and found nothing useful. Bah.
posted by octothorpe at 3:35 PM on June 3, 2015


I haven't played any Fallout games, but I did watch the trailer to be sure there's a post-apocalyptic Citgo sign. It's really set in Boston!
posted by rmd1023 at 3:41 PM on June 3, 2015


I wonder if they'll have Ho Chi Minh on the tank by I-93. Or some Fallout-universe equivalent.
posted by vogon_poet at 4:00 PM on June 3, 2015


I think voiced protagonists are one of the worst things to happen to gaming in 20 years. Sad face.

Commander Shepard would like to have a few words with you in the CIC.
posted by Celsius1414 at 4:05 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


If you've never played Fallout before but you've always been intrigued, where should you start?

Plenty of answers, hm? Your first choice is how much do graphics matter in a game?

If this looks unplayable, your choice is between Fallout 3 and New Vegas. NV has better dialogue and characters, is more influenced by westerns in the beginning but not overtly so, and has some fantastic science fiction B movie DLC. More factions too though one is comically evil.
Fallout 3 does Vaults (the leftovers of civilization) better and has some very interesting locations to explore, but it's more combat heavy and the dialogue of NPCs leaves something to be desired. DC has more landmarks to explore, but there are some filler-y sections with tunnels and super mutants as well. Pick whichever sounds better.

Now, if that screenshot didn't look too bad, I'd recommend my favourite, Fallout 2. It allows for different styles of playing from talky pacifist to guns blazing, the dialogue remains better than every other Fallout and the setting is very interesting. Some versions sold online come fully patched, but with the latest official & fan patch, you won't have any trouble. It was a very buggy game in 1998, not now (all Fallouts were buggy on release).
Fallout 1 flies its Mad Max influences a bit higher (which is good in my book), hand to hand combat can be broken with hilarious results, it's great for that feeling of eking an existence after the end of the world... but it's also smaller than the sequel and there are fewer people to talk to. It's a lovely game as long as you remember it's old enough to join up.

And since no one mentioned it, Fallout Tactics is not an RPG or canon, but it makes good use of the trappings of the series and it's rather fun.

All games go on sale often for the pc (FO 1+2+Tactics often in a bundle). If you opt to play FO on pc download mods. Fallout 2 has a game-expanding mod that tries to sneak back in content cut from first release.

No matter which one you choose, it will likely be a good time.
posted by ersatz at 4:12 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Ok, so now I'm impressed.

I'll be even more impressed if some sort of epoch-making event resets the calendar, and then thirty years after that we get a Fallout set in Chicago.
posted by Iridic at 4:15 PM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Fallout 2 is my least favorite Fallout. I want to love it. I appreciate that it's bigger than Fallout, and has more interesting locales and characters and ideas. But I don't enjoy the mechanics at all really, and I've never found a way to make it playable short of cheating. It's not just that it's buggy; it's not very well designed. The tutorial dungeon is SO BORING, the early parts of the game are way too combat-heavy without giving non-Hulk characters adequate time to prepare for that*, and they push you along paths that never really go anywhere like Vic and the pestering shaman. It just feels unbalanced and more "directionless" than "open," at least until you get a hook in, and I've never figured out how to do that legitimately. I might love it if I ever figured out how to play it, but coming to it way late, I put it in my mental "Interesting, But..." basket instead of my "Timeless Masterpiece" case.

The tutorial dungeon is the worst part of the game - no wonder some mods cut it out. You can still talk your way out of the last fight though. The first village is just a place to get some exp and ditto for Klamath. That shotgun you find early on can put you through Klamath without any points in small guns. I mostly do a couple of quests and go to The Den where the real game starts... but that restoration mod I mentioned in my previous comment gives back purpose to the starting areas.

If you are on Steam, I'll stream a playthrough sometime. The next areas are fleshed out and I'll stop ranting and get some sleep.
posted by ersatz at 4:25 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Everyone griping about the cost of playing games like this on PC...

1. You don't need that great of a computer to play games like this and have them look pretty or run very smoothly. I spent about $380 and i can play pretty much any game out there on "ultra" at 1080p. It was entirely used craigslist parts, but you could still get a good experience with new stuff for around $400. This for example would play this game very well even at higher graphical settings.

2. If you already have a desktop from the past few years, you can likely just buy a that graphics card and pop it right it in. It draws a small enough amount of power that your stock power supply will likely even be fine unless it's under 300 watts(which is unusual, even in bargain dells and stuff)

3. Want to play it on your couch? buy a ps4 or xbox 360 controller, and a receiver or bluetooth dongle, then a long hdmi cable. Problem solved. This has worked in every house layout i've had, dunno if it will in yours but there are many other solutions(including using your laptop, no matter how wimpy, for streaming with steam)

4. this game is already on sale for pc. It'll only get cheaper.

I realize that there is a(large) convenience factor in not dealing with setting up(or upgrading) a pc and such, but it's really a no brainer. This likely wont even run at full resolution on consoles and you wont get any of the fun mods, which are half the fun of bethedsa games anyways...

Except that it's nigh impossible to use a mouse and keyboard effectively while reclining Jabba-like. I mean, cool for you if you like PC gaming; for me it's about simplicity of not too many buttons, and being able to lounge about however I wish. Diablo II is about the last run-around-and-do-stuff game that I liked on PC, and even that gets wearying remembering which buttons I've mapped to which functions. (Stuff like Sim City/RCT/etc are different of course).

I just use an xbox 360 controller with my pc. It works 100% perfectly, and i had to do *nothing* to set it up. Literally just plugged it, waited a couple seconds, and it was ready to go. Works without even changing any settings on fallout/skyrim/GTA and tons of other games. Even quite a few PC games like project CARS work right out of the box without touching anything.

You can also use a PS4 controller in a similarly instant plug and play way and go wireless, or use the adapter to use wireless 360 controllers(xbox one controllers are weird right now).

I've been doing this since college, and basically roped all my friends in to buying cheap wired 360 controllers too. I agree with regards to gaming on my couch looking at my nice tv Vs at my desk if i just want to lounge out, but it's really like... no effort at all, and no extra cost besides what buying a controller would be anyways.
posted by emptythought at 4:35 PM on June 3, 2015


Is it too much to hope that all the missiles were aimed at City Hall? Please? It's a blight upon the landscape and the inside is almost as bad. (Visiting Boston with my girlfriend who had never been there, she's admiring the architecture and such, we reach city hall, I feel like I just have to apologize.)

That shot doesn't quite look like the Blue Hills that I know, but it isn't too far off.

Traveling the tunnels of the T may be just as enjoyable as actually riding in it.

The biggest question from F:3 is how does Little Lamplite still exist? Are the 15 year olds popping out kids? I loved 3, actually really enjoyed The Pitt (in part because there really is no good solution) and decided not to buy the Alien one again after a theft made me lose my DLCs. New Vegas, well, Honest Hearts isn't great, but it is beautiful, but Old World Blues is perhaps the best Fallout experience I have ever played.

I think the atmosphere will be incredible, the characters a bit shallow and illogical and the game quite fun. I really hope they do something like the faction system of F:NV instead of just the Karma system in 3.
posted by Hactar at 4:45 PM on June 3, 2015


The biggest question from F:3 is how does Little Lamplite still exist? Are the 15 year olds popping out kids?

It's almost like nothing in Fallout 3 is thought out at all beyond "You know what would be cool? A cave system... inhabited entirely by children!" "But how would that even work?" "Who cares? Building a world that actually feels like a place is hard and takes effort! Let's just make a bunch of little five to fifteen-minute set pieces and scatter them across the landscape and call it a day!"
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:48 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yes, exactly! That's why I love FONV!
posted by Justinian at 4:52 PM on June 3, 2015


Everyone griping about the cost of playing games like this on PC...

I'm not sure I actually see "everyone griping" about that. But as a PC gamer I'm not sure I can say #1 is going to keep being true. The Witcher 3 has already put down a signpost saying "welcome back to not being able to run games". And we are entering a new console era as well as an era where developers may feel more comfortable pushing requirement. Based on the trailer, though, which frankly looked like a 360-era game, you might be right!

In terms of that card, I have one a more powerful CPU than the Celeron (which I would avoid, you can buy an i3 for really not much coin) and.. eh. There are definitely games at 1080p where it can struggle (Splinter Cell Blacklist is one on higher settings). I think it's great for playing games already out, but I'm really not sure about the future.

Is it too much to hope that all the missiles were aimed at City Hall? Please? It's a blight upon the landscape and the inside is almost as bad.

You are incorrect; City Hall is cool as hell.
posted by selfnoise at 4:54 PM on June 3, 2015


I think the little lamplight quest is a reference to wild in the streets(?) The movie where they put everyone out to pasture at 30, specifically the ending...like those! is a reference to them!...lots of hidden movie references
posted by sexyrobot at 5:07 PM on June 3, 2015


The Witcher 3 has already put down a signpost saying "welcome back to not being able to run games".

I don't think that's fair, though. You need an extremely powerful rig to run the rig at max settings and use HairFX to see the monster fur rippling in the breeze in all its silky glory... but you don't have to run those settings. The question should be what kind of rig do you need to run the game at settings which are at least as good as a console can run the game. That's, what, 900p at 30fps on an Xbone? You can do that on a pretty dang old system.

You don't compare the cost of a Ferrari to the cost of a Chevrolet when you're looking for a car that only needs to go 20mph.
posted by Justinian at 5:11 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


The biggest question from F:3 is how does Little Lamplite still exist? Are the 15 year olds popping out kids?

The answer to that question is strongly implied in-game. They're most likely being repopulated by children from Big Town in the same way that Big Town is populated by adults who have outgrown Little Lamplight.
posted by fifthrider at 5:13 PM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


I mock the hair physics but holy jeebus is it awesome if your rig can run it.
posted by Justinian at 5:15 PM on June 3, 2015


The trailer looks gorgeous but I hope they bring Obsidian in to do the writing. Fallout 3's writing was totally soulless, while New Vegas was perfect - witty and literate, with tons of meaningful choices.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:23 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Ok, I think I'm going to have another go at New Vegas as the Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight and dump stats into explosives and sneak. And I guess melee so I have at least a minor chance of surviving.
posted by backseatpilot at 5:30 PM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


*sneaks grenade into pants*
posted by Justinian at 5:32 PM on June 3, 2015


Please let this have maximum gibbage.

There was nothing more satisfying in Fallout 3 and New Vegas than a perfect sniper rifle shot that just exploded brain and jawbone and teeth and eyes everywhere in highly-detailed slow-motion.

Also, being able to shoot off limbs like in Soldier of Fortune would be hella sweet.

Somebody pls make Soldier of Fortune ultragibbage mod for Fallout 4 k thanks.

Dogmeat needs to be given power armour and also I want to play as Dogmeat.

Fallout is the best. What's Boston near? New York? I suspect New York DLC will be forthcoming. Everybody has a shitty attitude and only cares about themselves. New York was unscathed by the war.
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:54 PM on June 3, 2015


There was nothing more satisfying in Fallout 3 and New Vegas than a perfect sniper rifle shot that just exploded brain and jawbone and teeth and eyes everywhere in highly-detailed slow-motion.

After the first hundred or so hours of every VATS kill requiring you to watch a slow-motion head or leg explosion, it honestly gets kind of tedious.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:57 PM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Not when it's a raider getting his head nailed to the wall with a railroad spike.
posted by rifflesby at 6:01 PM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


After the first hundred or so hours of every VATS kill requiring you to watch a slow-motion head or leg explosion, it honestly gets kind of tedious.

lol. Funny joke guy XD
posted by turbid dahlia at 6:07 PM on June 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


What's Boston near?

I can think of a couple directions to go with this.
1) Up into the White Mountains of New Hampshire, with crazy beasts and caves and weird New Hampshire people and a quest title that plays on the state's motto of "Live Free or Die".

2) New Bedford, MA. Once the whaling capital of the country and the starting point of Moby Dick. Possibly a quest inside a mutant whale.

3) Providence, RI. We've got Lovecraft and a strong Mafia presence. Plenty of quests to be had here.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 6:08 PM on June 3, 2015 [9 favorites]


omg

I'm even more excited for The Great Big Mulp's trilogy of DLCs than I am for the game itself.

Get on it!
posted by turbid dahlia at 6:12 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Or if we wanna get lazy, Boston isn't that far from DC...
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 6:15 PM on June 3, 2015


Provincetown.

Fabulous ghouls.
posted by backseatpilot at 6:57 PM on June 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Northampton.

Earthy ghouls.
posted by maryr at 7:06 PM on June 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


selfnoise: "Are people really excited about the Boston setting?"

It's an incredibly curious setting for a game that will have a worldwide audience. American fanboys are gonna love it, but to many folks in the rest of the world, who the fuck is Boston and why aren't they New York?
posted by barnacles at 8:26 PM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


There was nothing more satisfying in Fallout 3 and New Vegas than a perfect sniper rifle shot that just exploded brain and jawbone and teeth and eyes everywhere in highly-detailed slow-motion.

In Fallout: New Vegas I helped a rape victim recover from her trauma. I united factions. I broke up a gang of cannibals. I helped a post-human Howard Hughes, and restored supply lines to farms and got medicine to isolated settlements. And I did most of it by talking. And I survived Hardcore Mode on my wits and a supply of mutated food (shades of that opening scene in Fury Road). Hopefully FO3 is half as satisfying.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 8:29 PM on June 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


I'm not sure I actually see "everyone griping" about that. But as a PC gamer I'm not sure I can say #1 is going to keep being true. The Witcher 3 has already put down a signpost saying "welcome back to not being able to run games". And we are entering a new console era as well as an era where developers may feel more comfortable pushing requirement.

Honestly, i think that game is just super terribly optimized or something. It's not that beautiful, it's just a system killer. I have a super powerful system and i can't even play it at 60fps at max settings. However, almost all my friends have middling systems with like, Stuff that was decent 4-5 years ago. You can play it pretty smoothly at mediumish settings.

And yea, more than likely this game and definitely every other current interesting game will run very well on the aforementioned cheap machine i linked. It's rare that there's a total system killer like witcher, and most of them can't even run at 30fps fully consistently on consoles. Look at GTA V.
posted by emptythought at 10:00 PM on June 3, 2015


Regarding Witcher 3,let's not forget that Witcher 2 was a monster as well - it literally melted my last computer's thermal paste. As for the looks of Witcher 3, I find it simply beautiful on a good pc. Boo hoo at people who got stuck at that first trailer and not the billion gameplay trailers that came out. When I'm riding around a forest and the sun is setting I want to kiss that game on the lips. As for gameplay, I like the sidequests ten hours in.
posted by ersatz at 11:51 PM on June 3, 2015


>>There was nothing more satisfying in Fallout 3 and New Vegas than a perfect sniper rifle shot that just exploded brain and jawbone and teeth and eyes everywhere in highly-detailed slow-motion.

>In Fallout: New Vegas I helped a rape victim recover from her trauma. I united factions. I broke up a gang of cannibals. I helped a post-human Howard Hughes, and restored supply lines to farms and got medicine to isolated settlements. And I did most of it by talking.


I did a lot of both and they were both pretty fun :)

I do think people should keep in mind that the Fallout universe, though set in the future, essentially forked off of our universe sometime in the 1950s.

Maybe we'll finally learn the fate of old Charlie. Come to think of it if there isn't a quest involving a ghoul named Charlie being held for ransom in a subway car then there will have to be a mod.
posted by mcrandello at 12:09 AM on June 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm actually glad there wasn't anything like I Don't Hurt Anymore in FO3 because Bethesda would've done something completely horrifying with it.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:10 AM on June 4, 2015


I really liked Fallout 3: I never beat it, heck, never got much beyond your father dying, but I sunk a crazy number of hours into it exploring the wasteland. The only reason I stopped playing (twice) was that at a certain point small guns stop doing enough damage to be useful, even with the Xuanlong assault rifle, Reservist's rifle, and The Terrible Shotgun. Doubly so if you have Broken Steel installed, to make hitting level cap less of an annoyance. Still, no matter where I went there was something to find, explore, see. Pretty much any time you see something on the horizon you could go there, and there would be something there. One time I went as far north as I could, and there were all these radio towers. Any other game, those would be locked tight, and/or somewhere you couldn't get. In Fallout 3 you could go to them, go in them, and at least two of them had interesting things inside them. (One of which you got to call down a nuclear strike with!)
I own New Vegas, but always wanted to finish Fallout 3 first before trying it. Guess once I have time I should sit down and do that....

Bethesda games and consoles: I guess that is alright, I mean, I played 120 hours of Skyrim on my brother's 360. But really, why pay for a version in which you can't access most of the best parts of it since you can't use console commands or mods? Heck, the fan patch alone will make it a better deal, plus you can use the console commands to fix characters that vanish or die unexpectedly.

How to do it; Buy a normal PC. Stick it beside your TV. Now either get a wired controller, or a TV tray and put your mouse and keyboard on it. Or you could also get something like a Logitech G13 for one hand (basically, a minikeyboard) and a mouse for the other. Mice don't work on couches you say? Trackballs ARE still a thing.

tl;dr: Console will work. Bethesda has a history of gamebreaking bugs though, PC can work around them. Console can't.

Now on to the important issue: The voice in the trailer is male. That is disappointing, they could have left them faceless and namelesso, like you know, every other Fallout game. I really hope they have female options and that they also feature in the advertising.

(Oh, and someone asked why people care what platform others play on? A dollar put into a console port is a dollar not spent on the PC version. If PC was the only gaming system, there would be more money spent on the game, and less on ports. Also, the more popular a system is, the more attention is spent on making that version of the game. PC has been on the downturn as of late, so there have been a lot of shoddy PC ports, since those aren't were the real money is.)
posted by Canageek at 1:28 AM on June 4, 2015


It is possible to like both FO3 and NV.
posted by walrus at 3:19 AM on June 4, 2015


I totally agree. It's possible to like two things!

But New Vegas makes you choose a faction.

That's why Fallout 3 is better. It doesn't make you choose a side.
posted by painquale at 3:30 AM on June 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Technically you can choose none of the factions in NV.

I liked how there were fewer cookie cutter dungeons in NV, but NV also had those fucking cazadors. Fuck them.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 3:45 AM on June 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


The thing about dealing with cazadors is a) they have zero armor, so feed them hollowpoints and b) if you fuck up their wings they're about as dangerous as feral ghouls. Conveniently, their wings are an easy target in VATS.

Silenced .22 SMG + .22 HP + cazador swarm = pile of XP and smug superiority.

Oh, and one of the Survival recipes added by Lonesome Road is the automatically self-activating Snakebite Tourniquet, which requires Survival 30 and is made from surgical tubing and a buffalo gourd seed, neither of which are rare ingredients. Have some on hand and laugh at anything that attempts to envenom you, along with the people who insist that Survival isn't one of the most useful skills in the game.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:58 AM on June 4, 2015 [9 favorites]


*taking copious notes*
posted by Elementary Penguin at 4:49 AM on June 4, 2015


seconded.

when I dump so much time into a game, it really would pay to actually study its mechanics from now on...
posted by indubitable at 5:11 AM on June 4, 2015


In Fallout: New Vegas I helped a rape victim recover from her trauma. I united factions. I broke up a gang of cannibals. I helped a post-human Howard Hughes, and restored supply lines to farms and got medicine to isolated settlements. And I did most of it by talking.

But did you take your friend Boone with you to The Fort and slaughter every last motherfucker you found there?

Good times.

The only reason I stopped playing (twice) was that at a certain point small guns stop doing enough damage to be useful, even with the Xuanlong assault rifle, Reservist's rifle, and The Terrible Shotgun.

Huh. If anything I've found the reverse -- with a small-arms skill near 100, which you ought to have by that point, most guns one-shot/one-burst most enemies up to super mutant masters. Ditto the energy weapons skill and A3-21's plasma rifle. By level 30, when you have both skills up to 100 and Bloody Mess, Better Criticals, and Grim Reaper's Sprint, you wander around the wasteland and things explode when you glance at them.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:04 AM on June 4, 2015


One thing I've learned: in both games I took the Explorer perk which reveals all waypoints as soon as I hit level 20, and each time it significantly decreased my enjoyment of the game. Never again.
posted by painquale at 6:16 AM on June 4, 2015


Well if you're interested, the reason I say Silenced .22 SMG is that it's a weird gun. Requires 50 points in Guns to use without a penalty, and you won't see it or very much .22LR ammo early on (for all that it is super-cheap ammo- even when I'm not bothering with it I'll still buy it to break down for powder), so it's clearly not an early-game weapon despite .22LR doing shit damage that won't break the Damage Threshold of anybody with armor (or if it will, not by much), and while the usual way to get better damage on low-caliber rounds is to go with hollowpoints, HP ammo is mostly useless against armored enemies since the increase in damage will be negated by the increase in Damage Threshold.

So what's this gun's niche? Unarmored enemies, which for the most part means noncombatant humans. But shooting somebody who's not fighting back isn't fun, so let's have a look at the stats for each kind of Cazador and notice that their Damage Threshold (a flat amount subtracted from every attack) and Damage Resistance (a percentage subtracted from every attack) are both 0. So any damage that hits a Cazador is coming out of that Cazador's health bar and hollowpoints don't cause any loss of damage.

But why the .22 Silenced SMG? Because it combines a very high fire rate (at 11 rounds per second there's only a handful of guns that rival it) with a surprisingly high critical hit bonus (I imagine it's designed to be the late-game version of the Silenced .22 pistol, which is designed for high-luck gimmick builds that revolve around sneaking around and killing everything with sneak attack crits) and cheap ammo. Not all that useful to most... unless you're hunting something with no armor and want to put lots of cheap hollow point bullets with a high chance of critical hits into it.

Eventually you'll get better weapons that will rock Cazadors even better. But for a good stretch of the game, the Silenced .22 SMG with hollowpoints is pretty much THE Cazador killer.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:20 AM on June 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


I have one counter point for both "VATS gets boring" and "Combat sucks":

Rock-It Launcher w/ Garden Gnomes as ammo.

NOTHING beats blowing off a ghoul's head, in slow mo, with a rocket powered garden gnome.

NOTHING.
posted by Twain Device at 6:44 AM on June 4, 2015 [6 favorites]


NOTHING beats blowing off a ghoul's head, in slow mo, with a rocket powered garden gnome.

I submit blowing up Allistair Tenpenny.

(Break into Tenpenny's apartment at Tenpenny towers, sneak up to him as he's sitting on the balcony and place a couple of dozen land mines in front of his chair. Then stand well back and shoot him with the weakest gun you have--. This won't be enough to kill him, but it'll make him stand up and come at you through the mines. For extra flamage, I recommend using the Zhu-Rong v418.)

(Also: Tenpenny is evil. He totally deserves this.)
posted by suetanvil at 8:23 AM on June 4, 2015


We'll know it's really Boston if there are Dunkin Donuts every 4 blocks.

Looking forward to this as well. Fallout 1 and 2 remain some of my most favorite games ever. I loved New Vegas. Mostly it's just nice to have the world back.
posted by Jinsai at 8:36 AM on June 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm very excited by this, even though I'll almost certainly be waiting until the game is completely overhauled by modders to actually play it. Right now I'm playing New Vegas turned into a bleak (yet colourful) almost empty actual-wasteland by DUST, and most of its recommended mods.

In general I prefer story and dialog to combat, but in this case stripping out (nearly) all the conversations and quests and NPCs actually removes a huge obstacle to enjoying the full impact of the open, apocalyptic landscape and the threats it can present. I respect Obsidian, but even their writers can't really do justice to the setting.
posted by Drexen at 8:56 AM on June 4, 2015


I really want a Skyrim mod which removes all the towns, cities, buildings and NPCs. I just want to be a wood elf hunting game in a giant, monster-haunted taiga.

Somebody please make this game.
posted by selfnoise at 9:09 AM on June 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


I submit blowing up Allistair Tenpenny.

Mezzing him is fun too.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 10:17 AM on June 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


The only reason I stopped playing (twice) was that at a certain point small guns stop doing enough damage to be useful, even with the Xuanlong assault rifle, Reservist's rifle, and The Terrible Shotgun.

The endgame small guns are Lincoln's Repeater and sniper rifles. Targeted headshots from a mile away. Pop.
posted by rifflesby at 11:26 AM on June 4, 2015


Headshots, high guns and all the sniper perks has always been the easiest path through Fallout. In 3 and later, sneak attacks are 100% crits, so even LUCK doesn't really matter.
posted by bonehead at 11:31 AM on June 4, 2015


Mezzing him is fun too.

OOOOooooooOOOOOOhhhh.....
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:48 AM on June 4, 2015


Man I thought smoking pot had gotten complicated with people talking about a bajillion different strains and names and things, but all this mod talk makes me think games are worse.

I'mma go play some Yar and smoke whatever Jim is selling behind the bleachers.
posted by phearlez at 12:51 PM on June 4, 2015




If you haven't finished the main story in FO3, drop everything and go do it right now. Two words: Liberty. Prime.

It's totally possible to love both FO3 and NV. I love 3's bleak desolation, the personal nature of the main quest (with Liam Neeson as your dad!), and the little hardscrabble pockets of humanity. They never had the NCR or even the Legion to unite them that far east, but they're still surviving.

In 4, I sure hope we see some more androids! The Replicated Man was a fun quest in 3, and dat plasma rifle reward... oh yeah.
posted by lovecrafty at 1:55 PM on June 4, 2015


I probably liked FO3 better just because of the setting. I got kind of bored of the constant desert and hills in NV after a while.
posted by octothorpe at 2:27 PM on June 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Oh yeah android plasma rifle! Last time through I got meltdown in addition to bloody mess. Sometimes they'd stack and send disintegrating green goo body parts all over the place. Whee!
posted by sexyrobot at 2:32 PM on June 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Oh man the plasma rifles

"...and now you're goo! And you are goo! And so are you! Glowing goo for everyone!"
posted by The Whelk at 2:41 PM on June 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


The correct answer is actually the Railway Rifle. There's nothing like stapling a feral ghoul's head to the subway wall with a railroad spike.
posted by entropicamericana at 3:02 PM on June 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


In NV, I was generally fond of the Q-35 Matter Modulator. With maxed out energy weapons, bloody mess, and that perk that makes people explode when killed with energy weapons, yes, that worked out rather nicely.

In 3, my favorite was the Captain's Sidearm from Mothership Zeta. With the action boy perk, you could fire that thing many times in VATS.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 5:39 PM on June 4, 2015


In NV, ya gotta love Christine's rifle. Dude is all "Huh my friend's head exploded for some reason well that's no cause for alarm I'll just go back to whatevBLAM."
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:00 PM on June 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


I have sunk a large number of hours into F3, NV and Skyrim, and enjoyed all three, but still have a huge number of reservations about the Bethesda Skyrim/Fallout questing. Because the focus is on a huge world with a huge number of things to do, major quests have either only a couple of solutions, or one single solution that can be approached in a couple of ways. The land is packed with NPCs that are immortal through the equivalent of invisible walls. Here's a list of unkillable NPCs in Skyrim – there are about 200 of them. Sadly the number seems to go up as the games become bigger and more ambitious.

The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a case study in the worst of Bethesda questing. You enter a town that's under the thumb of a thieves guild. Half the NPCs in the town lament the guild and wish for it to be removed. During my first playthrough I was a paragon of justice and decided to help these townsfolk. But you can't. The Guild Leader is tagged as 'Essential'. There's no quest about banding the town together to eject them. You have to leave the town alone, even if you're a warrior with godlike powers who has the capability of killing every person in the entire town in a brawl. The guild cannot be removed.

So for my next playthrough I decided to join the thieves guild, as a sneaky archer pickpocketer. The thieving was fun and there was a juicy mystery to uncover. After a couple of missions you find out that an important member of the town's ruling elite is corrupt and murderous. Right, I thought; time for some old fashioned vigilante justice. But you can't kill the corrupt townsperson. Tagged as 'essential' for a later quest.

It looks like F4 is using an iteration the same engine they've been using since F3, and I worry that the questing is going to be very similar. It's easier to market a game on the size of the landscape and the crafting opportunities and the impressive loot and the exciting set pieces, than it is to market the fact that your smaller number of quests are meticulously designed and support playstyles from rule-followers through blunderers to total anarchists.

Bethesda: PLEASE make the questing robust. Have a person in charge of that Essential NPCs list, and make their sole job figuring out how to whittle that list down. Allow the player to fail quests or miss out on some quests. If you have to have Essential NPCs, just make them incredibly, incredibly difficult to kill. Make it make sense diegetically. If they can only by destroyed by a level 40 character, then it means that the killer will probably at least know what they're doing and can take their lumps if a future quest can't be triggered.
posted by Cantdosleepy at 2:00 AM on June 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


New Vegas did the smart thing and made virtually nobody essential. I think it was Josh Sawyer who said they designed NV to be possible to beat even if the player character had a flamethrower with infinite ammo strapped to their chest.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:42 AM on June 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


I think it was Josh Sawyer who said they designed NV to be possible to beat even if the player character had a flamethrower with infinite ammo strapped to their chest.

But if you kill certain characters out of the prescribed order, their factions will continuously send end-game level execution squads after you. I'm not saying I regret blowing Vulpes Inculta's head off at Nipton, quite the opposite; but after I spent the last of my grenades on the fifth execution squad, it became almost impossible to beat the game. I would have needed something like a flamethrower with infinite ammo strapped to my chest.
posted by Iridic at 7:35 AM on June 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm confused. Is a flamethrower with infinite ammo a bad weapon? Because it sounds like a pretty good weapon.
posted by maryr at 7:55 AM on June 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Iridic: Well, that explains why I always had much more trouble with the Legion hit squads than anything else in the game.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 8:01 AM on June 5, 2015


But if you kill certain characters out of the prescribed order, their factions will continuously send end-game level execution squads after you. I'm not saying I regret blowing Vulpes Inculta's head off at Nipton, quite the opposite; but after I spent the last of my grenades on the fifth execution squad, it became almost impossible to beat the game.

Don't think of them as execution squads. Think of them as gift baskets full of XP, guns, armor, and ammo. Caesar knows he has to be stopped, and he sends you hit squads to make sure you're well-equipped and leveling up properly. Be sure to thank the people who bring you the XP, guns, armor, and ammo- armor-piercing bullets to the face are the custom, though yeah, blown-off legs are also popular in some regions.


I'm confused. Is a flamethrower with infinite ammo a bad weapon? Because it sounds like a pretty good weapon.

Point is, even if you murder literally everybody you meet, you can still get to an ending, because a) Vendortron cannot be successfully attacked without cheating, so you always have a vendor, and b) Yes Man will simply download himself into another Securitron even if you destroy the one he's in (and eventually will simply be indestructible in House's system). The Yes Man ending is not only for people who don't like either the NCR or the Legion, it's also an ending that it's literally impossible to lock yourself out of.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:23 AM on June 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


Yes, the Legion Hit Squads were a mistake best fixed with a mod. It's easy to get terrible reputation with the Legion before you recruit any companions, and the hit squads show up with better armor and weapons forcing you into combat (unlike the Powder Gangers, who are easy to hate, but easy to avoid, and have minimal equipment.) There's a mod that scales the hit squads to level with the player so you don't get ambushed by groups with rippers and supersledges in the early game.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:26 AM on June 5, 2015


So long as you putter around a little bit before getting to Nipton and grab the Gobi rifle ASAP, Legion death squads are indeed gift baskets.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:10 AM on June 5, 2015


I'm curious to see if Dr. Li will show up at all in Fallout 4. The Broken Steel DLC for FO3 explicitly stated that she had left the Capital Wasteland to head north to The Commonwealth (AKA Boston).

I'd also expect Dr. Zimmer's associates at The Institute, and their pass-perfectly-as-humans androids to be a sidequest, if not a plot point to the main story.
posted by radwolf76 at 9:13 AM on June 5, 2015


If The Institute features so prominently, I wonder how the school named after a subway stop will come in.
posted by maryr at 9:15 AM on June 5, 2015


My main thing is urban environments that aren't artificially constricted simply because the engine can't load all that stuff into a single scene.

I know that some compromises had to be made back in 2008, and at least FO3 handled it pretty well by using rubble to mark boundaries. It does make sense that a post-apocalyptic DC would not be possible to navigate entirely via surface roads.

FO:NV, on the other hand, solved it by having weird arbitrary gates in between sections of Freeside and the Strip. If you were somewhere in the desert and wanted to get to Ultra-Luxe, you needed to sit through no fewer than three loading screens, even with fast travel.
posted by savetheclocktower at 9:18 AM on June 5, 2015


I'm hoping that tge new consoles having 16x the ram of the old ones will help with that.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:47 AM on June 5, 2015


Stolen from the SA forums:

Did you hear Bethesda is changing the name of their engine to War? Because Bethesda's engine never changes.

(Also because what is Bethesda's engine good for? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Say it again!)
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:54 PM on June 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm guessing they'll bring out a new engine for the next Elder Scrolls game. Which will then trickle down to Fallout.
posted by Justinian at 6:56 PM on June 5, 2015


FO:NV, on the other hand, solved it by having weird arbitrary gates in between sections of Freeside and the Strip. If you were somewhere in the desert and wanted to get to Ultra-Luxe, you needed to sit through no fewer than three loading screens, even with fast travel.

The Strip and Freeside were both supposed to be large, open areas, but this proved unfeasible because they ran terribly on systems with little RAM, like the 360 and PS3. There's mods that make The Strip and Freeside open, single-cell areas, but if you don't have a big whack of RAM, they might run poorly. Also! Start a new game if you use them- existing saves WILL NOT WORK with these mods.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:56 PM on June 5, 2015


And for the people who wonder why folks care what system you play games on; that's why. Because games are gimped in order to allow consoles to play them. So PC players, while still generally getting a better experience than console players (eventually), do not get nearly the experience they could have had if the game was designed from the start to take advantage of the possibilities a PC offers.
posted by Justinian at 7:20 PM on June 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


I don't care about the Strip/Freeside too much, but my major beef in that direction is Primm. When you get to Primm, you discover that Powder Gangers have killed the Sheriff and taken over the city, and the citizens are hiding in the casino while the gangers roam the hotel and streets. In the original release, Primm was just crawling with Powder Gangers, but they were almost entirely patched out because on consoles that area just crawled due to how little RAM the 360 and PS3 have. And that meant that the PC version lost those guys, too, because the data files need to remain consistent across platforms. The Increased Wasteland Spawns mod (which I recommend to virtually all PC players except those playing on some sort of toaster) makes that area much more challenging rather than the bare handful of Powder Gangers the official game contains.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:30 PM on June 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Justinian: "Because games are gimped in order to allow consoles to play them."

Except that in this case, the mods that make it as the developer originally intended are acknowledged to decrease the stability of one's game. Even with the several mods enabled that claim to help with random crashes, my New Vegas game still had the occasional crash, so I'm not entirely sure that Obsidian's vision would have been achievable even if they were developing solely on PC.

Plus NV is buggy as hell and until recently Obsidian thought the phrase "Quality Assurance" was solely for the people who inspect underwear before it leaves the factory.

Plus a great majority of games that are developed for consoles and PC probably wouldn't get made (or would be less ambitious) if they were being made solely for PCs.

I mean, I kinda get the whole "PC master race" thing, but I don't understand where people find the energy to get really mad about it.
posted by savetheclocktower at 7:35 PM on June 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Also, the upside of the ridiculous Bethesda engine is that it's wide open and the community can make a lot of these changes themselves.
posted by savetheclocktower at 7:36 PM on June 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Plus NV is buggy as hell and until recently Obsidian thought the phrase "Quality Assurance" was solely for the people who inspect underwear before it leaves the factory.

Bethesda did the QA on New Vegas, so slamming Obsidian for the quality of NV's QA is incorrect.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:41 PM on June 5, 2015


Then the two halves of my sentence are unrelated. But each one is true in isolation.
posted by savetheclocktower at 7:56 PM on June 5, 2015


Except that in this case, the mods that make it as the developer originally intended are acknowledged to decrease the stability of one's game.

That doesn't imply that the game would have been unstable on PC had the developers continued with their vision of an open Strip and Freeside. Mods are by nature hacks and kludges with the attendant stability problems.
posted by Justinian at 10:17 PM on June 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Well, it doesn't imply it would have been more unstable than a game on this engine already is. Which is pretty unstable.
posted by Justinian at 10:18 PM on June 5, 2015


So what's the bet that the PC turns out to be an Android then?
posted by longbaugh at 3:22 AM on June 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


I think savetheclocktower is right and that the PC-only version of New Vegas would simply never have existed at all. To a first approximation the difference is not between very large and expensive PC games that are limited by co-development with console versions of the games and ones that are not gimped, but between large and expensive PC games co-developed with console versions and not having large and expensive PC games.

So we shouldn't complain so much about carving up New Vegas and Freeside into stupid chunks, and just be happy that the PS4 and XB1 both have as much memory as a low-end-but-pretty-normal PC.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:17 AM on June 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Bah. I've tried every single tip and hack to get FO-NV running on my 8.1 PC to no avail. It crashes right after the initial cut scene every time. Hoping the new one is a little more stable.
posted by octothorpe at 7:43 AM on June 6, 2015


Here's some intense and impressive analysis of the game world portrayed in the trailer.

It turns out that The Institute is secretly shown in a whole bunch of different shots!
posted by painquale at 1:49 PM on June 6, 2015 [6 favorites]


Huh. I'm not sure about this. The ruined highway seems like it should be 93 - maybe I'm just hoping to see backseatpilot stab some thugs, but Somerville/Medford would be a better northwest area for the Vault. At least, if the highway is 93 it makes more sense, plus the flight path to Logan for over this area. Plus Medford borders the Fells which gives a wooded area for the possible vault location. It's more north of Boston than Watertown is so the bomb could have been dropped on the city proper from there.

Brighton would be a weird place to stop a nuke unless you really hated families and BU/BC students. But fiction, I guess.
posted by maryr at 8:19 PM on June 6, 2015


Random thought: you know what would be awesome? If there was no bomb but the MIT reactor had gone critical. Dunno when it was built though.
posted by maryr at 8:21 PM on June 6, 2015


If they go up to Medford, Tufts would make a great compound for some faction. It's already like a little fort on a hill.
posted by painquale at 11:04 PM on June 6, 2015


The hill is a really effective deterrent! I've walked around it for years, never knowing there was a quadrangle within. I just assumed it was a collection of buildings interspersed throughout the city. Enter the collegey part of it was a video-game-like reveal.

Of course, in Fallout, there's probably no cost for traversing grades, but maybe they could distract from the hidden central quadrangle via shrubbery or something.
posted by ignignokt at 6:13 AM on June 7, 2015


dammit. i don't know about fallout 3, but fallout nv definitely tweaks the 'simulation sickness' motion problem for me. have to try tweaking some of the video settings to see if I can reduce that.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:18 AM on June 7, 2015


rmd, try adjusting the FOV- I've heard a lot of people who have difficulty with FPS games finding that either increasing or deceasing the FOV makes them feel better.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:04 AM on June 7, 2015


I am convincing myself that the shelter is at Wright's Tower. In fact, I want to go on a very short walk so I'm going to go buy a donut and an iced drink and take a walk there.
posted by maryr at 9:11 AM on June 7, 2015


Re: The Institute's tall building: it has been said that when all the lights in the Green Building are out, it's the first sign of the apocalypse.
posted by maryr at 9:14 AM on June 7, 2015


Well, this was a while ago. Small guns work fine on Raiders, Mercs, etc. But the guys in power armour, or most super-mutants? Multiple sniper hits from my Reservists Rifle (Unique sniper rifle). Not to mention Albino Rad Scorpions.
posted by Canageek at 12:10 AM on June 10, 2015


unless you really hated families and BU/BC students. But fiction, I guess.

Fiction?
posted by phearlez at 7:03 AM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


Brighton would be a weird place to stop a nuke unless you really hated families and BU/BC students. But fiction, I guess.

Someone could just be really frustrated with the B Line. Or maybe the trolleys got so backed up that it formed a critical mass and spontaneously exploded. The trains are probably run by nuclear batteries in the Fallout universe.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 7:13 AM on June 10, 2015


Well, this was a while ago. Small guns work fine on Raiders, Mercs, etc. But the guys in power armour, or most super-mutants? Multiple sniper hits from my Reservists Rifle (Unique sniper rifle). Not to mention Albino Rad Scorpions.

I just started playing A Tale of Two Wastelands, which drags Fallout 3 into the New Vegas engine and lets you take trains between DC and the Mojave, and one consequence of this is that the nine trillion DC super mutants all have suddenly have the very high DT they do in New Vegas. So anything with damage under like 20 actually does nothing. Ugh.

I mean, I can tell that by level 50 I'm going to be ludicrously overpowered because it combines the perks from FO3 and NV (so I can pick up Almost Perfect at level 30, still have 10 more perks to pick, and still buy the implants from the doc in NV), but at low levels in DC... hoo boy.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:37 AM on June 10, 2015


What I came up with in ToTW was to buy Hand Loader and start making the really nasty magnum buckshot to put in the Combat Shotgun. That held me til I got Lincoln's Repeater.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:44 AM on June 10, 2015


I admit that for the time being I've installed the super mutant rebalance add-on that brings super-mutants back to about where they were in FO3. But that's because (I tell myself) I kinda want to blitz through the main questline in FO3 before I start wandering between the wastelands, so I have to hit DC at lower levels than I usually would.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:52 AM on June 10, 2015


Mass Effect dialog trees! Pet Mechanics! Voiced Protagonist! Wasting thousands of dollars on voice acting so that I can hear my character's name!

call me when Obsidian gets the licensing rights
posted by codacorolla at 8:02 PM on June 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


Speaking of Mass Effect, the female protagonist's voiced by the actress who voiced Jack. So I am pleased. And have already downloaded the SimVault game.

I went back into F:NV, finished up Hard Luck Blues and stalled out again, bored.
posted by rewil at 9:30 PM on June 14, 2015


Voiced Protagonist! Wasting thousands of dollars on voice acting so that I can hear my character's name!

I see that as an executive level decision, to support streamed gaming channels & Lets Play videos, and all the free word-of-mouth marketing such things bring. There was probably some focus group research that told them that when people are watching someone else's game, they don't want to have to read to keep up with the plot.

I eagerly await the day when they can start dropping in robust Text-To-Speech engines that have climbed far enough up the far side of the uncanny valley, that they can start using them for minor NPCs, or even to patch gaps in what tracks the voice actors laid down for the main NPCs & PC.

It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough. I could put up with the second uncreditted voice for Esbern in Skyrim (Bethesda only ever lists Max von Sydow for Esbern's lines, but there's clearly another actor doing parts of it). As is, voice acting is the bandwidth bottleneck between the writers' ideas, and the audience. I miss the days when you got novella-sized chunks of world building dialog from any and every NPC.
posted by radwolf76 at 7:01 AM on June 15, 2015


The presenter guy addressed that a little bit in the afterchat, saying something to the effect of "If this weren't a Bethesda game, you'd expect a voiced character instead of only hearing half of the conversations." I wonder how much the new consoles having 25/50GB discs instead of 5/9 played a role?

The building stuff looks like good endgame fun, but so much will depend on the story/questlines. Hopefully something closer to New Vegas or Skyrim and their factions than Fallout 3, though I wouldn't mind not being able to be almost-everybody's best friend like you could in NV and Skyrim.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:39 AM on June 15, 2015


A few other things I noticed from the conference were that:
  • Super mutants are possibly back to being brainless cannon fodder like in FO3, instead of just other survivors in the wasteland like in NV
  • One of the enemies was called a "Synth SOMETHING", indicating that people speculating about androids were probably right.
  • The Brotherhood were a large number of the enemies from the video, indicating that they're back to heel status.
Anyway, I think it looks better than I was anticipating, honestly.

I'm not thrilled about all voiced everything, and I think the crafting settlement defense stuff looks tedious, but overall the engine seems pretty tight and the other changes are for the better. Plus the release date is within this year, instead of just a year or two off in the future.
posted by codacorolla at 9:59 AM on June 15, 2015


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