Is Fallout 4 a lot harder than 3 and NV? Because âfiendishly difficultâ does not sound like a description of a Fallout game unless youâre applying some additional constraints on your gameplay.
No, no itâs not.
Unless he means some of the base-building mechanics. Iâd say maybe frustrating might be a more fitting description.
But⌠I still like F4 quite a bit.
Iâm waiting until itâs cheap to pick it up. I almost never buy new games, when they get a little older not only are they cheaper but the bugs are usually worked out .
Itâs not exactly going to match Dark Souls or Dwarf Fortress; but 4 is substantially harder than 3 or NV(though, with its expanded quasi-sandbox âsettlementâ mechanics, you have additional latitude to just putter about in ways orthogonal to any major questlines or dangerous locations and still score XP).
The new radiation mechanics(instead of a separate count-to-1000 with new radiation sickness symptoms kicking in every few hundred rads, culminating in death, rad damage now subtracts from your maximum HP edit: I was wrong about point-for-point: itâs still 1000 rads; but every 10 rads knocks 1% off your maximum HP, however many you have, and no healing items can restore those HP until the rads are removed, so rads actually remain a nontrivial threat even at high levels, since their effective damage is percentage-of-max-HP, rather than fixed) mean that you can end up with a good third or more of your potential health unavailable with just a short jaunt through the wrong places(plus, the number of hostiles that do direct rad damage is substantially higher: even radroaches and ferals now do rad and HP damage from level 1 and anything with âglowingâ in the name, of which there are a lot more, has a radiation aura until death.(Plus, letâs just say that the âChildren of Atomâ have really gone all church-militant this time around, and the âgamma gunâ does what it sounds like it does.)
Theyâve also upped the number of opponents that use some degree of stealth(either actually popping stealth boys/using equivalent tech; or mirelurks and mole rats burrowing and ferals often lying still-as-though-dead in various crannies until you approach them more closely); and handed out power armor and explosives more liberally to early game enemies(I was ~level 10 when a settlement got attacked by a raider team consisting of a couple meat shields with pitiful melee junk, tire irons or pool cues, 3 with low end firearms, and a two-man surprise team with rocket launchers. I eventually figured something out with copious cowardly running and letting poor dogmeat do a lot of the work; but running into rocket launchers used to be a âSupermutant Masterâ sort of thing, not a generic-raider-assholes thing.) There is also a particularly obnoxious(though, admittedly quite vulnerable if you notice him first and approach correctly) raider with power armor, a Fat Man, and 3-4 stories of high ground in Lexington, near an early game quest location.)
The increased emphasis on the vertical environments also cuts both ways. Great fun if youâve ascended to some suitably lofty perch and can spend some quality time with a .50 marksman rifle and a long scope; less fun if you are staring into the sun, trying to figure out where the half-dozen guys plinking hopefully at you are in the maze of catwalks and scaffolding.
All that said, this is Bethesda we are talking about; so stealth is hilariously overpowered if you put the points into it; as always, and the addition of lots of extra weapon and armor mods means that their perennial inability to build weapon and armor lists without absurdly overpowered and absurdly underpowered entries is even more dramatic than usual:(omitting power armor, the best conventional armor I currently have is actually formalwear: once you get access to ballistic fiber mods; you can add +100 ballistic and energy protection to certain otherwise-useless-except-for-charisma clothing; and without adding much weight. This allows you to wear a dress and a trilby hat and have approximately double the ballistic and energy resistance of a full suit of heavy combat armor, while still leaving your arms free for chosen arm-slot armor either to give you some rad resistance, or to improve scope stability or close combat capability. Talk about âdressed to killâ. You can also armor a tux, if you prefer; but that doesnât leave your arm slots free, so offers an incrementally inferior package.)
Plus, in the glorious tradition going right back to Morrowind, potions(er, um, âchemsâ) are hilariously powerful if you donât mind sacrificing the income from selling them and getting the occasional scolding when you go to a doctor for detox. A reasonably dedicated junkie can turn into a terrifying whirlwind of slaughter pretty effectively, especially now that there are various combo-chems that combine attributes of the traditional base chems(shooting Psycho has always been pretty powerful; but your options for being a drug-crazed super soldier are markedly more potent this time around, though all chems are fixed-effect, unlike TES potions, so you canât pull the truly crazy stuff you can with potion-stacking).
All that said(as was the case in 3 and NV) unless you grossly mismanage your perks, you will become a truly terrifying force to be reckoned with in the mid to late game; especially if youâve accumulated a set of legendary gear that matches your desired play style well. (Though, even at mid to high levels, there seem to be more âyou can handle this; but if you donât, youâll be dead before you hit the groundâ encounters. It gets substantially easier to kill super mutant suiciders or raiders/gunners with heavy weapons as you get better; but a mini-nuke to the face will ruin your day in basically any armor available, including at least the lesser flavors of power armor; and the stagger mechanics mean that even random ferals can beat you down surprisingly effectively if a few of them get you boxed in.)
Thanks, that is a really excellent review of the game.
Iâm apprehensive about the settlement building as it seems to be fairly demanding if you want to actually have decent settlements that can withstand the random attacks.
Oh⌠this way be bugs, make no mistake.
I, I have a backlog, butâŚ
While waiting for the second Witcher 3 DLC just what was I supposed to play petulant tone. Besides, itâs Fallout.
It is quite good, in my estimation. It has something that to me seems sort of new. There is so much incidental content as to make each experience differ significantly. Behavioral parameters are pretty wack too.
The settlement building mechanics need serious work(having to manually âassignâ people to do things like man guard posts or grow crops instead of standing around, staring into space, and complaining about how they are starving and scared of raiders, gets really tedious really fast.
Itâs not beyond hope(weâll see if Bethesda does, or if modders do; potential obviously doesnât matter if it doesnât happen) but simply changing the settler AIâs default from âstare into space and occasionally scavenge junk unless directly ordered otherwiseâ to âgenerate whatever the settlement is most in need of, if facilities exist, if food and security needs are met man any available trade posts, if nothing needs doing, scavengeâ would markedly improve matters.
Similarly, the current method for providing settlers with something other than rags and pitiful plinking pistols is âmanually walk up to them, ask to trade, and provide them with actual gearâ. That is so obnoxious that I usually end up using my Gun Nut and Science! skills to let turrets do the work if something actually needs to be secure. If they could just add an âArmoryâ or âArms lockerâ, buildable like any other container; but with settlers(priority to those on guard duty, others if reserves exist) allowed to grab any guns, ammo, and armor you place inside; itâd be a whole hell of a lot easier.
On the plus side, while there are benefits to building solid settlements(economic, and fire support); you only need to do very minimal work, in a few locations, even if you want to curry lots of favor with the Minutemen(who are pro-settler/settlement, with the settlement system if you donât feel like it.
I have a couple of settlements I actually care about; and Iâll usually do a âdefend the hapless settlers in PLACEâ if it pops up; but the fact that most of the Commonwealthâs alleged âsettlementsâ are largely in the same condition as when I found them, miserable, undersupplied, and unsecured, is not held against me in any serious way.
Iâm not quite sure why they missed some of the seemingly-easy improvements that would have made settlements much less of a chore to run, and I hope that they will fix them; but the fact that settlements are substantially broken can be largely ignored if you prefer, so it isnât a gamebreaker.
Alternatively, ask your nearest nuclear power plant if they need all those spent fuel rods and enjoy Christmas in the cool blue glow of Cherenkov radiation.
Or build an accelerator yourself. A Lenard tube can make an electron beam that travels a short distance in atmosphere.
I saw some video with beam strong enough to ionize the air and be visible with naked eye, but cannot find it now.
Thereâs a few elevator and physics bugs here and there but compared to other titles like the witcher 3, Fallout 4 is a lot more stable. On PC any way.
I got mine the hard way. 
Placed the bottles on a home-made lightbox table.
What is particularly unfortunate is that Fallout 4 is stuck in the âglaringly inconsistentâ stage of destructability and physics modeling.
I understand that, both for computational limits and plot purposes, not everything can be destructible(Red Faction style blow-up-all-the-things can be amusing in a shooter or a mayhem-fueled open world game; but given that everything in Fallout is falling to pieces anyway, youâd probably spend most of your time reloading from saves because a half dozen quest objectives, and you, became trapped by rubble every time somebody throws a grenade); but what is really annoying is that some items, chosen without any clear rules, are movable and/or destructible; but others arenât, sometimes even when visually identical.
Some rickety plank bridges will collapse if walked on too heavily, shot at, or exploded, some equally precarious structures are part of the world and immutable against mini nukes and artillery barrages. Some oil drums can be bumped around, some are rooted to the earth with the tenacity of Yggdrasil and stand firm against all things. Some lanterns are utterly unshakable, some can be picked up as a minor scavenge item to provide steel, glass, and oil.
Same thing, alas, applies in workbench areas. Some buildings, furniture, trees, etc. are in fact implemented as the buildable/movable/scrapable objects that you can create. Some are scrap only. And some, despite being apparently identical to objects you can build, are utterly unreactive(most of the furniture in the playerâs own kitchen, for instance, and most, but not quite all, the light fixtures in Sanctuary Hills).
Suspending disbelief for the purposes of the game isnât something I have trouble with, or object to having to do. Iâm also not inclined to quibble about the ugly details of exactly what should, or shouldnât, have survived a given blast pattern and 200 years of neglect. What is galling, though, is when the gameworld isnât consistent, and keeps rubbing your nose in âyup, thatâs a static mesh, part of the level geometry; oh, that one over there is an interactive object within the level, you can poke it! What next?â
I realize that this is a far-from-trivial challenge, and Bethesda has been iterating slowly toward greater environmental interactivity; but it is still pretty rough at present.
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