cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20867322
This is a long post about the various aspects of Fallout, don’t read it all unless you care to. Instead, find a section and comment on that so we can have a focused discussion if you prefer.
Summary
I modded the ever loving crap out of Fallout 4 with minimal effort using the A Story Wealth mod pack . My reasoning was that on my first play through I found the world empty but I mainly enjoy stories and quests, which this modpack seemed to do. Also I didn’t have time to spend modding and didn’t want to get lost in that hellhole of doing it myself. This play through was long, about 150 hours (yikes) which is probably all the fallout I’ll need for many years to come. I also used an addon to the modpack to make the game extremely difficult with healing items. More on that later.
Mods
The mods here are really quite varied and I was surprised at how coherent they are. With Skyrim modding, I always felt that the mods are somewhat disjointed and it takes skilled modders to stitch together. Here in FO4 its impressive how stable the pack was and how well the quests worked together. The most standout mod by far is The Fens Sheriff Department which adds hours of story, actually interesting quests, and in my opinion content miles better than Bethesda’s own content. It was worth coming back just for that alone.
Story
spoiler
After seeing what mods have done, I have no good words to say about FO4 in terms of story. The entire plot revolves around you getting your son back and its all in service of setting up the surprise that he isn’t a child anymore. Its predictable, boring, etc. All of the factions are uninteresting. Minutemen are nobodies and their story is minimalist. So is the Railroad. The Brotherhood of Steel are cool in concept but can’t back up their grit at all and end up being too friendly with zero depth to them as well. The Institute makes an attempt at depth but geez, its barely deeper than a puddle. I chose to end the game with the Fens Sheriff Department and it ended up being way more interesting despite the muted ending to their plot. If you’re playing this game for story, don’t.
Graphics
I’ll spend little time here, I didn’t spend any time beautifying the game at all but it looks surprisingly good at times. But at other times, the engine is terrible. The way it handles LOD stuff is awful and graphical glitches and clipping are extremely common. And yet, I do enjoy the aesthetic. The art is charming as ever and my main and only complaint is that the wasteland itself is very one-note and could’ve used some changes.
Engine
Take it out back and kill it. I won’t blame the vanilla game entirely but mods didn’t contribute to the instability of the game much. It has always been rough. In the city, due to a lack of proper culling you will get half your FPS or worse. My rig is very well equipped and still struggled to maintain 30-40fps in the cities. Then add in the few quest bugs that I had (mostly vanilla quests too) and the large amount of physics and items bugs and this really feels barely glued together in ways mods can’t fix. This engine needs to be worked on. A lot.
Characters/Followers
I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Fallout 4’s followers. Dogmeat is great but the interaction is minimal and Nick Valentine is easily the best in my opinion. He’s one of the few with a great set of dialog that actually makes use of the setting and feels grounded. Everyone else could almost belong in a different game. As with the story, a lot of the characters are poorly written and have lackluster dialog. The DLCs fix this but the main game struggles big time to ground everyone properly. I played the entire game with Heather Casdin and that was a real treat. She is what every follower could have been and provides really unique story commentary and relationship moments. It actually feels like you get to know her well instead of her just spouting backstory at you constantly. Bethesda take notes.
Locations
One of the better noted parts of Fallout 4 and Skyrim are the random locations and storytelling within them. Only problem is, FO4 doesn’t reward you often enough with location exploration beyond loot and thats not what people play fallout for in the first place. Its a mixed back here, some of the locations are very well done and are 10/10 settings where others are bland as mayo and waste your time.
Settlements
As intrigued as I initially was a long time ago at launch with them, the settlement system really brings the game down. Its impressive, don’t get me wrong but it eats up way too much of your time to configure and there isn’t any real point in setting them up. Sim Settlements helps with this but it still misses the mark in my opinion. I hope this system returns but very diminished in terms of tedium.
Gameplay
Guns feel good, fights are great. The mods all enhance that by giving the high stakes gunfights I really enjoy. Yet the game still became too easy despite me playing on survival. Needs just became annoying distractions. And being overencombered is just… awful. Especially with scrap being a thing and I hate scrap honestly. The scrap is a cool idea but has you doing the even more annoying part of Bethesda games, looking in every nook and cranny for a desk fan or box car. Its stupid and it takes you out of the game completely. I think this could have been fine if they toned it down, not every item needs to be able to be used like this.
DLC
This was the highlight of my time because I had never played the DLC, I couldn’t afford it back when this launched. Far Harbor blew me away with how cool it was and just really showed what parts of the base game were missing. The moral grays presented here were fun to work through and the quests unique. I wish Far Harbor was its own game almost. Nuka world feels more like a lightweight DLC but still shows that Bethesda can write decent stuff and have decent art when they try. I have no idea why the quality of these DLCs is so high when the rest of the game is kind of bland compared to FO3 or New Vegas.
The Takeaways
I hope Bethesda gets their act together because FO4 was a pretty decent game. Not perfect but also very dated. Quests are mostly bland and are often fetch quests or don’t reward you with much dialog or story. And the mods just show how easy it would be to get this stuff right the first time. The lack of grit to the story is something that really sucks in my opinion. Its not a game for kids clearly, there is blood and guts and mutants abound. So why don’t any of the major characters die? Why don’t they meet horrible ends? Why not have your son meet a horrible demise if you make the wrong choices? The only time any of that happens is the end of the game. Far too little far too late. The game just has absolutely no stakes to it, no impact. At least in Skyrim the Civil War shakes things up. Thats what I really wanted from this game is to feel like my actions were doing something and the mods really helped with that.
If you made it through this wall of text, I appreciate it. I spent way too long on this but I felt like telling someone about my experiences. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun with this game but by the end I was exhausted of Fallout 4’s short comings. Let me know what you think!
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Is it “great” if you have to mod the shit out of it though? Maybe a more accurate title would be modded fallout 4 is great?
That aside i’ve tried to get into Fallout 4 a number of times now and I could never do it. I usually give up around 10 - 15 hours in. The story is terrible what I’ve seen of it and I absolutely despise base building / settler management aspect that I think has absolutely no place at all in this game.
I do intend to return but this time mod it and see if that can improve my overall experience and actually make this a game worth playing for me.
Would you recommend the modpack you used? Is there anything missing from it in hindsight you’d have liked?
I think the game is good/fine without mods but with mods it’s absolutely a great game. I would absolutely recommend the mod pack that I used. I paid for the nexus pro membership thing to have it all auto-installed for me, it was a breeze. Cost me $10 or whatever but it’s worth it to not have to spend the time installing everything. And I liked the ability to install the add on mod pack for added difficulty but honestly ignore the needs system entirely.
I played using the vanilla survival mechanics and it was fine. Food is easy to find and so is water but it just gets annoying at some point if you just want to adventure. Survival does limit you to saving at beds though, which are common 90% of the time. The other 10% it either creates some good tension as you actually fear for your life but also some annoyance having to retry stuff and wastes time. Up to you.
As for recommendations, just realize that the mod pack I used did indeed take 150+ hours to complete most of the quests. That being said, even if you did a fraction of that it’s not a waste of time. You will have to get a little further into the game for the mods or DLC to really hook you. Do Nuka World DLC sooner rather than later.
I mostly ignored the settlement stuff entirely. I did a little bit of what it asks and tried to get into Sim Settlements but I just didn’t care.
I think what I would mainly say is don’t make the game too tedious for yourself and feel free to focus on the mods. I actually didn’t complete the main story until the very end of my play through and I’d recommend that as well. Also, just do the Fens Sheriff stuff. It’s really that good and the vanilla stuff is very boring.
As for add on mods, I think an unlimited carry weight is not a bad idea to enable. Inventory management is hell in this game even with the backpacks. Other than that you don’t need to add much at all. If you need any help my DMs are open
Appreciate the long reply. I have recently finished a 100, hour New Vegas play through so I need a break from that universe for a while but may look into this mod pack and 4 in general again in like 6 months time :)
No, it’s not even remotely “great”.
I would give it a “good”, at most.For the vanilla unmodded game I think even “good” is generous!
Really it depends what you care about. From my perspective, I call it great as a synonym for good but really I don’t think any other game has threatened to steal Fallouts thunder. I’m not sure how to give an overall sentiment for a game that has such highs and moderate lows though.
Oh…hemlo.
Story
I call fallout 4 a good game but terrible fallout…HOWEVER. I do not agree the story was foreseeable or boring. The hints on the way pointed to possibilities but sure as hell I didn’t expect where the sonny ended up. But about factions - liked the twist of Brotherhood compared to lore, they shown both Lyons and Outcasts influence. There is nuance hidden in story of Minuteman…and yet Railroad and Institute both terribly bleak, both lore wise and gameplay wise.
Characters
Typical bethesda followers are typical, but to be honest, they did what they could with that ring dialogue. I liked most characters, maybe they were a little…dry, and outside quests their interactions were flat but where Bethesda decided to give them chance to speak, they shined.
But they shouldn’t be romancable, period, your goddamn spouse got shot in the fucking head in front of you.
Settlements
I enjoyed them. Were they useful? No. I mean post artillery maybe somewhat, but still meh. But i didn’t treat them as integral, but rather creative outlets. This also influences how you see scrap - if you are not builder, take note of the few resources for weapon/armor crafting and ignore the rest, it suddenly gets more actiony. Also, with DLC, robots my beloved.
Overall
I mostly agree, but then again, my enjoyment jumped immensely once I stopped expecting fallout like depth from Fo4. It’s arcade shooting game with one of the most ingenious building systems and some RPG leftovers.
That last part I especially agree with. It’s not really the fallout game I expected when it first came out and some where in this play through I gave up taking it seriously. It’s fun for what it is but I think the mods really highlighted how lighthearted and shallow most of the game is. I mean hell, Heather uses the conversation wheel I think and she even ends up a decent companion with actual development.
Bethesda needs to get away from the companions just randomly coming up to you to spill their life story now that you reached enough XP. They can do better and the mods I’ve used show how simple it would be to do so
I’ll admit - I do not mod story or companions. I mostly mod environment (adding green after nth playthrough through the brown slob) and dificulty/survival (Horizon my beloved). But yeah, I much prefer New Vegas approach, where followers spilled beans when you approached location that was important for them or were going through a quest that they had stakes in. Veronica and BoS bunker, Boone and the place where NCR brutalized Khans. This simply made sense. Also companions having opinion of you that mattered. YES I KNOW CODSWORTH YOU LIKE ME MODYFING ARMOR GAH.
And also I miss quests which branched and influenced each other. They were always rare but in Fo4 they are almost non-existent.
BTW, if you hand’t tried and do not yet despise Fo4, but want to see what potential lied in settlements, try Horizon. It’s more hardcorish survival overhaul, so it doesn’t like many mods, but damn it made settlements not only fun but also practical.
With Skyrim modding, I always felt that the mods are somewhat disjointed and it takes skilled modders to stitch together. Here in FO4 its impressive how stable the pack was and how well the quests worked together.
I modded a lot of Skyrim and I just don’t understand this part. Modlists by other people are very stable, I’ve never had a problem with Wabbajack or lists with just written guides like lexy or phoenix. I’ve made my own lists and I am not a skilled modder, I just read the descriptions of the mods I was downloading and recent comments.
I didn’t mod fallout 4 very much besides appearance mods and settlement mods. I liked building settlements. But I hated the ending. Ugh. I replayed Skyrim a bunch with and without mods but not fallout 4 because of the ending.
I think it’s less that the mod lists don’t work together in Skyrim and more that I just never felt cohesion the way that FO4 modders appear to have worked out.
For instance, this mod pack has several moments that modify the main quest. And other mods work with that. Or there’s mods that interconnect beyond basic dependencies and assets, creating quest lines that play nicely together.
I’m not saying it doesn’t exist in Skyrim mods, I’ve done a lot of that as well. It just seems like there was coordination here by the community more than in Skyrim from what I’ve seen. Personal experience, could be wrong.
You might give Fallout another go though and do what I did and choose the modded endings. Far more interesting and I engaged with the vanilla story very little. DLCs are also worth it
