Phatose on 12/11/2015 at 04:47

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Thanks guys.


Honeymoon is over for me. Game has some issues. The engine seems to have serious problems with the y-axis while sneaking, to the point where stepping over a dead body is impossible. If one enemy is at fully alert, any others in the area who would be at caution instantly become absolutely aware of your location - so any reinforcements that show up will not require even a split second to locate you.

Enemy grenade speed and accuracy is stupidly high. Even basic raiders have the ability to pull out a grenade and throw it with pinpoint accuracy essentially instantly.

Dogmeat may be immortal, but he's all too happy to cause your death. For all the commands they have, something that you really need - stay behind me and stay quiet, dog - is not there.


Wondering if this is a case of superficial flaws hiding the fundamental ones that will show themselves later. Hard to tell, but so far it's buggy (fell through the solid ground to my death for no reason within the first 4 hours), and it performs badly. Which only leaves "fundamentally flawed mechanics" off the checklist of typical Bethesda releases, so I'm not especially hopeful.

Ostriig on 12/11/2015 at 11:15

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Wait, is that a definite? I Googled "safe storage" last night for F4 and people were suggesting using the Workshop inventory particularly so you could access it between locations. And cheers on the materials clarification.


But anywho, let me regale you with another knee-slapper from the comedy club that is Beth's UI department. There's plenty of hard-bound or nonsensical controls to whinge about, but some are more egregious than others. So you have a control defined to activate stuff, which by default is bound to E. Now, if you're like me you may want to bind that to something else - Mouse Button 4 in my case - which has been largely fine in Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Except this time, the Activate control only seems to apply to most established interactibles, like picking up single objects, opening doors, activating terminals and so on... It does not apply to some other interactibles, like climbing into power armour, activating workbenches and, most annoyingly, the new quick-loot system. No, all that stuff is hard-bound to E.

Now take a moment to consider this. Not one of the items this applies to require that the player be able to both use the "generic" activate as well as the particular hard-bound "E activate" at the same time. Effectively, the special hard-bound E should've been the same control mapping entirely. Right now I gotta train my brain to "take" cans of Pork N' Beans off a shelf with Mouse 4, but also "take" 'em out of inventory lists with E. Or give in to Beth's default layout.

This is not really the case with the other highly common hard-bound control, R. Which by default is Reload, but also doubles up as activating the Transfer functionality on the aforementioned interactibles. Now, yes, they do interfere and clearly the devs didn't think this was a problem, since one action is hard-coded and the other is set by default to the same key.

Which brings me to my main point - if both of these keys were always meant to do the same thing in the designer's vision, why weren't they built as unified controls? The Activate control would activate, open, take, or take from a list, the Reload control would either reload your weapon or open the Transfer interface when appropriate. That's just to stay within the general keymapping Bethesda's gone with, no point in dreaming up altogether different layouts.

What's most irritating about this entire affair is that it's clearly not a mere oversight. CDPR had an oversight with The Witcher 3 when the Dismount action didn't extend to the boat as well, it was hardcoded to E. But it was just that, an oversight, a bug which was later fixed. With Fallout 4 we're not talking about isolated cases, we're talking about an entire set of functions which were mangled this way and it's hard to think up of any excuses past crass disinterest.

Now, just to sweeten this towards the end, I don't have an overall bad impression of Fallout 4 so far. Quite the contrary, I ended up sinking in another two hours last night, despite my initial inclination to let it sit for a patch or two. It does seem to be just Fallout 3++, a new lick of paint, some improvements, some regressions, but I'm generally ok with that. I loved Fallout 3 and I may turn out to love Fallout 4 in the end. But I do get miffed at screwups like these because they're not grand engineering challenges, they're very basic failures that end up causing a disproportionate amount of grief.


P.S. On a separate note, surprised there isn't a bigger hullaballoo about the PC DVD, reviews have rightly tanked on Amazon to around two stars, compared to four-five stars on consoles. Technically, Hines did (http://www.gamespot.com/articles/fallout-4-pc-discs-dont-contain-full-data-partial-/1100-6431658/) mention it was just one DVD, so if you knew the HDD requirements you might've guessed about how much of a DL was needed, but it was a very slippery way to put it and the Amazon listing doesn't say squat.

Phatose on 13/11/2015 at 01:09

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I'm really, really trying to give this game a fair shake, but right now it's in 3/10 territory.

The interface is an ungodly abortion. Want to close the pip boy? Hit tab. Want to close the crafting interface? Hit tab over and over again, then hit enter. Want to close the building interface? Hit escape, not tab. Goddamnit, how about some consistency.

More problematically though, the interface itself has directly affected the quality of quest and the world. There is an awful lot of shooting - expect kill everything to be the solution to every problem. Which is actually easily understood once you realize that with only 4 dialog options available, there's not much room for testing against perks, or equipment, or items found, or quests done, locations or information you've discovered.

Especially since 1 option is always taken up by accept, and one by decline, and most of the time a third is taken up with 'repeat that explanation again'.

So far, the quests are Mass Effect 2/3 level shallow. Except Mass Effect actually had pretty good combat. This, not so much.


And then this horrible interface is used for a game about scavenging, but inventory management is beyond a chore.

Well, at least the performance is good......well, no. But the visuals are good enough to just.....no, no they're not.


I'm gonna keep trying at it for a bit, but I have zero optimism at this point and pessimism is approaching "Uninstall" pretty quickly.

Phatose on 13/11/2015 at 16:43

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Pretty much, yeah.

So far, I'd be hard pressed to call Fallout 4 an RPG. It plays like it was a Far Cry - very light RPG combat mechanics, but next to nothing on the social or non-violent side of RPG questing.

If I'm going to keep with this game, I'm going to have to restart since I put too many points into perks and stats to help non-combat portions, since that's where I tend to lean. I didn't realize at the time the non-combat portions barely even exist.

Jason Moyer on 13/11/2015 at 20:25

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It's because STEPHEN RUSSELL read a list of names.