Having dropped New Vegas in the past due to lost interest, I decided to try this game out finally since a friend of mine was having a fallout 3 playthrough himself. It was it 8 bucks, so I figured why not. I have to say, I put way more hours into this game than both other Bethesda games I’ve played through (Skyrim and Oblivion) before even finishing the main quest line. The combat was excellent in my opinion, and I (seem to be in the minority of people who) really liked the story. The choices it forces you to make sometimes really had me feeling emotional at times. I also played it with some minor mods installed, just some custom outfits and real world guns for immersion. Nothing to break the story or anything, though there are a few DLC sized mods I’m eyeing up to play in the future. Overall I seriously enjoyed this game, I’ve noticed online it seems to be regarded as one of the least popular mainline games but I think it’s become my favourite Bethesda game I’ve tried so far honestly. Seriously recommend anyone who hasn’t played this yet to at least give it a try. It really pulled me in.
Edit: Since I’m done with F4, got New Vegas running with some nice mods to add gritty aesthetics and real world weapons. Giving it another try 6 years after I initially tried it and so far I’m way more into it!
Edit 2: more specific context
Fallout 4 kind of in a weird place where it’s simultaneously a bad Fallout game and arguably the best Bethesda game. How much you like it really just depends on which of those things you’re more into. I’ve personally never really gotten the appeal of Bethesda games. I usually end up spending 90% of my time going through my inventory analyzing the price to weight ratio of all the worthless junk I’ve accumulated, and the worlds have always just felt really shallow to me personally, but clearly I’m in the minority. I am sort of curious why more people seem to have agreed with me on Fallout 4 than on Skyrim though. I guess maybe it’s just that the people who talk about it the most are more likely to be Fallout fans than Bethesda fans.
Fallout 4 kind of in a weird place where it’s simultaneously a bad Fallout game and arguably the best Bethesda game.
Thank you
That’s how I’ve described fallout 4 since it first came out. Nice to see someone else had the same thought. It’s a great game and I’ve put a ton of time into it and I play through it every 2 years at most.
But it’s really not a great fallout game. The game overall is excellent but it feels the least fallout-y, to me at least.
Play Morrowind and your opinion might change on them having to be shallow. It’s hard to get into, but it is the 3D one that takes its world very seriously.
For example, there’s a faction that uses magic and levitation is a thing in Morrowind. Their buildings are built vertically with shafts connecting floors you almost have to levitate through. Skyrim did these in the DLC that includes some of Morrowind, but they just made them floaty elivators, not a skill your character can use.
It is hard to get into though. The key thing to know is its actually an RPG. Your character stats matter more than your player skills. If you aren’t trained in using a sword, you aren’t going to be able to use one effectively. The game won’t stop you from trying, but you’ll miss a lot. Also things like using up your stamina sprinting (what feels like normal speed) and being tired makes your character tired and they can’t hit things. They’ll also be worse with bartering/talking with people because basically they’re standing there drenched in sweat and panting, which doesn’t look nice and people don’t really like dealing with it.
Bethesda has strayed far from this path though and I doubt we’ll ever see it come back.
What’s the best fallout game? I played 3 many years ago around the time out and I enjoyed it. Thinking of playing another one now
1 and 2 if you like oldschool isometric RPGs and New Vegas if you want them in 3D. 3 and 4 if Bethesda games are your favorite
New Vegas is easily the best Fallout.
4 is a beautiful game. But they’ve dumbed down the entire R aspect of the RPG. Dialog in 4 is a joke.
I loathe Fallout 4 for all the things the game has robbed the franchise of.
Most dialogue choices boil down to “yes / sarcastic yes / tell me more / not right now”
I really hate the settlement building, but I feel like I need to interact with it to play properly - it’s too powerful to ignore when playing on Survival.
I would have preferred if the settlers improved things themselves over time if the resources were available for them.
The three factions make the moral choice a no brainer. The Institute are slaveowners, the Brotherhood are Nazis and the Railroad are the Underground Railroad (very clever Bethesda).
(Minute men is not a real faction, they’re tertiary)
Also, the only temporarily impactful decision you make is which flavor if the final mission you’ll do. You don’t actually have to choose one until the very end. You can somehow be not just friendly, but high rank with all four at the same time, despite the conflict of interest.
They make you think your making choices sometimes (though honestly rarely in F04 because of the dialog system you mentioned), but you never do really. It’s an alright survival shooter thing, but a bad RPG. You choose abilities, but you rarely choose a role. You’re given your role at the start, and your only choice is to follow it.
Yes!! I felt the same way!
Particularly the ham fisted way it’s written, you’re really led to choose the railroad path, but I felt I never got a proper explanation on how the institute was bad (the why is clear).
I ended up going with the institute and I got a really underwhelming ending
The institute are bad because they’re basically “scientific racists” - they diminish the experienced suffering of conscious beings, even though they’re anatomically identical to Real Humans™
They’ve got the power to fix so many problems upstairs, but they’re so far removed from the suffering of others that they don’t know what the problems even are.
They’re essentially the 1% in our world. Bunch of privileged cunts who think they can fix the world by throwing money at a problem without really understanding the plight of the working class.
I put in 1300 hrs into fo4 just for the settlement building. With mods though.
“I heard people complaining about the bed situation…” NPC carrieing a bedroll on her back.
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Good to know, but as a purist, I don’t like playing with mods which change things in ways which could break the game if uninstalled (the one exception being UFO4P).
You posted this comment three times BTW.
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It just depends what you go into it looking for. If you want a deep RPG you won’t get it, and I found the story enjoyable, but just all right, but not horrible or anything. I do also really enjoy the gameplay.
The shooting won’t change the world, but it is enjoyable, and I really like the scavenging and modification of weapons and armor, and as a motivation for exploration it’s great.
That part about weapons and armour rang true for me as well. I spent a lot of time just wandering the commonwealth looking for junk to upgrade with and levelling my gunsmith up as a result. I think this is the most I’ve really explored in a game. Personally I didn’t really go in looking for anything so I was pleasantly surprised. But I definitely can see how say, someone going in for full role playing immersion from a game wouldn’t feel quite the same.
I think that’s a lot of what happened back when it released. The most recent Fallout game before then was Fallout New Vegas, and when it comes to a narratively deep RPG that’s almost an unfair fight compared to anything Bethesda has put out, so of course Fallout 4 fell very short of that mark.
But it does have successes in other areas. For the first time in, shit, any Bethesda game ever I found the animations and feedback of moment to moment combat actually enjoyable, the junk gathering and upgrading is an extremely addictive loop, and the game does look genuinely pretty and immersive, though the character animations still let it down.
I liked it to the tune of multiple hundreds of hours, myself.
Which modern Fallout game would you suggest for someone who loved the first 2 and generally prefers classic (and modern classic style) RPGs and deep stories?
If by modern you mean Fallout 3 and beyond, then absolutely New Vegas and its DLCs. You will not get anything of a deep story from any of the other offerings except maybe Fallout 4’s Far Harbor, but that comes too little too late if you might not tolerate Fallout 4’s flaws to get there.
New Vegas doesn’t play very well in terms of combat, hello Gamebryo engine, but it has a complex story with many possible directions and endings, and many factions that are much more than black and white. Your character’s own dialogue is also far better written compared to Bethesda’s offerings and has a lot more agency in the world. I think you will find enough to enjoy there as long as you can get past the hump of some middling (even for its time) shooting.
A lot of that can be owed to the staff similarities between the original Fallouts and New Vegas, Obsidian’s strong point, particularly Josh Sawyer as director.
I’ve been replaying and somewhat enjoying Fallout 4 recently too and all I can say is Bethesda made a very good (and janky) video game back in 2003 and managed to reskin it into 5 different games over the past 20 years fairly well—only blatantly showed its age with Starfield because they removed all the (now out of date) modernizations introduced in Fallout 4. I will not buy The Elder Scrolls VI if that ever comes to market.
Just throwing it out there if you haven’t played it, The Outer Worlds hits all the fallout notes in a tighter package (also made by obsidian who made New Vegas)
Noted! I have been meaning to cross outer worlds off my list for a while.
As someone currently playing through the Outer Worlds (I even made a post about it not long ago on this community), I’d highly recommend it. I’m having a lot of fun with it
I love FO4! One of my friends kept telling me to get it and play it. So when it was on sale I bought it in a heartbeat.
My only gripes are the inventory management and the depressing landscape, so nothing a couple of mods couldn’t fix to make life easier and not depress the hell out of me.
Snow mods in the summer. Desert mods in the winter.
Settlement management can get tedious and be a large time sink. Sim settlements 2 is actually not bad. You can off the most annoying ones on “mayors” to control. Show up later and add things if needed.
It revived the game for me. Changed settings so it would grow without my tedious input, so thankful for that. Show up to settlements over time to find evolving cities that are actually worth visiting and make the game feel alive, like you didn’t build every shack in the wasteland personally with the toaster you hauled from a national guard building.
I need to get unlazy and figure out how to do that. I enjoyed Conquest because it auto built settlements for you to conquer, but that’s been dead for a while.
just some custom outfits and real world guns for immersion
Kind of funny when you know Fallout is a satiric version of USA society
It’s a bad game that does some things that really make it worth playing, imo. The gunplay is mid and the social systems sucks so much ass, but not many games go for the scavenger fantasy like fo4. Throw some mods on top of the shaky base and you’ve got the only real good post apocalyptic survival game i can think of. Pick a spot to build up while living like a rat and you might get a few dozen hours of genuine fun out of it.
I personally recommend Frost or that modpack that turns the game into a survival horror, because the game is at it’s absolute peak when you are actually desperate for three more rounds in your revolver.
I lost interest in this game half way through. I really don’t like how the enemies level up with you. I was about 2/3rds through the main quest line when the bad guys became such bullet sponges that it wasn’t fun anymore. Like, multiple nukes to the face and they still keep coming.
I far prefer games where the enemies scale by location, not the player.
This is my running complaint with most Bethesda RPGs. Just about everything scales by player level, which can put you in situations where enemies are downright impossible to kill if you’re too spec’d into non-combats.
Oblivion: why level up when I can stay level one and steamroll everything?
New Vegas: Just another Bethesda contracted game and I’ll just head straight north and OH GOD CAZADOR—
Haha yeah NV lets you know shit is real awfully fast.
It wouldn’t really be an open world game if areas were artificially blocked due to leveled enemies. And other areas would simply be steamrolled once you out level them.
In my opinion, open world doesn’t mean being able to complete any objective in an arbitrary order.
Progressive growth is one of the most rewarding things in an RPG for me. That means that I have to rethink my path forward until I gain the strength to overcome an obstacle. And that also means that some of my once difficult foes can be a showcase for my experience.
Areas aren’t blocked, they’re turned into goals for me to overcome. Yes, I should have a choice in how I explore the world, but having limits gives you something to break through.
It was actually the first fallout game I played, and I’ve replayed it a couple times since then, I really like it.
That’s a great came to play for the first time, especially with qol mods.
Any QoL mods you’d recommend?
I play F4 with Vivid Fallout for better textures, Load Accelerator and the Unofficial patch mod.
What are must have QoL mods that that don’t alter the vanilla experience too much?
I played f3 and 4 next to each other, so it can’t remember exactly which was which, but removing the tint over everything outside was huge, visibility immediately increased, the sky was blue, everything was more aesthetically appealing.
I really liked adding the weather mods in so it rained or snowed, and then textures. I didn’t change too much, but with an improved look and distance, everything felt more fun and immersive.
It sounds like that vivid mod you have did pretty much all of that
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I definitely plan to get the season pass in the future if I can catch it on sale as well! I definitely wouldn’t say I’m done with the game as a whole, but for the time being I am just waiting to pick up the DLC.
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Do a Child of Atom playthrough, if you haven’t already.
Rush to Far Harbor and acquire the Robes of Atom’s Devoted and end the DLC by destroying FH for the perk. Wear the robes, get irradiated until almost dead (above 900 rads) and congratulations, you now deal double damage, are immune to radiation and ignore the effects of rads on your HP bar.
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Fallout 4 was a top tier fallout game with mods. The more you mod it, the better it gets. Fallout 4 with no mods is meh.
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PLEASE PLEASE try the survival mode. It changes the game so much. It reminds me of hardcore games of the past, I have to actively plan for the game and can’t just gung ho rush things.
I’ve noticed online it seems to be regarded as one of the least popular mainline games
Where have you been looking in order to find that? It’s regarded as the best fallout by almost everyone as far as I’m aware.
Or are you confusing Fallout New Vegas with Fallout 4? They are two different games
What? I’ve never seen people say that, FNV is widely regarded as the best 3D Fallout game.
Yes. He is playing New Vegas. He got confused and called it 4 because it’s the game after 3.
I’m pretty sure they’re playing Fallout 4, considering they explicitly said they tried FNV before…
Read his edit.
Yes, their edit states they are now trying FNV again. Their post, containing the part you quoted, was neither part of the edit nor referencing FNV. Please, just read it again.
Yes. Well aware, he gave up to lost interest.
He’s not referencing anything apart from title and edit, he talks about the mods and writes his edit like a tldr referencing the mod again.
But sure. If you say so
Their whole post is talking about Fallout 4. What is more likely:
- they are talking about Fallout 4
- they are confusing Fallout 4 with Fallout New Vegas, a game they played previously and just said they’d try again after having played Fallout 4, having freshly installed and modded it, still not noticing that they already played through the game just before, while also confusing the online coverage for a totally different game
Please, just think for a moment.
Played fallout 4, now I’m back to trying new Vegas again
I see, i misunderstood then. Sorry
