On Fallout 4 and Its Density...

Finlee Kilgore, the Wasteland Bar-bear-ian has entered Vault 81. As he walks in for his second visit, to the jeers of many for being Commonwealth trash, he helps save a small boy's life and gain the adoration of everyone. Despite still being questioned about whether that is his Pip-Boy or not, Finlee journeys back into the Wasteland, wearing his Grognak loincloth and wielding the great barbarian's axe with the dilapidated head of a former sports mascot. He seeks revenge against whoever murdered his wife and stole his son.

This has been my experience with Fallout 4, and it's going to be a LOOOOONG time until I find my son.

The delay in finding Shaun isn't because he isn't important to me. As a matter of fact, Fallout 4 didn't have to do much to get me attached to my main story mission. As a man who has always wanted to be a husband and a father (but am neither), that motivation alone is enough to get my blood boiling. The reason it's taking so long is because...well...there's so much shit to do!

Fallout 3 and New Vegas had their density, but it just can't quite reach the level of how Fallout 4 has achieved it. There's a ton of places to venture to, little "dungeons" with hidden secrets and cool side-quests that offer a one-off experience. This is typical of the franchise at this point. It's the additions to all of this that make matters so much larger. The innumerable number of companions available to you, the absolute depth of the perk chart coupled with the lack of level cap, and even the addition of legendary enemies with special versions of weaponry give the game far more flavor than it already had.

The crafting system even gives you depth, letting you turn your gear into whatever you need it to be for your play style: stealthy, gun-toting, melee-wielding, broad-shouldered tank, and the list goes on and on.

The settlement building lets you create towns that, to many, won't matter. However, the fact that you can essentially build your OWN Megaton, that YOU can be the one who creates the new crown jewel of the Wasteland...and that you might have to defend it... This idea is just extravagant in ways that the series has never known outside of community mods.

The game is packaged with all of the stuff that I wanted, and I can only hope that the DLC will expand on it.

This is why I say that Fallout 4 is my Game of the Year, even with a month and a half left and only 24 hours played on my main character. I already know that I'll be playing this for hundreds of hours to come.

Bethesda did a really good job at making the different side missions feel unique and offer their own experiences. Been playing for 40+ hours and I have yet to encounter a mission where I was like "oh this type of mission again".

Nice to see some positive feedback amid the "the game dropped to 15 fps for four seconds during X battle" performance gripes

Yeah, i found that once i stopped doing missions and just started wondering the game has gotten a lot more fun and immersive. Even the side quests i've found on the way have been better than the first few things i got. The thing I hate so far is I feel like i need the powersuit sometimes but i hate walking around in it, it kinda breaks immersion to run away and fast travel to get your robot suit, then fast travel to put it back

I just picked this up last week and I'm itching to get into it. This post has just made me that much more excited. I just really have to get through The Witcher 3 first.

Nice blog - it certainly assuages some of the worried I've had since hearing the very audible hand-wringing that's been made over this game's density and technical hiccups.

I'm currently doing The Silver Shroud quest...it's incredible!

With all of my recent gripes about Fallout 4, I have to admit that they did a good job with quests and did a lot to make the world more interesting than the last games. I still have my misgivings about the jank, dialog system and the kinda half-assed building mechanics, but everything else is pretty solid. An improvement over Fallout 3 and New Vegas in most ways, but I just feel like they could've done more along the lines of polishing things up a bit. It looks like mods and patches are going to go a long way to fix those problems so I guess that stuff won't be an issue forever, so that's nice. But yeah, they did a really good job making the game interesting and fun. So far I'm just about 60 hours in over two characters, and I don't see an end in sight anytime soon. Once the good mods and DLC get released that will be even more fun.

You probably haven't got that far into the city yet, but you should check out the USS Constitution when you come across it. So far that is probably my favorite side quest in the game, possibly in the whole series.Its really good!

@jakob187 Wait what, how'd you get that bandana on ol' Dogmeat!?

Great write up, I feel pretty much the same. Rough edges be damned, I still love the formula and there is just nothing else out there quite like it. Definitely gonna get a hundred hours out of me, if not two.

@professoress said:

You can equip Dogmeat with bandanas, dog dollars, and dog armour. Just talk to him and initiate a trade. When you're in the trade menu, go to his inventory and hit triangle (or Y, I guess), and voila, companions equip shit.

thanks man, I'm sure I just wasn't paying close enough attention but that has been literally, sorry figuratively, killing me.

at the start it felt like there's a lot of content but after 70 hours i felt bored its still 70 hours ofc witch is a lot. But just wait a few months for the regular people to hit that wall, and i am thinking most people will have the same feeling. After playing those 70 hours i just wished Obsidian would make a new fall out game but there making a Tank game ? what a weird world we live in.

At this moment, I have 52 hours logged, currently level 46, and that quest was excellent. I have the majority of the map discovered at this point. Nonetheless, I'm still...STILL finding stuff to dig into, and I've finally gotten into the building aspect of the game. Despite how much it "doesn't matter," it definitely makes the game much easier if you take a couple of hours to do a few things. Particularly, vegetable starch can be used to make adhesive, so getting a good crop of tatos and corn going is mandatory to make a ton of that. Having a water purifier also helps that quite a bit. There's also the fact that going six points into Charisma and getting Local Leader lets you get shops built in your town, which can help when you need to sell stuff for caps, pick up basic stuff, and open up supply lines between all of your locations.

Personally, I started building up The Slogs, as I thought it could be a nice little place to start up some stuff and experiment with some ideas. I spent about seven hours there doing random stuff, and now, I've started working on stuff in Sanctuary Hills. Originally, I was going to build a trophy hall/museum where I could put all of the legendaries I've acquired in the game on display. Unfortunately, I would actually recommend AGAINST doing that. Unless you use the floor mat trick (where you place an object on a floor mat and then move the floor mat, which for some reason makes the object not move much), you could be wasting a lot of time trying to get things set up...only for them to fall off whenever you reload into the area or just load your game in general. It kind of sucks.

However, I've now decided that I'm going to turn it into the Church of Grognak, where I can build a holy ground to the God of All That Is Brutal, Grognak the Barbarian. I'm just hoping that I can make terminals so I can load up the Grognak holotape into it and play it whenever I go to pray to my god.

I decided to use the wire fence posts as my "walls," mainly to keep everything open to the nature around it. It also helps me avoid the situations of having bad measurements for the walls (which I really wish you could change the scale of in the game to fit into smaller spots). I'm also still learning a lot about the way that electricity and power works in this. The AoE system they have set up with power relays, conduits, and other things was confusing at first, but I think I have a good handle on it now to make sure that things don't look terrible. I just...need a lot of copper. A fucking LOT of copper. That shit is ANNOYING. Telephones and hot plates weigh so much, and even though my carry capacity is at 500 (more with all the alcohol and chems I can take, which is all of them...because my guy is a hella drug addict and alcoholic...like a goddamn bar-bear-ian should be), it just gets to be too much. Luckily, I finally have the perk that lets me fast travel while over encumbered, so it'll be less of a bitch now.