Love / Hate Fallout 4 game

[M00nP1e]

Seriously - How does Bethesda get away with this crap ?

Fallout 4 is a beautiful game.

Its dark / humerous / well crafted ..

But, how do they get away with it being so bug ridden ???

Has the world become stupid ?. Are we all like trump supporters and totally influenced by a playground bully that we accept a feed of shit and just work around it ???.

The game does not work without the modding community efforts to solve all its problems. As it stands we just buy it upon its online reputation, and accept it needs work. Are we all stupid ?.

As far as I have seen is the same true for all Bethesda titles ?

Do we all have cabbages growing out of our necks instead of skulls and brains ?.

Edited December 19, 2023 by M00nP1e

[RabidGears]

I've never actually played Fallout 4 all the way through without UFO4P, but I have played all the way through Starfield and Fallout 3 without any mods so they at least do work. Sure, they do have bugs, but you're exaggerating when you say they don't work without the modding community. There are plenty of people who play these games who don't use mods at all.

They shouldn't get away with not fully fixing their games, though, and given the backlash they're getting over Starfield they're probably not going to get away with it the way they did with previous games.

[M00nP1e]

Yes I did exaggerate a bit, I was under the affluence of incohol, and now reflecting upon the error of my ways.

The game does work, I'm playing the GOG GOTY version, but the things that are annoying about it without fixes are reeaaally annoying, enough to put you off playing the game after it has got its hooks into you. Fortunately there is a marvellous modding community that sets about fixing everything to the rescue.

[Lonewanderer]

I did play Fallout4 at release (and without DLCs even released) in full, and yes, there were problems at the beginning, but I never ran into a plot stopper.

I remember several silly things, but this is all they were - just silly. The biggest problem nearly everybody complained about was Preston Garveys never stopping 'Another settlement needs your help'. I remember one case, where he gave me three at once

But it turns out this was bug in a script named 'Story Manager', and it was fixed, in Bethesda way: Preston gave nearly no quests at all

Around this time I became aware of the UFO4P, and started to use it and report problems.

So - yes Bethesda got away with a lot. It led to nothing good for them, Fallout 76 and now Starfield are not the highlights of their games...

But if I had to 'rank' Bethesda games (only those I played), I would give Morrowind number 1, then Skyrim and Fallout 3 with equal 2nd rank and Fallout 4 in the 3rd place. Oblivion was (IMHO) a failure, because of excessive level scaling and mostly empty dungeons. The story was fine, and after Oscuros Oblivion overhaul came out, it changed to ;playable' for me...

[Scythe Bearer]

As someone who has both played since day one and made mods for Fallout, I find the negative evaluation/assessment of the game to be just ... well ...  contrary to my experience.  So, I will start with an old saw; "Expecting perfection will always lead to disappointment".

Yeah, the game has bugs, but what game doesn't?  I fixed some, reported others, and ignored the rest.  For myself, I don't think Bethesda "got away with" anything, as there was nothing really wrong with the game.

I will further stipulate that it isn't necessarily their best work, but even with that, it's a damned good game.  Fallout 4 is just different from other games and these evaluations ignore the reality that Bethesda tried to implement some new and untried features/functionality with this game.  Some of these new features/functionality worked well and are quite popular; while others kind of fell flat on their face.  But instead of seeing Bethesda's less than spectacular results as failures, I prefer to see these efforts to expand their repertoire as incomplete and needing more work to sand off the rough edges. 

 

[M00nP1e]

Yes I think I am a bit too OCD, every time I find bugs with the game I have to have them resolved otherwise the problem will play on my mind forever.

Just about all mods I have installed are bug fixes, apart from a radio station additions and a companion ..

Active Plugins:

 

00  Fallout4.esm
01  DLCRobot.esm
02  DLCworkshop01.esm
03  DLCCoast.esm
04  DLCworkshop02.esm
05  DLCworkshop03.esm
06  DLCNukaWorld.esm
07  Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch.esp  [Version 2.1.5]
08  PPF.esm
09  Community Fixes Merged.esp
0A  SavrenXHDVanillaLandscape.esp  [Version 2.0]
0B  Fixed Gobo Effects.esp  [Version 2.1.2]
0C  Wetness Shader Fix.esp  [Version 3.6.2]
0D  MechLairPathfindingFix.esp
0E  WeaponModFixes-GOTY.esp
0F  Community Fixes Merged - Weapon Mod Fixes Patch.esp
10  More Where That Came From - Classic.esp
11  More Where That Came From Diamond City.esp
12  Elvani's Track Pack - FIX.esp
13  llamaCompanionHeatherv2.esp
14  llama_Heather_NoCBBE_PATCH.esp
15  BoS_HagenFix.esp
16  Q_SoundFix_PowerArmorFST.esp
17  PRP.esp
18  Bashed Patch, 0.esp

.. The main fix you can not see here, which is an F4SE plugin, Antonix35's "High FPS Physics Fix", without that the GOG GOTY version of the game over time becomes unplayable because the loading screen pauses become so unbearably extended.

The fix mods I have installed too are not insignificant in their content. Without them the game is riddled with problems, even after all that the unofficial patch does.

There are also quite a lot of fixes which do not need plugins, and are installed as loose files, such as the "Black Codsworth, windows" and Cube Map fixes, a few sound fixes, and quite a lot of texture fixes (these are mostly about the size of texture being inappropriate for the size of the object they are mapped to, SavrenX texture collection solves all of those), plus a mod which fixes a load of Alpha maps.

And the Previsibines Mod, took me a while to get my head around what it is trying to achieve but that is one complex fix project.

To me its far too many rough edges to sand down, and it all should have been done by Bethesda.

With all these fixes the game is a wonderful dark humerous and very fun game.

@Lonewanderer You mentioned the problem with Preston Garvey spamming settlement in trouble quests as being fixed. But in my playthrough over the last month I have seen this problem in the game, I guess you must mean there is a mod which fixes it?

Edited December 21, 2023 by M00nP1e

[Arthmoor]

One thing to keep in mind is that not only is Bethesda willing to experiment (and I'm glad they are), they also learn from the experiments. Especially the ones that fail. They definitely took the whole dialogue menu thing to heart, though I think the response to that in Starfield was a bit too much of a regression to how things used to be done.

A lot of other game companies stick to the same tired formulas for years which is why their games all feel like copies of each other. It's a safe approach to be sure. Todd has never been about this kind of safe approach. He's a tinkerer.

[RabidGears]

On 12/21/2023 at 7:32 AM, M00nP1e said:

@Lonewanderer You mentioned the problem with Preston Garvey spamming settlement in trouble quests as being fixed. But in my playthrough over the last month I have seen this problem in the game, I guess you must mean there is a mod which fixes it?

There are mods that stop him spamming quests, but in the vanilla game he still can give you up to three quests at a time.

There's a way to stop him without mods, though. You can leave some of his quests uncompleted indefinitely, like the ones where he sends you to clear out enemies from a settlement and put up a recruitment beacon. You can clear out the enemies, claim the settlement, completely build it up and send settlers there from other settlements, but as long as you never set up the recruitment beacon, the quest will never progress and he won't be able to give you any more quests. I've stopped him on my current game with one of the clear a settlement quests and the one where he sends you to Greygarden.

[Lonewanderer]

On 12/25/2023 at 12:53 AM, RabidGears said:

There are mods that stop him spamming quests, but in the vanilla game he still can give you up to three quests at a time.

There's a way to stop him without mods, though. You can leave some of his quests uncompleted indefinitely, like the ones where he sends you to clear out enemies from a settlement and put up a recruitment beacon. You can clear out the enemies, claim the settlement, completely build it up and send settlers there from other settlements, but as long as you never set up the recruitment beacon, the quest will never progress and he won't be able to give you any more quests. I've stopped him on my current game with one of the clear a settlement quests and the one where he sends you to Greygarden.

Yes, this is what I do. And I am sure I remember, that Bethesda in one of the earlier patches somehow 'moderated' the quest giving by Preston. This is what I meant. If you know the game, it is quite easy to control this:

There are different settlement quests, namely quest that have a time limit and can fail, and other quests, which you can ignore for a long time with out consequences. If a settlement has problems with enemies, a time limit exists (in game time, and it is quite long). If you receive a help call, the time limit is much shorter. The time limits are documented in the Wiki.

But if Preston tells you a 'good pace for a settlement', these quests have no time limit at all. You can postpone them indefinitely.

What I do usually: I play the game until Preston and his party arrive in Sanctuary, and I help them building food, water, beds and defenses. Then I leave and do not come back for a long time. At this point you will have only the request for the first settlement, and this has no time limit.

At some point in your game you will NEED to have a number of settlements (I think 5, but not sure) to trigger Prestons request for the fortress. This will be needed for the main quest, AFAIK.

But as long as you just leave Preston in Sanctuary he cannot give you any new quests, and so you can easily regulate it.

My problem in the later game was, that Preston just did not give quests for settlements I wanted, and toward the end of the main quest there were often still settlements, which could not acquired, because a quest is needed and Preston did not give it. The only way to get these settlements is to kill the settlers, which I won't do.

But if you detest settlements, you can keep them to a minimum by just not take on Preston as companion and leave him in Sanctuary as long as possible. The game will try to give you some settlement quests by using settlers in settlements you already have, but this is not too bad.

[Pseron Wyrd]

13 hours ago, Lonewanderer said:

At some point in your game you will NEED to have a number of settlements (I think 5, but not sure) to trigger Prestons request for the fortress. This will be needed for the main quest, AFAIK.

You're thinking of the Minuteman quest line.  The main quest does not require settlement building (I consider a transporter crafting, not settlement building).

Edited December 26, 2023 by Pseron Wyrd