Shamus Answers Your Fallout 4 Questions

Shamus Young

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Shamus Answers Your Fallout 4 Questions

My last two columns were about Fallout 4, so this week I decided to answer some reader questions for a change of pace. But then all the questions were about Fallout 4.

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Jan 12, 2012
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RE: The Weight Limit

The thing about the high carry value is that, even if you don't want to pick up every piece of junk in the Wasteland, you can still enjoy it. Personally, I like carrying a bunch of different weapons and ammo, and switching out whenever I feel like it; I don't have to do the whole '2-gun' system of so many shooters, I can relive doom and carry 3 different kinds of rocket launcher if I want.

I do like the idea of a junk sorting mod, though. Tie it in with your dog, and have it so you allocate a certain amount of your carry weight to 'junk'. Then you send the dog out to gather materials, and it automatically sorts your junk inventory for highest value per weight and drops the least valuable stuff to stay below the cap you set.
 

hentropy

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It does seem like "multiple groups all looking for different things" seems to be a significant problem for Bethesda. If you displease any one group they'll probably review-bomb the game and cause a ruckus, but if you try to appeal to all of them like they tried to in Fallout 4, no one ends up being terribly happy.

Hopefully with the big success of The Witcher 3 other devs will start getting the picture, but it's rather hard to say...
 

IceForce

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Article said:
In my 200+ hours with the game, I've never heard my character ask about people using bottlecaps as money. (Which should be a really strange idea to them.)
Sorry Shamus, but you seem to have missed an interaction with this person:

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Lucy_Abernathy

During dialogue with Lucy, you *do* actually get to ask them why "caps" are used as currency instead of pre-war money. (Although the explanation doesn't go much in-depth.)
 

sXeth

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IceForce said:
Article said:
In my 200+ hours with the game, I've never heard my character ask about people using bottlecaps as money. (Which should be a really strange idea to them.)
Sorry Shamus, but you seem to have missed an interaction with this person:

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Lucy_Abernathy

During dialogue with Lucy, you *do* actually get to ask them why "caps" are used as currency instead of pre-war money. (Although the explanation doesn't go much in-depth.)
Unless my memory's bad, I believe Trashcan Carla (likely the first travelling merchant you meet) also has the option to ask about Caps initially.

Various people offer the option to ask about Ghouls, notably Preston in your first meeting which is before you likely met any. Slightly later, Paladin Danse (a likely encounter on the way to Diamond City, if you investigate the radio signal appearing, or are following the main road, explains Ghouls, Super Mutants, and Synths, as well the Brotherhood of Steel and power armor. Mutated creatures don't get a dialog especially, but many of them are just Regular Thing+Supersize. You can listen to Preston's gang ambient conversations for some idle banter about Deathclaws.

The government does come up as well, there was one, but a synth assassin wiped them out. I believe this is in Diamond City, possibly with Piper.

In general though, I found that the options to ask about enemies (particularly Ghouls) kept coming well past the point of logic. You could be on your hundredth Minuteman mission to sort out Raiders and still able to ask what a Raider was.
 

visiblenoise

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I like that idea about the weight/speed gradient. I don't mind the whole inventory sorting thing so much on the first playthrough, but it certainly stops me from wanting to do a second.
 

Souplex

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Jul 29, 2008
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They actually do address where the Boston Super Mutants come from later in the game.
The institute was experimenting with FEV and sending their failures up to the surface. You can also hear mutants talking about trying to find more "Green Stuff" implying they're making more of themselves, or at least trying to.
 

Kenjitsuka

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"2) Stuff to be put on display in the player's home / base / murder museum."

Ahahaha, thanks for the lolz, murder museum! :D

I assume btw that this game DOESN'T have 'feather' magic spells/rings to make your nerdy type character be able to lift a lot more? That was the BEST about Oblivion! (Yes, I super hoard...).
 

Morti

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Kenjitsuka said:
"2) Stuff to be put on display in the player's home / base / murder museum."

Ahahaha, thanks for the lolz, murder museum! :D

I assume btw that this game DOESN'T have 'feather' magic spells/rings to make your nerdy type character be able to lift a lot more? That was the BEST about Oblivion! (Yes, I super hoard...).
Not spells, but you can modify your gear with additional pockets to carry more stuff.

And certain foods increase your carry capacity.

Not to mention anything that buffs your strength will also increase your carry capacity.
 

Cindy Parker Hoskey

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In your paragraphs about junk collecting you fail to mention that you can highlight junk you want. Initially I found myself picking up EVERYTHING and having to drop that one last thing to get myself to 199.9 so I could fast-travel away, stash my junk, and fast-travel back to pick up where I left off. Later I learned to load up my companion (tip: when it says your companion can't hold anymore, try sorting your junk by weight and then give him/her the ones with the lowest weight - it's possible the companion can handle some more but not as much as first thing you tried) but we would still max out collectively and have to go and dump our stash. Power Suits allow you to carry more, but it was never enough. But there is a solution.

It took me a while to understand tagging, and it really helped me cut back on the urge to pick up EVERYTHING because something might be critical. When you're trying to build or mod or cook something and you don't have the right ingredients you can click the option to Tag the missing components. Imagine you're trying to mod your Power Suit and it says you're missing ceramics. Tag it for search, and the next time you're wandering around and look at a Coffee Mug you will see a magnifying glass symbol next to it, indicating that it contains the component you're looking for. You can also look at your Junk list in Pip Boy and click to look at it in Components view. Instead of seeing that you have 3 Coffee Mugs you will see that you have 3 ceramics, or whatever. You can do the same in your Workbench, and tag components there too, I believe. Now I can resist the urge to pick up EVERYTHING, yet I know I won't miss out on what I need. There is even a Perk you can select that highlights anything you're looking for with a green glow so you can spot it from a distance instead of having to hover over it to see. I had been ignoring plungers but now they glow to remind me that they're a good source of the rubber component that I've been looking for.

Also, keep in mind that this is all unnecessary if you're not into building or modding. You could, really, play the whole game with a minimum of building or modding. When it is required to build something in order to complete a mission, the components you need are always there in the immediate environment. You may just need to junk a car or bunch of trees to get the necessary steel or wood. Now that I've gotten a better feel for the inventory management I only pick up stuff I've highlighted, named stuff (like "Sebastian's Pocket Watch"), perks like comic books or bobble-heads which give you something, ammo (which always has a weight of 0), and weapons/armour marked with an asterix * which indicates they've got a special feature.
 

Starke

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Seth Carter said:
The government does come up as well, there was one, but a synth assassin wiped them out. I believe this is in Diamond City, possibly with Piper.
You can also get the dialog off Nick. I want to say Desdemona or Deacon has some on the subject as well.

You can also get Supermutant and Ghoul exposition off of a settler after finishing a defend mission. It's usually a little weird, (though not as weird as supermutants ransoming hostages,) but it is in game.

That there's no possible caps exposition dump from Preston is a little weird. But, other than that, most of the exposition is in the game, you just need to actually get it from people.
 

Dr.Awkward

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One thing I know that the SkyUI mod did to reduce junk collection is that you could sort items by value-per-pound. If Bethesda would put this filter into the FO4 vanilla UI along with what raw materials you would get from scrapping an object, I'd think the excessive junk collection can be cut down.
 

Amaror

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The Junk collection wouldn't be so horrible if one of Bethesda's employee would actually look up "Interface-design" on wikipedia and read what it actually means instead of just throwing everything on the screen were it fits.
I am still amazed that they managed to actualy create a worse interface than skyrim, which I personally didn't think possible.
About the exposition, it does seem like it's there, but just rather hidden. You actually have to go of the beaten path to a small little farm to find out about caps. Maybe if they hadn't gutted the dialogue system so much they could have just made you able to ask codsworth about all that stuff, but whatever.
 

Zydrate

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I don't mind it. Once I get about ~220 weight, I warp to Sanctuary hills and simply press "Deposit all junk" on the workbench. Problem solved, and all it cost me was a couple of loading screens. Then I continue adventuring, or sometimes I will sell stuff.
 

Rope Arrow

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I think it's interesting he mentions the carry-weight gradient. A lot of people don't notice this, but Morrowind actually does almost exactly that. The closer you are to your encumbrance limit, the slower you move. Many people give Morrowind crap for its default slow movement speed, which is partially deserved, but I think the people wandering around at 99.9% encumbrance all the time have something to do with these complaints. When I realized what was happening, I became much more stringent with what I was picking up, and I noticed that I had a much easier time keeping track of everything I was carrying, simply because everything in my inventory was there for a specific purpose. It was a strangely liberating feeling.

This was especially striking to me, because I had noticed before how at least once in each session of Skyrim, I would have to stop and clear a bunch of random clutter from my inventory, and I had no idea where or why I had picked up most of it. I far prefer Morrowind's approach to carry weight, even if it does mean I move slow for a while.
 

ZZoMBiE13

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I really love Fallout 4, but I hope that when they follow up with 5 or with "New Seattle" (or whatever) that they dump the voiced protagonist thing. It's an immersion killer for me. That my Soul Survivor sounds like your Soul Survivor and it sounds like every other Soul Survivor on every Let's Play of the game really throws me out of the role play I'm trying to build in my head.

It's a neat idea, and I get why someone would think it would work in a pitch meeting. But in practice, it takes more away than it gives. There was truly nothing wrong with the old Fallout 3/NV system and then I could have the dialog in my mind in whatever voice I'd deciided the character happened to use.

It's really the only blemish on the game so far. I don't mind the UI as much as many people seem too and if I'm honest, I'm one of those hoarder types in these games so picking up tons of junk isn't a negative for me. It's part of why I get hundreds of hours out of a Bethesda game in the first place.

If they insist on doing a voiced protagonist next time, I hope they can at least give us an option the way Saints Row did. I know that's a ton more dialog to record having four or more actors do the entire script. But it would mean a world of difference if there was just some variety. Failing that, the option to pitch the voice up or down would be a fair compromise. At least then there would be some variety out there in the world.
 

IceForce

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You know, actually, the more I read this article, the more I can't help but think that it's a fairly poorly written and poorly put together article.
Shamus, this isn't like you.

The presence of super mutants is explained once you reach the Institute. The article talks about the inventory and junk item management, but completely fails to mention the fact that you can tag items for search. And that line about how you can't ask people about why bottlecaps are used as currency is demonstrably false.

Given these oversights and omissions, I'm struggling to believe the "over 200+ hours" claim. Unless of course you spent those 200+ hours faffing about settlement building...
 

sXeth

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IceForce said:
You know, actually, the more I read this article, the more I can't help but think that it's a fairly poorly written and poorly put together article.
Shamus, this isn't like you.

The presence of super mutants is explained once you reach the Institute. The article talks about the inventory and junk item management, but completely fails to mention the fact that you can tag items for search. And that line about how you can't ask people about why bottlecaps are used as currency is demonstrably false.

Given these oversights and omissions, I'm struggling to believe the "over 200+ hours" claim. Unless of course you spent those 200+ hours faffing about settlement building...
To be fair, the FEV lab is a completely optional sidequest, and one's first visit to the Institute, it may not be in one's mind to start breaking into locked areas. It also (at least for me, which may have been a glitch) didn't show up in my quests anywhere to get that serum for *spoiler*, even under Miscellaneous, I just remembered to do it offhand. And unless I missed some more blatant notes, you do need a decent level of Fallout lore to really put the pieces together.
 

freaper

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I've got another question: why are there NPC's, specifically Rodriguez and the Bobrov brothers, who presumably were born and raised in Diamond City, that still have an incredibly thick accent (you can guess which ones)? Mind you, this is after 200 years of isolation. (Disclaimer: Fallout 4 is my first entry into Bethesda's nuclear wasteland series, so I have no idea if they ever mention culturally homogeneous settlements, other than Vaults, that are isolated from the world).
 

fenrizz

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Seth Carter said:
IceForce said:
You know, actually, the more I read this article, the more I can't help but think that it's a fairly poorly written and poorly put together article.
Shamus, this isn't like you.

The presence of super mutants is explained once you reach the Institute. The article talks about the inventory and junk item management, but completely fails to mention the fact that you can tag items for search. And that line about how you can't ask people about why bottlecaps are used as currency is demonstrably false.

Given these oversights and omissions, I'm struggling to believe the "over 200+ hours" claim. Unless of course you spent those 200+ hours faffing about settlement building...
To be fair, the FEV lab is a completely optional sidequest, and one's first visit to the Institute, it may not be in one's mind to start breaking into locked areas. It also (at least for me, which may have been a glitch) didn't show up in my quests anywhere to get that serum for *spoiler*, even under Miscellaneous, I just remembered to do it offhand. And unless I missed some more blatant notes, you do need a decent level of Fallout lore to really put the pieces together.
You'd also need a pretty decent level of Fallout lore to be aware that Super Mutants should not be in the Commonwealth though.