Zero Punctuation: Fallout 4

[Imp_Emissary]

People really have that hard of a time finding screws? I've got like 800 of the things. Though, I do dismantle a lot of guns taken from enemies. The building materials I've found hardest to find are copper, fiber optics, nuclear material, and aluminium.
.

Invest in both scrounger and scrapper perk, put ranks into those, scrounger helps you scavenge more stuff, ammo and various other things. also bent cans are good for aluminium. Scrapper gives you back things like screws and all the other carious weapon parts. honestly I think any guide for this game should highlight taking those perks as earliy as possible

Oh wait. THAT'S why I have so many screws. I got those Scrapper perks as soon as I could.
Well that explains that.

Also yeah. The cans are the easiest way to get more. Just got to find good spots to farm them.

I'd say the Lonely Chapel is a good place to go. Raider camp with lots of them. Tin cans for steal too.
Also tv dinner and surgery trays. You can find lots of those in hospitals. Normally filled with super mutants. Hospitals also have a fair number of microscopes which are good for fiber optics.

Havn't found a great spot to find copper yet, but it's in a lot of items you can normally buy for cheap enough or find here and there while exploring. Plus you can buy shipments of it.
Nuclear materials show up a lot in "glowing" enemies, some less common items, and in very modded weapons. You don't need a LOT of it though so it isn't too bad. Suppose to show up when you kill an enemy with energy weapons too, but I barley ever found any when killing them with lasers or plasma.

Also, another gripe for Fallout 4 is that it doesn't really go into enough detail with the settlement crafting. Had to experiment or find out about a lot of it online.
Also didn't know they had a cover system until I read about it on the Escapist. Saw a few companions and enemies use it (shooting around corners) but I just thought that that was something only the AI could do.

 

[9tailedflame]

Weird. He seemed to lament the absence of a karma meter, yet in the past he's said, direct quoting here, "karma meters are bulls***". I wonder if he's changed his mind about moral choice systems.

There's better ways for a game to react to your actions than just a meter. The NPCs treat you differently, their dialogue changes, they might welcome you into their home, or attack you on sight. Making your choices feel like a meaningful part of the world, rather than some bar on your hub, or one of two linear paths, is a good thing i think.

 

[Jandau]

That awkward moment when you watch a joke review video and find that it entirely reflects your actual opinions regarding the game...

 

[Joshroom]

That awkward moment when you watch a joke review video and find that it entirely reflects your actual opinions regarding the game...

I've always found that with Yahtzee. For all that he jokes around he usually manages, in 5 minutes, to critique the games he reviews better than "proper" review sites do.

OP: The minute I found the protagonist was voiced and there was now binary speech options it immediately set off my warning alarms. I love me some Mass Effect; but Fallout is Fallout - the same style of conversations just won't work. I was really hyped to get Fallout 4 but the more I'm hearing, the less I'm enthused. I might just stick to playing modded Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas for my Bethesda RPG fix.

 

[Jandau]

That awkward moment when you watch a joke review video and find that it entirely reflects your actual opinions regarding the game...

I've always found that with Yahtzee. For all that he jokes around he usually manages, in 5 minutes, to critique the games he reviews better than "proper" review sites do.

OP: The minute I found the protagonist was voiced and there was now binary speech options it immediately set off my warning alarms. I love me some Mass Effect; but Fallout is Fallout - the same style of conversations just won't work. I was really hyped to get Fallout 4 but the more I'm hearing, the less I'm enthused. I might just stick to playing modded Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas for my Bethesda RPG fix.

The thing is, he usually exaggerates and focuses on a small flaw and blows it out of proportion. Even when I agree with him, I usually feel he's not being fair (and he isn't supposed to be, that's the point of ZP). But this time, it's literally what I felt - especially the crafting and ESPECIALLY the sudden focus on hoarding random junk which interferes with the rest of the game. If someone had given me a transcript of this ZP video without the series name and simply told me it was a review on a site somewhere, I'd find that perfectly acceptable...

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

I knew it. I knew this would be disappointing, bland, overblown, committee-design Skyrim-meets-Minecraft half-assery with needy factions and poor companion planning, with a contrived, 'serious' main plot - IE a missing child - that you can happily discard so you can collate power armor and build a fucking town.

And now I am narcissistically proud of myself for, as a massive Fo3 fan, never giving into the hype, looking at the new title objectively, and almost never being at all interested in buying it.

But Fo3 was also a disappointing, bland, overblown, committee-design blah blah blah game.

 

[fenrizz]

I understand why people like Fallout as a game series, I just never really got on with it personally.
I played Fallout New Vegas, which is supposedly the best one of the series and I thought, 'to hell with this' in about 2 levels worth. Still far be it for me to have a go on other peoples favourite games I love playing Destiny and MMORPG's in general.

Since when is New Vegas the best of the series? The argument has always been between 1 and 2 (i vote 2).

No, it's New Vegas.
And it was the best since it came out.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Having never played any Fallout game I'm kinda disappointed by this critique. Doesn't really sell the series to me.

 

[Redvenge]

Since when is New Vegas the best of the series? The argument has always been between 1 and 2 (i vote 2).

Fallout 2 is probably the most... interesting of the Fallout series.

Fallout 2 has a lot of amazing highlights. Being a porn fluffer, talking albino deathclaws, Pinky and the Brain, Scientology and, of course, being able to "get married and pimp out your spouse for chump change" (from the Fallout 2 box blurb). Oh, and it happens in some post apocalyptic wasteland. A wasteland in some corner of the Twilight Zone.

Fallout 2 has a lot of unique "content". Fallout 1 was a lot of content that was "borrowed" from Wasteland.

 

[JagerBombastic]

I understand why people like Fallout as a game series, I just never really got on with it personally.
I played Fallout New Vegas, which is supposedly the best one of the series and I thought, 'to hell with this' in about 2 levels worth. Still far be it for me to have a go on other peoples favourite games I love playing Destiny and MMORPG's in general.

Well, as far as I can analyze the problem, you haven't played Fallout 1 nor Fallout 2.

It's a common misconception that game series start with 3 (Fallout 3, TESIII: Morrowind, Persona 3, Devil May Cry 3, etc.). =P

To be fair you are completely right I have not played Fallout 1 & 2, they probably are the best 2 games of the series but I just can't get on with the game series.

Saying that their are a lot of games out their to play and I just will never find the time for all of them.

 

[JagerBombastic]

I understand why people like Fallout as a game series, I just never really got on with it personally.
I played Fallout New Vegas, which is supposedly the best one of the series and I thought, 'to hell with this' in about 2 levels worth. Still far be it for me to have a go on other peoples favourite games I love playing Destiny and MMORPG's in general.

Since when is New Vegas the best of the series? The argument has always been between 1 and 2 (i vote 2).

It was just something my friends who played a lot of Fallout back in the they said to me, I believe it was after their big world at war binge, still like I said just not a fan is all.

It was the combat system that I just couldn't come to terms with, which is kind of annoying because it dose look like a really fun story with great ideas. I guess the closest I will ever come to an story like that is the Metro series.

 

[asdfen]

earlier Fallouts are much better than 3, nv, 4. Out of new ones NV sees to be the best. 3 being digusting and 4 turned into fps minecraft abomination with me dialogue system. I am supried 4 didnt have towers to climb to uncover map.

 

[Overquoted]

As a person with 325 hours of time played on Fallout 4 (for comparison, i have around 450 on Skyrim,quarter of which was me trying to get my game look just right with mods, and failing).
I have to say that i agree with almost everything Yathzee said.
If anything, he left lot of things out that i would have complained about (settlement system, inconsistent voice acting for male MC, forced characterization, story and gameply dissonance, some obvious flaws in crafting system, etc...).

Having said that, i'm of to play some more fallout, those raiders won't (usually) kill themselves.

...Wtf. How do you have 325 hours in F4 already? DO YOU SLEEP?

 

[Overquoted]

Agree with Yahtzee on the baby. I've barely played the game but every moment of the beginning in which the baby was present, I had to look away. I don't think it was uncanny valley creepiness, but that baby was just horrifying. The adults look better, as long as they don't smile. Really wish they couldn't smile. :|

And for everyone disliking the game, I kind of understand. Fallout's intended audience falls into two categories: the OCDers (Fallout scratches that itch but good) and people who enjoy some of the randomness of the encounters. I still fondly remember walking out of a shack in the middle of nowhere while playing F3 and seeing a giant albino radscorpion and a a military robot fighting the Brahmin in the pen next to it. The Brahmin lost, of course. And then I lost. Then there was that time I fast-traveled, auto-saved and then proceeded to get hate-killed by the same Deathclaw for the next hour. Annoying, but kind of fun at the same time.

Really, Fallout doesn't need a story or crafting or a skill system. It just needs to be a giant open world with completely randomized enemy and NPC encounters.

 

[iller3]

Fun to watch the current still-enamored-by-it purchasers of this game dogging Yahtzee in order to protect their latest investment.
But if they were being really objective, they'd admit outright that it's not in any way "Fallout" in the traditional sense and not nearly as fun as NewVegas either despite having the most "functional" gun mechanics in the series to date

There's plenty of other Shooting Galleries out there with prettier animations/tilesets that don't cost $60.00

 

[Fbuh]

Well I'm enjoying it so far. I think it's ok for a new installment in a series to try something different. What's the point of just doing the same things as previous games?

At any rate, I'm surprised that he disparaged the building and crafting system so much, considering how much he loved Minecraft.

Ah well, to each their own, I suppose. I know I'm greatly enjoying the game. Not sure about all these bugs people keep complaining about, either. I've found only a small handful, and they were easily solved quirks that I never saw crop up again.

 

[4Aces]

After spending hundreds of hours modding F3/FNV I simply cannot bring myself to even return and finish F4, which is a requirement for a good modder. Consider how easy it would be to fix, if time consuming, returning many of the elements from F3/FNV to this game, I simply cannot understand it. I have hundreds of screenshots of things to fix, and was really looking forward to poking Bugthesda in the eye again (when you get 1m+ DLs for a fix, it qualifies), but my enthusiasm for even fixing it died a month ago. Hopefully it will come back after the first DLC hits (pre-ordered the season pass like a noob).

F4 is just a boring sandbox with auto-repeat (Radiant) missions, and magically respawning enemies and items, to fill in the fact that they cut the budget to a significant degree. The lack of RPG elements and the nonsensical magic is one step away from Fallder Scrolls being the malformed, diseased offspring, from these two titles. Then they can just sell access to the mod tools and pat themselves on the back for figuring out how to make more money for doing even less.

As for the building - WTF are you people on, and does your contact accept bitcoins? No physics, no logic (at all!), no reason, no interaction with the regular story aside from artillery strikes that you constantly forget about because you are easily OP with your magic weapons & armor. The limited items you can build with, the massive number of bugs that crop up to make it a nightmare (ghost settlers, and invisible moving turrets are my favorite), or the fact that enemies can teleport past your massive F'ing walls! So, please stop misleading people. Construction is a waste of time, literally. If you cut out that nonsense, and just focus on the missions, you will not be humping back all the magically respawning garbage from every area. That alone lets you actually play the game, and not get played by it.

Perhaps Bethesda has a Russian office now? (In Soviet Russia you do not play the game...)

 

[drakesteele]

I have been a huge Fallout fan since the original back in like 1997. I also loved Wasteland back on my Commodore 64. And while, yes, Bethesda's extension of the Fallout brand has been less successful in its storytelling, it, like their Elder Scrolls games, has had EXCELLENT environmental storytelling... Finding an area, and seeing things laid out in an odd way that makes you go, "Hmm... what the hell happened here?" and then you find a note, or a holotape... and a couple oddly placed items... and it all fits and tells a little story about what happened there when the bombs fell... I love that. Sure, I'd love it if FO3/FO4 had more dialog options and actually varied them based on your stats and karma like the originals... it helped the immersion a lot. But it's still fun, and while the building and crafting are sort of disjointed, mods are helping that quite a bit, as well as adding things back like traits, and a better dialog menu system, albeit with the same options... Overall though, I love Fallout 4 for the same reasons I loved 3/NV and the Elder Scrolls: exploration. Finding these little setpieces that BGS does so well... and the getting slightly better combat.

What confuses me about Yahtzee's review is it seems to be giving it shit for the sake of giving it shit - he talks shit about Bethesda RPGs but every previous one he enjoyed. "Branston pickle" he called it... thinly spread but still delicious... They've given him more of the same with some improvements, and some "dumbing down" or streamlining but it's still BGS Fallout, and a BGS-style RPG with lore and setpieces and better combat than any other before... And just cause theres no karma so you can't be a complete douche in dialoge and an added building/crafting option you aren't required to use, now you don't like it? Pff. It's still Branston Pickle... You know you'll eat it, Yahtzee. XD