It's...different, all right.
The settlement management will be hugely divisive. I quite like it, although the interface for it (and the keyboard and mouse interface in general) is God's punishment for an evil world. RIDICULOUSLY awkward. Frequently turns it from joy to chore. But it's incredibly unique and in-depth. It's something NEW, from a developer that doesn't really do "new".
The voice acted main character does an OK job with an absolutely woeful script. The setup is extremely sparse and you're hurled into events extremely quickly, making it difficult to feel engaged. You're supposed to have hundreds of hours of content, dudes, fucking pace yourselves.
The facial animations are FUCKING GHASTLY and among the worst I've ever seen in a game. Seriously what the fuck is going on with those mouths. I realize this engine never had a good facial acting system but they should've sucked it up and lived with the gormless, staring automatons they had before because
this is not an improvement!
The dog is cool. I very much appreciate that he does not count as a companion, so I can enjoy my lone wanderer perk.
As others have noted, inventory clogs up fast. You're much more of a wasteland scavenger now, not just a survivalist, presuming you give a fig about the housing.
Shooting is OK. Better than I'd feared it might be. Bit soggy at distance but there's enough precision that it doesn't feel like you rely on VATS to make it function.
I kind of like the new radiation system, radiation actually MATTERS now, instead of being an extraordinarily mild nuisance. I really do wish they'd carried Hardcore Mode in from New Vegas and made food and drink a necessity though. I know it was a bit soggy in New Vegas but it could've been improved upon. Immersion is essential in these Bethesda titles, it's their selling point.
Environmental graphics are OK. Character graphics...outside of animations...are OK. Some truly woeful textures here and there, but they're OK. Witcher 3 this is not, but it doesn't make me want to poke my eyes out. Until the mouths start moving, and then OMG.
Bug and issue wise, it's yet another unforgivable shitshow from Bethesda. I got to enjoy the first two hours tweaking my .ini files to fix the fucking mouse (which inexplicably had its Y axis halved in speed from the X axis to mimic a controller), and remove a horrendous microstutter caused by the game frame-locking itself to 30 (requiring me to disable the frame locking and then forcing vsync through the control panel). Oh, that and upping the nauseating FOV to 90. Now it's playable. Like it should have been OUT OF THE BOX.
sky pies said:
How called for do you think the game actually was?
Like, what are you playing the game for? The set-pieces? Memorable enemies? Nuclear Intrigue? Does F4 bring much new to the table?
Not really, but the Fallout setting is hypothetically bottomless. You can squeeze a nigh infinite amount of "juice" out of almost any setting requiring you have sufficient imagination among your writers and among your world builders. I've only played a few hours. Is this going to be an incredibly fresh new take on Fallout? LOL NO. It's definitely going to feel more like an extension of Fallout 3. But even that setting can still be mined for some nuggets.
sky pies said:
Is it in a new area of the States to the last game?
Yep. Boston.
I'd like to see them start moving outside America with this series. I realize that 50's style Americana has been part of the series since the beginning, but that doesn't mean they need to be married to it. They could import the same "socially arrested in the 50's" ethos to a multitude of other regions and it would make for very Fallout-feeling gameplay while being very fresh. Why not Britain? Or Australia? Or Canada? If you're hesitant to abandon the game's English-as-a-primary-language territories. To say nothing of how off the hook you could go with a Japanese Fallout, or Indian Fallout. Sky is the limit guys. Stop being so conservative. This is your secondary franchise, take some risks.
sky pies said:
What you said in your comment about it just being F3 with better graphics is again part of the reason I haven't invested in this game yet: I kind of had my fill of the landscape during my unfinished playthrough of F3, I got tired when I felt I had explored pretty much the most interesting part of the map and hardly got anything out of it. I didn't want to do the quests in the aircraft carrier (or whatever it was) because I just didn't feel like rabbiting around a dreary environment for hours on end, and the same applied for pretty much everything else. I think I had recently finished viewing 'The Road' when I played that game so I was pretty into the whole 'vicious post apocalyptic future' vibe, but even that wasn't enough to really keep me hooked.
It's a
much more colorful wasteland than FO3, which had the green filter and an extremely visually unvaried landscape. I'm a huge fan of "The Road", and "The Road" this is not. Not in its good ways, not in its bad ways.
