Fallout 4: Part 2 - Gameplay

The biggest worry I had whilst riding the hype train to Fallout 4 town was when I heard that skills system would be "different" No one knew what different really meant, obviously everyone expected the worst. Next thing was how the shooting was going to be improved, after that the harrowing cries came. "It's going to be like Skyrim, the levelling system will be too simple" Turned out, all things considered it just was different. Sure, it was a little bit more streamlined - and developers do often use that to mean less in depth - but it was still involved, interesting choices still had to be made. You're able to get every single skill in the game, and the infinite level cap is cool but I do prefer to have choices that have positives and negatives in my levelling- but fallout hasn't really ever been about that. I prefer the older system, but I don't think this one is bad- it just punishes min maxing less and sadly means that everyone's characters will all diverge into the exact same thing.

 Wasteland Jesus.

There is a very small element of choices with positive and negative impact, and that is the much talked about gun customisation. There's a lot of it, and a very few select mods increase stat X and decrease stat Y - I think this is a great concept, not only do the story choices matter- but your stat ones do too, much like the Witcher. Sadly, in practice, this isn't the case. There's pretty much a perfect mod for each slot. It's a very linear progression. Gameplay wise, this is my biggest complaint. I'm certain it'll be fixed via mods - but it isn't really the point, the game deserves credit based on it's vanilla state. Aside from this the gameplay is solid, it's more of the same really. Looting, collecting unique shit, killing people for hats etc.

An entirely new vanilla feature, though a much modded one, is the ability to create settlements. It's a pretty bare bones system, you can craft buildings, shops, chairs, beds etc. It isn't largely important to the main story, nor is it particularly complex. I really don't have much to say about it, if you like that element of minecraftian building it's a great time sink - if not, it isn't required what so ever. As I'm sure many of you have seen, you can create some pretty crazy settlements.

Limits on your freedom tend to engender creativity 

I'll save most of what I have to say about settlements for a separate post, because I don't want this one to go on for too much longer.

Speaking of not going on much longer, it's time to complain about bugs.

With any Bethesda game you can always expect a healthy serving of bugs to come along with you for the ride, for the most part they're just dumb visual glitches or harmless audio skips and the like. Sometimes, however, they can result or constant crashes on loading doors, inability to proceed due to a quest trigger not working in the correct way, sometimes even complete save loading failures. Fortunately, most of these issues can be resolved, or at least worked around by using console commands. Yet even the mighty console in all glory can still fail to help in your time of need.

In my first characters run of the game I ran into countless visual bugs, and that's fine I don't really care about that. Then next one that I ran into didn't really end up being a huge deal, but I only felt that way after I solved it. As it displayed your damage output incorrectly, you dealt the right amount of damage - you just didn't think you did because your stats said otherwise. The motherlode for me though, was a particular side quest in one of the larger quest hubs of the game - Diamond City. The quest is called "confidence man" The damn thing is so broken the third result on Google for that quest is the huge Reddit thread on people trying to figure it out. It took me about 2 and a half hours to console command the thing into submission, and it put me off the game for near 2 weeks.

It's quite a simple solve, but figuring it out was torture. For anyone's that interested the problem arises due to NPC's being marked essential at the start of the quest, then needing to be unmarked later as they turn hostile, but well - they don't. So they can't be killed, hell for some reason it can also turn you immortal. It's since been patched out, but on day one - well that's some killer shit to deal with.