My First Impressions after 6 hours:
Ok so to report. The game is indeed just full of Kill quests, basicaly every quest before arriving to Diamond city is just entering a dungeon and killing a bunch of Raiders/Ghouls/Synths. They don't offer any alternate paths to completion, even tho some have Named NPCs they mostly serve as Bosses. Every Conversation so far has had a "Persuasion" check, usually to get paid more, I have yet to see any charisma check that actually results on alternate Paths. Current Build is 6 Charisma. Only Charisma perk I have picked by level 10 is Lone Wanderer. Leveling up is indeed pretty fast, I already got 2 of the Level up achievements on a single play session.
The BOS qustline so far seems lifted from New Vegas but without alternate non violent routes, my current mission is even to recover the reports from dead Patrols.
Diamond city does have a small orchard in the middle. It's not quite big enough in representation but I guess is a step up from FO3's Single cow settlements.
There seem to be some named Raider Gangs but I have yet to find them, all the Raiders are called Raider so far.
Playing on hard, Stimpaks are scarce early on, but I am dealing lots of damage with my moded Knuckles, the Laser Musket is also pretty OP, the game isn't really that challenging. Definetly not "Unapologetically hardcore" as that laughable Polygon article claimed. You also get the Minigun pretty early on and unlike previous Fallouts, even FO3, getting a highlevel weapon at lower levels has no penalties, you shoot just as accurate, doesn't seem to be much penalties for not specing on a type of weapon. For example I haven't taken a single Sneak or Energy Weapon related perk and the Laser Musket still kills everything in a single shot in VATS.
A video of me Fist fighting the first Deathclaw. A test video before the actual recording starts. Cooling fan is going crazy, I am changing it today actually. Recorded on medium settings as I didn't want to suffer any stutter.
One thing I gotta give it, as you can see in the video, I found a tunnel to another part of the map after accidentally falling into the Hole the Deathclaw came from so the map seems to be nice and interconnected with secret zones to discover... Now if only Concor had anything going for it storywise....
One thing that is seriously annoying me is that blocking, gunbashing and Grenade throwing are all mapped to the same button. That's just fucking stupid.... Project nevada handled it in a more elegant manner and it was running on the New Vegas version of the engine...
Navigating the Pipboy is much clunkier now.
It'sstill divided into Tabs with the subsections lsited horizontally like before with the marked difference that the subsections are notall listed simultaneously, you have to Scroll Sideways toget to the different ones, which really has no reason be like that at all, getting from Weaponsto Miscellaneous items now takes multiple clicks for example, Holotapes and Notes are no longer on the "DATA" tab but in the INV tab, which makes the whole Inv section just a cluttered mess to navigate.
You can't move around the Perk chart with WASD for some reason, it requires you to Swipe while rick clicking it which any seasoned PC user would know is a pretty shitty way of controlling anythign ever. The Settlement building interface is another clunky nightmare, the mouse wheel doesn't let you scroll through the different structures, you have to move your mouse hand to the arrow keys to navigate the structures, pulling out of the menu requires multiple key strokes and you can even get into it by accident if you just happen to want to change to Third Person while in a settlemen. Commands also seem very inconsistent with menus and actions sometimes requiring to keep the button pressed sometimes while other times triggering with a light tap.
Why is Settlemen building mode even in First person? Wouldn't an Eagle view make much more sense and make it easier to use?
The Junk Jet is also pretty buggy, I was unable to pull my pipboy multiple times after loading it with junk, I had to Hotkey into another weapon to be able to access the Pipboy again. Lot's of Invisible Weapon bugs too.
Dialogue is GARBAGE, the "Sarcastic" option results in some very cringeworthy dialogue pretty often. Saying no is always Rude, accepting quests is always super polite, so if you want to play a "jerk character" but you don't want to turn down every single quest, you are goign to end up with a completely bipolar douche.
(X) Sarcastic: It just works.
More to come later. I might do a video on the UI.
