If you had to choose TWO things Fallout 4 did RIGHT, what would they be?

Hmm... two whole things??? I kid of course. There is actually a lot of stuff I enjoy. I mean, I'm still playing it after all.

1. Follower personalities. This one actually surprised me. Followers are never characters I expect to like, but FO4 has a few I find legitimately interesting.

2. Resource balancing. Usually, I'm able to quickly amass enough caps to buy pretty much whatever I need, yet in FO4, I found myself surprisingly poor well into the game. After a bit of consideration, I realized it was because I was scrapping weapons that I'd normally sell. Honestly, I'm glad to see weapons and armor having a purpose besides trading for once or being used as gun-shaped repair kits.
 
Hmm... two whole things??? I kid of course. There is actually a lot of stuff I enjoy. I mean, I'm still playing it after all.

1. Follower personalities. This one actually surprised me. Followers are never characters I expect to like, but FO4 has a few I find legitimately interesting.

2. Resource balancing. Usually, I'm able to quickly amass enough caps to buy pretty much whatever I need, yet in FO4, I found myself surprisingly poor well into the game. After a bit of consideration, I realized it was because I was scrapping weapons that I'd normally sell. Honestly, I'm glad to see weapons and armor having a purpose besides trading for once or being used as gun-shaped repair kits.

Companions had character? Get me God/Dog or Christine please to show some real companions.
 
I agree that the companions were positives. Sure FONV's companions were better, but that goes without saying. And better yet, Cassidy - from FO2, I would actually make a grieving ceremony should I lose him... :D

But companions in FO4 were surprisingly good - in relation to the catastrophe this game is
 
I already put up a couple things, but I want to say that they did a good job on the the Glowing Sea area. I kept seeing a green glow in the sky at night, and today I took my guy out to find the source. It really did look and feel like ground zero (though I think that nature would recover a bit more than Bethesda's vision allows).
 
Companions had character? Get me God/Dog or Christine please to show some real companions.

I like Deacon. He constantly lies to the player yet in a way where I can't tell whether he's doing it for fun, to teach a lesson, or because it's compulsive. Not to mention, he's also one of the most dependable and friendly characters despite being among the least trustworthy. I found that interesting.
 
Like r0b0wnz I am a fan of sound of distant gunfire. It would help with immersion if it wasn't foiled to the point of no return anyway.

Also the crafting is kinda cool, though not the legendary affixes. While there was a time I enjoyed dulling my mind with Borderlands, it was while playing that game not Fallout.

Runner-up: Power armor would have won if they made it later game and didn't shove so many fusion cores in one's face that the little nixie tube hud counter can't even display it.
 
1. Weapon/armor modding.
First, for the symbol, as it's one of the rare cases where I feel Bethesda have used something that was in NV, and improved it. Note that I'm only talking about modding of weapons and armors. The rest of the craft-driven stuff (settlement building) is quite fun at the beginning, but a bit too gimmicky.

2. Radiation Storms
The only thing that I found really dramatic so far in the game. When you're hit by one out in the open and you're not in great shape (injured, overencumbered) I find that they manage to create a nice little atmosphere.


Power Armor is a close runner up. I love the suit concept of it, but I dislike the fact that it's available so early and that there are a ton of them peppered everywhere.
 
I noticed that people complain about graphics. If we can all agree that it looks better than the older ones then it's alright in my book. The list of other things that suck is so long that I wouldn't mind the next 10 Fallouts to have this level of tech if the story, choices, logic and the whole game universe being glued together better would improve.
 
Two? I can't think of two, but I'll admit the new mutants are fun to fight. Ghouls have better animations and molerats. It's important to surprise the players. Glowing deathclaw? Spooky.
 
I noticed that people complain about graphics. If we can all agree that it looks better than the older ones then it's alright in my book. The list of other things that suck is so long that I wouldn't mind the next 10 Fallouts to have this level of tech if the story, choices, logic and the whole game universe being glued together better would improve.
I agree.

Anything that stays on the same level as Skyrim from a technical perspective is alright in my book, to be honest (in terms of general quality and details).

I don't need super detailed faces with creases and hair growing in real time that you can see when you zoom in, I need choices.
 
I noticed that people complain about graphics. If we can all agree that it looks better than the older ones then it's alright in my book. The list of other things that suck is so long that I wouldn't mind the next 10 Fallouts to have this level of tech if the story, choices, logic and the whole game universe being glued together better would improve.

I think the graphics are fine, mostly, but I also have the luxury of running it on PC on Ultra without any performance issues. The only gripe I have with the graphics are texture pop-in (sometimes LoD textures take a few seconds to load, but it's rare*) and some bad lighting. I mean, the game looks quite gorgeous outside sometimes, but apparently they carried over the lack of dynamic shadowcasting light sources from Skyrim, meaning that (without mods) there's a severe lack of shadows where appropriate. Especially the lack of shadows from Pipboy/headlamp is annoying, as well as from user-placed light sources. There is a mod that fixes that, but it's rather unstable and leads to glitchy shadows. The shadows look pretty good, though, at when they're there...
Is it really that hard to implement? I mean, look at Stalker: SoC, it already did shadows from headlamps and so on (it also did smooth sun-movement, if I remember correctly...) in 2007.
But other than that I think the graphics are fine. Textures are surprisingly good for the most part, although there are some rather low res textures here and there.
And, of course, animations are mostly shite, but that was to be expected.

*Fun thing: The game appears to be absolutely terrible at downscaling. The specs say that you need 2GB VRAM, and they absolutely mean it. Usually you'd expect that a game would just run like arse when you lack memory, but Fallout 4 simply refuses to load half of the textures regardless of your texture setting. Sure, it runs fine like that, but it also looks like Quake 2 half the time because you only get the lowest LoD, and it doesn't pop-in higher LoDs, either.
Now that's just my experience and it's my fault for ignoring the specs in the beginning, but to me that appears to be some pretty shitty optimisation.
 
I play on the lowest of the low settings and frankly, I don't give a damn about graphics. The way Fallout 4 looks is nowhere near the biggest offenses this game makes.
 
Sound design was actually quite good, though the ambient music sucked, but theres already a mod to put Fallout 1/2 soundtracks in.

Combat was actually improved, I really wish they made it more like Project Nevada/Wanderer Edition and not just make things bullet sponges, but in that area its a step in the right direction.
 
Sound design was actually quite good, though the ambient music sucked, but theres already a mod to put Fallout 1/2 soundtracks in.

Combat was actually improved, I really wish they made it more like Project Nevada/Wanderer Edition and not just make things bullet sponges, but in that area its a step in the right direction.

Wasn't there a decent amount of Fallout 1/2 ambient music used in NV? Ambient effects? I'm not sure what to call the stuff that isn't music that just sort of goes on in the background. Non-diegetic sounds? Whatever. Anyway, I don't mind the ambient music in FO4. A lot of it doesn't sound all that wasteland-like, but given that it's in Boston, I understand the Celtic stuff.

I like how different factions will fight each other in the background. It's cool that when you hear gunfire and explosions, there's fighting going on. Also, I don't hate the perk-only system near as much as I thought I would.
 
I do like that you can avoid fast travel, at least with the BOS faction, and enemies like radscorpions being able to burrow was cool. I could give way more examples, but for every good idea put in the game Bethesda did something to directly undermine it.
 
1. The Tone of the game - the walking around the wasteland and thinking of those who used to live in the places you go.

2. Rad storms - a nice touch.
 
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Sound design was actually quite good, though the ambient music sucked, but theres already a mod to put Fallout 1/2 soundtracks in.

Combat was actually improved, I really wish they made it more like Project Nevada/Wanderer Edition and not just make things bullet sponges, but in that area its a step in the right direction.

I found the combat tedious, and not much of a change from the earlier games. It looks prettier but that's it.
 
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