Humanoid

I just want a developer to understand that "turn-based isometric" is not synonymous with "party-based".

I think FO3's interpretation of the BoS as lawful good paladins is even less true to the source, so in a way, the way FO4 has them is an improvement. I haven't really listened to the ingame radio yet so I kind of did the quest to help the DJ with no prior context. The game is like "I'm sure you know him", and I had no idea he was actually someone you could meet. You couldn't meet Mr New Vegas after all.

So after the Deathclaw incident, I went ahead and made a beeline for Diamond City in a bid to avoid the general opinion that the early part of the game kinda sucks, and ...I dunno really, it's still a game I kind of have to convince myself to sit down and play a bit, rather than one I can say I'm genuinely enjoying. I mean, I've only just finished wandering the city, talking to everyone, doing minor quests, and it's okay, but it's not holding my attention and I'm tabbing out to take breaks frequently (like I am right now). Guess the big test is coming up where I step outside town, not as a lost, desperate vault-dweller but as someone with a firm purpose with the whole gameworld open proper - let's see how that goes. An anecdote about the best and worst moment so far: there's confrontation at a bar, and I'm the supposed mediator, but as I walk in, the game engine is happy to let me walk and sit down on the couch while the confrontation occurs. It's a trivial thing, but it feels cool for you to sit there lounging comfortably and occasionally chiming in in a relaxed way as the camera cuts to me while two other people have a tense stand-up conversation a good distance away. It's wonderfully organic in a way a Bethesda game has never been before. It plays out almost like a cutscene. Then the conversation suddenly breaks off for some reason. They're still in talk range so I restart it. It breaks again at the same point, and this time I know the NPCs haven't moved out of range or anything. So I have to get up, walk up to the characters involved, and restart the conversation yet again to finally complete it. Goddammit Bethesda. Still, to be positive for once, the strides they've made in dialogue have been pretty impressive, in that I haven't found one where I absolutely hated the manner and delivery of the NPCs - a very common thing in their games past. If an NPC is a jerk it's okay because I can respond in kind, and that makes a big difference.

I think the theory is that the new consoles with their new memory architecture means games designed for them really love bandwidth. Even in that context though, this test was a real eye-opener to the extent I'd have guessed there's something wrong with the test: via Techspot

Yeah, it's a new thing, K-series CPUs come in smaller boxes maybe about the thickness of a paperback novel. Cain, for gaming at the moment and for newer Intel CPUs in general RAM speed matters much more than it used to, which is why the recommendation is to get 16GB of faster RAM such as that DDR4-3000. The default speed of DDR4 is DDR4-2100 and that's a big performance hit for certain games. I know Fallout 4 in particular is a big outlier, it benefits massively from higher RAM frequency. Faster RAM > more RAM.

Try something like this: Notes: - No OS so if you need to buy Windows within that budget, need to trim a bit. - One obvious candidate would be dropping to a non-K CPU, which also drops the need for the third-party cooler (as K models don't come with one). - 550W is plenty for any system with one graphics card. Assume ~100W for the CPU and ~200W for the video card, plenty of headroom. - There are probably some bundle deals that can cut down the price even more, but I disregarded them - but there's a Newegg bundle for that RAM plus a 6600 non-K for example.

Not the best first impression the game could have given me: Okay, so I goofed and spent all my minigun ammo trying to snipe raiders from the roof. I took it that trying to take out the deathclaw with my puny small arms might be somewhat challenging, so in typical fashion the most expedient way to take it out is to exploit classic Bethesda AI. The whole time here, the deathclaw is charging headfirst into the wall while I plink away at its tail. I mean, rationally I would just choose to slink away and not engage the thing, but thou must.

Next thing we know, someone will come here asking for a sequel to Descent to Undermountain.

By the time the game finished installing I only could play about an hour last night. Which wasn't enough time to even leave the house, because I spent pretty much the whole hour messing with character creation - though to be fair it wasn't all on one character at least. God I wish they'd shut up though, the comments they both make every time you make a tiny change was cute for about thirty seconds. Anyway the UI for it kind of sucks and is a weird mish-mash of keyboard and mouse controls, but I'm happy with the scope of changes you can actually make. Being able to use the whole screen is an obvious improvement versus Skyrim's half-screen and FO3/NV's one-tenth-screen, and the lighting is neutral so there are no tricks of the light. It's a little worse than Skyrim at providing an accurate expectation of what you look like once you get into the gameworld proper, but I guess it's sort of inevitable given that they at least attempt to animate some facial expressions this time around, versus the perpetually neutral mask of the Skyrim player character. So yeah, that's my entirely superficial first-look at the game. Maybe tonight I can get some actual gameplay done.

It's a nice illustration of how Bethesda games differ from Bioware games I suppose. Even when both companies make the exact same design mistake, with Bethesda it can be corrected.

Oxenfurt was conspicuously devoid of things to do in the base game, but the recently released first expansion is pretty much the Oxenfurt expansion. It's balanced around the lategame though, so yeah, just proceed with the game in other areas in the meantime, there aren't any real content-free areas that stick out even nearly as much.

I get that Blu-ray never achieved the market share to justify shipping games on them, but pressing DVDs is dirt-cheap: it's disappointing that they could only deign to give us one measly single-layer DVD. Indeed it seems almost more of an insult to provide one disc than it would be to provide none: "Hey you should totally thank us for including one-fifth of the game on disc". The previous PC game I bought a physical copy of, Witcher 3, was pretty much a full install, being a neat perk of DRM-free physical distribution. It's sad that even when Steam isn't being a jerk, it is by its nature a permanent enabler of other companies being jerks. I get that a fair chunk of stuff isn't finalised before the physical copies are produced, but in cases like this it's going to be mostly static assets that have been in release state for months, so it's not a remotely plausible defense. Fortunately my ISP provides unmetered Steam downloads so it's just wasting my time, but for the majority of users here, it's going to be a hefty chunk of their download quota for the month since the average is likely still some way short of triple-digits.

Wait, do people think oil comes from dinosaurs? https://what-if.xkcd.com/101/

Popped in the Fallout 4 disc. It installed the first 5.2GB. Now I have to download another ~19GB. Goddammit Bethesda.

This is one of the issues I've always had about level scaling enemies. It just seems silly from a logical point of view that you can dispatch a high dragon because it's only level 10, but then get your ass kicked by a level 30 wolf. I guess the problem then comes from level and game play design. How does one design it so that all the "high level" enemies are actually high level, but at the same time making them accessible to the player earlier in the game without having to keep all the best enemies until the last hour. I mean, a dragon should be higher level than a toad. But then how do you design the game so that that is the case, while at the same time not making the player face toad after toad until 90 hours into the game when they're high enough level to face a dragon? Especially when Skyrim already sort of did that by slowly replacing garden variety Draugr with "Restless Draugr", "Draugr Overlord", "Draugr God Lich Monster", etcetera, as you levelled up. Just slight tweaking of the model, with or without a name change, is plenty enough to communicate that this ain't your father's drowner.

The primary purpose of grenades have always been to plant them in unsuspecting people's pants, not to throw. You can still do that, right?

As any fule kno, you sell the items with the lowest value per unit weight first.

Yeah, rare occasion where combat became an absolute dealbreaker for me. After a few fights I just didn't want to do it anymore despite being fine with the rest of the game, and that was that. Won't be back for the sequels unless combat is overhauled.

WoW's had a pretty messed up difficulty curve lately too, where you're expected to do 80-90% of the raid in normal difficulty, then 80-90% of the raid in hard difficulty, then do the final boss(es) in normal, then the final boss in hard. It's stupid but I guess that's the current Blizzard paradigm.

And speaking of mirelurks, is fighting in the water a thing yet? Or is it once again just a case of it turning into a slightly awkward staring contest with the mirelurk if you're both swimming?

But it added nothing to the style of gameplay Skyrim encourages. New Vegas vanilla is broadly the same, you can carry plenty of stuff but it just means there's no meaningful gameplay value in deciding whether gun A or gun B is better value per weight. Indeed it strikes me as somewhat absurd that such a tangential gameplay feature is considered so important that SkyUI has a dedicated value per unit weight column in its inventory listings. No, I just want to click "loot all" for every enemy I kill without having to inspect every single one of them, I can worry about it later when it comes time to liquidate my loot. (It doesn't help that Bethesda seem to be actively trolling players by putting worthless "Ancient Nordic" gear on every single draugr, the net effect being that for a player playing without cheats, they have to click multiple times per kill to loot "properly". Screw that.) Then I played New Vegas in hardcore mode with Josh's mod. In that state, weight management is a valid and interesting gameplay mechanic, and I was happy to stick with what the game gave me as the baseline.

One of the first things I did in Skyrim - i.e. before the starter dungeon was even through - was to open up the cheat console and double the carry weight limit. Later on, I increased it a further 100-fold or somesuch. Best decision I ever made in terms of being able to enjoy that game.

Doing it as a DLC for CK3 (whenever that's made) would probably be the sensible compromise. It's hardly more outlandish than Sunset Invasion after all.

Fallout 3 had Liam Neeson and Malcolm McDowell. New Vegas had ....Chandler from Friends. In all seriousness though, the only area I'd genuinely mark down New Vegas on compared to Bethesda's titles is interior architecture, with some ridiculous layouts. I mean I guess you can justify some locations like vaults being confusing to navigate, but simple buildings like Elvis' house or most of the casinos are just nonsensical.