Humanoid

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.

Anyone tried a pure stealth approach yet? Preferably melee. How does it feel? For context I found it worked pretty well in Skyrim but poorly in FO3 and NV.

To be honest, I've bought one set of bike wheels over another simply because they had a satisfying freehub sound when freewheeling. :D

Eh, I'd say it's more about the feel than the sound. One of those things that's impossible to quantify, but it's a classic case of "once you try it you won't want to go back". I know when I'm forced to use a membrane keyboard these days it feels like I'm typing on a sponge. But yeah, if you've never tried it then perhaps it's lucky that you don't know - after getting one for my home PC, I ended up having to buy one for my work PC, paid out of my own pocket - so all in all a rather expensive exercise.

This is probably the best guide I've come across in both explaining the benefits of, and knowing what to look for in a mechanical keyboard. Nothing can substitute for the experience of actually trying one though. Fortunately, it's easier now than it used to be to test drive one at retail store, now that "mainstream" brands like Logitech, Razer, Asus and Corsair are making them and marketing them heavily. The mech keyboard hipster will contend these companies new to the market produce an inferior product, and it may be partially true in terms of overall construction, but generally speaking the switches, and therefore the feel of the keypresses, will be the same whatever brand you go for because they're generally sourced from a single third-party company. Exception is made for some of the very cheapest models which use a generic clone of the ubiquitous "Cherry" instead of the real thing (as the patent has lapsed recently).

@bethesda: Fallout 4 is 1080p & 30fps on Xbox One and PS4. Resolution and FPS are not limited in any way on the PC. 22 Jun 2015

Played Shaman as my secondary class from the start of WoD to the end of BRF, and I'll be the dissenting voice I guess. Playing as Enhancement there's how many keys now, fifteen? Way too many for my puny 101-key keyboard to handle. As Restoration the class was generally fine although the lack of a tank cooldown hurt a bit. Haven't played Elemental since Firelands so not qualified to comment on that. (For what it's worth, started WoD with Druid main and Shaman alt, ended with Paladin main and Priest alt) Aside, it can be surprising how quickly the cliff comes. In the space of not much more than a month, I've gone from business-as-usual to eh-I'll-stick-around-for-raids to I-really-don't-want-to-log-in. Maybe it's telling how much I've lost interest that I haven't even read a Blizzcon summary of Legion yet, let alone any of the class previews. I've only been back for one year now, after being out of the game for two-and-a-half. I wonder if that's going to be my pattern of play going forward.

Well now you can play each game during the loading screens of the other one.

I ....I don't actually know, I haven't had reason to hit any of them. They don't look like cheapo rubber knobbly bits on basic membrane keyboards, yeah, but my only concern really is that there's no longer an 'Fn' key on the bottom row, which made the earlier Das model a 102-key keyboard. This is how it looks on their marketing anyway: