Date played: November 10th
Platform: PS4
Session fun rating: 10/10
This is it, Fallout 4 is out!
I haven't been this excited for a game in a very long time... in fact, the last time was probably Skyrim, Bethesda's last game, back in 2011. I still think Skyrim is one of the best video games ever made, right up there with Super Mario World and Grand Theft Auto V. I also loved Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, so I was very pumped to play Fallout 4.
The game begins in 2077 somewhere in Massachusetts, prior to the war. I spent the first 30 minutes making my character. I chose to play as a woman because the voice actress seemed better. I walked around my fancy high tech house, spoke with my husband, my robot butler and comforted my crying infant. We were interrupted by an urgent news report. The war had started and nuclear bombs were dropping all over the East Coast. The family runs to the nearby Vault 111, which is advertised as a shelter against nuclear war and enters it just as a spectacular nuclear explosion occurs nearby.
As any Fallout fan knows though, the vaults are nothing more than a facade for social experiments. Vault 111 was designed to cryogenically freeze it's occupants and study their condition. By telling us that the pods were used for "decontamination", the Vault's staff tricked us into getting inside the cryo pods and froze us, my husband and child in a pod together. In a disturbing scene, I wake up to see a scientist and a thug open my family's pod, steal my baby and shoot my husband... The screen fades out and I wake up again and my pod is open. I explored the vault a bit, fought some roaches with a baton and later, a pistol, then left the vault.
Fallout 4, like all Bethesda games, is fucking gigantic! There is soooo much to do, it's quite overwhelming and exciting at the same time. I went back to my house and found Codsworth, my house robot, was still functional. I discovered it is 200 years in the future and headed to Concord, the nearest city to find clues about my family.
There are lots of little things that are different from the last Fallout game. There is now a sprint function and some of the leveling systems have changed a bit. V.A.T.S., the system that allows aiming for specific body parts, no longer stops time completely, it slows it down instead. This changes combat quite a bit, but it still feels great.
I found some folks fighting raiders from inside a museum, so I decided to help them. After killing a dozen raiders, I met the group of 5 people and agreed to work with them while looking for my family. They asked my help to kill the raiders outside the museum too, but gave me access to power armor and a minigun for the task. The power armor is different than in the previous games, it's now more like a vehicle that has a fuel gauge. It's very powerful, but can only be used for a limited time. I killed a bunch of raiders with it and even one of the gigantic Deathclaw beasts.
The group decided to settle in my old neighborhood. That's when I was introduced to the settlement building mechanic. So basically, I can build a whole neighborhood from scratch. I gathered materials from the shit lying around the area. This probably took me a bit more than an hour... I even destroyed picket fences and tires to gain materials.
Then I started to build. There's a surprising amount of flexibility in this process. Settlers need beds, water, food and the settlement itself needs defenses. There are also objects that require power. And when I say they need food, it means I have to plant the damn things and assign a worker to tend to them. It's a big system and it seems like a ton of fun!
I started building myself a sort of headquarters building. So far, I have a large metal structure with multiple rooms, a generator outside, a couple of doors, a chair and a painting. I will continue building the main structure so that I have enough room for all my workbenches and containers, then I'll decorate. It's really fun to do this stuff...
Platform: PS4
Session fun rating: 10/10
This is it, Fallout 4 is out!
I haven't been this excited for a game in a very long time... in fact, the last time was probably Skyrim, Bethesda's last game, back in 2011. I still think Skyrim is one of the best video games ever made, right up there with Super Mario World and Grand Theft Auto V. I also loved Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, so I was very pumped to play Fallout 4.
The game begins in 2077 somewhere in Massachusetts, prior to the war. I spent the first 30 minutes making my character. I chose to play as a woman because the voice actress seemed better. I walked around my fancy high tech house, spoke with my husband, my robot butler and comforted my crying infant. We were interrupted by an urgent news report. The war had started and nuclear bombs were dropping all over the East Coast. The family runs to the nearby Vault 111, which is advertised as a shelter against nuclear war and enters it just as a spectacular nuclear explosion occurs nearby.
As any Fallout fan knows though, the vaults are nothing more than a facade for social experiments. Vault 111 was designed to cryogenically freeze it's occupants and study their condition. By telling us that the pods were used for "decontamination", the Vault's staff tricked us into getting inside the cryo pods and froze us, my husband and child in a pod together. In a disturbing scene, I wake up to see a scientist and a thug open my family's pod, steal my baby and shoot my husband... The screen fades out and I wake up again and my pod is open. I explored the vault a bit, fought some roaches with a baton and later, a pistol, then left the vault.
Fallout 4, like all Bethesda games, is fucking gigantic! There is soooo much to do, it's quite overwhelming and exciting at the same time. I went back to my house and found Codsworth, my house robot, was still functional. I discovered it is 200 years in the future and headed to Concord, the nearest city to find clues about my family.
There are lots of little things that are different from the last Fallout game. There is now a sprint function and some of the leveling systems have changed a bit. V.A.T.S., the system that allows aiming for specific body parts, no longer stops time completely, it slows it down instead. This changes combat quite a bit, but it still feels great.
I found some folks fighting raiders from inside a museum, so I decided to help them. After killing a dozen raiders, I met the group of 5 people and agreed to work with them while looking for my family. They asked my help to kill the raiders outside the museum too, but gave me access to power armor and a minigun for the task. The power armor is different than in the previous games, it's now more like a vehicle that has a fuel gauge. It's very powerful, but can only be used for a limited time. I killed a bunch of raiders with it and even one of the gigantic Deathclaw beasts.
 |
| My power armor |
Then I started to build. There's a surprising amount of flexibility in this process. Settlers need beds, water, food and the settlement itself needs defenses. There are also objects that require power. And when I say they need food, it means I have to plant the damn things and assign a worker to tend to them. It's a big system and it seems like a ton of fun!
I started building myself a sort of headquarters building. So far, I have a large metal structure with multiple rooms, a generator outside, a couple of doors, a chair and a painting. I will continue building the main structure so that I have enough room for all my workbenches and containers, then I'll decorate. It's really fun to do this stuff...
