this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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I loathe Fallout 4 for all the things the game has robbed the franchise of.
Most dialogue choices boil down to "yes / sarcastic yes / tell me more / not right now"
I really hate the settlement building, but I feel like I need to interact with it to play properly - it's too powerful to ignore when playing on Survival.
I would have preferred if the settlers improved things themselves over time if the resources were available for them.
The three factions make the moral choice a no brainer. The Institute are slaveowners, the Brotherhood are Nazis and the Railroad are the Underground Railroad (very clever Bethesda).
(Minute men is not a real faction, they're tertiary)
Also, the only temporarily impactful decision you make is which flavor if the final mission you'll do. You don't actually have to choose one until the very end. You can somehow be not just friendly, but high rank with all four at the same time, despite the conflict of interest.
They make you think your making choices sometimes (though honestly rarely in F04 because of the dialog system you mentioned), but you never do really. It's an alright survival shooter thing, but a bad RPG. You choose abilities, but you rarely choose a role. You're given your role at the start, and your only choice is to follow it.
Heh, I'm probably the opposite. I like the settlement building capability in the engine, but don't feel that Bethesda's done a lot with it in any of their games.
In Fallout 4 you can make pretty settlements, but there's a very minimal degree to which layout interacts with the game. Putting some walls up around expensive stuff and making enemies need to go past turrets or guard posts helps a bit, but it's basically just SimArchitect. Lay out stuff how you want for fun. That's not bad as such, but I'd like to have more interaction with the game world. Also, using settlements without the Local Leader ability to let settlements trade goods was a pain, which was one of the few useful things in the Charisma tree. There is one quest where one does lay out defenses for a significant fight, bur that's about it.
The Sim Settlements mod introduces settlements that build themselves, which gives you elaborate, evolving things without having to manually do all the work of building them (and can take advantage of newer hardware with larger settlements). That's nice, but it really just provides an opportunity to rebuild nice-looking stuff in without the scrap-hauling and placement drudge work. The mod adds a (fairly extensive) questline, but the actual layout of the cities again doesn't matter much. Avoids the need for Local Leader as a quality-of-life perk, so provides more character build flexibility.
Fallout 76 has some game-important roles to a player's CAMP, but it's basically providing convenient access to workshops and a player vendor. Defensive layout does matter somewhat-more, as attacks when a player isn't present are actually simulated in the game world. You can take and hold certain map locations, sorta a tower defense mode, but there's minimal reward in the game for it. The point is still mostly being Sim Architect for player CAMPs, except now you can show your creations to other players. CAMPs are much smaller than Fallout 4 settlements. You can also have Shelters, which are little areas to free-build off the main world. Like CAMPs, but with a few restrictions, like the inability to have resource-producing items (and automated resource production is very limited, rarely worthwhile). Some players have done neat things that add to the game, but again, just doesn't feel like there's much "game" to it. Fallout 76 has some hard limits on ability to store things in a CAMP -- inventory limitations are a core part of the game.
Starfield has multi-base spanning automated production, and automated production matters, more like a very limited Factorio. However, you can pretty much play the game and ignore that aspect, as the main purpose of getting resources is...building more bases. IIRC, bases don't get attacked when you're away, and defenses aren't an issue. I guess that's nice for people who don't like base-building, but it felt like kind of a pointless loop to me. Not like, oh, Egosoft's X series, where you build out a space empire to get more stuff that unlocks more things. You can buy player homes, but they never felt as useful to me as Home Plate in Fallout 4, as I just usually wasn't passing by the player homes, and the ships are generally more available. I think that those are more aimed at people who want to do interior decoration. Starfield does let you modify ship interiors, but there just isn't a lot of gameplay point to it, though it's probably where I spent the most time. There just isn't that much that happens in your ship.
None of those are bad things, but the base-building aspects just feel kind of decoupled from the game, like a kind of bolted on architectural program. If you want to create your dream space home, I guess that that's fine, but I was kind of hoping for something that heads more in the Sim City or Caesar direction, where there's real gameplay associated with the settlement you build. If one wanted to do just aesthetics, maybe in Fallout 76, let players build new stuff in contests and then whoever builds the neatest gets some award and the structure gets incorporated into the base game, something like that.
Yes!! I felt the same way!
Particularly the ham fisted way it's written, you're really led to choose the railroad path, but I felt I never got a proper explanation on how the institute was bad (the why is clear).
I ended up going with the institute and I got a really underwhelming ending
The institute are bad because they're basically "scientific racists" - they diminish the experienced suffering of conscious beings, even though they're anatomically identical to Real Humans™
They've got the power to fix so many problems upstairs, but they're so far removed from the suffering of others that they don't know what the problems even are.
They're essentially the 1% in our world. Bunch of privileged cunts who think they can fix the world by throwing money at a problem without really understanding the plight of the working class.
I put in 1300 hrs into fo4 just for the settlement building. With mods though.
"I heard people complaining about the bed situation...." NPC carrieing a bedroll on her back.
Just out of curiosity, if you don't mind sharing, which mods did you use? Like, just stuff that adds more items to the world, or stuff that changed gameplay linked to the settlement-building stuff?
Not the person you asked, but I’m in a similar boat and used mods and spent a lot of time in settlement building. The only two mods I can remember that made a big impact included the one that basically acted as a cheat terminal (since I played it originally on Xbox, but now that I’m on pc I don’t need that anymore) which allowed me to have unlimited resources, and the other being the one that expands the build able area and the build limit infinitely. I did use other mods, but I think they were mostly graphics mods that didn’t affect the actual settlement building, just the way it would look slightly. I might’ve had some mods that changed NPC behaviour within settlements but I can’t remember 100% right now. That was probably 5-6 years ago
Good to know, but as a purist, I don't like playing with mods which change things in ways which could break the game if uninstalled (the one exception being UFO4P).
You posted this comment three times BTW.