Nappi

I realized that since I'm spending so much time modding my gear, crafting stuff and sorting my inventory, I might as well take a look into the base building stuff and try to make home feel more cozy. Now I am worried about stuff like bushes clipping through floors, not being able to place bottles in Nuka Cola vending machines and lights programming requiring completely separate power grid for each set of lights connected to a terminal. Oh and there is no way to sync the interval switches!? What is this shit?!?!

Yesterday I jumped into the power armor for the first time since the beginning to tackle the Glowing Sea. I liked the feeling of wandering into a hostile environment a lot. When my friends ask me about the game, I answer something along the lines of "It is buggy and unpolished, but the world is very immersive and...". A while ago, I started thinking about how many bugs I have actually encountered, and could remember only some minor physics/geometry related glitches every now and then. I'm sure that the bugs are still lurking somewhere, though, and that, up to this point, I have just been lucky and/or careful not to upset the world. It's a weird thing when you start to feel responsible for the wellbeing of the game world.

I don't know how I should approach this game. I played through Act 1 and some of Act 2 a long time ago and loved the experience, but then stopped for some reason. Probably another game came out or something. Now I remember almost nothing of the plot, and would like to play through all the acts consecutively. I don't know whether I should wait for Act 5 to be released as well, or just play through acts 1-4 now, and then wait for the final act for, what, a year?

I like to listen to podcasts when I go for a walk. One hour shows like This American Life and Radiolab are really nice for that purpose, but every now and then I like to try something different. So one time, I queued up a couple of episodes of 99% Invisible before stepping out. It was a disaster. The ad reads were so frequent that I was constantly reaching for my phone to skip them. Never going to try that again.

No problem. That thing is fascinating. Thanks Jake and paradi6m for pointing it out!

Don't know which article Jake was referring to, though.

I really need to find the Fallout alternative universe equivalent of a Torx set. I feel like devices should have more screws than I am able to get by scrapping them.

I'm still okay with the economy, because it prevents me from buying overpowered equipment before I'm "meant to". Selling stuff is a chore, though, so yeah, a Torchlight-style salesdog would be awesome.

I realized that a significant portion of my daily Fallout 4 time is spent in the inventory, and I'm quite close to increasing the carrying capacity of my character with a console command at this point. I was able to deal with the inventory management in Fallout 3 and Skyrim quite alright, but this time I'm really struggling with the stuff due to the heavy focus on weapon and armor modifications. I figure that if I can quick-travel to my base, dump all the junk and quick-travel back to gather the rest of the precious junk, I might as well skip the time-consuming part and go for a bigger inventory instead. I know that I could also invest heavily in Strength and Strong Back, but I'd much rather spend my hard-earned skill point on something that makes the game more fun, and not just less of a chore.

I finally reached Diamond City. As I was exploring the market, suddenly the sky turned all Fallout 3 (greenish yellow) and there was lightning. Although I took radiation damage from the lightning, this was the first time I felt completely safe in the game, within those city walls. Man, the atmosphere in this game is great. A friend of mine wanted to see how the game looks like in action, so I streamed a couple of hours of gameplay in Steam Broadcast (which was surprisingly painless, by the way). I changed my playstyle a bit to make the stream more watchable – i.e. I switched between weapons more, was less organized when wandering around, and most importantly did not obsessively comb through every large indoor area I came across on my way to the next waypoint – and I ended up enjoying the gameplay quite a bit more myself. I think from now on, I will focus less on exploring each building I happen upon (as they often seem quite dull, and with my playstyle, take forever to clear) and instead concentrate on exploring the wasteland itself and completing the missions. I might have to consult an online map to see that I don't miss too many bobbleheads, magazines and rare weapons, though. I still have no idea how to approach base building. I don't know what is the point of it, how things are supposed to turn out, how much time and resources I should invest in it, and what I can gain from it. The tutorial for this part of the game was even worse than the normal gameplay tutorial, and the interface is clearly not optimal for this type of shit. Like, I barely know how to assign settlers to specific roles (and that only because I looked it up on the internet), and I have no idea if I can check which settlers already have a role assigned to them. Oh, and I only just now learned that I should probably build a radio beacon to attract more settlers? I have something like five, I think. The mouse and keyboard interface is really um... inefficient in this game. I hope someone is working on a mod to make going through the inventory a bit less of a chore. Still love this game, though.

The brutal devastation of the optimism and visions of the future of the 50s is definitely a fascinating setting, and I enjoy exploring the remnants of the American dream a lot. However, as has been said already, the timeline and especially the technology do not really stand up to scrutiny. At all. I don't mind. It is a cool weird world. I enjoy my time exploring the wasteland a lot. This is not the case with the large indoor areas such as the Corvega Assembly Plant. It took me a long time to clear the place of raiders and then going through each body, locker, and safe. The area was plain and dull, and while the gunplay has improved from Fallout 3, it is still quite mediocre. What portion of the story missions are set in these kind of large indoor environments?

If you are enjoying your time with the game, then sure. There are not that many new story missions left (you don't have to play the repeat missions if you don't want to), and the post-credit missions are quite straightforward and nice. If you run out of new missions, just play a couple of side mission and occasionally visit the motherbase and they should gradually get unlocked. I can also confirm that you don't have to fully upgrade your base and all that shit to unlock the final story mission (as was claimed in multiple early walkthroughs and guides). I just finished a couple of side missions more, and it opened up.

The opening of the game did not really grab me and I thought that perhaps I'm not into Bethesda style RPGs anymore, but the moment I got out of the Vault and saw the view, it was bye bye free time, I will miss you. I did not play for long after that yesterday, but my first impressions are that the atmosphere, especially the sound design, in the wasteland is excellent. The abandoned suburb near the vault was fantastically eerie with all the random clangs and the wind and all the other ambient sounds. I turned on the radio just to feel a bit more comfortable. The scared, insecure and lonely announcer only made things worse. Excellent.

Saw Ghost yesterday. Their live performances are hilarious and awesome. You should go see them.

Reviewers do indeed conclude that Fallout 4 is a Bethesda game.

Well fuck everything. This is some of the best drone/sludge/doom I have heard in a while: https://soundcloud.com/alvin-thechipmunkson16sp/sets/sludgefest Call Me is simply brilliant.

Best Quick Look in a while:

Can you post the Downwell on cinema screen pic/video?

I feel like "classic" as a status is overrated.

Is it really that big of a blow when a thing that you have been looking forward to does not meet your expectations when it's finally released? I mean to an extent that you feel like you should consciously lower your expectations, or even force yourself to be cynical or wary of the developer or the product a year or so in advance? The biggest problem I see is preordering the game based on the hype alone, only to realize that the game is broken and/or shitty, but that is easily avoided by not preordering games ever.

I'm about 100 pages into A Brief History of Seven Killings, and I'm absolutely loving it so far. I'm always wary of novel that follow more than one character, because often one or more of the threads or characters are not that interesting, and the different stories take way too long to converge. This novel takes a different approach in which the protagonists act as sorts of security cameras that cover the same events from different perspectives and through different sets of filters. This choice is immensely successful, and gives you a nice sense of what it might well have been living in different parts of Kingston during that period.

I just finished mission 43 and I think I'm done with the main story because (mission 45 and 46 spoilers) I watched mission 46 cutscenes and the draft for mission 51 which was cut from the game. I'm yet to check out mission 45 cutscenes but I'm looking forward to finding out I have probably said this multiple times already, but while the story is a bit of a mess, on a technical level, this game is fucking fantastic. The gameplay is so fluid and satisfying, and I have hardly encountered any bugs or even glitches during the 60+ hours of playing.

I'm happy with the graphics remastering and excited about the news on voice recordings. I hope the animation will be fine. Anyway, will perch.

I have never been raided either, but I'm suspecting this might be because I lost connection during the FOB tutorial and never finished it.