Well, I've put quite a few hours into the game, and it's still a mixed bag. It definitely has the Bethesda addictive magic, with always something to find over the next hill or in the next ruin.
I'm warming to the settlement subgame to some extent. There are some UI/UX pain points with the way it's shoved into a completely different game engine. Most notably, there is no way to see what your actual stocks of a resource are except when you are about to build something that uses it. The feature to "tag" resources that you need to build something so junk that would yield them is highlighted during exploration is decent (especially if you take the otherwise unexciting Scrapper perk, or use the console to cheat it on) - but there's no fine control. Certain rare resources I'd always like to see highlighted, and some common ones I don't really want highlighted except when I'm actually low on them.
I think the mods available on the PC are also a must-have thing. I can't imagine playing on a console where there's no way to fix the quest bugs, or the surprisingly dim settlement lighting, or the fact that your companions don't even try to sneak when you do.
I'm actively annoyed by the second DLC, too, though for $5 it's not as insulting as if they charged more. You get:
* Settlement objects that modders have pretty much already provided. Some of these are such glaring omissions that one wonders if they were deliberately held back for the DLC, while a couple are practically PTW, like the radiation cleanser device.
* A half-implemented and mostly broken system for "capturing" creatures to use for settlement defense or arena fights
* A (totally broken by every account I've read) system for adding a deathmatch arena to your settlement.
The first DLC was much more worthwhile, not very buggy, and while they took the cheap approach of using a radio message to start the questline, it's decent enough and I felt I got my money's worth. That said, here too the PC modders have covered the big flaws in the product, namely all the existing robotic allies (Codsworth and Curie, the robots in Greygarden, the robot from Covenant) that Bethesda didn't retrofit to be used in the robot workbench.
But the biggest irony so far is still related to the main plot. There's a really nicely done, engaging child character in Vault 81. In only about 10 minutes of screen time, you really establish a relationship with him that motivates you to not only go to his rescue (duh, murder hobo doesn't need much reason) but even make a small sacrifice to save his life. This in contrast to the uninteresting, poorly animated blobby rubber-doll thing that's supposed to be a baby, that you interact with once by clicking on it and once by clicking on a nearby object, and that's supposed to drive you to quest through nuclear-devestated wastelands.
I'm warming to the settlement subgame to some extent. There are some UI/UX pain points with the way it's shoved into a completely different game engine. Most notably, there is no way to see what your actual stocks of a resource are except when you are about to build something that uses it. The feature to "tag" resources that you need to build something so junk that would yield them is highlighted during exploration is decent (especially if you take the otherwise unexciting Scrapper perk, or use the console to cheat it on) - but there's no fine control. Certain rare resources I'd always like to see highlighted, and some common ones I don't really want highlighted except when I'm actually low on them.
I think the mods available on the PC are also a must-have thing. I can't imagine playing on a console where there's no way to fix the quest bugs, or the surprisingly dim settlement lighting, or the fact that your companions don't even try to sneak when you do.
I'm actively annoyed by the second DLC, too, though for $5 it's not as insulting as if they charged more. You get:
* Settlement objects that modders have pretty much already provided. Some of these are such glaring omissions that one wonders if they were deliberately held back for the DLC, while a couple are practically PTW, like the radiation cleanser device.
* A half-implemented and mostly broken system for "capturing" creatures to use for settlement defense or arena fights
* A (totally broken by every account I've read) system for adding a deathmatch arena to your settlement.
The first DLC was much more worthwhile, not very buggy, and while they took the cheap approach of using a radio message to start the questline, it's decent enough and I felt I got my money's worth. That said, here too the PC modders have covered the big flaws in the product, namely all the existing robotic allies (Codsworth and Curie, the robots in Greygarden, the robot from Covenant) that Bethesda didn't retrofit to be used in the robot workbench.
But the biggest irony so far is still related to the main plot. There's a really nicely done, engaging child character in Vault 81. In only about 10 minutes of screen time, you really establish a relationship with him that motivates you to not only go to his rescue (duh, murder hobo doesn't need much reason) but even make a small sacrifice to save his life. This in contrast to the uninteresting, poorly animated blobby rubber-doll thing that's supposed to be a baby, that you interact with once by clicking on it and once by clicking on a nearby object, and that's supposed to drive you to quest through nuclear-devestated wastelands.
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