I've got about 24 hours into the game, spent so much time messing with settlements I haven't even gotten to Diamond City yet. Only started getting crashes today. Game freezes sometimes when I open the Pip-Boy, becomes completely unresponsive. It is very annoying.

On a side note how suits of power armor have people collected? I'm at 4.

 

Full suits or just frames?

I have created my robot army in Covenant. Ten frames, standing in formation, waiting for the Synth menace to strike. We are ready.

 

I've got 4 frames, 3.5 suits: T-45, T-51, and raider with some spare T-45/51 parts

 

3 frames. One's a T-45, ones a T-51b, and the third is a t-60 BOS pattern. There's a piece or two missing from the 51, which I've patched up with RaiderII parts.

I also have a full set of RaiderI, and a near set of 51a in storage.

All three sets live on the roof of the garage, requiring a jump to get to them. Stops any followers climbing in again, and stops raiders making off with them.

Make sure to remove the fusion cores when leaving them around, too, because sometimes sneaky raiders WILL steal the whole thing. And you can't loot the frame back off their body.

 

Goddammit, I gotta stop coming here (And others elsewhere.) and reading about the game. I have enough money to buy the game but considering what I've learned about life I shouldn't because I'll be sucker-punched by something. If I can wait just a little under a month I can likely get it as a birthday gift but rationalizing it isn't doing much good.

 

What GPU do you have? I have been running into problems with a GTX 860m (lenovo y50), and a lot of the most recent drivers are just shit tier from NVIDIA.

Heads up to anyone with an 860m, don't update to the newest drivers even if it is the official fallout release driver - stick with 355.98. Last stable one.

 

Some thoughts so far:

- Settlement building might be fun when I get into it more, but just from doing that quest for the guy you rescue from Concord I've had some things not work well. Also I'm wary of that build limit bar. It's probably a stupid console limitation.

- I'm not impressed with the story setup, even as early as I am.

Spoiler

A father (or parent, I guess) searching for their son. Wow. And you know, I didn't think Bethesda could top FO3's story, but here we have such an original variation on that winning formula.

Also you'd think Mr. House would've been able to get his hands on this seemingly side-effect free cryogenic freezing tech instead of that techno-horror he was using.

- Not that FO3 really had that much range of responses in the first place, but the dialogue compass here isn't really giving me a whole lot of variation. Two steps back from NV.

- Weapon mods look good. Improved over NV even.

My graphics card is now noticeably out of date, so I'm playing on low settings. Still looks pretty decent though. I certainly don't miss the stupid color filter.

 

Aviary:

Spoiler

I expect House didn't want the cryogenics: He wanted to be awake and alert the whole time, which is why he was in some sort of life-support instead of "frozen and asleep"

 

Yo, anyone notice how fucking beastly ghouls are compared to previous titles? I went to the police station, and was put through hell. They're so agile now, as they run and dodge and leap at you. They crash into the ground when they miss, which is pretty cool, and they don't just claw at you, they practically throw themselves at you. They even crawl through windows, which has surprised me more than once. I saw one hiding underneath a truck! Sometimes, they lie down alongside other corpses, and you think they're dead, 'til they get up.

And thats not all.

I've had ghouls come at me with no arms, or no legs! You can blow them off, and they can survive. They'll crawl or stumble towards you when this happens, and fight anyway. With no arms, they headbutt and bite you, and with no legs, they slowly crawl and claw at you. It's a very viable strategy to blow off legs to get the, pun intended, "leg up" in a fight. It's some Monty Python shit, thats for sure.
Hasn't happened to me yet, but on the Fo4 reddit, I've seen that protectrons and assaultrons can live without limbs as well. Good stuff.

These ghouls are insane and I love it.

 

I'm not sure which I hate more; Deathclaws or Assaultrons. Probably should try to level up a bit more before saying screw it and just open world exploring the far ranges of the map.

Also, I was so relieved to not have Cazadores in this game, and then I found Stingwings. I need more shotgun ammo.

 

I've got a 660 ti. Was running 358.something and had to roll back to 347.62. Didn't stop the crashes completely, but not I can play for a few solid hours before it occurs. All settings are on low, windowed and borderless. Still looks pretty decent.


Also, fuck ghouls. Fuck them really hard. Motherfuckers evolving mid combat like a goddam pokemon. Cleared out the National Guard Training Yard. That was real fun. Specially 'The Glowing One'. Practise your kneecapping. Practise religiously.

 

Ran into my first super mutant suicide bomber today. Ended badly for me, that's for sure. The things suicide using fucking mini nukes!

Also, saw a glowing radroach, which was still just named "radroach". Same health as others and everything, but it was green and glowing. Not sure why, but pretty damn cool. Fought a super mutant with a minigun, by using a minigun. But not by shooting him. By demolishing
him with the "shredder" attachment on the minigun, which is brutal as hell. It's essentially enough knifes to make Jason Statham happy, wrapped around the barrel of the minigun to create a spinning, murderous bayonet of doom.

Good stuff.

 

I'm just going to leave this here:

https://i.imgur.com/LaoU2IU.gifv

 

Jon would have worked. I was watching Many A True Nerd's playthrough, he used Jon and Codsworth said it just fine.

 

And now for a completely different review that everyone else is posting:

I don't think I've ever been more disappointed. The fallout series has steadily been transformed from an open world rpg with a focus on dialogue and story, to an open world shooter. Fallout should not be reduced to Skyrim with guns (another game I have serious issues with), the crafting is intrusive to immersion and a gigantic time sink without any real gameplay offered.

Also, I can't be evil apparently. I was given the dialogue option to not give someone a piece of information, I selected that, and eventually had to give it to them. Why have that dialogue option there? Why have charisma in the game at all if it makes almost no difference? I played about 6 hours with a character that had 8 charisma, and got to the same point on a character that had 1 charisma and intelligence, and I don't think I saw more then a handful of different dialogue choices, maybe they were voiced differently, but that doesn't mean much when my choices are: "Sarcastic" "Yes" "Question" "Maybe".

On that note, fuck the dialogue system. Reducing it to one - two word answers and full voice over just impeded the modding community like crazy, and made it take about 5 times as long to guess what your character was going to say. Most people playing the game can probably read.

Combat sucks, my dog is apparently now invincible, power armor is available within 20 minutes of starting the game (this is particularly lolzy to me, I don't recall seeing a suit of daedric armor outside white run in Skyrim) and combat sucks despite making it much more combat focused.

To top it off, and probably the most minor of my complaints, is that I'm playing this on a 144 hz computer, with every bug imaginable, from lock picking apparently happening so fast that they break within seconds of using them, and the fov being nausea inducing.

Edit: I forgot to mention that yet again Bethesda has found a brand new way to make the pc ui worse. Kudos.

5/10.

 

Hm. I for one think the gunplay is far and away better than it's been in any fallout game - and thus the combat is far and away better than any bethesda game. And of course the dog is invincible. I've read reviews about invincible companions before. On survival mode, every single companion is going to be worthless halfway through almost every battle. Period. What's the fuckin fun in Dogmeat making it to your first mob and dying off? They're just there so wandering the Commonwealth isn't dreadfully solitary.

Power armor being available early is an aight complaint... until you turn up the difficulty. Of course the difficulty scaling could be argued as bad but.. meh.

Re. Dialogue. I absolutely agree. With bugs, I haven't run into anything remotely gamebreaking... or even irritating other than NVIDIA's shitty drivers. Just sucks if you have problems. Shit, your entire complaint sounds like you went to unlock the framerate and then ran into problems. Here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=551069501&tscn=1447077828

Complaining about the fun crafting shit just seems to be complaining to complain.

With UI... yeah. Bethesda sucks at that

 

Companions and dogmeat managed to survive just fine in previous iterations without being invincible. I'm not complaining for the sake of complaining though, I'm complaining because I played Fallout 1/2 and New Vegas quite a large amount and loved those games, and this is almost a sequel in name alone. Yes the combat gameplay is very similar, but that was almost the least important part of the game, and now it's arguably the most, for not very good reason either.