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Fallout 4


Odine
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Welp, having put in almost 60 hours, I'd say mods definitely saved this game for me.

The START ME UP mod isn't perfect, they couldn't excise every line referring to the PC being the sole survivor, but those instances are pretty far and few between enough that you can ignore them. Basically, you select a character class RPG style, do your stats, it gives you a bit of gear, and a simple prompt as to what you are doing in the Commonwealth (exploring, raiding, scavenging, etc). In my case, I was a scout, new to the area.

You spawn in at a pre-chosen location, and the only mission you have is investigating the rumors of Vault 111. You get in there, and basically find "Nora's" body and a holotape. Play the tape, and you get the ripped audio from the kidnapping scene. So basically, now you've just come across a kidnapping crime and have no personal ties to it.

From there, you are given the mission to report the kidnapping to somebody (which sends you to Diamond City). You also get Preston's distress call. That gets you into the Sanctuary/Minutemen stuff. Go to Diamond City and you meet Piper as per usual, you get the idea you need to report the kidnapping to Nick, but of course he needs rescuing.

So basically, you get jumped into everything from these points. Aside from the Minuteman missions, which are mostly radial, everything from here on out is motivated by who you end up talking to or what you explore on your way to radial missions. At this stage I'm hitting a lot of the bigger quests, but have elected to ignore all the other faction intro missions. 

The Railroad-- just don't follow the path. Brotherhood-- either never go find Danse, or bail after you help him with the Feral horde. Institute-- without forcing me to find my missing kid, the Institute continues just to be creepy aggro synth attacks.

The main questline is there, but I haven't felt compelled to follow it. Rescued Nick, and we're at the point where finding the missing kid requires hunting down Kellog. Again-- there's was no pressure to do this removed from being the sole survivor. In my head canon, I reported the kidnapping, my job is done. Maybe when I run out of things to do I'll pick it up.

So what AM I doing? Thanks to mods-- a lot of stuff.

I loaded a mod that adds a few unique weapons and workshop items but you have newly made quests to get to them. Another adds random locations to the vanilla map that can be explored with little ministories hidden in them. There's a couple modder-made DLC sized quests.

One of them is a combo mod/dlc that is so epic, I don't know how it was simply made by fans. The creator HAS to be angling for a job with Bathesda because his additions give the game new life. It's called Sim Settlements and it basically adds motivation to the settlement building portion of the game. It revamps everything to make settlements full on sim-towns. You have to build to make a balance between power, water, food, and defense points, but also, making sure everyone has a job (through which they get stat bumps), and said jobs provide new stats for the community-- like building parts so everyone can upgrade their homes or jobs, entertainment and commerce stats...

What's cool is that you basically just lay down a plot (residential, commercial, industrial, municipal, entertainment, or security). A settler will claim a home and take a job and the stats start growing from there. You need a home for everyone, farms for food for everyone, industrial plots for them to work to make building materials to upgrade said plots, and eventually, add in stores and bars to make money, a caravaner network, and security stations. The buildings/plots are built by the settlers based upon endless plans made by the modders. So you can throw down the plots and come back later to find a unique town growing. You can manage every aspect, let it be automated, or pick a midpoint between the two. You still have the base workshop system, so if you're like me and you enjoy building stuff, you can combine this with interior plots from the sim system, along with building what YOU need as a PC (a bed, some storage, and crafting stations) and basically design every settlement to be a unique little enclave.

On top of all THAT, all of this is taught to you and comes piecemeal via a series of very-well designed and voice-acted story missions. These missions are deep and frequent enough they have basically become my main questline. It makes a lore-friendly narrative for why you'd be into building settlements to start with: It's your job to make the Commonwealth civilized again. You get deep enough into it, and towns like Concord get fixed up and have settlers move in. It goes hand in hand with the Minutemen stuff-- and while I don't think the MM are all that interesting, their basic "help everyone" mission as the faction you are most guided to makes sense. (Unless you like to play as a jerk)

I've also installed a lot of mods to help with crafting, visual and gameplay overhauls, some lore and glitch fixes Bathesda never addressed, etc. I have one that makes Preston stop giving you random "save this settlement" missions every time you see him. 

So I'd say, YAY to modding.

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It's kind of like being able to correct shit that bothers you about your favourite films. But in gaming.

And for sure some mods are made by professional or aspiring professional developers who love X game, and want to add their own content. Some mods are finished to such a high standard they surpass the quality of the original game lol 

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Sim Settlements is at that level-- it's mind blowing. There's guys out there recreating New Vegas and F3 in the F4 engine. It's nuts!

...and of course don't even get me started on the entire community based around maiking the game x-rated.

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I'm glad that they at least made a hi-res texture pack for Fallout 4. I had to mod the shit out of the original Skyrim, which was beautiful, to get realistic water, clean skin better textures and realistic foliage. Those mods are long gone and the last time I tried to use them, the game was unplayable.

 I don't know if I have the patience to go through putting all of those mods into the latest edition of Skyrim, or Fallout 4. You'd think that they'd at least have a hi-res texture pack for Skyrim by now. 

Speaking of Mods, I've been playing a Star Wars Mod for the game "Sins of a Solar Empire". It's really cool, but I have to shut it down after an hour of play. It does something that causes the game to slowly, slow down, even with an i9 CPU and 32GB of RAM.

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The three things that changed The look of my F4 was an all new water texture pack and rendering scheme, a mod that replaced all the foliage with higher textured and better varied plant life, and a control panel for adjusting the lighting effects and color correction. That last mod has literally hundreds of user made presets for different looks.

A varied weather system has added a lot of atmosphere too.

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9 hours ago, Odine said:

There are soooo many high Res texture packs for Skyrim, that literally cover everything in the game. And more besides. Just nothing official from Bethesda. 

 

 

Yeah, I know, but when you return a couple of years later and the author has pulled their Mod from the Steam servers, it becomes an unplayable mess. I started using a mod for the Legendary Edition of Skyrim and it pretty much took out my ability to earn Steam achievements for the game, even after I'd remove it.

 

Believe me, I had somewhere around 100 Mods for the original Skyrim and it was amazing. It's when the Mods started disappearing from the Steam servers, that the game became a buggy unplayable mess.

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7 hours ago, Odine said:

I've only ever used nexusmods so haven't had disappearing mod issues. Sounds annoying

There can be an issue with modders not updating their contributions! This just came up recently with the update to Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, there was a mod so you could change the character's appearance like hair, height, face, skin color, etc. The latest update broke it and it finally took another modder to come in and fix it for everyone.

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