Saturday!
I mentioned last week that I experienced my first really unpleasant bug: While on the way to visit Diamond City, I encountered a Mutant Hound in front of the entrance (like, *RIGHT* in front of it) that could not take damage. I tried the sniper rifle, I tried the shotgun, I tried melee, I tried blowing up a car right next to it. The dog never took a lick of damage. (Perhaps of interest, perhaps not, the dog also moved oddly… instead of approximating actual movement down in the uncanny valley where these games reside, it was like the dog was ice skating to get from place to place).
Well, I had assumed that this would be a problem fixed by the upcoming patch and so figured I’d wander around in the northern part of the wasteland for a while. I searched for various settlements, did an errand here or there, found a couple of hidden bunkers that had been sending out distress signals on repeat for about a hundred years, and went up a handful of levels while waiting for Tuesday, patch release day.
Tuesday came and went and I realized that there was no patch. Not this week, anyway.
So I figured I’d go back to Diamond City and see if I couldn’t trap the hound, somehow. Maybe make him fall in the river or something. This time, however, he had been re-generated properly and could easily be sniped from afar!
All that to say, I’ve visited Diamond City, walked inside, and immediately experienced choice paralysis and ran back outside to wander around in the northern part of the wasteland.
(Oooh, and free advice: If you happen to stumble across an “overdue library book”, pick it up and carry it around with you. There is a point at which you will be pleased that you did so.)
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is “Untitled” by our very own Will Truman. Used with permission.)
I’ll be on an airplane to New York.Report
Pretty much every problem with people or things in bad positions can be fixed by going to another ‘zone’, saving, and reloading the game. The game generally doesn’t save the exact location of any character not in the same zone as you. It instead respawns them when you visit. This can happen without reloading, also, to clean up memory, but it always happens across a save file.
Note what I’m talking about is different than the *zone reset*, which is where all the door and terminals relock, the protectorons get back in place, the turrets are recreated, and all the enemies are back alive. That’s on a timer. This is something else, it’s the game saying ‘That enemy is way offscreen, I’m not going to keep track of where they are’ and then later saying ‘Okay, I need them back, they belong here, so that’s where I’ll create them.’ In your case, the mutant hound belonged around the side of the stadium with a few others, close enough that the security really should have already killed them! (I was at a low enough level when I tried to get past there I found it helpful to have them spot me, and then run back around to the Diamond City entrance and let security handle them.)
Incidentally, you should go talk to people in Diamond City, if only to get quests that you’re *going to do anyway* if you’re randomly clearing out places in the north of the map. And that woman that was outside trying to get in? She’s your first *plot* companion. And she is hilarious.
Also note that Diamond City isn’t the only friendly ‘city’ around there. Goodneighbor and Bunker Hill are both interesting places.
If you’re wandering around the north, you might have run across Bunker Hill already. It’s…at the actual location of Bunker Hill. Basically, look at where the Cambridge Police station is, and then look due east to that peninsula where the two rivers meet.
Goodneighbor is more annoying to get to, being right in the middle of the inexplicable mixture of Super Mutant and raider fortifications that is the east of Diamond City. You’ll end up there via the plot eventually, but there’s no harm in going there early.Report
Ooh, awesome and good to know. (I’m vaguely irritated that I could have merely gone back to Sanctuary and played Fallout: Sims for a day or so and then tried again…)Report
In previous Fallouts, I didn’t use chems (drugs are bad, m’kay?), and I was fully expecting to continue the trend with this game…until I came upon a particularly difficult encounter (on Survival difficulty). After several failed attempts that weren’t even close to successful, I basically took one of everything in my inventory, and it was surprisingly effective. I’m now a Jet (and more recently PsychoJet) convert.Report
I’ve been playing a lot of Thea: The Awakening, which I bought due to a recommendation from “Rock, Paper, Shotgun”. It’s an interesting hybrid – I don’t know if it will have more legs than the likes of Fallen Enchantress, but I’ve really been bitten my the “one more turn” bug in a way I haven’t in a while.
The macro level is instantly recognizable as a Civilization-like. Isometric terrain on a hex grid, stacks of units moving about, villages (well, village), goody huts, monster lairs that generate wandering stacks if left unchecked… The theme is fantasy/RPG rather than empire building, but the mechanics are right out of the same playbook that goes all the way back to Master of Magic.
The micro level, however, is more of a craft-and-survive challenge in the mold of Don’t Starve. Find the things to build the things to kill the things, and everyone survives the night – but there are more things coming when the sun goes down again.
What links them together is your village – your only village. Unlike Civ, it’s not a 4x (more of a 2.5x) – in particular you don’t expand. You don’t even build units. Your units are your village people – the individual civilians, with names and professions. So the only way you get more is the old-fashioned way. You want another crafter? Make do until your current one’s apprentice comes of age…
That conceit ties the two levels together with a sense of community. Your warriors aren’t an impersonal personification of manifest destiny, they’re a foraging party. They don’t get upgrades through industry on the home front, not unless they can locate the stuff to make them, and successfully take the stuff home. Even experience points are communal – all your deeds go in a bucket, and everyone levels up at once. At the same time, every combat has a sense of imminent dread – even one casualty isn’t necessarily replaceable, and not only did you lose an old friend, you now are less efficient at foraging, which affects your growth and therefore your security in the longer term…
Combat is interesting. All skill challenges, from convincing someone via fast-talk to hunting bandits by their trail to actual combat to the death, are handled by the same system (abstract, they’re even represented by cards in a mini-game). Your party is split randomly in half, half on the front line, half in support (you can reroll from the top, but only once). This is the only randomness. After that, there are no dice rolls. The cards are played, and the results are fully deterministic, which encourages on-the-fly number crunching. Since you want to avoid any damage at all (in armed combat – skill challenges are nonlethal), because wounds are persistent, so even a scratch taken in an otherwise dominant encounter can harm you down the line, especially if you don’t have someone with medical talent.
Throw in random encounters and RPG style quests. And distinctive art and music that backs up the Slavic mythological theme. And you have, well, after twelve hours or so I’m not sure exactly what you have. But it’s interesting so far, and full props to the designers for blending so many different elements. If the blend holds up to the endgame and beyond, this could be a winner.Report