Saturday!
I’m noticing two dynamics going on when I play Fallout 4 again on Survival Mode. The first is the whole “holy crap, I can’t believe how few stat points you get!” thing that I had forgotten from my first play through. Seriously, you have enough points to get a 4 in every stat and that’s it. You want a 5 in something? Then something else will need a 3 in it. The other involves how I went up more than 80 levels and also collected all of the Bobbleheads so I had about 90 points to distribute to my character and even though I was not playing Survival, having 8s in all of your stats (9s and 10s in some) and skills that bolster your abilities (allowing you to end combat with 2, maybe 3, shots) really changes the experience. And since you earned each of those points by inches, the getting better was so incremental that it felt smooth… having them all ripped away at once? Brutal.
So now I’m back to being a level 10 schlubby guy who doesn’t really have points worth mentioning in anything and pretty much everything out there more dangerous than a bloatfly is a risk for a one-hit kill. So I’m learning how to be a sniper, again. I’m learning how to sneak, again. And I’m learning how much I relied on save-scumming (and the barely noticable save-scumming that the normal game just automatically does for you as you move from one area to another).
Oh my gosh! I can’t believe how much water my guy goes through! How much can one person eat! Jeez, radiation is a serious pain in the butt! Do you seriously need to sleep *EVERY* 16 hours, guy? What the heck! And just walking to the Corvega Plant to remove raiders has killed me 6 times so far.
The game has seriously changed back into the wonderful challenging/frustrating experience that I remembered loving back when I was a kid. Fallout 4 wasn’t even close to being as good as Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas. Fallout 4 Survival Mode? It just might be.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is “Untitled” by our very own Will Truman. Used with permission.)
One of the biggest pains for me with the new survival is trying to manage moving non-junk (and thus not impacted by supply lines) items between settlements. I recently read a tip about using settlers as packrats and assigning them to new settlements and letting them haul the stuff around. It’s even more useful if you have the Automatron DLC.
I haven’t done Corvega yet. I’ve been avoiding it and hitting surrounding areas until I get the nerve. I find that the sleep requirement fits in well with Night Person, at least for high int builds.
I’ve shelved FO4 for the moment, though. In part because I’m waiting for Far Harbor, but mainly because Stellaris is now out.Report
One of the biggest pains for me with the new survival is trying to manage moving non-junk (and thus not impacted by supply lines) items between settlements. I recently read a tip about using settlers as packrats and assigning them to new settlements and letting them haul the stuff around.
That’s why, about eight levels into Survival, I went and found two mods.
One lets you build and put ‘markers’ in containers, and it prompts you for a settlement when you place them, and within 24 hours entire contents of that container are collected and sent to that settlement’s inventory. The in-game justification is that markers are some sort of radioactive radio signal that tells nearby settlers to come and get the stuff. (And then, I guess, pass it via supply lines?) And they only work if you’ve cleared the area, which makes sense…but frankly, 90% of the time, I’m using them to sent stuff between existing settlements anyway! And, nicely, the markers don’t get used up…they end up at whatever settlement you sent everything else to.
The other is fast travel between settlements. There are a few mods for that, some that just allow it, but I picked one that has you build a motorcycle/other vehicle at each location. (And once you get access to the Institute, you can build teleporters, but I don’t really see the point.) You can install a ‘balanced’ mod that requires oil for each trip, or one that doesn’t. (It is an insane amount of oil, frankly.)
In my mind, there’s survival mode, and then there’s tedious ‘Look, I know how to get to damn Diamond City from Red Rocket without passing near any enemies at all(1), I am in no danger at all…but it takes *forever*.’ mode.
1) Pssst, for those playing survival mode….I think I said it before, but I’ll say it again: One of the first perks you should take is ‘swim without radiation damage’. The river is *incredibly safe* to swim up and down compared to the land, as almost no serious enemies will even enter the river. You can easily get to Diamond City (Exit the river at the back door to Hangman’s Alley, dodge through the stadium to avoid the supermutants.) and Bunker Hill and Goodneighbor (Exit at the Cabot House bridge. Easy north to Bunker Hill. The south path to Goodneighbor is trickier, but there is a route from the Cabot House area without any enemies at all.)Report
swim without radiation damage
I… my goodness. This never even occurred to me.Report
It’s interesting how many weird tricks there are to avoid dangerous areas. Like I said last week, I was having all sorts of trouble going from the river to Goodneighbor, but then I suddenly found a Cabot area cut through without any enemies. Likewise, you can go from the upper level hangmans alley exit to DC without any enemies if you dodge through the broken stadium windows.Report
Early impression: Stellaris is the game that the producers of Master of Orion 3 wanted to make.
I’m still not sure what that means in the larger scheme of things. Guess I’ll have to play it some more to refine my opinion…Report
That’s a bold statement.Report
I think the comparison will largely hold up. I was struck by how many of the systems in Stellaris, some of which extend genre conventions(*) – balancing warp, wormhole, and hyperspace transit technology, empire-wide ethics leading to factionalism, population migration on an individual level, requiring “intelligent” governors with their own individual agenda in order to grow past a certain size – are more-or-less successful realizations of features that MOO3 either failed catastrophically at or were so opaque to the player that they might as well not have existed.
Space combat also reminds me of MOO3, though, and that’s not a good sign.
(*) I’ve never played Endless Space (knock on wood), but I know someone who has, which makes me wonder if it could stretch the boundaries, rather than being a tight presentation of the main stream of the genre. I’ve played Endless Legend, though, and I’m informed that Space was less revolutionary.Report
I’m pleased to hear this. I’ve been holding off buying it until I’d heard more about it.Report
I’m definitely enjoying it, but it seems unfinished. It’s not exactly a beta, but I think they could have done with another tightening/balancing patch. It’s feature-complete, which is always a positive, but some of those features it’s not clear how to make best use of, and others are functional but with issues (e.g. the interaction of combat weapon range and the AI combat doctrine selection – it’s not trivial to get your fleet to fight properly for their weapon mix, and in some cases – fighters – might not be possible until a patch). It’s definitely not perfection out of the box.
After all, it’s a Paradox game – they have a long history of extensive patch support and of releasing games that could really use extensive patch support.
Maybe I would have been more correct to say that Stellaris will be that game that MOO3 should have been.Report
@el-muneco
I feel similarly. Some aspects of it a bit rough (the sector management system needs some work), but I’m really impressed with it so far. I like how much of it is procedurally generated, which should make for good replay value.Report
Playing XCOM 2 with the latest DLC, “Alien Hunters,” and I’m not even kidding when I say something story-wise just happened that had me hooting and clapping my hands (I will offer no spoilers).
Well done, writers. Well. Done.Report
And just walking to the Corvega Plant to remove raiders has killed me 6 times so far.
Sleep on the overpass in front of it. In fact, if you’re playing a sniper, *kill* the people from the overpass.Report
Well, one of the ways I got there (or left from there) involved a guy with a fat boy.
I figured out how to not be killed by the fat boy (e.g., kill him first) and, tah-dah, I found that the area was a lot less inhospitable. I’m now considering going to Diamond City.Report
Been playing shadow of mordor until
1) Doom comes out
2) Witcher 3 Blood and Wine comes out.Report
I think I may start a playthrough on the “Death March” difficulty when Blood and Wine comes out. I previously completed the game on the 2nd hardest setting.Report
Yeah, I’m not up for spending hours being frustrated. I prefer normal, or sometimes, hard. I spend more time running around doing all the side quests/options/achievements.Report