Fallout 4

[Normann]

As usual here is my lefty rant:

Why the fuck is it so impossible for a multi-million dollar game to ship with "map any key to any action" controls for the PC?

"That key is reserved"

Fuck all of you UI/engine developers who worked on this game. I am also a dev, I know how much effort it would have taken to make this happen. It's probably as much time as it took for you to shoot Nerf darts at each other or whatever "fun" BS things you think Agile and Scrum do for your efficiency. (PS, that number is ZERO hours.)

Also the fact that I remapped "Action" away from "E", and yet when I go to loot a container and I still have to press "E"? FUCK YOU, LAZY DEVS.

I really do hope someone from Bethesda reads this because it is absolutely ridiculous that this is occurring today for what should be a AAA game.

love this post lol. Agree 100%. I just did not want to put it that way...

... Moving on...

Someone mentioned "soulless". So true. Skyrim was like that too and so was F3.

Yesterday I got to my first boss fight. Probably got there too early. Too low level I mean. The boss popped out of nowhere. The fight was reduced to the usual hit it as many times it takes to get the health bar down. Meanwhile I did not know how it got there, why I had to fight it, and what I will achieve by killing it (besides the obvious). So far the low point in the game for sure.

Yeah... Before witcher 3 and before the unexpectedly bombastic gta V characters this would have been the standard of role playing. Since those games are the new norm this is shallow entertainment. Right now I am 7/10 possibly 6/10 and chances are I will not finish it. Just too boring already.

[DOS=HIGH]

Someone tell me if I'm doing this right, or doing it the long way around. I'm upgrading a rifle I have. One of the parts needed for the upgrade is a screw. In my workshop storage are a few Institute Pistols. What I do is take it out of storage, into my own Inventory. I drop it on the ground, switch to Workshop mode and scrap the pistol, which gives me among other parts a screw. Then I go back to the weapons table and can now upgrade the rifle because I have the screw. Is this right?

You can scrap weapons directly from the weapon bench as long as they are in your inventory.

Well, that makes a bit more sense. Thanks

But you won't get screws without the Scrapper perk (Int 5). I'm starting too feel like this game is going to hit 200 hours on the first play through with this settlement thing.

[Jag]

Can I dump all my crafting crap at a bench safely? I read something about raiders being able to steal things (like Power Armor). I'm packrating like usual, but it would nice to have a safe stash.

[jztemple2]

Thankfully I saw that Scrapper perk so now I can get screwed properly

My Collectors Edition Fallout 4 guide just arrived: (click to enlarge)


Those seven SPECIAL posters are a bit of a waste, unless I can convince my wife to put them in proper frames . The map is double sided with one side of the whole game map and the other a close-up of Greater Boston. There's also a free Prima e-Guide.

[$iljanus]

I'm not that far into the game but even though I don't mind crafting I'm not sure how much fun I'll have setting up settlements and catering to their needs. It just seems like work.

[TiLT]

I'm not that far into the game but even though I don't mind crafting I'm not sure how much fun I'll have setting up settlements and catering to their needs. It just seems like work.

It isn't really. When I find a new settlement now, I just spend a few minutes to set it up, and then I move on. That includes building a generator and a radio tower, a few beds, a patch of plants for food and a water pump or two, as well as one or two turrets. Then if I have more than one settler at this point, I have one of them set up a supply route to the nearest settlement (I do this earlier in the process if the new place has a lack of materials), or alternatively head to the nearest settlement to establish a supply route from there instead. And that's it. If the place is rich in materials, I spend a little time scrapping stuff. Otherwise I'm off to do something else, and I won't have to bother with that settlement again for a long while.

[jztemple2]

Anybody been thinking about save game management? I've just been saving the game again and again, I'm just wondering if I need to go delete some old saves or not be bothered.

Oh, and I know how long ago it was when I got my last Fallout Game Prima Guide. Back then I didn't need reading glasses

[Blackhawk]

How do you scroll computer logs? I keep getting into terminals that have entries that are particularly long and stop in middle of a sentence, but can't figure out how to scroll/turn the page.

/edit - nevermind, it was the Use key.

[Grifman]

Someone tell me if I'm doing this right, or doing it the long way around. I'm upgrading a rifle I have. One of the parts needed for the upgrade is a screw. In my workshop storage are a few Institute Pistols. What I do is take it out of storage, into my own Inventory. I drop it on the ground, switch to Workshop mode and scrap the pistol, which gives me among other parts a screw. Then I go back to the weapons table and can now upgrade the rifle because I have the screw. Is this right?

No. Go to your weapon mod table and scrap the weapon there from storage. No need to drop it on the ground.

[IceBear]

Playing Missle Command on my phone via the Pipboy app. Odd...I don't recall finding that holotape in game yet

[raydude]

It comes free with the app. I played it before Fallout unlocked on Tuesday.

[Newcastle]

So I utterly suck...i just got to concorde and now i got to deal with.....

Spoiler:

a deathclaw popping out of the ground? tried it like 7 times now, and have died each and everytime. I just aint good at shooters of any sort. Any advice? Just got the musuem cleared, wasn't sent to fetch the power armor, and now i have to clear the streets...except that death claw is killing me...yeah i know i suck at these type of games.

[dbt1949]

Get your power armor and minigun first.

[Blackhawk]

Yeah, I can't see of any way to deal with the deathclaw at that level without it. Talk to the fellow with the hat, or check your quest log for something about a fusion core.

[Newcastle]

i picked up both of those...the minigun dont do much dmg, unless I'm doing it wrong. I get maybe 10 secconds on him and he comes and eats my face in.

[Blackhawk]

You picked up the fusion core? Are you wearing the power armor? It is on the top floor, right next to the vertibird. You just plug the core in, then 'use' the armor to put it on.

[Smoove_B]

Deathclaws are always a nightmare to deal with in every one of the Fallout games, so seeing one in what is essentially the starting area is hilarious. The power armor is the only way you're ever going to kill it, so don't even bother with another strategy. If you go into the museum and out on the balcony, can you attack it from there or does it move away? When I was dealing with it, there were also raiders so they weakened it a bit. Then invincible dog ran in for a good distraction.

In summary, it's nonsense.

[Newcastle]

You picked up the fusion core? Are you wearing the power armor? It is on the top floor, right next to the vertibird. You just plug the core in, then 'use' the armor to put it on.

I have both. I drop down from where you pick it up and wade into the battle, the deathclaw spawns and And i go in there firing, have tried firing on the belly, tried using molotov. Not sure what to do.

The raiders dont seem to be around any more either. Am only lvl three, and this thing is red with a little skull on it i think.

my restart the save a bit back. to let other raiders chew him up.

[Gato]

Here's a hint for the Deathclaw

Spoiler:

he's big, he cannot pass through a door frame

[Holman]

I hope it's OK to go negative, for I think I'm about to give up on Fallout 4.

I can see that it's a technical achievement even by Bethesda standards: huge map, lots to see, a whole new layer of crafting, etc. But I'm only at level 5, and it's already starting to feel like a huge grind. I'm swimming in loot to the point where I'm really not interested in searching bodies, but I can tell that much of the game will involve fetching ingredients.

More crucially, the game hasn't grabbed me with any of that sense of wide-open potential I felt when I first escaped the dungeon in Oblivion. Maybe it's just that I know what to expect, and I know what the engine will and won't be able to do.

I'm feeling a bit down about this. I kind of wish I'd saved my money, but mostly I fear that, for a certain kind of gaming experience at least, the thrill is just gone.

Maybe I just had a bad day.

[DOS=HIGH]

Here's a hint for the Deathclaw

Spoiler:

he's big, he cannot pass through a door frame

That's the strategy I used, it's pretty fool proof.

[Smoove_B]

Maybe I just had a bad day.

No, to echo what others have said (or implied) it's feeling a bit soulless. I think they severely overestimated how much a person playing would feel connected to or motivated to figure out what happened to your missing family member in the beginning. Clearly, they want me to care, but I don't. I'm more interested in finding bits and pieces to make a little corner of the Wasteland that I can call home. I've built up Sanctuary to a level I feel is nifty and now I'm almost wanting there to be an attack just to see what happens. I have defensive positions, walls and turrets. There are generators and farm areas as well as new settlers. That feels kind of cool to see happen and being able modify the environment in that way is surprisingly satisfying. How long that will last I have no idea, but if I can get 25+ hours of just map wandering out of this game (like I did Skyrim), I'll be happy.

My single motivation for any of these open world RPG games (Fallout, Skyrim, etc...) is Hey...what's that over there? as I walk around. If I see something interesting on the horizon or off in the distance, I'll keep playing - and to their credit, both Skyrim and the last two Fallout games delivered that experience in a huge way. This (so far) seems similar and as long as that works, I'll keep playing. I really enjoy seeing all the "set pieces" or things left in the world that clearly have back stories or were creatively placed. For example, while wandering around near an abandoned Air Force satellite station I found a downed Vertibird with a suit of power armor just standing near it. Curled against one leg was the skeleton of a solider. I find that stuff cool as hell to discover.

I mean, I have 7 hours in the game and a few quests completed. I've mostly been cleaning up my first settlement and putting things in order. Main quest? Meh - and I think that about sums it up for me so far.

[jztemple2]

I'm fifteeen hours in and I'm feeling a bit of the same way; the game is fun, but not FUN. I think part of it is that I've been spending time working on improving settlements and that's starting to feel like busy work. I'll just switch back to working quests for awhile.

This makes me look forward a bit more for some reviews of Assassin's Creed Syndicate on the PC. And of course Just Cause 3 is coming the beginning of December, the game family that eschews subtlety, crafting and serious story lines for some silly, yet FUN destructive gameplay.

[dbt1949]

Spoiler:

I'm afraid that now I know Dogmeat is immortal I don't pay much attention to him. He's a useful distraction while I take on my share of the badguys and I never have to heal him.

[El Guapo]

As usual here is my lefty rant:

Why the fuck is it so impossible for a multi-million dollar game to ship with "map any key to any action" controls for the PC?

"That key is reserved"

Fuck all of you UI/engine developers who worked on this game. I am also a dev, I know how much effort it would have taken to make this happen. It's probably as much time as it took for you to shoot Nerf darts at each other or whatever "fun" BS things you think Agile and Scrum do for your efficiency. (PS, that number is ZERO hours.)

Also the fact that I remapped "Action" away from "E", and yet when I go to loot a container and I still have to press "E"? FUCK YOU, LAZY DEVS.

I really do hope someone from Bethesda reads this because it is absolutely ridiculous that this is occurring today for what should be a AAA game.

love this post lol. Agree 100%. I just did not want to put it that way...

... Moving on...

Someone mentioned "soulless". So true. Skyrim was like that too and so was F3.

Isn't that kind of inherent to the nature of Bethesda-style "open world" games? I feel like the trade off of making a massive "anything could be around the corner" exploration / interactive type world is that it limits your ability to put detail and nuance into a story and a more limited set of environs in a way that you can when the game is more "on rails."

[Giles Habibula]

Thankfully I saw that Scrapper perk so now I can get screwed properly

My Collectors Edition Fallout 4 guide just arrived: (click to enlarge)


Those seven SPECIAL posters are a bit of a waste, unless I can convince my wife to put them in proper frames . The map is double sided with one side of the whole game map and the other a close-up of Greater Boston. There's also a free Prima e-Guide.

Thanks for posting that. I've got mine sitting here, but for once it arrived in pristine condition, and I don't want to open it.

[dbt1949]

So after leaving where ever it was that I got the power armor I'm walking thru the woods ,stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp, and I come to a city with a Corvega factory and the first thing off the bat I get nuked by a raider. Surprisingly I survive. All but two of the armor spaces are gone. I enter the factory and proceed to kill almost half a million raiders. Now I have no armor spaces left but I don't have a clue how to take the power armor off. So I find a safe spot,save,and quit. I find out how and go back to the game, look at myself from the 3rd person. I'm a guy walking around in the big metal framed exoskeleton with my blue jumpsuit showing everywhere. It looked pretty silly.
Oddly tho, it still seemed to deflect most the the hits I took.
I would say to avoid the Corvega factory but there's a bobblehead in there.

[TiLT]

You people who are complaining about the story, have you paid attention to the other Fallout games? Heck, can you think of a single game Bethesda has ever made that has a well written story? I can't. Not Elder Scrolls and not Fallout. I don't know why they are so bad at storytelling, but they just are. It's part of what one has to accept before playing their games. What they do well is make compelling worlds to explore.

I've played Fallout 4 for 22.5 hours according to Steam, and I've barely even touched the main quest.

Playing Missle Command on my phone via the Pipboy app. Odd...I don't recall finding that holotape in game yet

I found it in the game, but I don't remember where. It was pretty early. Could have been on the computer in the room where you meet those guys who tell you to get the power armor, actually.

[Doomboy]

You get a free game every time you pick up one of those Robco Fun magazines. Which is nice, except who has time to play games in a game about the post apocalypse? Especially when you have villages to build...

And just for Daehawk this time around in those settlement areas, you can hoover up all the piles of junk and tires and fallen over dead trees and collapsed houses and make everything nice and pristine. Although you can't make windows, apparently. Well, at least I haven't seen any prefab with windows. Admittedly I haven't explored those menus a lot.

I don't know why everyone is complaining about the story. The only game I can remember with a really great story was Planescape. Every other RPG is just a place to kill monsters and get shiny loot. Which has always been enough for me. I don't go into these games expecting something incredible. If I can feel good when I kill a big bad guy, that's enough.

[jztemple2]

I wasn't complaining that there wasn't a good story line when there should be one, I was just noting that without a good story line it's just not as fun as I hoped it would be. I do seem to remember that there was a bit more of a story to Fallout New Vegas, in that you were pushing through all these obstacles in order to get to New Vegas to meet Wayne Newton. Looking for a baby just isn't as compelling. For cripes sake, he'll probably just grow up and want to play incredibly involved RPGs on a console.

[Grifman]

Two questions:

1) How do you throw grenades/lay mines. Use to you could hotkey them but that doesn't seem to work (another step back).

2) Can you somehow recycle weapon mods? I haven't found a way to yet if there is one. I've got a bunch I either no longer use or got off other weapons but they're just there, not doing me any good.

[Doomboy]

If you select a grenade type, you use the melee combo button to throw it. You have to hold it in for a second, otherwise you do a melee bash at the air instead of throwing a grenade.

[TiLT]

I wasn't complaining that there wasn't a good story line when there should be one, I was just noting that without a good story line it's just not as fun as I hoped it would be. I do seem to remember that there was a bit more of a story to Fallout New Vegas, in that you were pushing through all these obstacles in order to get to New Vegas to meet Wayne Newton. Looking for a baby just isn't as compelling. For cripes sake, he'll probably just grow up and want to play incredibly involved RPGs on a console.

Fallout New Vegas isn't a Bethesda game, but an Obsidian game published by Bethesda. Obsidian knows (or knew, now that they've lost some of their primary talent) how to write a good story. Bethesda doesn't.

[Blackhawk]

I've said before that the ultimate game would be for Bethesda to create the world and then contract out the main storyline to someone else.

They make fantastic worlds where you can do all sorts of cool things. They just don't tell good stories.

Now, I have a prediction for the first big mod for FO4: Build Anywhere.

[neofit]

Don't be shy to use the weapons workbench!

At first I was reluctant to upgrade any of my newbie weapons (I am level 9 atm), since I was expecting them to be made obsolete within the hour in pure mmo style, but this didn't happen. I am trying to play on Hard too, for the legendaries (rather unsuccessfully so far, but that's another issue), so mobs are bullet sponges. What happened is that I nearly ran out of .45 ammo for my main rifle but had 600+ .38 rounds for the weak 10-13 dmg guns. And using this against feral ghouls is more about running away than shooting. So I used a point on Gun Nut and went nuts.

This pea shooter:


after a few clicks transformed into this ultimate ghoul killer:


Way more effective than the little extra damage would make you think. Seriously I was impressed by how things changed. I can now walk into a room with 3-4 ghouls and each goes down after a 1 sec burst, feral, reaver, you name it. Most humans too. I forgot the last time I used VAT.

[TiLT]

Don't be shy to use the weapons workbench!

Indeed. 22.5 hours in, I'm still using the same weapons I had 2 hours in... except they are no longer the same weapons. My short-barreled rifle has become a powerful marksman sniper rifle, my basic 10mm pistol has a seriously upgraded frame, improved and expanded clip, and so on. It appears that there's no randomness in weapons in this game. If you find a 10mm pistol that does more damage than another 10mm pistol in your inventory, it's because they have different components. Most importantly, these components are all available for you to craft on your own. The difference between crafting and not crafting in this game is only about which path you take to get that "perfect" weapon. If you craft, you can make it yourself eventually. If you don't, you rely on luck to find it. Either way, neither method seems able to produce anything the other can't. The exception is legendary weapons. They follow the same system but have an additional, unique effect, such as "+15% damage resistance against robots". Those you can't craft, though you can always modify legendary weapons to make them even better.

I tend to be pretty cynical about game design in modern AAA games, so it's pretty nice to realize that not only do I really like some of the decisions Bethesda made with this game, but I even admire these decisions. A couple of things that stand out:

• Moving away from numbers in character creation and instead focusing on what your character can do. This is something I've thought a lot about over the last few years, so it was surprising to see Bethesda move in the same direction as I was thinking. It's much more interesting to create a character who can do this and that, instead of a character who has X and Y rank in various skills. Define a character by his specific talents, not by vague game mechanics. I hope other developers catch on to the design decisions that led to this. In particular, I hope Japanese game developers catch on, because they are stuck decades in the past with their fetish for numbers upon numbers upon meaningless numbers in RPGs.
• They finally solved the power armor problem. Bethesda has been struggling with this since they took over the Fallout franchise. On the one hand, power armor is supposed to be the end-game armor that feels truly special, but on the other hand you want it to be balanced so that not every character automatically uses it all the time. They failed miserably at this in Fallout 3, resulting in power armor that was absolutely useless and which everybody skipped in order to get combat armor instead. Fallout New Vegas tried halfheartedly to improve the situation, but even there it didn't feel like they knew what they were supposed to do with this glaring balance issue. Fallout 4 gets it right. It breaks a bit of previous lore in that the fuel requirements are so high, but by treating power armor as something completely different from ordinary armor, something that feels more like a vehicle, they've made it both incredibly powerful compared to everything else, as well as balanced. Yesterday I scoped out a heavily fortified radar dish with loads of super mutants. Realizing that I was in over my head, I went back to base and picked up my power armor, then went back in the middle of a radiation storm and engaged the super mutants directly in a huge battle that left me expending half my ammo and tore pieces of my armor to shreds. It was awesome, and it was completely unlike anything Fallout has ever been able to do before.
• The crafting system is brilliant. Crafting is usually something that feels thrown together at the last minute, and which is either overpowered or inferior compared to loot you find. Not so in Fallout 4, where everything seems to be designed with crafting in mind. You can easily skip it, but the reward for diving into it is a feeling of attachment to all your equipment. You're not just crafting something that you'll replace in an hour or two with found loot. You're crafting something that you'll use for a long, long time, something that improves along with you. Even better, the options available to you mean that you can tweak your equipment to perfectly fit your playstyle. Want a lightweight, silenced sniper rifle that can pick off enemies in a single shot from a long distance using night vision? No problem. Want a heavy automatic rifle that spits out minigun ammo to rip enemies apart in close combat while aiming from the hip? No problem. Even better, both those options are built from the exact same rifle, only with different modifications.
• Stores are very restricted in Fallout 4. You might not even find a single store to purchase anything from in your first 10-15 hours of the game, depending on where you go. When you do find one, it usually doesn't sell quite enough of what you need. You might want to buy 50 shotgun shells, but it can only sell you 15. You might want to buy junk that you can scrap to get nuclear material or adhesives that you desperately need for your crafting, but there's only so much that store owner can do for you. This places a lot of emphasis on scavenging, which fits Fallout very well. Coming across a cache of electronic junk, a roll of duct tape, a fusion reactor, or a crate of ammo feels significant in this game in a way that it never did in Fallout 3 or New Vegas.
• Ammo is rare. If you rely on a single weapon, you're going to run out very quickly. I find myself swapping between 4 separate weapons to keep from running out of the right type of ammo, which I never did in earlier games. In New Vegas I just used my sniper rifle all the time. Here I keep swapping between my pistol, my sniper rifle, my laser rifle and my shotgun based on the situation I'm in. After some hard battle my ammo reserves run dangerously low, but then I almost always seem to stumble upon a cache of ammo just a little bit later. It all feels so incredibly well balanced to give you just enough to let you do what you need, but to wait until just when the impact of giving it to you is big enough.

[Reemul]

Don't be shy to use the weapons workbench!

Indeed. 22.5 hours in, I'm still using the same weapons I had 2 hours in... except they are no longer the same weapons. My short-barreled rifle has become a powerful marksman sniper rifle, my basic 10mm pistol has a seriously upgraded frame, improved and expanded clip, and so on. It appears that there's no randomness in weapons in this game. If you find a 10mm pistol that does more damage than another 10mm pistol in your inventory, it's because they have different components. Most importantly, these components are all available for you to craft on your own. The difference between crafting and not crafting in this game is only about which path you take to get that "perfect" weapon. If you craft, you can make it yourself eventually. If you don't, you rely on luck to find it. Either way, neither method seems able to produce anything the other can't. The exception is legendary weapons. They follow the same system but have an additional, unique effect, such as "+15% damage resistance against robots". Those you can't craft, though you can always modify legendary weapons to make them even better.

I tend to be pretty cynical about game design in modern AAA games, so it's pretty nice to realize that not only do I really like some of the decisions Bethesda made with this game, but I even admire these decisions. A couple of things that stand out:

• Moving away from numbers in character creation and instead focusing on what your character can do. This is something I've thought a lot about over the last few years, so it was surprising to see Bethesda move in the same direction as I was thinking. It's much more interesting to create a character who can do this and that, instead of a character who has X and Y rank in various skills. Define a character by his specific talents, not by vague game mechanics. I hope other developers catch on to the design decisions that led to this. In particular, I hope Japanese game developers catch on, because they are stuck decades in the past with their fetish for numbers upon numbers upon meaningless numbers in RPGs.
• They finally solved the power armor problem. Bethesda has been struggling with this since they took over the Fallout franchise. On the one hand, power armor is supposed to be the end-game armor that feels truly special, but on the other hand you want it to be balanced so that not every character automatically uses it all the time. They failed miserably at this in Fallout 3, resulting in power armor that was absolutely useless and which everybody skipped in order to get combat armor instead. Fallout New Vegas tried halfheartedly to improve the situation, but even there it didn't feel like they knew what they were supposed to do with this glaring balance issue. Fallout 4 gets it right. It breaks a bit of previous lore in that the fuel requirements are so high, but by treating power armor as something completely different from ordinary armor, something that feels more like a vehicle, they've made it both incredibly powerful compared to everything else, as well as balanced. Yesterday I scoped out a heavily fortified radar dish with loads of super mutants. Realizing that I was in over my head, I went back to base and picked up my power armor, then went back in the middle of a radiation storm and engaged the super mutants directly in a huge battle that left me expending half my ammo and tore pieces of my armor to shreds. It was awesome, and it was completely unlike anything Fallout has ever been able to do before.
• The crafting system is brilliant. Crafting is usually something that feels thrown together at the last minute, and which is either overpowered or inferior compared to loot you find. Not so in Fallout 4, where everything seems to be designed with crafting in mind. You can easily skip it, but the reward for diving into it is a feeling of attachment to all your equipment. You're not just crafting something that you'll replace in an hour or two with found loot. You're crafting something that you'll use for a long, long time, something that improves along with you. Even better, the options available to you mean that you can tweak your equipment to perfectly fit your playstyle. Want a lightweight, silenced sniper rifle that can pick off enemies in a single shot from a long distance using night vision? No problem. Want a heavy automatic rifle that spits out minigun ammo to rip enemies apart in close combat while aiming from the hip? No problem. Even better, both those options are built from the exact same rifle, only with different modifications.
• Stores are very restricted in Fallout 4. You might not even find a single store to purchase anything from in your first 10-15 hours of the game, depending on where you go. When you do find one, it usually doesn't sell quite enough of what you need. You might want to buy 50 shotgun shells, but it can only sell you 15. You might want to buy junk that you can scrap to get nuclear material or adhesives that you desperately need for your crafting, but there's only so much that store owner can do for you. This places a lot of emphasis on scavenging, which fits Fallout very well. Coming across a cache of electronic junk, a roll of duct tape, a fusion reactor, or a crate of ammo feels significant in this game in a way that it never did in Fallout 3 or New Vegas.
• Ammo is rare. If you rely on a single weapon, you're going to run out very quickly. I find myself swapping between 4 separate weapons to keep from running out of the right type of ammo, which I never did in earlier games. In New Vegas I just used my sniper rifle all the time. Here I keep swapping between my pistol, my sniper rifle, my laser rifle and my shotgun based on the situation I'm in. After some hard battle my ammo reserves run dangerously low, but then I almost always seem to stumble upon a cache of ammo just a little bit later. It all feels so incredibly well balanced to give you just enough to let you do what you need, but to wait until just when the impact of giving it to you is big enough.

All excellent points.

I am really enjoying it.

Only issue I have is I cant seem to find cable to in the workshop to power my town.

[TiLT]

Only issue I have is I cant seem to find cable to in the workshop to power my town.

You mean power lines? They aren't their own item in the menus, but are added by looking at an object that either produces or requires power while in crafting mode and pressing Space (or your controller equivalent. It should be listed on the screen). Then look at the object you wish to attach to, and press Space again. If the power line turns red while doing this, something is causing a problem. Most likely the distance is too great. Move the objects closer, attach the line, then move them away from each other again.

[Reemul]

Only issue I have is I cant seem to find cable to in the workshop to power my town.

You mean power lines? They aren't their own item in the menus, but are added by looking at an object that either produces or requires power while in crafting mode and pressing Space (or your controller equivalent. It should be listed on the screen). Then look at the object you wish to attach to, and press Space again. If the power line turns red while doing this, something is causing a problem. Most likely the distance is too great. Move the objects closer, attach the line, then move them away from each other again.

Ah right, yeah I was looking for them as an item thanks for that

[Smoove_B]

I don't have nearly as many hours as TiLT, but I think I can agree with the bigger points as described. I'd also agree that the Bethsoft games are typically lackluster with their story elements - particularly the main story. This doesn't change that in any way, but to me (so far) it feels worse than usual (at least in comparing Skyrim and Fallout 3). For Skyrim I was motivated to play the quests that rounded out my character (based on skills or profession), but still couldn't care less about the main story. Right now in Fallout 4, I don't care about anything.

But yeah, crafting and gun tweaking. As I said earlier, I'm not really a gamer that is in to either but so far it seemingly works. Bullets definitely seem to be more scarce, which is hilarious given that I am trying to make a gunslinger type character for once. I think it was New Vegas where I was a hand-to-hand maniac and I was overloaded with ammo - hundreds and hundreds of rounds. I guess as long as there's no level cap, I can just just wander around and skill up. I do think that with the crafting system it forced them to re-think about how loot works in the game. While there is still a ton of junk, finding a cache of good stuff seems rarer (again, from my ~7 hours of time and limited exploration).