Fallout 4

[Richard Blonoff]

So right now the two games being rotated in my console are Fallout and Star Wars Battlefront. I'd like for us to talk about Fallout a little.

Personally the game has met all the hype thus far. Of course, it is a Bethesda game, so it has its bugs. I've heard of at least one game breaking bug later in the game, but thus far I have yet to encounter anything serious, just minor things like my dog getting stuck in a door as it closes or floating dead enemies.

The game had a lot of hype, and as I stated, it has thus far met all of that hype. The story is a bit cliche thus far, but most of the Fallout games have pretty lame and contrived plots. I'm not super far into the game, so maybe I will find something that changes my mind.

I do enjoy the new dialogue system, though at times it feels like your options are limited due to only have four choices at once. The combat is still great, and I'd even sat that V.A.T.S. has been improved.

Share your stories and thoughts on Bethesda's latest masterpiece.

 

[enviousdominous]

I was putting off getting a PS4 until this came out, then I had to test for promotion and I knew that this game would destroy any chance I had at making it. Last week I was finally able to get the system and the game, I won't know my exam result until May but I know I did well.

I'm absolutely amazed at how much work Bethesda put into this game, there's days of spoken dialogue recorded for this game. You go to any random place on the map, and most of the time there's a story hidden in there. I went to a school, and uncovered a plot where the principle was selling mentats to the students to boost the test scores and ended up having to murder the student he had hired to push the goods. I tuned into a radio station broadcasting a recording of a woman shrieking for help from a hidden safe in a mall's jewelry store, found her skeleton in the hidden room and a ton of ammo and chems in separate wall safes in that room. Tip of the iceberg.

I'm still surveying the entire map as I'm wont to do, and I've only gone about two missions deep into the main story. I have that X-01 power armor that seems to be the best, and upgraded every component so it has a jetpack, boots that explode when I land from high up and fists that do energy damage. I've also horded over a hundred fusion cores, so I could probably go the rest of the game one hit killing almost any baddie that wanders into my path.

There's a few glitches and stupid things that have caught my eye. If you get Grognak's Axe and do a critical on an opponent who dies by some other means before your hit registers, you'll just stand there immobile for about ten seconds while anything around you can still act freely. I fast traveled to a location and within a tenth of a second of the game loading I was hit and killed by a behemoth. I spent a ton of resources to fully upgrade the gamma gun, and it only does slivers of damage to most enemies even if they don't have any rad resistance which is dumb because it also launches your enemy into the air which you would think would hurt them more.

I'm glad that they finally found a purpose for the random crap that you can pick up. I find myself getting excited when I see anything that contains aluminum or adhesive. Whichever companion I choose to run with (usually Curie) I always use them as a pack-mule so I can pick locations completely clean of every type of junk that can be picked up.

Your companions are apparently impossible to lose or kill, which is good but can get very silly. The mutant suiciders in the game come running up, and if I'm out of VATS points I just high-tail it. They catch up to my companion who's brilliantly just firing away, and *KABOOM*. I run back up and see that they're just sitting on the ground, or sometimes they don't even go down from that.

The story so far is neat, but I've been getting high on digging deep into every structure I can enter to see what little stories were left buried in the computers and datapacks.

If you get deep into the cooking, you can make some insanely powerful foods. The Yao Guai roast is essential if you use melee weapons, and the refreshing beverage is an amazing emergency heal for if you're being rushed.

There is no level cap in this game, which is fucking awesome. In Fallout 3 you had to pick from several perks that you could only get at level 20, where in this game you can pick whatever perk is available so long as you meet the level and stat requirement. I think I'm at level 48 now, I've got every possible crafting perk and I'm mostly focusing on stat upgrades.

 

[enviousdominous]

I am on a personal journey, to complete Fallout 4 on Survival.

I'll be sharing tips and tricks as I trudge through this horrifying difficulty, and I'll make sure to have those tips and tricks summarized in spoiler boxes. There likely won't be any actual spoilers, just very lengthy explanations that would otherwise drown out the rest of the post.

First off, why should one torture themselves with this difficulty:

Spoiler

You will experience this game more vividly than you could have ever imagined. You will see exactly why certain areas are designed with certain details that would seem pointless on the lesser difficulties. The game will be an intrepid journey, as opposed to a quick travel cake-walk. As you can no longer quick travel; you will encounter random events that you hadn't seen on a lower difficulty, you might even discover new epic quests that were just sitting there. Trust me, it's worth the agony. You will likely take greater care to notice random pup-tents and hovels around the wasteland, if they have a mattress or sleeping bag, you'll want to take an hour nap and save. Playing on the lower difficulties makes one take for granted the notion of quick saving, on survival you can only save your progress when you sleep. Don't ever pass up an opportunity to save your game. Survival has a perk called "adrenaline" that allows you to do more damage after you rack up enough kills, and that perk goes away if you sleep. Trust me when I say that saving your game is much smarter than trying to get a max adrenaline perk, at least in the early going.

Water:

Spoiler

You will get thirsty A LOT in this difficulty. When you make it to Sanctuary Hills, scrap up some concrete blocks and anything with gears in them so you can build a water pump. A big thing that many people seem to over look, is that you can fill any empty glass bottle at the pump to make purified water. For this reason, you will want to pick up all empty bottles you find. Breweries are treasure troves of empty bottles. If you let your thirst get out of hand, you'll have diminished AP and you'll get sick faster. Stimpacks make you thirsty now, so you might either take a bunch of waters with the stims or take a bunch of cooked food to use for healing.

Food:

Spoiler

KILL EVERY ANIMAL YOU SEE! It's only a game, alright. You won't get sued by PETA for picking off some binary coded wildlife. At Sunshine Tidings Co-op there's a Wasteland Survival Guide that gives you double meat for your kills. Before you go anywhere, you need to have a good supple of food as you'll get hungry almost as often as you'll get thirsty. Cook the meat at a settlement cooking station, most already have cooking stations built for you.

Rads:

Spoiler

When you start building at Sanctuary Hills, make it a priority to build a decontamination arch. On survival, rad-aways make you more prone to sickness and there's no way to undo that negative status effect. Rad-Xs will make you really thirsty also, so see if you can make some vegetable soup instead and take that with you. Vegetable soup will heal you and give you comparable rad resistance. As soon as you can, take the aqua boy/aqua girl perk. You'll be able to breath underwater, which makes the Thicket Excavation area a thousand times less difficult, and you'll be able to avoid taking any radiation effects from water. You still get rads for drinking dirty water, but now you'll have an instant escape route if things get heavy and you're around a river or lake.

Sickness:

Spoiler

HOLY SHIT YOU GET SICK A LOT! You'll go to sleep in a clean bed with a frame, and get sick just as much as if you have your body burrowed into by a hundred bloat-fly larva. You can find herbal supplements that "help" you prevent sickness, but you'll still get sick because this difficulty really hates you. Antibiotics are the cure-all for everything, except the increased likelihood for sickness that's caused when you take a rad-away. Antibiotics are also insanely expensive and can only be made if you build up your intelligence and take the chemist perk, oddly enough they can cure insomnia and fatigue. Like most things in this game, antibiotics will make you very thirsty

Guns and ammo:

Spoiler

ARE FUCKING HEAVY! You will probably notice really quickly how your carrying capacity on this difficulty is ridiculously low compared to very hard difficulty. Missiles weigh seven pounds now, so you'll probably only be able to travel with ten of them (if that). You can find a fatman in the Robotics Disposal Ground just to the northeast of Sanctuary Hills, go get that shit. The fatman and its ammo might be heavy as all hell, but it's literally the only way I've been able to find to defeat a mirelurk queen. Mirelurk queens can kill you within seconds of seeing you, so you need to hit it with as much damage as quickly as possible if you know you'll have to fight one.

I highly recommend taking a few gun nut perks, as you'll only need two to get some great upgrades into the 10mm pistol. The 10mm pistol is one of the most useful guns in the game, the amount of shots you get for your AP will more than make up for the lack of damage.

Shotguns are absolutely worthless on this difficulty, don't use them for anything except scrapping for parts. They take too much AP to use in VATS and is seems like no matter how upgraded they are, you'll always be doing hardly any damage even with shots at point-blank range.

Sniper rifles are great, but you'll quickly notice how a sneak attack sniper bullet to the skull is not fatal on survival difficulty. I'm not talking about how legendary enemies will auto-heal, you'll encounter a lot of enemies in this game with such ridiculous damage reduction that a double damage bullet to the skull will only make them angry and give away your position. If you're going to snipe, have an escape route planned out and maybe use your companion to run a distraction if you don't think they'll get neutralized right away.

Armor:

Spoiler

From the get-go, you can upgrade your vault suit to have increased damage. You'll likely be wearing it for a long time, as from what I can tell it's the only upgrade-able under-armor you'll find until you can make nice with the Underground. I'm only at level 27, and I've found nothing else that compares to the vault suit.

There are some pieces of leather armor that can be found if you head north from Sanctuary Hills, cross the surrounding water and walk east along the shoreline. Leather armor is the easiest to upgrade early on, but keep an eye out for metal armor and then combat armor as you progress. Make the "deep pocketed" upgrade a priority, though you'll have to spend a few perks on armorer.

Settlements:

Spoiler

Build those up as soon as you can. Keep some crystal and copper handy, as those are parts of what you'll need to build a recruitment beacon. Take a perk in local leader when you can, so you can command settlers to be supply lines between settlements. Sharing resources between settlements will make it very easy to get a settlement up and running. Build sheltered homes, beds, doors and decorations to get the people coming. Plant crops and assign folks to those, obviously build some water pumps as well. Set up a machine-gun (or heavy machine-gun, if you have the resources) turret on each corner of a settlement and you'll have adequate defense.

Settlements have much greater purpose in survival mode, and you'll want as many as you can have scattered through the wasteland. If you have extra people at the settlement, consider assigning one to a scavenging station.

Resources:

Spoiler

The best resources to scrounge for are as follows:

Adhesive; used for damn near everything involving upgrades. Duct tape, wonder glue and vegetable starch. Craft the starch if you can, adhesive isn't as abundant as it is useful.

Oil; used to build defense turrets and for weapon upgrades. Oil cans, gas cans, vegetable oil, paint cans and flip lighters.

Crystal; used for building structures on your settlement and for complex weapon mods. Cameras, microscopes and crystal decanters.

Aluminum; used primarily to repair and upgrade power armor, this stuff runs out fast. Aluminum cans, tv dinner trays and surgical trays.

Copper; used to make everything involved with electronics at your settlement. Light bulbs, broken lamps and cooking pots.

Circuitry; used to make defensive turrets at settlements. Hot plate and telephone.

I hope this helps, it was very cathartic for me to write all this. I'll likely share more as I go along.

 

[enviousdominous]

Level 34.

A quick caveat to my last posting:

Spoiler

The ailment you come down with from consuming Rad-away does go away on its own over time. If you have a decontamination arch at a nearby settlement, then all you really need to worry about is taking a form of rad prevention. Also; make sure to check under Shaun's Crib for a S.P.E.C.I.A.L. magazine that gives you a permanent stat boost. Also also; don't get the Recon Scope if you're using the 10mm pistol. It uses a lot more stamina in VATS than the Reflex Sight.

Now then, going into a bit more detail on what you'll want to invest in to have a slightly less punishing experience in the wasteland, and some tips for how to deal with some tough areas.

Melee weapons:

Spoiler

I highly recommend finding a security baton. They're common drops from synths, the quickest way I know to find synths is to head to the Malden Center. With just a few perks in blacksmithing, you can upgrade the security baton to have a chance to stun your enemies. I was able to melee kill the death claw hanging out at The Old Gullet Sinkhole using this weapon. Also; you'll do both physical and energy damage with the stun upgrade, both types of damage increase if you take perks in melee damage.

Explosives:

Spoiler

Are a huge equalizer in this difficulty, so long as you know how to use them. If you take a couple perks in explosives, you can craft your own frag grenades and mines. Some enemies have ridiculous damage reduction and can survive explosions, but even they usually end up with broken legs from a well placed frag mine. I wouldn't recommend investing in baseball grenades as the cork in baseballs can be a rare resource, and the only sure source for cork is the baseball themed merchant in Diamond City.

Sneaking:

Spoiler

I throw around casual "maybe take this perk" comments, but this one is a must. While sneaking is a good way to conserve ammo and minimize the risk of being mobbed, the biggest reason to take perks in this field is in how you'll eventually stop setting off mines and traps. This difficulty throws frag mines in the most off-beat places, and more times than I care to remember I would get caught by a frag mine while I was back peddling during a tough random encounter. An armor attribute to look for that really helps in sneaking is "chameleon", it's like having the Predator's cloaking ability (though it glitches up the pip-boy interface). I highly recommend upgrading guns to have silencers also.

Lonely Church/Federation Ration Stockpile:

Spoiler

DO NOT ENTER THE FEDERATION RATION STOCKPILE, it has a back door that I highly recommend using. Just to the south of Sunshine Tidings Co-op is a church where a few tough as nails Raiders might be lingering. They might be a bitch to kill since they have a wide open area to maneuver, but at least you're right next to a settlement so you can save your game. Inside the church is a trapdoor, through which you'll get the drop on a unique Raider known as Red Tourette. If you sneak, you can get close enough to where you can lob a grenade type weapon through a crack in the shanty's doorway. She'll likely only be weakened by the blast or flames, but it gets her to come out of cover so you can pick her off like a sitting duck. Inside her shack you can access a terminal which will shut down a few nearby gun turrets, which will make them easy pickings for melee attacks. There's also a Covert Operations manual on her coffee table. As you trudge forward, be warned that even low level raiders have their senses ridiculously enhanced in this difficulty. Always proceed with extreme caution, and use a grenade if you know that a group is lurking in the distance. You should be able to find a mattress where you can save in the area with a high catwalk and a tough Raider lurking around the water below. If you can make it all the way through, you should get some awesome drops like fusion cores and newer types of armor.

Saugus Ironworks:

Spoiler

IS BALLS OUT DIFFICULT!

Make sure to bring plenty of food, water and jet for this mission. If you have psycho-jet, that's even better. If you can, have unique foods like deathclaw steak for a small agility boost, radscorpion steak so you can withstand the attacks from flame throwers and Yao Guai Roast so your melee attacks will hit like a loaded freight train.

This place is guarded by some insanely aware guards, night and day makes very little difference to their ability to spot you from far away. Maybe use a sniper rifle to pick off one or two, but know that you'll have a swarm of tough as nails flamer wielding brutes known as "forged" on your ass soon, so have a plan if things go south. Maybe lay some mines prior to your siege.

If you can sneak close to the facility, there's a small shack on one corner of the back of the building. When you open the door to that shack, it'll set off a flamer trap which you can just wait out. If you don't mind playing dirty, you can sit inside the shack by the closed door and use VATS to kill anyone who opens it and charges inside. After killing one, shut the door and wait for the next one. After it seems like you've killed them all, scout the entire perimeter carefully. There will be some on the roof that aren't worth your ammo, but just make sure that there aren't any lurkers waiting to ambush you. There isn't much loot beyond some common resources in the small shack and whatever goodies you find on the forged.

In the entryway to Saugus Ironworks you'll find a few mattresses, definitely save your game before going inside. The forged that are inside near the entrance weren't as tough as the ones outside for my play-through. I recommend sneaking left until you can go up a metal walkway and get the drop on a lookout forged. There's two more forged on the floor of that part of the foundry, they should be easy pickings using either melee or a long range gun. You want to kill these first few forged without alerting the entire facility to your presence. Make your way to the rear of this area and find the stairway up, from up top you can scout out where the forged are in the next section of the foundry.

If you have a companion, they'll probably get themselves killed in this next area without careful supervision on your part. It's not a big deal, since enemies swarming on your companion can make them an easy target for a grenade. There's a gun turret in this area, that's usually what incapacitates your companion as they mindless attack the patrolling forged. After killing everyone and everything, make your way up and over to a door leading to the "blast furnace" area. If you are capable of picking an expert lock, I recommend taking the door to the roof instead of the door to the blast furnace.

On the roof, you can easily find cover to kill the three or four forged that will be patrolling around there. There's a mattress in one of the huts, save your game and be ready to deal with a world of shit.

After entering the blast furnace area, you'll have to talk down a kid named Jake who's being coerced into killing an innocent settler, you may have been asked by a settler to find Jake already. If you fail the first persuasion attempt, DO NOT attempt to persuade him again. If you fail twice in persuading him, he'll join the forged and team up with them to annihilate you. The big bad guy -- Slag -- will say his piece, and give a three-second countdown until he expects the kid to kill the peasant. Nobody will attack you while he's talking, even if you run up on them. Take a hit of jet, run up to Slag and start dropping mines at his feet. Everyone else will just hang out while you do this. When Slag counts down from three, they'll go off, so don't linger too long. When you've dropped enough mines to satisfy you, run past him and up higher on the catwalks to find a forged chilling out with a view of the whole area. Set off the action by attacking this forged, and the mines will erupt around Slag. Slag will probably only be weakened, but you'll likely take out the forged that's standing next to him. You can get killed out of nowhere by a wayward forged in this encounter, and slowing down time with jet is about the only way to stay a step ahead. If time is slowed, Slag is much easier to kill. After dispatching the forged, talk to Jake to further the quest to find him. Loot the Shishkebab off of Slag, grab the explosives Bobblehead from near where he was standing, grab the Picket Fences mag from the area below where he was standing, and search in the back area for a "dampening coil". The dampening coil is needed for the Here There Be Monsters quest.

Make a few trips back and forth from the Greentop Nursery so you can pick Saugus Ironworks clean of resources.

 

[enviousdominous]

Level 51:

This post will be dedicated to the bugs I've encountered playing this game. Now, I'm not trying to rip on Bethesda here. I've taken classes in computer programming before, I realize how impossible a task it would be to craft a game as complex as Fallout 4 and not have any harmful bugs lurking in the code.

Keep in mind, I'm playing on a PS4. I see a lot of complaints about bugs being ripped into with "You installed too many mods dummy!" I only have three mods, which are the only three that a PS4 player is allowed to have. None of the bugs I'll mention could possibly be due to me gunking up the game with unofficial modifications.

Cars:

Spoiler

Can kill you. This has happened twice on my playthrough, and it caused huge setbacks each time. The first time was at the Corvega Assembly Plant way early on. I had found a ready set of power armor nearby, so I was rocking and rolling through the facility going on raider massacre. I killed off the main bad guy, and as expected his two lackeys come running into the area after he dies. I was running toward one of them, and *dead*. The second time was when I was at around level 43, I was running around The Commonwealth and abruptly died.

Apparently this has been a well known glitch ever since Fallout 4 was released. Behemoths can throw cars as projectiles, and mini-nuke explosions will sometimes launch cars. The programming for a flying car being a deadly projectile can occur when a stationary car is run into by you. Try to avoid running up to them.

The Blitz Perk:

Spoiler

It's a neat perk that allows you to -- through VATS -- *bampf* like nightcrawler or even use what appears to be telekinesis. It doesn't always work though, apparently there has to be a clear path. Sometimes you'll be able to teleport up buildings, and sometimes you can't hit someone who's standing directly in front of you.

My latest setback had me standing around a bunch of low level super mutants. One throws a grenade at me, but I was in VATS choosing to attack a distant mutant with a 95% chance of hitting him. Now, that "95%" is apparently not "100%" because the developers realized that their game could bug out at any moment. The potential for failure is always at least 5% there, and when it happens it's pretty spectacular. Instead of attacking that mutant, I just stood there doing nothing. I no longer had control of my character, and the grenade took its sweet time erupting and killing me off.

Sneak Perk, Level 3:

Spoiler

It's such a useful perk! You no longer set off traps or enemy mines! Except for when you progress in The Castle, and by then you most certainly wouldn't have seen it coming. In The Castle, you have to trudge through an underground chamber to enter the armory. In this underground area, there are frag mines laid around. I assumed that my perk would save me from getting blowed-up, and I was literally dead wrong. *beep beep beep* *KABLAMMO* On the next run through, just to make sure, I went head strong into the mines and had the same result. Yeah, that shit was bananas.

Companions:

Spoiler

Disappear, A LOT. In this mode, your opponents will be packing some serious firepower. If a raider boss is holding onto a fatman, they'll sometimes fire it off even if they're a foot away from what they're firing at. Your companion will typically sit in a weakened state and wait for you to come heal them, but sometimes they'll give up all hope and just up and teleport back to their place of origin. That's fine, when the game bothers to tell you that. As there is no fast travel and some missions just aren't fulfilling unless you have certain characters along during them, you're really taking a big chance by walking across the entire map for a mission when in a split second your companion can die and teleport away.

There's also one thing I noticed; companions will up and decide to chat you up about something very near and dear to their heart. Sometimes; if you don't notice that they're trying to engage you in conversation, they'll stand there in suspense. Sometimes; if you left the area without noticing, they'll teleport back to their place of origin. So -- without any mention -- you find that your companion just isn't there, and now you have to go on an expedition across the entire damn map just to retrieve them. You'll know that this is what happened if when you find them again, they chat you up.

 

[enviousdominous]

Level 89, it finally happened.

The Mechanist's Lair

Spoiler

What finally happened was that I had to stop, and stay far away from anything breakable for a good thirty minutes.

In Survival mode there will be setbacks, major setbacks. You'll have spent hours accomplishing difficult tasks, you'll have made extremely lucky breaks in negotiations and finds in legendary enemy drops. And.... you're dead or incapacitated by faulty programming code.

Now, I'm sure that the folks at Bethesda had only the purist intentions when they made their Automatron expansion. Where other sections of the game are made more immersive through Survival mode, in that you'll need to make more intensive use of resources and strategy, Automatron is just a clusterfuck. A useless, boring, clusterfuck which is only useful for experience farming. I know, because I had to endure the final leg of the quest tree for that expansion three fucking times.

There is no strategy, the most you can do is to convert a bio-sensor entryway into a decontamination arch, and play some holotapes at a terminal for quick access to The Mechanist. Both are stupid and grant you almost nothing in terms of reward. If you meet The Mechanist early, you're deliberately ignoring an opportunity for a couple thousand points of experience in the robot gauntlet battle you would have endured going the normal way.

On my first run, I became stuck. Literally, stuck in place between two areas of obstruction.

On my second run, I made it through the whole mission. Then I realized that you can't invite settlers to the Mechanist's lair, which makes it fucking stupid and pointless as a safe haven in fucking Survival mode. You can't fast travel, so it's not like you're going to wander through that fucking stupid building just so you can fuck around in your own personal club house. Graygarden was being attacked, so I made haste toward there without saving.

Now; in survival mode you have to sprint back and forth a lot. I was at the point in sprinting where I depleted all of my AP, and a group of six rust devils and robots magically appeared in my area and started attacking me. I killed off three of them, and was gunned down.

To have to go through this fucking stupid part of the game isn't something I'd wish on my worst enemy. There is literally nothing redeeming about this mission other than the experience points, which you get by doing almost anything else in the fucking game. Bethesda obviously overrated how well fans of the series would take the idea of have a robot themed storyline in the game. It's just a shit ton of mindless chatter, and you get some cute robot armor and a save haven that makes no fucking sense for your effort.

Honestly; I was going to drop off my junk at the Mechanist's lair, and thought "Why in the fuck am I going to do this?" You can't share those resources with a supply line, probably because Bethesda didn't want to feel embarrassed with multiple YouTube videos of Brahmin glitching up all over that area. So if you drop off junk there, it's just fucking there. You can't access it again unless you enter the building which makes you have to wait for a loading screen to crank out the code, and trudge through all those hallways. Thus, I didn't build a bed and save my game.

I'm playing Survival mode to make the game more immersive, and Automatron is about as immersive as Q-bert. I literally only completed that mission because I'm a compulsive completionist, everything else about this mission betrays what would otherwise be a near perfect game.

Bottom line up front; DO NOT play this mission if you're playing on Survival. Don't put yourself through the Hell that I had to endure. I've had worse experiences with video games, but this one really made my time playing Fallout 4 seem like a waste.

 

[enviousdominous]

Level 121; amazingly, there's still more game left!

In Survival mode, you will encounter hostiles that are obscenely powerful, though you will be rewarded appropriately with experience points and rare item drops. Even though you're having to sprint your way to most places, you end up netting more experience points than you would have just fast traveling and turning in a quest.

A brief retraction:

Spoiler

You can send supply lines to the Mechanist's Lair after all, though I really don't see why anyone would want to do that. You can't build a recruitment beacon, so it still makes little sense to build it up as a settlement.

Here are a few random tips from my epic level experience:

Enemies that can still kill you instantly

Spoiler

Assaultrons, these things are fucking nasty. I don't know what the level threshold is for when they can cloak, but they can totally cloak at will later on in your adventure. That's extremely troublesome considering they can also light up their mega-deathray eye-beam in a few seconds of recognizing your presence, and that super powered laser can kill you in less than a second. If you know that an assaultron is nearby, use jet or some other form of slow-motion. You won't be able to target them in VATS while they're cloaked, so you're going to have to attack them in real time. If that beam is firing, head for cover immediately. I had my energy resistance jacked to the nines with the maxed out perk and with ridiculously over-powered armor thanks to Tinker Tom, and yet assaultrons could still cut me down like I was nothing.

Common enemies on rooftops, because at a certain point they'll be packing missile launchers and fatman launchers. The missile launchers might not be so bad, except that they can cripple your limbs. You're sort-of okay if you took the perks in bone indestructibility, but there's no surviving being hit by a mini-nuke. If you hear that tell-tale whistle of an incoming mini-nuke, run like a bat out of hell for anywhere far away from where you just were. Unless you can spot the bastard and snipe them out, just avoid that encounter all-together. At the Gunner's Plaza, don't engage the gunners in front of the facility. There's an emergency stairway on one side of the building, sneak up that and take out the unsuspecting asshole with the fatman.

Trappers with harpoon guns, yeah. Trappers are raider variants that you'll encounter if you play the Far Harbor expansion, and they're not that threatening. You could probably mow them down easy with whatever means your character has developed an affinity toward, though you should still watch out for unique trappers carrying harpoon guns. Even with my damage reduction eclipsing the potential for a maxed out sniper rifle to take me out in one shot, it only took one shot from a harpoon gun to kill me.

Bloodbugs, something is up with these guys. So basically; with some bloodbugs (usually the vampiric ones) you'll notice that what would ordinarily kill them is only taking them down to a sliver of health. Try as you might, every subsequent attack doesn't kill them off. If this isn't a glitch, it seems to happen because the bloodbug sucked your blood out and is regenerating its health at a pace that the game finds consistent with always earning back a point of health before dying.

Gun turrets, DO NOT FUCK WITH THESE GUYS! Especially with laser turrets, Survival mode seems to assign them a level of difficulty that's meant to be as inconsistent as possible. You'll set off a gun turret, and it'll pop its pitiful rounds at you and do almost no damage. Then you get cocky and casually wander into the path of that one turret and you're dead in less than a second. Some areas are consistent with this, the FEV labs in the Institute is a prime example. You have to tiptoe your way through that area and pick off the gun turrets one by one, all the while ready to high-tail it to safety if they notice you long enough to open fire. If you're trying to conserve stimpacks, you might want to tell your companion to stay put before entering an area with gun turrets. Companions tend to go all Leeroy Jenkins and try to take on the gun turrets head-on. As you've likely figured out, companions don't just take a breather and get up on their own in Survival mode.

 

[enviousdominous]

Level 128, done.

I joined the Railroad, and wreaking havoc on the Brotherhood with a supersledge and railgun was pretty damn therapeutic.

Once you get into levels beyond level 50, your strategy will probably be just like Brock Lesnar's. You eat/drink because you constantly get famished, you sleep because you constantly get tired, you conquer because at that point your an absolute badass and you repeat because certain areas of the game reset themselves.

I can finally put the game down, up until the Nuka-Cola expansion finally comes out.

Here's a vid of part of my experience playing the game:

 

[enviousdominous]

So, I downloaded that Nuka World DLC.

So far, it's neat. Nothing spectacular so far, but then I'm only about an hour into it.

I had to stop after an hour because the DLC has a game breaking glitch. Thankfully I saved my game after doing a preliminary intro to the DLC involving destroying a shit ton of gun turrets.

Southwest of the Nuka World amusement part, there's a group of Scientologist parodies called the Hubologists. They're a fun throwback to Fallout 2 as well. One of them offers to do some kind of cleansing for you, but it'll cost you 50 caps. You can persuade him to do the cleansing for free, provided you have the necessary points in charisma or are just really lucky. Given that persuading people gets you some easy experience points, I opted for a free cleansing. I went and sat in the cleansing chair, and.... nothing.

At this point, I realized that I couldn't do anything except access the load/save menu. Everybody else just mills about as their AI commands them to do so, and I sit in the chair unable to get up or use my pip boy.

Apparently this glitch has already made it to the message boards. I'm ticked off that such a blatant game breaking glitch made it past the beta phase, given that those of us who are playing on survival can't just quick save.

 

[enviousdominous]

Nuka World isn't for everyone. I learned that by being one of the types of people that Nuka World definitely was not intended to impress.

I'm putting my explanation in a spoiler box as a precaution, but I really don't think that anybody will be blown away by what happens if you complete the main story of the DLC.

Spoiler

Nuka World is for players who lament not being able to side with the raiders in Fallout 4's Commonwealth map. The basic premise of Nuka World is that you now have the option to ally yourself with a raider faction that's unique to the Nuka World map, but you'll still be the sworn enemy of all types of raiders in the Commonwealth.

This doesn't work for my character, because I had already played through the main Fallout 4 storyline on Survival. The explanation for my explanation is that the payoff to completing the main Nuka World storyline is that you can now select settlements in the Commonwealth for your chosen raider faction to take over. By this point, I had already built up every potential settlement in the Commonwealth map. When you're playing on Survival -- and your best option in terms of fast travel is to call a helicopter to give you a ride -- settlements are extremely important as hubs to save and craft.

The only option I had was to allow the raiders to sack a settlement that I had already obtained, which would be a pretty fucked up thing to do considering all the previous DLC granted me increased options for settlement development and I took full advantage of all of them for all of my settlements.

Nuka World offers you a nuclear option if you're not into all that raider bullshit, but it's a very anti-climactic option that barely changes anything about the Nuka World map.

Bethesda obviously rushed this DLC, because there are too many bugs to name. One involves helping a young woman meet a man of whom she's a huge fan, that man is just a head in a machine by the way. He wants you to kill him by shutting down his circuits, she wants you to let him live. You choose to let him live, and reap the rewards. Right after that, you shut him down and kill him to reap some other rewards. Her reaction is to freak out saying that she'll kill you, but she doesn't do anything and immediately after her speech returns to taking about random happy nonsense.

There's a few new weapons and pieces of armor that aren't any better than what you would have found in the main game. The armor looks nifty, but offers nowhere near the amount of protection that a modified set of armor from the main game will offer.

If you have the season pass, go ahead and put Fallout 4 to rest by completing this expansion. Don't pay money for this unless your really want to be able to side with raiders.