Everyone, meet Elaine. Elaine, meet everyone.
I’ve been playing Fallout 4 again, as I mentioned yesterday. It’s my second crack at the game. The first time, I got frustrated with a combination of the keyboard controls, the main character being both a defined person and bland, and my propensity for endlessly running out of inventory space, because I’m talented like that. While I puet in 50 hours, I came away with an impression of the game as kind of mediocre.
Not exactly an auspicious start for a second playthrough. But I was craving another game, like Shadow of Mordor, that I’d started but never finished. Fallout 4 definitely fell into that for me. I could barely remember what I was doing the last time I played, except that it felt like the game was pulling me in a ton of different directions at once and I wasn’t doing very well at going in any of them.
So it was new character time. New game time. And new gameplay time. Yep, I modded the shit out of it.
Okay, that’s overstating it a bit. I still ended up installing most of the mods on PC Gamer’s list of the best Fallout 4 mods. How has this affected the game so far? It’s made it pretty great, that’s how.
The one with the biggest impact has been the combination of the full dialogue interface and the silent protagonist mod. While the game does some strange things when the protagonist is completely silent (the subtitles still try to play, but they just flash for less than half a second), overall it’s made for a very different experience. There’s no voice acting to overlay the developers’ idea of my character onto how I play. The full dialogue mod also lets me choose which answer feels the most natural, without worrying so much about the tone, and having a clearer idea of what I’m going to say makes the dialogue roleplay feel more meaningful. While it’s not perfectly immersive (in addition to the subtitles thing, the PC has one-liners, cheers, grunts and such outside of the dialogue menu that no longer play), it’s making for a very different experience. Plus the dialogue trees go a lot faster.
I’m also running a number of graphics mods. So far I’m enjoying the changes to the weather, which has led to some wonderfully foggy days (see above screenshot) and makes thunderstorms feel huge in a way they didn’t before. I also have a mod going that makes radstorms more deadly, so I’m looking forward to cowering inside as the world above gets wrecked on fallout.
The last one that’s really made a noticeable difference so far is a mod that allows for conduits to pass through walls and ceilings. The way the game manages running power wires and which conduits on which surfaces power what can be really frustrating. With this mod, it makes it easy to, for example, run power to every floor of a building in the same corner. I got to put a generator up on the roof of my building, so it could power all my lights, and it was way more fun than messing around with pylons and trying to figure out what the wire I want to place is running into now, geeze. (All this experimenting made possible in part by Clean Up The Wasteland, which lets you scrap detritus you find out and about in your travels and turn it into oodles of resources. Who knew how easy it is to scrap entire cars as you walk by them? And huge crates? And piles of rubble?)
I’m looking forward to spending more time with the game. My goal this time is to actually finish the main quest, which is when I’ll considered the game “finished.” There’s a lot between here and there, though. I’ve already run into one minor location and quest I’d never seen before, despite it being extremely close to some areas I’d visted in my last playthrough. Those are the kind of surprises I love in Bethesda games. Here’s hoping they’re enough to help me keeping have lots of fun, and taking time to stop and smell the (crispy, dead) roses on the way to the finale of the game.
Comments are closed.