Say what you will about Fallout 4 and the
changes it made to the series, you can’t deny that the weapons were, for the most part,
a vast improvement over previous games. I say “for the most part” because there’s
one weapon that ruins the entire game just with its existence. Can You Beat Fallout 4 With Only A Flare Gun? Speaking of flair, there’s still time for
you to add some flair to your life with the Fork Barbarian plushie. It might not make whatever pain you’re feeling
go away, but it will help you through the hard times. Just imagine having the worst day of your
life, you look down at the plushie for moral support, and with a nasally twang it says
“this is where the real game begins”. That probably won’t happen, but if you’re
in enough pain you could certainly imagine it. I suppose we should start at the beginning. After making my character as true to life
as possible with a giant crooked nose, oversized eyeballs, and a bald spot, I realized that
I’d forgotten to activate the mod that shows the full lines of dialog, was already far
to late into the game to go back and activate it, and started assigning SPECIAL Points. It’s been proven with the power of probable
science that Luck and the Idiot Savant perk is better in the long term for maximizing
your experience than going with Intelligence. Because I was only after a few perks, I spread
out the remaining points amongst everything except Charisma. Then, I had to find the truth. I had to know where the salesman goes after
our conversation. I’m not sure what it is, but something about
these shots makes me sad and uncomfortable at the same time. He doesn’t go to the vault though, it hasn’t
even finished being constructed yet. The bombs dropped, I wrapped myself in plastic
wrap and climbed into the freezer, and found out the truth, again. Nora, your supposed wife, doesn’t die. It’s a trick. See, her eyes are still moving. Want more proof? The resurrect command doesn’t work on her. It makes perfect sense, you can’t bring
her back from the dead if she’s faking it. I did what I always do to escape Vault 111
without attacking anything, left the Vault, arrived in Sanctuary, ignored Codsworth, and
the real game began. I wanted to get a few levels under my belt
before I started doing much of anything else. Just needed a couple perks to make life easier. I won’t waste as much of your time on this
as I did mine, all that matters is that I had almost 600 fully erect pieces of wood
by the time I was finished, and they were arguably the most organized they’d ever
been. Satisfied with my work, I left the settlement
and set off for Concord. Why? Because that’s where the real game lives. See, like most unique gimmick weapons that
aren’t worth their weight in garbage, the Flare Gun is a pain to obtain. To get it, you’ve gotta complete The First
Step quest, which comes after When Freedom Calls. Ya know, that quest that involves killing
a bunch of Raiders to save the Minutemen. As luck would have it, it’s not at all easy
to do that when you can’t attack anything yet because anything but a Flare Gun is not
a Flare Gun. The Raiders outside can be cleared out by
Preston if you’re patient enough, no problem there. But the ones inside, well, let’s just say
that in the process of trying to figure out what to do about it, you almost got drunk
Mitten Squad vs the air conditioner round 2. It would’ve happened when I was in North
Carolina last week but they’re more civilized down there, their air conditioners know to
shut the up when they’re emotionally assaulted. My first idea was to use the power armor to
glitch myself into the office the minutemen are hold up in. I thought that maybe because you’re not
supposed to be in there until the Raiders are gone, getting in their early would trigger
the rest of the quest. It didn’t. All that happened was I got stuck in the door
and couldn’t move. Momentarily content with my own failure, I
left for greener pastures: Diamond City. I had me a plan. I bought my first flares from Cricket outside
of Megaton and also ridded myself of a lot of the garbage I’d collected. Piper helped me get inside the city, I got
even more Flares from the various vendors inside, did Piper’s interview, and had me
a companion. There’s a trick to making things dead without
actually doing anything. All you’ve got to do is get a companion
into a situation where their life can violently be ended and in the midst of their existence
crumbling around them, you tell them to off back to wherever they came from. You dismiss them in combat so they aren’t
your companion anymore which makes it so anything they kill won’t go on your permanent record. That’s the idea, anyway. As with all things in life, it’s never as
easy as someone on the internet would make it seem. The only hurdle you need to overcome is probably
something familiar to most of you watching this, because I know my audience. The hard part is talking to someone. It turns out that getting Piper to engage
you in conversation while people are trying to stick bullets and all sorts of things inside
her is not the easiest thing in the world. After that didn’t work, I tried sitting
in a corner and waiting for several minutes. Only one guy died, an idiot who forgot about
fall damage. I also went ahead and used the free cam again
just to see how Preston was handling his end of the conflict, which was not very well. He probably could’ve stuck the end of his
musket in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and still missed his head. In another attempt with Piper, I did manage
to convince her, but that was no good. In the time it took me to lure her into the
back room with the mannequins, she’d gone and killed 5 people. From there, out of ideas, I called it quits
for a long time: almost 20 minutes. Back in the game, I had no new ideas. I had one, actually, it just wasn’t a good
one and I hate myself for it. This run is supposed to be about how bad the
Flare Gun is as a weapon you’d use. The path to getting it is part of that challenge,
but it’s not where the meat of this burrito is found. I let Piper kill everyone. I only found one example online of someone
doing this part of this quest as a pacifist. YMFAH didn’t side with the Minutemen in
his pacifist Fallout 4 video. The one guy I found just said to do what I
did, use the companion dismissal technique, but that never worked for me. The building is too small to be able to get
Piper out of combat to bring up the dialog interface. So, I successfully failed on purpose. Outside, I didn’t need Piper. I just had to lure out Rango and let him lay
waste to the inhabitants of Sesame Street before getting Preston to kill him while I
waited in the gift shop for my mom to show up. With life now something that doesn’t exist
in Concord, all I had to do was meet Preston back at the Sanctuary and part 1 is now complete. Now we move on to The First Step. This was another problem that I didn’t solve
the right way. I ed up. What I could’ve and should’ve done was
lure something to the settlement to get them killed, fail the quest, then keep doing that
until I hopefully got a quest that was setting up a settlement not helping one. Didn’t do that though. Instead I entered Fishing Club Electrical
Manufacturing, I don’t remember what it’s actually called and can’t be bothered to
check, and ran like a madman for the sole Raider I had to kill. In that brief instance, I hoped to use the
environment to kill everyone. Between the turrets, cars that could explode,
and random explosives being used by the dozen or so raiders in the room, I thought something
would kill the leader. That didn’t happen. The cars did explode, rest in piece Mater,
and people got hurt, but it takes more than an explosion to bring down the all powerful
Jared. I also could’ve done the companion thing
here but like for realsies this time. I tried, I really did put some effort into
it, just not as much as I should’ve, because I gave up and blew his ing head off, failing
the challenge once more. Don’t let that get you down though, the
game made sure I suffered for my misdeeds. Back at Sanctuary, I spoke to Preston, finally
reached 10th Prestige Level 70, and was awarded a Flare Gun for my troubles, allowing the
real game to finally begin. I’m about to tell you everything great about
the Flare Gun, ready? Make sure your ears are opened and primed
for listen. The one good thing is there’s a way to get
effectively infinite ammo. Every day, between 4 and 10 Flares will spawn
in the workshop bench in Sanctuary. It would be time consuming as , but you could
sleep for 24 hours, get your ammo, and go back to sleep, though you would probably have
to fast-travel somewhere to sleep because I don’t think it resupplies while you’re
there, but that would give you as much free ammo as you wanted. Or, you could just buy it. The Fallout Wiki says that flares are “occasionally
sold by vendors” but that’s not true at all. They’re not rare at all and are surprisingly
cheap. With the lowest possible Charisma and no barter
perks, they’re only 3 caps per flare. And because I’d been hoarding like a mother
er, I had plenty to sell to get myself up to around 1800 caps. Most of those came from the 1200 5mm rounds
I got from the Minigun atop the Preston mating ground. So here’s what you do. Buy your ammo at Diamond City, between Arturo
and the robot lady, you’ll get around 20 flares. Wait for a few hours for the Mr Handy to come
out to play, buy from him, wait more, go back to Sanctuary where more flares have spawned,
collect them, then go back to Diamond City to do it again. It’s not as fun as the merchant exploit
in Skyrim because it’s not an exploit at all, but if you’re only buying Flares, it
will only take you about an hour to get up to 850 flares. And with all the ammo in the world, the real
game can begin. Now the Flare Gun is just the worst. Last week I said the Chinese Pistol was the
impressively bad, but this is much more horrible. Here’s why. For one thing, unlike almost every firearm
in the game, the Flare Gun’s projectile has an extreme arc to its trajectory and it’s
slow as slug. Hitting a moving target is generally not going
to happen. Then there’s the reload time, it’s a lengthy
one. There’s also this fun thing that happens
where sometimes you won’t automatically reload or sometimes if you’re swapping between
first and third person the game just won’t let you reload at all for a few seconds. Oh and the damage? Traumatizing. For reference, a basic Pipe Pistol with no
upgrades will do 13 damage. The Flare Gun does 10. But you know what? It gets worse. See we’re going downhill and have already
lost all control of the vehicle, you think it’s over but we haven’t even hit the
ing ramp yet. And we’re not landing on the ground, we’re
landing in a pool of lava. The Flare Gun, being it’s own unique layer
of hell, does not benefit from any perks in the game. You can’t take the gunslinger perk to boost
its damage by 20% per level. You can’t get sneak attack bonuses because
in cased you missed it this thing fires a flaming ball that showers the county in a
red light. Stealth isn’t something that exists for
us anymore. And, lastly, the Flare Gun cannot be modified. At all. Full stop. What it is is what it is. The only perk that does apply is the Gun Basher
perk but guess who’s 4 points short of being able to take that perk? I am and I would’n’t have taken it anyway. This had to be hell after cheating like I
did, I refused to gun bash unless it was absolutely necessary. The premise of this run is that I have no
arms and I must dab. By now I’ve since arrived in Park Street
Station to rescue Nick Valentine and was met with a severe lack of friendliness in the
lobby. The other thing you might notice is that the
top of the Flare Gun is blank, there are no sights to look down, that would be too easy. Oh and a lot of the time you’ll see miss
my shot only to have the flare go off and give you a hitmarker. That hitmarker isn’t real, it’s a placebo. It’s not actually doing damage. As for the Triggermen themselves, they can
take anywhere from 4 to occasionally 10 or 11 flares to kill. That doesn’t sound bad but remember that
it takes about 5 seconds to fire and reload the Flare Gun. Now recall what’s waiting for me down in
the meat of the vault. At one point I got tired of murder, the psychological
damage it was causing me wasn’t hurting enough, I had to destroy that which I loved,
my beloved fences. I recycled them and create a new world of
fences with their dismantled corpses, retired to the Museum of Freedom for my Power Armor
that got mostly destroyed in the process of trying to get it back from the Raiders that
respawned, headed to the Police Station to get some collectables off the ghouls Danse
put to sleep, and took what I’d stolen to sell to buy Stimpaks. Then I met up with Danse at Arcjet and let
him do his thing inside so that I could pick up all the synth weaponry that dropped to
again sell for caps. Then I returned to Park Street Station. It, no joke, took me 8 minutes to clear out
this one little area of Triggermen. I didn’t fail, I didn’t have to reload
any saves, that’s just how bad the Flare Gun is. If you’re going to try this, which you aren’t
because nobody hates themselves more than I hate me, you’d be advised to make this
a build based around VATS. The Flare Gun is a pain to aim while in combat,
so letting the computer do the aiming would alleviate a lot of the stress that comes from
using this piece of trash weapon. The remainder of the vault was more of the
same, that being awful. I found that 3rd person mode is great in close
range. If you’re close enough, the dot that forms
from your crosshair will be exactly where the flare goes so you won’t have to worry
about the projectile dropping. Dino was one of the toughest foes I’ve faced
so far, he took about 15 flares to become kill. I let Nick do a lot of the work as we escaped
the Vault, convinced Skinny Malone to play hide and seek with us, he started counting,
and Nick and I hid at Diamond City. The mayor was convinced by a man with the
charisma of defective toaster to hand over someone’s house key, and I eventually arrived
at Fort Hagen. Before I could enter the Fort, I had to deal
with a couple Feral Ghouls. These suck. Their speed and the way they go all flaccid
as soon as they’re within striking distance makes them difficult to hit without VATS. Dogmeat had a photoshoot, I ignored the turrets,
entered the Hagen, and began facing the Synths. This wasn’t any better than anything else. A headshot with a Flare did barely anything
against a Synth. A weapon bash was more effective, but I’m
a cheater, not a coward, which is why I ran away towards more death and despair. I could’ve faced them, but I had to save
my Stimpaks and Chems for Kellogg, and I didn’t have 6 hours to spare widdeling away at abominations
with borderline sentience. I hadn’t lost too much blood by the time
I found Kellogg. Somehow I’d forgotten that he Danny Phantom’s
cousin and can turn himself invisible. As you can probably imagine, hitting an invisible
target with the Flare Gun in the midst of a firefight is no small feat. So small in fact that I decided to just beat
him to death. With a Flare safely stored in his temple,
I still had to clean up the scraps which wasn’t any easier because, ya know, Flare Gun. From there, an assortment of events took place
that are always the same regardless of the challenge so I’ll breeze through them. The Brotherhood of Steel arrived in the Commonwealth,
I sold what I’d looted at the Fort, told Piper and Nick about the free head I found
inside Fort Hagen, used a few flares to gouge out Finn’s eyes, killed her in Daisy’s
shop because I had a feeling she’d be into that sort of thing, met Doctor Amari, went
spelunking in the memories of a man I’d killed while wearing his clothes, and set
off for the Glowing Sea to find Virgil. After speaking to him, I got the lowdown on
the Courser, and entered Green Tech Genetics to find one. This was as horrible as Fort Hagen and the
Raiders in the Museum of Freedom and the Triggerman and everything else. Despite the abundance of Flares stuffed inside
me, I didn’t have the patience required to kill all the Gunners inside. Best case scenario, you’re looking at 5
shots per Gunner, it takes roughly 5 seconds to fire and reload, call it 30 seconds per
Gunner to take aiming into account, probably at least 15 Gunners inside the building, that’s
7 and a half minutes, assuming you never miss and don’t have to take time to heal or sit
behind cover. It would’ve been a cluster . But guess what, it was all worth it. Everything in the universe had to happen exactly
as it did going back billions of years to lead me to this exact moment at this exact
second. Look at the ing word I got in this terminal
puzzle. Just look at it. The rest of this run doesn’t matter, this
made it all worth it. I don’t scream, but if I ever did, it would’ve
been when I saw that. It wasn’t the right password, clicking it
4 times just to be safe proved that, but it was still wonderful. The Courser wasn’t. See how little his health went away when I
blasted him in the dome with portable fire? It was a solid 8 minute fight that almost
ended twice before he recharged his battery as I momentarily ran away. After Doctor Amari was worthless again, I
followed the road to freedom to the Old North Church, lit up the Railroad which made this
much more ominous, convinced them to help me, got the chip analyzed, might’ve accidentally
turned Desdemona into Desmond and ed with his head, but then I left, got the plans from
Virgil, and went with the Brotherhood because why not. The Minutemen are a time sink and I don’t
like the Railroad today. Rode up to the Predwyn, saw what a real man
looks like, got told that I had to clear out Fort Strong. That means killing a Super Mutant Behemoth
with a Flare Gun, which is why I’m siding with the Minutemen now. You do have to do another quest before they’ll
help you build the transmitter. Or, you can bop the old man on the nose and
tell Preston they’ve gone to meet God, allowing you to build the device and fax yourself deep
underground. Because I couldn’t fill the kid’s room
with smoke, I did some work for the Institute, mostly just poking around the facility to
meet some new faces. Then I did one more mission for the Minutemen
before trusting my gut and siding with the Institute. Going with the Minutemen could’ve been useful
because the Flare Gun is more than just a glorified dart gun, but you need to play the
long game to make it worthwhile. If you had a bunch of settlements all over
the map, calling in reinforcements to attack for you would be an interesting way to play
the game, but it’s not for me. If I’m calling in reinforcements, it’s
in the form of corpses of defeated foes, not minutemen. Libertalia gave me a bit of trouble. The Raider with the Fat Man is behind my comprehension. With the recall code, I shut down the rogue
synth, he got teleported back underground for several weeks of unimaginable pain, and
prepared myself for the Battle of Bunker hill to retrieve my Power Armor and check on Elder
Maxson’s beautiful body. Unfortunately, he only offers his eye candy
for those who are siding with him. It’s alright, my mind is still too fixated
on Vault Yoshi to have room for another sex symbol. Now Vault Yoshi’s in your head too, and
he’s not going anywhere. The Battle of Bunker Hill was what it always
is, kinda boring. It sorta feels like a large scale conflict,
but the issue is that because so many things are attacking each other, it’s easy to just
sit back and do nothing. And surprisingly, the Railroad Heavies I had
to dismantle weren’t as tough as I thought. Accuracy is always an issue, though. My next job was a photoshoot atop CIT Ruins. I didn’t get the exact shot I wanted, but
this one’s not bad. This one’s alright too. Wanna see something weird? Makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it. He has no eyes but he still sees you. [1:17:00] At my surprise impromptu unofficially birthday
party, Dad gave me the greatest present a son could ask for, knowledge that his father
is slowly dying. Then came the part I’d been dreading for
the last hour: Mass Fusion. Getting in there wasn’t the bad part. Avoiding the Brotherhood recruits as I got
down to the basement wasn’t the bad part. Retrieving the Reactor wasn’t the bad part. The bad part is killing a Sentry Bot and Two
Assaultrons with a ing Flare Gun. For once in my life, I had a plan, and a pretty
good one at that. An Institute Scientist joins you on your journey,
so if you’ve got Power Armor, you can block the doorway to the cleansing room with your
armor and wait for the good doctor to do all the killing for you. In theory, that would work. If Allie Filmore is nowhere to be found, that
doesn’t work. Luckily for me, I had a failsafe idea that
might work, maybe. I attempted to use this glitch earlier, the
one where you use Power Armor to glitch yourself through a wall. There’s a lockdown after you snag the reactor
and blast doors block the elevator. But, if you use power armor, you can phase
through the blast doors and into the elevator that you can then ride up towards freedom,
thereby avoiding the most intense combat section of this entire playthrough. For what it’s worth, I did attempt to do
some damage on the Sentry Bot, but the amount I did almost made me cry. The next quest was Pinned, an easy one if
you manage to get ghouls and weasels and the Brotherhood of Steel and robots and gunners
to all fight each other outside the house you were sent to. On the off chance you were as curious as I
was, glitching yourself into the shy guy’s hidden bedroom and taking his head off not
only fails the quest but makes you enemies with the Institute. Then there’s the Railroad. They must be destroyed. Unfortunate because I’m going in alone. At first, it tricks you into thinking it’s
gonna be quick and easy, but my sister this quest is not. As soon as you off Desmond, everyone loses
their minds. And most of them have to die. Stimpaks help, power armor helps, hundreds
of flares help, gun bashing helps a little too seeing as it was my main method of attack
because the Flare Gun is still the Flare Gun and is as worthless as ever. It was around this time I started wishing
that the Flare Gun worked like Flare Guns in other games, that if you hit a target with
it they’d be engulfed in flame. Would’ve made this more fun. With every last one of them with names wiped
out, the end of the line arrived. It was time to destroy the Brotherhood of
Steel. The small piece of good news is that the Flare
Gun can kill the generators in one blast and as you kill them, more and more Synths can
spawn in from heaven to take all the fallen angels back to hell. To protect the virus, I parked my Power Armor
on one set of stairs and stood like a rock on the other. I still can’t believe that I managed to
kill two brotherhood Knights mostly with the flare part of the Flare Gun. It wasn’t easy, but it certainly did happen. A few stragglers made their way to the top
in an attempt to stop me, Elder Maxson never showed his face or incredible body on the
field of battle, probably would’ve distracted all his troops, the blimp went down like the
hindenburg, I told Father to go already, and I did not beat Fallout 4 with only a Flare
Gun.
