Evaluating Fallout 4's DLC- Incompetence meets brilliance

when i finally finished fallout 4 i couldn't wait to enjoy not playing fallout 4 for a while now unfortunately that plan thoroughly backfired when i realized that i was so blinded by my love for the fallout franchise that i bought the season pass for fallout 4 right when it came out but never played it now if you disregard the garbage that should have been free updates and instead sold for five dollars each we got a staggering two hole dlc adventures right from the biggest brains at bethesda i actually figured out the formula here to better understand why each bethesda published fallout game got the amount of dlc that it did so with fallout 3 we got 5 dlc adventures but only 3 of them were any good with fallout new vegas if you count the number of letters you'll note that there are 15. now the closest square integer to 15 is 16 which is 4 squared that one's pretty obvious and a lot of people caught on to it pretty early on but fallout 4 went with the more traditional route here because if you compare its storyline and dialogue options to the previous games you'll realize that it's really only half a game so we only get half the dlc anyways in this video i'm going to evaluate all of the dlcs and figure out if any of them are worth playing i've heard pretty mixed opinions on all of them but most people tend to regard far harbor as the best dlc before i begin i have some limited time merge for sale on crowdmade because this is just what i do now i also have an ad for atlas vpn about 10 minutes and 50 seconds from this part of the video and finally i stream on twitch.television nearly every monday tuesday and friday alright let's get on with it so let's start with a brief history of the dlc release here obviously there was a season pass involved and really what a season it was first we got automatron the wiki description reads as such hunt down robots and create custom robot companions well i'm sold that sounds like an adventure but then we got the glorious wasteland workshop the wiki has this to say design and set cages to capture live creatures thanks todd then we got far harbor but then we got the contraptions and vault-tec workshop dlcs now i don't want to spoil too much here so i'll keep these two gems under wraps for now and then finally we got nuka world i was initially going to skip everything besides far harbor and nuka world but bethesda was really adamant about selling these other four at five bucks a pop and i want to know if they really pulled their weight in the season pass also it's worth noting that i popped some graphical and audio mods on for this video since i wanted something pretty to look at but then my game kept crashing so i kind of removed them and then it continued to crash anyways and it turns out that a bethesda game of all games is an unoptimized mess on newer rigs can you believe that anyways i'll list the mods that i re-enabled in the description alright so automatron actually does have a couple of quests to it they're actually decently well done in terms of substance and make the dlc better than just sudden access to robot creating first you gotta meet with this robot who's fighting other robots apparently her masters got killed by said group of robots and now we gotta attempt to take out the remainder by tracking down some robobrains basically the robobrains have been unleashed by someone known as the mechanist who has been spreading his gospel through his robots when you finally track down multiple brains you can pinpoint the mechanist's location and then go deal with him before we head off we reconstruct one of his robots which illuminates us as to why his creations are decimating humans turns out that he programmed them to help humanity as best they could and the robots determined that the best course of action to help out humanity would be by destroying it to ensure that there isn't any undue suffering because of life in the wasteland so you've got an okay plot line which is unfortunately marred as always by the devs going alright what kind of stupid [ __ ] can we put in here in this case you've got robots which use some kind of cryofog attack which makes it nearly impossible to see them when they use it which of course has no cooldown and you've got these lasers which any player with any stats can disarm though doing so takes longer than it should because programming a stationary hitbox is hard of course this pseudo-stealth mission only saves you the effort of a single fight against turrets as the next scripted event has the mechanist attacking you on site with his bots so you head through this pretty massive facility with the game making it clear that they were taking prisoners brains to use for their robobrains here after fighting robots for a pretty sizable chunk of time you make it to the mechanist who is as always a byproduct of bethesda's wonderfully unique dialogue system wait my reign of terror the commonwealth has suffered more than its fair share of injustices because of you now you'll face the full mind of the mechanist maybe we should talk about this the commonwealth has suffered foreign shut up already show me what you got no no no no dude you do not understand it'd be way cooler to have a big [ __ ] robot battle trust me well after the facility runs out of power bethesda hits us with the biggest plot twist that they could muster that the mechanist was the elusive woman all along like they wanted the face reveal to be significant but not so much so that they decided to rope in a recurring character or whatever i just like that i literally failed the speech check and this was the result don't you think it's time you ditched that mask you're right it's time i faced the true enemy of the commonwealth don't you think it's time you ditched that mask you are you're right right on thanks speech check for sake of experience gains anyways yeah you can choose to spare her and she'll become a merchant or kill her and she'll become a part of the ground you get the password to shut this place's security down and her suit of armor regardless so i went with sparing her because i wanted that sweet sweet radiant quest of hunting down more robots though let's be honest i'm sure you get that quest even if you do kill her overall the questing here is alright i mean not terrible but not amazing the first quest takes about five minutes including travel time the second takes 10 to 15 minutes the third takes 30 to an hour depending on how much you want to loot and the final quest takes about an hour also or more if you want to explore around but beyond the questing the actual selling point of the automotron dlc was supposed to be more about building robots which you can obviously do this is one of those things that's cool to do a couple of times and then becomes about as exciting as all the other modding in the game especially when it's just about as complex as tweaking your power armor i just love that despite this thing being built brand new from scratch with new paint and everything there's still that classic bethesda layer of dirt and rust on certain bits all in all the questing definitely surprised me and i'd say that five dollars is i don't know just a little less than fair for this dlc let's take a look at wasteland workshop [Music] now [Music] yeah this is a [ __ ] free update that they sold for five dollars it literally only adds more things to the settlement building stuff i do have to say though that absolutely nothing makes me feel less intelligent than building in this game no matter how hard i try to snap pieces together it always takes me like five tries or so per piece and it makes me hate this stuff even more but it gets better because the contraptions workshop dlc is the exact same [ __ ] thing but with different stuff uh hey mr howard uh we got those two free updates ready to put out people are gonna love getting these nice little changes for free of course they are wait two we're giving them the high resolution texture pack for free uh did we go through with the uh high resolution audio pack also oh uh well no i i meant the workshop stuff oh oh no oh well what do you mean mr hop no all right onward to our final piece of dlc before hitting the real stuff so the vault-tec workshop definitely has more substance than the previous two workshops since the bulk of this thing actually takes place in the abandoned vault 88 after scooping out some raiders a ghoulish overseer tells you to come in and free her from some rubble which has blocked her in after clearing out both the debris and the feral ghouls she explains that her vault was never able to come to fruition as the bombs fell before it was completed she's still driven to fulfill her duties but she was never able to after the cave-in trapped her and her colleagues here the stupidest part about all this [ __ ] is that she keeps claiming that she had no way at all to excavate the debris but there are these two massive construction machines just chilling down here either way we ignore the bethesda logic and help her to build her own little overseer's desk from here we're to explore this gigantic vault well it's not really a vault so much as a series of underground passages which mirror pretty much any other urban underground sequence in this game but the place is insanely huge you can basically go clear out and add large swaths of underground to the building space of the vault which is a neat concept but ultimately falls flat you see the fundamental issue with building in this game is that once you've done it for a while it feels like the same thing over and over for minimal payout beyond your own aesthetic desires for some people it's a great time sync but for myself and i believe i mentioned this in my first fallout 4 video i got over it in my first playthrough what this particular dlc needed more than ever was a complete overhaul for building i would have loved to have been able to use the overseer's terminal here to go into an isometric perspective and start placing things down and then exploring all of my creations in first person after unfortunately even though i was excited to build my own vault i quickly grew bored of trying to snap the puzzle pieces together in first person beyond this there are a couple of questing snippets to this dlc which are amusing the entire experiment with vault 88 seems to be to create the most efficient workspace possible basically taking stuff like routine exercise and drink breaks and enhancing them to create more productivity you have to interview some potential vault dwellers to ensure that they're good candidates to reside inside the vault you have to conduct some experiments like determining the best way for a dweller to remain motivated when using the power generating cycle to produce additional power for the vault i chose to inject my guy with buff out periodically to give him that rush then you have to go grab some notes on how to create various drugs from an outside facility which is business as usual and takes about 15 minutes then you got to create a soda fountain which you can spike with various drugs to further enhance productivity i chose caffeine just caffeine what it's good [ __ ] man bethesda didn't like the idea of creating something so ridiculous like fluid physics so i'll make my own hair the last two involved tweaking a set of optometry equipment and a slot machine with the optometry stuff i allowed the equipment to project whatever the subject was thinking about into the lens and with the slot machine i chose to make sure the subject loses all of their money through addiction thus making them indentured servants to the vault apparently my overseer methods are chaotic ultimately i can't help but feel that the potential is a hundred percent here i would have honestly loved this if the vault was already fully constructed from an outer wall shell kind of perspective and then you were able to add rooms and furniture and all that from there but when faced with the same kind of visuals i've seen for hours and hours in this game my enthusiasm kind of died pretty early on making it fall flat still i did enjoy the little experimentation to a degree and had a little bit of fun designing a small fraction of this gigantic space despite my imagination with this stuff being pretty lackluster overall i would say that this is the best bit of dlc that we've dealt with so far even though automatron's questing was about two to three times as long alright before we get to the real stuff let's jump over to our sponsor for this video atlas vpn so i've been using vpns for about three years now but i've been using them more ever since i moved to germany to be with my wife they're fantastic tools which help me to feel like i'm still browsing from the us or wherever i need to be when going about my daily activities an atlas in particular has made that endeavor the best that it can be i've been able to watch various series on netflix kept up with sports through hulu and re-watched the sopranos recently on hbo but that's just the tip of the iceberg with atlas so obviously atlas will encrypt your data to secure that sweet anonymous internet browsing that we all crave but it also has something called a data breach monitor which allows you to insert your email addresses into the tool to check if there have been any data breaches which may have caused your passwords to various websites to be compromised which yeah apparently i have some password resetting to do but breach data aside atlas is also supported on any modern device and comes with a 30-day back guarantee if you don't like it or if money suddenly becomes tight if this all sounds like something you can get behind feel free to check out the link in the description of the video to get your hands on some slick vpn action currently atlas is running a pretty massive discount on their 3 year deal which comes out to 139 a month with that previously mentioned 30 day money back guarantee the deal won't be around for too much longer so feel free to check it out with my link thanks guys all right let's get down to business so we've got our choice between nuka land and distant harbor i've already heard rumors between you guys telling me and just general internet reading that far harbor tends to be one of the only redeeming things about fallout 4 in a lot of people's eyes and nuka world seems to be ridiculously hit or miss depending on the person i don't think i've read a single opinion on it that didn't end up with the person loving it or hating it adamantly so let's start out with nuka and see where i wind up placing my two cents oh you kids remember nuka world is only open for a few more weeks in october yeah alright this one's gonna be weird so nuka world starts with a mix of emotions from me you head up to this monorail that leads to the park and take out some raiders outside of it and then you head inside and find a man wounded on the ground he gives you a sob story about the park being overrun by raiders and insists that you help his family escape when you try to give him a stim pack and pass a charisma check he explains that he isn't really injured and that the raiders are making him lure people to the park which i mean if someone made it this far chances are they intended to go to the park anyways but whatever when you get the truth from the guy he says that he's done doing the raiders dirty work and gives you the monorail control password so that you can get to the park easier i thought that this was a really neat way to possibly bypass going the long way on foot but it turns out that i was bamboozled as always because what i thought was a really cool reward for passing a charisma check turns out to be [ __ ] when i reload and ignore the charisma check the guy continues on the charade of pleading with you to save his family and then gives you the terminal password anyways so i blast him out of frustration and then a voice comes through the intercom from one of the raiders hailing you as a ruthless individual who would fit right in at the park now that i like but i also need to know what happens if i enter the park under that pretense or the one where i leave the guy alive but if you somehow make it through a lot i'll give you the details on my offer but if you somehow make it through alive i have an interesting offer for you yeah that doesn't surprise me in the slightest oh well i guess i'll run with the one where i blew old harv away i do like the concept of this place it's basically a disney world theme park dedicated to nuka-cola with all the showmanship and frills that you would expect from that kind of attraction but before we actually get into the park we gotta run through this gauntlet that the kind man from the intercom told us about before this is actually pretty cool just because even though it's more or less an advanced raider area it's got a lot of flair from the announcer who screams over the intercom like a game show host the gauntlet has me running through trap room after trap room with some more clever than others it's pretty damn cool in its own right and it's a great introduction to the ruthlessness of this dlc when we finally make it to the end of this event we have to face down the boss of this gym in a one-on-one death match he makes it very clear that the suit that he's wearing is going to allow him to win no matter what which is only reinforced by the intercom guy who told me that i would fit in at nuka world apparently the suit makes him invincible but the intercom guy wants me to win so he gives me a super soaker to short circuit him with sick [Applause] now unfortunately this kind of trivializes the fight i mean yeah sure fallout 4 combat but they could have still made the guy move or given him some kind of phases that were attached to every time i short-circuited him or something granted short-circuiting him would have had to last longer than three seconds but still it's an easy fight well after i win i become the boss of nuka world which is kind of [ __ ] cool at least it sounds cool the guy who arranged all of this to happen named gage fills me in that the previous boss had pitted the three raider clans here against each other and that if tensions got any worse we'd have a bloodbath on our hands as the new overboss i need to try to prevent all of that if i can to which gage has me meeting him over at the 5 star restaurant here in nuka world which is apparently my new headquarters when i step outside i'm greeted with well nuka world there's this malfunctioning ass robot which tells me that i can collect park medallions from six different attractions for a reward then there's this guy you a sheep or a wolf because the pack only runs with wolves whoa dude and you've got a lady who somehow made it into this park unmolested by the vicious raiders and is just meandering about as a tourist she wants to try and find the 10 hidden images of the nuka-cola mascot cappy to try and win a contest that was going on before the bombs fell in order to hopefully nab the nuka-cola secret formula so yeah the main thing here is still trying to appease and unite the raider clans apparently the previous overboss got a bit lazy when it came to this front and the goal of fortifying nuka world to become an impenetrable bunker became a distant dream until now so i head off and begin the consultation process we begin with the disciples if there's one thing that i've noticed it's that many of the raiders here have dialogues regarding the player character as the new boss and pointing out that they don't trust me which is kind of silly when i'm a foot away from them but not surprising given the game anyways this is nisha she's just like all of my other favorite female game characters except those ones make sense as far as not seeing out of their hoods goes so unless she's blind i don't get this helmet at all anyways nisha and her disciples are pretty much all cutthroats who move in the shadows as far as rules go they only care about keeping the peace meaning that as long as they don't get caught doing things that would piss others off everything is fair game nisha has little respect for you which i'm betting is going to be mirrored by the other clans here soon but she doesn't mind you being the overboss if you can keep the peace she also wants me to go color a raider as a potential recruit into her disciples which i'll do after i meet the other two clans the second group we run into here is the operators these guys are definitely a bit more dressed up and fashion forward their entire motivation is as cut and dry as caps they want money and that's a very easy goal to deal with compared to the disciples these guys are ran by a brother and sister duo of which the latter gives me a quest to wait hold on [ __ ] yeah these are radiant quests that i'm getting and not specific to the clans that i'm meeting with well [ __ ] never mind then i'd give the game the benefit of the doubt and try out these quests but let's be painfully honest here these are going to be go here and do this quests with little substance and i've had enough of that in bethesda games it is worth noting here before i head out that these guys were testing out a drug that forced people to obey the operators when a command was given which is a pretty interesting read on this terminal apparently it only wound up working on farmer settler types something about the environment that they were living in maybe that'll come into play later it doesn't so the final group is the pack with the disciples you had blood and gourd decorating the place with totemic imagery and the like with the operators you had more of a classical upscale almost rockabilly in a way aesthetic and with the pack you've got just [ __ ] animals and chaos running about i go to talk to their boss and i can barely hear over the animals that are fighting in a cage match behind us which is annoying you gonna be a problem i need to solve slow down their boss these guys seem to be after caps also but they also tend to have a lot more of an aggressive animalistic attitude you know the whole alpha male kind of vibe their boss is also capable of being intimidated which is a nice change from the last two that i dealt with i don't quite understand why this guy has a perfectly cut fade and groomed mustache but i guess it complements his face paint well or something alright now that the gangs are talked to let's take the time to hammer out the side quests before moving down the main quest line so first things first let's collect those hidden images so i can take these stupid glasses off and wear the stupid robot helmet instead so the first place i wind up that strays from the starting area is a place called kitty kingdom this is a radiation filled nightmare zone of ghouls and well radiation there's also a guy who sounds like he's a ghoul who taunts me with nursery rhymes and the like while telling me that i'm going to die here i wind up splunking through the place looking for him first i run through the fun house which is filled with stuff like amir maze hypno tunnels a spinning room and the like i [ __ ] i think i might really like this dlc this stuff is so well done and the environment here really is the only thing that fallout 4 can do well without a complete overhaul to various systems like without tweaking dialogue or polishing combat or working over the physics systems the two best things that you can add to this game are amazing new environments and an actually good story and while the story isn't super compelling by any means yet exploring a pretty sizable theme park is a hundred percent a huge leap in the correct direction i just hope the devs don't shoot themselves in the foot here so after the fun house comes the tunnels where we sneak up on the ghoul who's been taunting us he's talking to another feral ghoul about his lack of face paint while explaining that they need to be painted to better scare off people while one of their own people go look for a cure to their ghoulification that's actually one of the better side stories in this game so far and even though the guy poofs away when i get close the logs left behind details the process that these people went through as their bodies and minds started to decay eventually we wind up confronting the taunting ghoul named oswald who claims that he just wants to help his people protect their home here he tells you that his significant other left to find a cure years ago but hasn't returned yet i convinced him to leave with a speech check in the hopes of finding and helping a significant other and then that's it overall it's not a bad quest the environment is amazing the ghoul fights got pretty damn tough and the irradiation was killer at times i just wish the speech at the end was written a little better i mean the guy goes on and on about how he'll protect his home and that his significant other will return with a cure and my guy's just like yeah well what if you went and helped her and he's like huh that's a good idea ah that's it okay cool good luck i guess he just seemed like he had a big investment in this place so next up is the world of refreshment which seems to have a world of coca-cola slash willy wonka vibe to it the whole facility is a little boat ride which markets the nuka-cola products to the customers and tells the story of how the company got to be where it's at or where it was rather the enemy here is mirelurks or nuke alerts rather which kind of spells out how this whole dlc is situated after we just got done with ghoul land after clearing the place out and looting all of its nuka-cola goodness i head outside to find a nuclear queen of course along with all of her bodyguards my [ __ ] god this whole battle had me chugging quantum and running out of nearly every ammo type it might have been one of the tougher fights in the whole game and while it was frustrating it did feel satisfying to finally clear the place out so after retreating back to the commonwealth for some much needed restocking repairing and upgrading we stumble into the next area of this park galactic zone this is definitely the first part of this dlc that i can declare as outright ass don't get me wrong the theme is cool as always it's a spacey kind of area that showcases stuff like robot fights vault-tec displays and generally futuristic stuff meant to impress kiddos now with that said the enemy flavor here is robots that would be annoying enough with these eyebots and protectrons and assaultrons but it's a whole other can of worms when part after part of this area suddenly springs five [ __ ] turrets on you at once my armor got destroyed my healing supplies got drained and it's like so what this is just a harder part of the dlc right well yes but it's also got one of the worst quest types in any type of game collect all the things in this area it was annoying enough dealing with the 10 cappy signs but i was willing to accept that it's a lot more annoying to nab 35 [ __ ] star cores in order to get this place working again i mean 35 if you want the super cool power armor and 20 if you just want to get the place running still this is the pit steel ingots all over again and i hate it i don't understand how you build this super cool area and then go i don't know just make them collect [ __ ] in it i mean couldn't you have had two factions of robots trying to vie for power here the refreshment bots versus the battlebots the battlebots have an advantage in weaponry the refreshment bots and numbers whoever you help to win nets you different rewards and affects the park differently i don't know something like that just seems easy enough to me and instead we got well probably the laziest quest design there is all of that said 20 isn't horrible it's just annoying as all i've been over scavenger hunts since ubisoft games and maybe that's just a personal preference i will say that to this section's credits it does have some pretty accurate level layouts for all of this technical [ __ ] that and knowing what the reward is for collecting the other 15 star cores is a huge plus to determine whether i want it or not which yeah i kind of do but the rest of the ones that i didn't grab are in other parts of the park so let's continue on with our primary objective of collecting all of these stupid little cappy images our second to last stop is dry rock gulch as you would expect it's western cowboy yeehaw themed god i hope prim slim pulled himself over here for some reason ready to saddle up and ride into the old wild west i do not accept this [ __ ] phony anyways dry rock gulch is easily the quickest escapade so far for some reason to get into the main ride here kids were forced to explore the town and help three friends of the sheriff to get the key to it which is a system that doesn't really work with hundreds of kids running around but whatever i do that in about 10 minutes and then head into the ride the main enemy here is a couple of different bugs consisting of big ass ants big ass crickets and big ass worms they're all actually unique to this dlc which is a pretty nice touch after the former enemies all seem to be just reskinned after about 10 minutes or so i wind up taking out the bloodworm queen to wrap up this little quest nicely it's a weak area but it's not annoying by any means alright and finally we've got our last place here on the cappy image list in the form of the safari adventure this place is a zoo area with some of these saddest and smallest looking areas for animals that i've ever seen which seems about right for nuka world right off the bat the enemy of the area makes itself known in the form of these gator claws which are pretty cool much like the new galax picking off the first one has us interacting with call drogo right after who wants us to stop the source of the gator claw infestation the caveman takes us back to his family of gorillas before giving me a tape that he received from a ghoul a while back the tape reveals that they were creating these gator claws at a cloning facility here in this part of the park as a means of trained protection and that the facility is now out of control because it turns out that merging dangerous animals together doesn't work out so well so together with drogo and his gorilla friend chris we head out to shut down this facility this takes about 10 minutes and then another 10 or 15 to track down and kill the rest of the gator claws here overall a cool area aesthetically but it follows in the footsteps of the last area in terms of actual things to do so now with our cappy image collection complete we head back to the lady who gave me this mission after entering the code and making it into the creator of nuka-cola's office i start looking around for clues so a couple of things first off nuka-cola actually contributed to the us military by creating new weapons for the war in exchange for the ceo of the company participating in a new experimental immortality program secondly the results of this weapon program brought about the creation of nuka-cola quantum which is the irradiated blue drink that glows in the dark thirdly a few of nuka-cola's offshoot flavors like cherry and grape were really just rebranded drinks which have been acquired by the company and finally the ceo is still alive down here in the hidden basement area of this office his head has been futuramed into a jar which is being powered by tons of machinery when we get down to him he pleads for me to kill him well old sierra has another idea this bad [ __ ] crazy broad wants me to keep him alive so that she can talk to him for the rest of her life since she's nuka-cola's biggest fan and by extension his biggest fan the ceo offers me a nuka nuke launcher prototype in addition to whatever else is in the vault behind him and sierra offers me a [ __ ] jumpsuit i mean the stats are decent but one-piece suits are hardly ever worth it in this game just due to being outpaced by individual equipment so i pulled a plug on the ceo and sierra gets pissed at me for not letting me torment him for the rest of her life before concluding that she was being selfish all in all i actually liked meeting the ceo and learning more about the dirty secrets behind nuka-cola but finding these images could be a bit annoying at times still the whole process gave me a tour of the rest of the park so i guess i don't mind all that much so where does that leave us well i still gotta get back to gage but there's one more quest that i haven't touched on that isn't part of the main quest chain well besides collecting a bunch of medallions i kind of gave up on that one since i looked up the reward and found out that it's just three bottles of nuka-cola but yeah earlier on i was told by one of the raiders here that there's a group of crazies known as the hubologists down in one of the corners of the park so let's go pay them a visit and see what they're about well on my way over to the general location i meet this guy named cleansed apparently my character canonically just knows people's names by looking at them because this guy asks me if i'm truly happy without introducing himself and one of my options are why the hell is your name cleansed uh ahs9 is that some sort of code that is her rank in the great wheel of herbology i am but an ahs six yep these guys are scientologists i'm actually kind of surprised that bethesda decided to go through with bringing over the hubologists from fallout 2. it just seemed like something they might nix due to potential legal troubles with how aggressive scientologists can be when faced with criticism so yeah i'd continue to try to come up with jabs at scientology but that's almost verbatim what hubologists are even playing off of elrond hubbard's name or charging you more money every time you want to advance your ahs level so these guys want me to retrieve five fake space suits from the animatronics and galactic zone so that they can protect themselves from the robots and get to the ufo kids ride in the junkyard i clear out the bots fix up the ride and head back to their leader before the game breaks and no one follows her to the spaceship ride so i spin her around for three and a half days in the ride well not really i can definitely tell that my character is the one who's spinning but whatever somehow the others wind up in here too and then afterwards i can't spin the thing again despite the game telling me to [ __ ] i hadn't been making regular saves so i would have had to do all of it again to get the results but um my last manual save was at the start of safari adventure because apparently i trust jesus won't smite my pc with a blue screen or something so i had to advance the stages manually with the console when i put it through the first stage dara wouldn't talk to me when i put it through the next bit their [ __ ] heads explode so what happened here was that there were two outcomes you could either put the required three fusion cores into the ride or you can put four if you put four the exploding heads thing happens i would have loved to have seen that apparently this bug is relatively common on the pc and xbox versions of the game at least if you start the ride without the other hub people being in it also when i was trying to get my ahs up earlier by paying tons of caps to get irradiated over and over there was a point where the guy just froze and wouldn't move and i was stuck in the chair so yeah it's a funny little side quest but [ __ ] it's buggy i'll say one more thing about this whole ordeal eventually through reloading i did manage to get my ahs level up with each time costing more and more caps so after about 20 000 caps or so i thought i had paid for nothing which makes sense it's [ __ ] scientology but then i looked at my special stats and well [Music] incredible yeah that's [ __ ] awesome though also completely temporary and i get a debuff later which is hilarious incredible so after all of this is done i check out the marketplace here in nuka world which is filled with traders who have explosive collars around their necks one of them pulls me aside and claims that i could take the good guy route here and simply kill off the boss of each family of raiders which seems like it would cut the dlc awfully short if i were to simply do that right away which that's exactly what it does it just ends the dlc wonderful but whatever for now let's finally go back to meet up with gage so gage fills us in that we have to do everything that we just did in all of the park sections but with the caveat that after each one is cleared out we give the territory to one of the gangs this means that if i try to split things evenly one of the gangs is gonna get less which means that i'll probably wind up fighting one or two of the gangs depending on how i split things knowing bethesda so we set off to dole out some territory i gave safari adventure to the pack obviously i gave dry rock gulch to the operators and i gave kitty kingdom to the creepy [ __ ] over at the disciples i respect the disciples the least because they're edgelord weirdos who have made it clear that they have zero respect for me as a person so i wound up giving galactic to the pack and world of refreshment to the operators i do see that most of this place was planned around clearing the respective zones one at a time after getting this assignment which is pretty neat after all is said and done gage decides that it's time to get nuka world powered up and ready to invade the commonwealth which is an interesting scenario i wonder if i could send out droves of raiders to [ __ ] up various commonwealth targets or if it's just kind of wistful thinking from old gage here either way we're to meet up with a guy named shank to discuss the next move so this is where things get interesting i can do nearly exactly what i just wondered about not only can i [ __ ] up my own territories and turn them into raider outposts i can also clear out other settler targets which i hadn't interacted with either by force or by smooth talking i opt for the latter because there's a reason why i've nearly maxed out my charisma but after clearing the first one out and giving it to the pack the most important event in the game happens the feeling is mutual use spineless wannabe colonial [ __ ] stick looks like that settlement doesn't need our help after all actually the mechanics behind raider settlements are pretty different from your average settler claimed territory so for example the raiders don't like to work so if you set up farms and force them to their happiness is going to deteriorate instead the optimal way to feed them is to load up their workshop with food additionally they require some form of entertainment which is provided with various raider-centric commodities and finally the key difference here is how the raiders get their supplies normally settlers can be sent to go trade with other settlements with raiders they actually intimidate surrounding settlements into giving up the goods which is awesome plus they tend to send tribute your way at nuka world all in all i'd say it's a pretty decent transformation of the notorious settlement system the entire process basically goes like this head to the settlement clear it out defend it from raiders who didn't like us encroaching on their turf and then make the settlement happy unfortunately these phases all require round trips to shank in nuka world which means loading the commonwealth loading the settlement and then loading nuka world every time i need to move surprisingly bethesda thought of this too as shane can move to one of your raider settlements to prevent the extra loading steps i wouldn't say this kind of foresight is typically impressive but it kind of is when you think about how adamant the devs have been with many of their decisions regarding little things like these well after clearing out two more additional settlements surprise surprise the disciples turn on us because let's face it having two territories with one of them being in the commonwealth isn't a much better situation than before i arrived i mean jesus if you gave me a little more time i probably would have had a third outpost for the disciples and everyone would have been even i mean let's think about this each gang told me what they were after but this all comes down to you didn't give us as much territory yet which is classic bethesda i just would have rather have this been an optional event i guess like if i was intentionally giving all of the land to one gang or completely cutting out another then yeah sure i'm asking for it but the devs wanted their conflict for the final mission of nuka world so this is what we got i'd have honestly just rather the other finale been wiping out the minutemen as a united gang of three separate raider groups but alas here we are so we head over to where nisha is wreaking havoc and meet up with the bosses from the other gangs we all charge in and the jet pack proves to be as broken as it's always been for bypassing most of this maze of enemies eventually we head up to the roof and i have a heart to heart with gage who wants to tell me his story about betraying the previous overboss while explaining that he would never do that to me this heartfelt conversation is interrupted rudely by enemy gunfire so we take out nisha once and for all i still don't know what she was gonna do here maybe just blow the place up because that's a reasonable alternative after being slighted one whole territory after this i grab the key from her body and fire up nuka world's power which is uh underwhelming but still neat and that's it for the nuka world dlc of course you can continue converting settlements and tending to your raiders you can also revisit parts of the park that are lit up now but the thing that i care about the most is that i can finally get this armor and i love it i mean uh it's [ __ ] awful and what a shitty reward and i hate collecting things nah i still think that galactic zone was squandered but i do appreciate the new gear regardless okay where do we stand well on the khan's side nuka world has the same amount of compelling writing as the rest of the vanilla game that is to say not much i mean to be fair bethesda gave themselves an out here by making nearly all of the characters raiders so they gave them about as much of a personality as any other raider of the game but really that's not an excuse i learned [ __ ] all about any of the leaders there's no interesting cool side quest in which i explore the depth of these gang leaders and really get to understand them but i've played this game for almost 200 hours now i know better it's not an excuse for poor writing i'm just used to it obviously most of the quest structure at its core is the same kind of quest that we normally get in the base game there's nothing revolutionary here and finally and probably most importantly there really is no reasonable good guy side beyond gimping the entire dlc by killing off the raider leaders i looked this up and it really does just end the dlc questing there's no minutemen excursion afterwards in which we build a whole new park with the good guys it's just cool they're dead yay now let's move over to the pros the setting is phenomenal i'm not gonna lie it wasn't half-assed and i really appreciate just the architecture of this place it feels [ __ ] accurate which is impressive from a technical perspective the actual zones are separate little adventures for you to explore about each with their own takes on the music in the game and the visuals which suit the zone the new armor weapons and enemies are all very welcome and add new flavor to the game honestly i'd give nuka world a solid 7 out of 10 which is pretty damn good for this game but i've looked at the reviews and it's so mixed which is crazy to me like let's look at some steam reviews alone which still straddle the 50 line to this day most of them are pissed off that preston doesn't like you anymore from what i can tell which is a positive for me so i kind of get it a lot of people just hated that they had to play the bad guy which is kind of fascinating to me because i also play the good guy more often than not but i'm not looking at this dlc and hating it because of this i'm honestly more impressed that it's a bad guy centric dlc just because the worst faction that you can join in the base game is the brotherhood or the institute which yeah they aren't great people but they aren't crazy evil like the raiders are let's look at one of these reviews enormous world to explore cool gun you can ride a roller coaster uh alright those are certainly positives what about the negatives okay the story sucks you have to be a raider and there is only one settlement you can build which is not even the park what are people going into this and thinking that bethesda suddenly knows how to write a compelling story with engaging quests in 2016 the only reason that i can honestly think of for this dlc being this scrutinized is that far harbor must have been really really good and really rocketed expectations to the top i don't really know yet because i haven't played it but that's gotta be it right no one can be expecting more from the devs after the base game i don't know i think i'll swing back to this thought after running through far harbor so to kick off far harbor we have to listen to a radio signal from valentine's detective agents ah [ __ ] i never did side quests and partner quests in this game uh all right let me ask you guys this are there side quests and partner quests in this game that are actually worth doing are any partners interesting beyond nick i remember liking strong too when i played the first time but i never really looked at that part of the game be honest am i missing out or am i good on skipping it either way for now dlc so nick and i head over to the detective agency to get details on the case the assistant tells us that she got minimal information from the client but that it sounded like a kidnapping case so we head out northeast here to the home of the missing person one kasumi nakano well kasumi's parents seem to disagree about her disappearance the father claims that she was kidnapped the mother claims that she ran away on her own apparently kasumi's grandfather died recently and he was the one who taught her how to tinker with machinery she seems to be a skilled craftsman building and scrapping random machines well recently she built a radio and disappeared soon after so i head off to the boathouse here to find more evidence as it was the place that she was spending most of her time after her grandfather died well after cracking the safe it seems that there's a log from kasumi detailing her contact with a group of synths from a place known as far harbor after asking these synths some questions they begin asking some questions of their own and she fell into a state of self-questioning it got so bad that she began to suspect that she was a synth and she wound up not quite understanding who or what she was after reporting back to kasumi's parents they both seem pretty adamant though also a little defensive about me questioning their daughter's humanity which i guess kind of makes sense when i tell kasumi's father where she went he urges me to go after her while insisting that i take his other boat so far it's a pretty decent start there's definitely a bit of intrigue but we'll see how this develops so we pull into far harbor and already i'm loving the visuals it reminds me a bit of point lookout but more bostony when we jump off the boat some hot head pulls a gun on us immediately before being talked down by an older woman she apologizes and claims that tensions are high in this neck of the woods when i ask her about kasumi she claims that she saw the girl wandered through the area but we get interrupted by an attack on the town before she can finish giving me the details the old lady then claims that she'll tell me everything if i help stave off the attack so there are these fog beacon things and they kind of suck up fog and swirl around when certain enemies get close these enemies are these monstrous amphibious deep sea looking things known as gulpers and anglers they are [ __ ] cool looking though it was also kind of hard to get a proper look at them at night after the fight the old lady tells us that there are even more dangerous creatures in something known as the deep fog which is a terrible irradiated swath of fog that's covering parts of the island she also notes that kasumi went off to the synth settlement of acadia and that we can hire on a guide here by the name of longfellow but the most intriguing bite of info here beyond the deep fog stuff is that the fog itself has been known to recede and advance when it advances people retreat into different parts of the island with the sea of fog creating even smaller islands of civilization well turns out that the children of adam arrived not too long ago which are the nut jobs who worship radiation and pray for it to cover the entire world and soon after their arrival the fog happened to get the worst that it's ever been the hot head from before remarks on this stating that the children need to be wiped out in order to get rid of the fog the old lady disagrees claiming that there's no direct proof of the children being the reason for the fog's rumbling advance i'm loving this setup so far the deep fog stuff is fascinating and it gives me that vibe of kenshi's fog lands mixed with stalker and the idea that there seems to be three established groups of people with different ideals and desires makes me think that there's a fighting chance at a decent story here but i've been let down before so let's start out by grabbing all of these side quests that we can muster these don't have the most interesting premises like you got this lady who's like oh i'm the last dalton and my family used to be the best but then they all died to the island want to kill some ghouls to avenge my family uh no but [ __ ] it fine and then the other one goes i need tools cool uh yeah sure i'll get those i guess christ the whole endeavor for both of these quests are about as simple as they come taking me about 12 minutes for the entire trip with some exploration included but i think that these quests are probably more to get the player exploring the island the island itself is a foggy hell as you might expect but it's pretty eerie to explore regardless nothing crazy yet just ghouls super mutants rad stags and a raider gang known as trappers i will say that this ak that i picked up in nuka world is [ __ ] amazing i fully kitted it out and the damage on it is ridiculous like holy [ __ ] anyways we turn in the quests and the crazy lady who wants her family avenge continues to rattle off vaguely threatening sounding scenarios we all love our grandparents don't we kind gentle doting love to spoil ya you'd never want something awful to happen to them nobody would so yeah she wants me to avenge her grandpappy got killed off by something known as a fog crawler which sounds like a mirelurk from the way that she describes it let's check it out well i didn't get a good look at it before it went down but holy [ __ ] this thing is a nightmare it's like a mantis shrimp mixed with something good god i'm so glad i didn't have this thing sneak up on me i'd have shat my respective pants so the final bit of this vengeance quest is killing off a trapper who killed the lady's husband this is located way south on the map which is quite the hike now initially when i ventured out to get tools and the like i thought to myself ah this fog isn't so bad no big deal at all well that wasn't the deep fog the deep fog is [ __ ] scary like i didn't even run into too many creatures out here but holy [ __ ] was i pressing my vats key nearly every moment that i could to make sure that nothing snuck up on me i was almost always on edge which means that this environment is done exceptionally well now that said there was one particular creature that i noticed when i got to the island where this trapper was supposed to be and it threw me off for a moment because i didn't know what to make of it it was an empty bus but it was registering as a hermit crab dude this [ __ ] mimic of a creature was just chilling in this bus and my god i'm so glad that i was smashing that bats button as often as i was this place is [ __ ] great man eventually we take out the trapper troop and head back to the crazy lady so that she can give me a pat on the back for my efforts our next side quest involves me doing something known as the captain's dance basically back in the day in order to put food on the table and prove that you were the best captain around or whatever various people would run out to a hazardous bit of the island and try to kill something that's particularly dangerous this doctor here claims that people would open up to me and accept me more if i perform that ritual so i have to go take out a group of mirelurks and their queen to get these people to show a little god damn faith this doesn't take too long and sure enough i get access to more side quests after this it's actually kind of refreshing i mentioned this issue with the witcher but i really don't like getting 40 side quests piled on me when i hit a new area or dlc i'd much rather work through them in phases sure it limits getting to the good stuff immediately but i just like the laddering system of working my way towards those more advanced quests a chunk at a time that said most fallout 4 side quests don't seem to be very special or great so in this case it's just more manageable to take on a bit at a time so the next three quests are also pretty straightforward i need to check on a guy's uncle and bring him back to far harbor fix up these whirly fog condensers from before that lead to the water supply and clear out some land for some of the harbor to move inland these are all easy enough though my game does hate the amount of fog here and crashes once which kind of sucked it's worth noting that there are actually quite a few new settlement spots if you give a [ __ ] about that i don't but they do exist so that's it for side quests for now let's figure out this acadia mystery and i guess go find the girl who ran away i guess so we recruit this long fellow guy to tour guide us to the synth hq his entire speech on the way up can be chalked up to one sentiment you best start believing in ghost stories miss turner you're in one on our way up we meet a member of the children of adam she spouts off about this being adam's holy land or some such nonsense before you can choose to sign on with them or not i see no reason at all besides for role play purposes to join these [ __ ] goofballs or i guess to do their side quests but for now i politely tell her to [ __ ] off before we make it to acadia so i was expecting something more i don't know i guess clean but the first glimpse of acadia is a darkened room lit up primarily by small monitors of light before my big ass headlamp shines a hole into the place standing in the middle is a single synth one that looks remarkably like our buddy nick now i'll mention that just on the outside of this place the guy who escorted us up offered to join me i took gage with me partway through nuka world because i thought he'd offer more insight into the way that raiders work and i was glad that i did but i hesitated with longfellow because i thought that nick would have some kind of interaction here with the synth hideout i'm extremely glad that i did because this new synth recognizes nick he calls him his brother claiming that they were the only two synths that were built the way that they were nick doesn't remember him but this guy doesn't care if he does or not he's just glad that nick is safe apparently with him they allowed him to experience and learn things for himself whereas with nick they forced the real nick's memories into this being this is an awesome development though i'm really questioning the decision to allow longfellow to be your partner right outside of a place that has such a key interaction with nick so the good news is that kasumi is here and safe the bad news well there isn't much really but i guess there is some troubling news dima here tells us that kasumi is in the process of figuring out if she's a human or synth and he turns the spotlight on our character by asking him what his earliest memory is now i expected to get the option to maybe say something like i grew up with my family before fighting in a war and then i got frozen but literally the earliest memory that this guy can come up with is i got frozen with my family which does not bode well for our guy being human well after this brief glimpse into the idea of being a synth the whole time which you think we would have found out from the institute we get the opportunity to delve into some more side quests you see dima escaped to far harbor a century ago and eventually decided to build a safe space for since while the place isn't a bustling society of them it does have a handful to talk to such as chase and faraday faraday explains that acadia invented the fog condensers and spread them to far harbor to help them out which is interesting because i hadn't heard that from anyone over at the harbor but he then explains that acadia ordered a shipment of storage drives a while back before the shipment boat crashed into the island he wants me to retrieve those of course so that's my first task chase on the other hand is a bit more interesting in that she was a courser for the institute before dima convinced her to turn on them she's in charge of security and getting new synths safely to acadia so basically these guys are a better railroad in nearly every capacity these guys probably should have been the railroad damn well whatever so basically her quest involves me needing to track down a synth who was supposed to be making his way here but hasn't yet there's a synth named brooks residing in far harbor who's been tasked with ensuring their safe passage to acadia and i'm to talk to him to figure out where this missing synth may be if he resists my questioning i'm to tell him what his designation code is to convince him which makes so little sense so this brooks guy is supposed to be wary of a stranger asking him about escaped synths right i mean it makes sense i could be with the institute but if i am with the institute wouldn't i know the designation code for literally every synth there especially one that i'm tracking down how does me telling him what his designation code is convince him well whatever i'm still enjoying most of these developments immensely and no bethesda faux pas is gonna keep me down well ah you know what just pretend i didn't say that so we head off to talk to this co-carnage looking [ __ ] to give him his designation code and he of course immediately speaks up about the missing synth now unfortunately the guy was scared out of his mind and ran off into the fog but fortunately i've got my lobotomy markers to tell me exactly where he went so we find a trail of blood which leads to a trapper hideout i try to speech check the guy at the front but unfortunately the fog had taken my head and most of my armor so he doesn't believe me when i reload the fog has blessed me with my head and armor so he believes me unfortunately it seems that our guy was eaten by the trappers or at least most of him was as i'm headed the synth's head for my troubles well [ __ ] the storage drives on the other hand are safe i mean they've definitely been chilling in some water but the guy did at least say that he could use the parts so we nab those and haul our treasures back to acadia after this we start meeting the other synths around the place most of them seem to be bored as hell which i honestly can't blame them for i mean for as pretty of a name that acadia is this place is pretty much a [ __ ] there is one more side quest that i can scrounge up for now though which comes from this d-gen and involves the tracking down of a courser who was hot on chase's ass apparently taking him out is no issue at all but i find the aftermath kind of funny i mean first of all the guy is like oh thank god that would have been bad if he found us or reported our location which i mean again coursers can just teleport to the institute wouldn't he have told them hey i think this lady went to far harbor and is hiding a bunch of synths and second of all the guy i reported back to goes i don't trust you you need to leave you're making things more dangerous for us by being here right after i presumably saved their asses all right then so now things get spicy so i head down and talk to with kazumi finally she explains that she knows that she's a synth the dialogue options in fallout 4 rear their ugly heads again as one of the options prompts me to ask her if she has proof that she's a synth whereas two of the other speech options have me convincing her that leaving her parents wasn't right even if she is a synth now i chose the latter here because hey speech option and now i don't know if kazumi has proof of being a synth or not but whatever that's not even the juicy part what kazumi tells me next is that she got into dima's computer system and saw diagrams and the like for the fog which has been ravaging far harbor along with what looked to be death projections across the entire island she suspects that dima might be planning on wiping out all life here that maybe he created the fog furthermore she knows that chase faraday and dima have all been having secret meetings together and that they never seem to look happy when they leave them now mind you dima has been one of the nicest and most soothing characters in this entire game he has a very calm demeanor he's very intelligent and very welcoming i like him a lot and i really can't see him secretly being some murderous maniac so to get to the bottom of this time to either talk to dima directly hack into faraday's terminal or eavesdrop on the trio's conversations i decided to go with all three i started with hacking the terminal and then on a new save i eavesdropped on them and the resulting information is nearly word for word the same so basically demo was initially found by a leader of the children of adam and an old submarine base on the island the leader treated demon nicely with respect eventually dima left after storing tons of his memories onto the old drives at this submarine base figuring that he wouldn't need them anymore and that he would be working with his new friends at the children of adam for a long while well eventually that leader was replaced by a much crazier one one that was aggressive towards the people of far harbor he began threatening acadia to help the children wipe out far harbor and claim that they would march on acadia themselves if they didn't help no one knows what data is on the drives but they figured that it would definitely not be good if the children bypass the pre-war security to get to it so dima's still a good egg he wants to see people live human or not and he hates being forced into this situation by a group that he regarded as allies up until now after speaking with dima he's surprised but not upset by my sleuthing he decides to send us in to infiltrate the children of adam as a new initiate meaning that i'll get to do those side quests regardless i enjoyed this development quite a bit it kind of mirrors the whole working for the railroad thing while pretending to be a part of the institute but the different sides here are a lot more compelling well i mean acadia is and far harbor's a pretty cool group of people also but the children of adam are still nut jobs so we head off to the submarine base which has now been dubbed the nucleus by adam's followers the guy out front explains that if we're trying to prove ourselves worthy of joining them then we must go drink from a highly irradiated spring of water and report back well doing so has us seeing all sorts of visions of irradiated monsters while following a shadowy figure to a shrine to atom this whole sequence seems familiar but i can't quite put my finger on it well at the end of the ride we acquire some figurine of a woman before hauling it back to the children i don't know if someone replaces that thing every time or what but this guy seems impressed and amazed by it so maybe it's one of a kind he claims that we were led around by the mother of the fog or some such nonsense before allowing us to successfully infiltrate the nucleus so as expected and as always these guys are [ __ ] nut jobs this place is cool though i like how it's almost cathedral-like in a twisted way there's a light chanting in the background while various members of this cult fall to their knees and praise adam the leader preaches the word of adam claiming that far harbor must be destroyed that the condensers surrounding him must be dismantled after he's done with his sermon i can talk to him and immediately gain access to dima's memories despite having only just arrived i think that the justification for this immediate trust is that nearly all of the side quests here involve you doing something heinous towards other people hunting down and executing a former member of the children getting someone to confess that they're plotting against the children and then reporting it back to the high confessor and fixing the decontamination device that normally gets rid of radiation near the start of the nucleus only to reverse it and have it spray irradiation directly into people's mouths so as little sense as it might make for these people to trust me immediately it does make more sense for someone wanting to play a character who may not want to do these things plus they gave the player a bit of an out with the whole mother of the fog business as everyone seems super impressed by it but then again all of that said there is a good path in nearly all of these quests you can hunt down the outcast and then convince them to leave the island you can hide the betrayal of the person who's plotting against the high confessor you can even tinker with the decontamination pump so that it actually decontaminates instead of irradiating people so i don't know it feels like maybe a couple of these quests should have been mandatory before getting access to dima's memories i am adam's messenger and i have come to free you from your shackles alright so let's bust into this pre-war security and get this show on the road [Music] okay so this next part is [ __ ] nuts you're basically infiltrating dimas data cache but in a very literal sense everything is this futuristic cyber flavored mesh of blues reds and greens and it reminds me a bit of ghost runner or rather i guess ghost runner reminds me of it i'm tasked with this memory retrieving minigame which uses these settlement building mechanics in a clever way first i must build a bridge and knock down these barriers for these little data retrieval bugs to do their thing then i gotta defend them it's a mixture of a puzzle game in which i use these blocks to redirect the green beam to dismantle the red walls and a tower defense in which i build up bridges and turrets to get my little green soldiers to the data and back safely it's not so much that it's a wonderfully fun game to play as much as it's a clever take on pre-existing mechanics well done bethesda so what data do we get well the first log outlines the woes between far harbor the synths and the children of atom the second reveals that there's a nuclear device aboard the submarine which the children use as their home and that dima found the key to that device and hid it away the third seems to be more trouble for these settlers of far harbor as dima came up with a contingency plan in case they turned against him this plan was to basically shut off the wind turbine which powers the fog condensers to which dima had the code to do so the fourth is a bit more heartbreaking as it details dima trying to help his brother nick but nick doesn't recognize him or understand what he is there's a bit of a scuffle before dima signs out by saying goodbye to his brother and the final entry details a shipment of pre-war marine armor that's supposed to be top notch and would help whoever found it immensely now all of this was cool at the beginning but the problem is that bethesda isn't really renowned for high grade brain twisting puzzles especially in the past decade or so so while the idea was cool for a bit it never really challenged me i pretty much always knew exactly what i needed to do next even on the last puzzle now that wouldn't be an issue if the entire experience didn't take me about 45 minutes to complete like if you're gonna make some puzzles make some puzzles people can look things up if they get lost but when you only really have two real puzzle pieces the amount of complexity to the puzzle can only get so high and bethesda's answer for that was making the player go through more steps or placing these lasers in further locations to get to i don't know either way it's clear that you can give all of this to the children or take it back to acadia hell you might even be able to take some of this info to far harbor but i'm gonna go with acadia here just because i like dima a lot but first i actually have to go get this stuff i got three different locations based off of the memories that i harvested and the first one is the [ __ ] mother lode so i head through the vim pop factory again before getting down to a basement level with a patch of petted down dirt when i dig it up i curiously find a skeleton in a coffin along with a tape and a locket the tape details that the old lady who greeted me and stuck up for me from the beginning who's probably the most respected member of the harbor is actually a synth dima murdered the real avery and replaced her to bridge the gap between far harbor and the synths simultaneously spreading a bigger tolerance for the idea of them while also helping to guide any nuisance to acadia holy [ __ ] man now i gotta wonder wouldn't someone at some point go damn avery what is this your 80th birthday you still look 55 i mean maybe dima intends to replace her at some point i don't know but good god what a find from here we grab the nuclear launch key and wind farm turbine codes these weren't really necessary to grab but it now gives me the power to either nuke the nucleus or disable the fog condensers around far harbor effectively aligning myself with either far harbor or atom another option that i've got is to march to far harbor and out avery as a synth but the final option with all of this is to go back to acadia and hear dima out while also telling kasumi what i found i'm gonna go with that it just seems like it's the most natural to me but it's also a very good thing that we have so many options here so i head back to kasumi and she thinks that dima needs the opportunity to make the right choice and i agree with her i still back acadia here at the end but what dima did is ridiculously hypocritical even if he sealed away his memory of it the guy's a very relatable and peaceable character but if he killed someone to achieve that peace while wiping the personality from another synth to replace her then he built acadia on the premise of something that he never wanted to see happen maybe you're right the compromises i've made all without even knowing yeah it's called willful ignorance for a reason as much as i'd love to say that it's harmless god knows what else he's capable of when faced with a tricky situation even now he didn't want to detonate that nuke on the children of adam claiming that they've simply been led astray by one man but what if they cornered him maybe he'd be tempted not that i'd mind that much so i send him off to the fairest option letting the people of far harbor decide his fate this [ __ ] sucks man and not in a bad way like i feel horrible for dima but the scene which unfolds is probably one of the best written fallout 4 quest lines in the entire game so dima confesses he tells far harbor what he did and why and then he pleads for them to not take it out on acadia at this stage liam o'brien is pissed peace you call murdering one of ours peace he demands that the town march on acadia right then and there and you get the opportunity for a speech check this is the beauty of this dlc if i decided that i wasn't going to help these people and skip the side quests then all of them would have agreed with liam but since i helped most of them pretty much every single one of them agrees that they shouldn't march on acadia unfortunately for dima the punishment for his transgressions is death which happens remarkably quickly and i feel [ __ ] bad but it's a good bad i don't feel bad because this scene was poorly executed or written badly i feel bad because it was written well holy [ __ ] fallout 4 made me feel emotions beyond bewilderment this is huge and again the best part about all of this is that if i hadn't done those quests everyone here would have ran straight to acadia and murdered every single person there kasumi included that is a powerful ending either way now i will say that if i had spared dima and heard out his alternative then this would have led to replacing the high confessor of the children of adam which would have in turn led the children down the better path and of course the third and fourth outcomes were destroying the nucleus or far harbor with their respective methods of destruction or both of them if it strikes your fancy but i really do think that the path that i chose is probably the best outcome here it has just enough of that consequence to make you feel good while also making you feel bad as opposed to the ending where dima gets away with everything and we replace the bad guy with a good guy and everything is good again i don't know when all is said and done i head back to kasumi but before i get to her it's worth noting that there's this other absolute [ __ ] of a synth that's been kicking around acadia the entire time and that she's very hostile for no reason that she can give beyond a botched memory wipe well one of the other synths approached me while i was turning in dima and told me that something's very wrong with her so we ask her and she explains that she keeps having this dream where she thinks she was on a boat that crashed she believes it's the same one that i recovered the storage drives from earlier she gives me a key to a trunk on the ship which reveals that she used to be someone known as victoria before a horrible shipwreck occurred while she was driving it at faraday's behest so faraday asked demo what to do while patching her up and they both concurred that victoria's mind was too broken by the damage to continue on so they wiped her and inserted a new personality which didn't take very well i wasn't going to mention this but it does continue to point at dima's willingness to sacrifice others when the going gets tough even after he sealed away his memories so anyways we convinced kasumi to come home or rather she decides it herself after thinking for a while she's still pretty sure that she's a synth on the count of dreaming of waking up in a lab and not remembering a lot of her childhood but she knows that her family needs her even if she is a synth we bring her back to the nakano residents who are obviously overjoyed to see their daughter again i refuse a reward and wrap everything up by talking to nick and his assistant about the job nick has talked about his brother a few times throughout this journey when prompted first about being confused when he initially found out trying to piece together exactly how he feels about this newly found person in his life and then about his death and about how he'll never know how he feels exactly it's sad hearing nick mourn the brother that he found and then lost and he insists on pressing onward and not thinking about it anymore all in all far harbor is a fantastic example of dlc done right it's a true return to form for bethesda which is something i honestly never thought i'd find myself saying like i would say it rivals some of new vegas's dlc which is incredible when you think about it the setting was amazing the factions were compelling for the most part the writing was surprisingly good i actually enjoyed nearly every moment of it could it have been better well yeah of course the children of adam were a pretty chaotic force but they weren't compelling to join by any means besides for role-playing purposes the true brilliance lied instead with acadia with far harbor being a decently well-written group that i feel like i left behind after finishing most of their quests i would have liked it if things intertwined a little more maybe a synth comes in from the mainland and goes crazy spouting off things about him being a synth and that he believes that the whole town will murder him so he holds himself up in a part of town and threatens to set off an armed explosive that he lugged with him if anyone gets too close when you dispatch him or talk him down you have to try to smooth things out between acadia and far harbor something like that i guess i just wanted a bit more substance beyond the final act of this dlc and another thing that never really came up again was the idea of the player being a synth it was hinted at when you only got the option to recall the day the bombs fell but ultimately the whole thing is a red herring when you think about it your character would have had to have had all of these memories of baseball the war that he fought in and other pre-war events planted into his mind by the institute he would have had to have had sean being kidnapped the existence of codsworth and however many other nonsensical things for a synth to know beam directly into his head and then of course he would have been shut down by sean and it would have been game over had he not agreed to join him at the institute the whole thing is just another bethesda fastball special of writing something to make the players go whoa what if he is a synth without it actually making any sense but don't get me wrong the dlc as a whole was still great and this has got to be the reason for nuka world's reception had the dlc release has been flip-flopped i guarantee that more people would have been more tolerant of it but let's compare the two we've got a dlc with multiple endings that are all flashy or compelling in their own way depending on the role that you want to play each with their own rewards and perks for ending it the way that you choose and you've got a dlc with a shoehorned single route and one other half-assed ending that skips out on most of the content when done at the wrong time you've got a dlc with charming at times heartfelt and intriguing writing and characters and you've got a dlc with non-stop wacky zany npcs that are pretty much all bloodthirsty save a handful of side characters sure nuka still has its strengths there are plenty of interesting ideas and fun concepts there are really cool areas to explore and interact with but you're on a roller coaster that obviously only goes one direction with the writing anything else in the coaster goes flying off its tracks i guess if i were to sum up the two the best that i can it's that nuka world is what you play when you want to have mindless gameplay fun you go to the park shoot things at all these different well-constructed hubs of buildings take the loot and carry on but if you want an engrossing and captivating storyline with tough decisions and even tougher outcomes then far harbor is your best bet overall i had fun for the most part sure the smaller dlcs range from [ __ ] to passable but the big ones each brought something good to the table even if one outshines the other pretty thoroughly in my eyes and it hurts me even more because if the devs had put the same amount of thought and planning into their main vanilla storyline as they did with far harbor the game probably would have been very good maybe even comparable to fallout new vegas in some capacity if they had taken some of the more creatively interesting and fun ideas that popped up in nuka world then the world would have been that much better to explore and if they had given out the workshop dlcs as free updates i'd have had that much more respect for them but obviously none of this happened the way that it did and this is what we were given if you happen to have the base game and we're still mulling over the dlc five years later maybe this video did something to convince you what it might be worth to you though let's be fair experiencing it yourself is half the fun thanks for watching i'm honestly surprised with the amount of fun that i had with this one so i'm actually glad that i finally got to it with the recent trailer for fable i'm thinking it's about time that i jump back into that series so stay tuned for that until then i've got merch the kind you wear the kind you stare at i don't know it's there if you care i've got a twitch where i stream nearly every monday tuesday and friday i've got a twitter where i sometimes make words pop in the feeds i've got a discord where people chat and i've got a patreon with a new tier system and that's it have a good one

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 2,923,481

Keywords: Fallout 4, DLC, Far Harbor, Nuka World, Automatron, Contraptions Workshop, Vault-Tec Workshop, Wasteland Workshop, Season Pass, Analysis, Evaluation, Comparison, Mechanist, The Pack, The Disciples, The Operators, Kiddie Kingdom, World of Refreshment, Galactic Zone, Dry Rock Gulch, Mad Mulligan's Mine, Safari Adventure, Acadia, Gulper, Angler, Fog Crawler, DiMA, Kasumi, The Nucleus, Children of Atom, Gage, Longfellow, Hermit Crab, Bethesda, I got my vaccine, Now I can be immune at home

Id: eTLhSoEIBIg

Length: 77min 58sec (4678 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021