Fallout 4 Is Better Than You Think

good afternoon ladies jeff and i'm john says betty a trudeau welcome to fallout 4 is better than you think which i think it is and that itself is something of a miracle you see to my mind fallout 4 is a deceptively intricate game filled with systems that don't look like they should work together in fact i'm gonna argue that in terms of mechanics fallout 4 might be the most dense game in the whole franchise there's a lot here that's easy to overlook it's a game that takes a bit of time to understand so that's what we're gonna do today we're gonna dive deeper into fallout 4 than i've ever done before and i hope that by the end i might have sparked a renewed appreciation for how elegant some parts of this game are so let's begin at the beginning actually no we need to begin earlier than that because to understand fallout 4 we have to understand how it came to be the context it was made in and the journey bethesda traveled on the way to boston so let's begin shall we [Music] so i want you to imagine for a moment what developing fallout 4 was like it's 2009 and work just wrapped up on the last bits of fallout 3 dlc and we know that work began immediately on fallout 4 representing a good chance to make some big foundational changes to how the game should work next to fallout 3. obviously good starting point try and figure out how people reacted to fallout 3 except there's a problem because at a very high level fallout 3 players who want things to change in the next fallout game fall into two camps and these camps have very different desires first up with such high sales for fallout 3 next to fallout 1 and 2 we know there's a big group who are new to fallout fallout 3 is their introduction to the whole fallout universe there's no one gaming background to these folks of course but there's an excellent chance that many of them would have been more familiar with shooters than rpgs and i say that purely as in 2007 two of the year's top three selling games were first person shooters while rpgs had fallen on hard times at the end of the 90s struggling with the at the time much smaller pc market but unable to transition to the increasingly lucrative console market the exact phenomenon that led in part to the disintegration of interplay the original publishers of fallout when you see the common criticism of fallout 3 that the shooting is clunky there's a decent chance you're hearing from this group because if your frame of reference is the shooters of 2007 or 2008 then yes fallout 3 would feel a bit clunky by 2015 of course it would have been much worse and fallout 3 shooting mechanics would have seemed hopelessly out of date so if you want fallout 4 to succeed you're gonna need better smoother more accessible gun plane but hang on as i discussed when i was arguing that fallout 3 is better than you think part of the reason that shooting is a bit clunky in fallout 3 is by design you're playing as a character who's brand new to the world and level 2 they shouldn't be able to nail a mole rat in the eye from 100 meters it's literally built into the game that you have to invest skill points to boost accuracy lower spread and reduce weapon sway you're not an amazing shot until your character is as a result of that if you make the shooting immediately accessible you've undermined the entire foundation of fallout being an rpg that what you can do depends on your character's ability as well as the player's skill which brings us to the second camp the long-standing fans of fallout or rpgs of interplay or rpgs of the 90s in general who have exactly the opposite complaint when you hear the common talking point that fallout 3 was a dumbed-down shooter experience that wasn't a proper fallout game that may well be somebody from this camp talking and what they want is a proper rpg experience which is traditionally characterized by your abilities being entirely defined by the character you're playing as so basically who thinks it's a good idea for fallout 4 to be an immediately accessible modern shooter where player skill translates into an immediate gameplay advantage and who thinks the exact opposite that shooting should have a much smaller part of the game to create a more diverse rpg experience where ability is a function of long-term character building decisions [Applause] then skyrim launches in 2011 and becomes one of the most successful games of all time so does that mean we should take notes from that and just when you think things can't get any worse those bastards over at obsidian manage in 18 months to make a fallout game that just happens to be one of the best video games ever created now a load of those new fallout 3 players have had the chance to experience a really good fallout game with strong rpg elements and many of them really liked what they saw and now things are even more impossible because previously the old fallout fans were a tiny minority but now thanks to new vegas there's literally millions of people who have played a fallout game that's a lot more rpg-ish and you can't ignore that many people so now fallout 4 also has to somehow embrace what people loved in new vegas even though new vegas didn't even exist at the start of fallout force development put all of that together and that's the context of fallout force creation just imagine the stress of that so what did bethesda do well they did precisely what they always do they threw everything out and started again now this point kind of slips past people a lot specifically i've seen a lot of discussion about fallout 3 versus fallout 4 and what got added or taken away and i think this is completely the wrong starting point for a discussion about fallout 4. yes at the absolute surface level fallout 4 and fallout 3 seem to have a lot in common volts ruins jumpsuit 10 millimeter pistol dog mole rats raiders vats compass pip-boy superficially the two look very similar but fallout 3 and new vegas look even more similar and they're hugely different from each other fallout 4 is a brand new thing and some people bring that up like it's inherently bad like revealing that fallout 4 diverged from some of the exact design choices of a turn-based rpg from 1997 is a big take down doctor moment and as strange as it is that this needs to be pointed out at all i don't think bethesda were trying to be as faithful as possible this isn't a secret ahead of fallout 4 they did a press tour broadcasting this say in an interview with the official xbox youtube channel in november 2015 pete hines could not have put his cards more clearly on the table every game gets treated from scratch there are no sacred cows i think this is part of todd howard's belief that you can get stale by staying in one spot so that's what they did in fallout 4. they threw out a huge amount of the core components of fallout 3 tone atmosphere location setup and made not so much a sequel to fallout 3 as something brand new but how do you square all those circles i was just mentioning how do you make everybody happy when rather like the fallout wasteland itself different factions of fans are trying to pull the game in opposite directions well strangely enough it all begins with a pile of rubbish the jung system is one of my favorite additions to fallout 4. it's a brilliant system that adds so much to the game but let's keep things simple just for now in the original fallout games the world is populated in a very pragmatic fashion when it comes to items almost everything you see is just painted into the background in fact items you can interact with are sufficiently rare that you could hold down shift to highlight items that weren't just part of the scenery from an isometric perspective this is perfectly reasonable as the camera is so far away from the player distinguishing a useful item from generic junk would have been very difficult this means in most scenarios most levels are effectively empty with items instead placed in containers or dropped by dead enemies when fauna moved into 3d first person this changed now the player was down on the ground and had a better view of the areas they were exploring this level of emptiness would have made areas seem bland so miscellaneous decorations were added all over the place spare parts trash components pencils various bits of pre-war detroiters now this did work as set dressing but it created a problem 99 of it was useless you might occasionally grab items with decent weight to value ratio to sell at the nearest store but mostly your character actor like potentially functional pre-war technology in a never-before-explored ruin was just a bit uninteresting and then came fallout 4. now basically every item in the game can be broken down into materials and those materials can be used to improve weapons and armor or build infrastructure on your bases this is a huge improvement and the core reason why is because we're playing a game here an interactive experience so the more benefit there is to engaging and interacting with the world the better let me give you a really simple example here let's look at a couple of very early game areas in various fallout games so this is silva's house in fallout 3. the vast majority of these items have no use and effectively no value they don't really tell us anything i could steal them but there's no point a pre-war camera useful chemicals practical day-to-day kitchenware all of them have no utility outside of a tiny number used in weapon schematics new vegas is very similar though the issue is somewhat eased by a more full crafting system in fallout 4 meanwhile this is the concord speakeasy and at first it looks very similar even featuring the same camera but now these items are hugely more valuable because they're a source of components so you drag them back to base and drop them off there for crafting and this has all sorts of positive impacts on the game world firstly it incentivizes the player to engage with the world with much more attention rather than passing by background decoration you start scavenging which fits perfectly into a game universe where scavengers and prospectors have long been a part of the games with the whole process streamlined through the quick loop menu one of hundreds of tiny ui improvements that fall out full games even better in a world where everything contains components that might have a use down the line the optimal solution would be to pick up and take everything but carry weight is the limiting factor you have to start thinking with a critical mindset about what is most important to carry back to base and what's even better than that is that changes over time and depends on your own build choices at the start of the game duct tape will be as precious as gold does as you need adhesive for everything but as time moves on you might well find it screws that become more pressing leading to the discovery that finding a desk fan now generates a slightly concerning amount of joy in the mid game copper and aluminium could well start running low and finally rare precious materials for advanced energy weapons that camera might be no use to at level 2 but become precious at level 35 leading to a world of dynamic scavenging where an area that seems uninteresting at one point becomes a gold mine later and perhaps even more importantly it quietly encourages you to pay attention to the world because unlike previous fallout games where luke tended to be fairly generic and distributed at random now you need to consider what's going to yield it need gold or silver try residential areas and look for jewelry need ceramic look for restaurants and kitchens as you play more you start to get a feel for what's going to be where and thus whether with your current needs it's worth taking the time to loot a nearby diner or science lab or electrical store and suddenly it struck me the game has taught me not just to act like a scavenger but to think like one the game mechanics have nudged me into role playing as a fallout prospector and i think that's kind of genius of course all of this would be meaningless if the junk didn't do anything so fortunately the opposite is true junk isn't just important it's part of the core of the game specifically the by this point well acknowledged core gameplay loop of explore loot craft in practical terms you begin the game with almost nothing you loot sanctuary hills you use what you find to slightly improve your gun that facilitates going to a further away and more dangerous location looting that and so on exploring further and further with better and better weapons and armor now we'll get back to this exact loop and how it works in fallout 4 in a second but i do want to step back and look at the wider picture here in particular how fallout 4 is for the most part unique in the fallout franchise for even having an identifiable core gameplay loop at all you see in any big open game you're gonna have two different tiers of goal at the same time first you have a long term goal find the water chip find dad find benny find sean but these girls are often vague and far off so generally the game is going to give you smaller more local more achievable goals in fallout this is often done through subquests stop the rad scorpions power of the atom ghost and gunfight stuff like that local missions that can be resolved in a fairly short period of time now this worked fine in fallout 1 2 as every location in the game features quests and the space between them is represented by a map screen the system however started to run into a bit of difficulty in fallout 3 in new vegas as now the space between major towns wasn't just an abstraction it was a real space you were traveling through which thus had to be populated with stuff this led to many small locations camps houses abandoned farms which the game flanks you and you can explore but there's a risk that you could walk away from them empty-handed and that's a bit of a disaster design-wise as that teaches the player to not bother exploring in future exploration should always yield something and thus we come to fallout 4 the junk economy is a very elegant answer to this problem how do you make every single building in the game worth exploring by giving every single bit of set dressing potential value if anything the loot might have been a bit too compelling remember just after fallout 4 launched there was a whole bunch of web comics that made the joke players were too busy crafting to bother finding sean that's a symptom of a cool gameplay loop so strong that it's hard to break away from it to focus on the wider macro goal though don't worry we'll get back to the issues of your mission to find sean later this by the way was one of fallout 76's critical mistakes by reintroducing weapon and armor condition into the game and making junk the currency used to maintain them in 76 it's entirely feasible you could go looting but if the hall is a bit lower you could end up weaker than when you began in junk terms in fallout 4 as condition isn't an issue that can't happen every single item you pick up brings you closer to improving your arsenal and every improvement you make will be with you forever but again all of this is meaningless if the final stage of the loop crafting doesn't hold up and i'd argue that the modular weapon crafting system of fallout 4 is a huge step forward for the franchise building on some of the best ideas in new vegas you see for a long time fallout had a problem with linear weapon progression basically this means that certain weapons are simply objectively superior to others meaning you have no reason not to trade up from one to the next as they become available the problem this creates is it makes playthroughs very similar you know that certain weaker guns will be traded out as early as possible and at the other extreme you know that the moment you get your hands on certain weapons there will never be any reason to stop using them from the turbo plasma rifle in fallout 1 to the pulse rifle in fallout 2 all vengeance and lincoln's repeater and fallout 3 these are objectively superior weapons to anything else you're going to find it was new vegas that started the process of fixing this problem through adding a limited array of mods that could be fixed to particular weapons while this didn't stop weapons eventually falling out of use it did mean that you could choose to invest in a particular weapon and give it a powerful edge that would extend its lifetime and let you keep using a weapon of your choice a common example of this is the plasma pistol which you can buy in good springs together with its high energy ionizer mod it's expensive but if that's where you want to dedicate your cash it'll be a powerful friend into the mid game in a way fallout 4's modular weapon crafting system is just a logical if very significant extension of this now every gun can be modded extensively your 10 millimeter pistol isn't doomed to redundancy within the first 10 minutes of the game instead if you want rush to gun nut 1 slap a powerful receiver on it you've got yourself a good early to mid game weapon the bigger deal however is that now you can make weapons work how you want them to work not just to improve them but to customize them make your pistols automatic focus on getting the weight down to make them more effective in vats specializing critical hits on maximize range and put a scope on it and once you get into energy weapons you can pretty much do anything turn a pistol into a shotgun add fire damage the world is your oyster assuming of course you can find enough advanced components to make the changes you want it was a really fun way to imagine energy weapons though rather than just being superior in power as in fallout 1 and 2 their strength now is in flexibility allowing them to be introduced into the game much earlier and you know what i'm just going to mention this here i love what fallout 4 did with energy weapons rather than being a distinct class as in every previous fallout game leading to that slightly awkward mid-game moment when you realize all the best weapons from now on are gonna be energy weapons which you haven't been investing in because you haven't really seen any ng weapons so far so now you have to spend a few boring levels just piling points into energy weapons to make them usable not anymore in fallout 4 rifles and energy rifles are deemed to be the same class in terms of perk investment so you can transition whenever you want with the limiting factor often being the energy weapons need a lot of rare materials to modify but that's brilliant because now the choice is in the hands of the player in fallout 1 and 2 the game just refuses to let you have an energy weapon until the mid game so screw you if you tag that skill i suppose fallout 4 takes a much more nuanced position you're welcome to use energy weapons straight away but it will take careful scavenging to find the high-tech components you need especially as at the same time conventional firearms are much cheaper and easier to mod with common resources and this is a good time to mention something i'd like you to try and keep in mind that way of dealing with energy weapons where the game gives you a lot of freedom to do things your own way if you choose to fallout 4 does this a lot and more than many people seem to give it credit for so as i say just bear that in mind going forward we'll be revisiting that idea now let's get back to weapons in general because there's a key point here i need to stress about why this system works there is no best modder ever every weapon you build you're choosing a specialization you never just make your weapon better you make it better in one way and thereby turn down something else if it's as powerful as it can be for example it might be heavier or fire slower we often talk about building characters in fall out in fallout 4 you're also building your gun and i do believe that some people in bethesda were thinking about guns are almost as if they were part of your own character build given they added the ability for you to name your arsenal suggesting they knew you might spend more time with each gun and get a bit attached and i can say in my first survival mode run i absolutely did but of course there's another side to the discussion about weapons too and prepare yourselves because i'm about to say a controversial thing i love the legendary system i think it adds so much to the game in so many ways firstly it gets rid of the old problem that once you've got a strong enough gun you know you'll never find anything better because time you could come across an instigating variant of your favorite weapon or explosive shotgun or an automatic that applies extra flat damage per bullet once i found a plasma infused mini gun that was a good day you can do as much crafting as you want but you'll never be absolutely certain this is now the only gun you'll ever need a better weapon or piece of armor might be waiting just around the corner even better the possibility of legendaries appearing anywhere further reinforces an incentive to search every building as even a low-level critter can spawn a game-changing bit of gear and that adds a huge amount to replayability if anything my only complaint with this system is that bethesda were a bit too generous with the guaranteed reward and shop spawns you can get some really good weapons that way though there is definitely still room for finding and crafting some better stuff now i can hear the angry hordes approaching already and i know what they're about to say just before the pitchforking begins john though cries they light the bonfire regardless of how well the system you're describing may or may not work that doesn't change the fact that these mechanics are fundamentally those of a looter shooter and not an rpg checkmate burn the witch seriously i've seen this one being thrown around a lot so apparently we need to discuss a bit of gaming history here because i think the term loot shooter gets some folks a bit upset possibly because it has shooter in it so that means it's further down the rpg to fps spectrum and thus represents a dumbing down of fallout but this just doesn't really stand up to any level of scrutiny first like just a reminder looter shooters as an entire admittedly slightly wibbly defined subgenre were a variant on loot heavy rpgs diablo is often mentioned as one of the important inspirations with diablo 2 lead david breivik running an early online test with hell gate london though the first big success was most likely borderlands coming out in october 2009 which very conveniently started selling very well indeed at just the same time as development was starting and big decisions were being made on fallout 4. the looter shooter has always been an offshoot of rpgs and often features plenty of character build and upgrade options to build your character in the direction you want which is a pretty cool part of you know an rpg and even by the standards of looter shooters fallout 4 really skews back towards rpgs and away from the direction plenty of other loot shooters developed fallout 4 doesn't put twitch you to gameplay at the center of the action there are no classes instead sticking with a complex character built an upgrade system there's no online focus and your effectiveness with a weapon and how you utilize it is much more a function of your character build and crafting choices than the inherent numbers of the gun itself but here's the crucial bit and the point that hopefully will stop the pitchforking i don't actually think fallout 4 is a looter shooter at all you absolutely 100 don't have to engage with any looting you can have a perfectly good time playing this game without ever touching a piece of junk the reason for that is to compare fallout 4 it's distant uncle borderlands the rate of weapon obsolescence is miles apart in borderlands you need to be constantly changing out your weapons every time you level up new stuff becomes available you're going to be routinely throwing out your arsenal to pick up new stuff instead in fallout 4 let's say you've done the early game brotherhood quest for dancing art jet you now have a legendary lucky laser rifle righteous authority and if you want to you can keep using that to the end of the game every 10 to 15 levels you'd unlock a new rank of science then you can improve it a bit further if you need materials buy them junk traders are literally all over the shop if you'd rather not spend your time looting i just don't think it's right to call fallout 4 a loot shooter if all aspects of looting are optional any more than you can call it a building game given it also contains an entirely optional building mode in fact it almost sounds like and stop me if i'm being crazy here that these are all things that you could choose to do in a world where you have the freedom to do or not do any of them like i say if you enjoyed town building you could set up a network of scavenging stations to automatically generate junk without having to do any looting yourself or set up caravan points so that traders will come to you allowing you to trade the excess food and water that your settlement produces for whatever materials you need this is something i never really see anybody talking about by the way settlements have real gameplay utility for those who wish to play as a builder and trader and that's pretty much a first for fallout you can actually run your own town that attracts merchants you can trade for what it needs or invest in your own stores so your own townsfolk can bring in passive income for you and you don't need the shops in established towns anymore you can simply handle all of your buying and selling inside your own towns it's almost like i don't know the game gives you that freedom i mentioned before where you could take the role of a town mayor or a prospector or a mercenary where the gameplay facilitates you being able to take on any of these multiple roles i don't know there must be a name for this sort of thing yeah it's time to address the early rpg in the room let's discuss character building [Music] you know the strange thing for me isn't that fallout 4 made some big changes to character building is that it took so long to happen in terms of how special works i think fallout 4 might be my favorite fallout game of all and that's largely down to a change that looks minor on paper but has a huge impact the reduction of your starting special points from 40 down to 28. this was massively overdue mainly as the old system 40 special points divided between seven primary statistics meant that you could be perfectly competent in six stats and then a world-class genius with a special of ten in a stat of your choice maybe even more curiously you could be literally as good as it was possible to be in two different primary stats and still have a respectable enough score of four in the other five it feels very generous to me to my mind it just seems reasonable that if you want to be as intelligent or strong or agile as it's physically possible for a human to be then go ahead and do that but surely there should be a compromise somewhere special balance is another issue that the franchise has struggled with in various ways while there's no special stat that's especially useless in old fallout there is one that's typically noted as very strong if you look over fallout 1 and 2 character build guides you'll see a pattern emerging very high agility after all it doesn't matter whether you're planning to use guns or melee whether you want to stand and fight or run away in a world where all of your in-combat actions and movements are controlled by action points you're gonna want plenty of them this was a very minor thing though the real trouble started in fallout 3. you see with weapon strength requirements removed and a new carry weight formula that was fairly generous to low strength characters anybody who wasn't going for melee didn't need strength and perception in a move so baffling i'm still convinced it must be some kind of mistake had no impact on your chance to hit and instead just modified your compass text leading to an odd situation where you might find yourself taking perception you absolutely don't want or need just to access the excellent perception perks sniper and better criticals now fallout new vegas did restore weapon strength requirements and then took away fallout for his blended charisma speech system making charisma basically useless and giving birth to the charisma one speech 100 monstrosity perception was still completely useless as well and then came fallout 4 with a rebalance special system and 28 points to invest in it and that's brilliant because that means your starting point is now an average of four points per primary stat if you want to be a genius with 10 intelligence your other stats are now on average three each want to be the world's strongest and smartest man great enjoy having twos and ones in your other five stats this has always made me think a lot harder about every single special point in fallout 3 or new vegas bumping up intelligence straight to 9 is just something i do without thinking at the start of each game as if being a neo-genius is some non-event in fallout 4 i'll rarely go higher than 7 because the cost and compromise seems too high elsewhere instead a 9 or a 10 might be something i choose to work up to during the game which makes perfect sense having to invest in your character over time to get them an elite primary stats more generally this feels incredibly fallouty to me specifically fallout 4's entire special system reminds me of the classic fallout trait system as a reminder traits are almost always double-edged swords they allow you to give yourself a particular advantage but always at a cost the 28-point special system feels like that principle taken to its logical conclusion unlike every previous fallout game where you're welcome to be both a world-class expert at one thing and a competent all-rounder and everything else too in fallout 4 any expertise must be paid for by being below average elsewhere but then of course there's the thing we have to talk about the thing the thing that always comes up when anyone discusses fallout 4's character build system and i'm going to say something now that makes me wonder whether i actually enjoy the pitchforking but it's something that needs to be said skill points are not and never have been a good way of representing and controlling your aptitude in key skills they were long overdue for a rework fallout one's mechanics were closely modeled on the girp system which was first created in 1986 and we were still using something close to it in 2010's new vegas okay do you know part of the reason why tabletop games represent skills as numbers it's because when a game is happening entirely on a table the easiest way to generate a random result is a dice that generates a number and thus the easiest way to check how well your character did is to also have your skill represented as a number easily accessible on a character sheet so you can see whether your status higher or lower than the dice roll but most lpgs today do not actually have visible dice rolls they're going on in the background and even more than that we don't see the calculation we just have numbers and a result say in new vegas i put six skill points into barter repair and guns how much better are the prices i get how much more accurate am i with a gun how much more can i repair my gear i don't know because the game doesn't say how it's working it out the moment the mechanic is a secret back-end thing then skills as a number have no meaning it's madness you can invest in skills and have no way of knowing what that did without checking the wiki but here's the crucial bit it actively specifically doesn't work in a video game let me give you a really simple example if you've ever watched the speedrun of new vegas you'll notice the runner immediately builds a very extreme character a common one is strength one to help fund endurance 10 and charisma 10. they'll rush to speech 100 by level 6 and use that to talk down the naius at the end of the game generally we call this min maxing the process of building a hyper-specialized character who is therefore hyper-competent at the exact thing the player needs them to do now in a tabletop game this wouldn't fly there are many articles by game masters discussing how to deal with power gamers who are trying to min max but the general gist of it seems to be if the game master spots this is happening they can adjust the world to compensate ideally in a fun way like having the player's strength draw unwanted attention or potentially just having a quiet word with the player to make sure everyone's having a fun and fair time but as soon as your game is running with tabletop rules xp and skill points but the game master is a dumb machine that has no way of spotting what the player is doing well welcome to exploit city population intelligence 10 charisma one speech hundreds now to be fair the system worked better in fallout 1 2 because they had a couple of mechanics built in to stop precisely this sort of thing like how investing in a skill yields diminishing returns over a certain level meaning hitting the actual skill cap of 300 was something that basically nobody would do where it all went wrong was fallout 3. you see in fallout 1 and 2 almost everything is being calculated with probability effectively tabletop dice rolls happening in the background this meant that investments in your skills would always give you at least some modest benefit in your chance to succeed and crucially your character sheet showed you those calculations so you knew precisely what benefit you were getting by investing yeah you can really tell that fallout 1 was literally built in tabletop foundation it really shows but in fallout 3 they kept the skills but got rid of 99 of the probability now i haven't been able to find any concrete statements as to why this decision was made but the most obvious conclusion is the people playing pcr pgs in the 90s went in fully understanding and expecting the game to feature hidden dice roles and probability a bigger general video game audience in 2008 and 2010 would be much less familiar with this idea and might find it confusing and frustrating that they were failing skill checks without knowing why or even that they were happening and i can speak from experience here because the very first time i played fallout 3 which was also my first fallout game i got hugely frustrated that i was failing pickpocket attempts in megaton which led to everyone shooting me now as far as i was concerned i was sneaking i was behind the guy so obviously to me at the time it felt like the game had either bugged out or i was just being screwed over unfairly i had no idea there was a stealing dose role happening in the background there was a function of my stealth skill luckily i gave fallout 3 another go a few weeks later and had a great time with it and i do sometimes wonder what my life would be like today if i hadn't done that mostly though fallout 3 and new vegas even more so utilize skill thresholds 25 lock pick to open this door 50 science to hack this terminal and in new vegas 60 speech to persuade this person now have you spotted the issue yet let's say you have look pick 25 and come across your first average locked door so you decide to invest in lockpick you're playing new vegas and you have a pretty good intelligence stats so you're getting plenty of skill points you wait earn xp level up and put all 14 skill points into lock pick now you have 39 lock pick which means nothing you still can't open average locks your character is in real terms identical to what they were before just consider that for a moment consider how wrong that is the game just played you this noise or maybe this one [Music] and you invested everything that a character that specialized in having plenty of skill points has interlocked and you get literally nothing out of it that is wrong that is objectively wrong the game played you a noise indicating you should celebrate because a good thing happened you should have gained something you should always gain something and the worst thing of all skill points can completely run counter to role play like i know i use charisma on speech 100 as a joke but it really is a problem it's absolute proof that completely detaching your intrinsic natural aptitudes represented by special from your actual practical day-to-day abilities represented by skills creates a complete mess it leaves us with a scenario where a character with perception of one who has never picked a lock in his life can be the world's greatest lockpick master just because that's where you put your skill points and accordingly it further imbalances special by making intelligence a god-tier stat because as soon as pretty much every interaction with the world is determined by skills and intelligence gives you skill points well that's the special skill to take then and what really makes me feel like i'm losing my mind is when it was revealed that fallout 4 was removing skill points people were furious there was anger anger that bethesda was dropping a 30 year old tabletop mechanic well known to be easily exploited imbalanced and capable of yielding nonsense power characters well hopefully i can change a few minds today because in fallout 4 everything's been folded into the perk system where every corresponds to a certain special threshold and i think this is good because perks are great when i was playing fallout 1 and 2 for the first time the levels where you got to perk which is only every third level they were the best and most exciting levels for me because fine what i'm about to say is pure opinion but i imagine most people would agree with me making a number go up a bit thereby providing a small invisible percentage increase to one of my skill roles is not as exciting and cool as scrolling through a perk list and picking which brand new ability i want to immediately have access to and i think black owls themselves would agree with that because when the time came to make new vegas they increased the perk rate to every second level they also got rid of various fallout 3 perks that simply boosted skill points and replaced them with more perks that provided unique benefits that generic skills can't provide perks are fun selecting a perk is fun and crucially unlike our lock pick example before you can't find yourself accidentally taking two-thirds of a perk if you take a put you immediately have that benefit meaning leveling up will always yield a positive change for your character and on top of that this solves a couple of our other problems because perks are tied to special you can't just become a master without any form of natural aptitude if you want to do advanced chemistry you're gonna need high intelligence if you want to run a bustling town you need decent charisma immediately this makes sense it's very intuitive and i think it provides the best possible compromise for allowing players to rush to elite special abilities while stopping a repeat of the level 4 skill 100 rushes of fallout 3 and new vegas you see in fallout 4 every perk has multiple ranks and you can always take the first rank immediately if you meet the special requirement if you feel like say you're specializing in power armor or forcing enemies to surrender or shooting through walls at level two you can do that straight away with further expertise following from further ranks which are level locked once again i think this is a huge part of the freedom that fallout 4 offers you this system gives you more flexibility and more ability to specialize from a very early level than any other fallout game so consider what about new vegas at level 2 13 skills you can invest points in and then nine potential perks though it's likely only about seven will be available to the average player fallout 3 level two 13 skills and a maximum possible selection of seven perks you really don't have much choice here every single game in the entire fallout franchise up to this point has actually had a very regimented perk system until fallout 4 came along and announced that you could have ice cream for dinner and go to bed when you want it because fallout 4 lets you have the first rank of any perk at level 2. that's a choice of 70 perks but it's not just the choice it's also about how it's presented to you what you actually see is a 28 out of an available 70 perks now that's a huge amount of choice and represents a huge amount of significance for your special decision if you go all in on perception you can start shooting through walls at level two cannibal at level two sure level two pacification of enemies no problem but you're gonna have to make the special compromises elsewhere like we already discussed and all of this is part of a wider trend in fallout 4 that lets you boost more specific abilities than ever before in the entire franchise up to fallout 4 power armor was just an elite armor type there were no perks for us if you wanted to roleplay as a brotherhood knight then i hope you've got a good imagination because the game's got nothing for you well in fallout 4 you can give yourself the ability to create shock waves by jumping from height and power armor and then eject your armor's power source as a dropped nuke grenade which you can do while flying you can fly over your enemies and do a fusion core bombing run it's amazing how about your faithful canine companion up to this point there's been literally one perk in the entire franchise for the dog in fallout 3 to make him respawn because people were sad he kept dying but in fallout 4 you can power up dog meat to give him new moves and make him cause bleed or limb damage fallout 4 gives you a lot of options for how you want to specialize i mean this is what we've always said we want from rpgs right difficult choices that lead to meaningful consequences your early game skills and specializations are hugely different depending on what special stats you choose to specialize in and that specialization that uniqueness that comes from your choices that stays with you in the late game much more than previous fallout games and i can prove that with numbers so let's consider how perks are gated in fallout games because that's really important to keeping characters unique if every character can have every perk well then you're probably always going to pick the same few really powerful perks like say in fallout 3 finesse nerves of steel sniper better criticals things like that except we have a problem here you see in fallout 3 the highest special requirement for a perk in the entire game is seven but john i hear you cry didn't you say earlier that the average starting special statin fallout 3 is about six why yes i did or you know seven with the bobble heads and as for skill requirements mostly it's 40 to 60. a single perk ninja does go up to 80 though now that sounds a bit more aggressive but then you remember how easy it is to max out every skill in fallout 3. to do that you need a thousand 300 skill points you start with 195 another 45 through tagging 130 through bobble heads there are actually 600 available through skill bugs but you're not going to get every single one of those though you are getting 20 skill points level from leveling up with intelligence of 10 so 400 by level 20 then there's educated at level 4 and a whole bunch of perks do give 10 to 15 points each it's actually surprisingly easy in fact to max out every skill in fallout 3 meaning every character no matter where you started from can have any perk and new vegas is barely any more strict a handful of special eight requirements six perks that call for 90 or above in a particular skill but again it's not difficult to rush skills in a world where intelligence is a giant skill point vending machine if i've got my numbers right you should be able to have access to literally every perk in new vegas and be very close to having 100 in every single skill as well around level 38 or so but with fallout 4 system of course elite perks are locked behind every single special 10 stat in a world where you start with less special now you can to be clear boost special instead of taking a perk in fallout 4 to access more perks thereafter but even if you did nothing but that it would take you until level 40 just to have access to every perk by having special 10 across the board but around level 40 is about the time a typical player seems to finish the base game if you want to take every perk that's going to take you to about level 300. now theoretically at that point yes you are an unstoppable super god but no more so than a courier at level 40 is to my mind the point i want to stress is fallout 4 is maybe the best game in the entire franchise and giving you the ability to build a character that gets to be unique from the very early game and keep unlocking perks that are only going to be available to you if you focus your special in that direction and this is before we get into the hugely welcome special rebalance first up offer sacrifices to zeus because perception actually impacts that's chance to hit again now there's a gameplay loop related to looting strength just became a lot more valuable and doubly so in survival mode where the base carry weight is stripped back even further without skill points intelligence provides a much more modest xp boost desirable but not as overpowered as the fallout 3 generation while luck receives some much needed focus now being less of an awkward general stat that passes tiny benefits to all skills and instead focused almost exclusively on vats and critical hits it's not perfect charisma standing in for speech is certainly a questionable choice but i would draw attention to the fact it's the first fallout special system that doesn't have a single stat the most character build guides acknowledge is the one you really ought to take for pretty much any character unlike agility and old fallout or intelligence in the fallout 3 generation now it really is the case that you're free to specialize however you wish and then we get to maybe my favorite change in the whole game now this one sounds tiny but it's actually huge and when you put a few of the pieces we've been discussing together oh it's beautiful in fallout 4 for the first time ever special is uncapped now your character's base special still has to be between one and ten then you can sort of manipulate it a tiny bit higher but you could boost it well over that using apparel or food or drugs and fallout 4 added a lot of apparel food and drugs and this is important because it massively opens up how strong and specialized a character can be let me give you a simple example in fallout 1 you can only have agility of between 1 and 10. this yields action points are between five and ten so the maximum possible ap difference that can exist on account of your choices is a hundred percent in fallout 4 the default ap is 70 agility 1 and 160 at agility 10 which is already a bigger proportional variance than in fallout 1 so well done fallout 4 for that but start moving agility towards 16 with a parallel armor add in some food and drink 300 ap is absolutely manageable and then we start mixing in gun crafting that we were discussing earlier favoring lighter parts that reduce the ap cost per shot then we mix in legendaries and hunt down weapons and armor to boost that's effectiveness and all of a sudden we have a level of specialization that is simply impossible in every previous fallout game fallout 4 is the wild west of character building if you put the effort in to bring the right special the right perks the right gear and the right weapons together you can make something so damn ludicrous and this helps reinforce making every character unique because you'd only ever bother boosting strength to 30 for a melee warrior or a luck of 25 for a vats gunslinger if i want to put in that work to make that choice i can in fallout 4 the training wheels are gone taking a step back though i want to stress that there's a lot of good groundwork here to build an rpg the blend of building a character building a weapon and engaging with the mechanics of the junk economy however you wish on paper it all sounds like an rpg and yet a casual look at fallout 4 would make you think it's a first person shooter so let's get back to the question i've posed at the start how do you square that circle and build something that works for the contradictory demands of shooter and rpg fans well to answer that we're gonna need to discuss combat [Music] first we need to define some terms here because to understand how combat works in fallout 4 we need to understand some core game genre principles in gaming at the absolute highest level there are two factors that can determine whether an action succeeds or fails player skill and character skill let's keep this simple and say your goal is to shoot an enemy under the player skill system the skill with which you manually aim your reflex time your ability to calculate known variables such as drop off bullet travel time enemy movement these player thoughts and actions determine whether or not you hit the enemy first person shooters are often aligned with this system under a character skill system whether or not you hit the enemy is a function of your character potentially a blend of their skills equipment or positioning in many cases transparent probabilities are given to the player so they understand whether or not a character has a good chance to succeed turn-based games tactical shooters and rpgs will often align with this system now you could absolutely flesh this out and add more axes tactical versus chaotic say to acknowledge the different skills behind strategic scouting games like far cry versus chaotic bullet held twitch shooters but i think the single spectrum player versus character skill is the biggest one now this used to be a really simple dichotomy back in the 90s shooters were 100 player skill based the doom guy has no abilities or skills or anything you survive purely on the basis of your player actions and accordingly 90s rpgs were pure character skill systems it doesn't matter how good you are at the game or at games in general or if you've played a thousand hours of fallout if your character doesn't know how to use a gun you're not going to hit that rat and no player input can change that but then at the end of the 90s everything started getting a bit messy system shock 2 and deus ex for example were pioneers of that most unholy heretical abomination genre the action rpg does not say they were the first mind if i had to pick a first i'd probably go for 1987 zelda 2 the adventures of link which blended real-time combat with an xp system that awarded upgrades to health magic and damage outputs but now all of a sudden we've got ourselves a spectrum and mainstream games are helping themselves with the character skill buffet hitman blood money in 2006 for example added a modest character upgrade system letting you customize weapons and armor the game is still strongly dependent on player skill but there is an element of character skill as well meanwhile in 2007 we got mass effect 1 where all combat is real time and features manual aiming but your character is massively ineffective in terms of power accuracy and survivability without proper character investment so that may well belong more on the character skill side but then in mass effect 2 you are much more effective by default in a fight so i guess the franchise was shuffling back towards player skill and at the same time assassin's creed originally wasn't but then became more and more rpg over time my point is that the context under which fallout 3 and 4 were developed was a bit of a mess a lot of experimentation was going on into how we could integrate shooter and rpg mechanics together in the end however the entire industry sort of came to a consensus which gave us the standard form of an action rpg shooter that survives to this day rpg elements would be represented by an xp system which would power character upgrades these upgrades would often give the character greater damage output abilities that function like spells and more options for engaging with the world outside of combat the actual combat itself however is rarely tweaked the character skill stuff tends to hide in the background and this is where bethesda's take on the action rpg in 2008 with fallout 3 is somewhat unique because the character skill aspect is absolutely front and center vats is a big part of the game that has direct utility in combat and was a prominent feature of the trailers though to be honest that may just have been because the kill cam did and still does look amazing so why was it in 2008 that bethesda decided to make a cool game system that was so different from the other action rpgs of its time i've discussed this previously on the channel so do feel free to check out another one of my essays on the evolution of aim shot and vats that i'll link to in the description if you'd like more detail but the cliff notes version is bethesda made some very interesting statements leading up to the release of fallout 3. p times for example was very open about the fact he expected some players would approach fallout 3 as a narrative shooter and never use that on the other hand emil pagliarullo openly said that vance was meant to be a character skill system for those who didn't want to engage in any twitch shooting the plan seems to have been well you absolutely could use both systems side by side and most players will have done so there would be some players who only wanted to manually fire and the shooting mechanics were supposed to be sufficient for them while there were other players who wouldn't want to be shooting at all and vats were supposed to be sufficient for that this was perhaps version 1.0 of trying to appeal to both the mass market and existing fallout fans by creating not a single unified system but two parallel systems where engagement with just one should be viable if you wish the slight issue was the system didn't really work while that shots were powerful ludicrously powerful in fact you'd routinely run out of action points in a fight so you had to fall back to manual aiming new vegas optimized this a bit providing more opportunities to earn more ap and more perks that lowered the cost of taking that shots but it was still a system that wasn't good enough to stand up by itself and obsidian had enough on their plate to make new vegas in 18 months without having to also retool vats from the ground up and so we come to fallout 4. we might as well start with manual gun players this is relatively simple it's a huge improvement from a certain point of view that being the point of view of those who have come from other shooters and expect a certain base level of smooth intuitive gunplay there are a few reasons for that famously bethesda called in some expertise from id software to help out einstein aiming makes a return from fallout new vegas and the gun crafting system helps here too allowing people whose primary interest is gun play to customize weapons to their liking including sights scopes range and recoil the biggest change though is under the hood and a small tweak that makes a big difference to those less familiar with rpg shooters in both fallout 3 and new vegas spread is a character skill informed mechanic what this means is the worse your character's relevant weapon skill is and the worse the condition of the weapon the more the bullet drifts at random from where you are actually pointing on top of that most weapons had innate spread which regardless of skill or condition would always be there this was hard coded to each weapon and could not be changed now to folks familiar with rpg mechanics this is fine it all makes sense there's an important part of character building and weapon balance but to those who are less familiar with this sort of thing well it just seemed like their shots were missing for no reason so fallout 4 made a shift now most perks that boost your abilities with guns boost damage for the most part accuracy and spread of manual fire are both tied to the gun itself its accuracy stat to be specific which could of course be modified in gun crafting so it was now much more obvious what was causing spread and if you wanted to mostly eliminate it you now could on top of that having removed penalties for low skill and low condition both very harsh in the early game your first gun in fallout 4 is going to feel a lot more accurate than your first gun in fallout 3. so with only a modest amount of witchcraft gunplay is going to feel a lot better to most players but what about the other side of the spectrum and that's well this is where things get clever we mentioned the special rebalance before for example a significant part of that rebalance was massively bolstering the utility of vats luck used to be a generalist stat that also controlled critical hits which could happen within or outside of that though the probability was always a bit higher in that well looking criticals both had a massive overhaul and now criticals are charged up and manually activated just in vats additionally spawning a whole bunch of new vat specific perks in fact of the 70 perk families 10 of them adjust for that and plenty more provide at least some additional utility to vats as well now that's nice by itself because the system needed a refresh but really that's the smallest bit of news what's much more interesting is how the flow of combat works for a vat user consider a typical engagement you have a certain number of action points firing depletes this meter however now it also fills your critical meter ready to unleash a powerful shot so here's where the grim reaper's sprint perk comes in if you kill an enemy in vance there's a chance you get all your ap back so you can keep using that okay so therefore you want to get as many kills as possible in a single vats route to maximize the chance of grim reaper's sprint triggering but wait every shot is also building your next critical as the critical banker pug means you can store multiple critical hits ready to go and four-leaf clover means every hit regardless of how much damage it does has a chance of giving you a free crit so now that's combat has its own distinct flow dishing out crits to inflict huge damage to your enemies when you need some space to breathe and get your action points back but also deliberately taking easy low damage limb shots to build up your crits again the vats player is basically on the fly being asked to monitor their ap chance to hit their crit meter how many crits they have in hand enemy positioning and the probability that they're going to get additional ap or more crits during the next vats exchange because bethesda did it they did what i think the goal from fallout 3 was they created two parallel combat systems that both work beautifully and completely independently play fallout 4 as an fps or as a tactical action rpg shooter both work and it bugs me when i see it being repeated so many times that fallout 4 isn't an rpg it's just a shooter when one of the ways you can approach the shooting is a character skill controlled action point management probability based system that's far closer to the original fallout's rpg combat system than anything in fallout 3 or new vegas and that's just the day-to-day combat flow that's before you get into some of the hilarious synergies the bethesda's expanded perk table allowed them to put into the gamer like how you can use the perk to create a synergy between vats and dog meat so that any enemy he's pointing is easier for you to pick off or how you can set yourself up to literally shoot grenades out of the air for both double damage and ludicrous badass points the gun crafting comes back here too because you can specialize your weapons for that favoring lighter parts to reduce the ap cost or receivers that do less base damage but more critical damage and as we mentioned before you've got uncapped special now you could basically be as strong as you were capable of making yourself which means there's constantly an incentive to get out into the world because there might be some more food or drink or legendary gear a hat a mod anything that could push you just the tiniest bit stronger so okay we've spoken a lot about foundational stuff so far the mechanical groundwork that everything else is built on because i think fallout 4 is a hugely ambitious rework and that doesn't get comments done enough but all that's for nothing if there's no actual you know game so let's step into the world and talk about the commonwealth [Music] it's kind of a cliche at this point given every time bethesda announced a new game they always say this but you really can tell with fallout 4 that a lot of love goes into the map and the world and a big part of that is the biomes which bethesda did beautiful work within skyrim and since then it's been a consistent bright spot in their games even fallout 76 for all its many flaws had a beautiful varied world frustratingly so to my mind as it could have been an amazing stage for a traditional fallout single player campaign but the more i think about it the more i think fallout 4 could be the crowning achievement to date and it's down to three things to my mind sure the variety is great the east coast beaches are beautiful the marshes are creepy and i love how much more water there is rivers and lakes in the ocean next to fallout 3. there's so much variety here and a pleasing amount of color but there's plenty of variety in skyrim too so as i say these are the three things that really elevate fallout 4. first up the glowing sea the glowing sea is wonderful by which i mean it's terrible and i want to leave it as soon as possible it's so beautifully designed it's even got its own buffer area around the edge of it as a warning as you approach the trees are replaced with blasted dead husks a mist starts to settle you can see smoke rising in the distance and with every step further in visibility falls as a sickly yellow fog sets in and then the rads star because just standing in this area will eventually kill you depending on how much you've been following the main plot to get here there's a very real chance this might be the first time you see a rad scorpion and the first death claw since the game's intro in concord all tucked away in ditches of blasted ruins and strange glowing material it's beautifully eerie and not just a visual design but the sound design tour with a constant rumble of the storm overhead and the tick of the geiger counter to remind you that this place is slowly draining your health now correct me if i'm wrong but i think this is the only biome the bethesda have ever created that's specifically designed to try and get you to not enter it and then chase you out if you make the foolish decision to come in regardless as an open world set piece it's brilliant now the second thing for me is kind of connected to the glowing sea in a way you see the oppressive noise and low visibility from the storm is part of what makes that area work but it's also noteworthy that storms can appear anywhere asking a whole bunch of other weather conditions which is just brilliant most of the time conditions are clear and sunny but just sometimes it'll be cloudy other times there's a fog that actually hampers visibility sometimes it's just raining and going out in the rain in survival mode causes a slightly raised chance of getting ill which is just amazing but most of all anywhere anytime a rad storm can break out and you either accept this is just part of living in this world and deal with the literal fallout or you make a run for cover and wait out the storm in a building just consider that for a second a dynamic weather system that might mean i choose to wait out some fog or a storm it's just a beautiful way of making the world feel a bit more alive and potentially turning even the most gorgeous area into something a lot more sinister but okay let's talk about the big one because of course every modern fallout game has an urban environment dc new vegas and boston and this has turned out to be something very difficult to portray fallout 3 came up with a conjuring trick of having dc be made up of a whole bunch of isolated pockets of ruins linked together by underground metro tunnels now this did help to create an oppressive and claustrophobic environment where you weren't always 100 sure where you were and it did mean it was possible to hide secrets away like say takoma park and be honest how many of you who've put a whole bunch of hours into fallout 3 have never even heard of isabella proud and her research camp it's one of a whole bunch of fun easter eggs buried in the dc ruins the only issue was perhaps some of that stuff was a bit too well hidden and only accessible through some relatively uninteresting subway tunnels as well as the fact that when you put all the areas together and excluded the dead space between them the dc ruins were actually rather small new vegas went in a more open direction with the outer new vegas ruins but honestly they're fairly unremarkable you just generally run through them on their way to something more interesting while the actual core of vegas the strip is extremely small made up of only a tiny handful of areas with a few casinos attached to them but then along came fallout 4 in boston which is just absolutely huge as in the main urban center from the north of cambridge down to the south of boston that's a longer walk than from vault 101 to 10 penny tower but instead of desolate wasteland it's heavily built up with hundreds of ways through there's no tricks like in fallout 3 it actually feels like a city where you can travel along back streets stick to main roads use the river to bypass trouble head up to the overpass to cover some ground even stick to the rooftops for parts of it even more so when you have a jet pack and i feel i should again stress that fallout 4 has a jet pack just the scale alone is amazing you know how in games you're often told you're going to a city but it's really just smoke and mirrors maybe you're restricted to a small neighborhood like dunwall and dishonored or any site you visit in hip man alternatively you might be given free reign but the cost of that is 99 percent of the city isn't interactive los angeles and l.a noire is example of that and to an extent i feel the same way about gta 5's los santos where it always feels to me like there are large patches of the city without a single building that actually has a unique interior fallout 4's boston might be my favorite gaming city of all time because it feels to me like it hits that incredibly difficult sweet spot it's huge it's relatively open but every street still actually does have something to offer sometimes just a broken open building with a room or two sometimes a large marked location with a tiny unmarked event and a delightful amount of easter eggs too interiors that aren't even marked on the map so they'll only ever be found by keen explorers and even more than that it's got its own mini biomes in the form of neighborhoods the ghoul-infested residential north around the highly radioactive cambridge crater the huge skyscrapers of the central financial district and the super mutants that occupy the area and the barricaded raider camps of the south you can literally navigate by the style of building around you or the enemies nearby and if that was all it was i'd still love it but there's something more you see fallout's always struggled a little bit with the third dimension maybe it was a hangover from the days when the franchise literally didn't have one or maybe it was something weird with the gamebrio engine but it took until fallout 4 for somebody to think hey what if we could go up and bloody hell up we went some parts of boston are beautiful vertical mazes with collapsed skyscrapers leading out onto broken overpasses a beautiful mess of fire escapes planks bridging gaps cutting through officers and thanks to power armor eliminating full damage diving from the rooftops down to the streets below if you want to go from point a to point b this isn't like fallout 4's trip to gnr where the quest marker gives you clear instructions for passing from station to station you have to navigate by yourself and there are more ways than you can count to traverse this wonderful place it's brilliant and the game even builds up to it starting you off with the modest concorde which still has a multiple buildings with interiors several ways to get up to the rooftops side streets back alleys and sewers just to introduce how the urban landscapes work these days then you get to lexington on your way to colvega your first proper city a towering ruin with ghouls infesting the street and heavily armored raiders up above again trying to teach you that these are vertical environments with the whole thing in the literal shadow of the corvager assembly plant an amazing dungeon with so many entrances i'm actually not sure of the exact number but it's at least four sneaking in a pipe the front door or if you fancy sneaking or fighting your way further at the factory exterior various side entrances and i think all of this is designed to teach you to think about complicated vertical ruins and the various ways you might make your way through an environment that to go back to this old chestnut again offers you way more freedom to move and navigate how you choose next to fallout 3 and even new vegas boston is pretty much a giant adventure playground the size of an actual city and i love it now obviously the whole area wouldn't work if it was a ghost town so let's talk about your opposition and here's where i need to swing in to defend bethesda's honor because there's one complaint i've seen repeated over and over again and i'm not having it doesn't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny this one goes bethesda are uncreative and the enemies are boring because they reused enemies from previous fallout games which is true in the most technical literal superficial sense we have seen things of roughly these names and designs before but in any meaningful way the enemies of fallout 4 are a huge step forward and i think they play an important role in why combat is much more enjoyable in this game okay refresher time it's 2008 you're playing fallout 3. you run into your first mole rat what does it do well it's a melee enemy so it's going to run straight at you in order to perform an attack how do you deal with it well you could [ __ ] its legs to slow it down or go for a headshot which does bonus damage oh look there's a dog over there it turns out it wants to run straight at me to do an attack so the viable tactics are triple legs or focus on head for bonus damage oh look yao gwaii straight at me legs or head death claw legs or head i was going to give the milo like a pass for having the shell but then i realized the weak point was still the head because basically everything's weak point is the head and all the melee enemies have the exact same tactic which is run straight at you my point is there isn't much tactical variety here either and how the enemies attack you or how you deal with them the problem i'm trying to get at here is that everything is interchangeable there's no real difference between a mole rat and a death claw aside from three numbers it's health it's damage and it's armor and that's a big problem fallout 4 put a huge amount of effort into fixing this giving us a game where the enemies now exhibit hugely varied attacking behaviors as well as varied weaknesses that reward the player for understanding the situation they're in and make different engagements actually feel unique let me give you a really simple example feral ghouls used to be a fairly generic humanoid enemy both in fallout 1 and 2 where they were very weak and slow and fallout 3 in new vegas where they were in effect the same as a melee human enemy just with a slightly increased speed fallout 4 doubled down on that and made them unique ghouls are now extremely fast and will do a flying lunge to close the gap on you on top of that they have a unique reaction to your attacks if you [ __ ] their limbs the limb is literally blown off take out a single leg they will fall to the floor completely neutralize so this becomes pretty much your plan a for dealing with ghouls in fallout 4 as the leg is already relatively easier to hit than the head and especially against toughen ghouls you're gonna [ __ ] a leg far faster then you're going to kill them unique behavior unique response so how about the new addition to the super mutant roster the suicider an enemy armed with a nuke who attempts to charge towards you to detonate it meaning one when you hear the telltale beeping you know you've got to take out the suicide as a priority target but two a single shot to the armor holding the nuke will detonate it not only killing him but also hitting his own friends or how about enemies who are a bit more sneaky like how mole rats and rad scorpions can now burrow underground to get behind you encouraging the player to get to higher ground like on top of a wrecked car to avoid being swarmed or how some enemies are literally waiting in ambush particularly in far harbor where tree top golpers underwater anglers and disguised hermit crabs are all awaits much attention has also been paid to robots who now represent some of the most interesting and tactical fights in the entire game take the humble protectron a very simple opponent in fallout 3 well he got a lot of love in fallout 4. so you know how if you attack him the casing will break letting you see his innards that's not just a visual effect if you expose his innards and then shoot him there he takes extra damage to offset the generally higher armor he possesses next to fallout 3 at the start of the fight he's still with his lovely combat inhibitor on his back so if you can get behind him you can make him turn on his allies oh and the new and improved robot expert perk now it's not just about turning robots off you can make any robot you meet into a proper companion and we're not done with the humble protectron yet either the critical weak point these days is the arms if they both get crippled and thus the primary weapons have been disabled the robot will self-destruct no matter how much health it has left and no matter whether it's standing next to its own allies and even beyond that you know those terminals you can use to activate control protectrons the personality profiles genuinely let you change the behavior of the protectron from attacking everybody who's armed to only those who draw on fire to only those who attack the bot first and you have to bear in mind which loadout you're facing as medical bots only have melee attacks whereas firebots can only attack at medium range using their cryo sprays all of that that's just information it's useful to know when dealing with one of the most simple and basic robots in the game but the real fun stuff is safe for the elite enemies and this is a huge step forward for bethesda as in both fallout 3 and skyrim they seem to inevitably decide that the only way to make a boss harder was to give him more health so much more health and sadly in fallout 76 there has been a relapse and that game is full of the tankiest bullet sponges that ever walked the earth but for one glorious moment fallout 4 showed bethesda at their best creating interesting elite enemies with a variety of behaviors take the assault tron say its primary weapon is its head laser beam which has to be charged before it can be fired at which point it's devastating if you could [ __ ] the head the laser doesn't work however there's an issue the head isn't the assaultron's weak point in fact the head is actually reinforced attacking the head does less damage than anywhere else so do you try and break the head to stop the laser knowing you're doing less damage to it overall or do you just hide while it's firing and attack when it isn't you could take out the relatively fragile legs but that's not going to stop it moving it just drags itself around by hand though you will have slowed it down a bit so for a tough enough bond you might need to [ __ ] every single limb and then run from it self-destruct or how about the mileage queen that has a behavior that's almost unique in the entire franchise it can fire egg grenades that bring other enemies out onto the field and her powerful acid attack can be stopped if you pick off and [ __ ] her acid spouts or how about power armor users who have ridiculously high damage resistance but can be forced out of their tough shell if you can just take out their fusion cores though to do that you'll need to find a way to get behind them and then there's the sentry bot extremely heavily armored but if you can just keep it busy and avoid dying it'll have to cool down revealing the vulnerable fusion cores take them out and it's an instant kill now like protectrons losing both its primary weapon arms will cause a self-destruct but the sentry bot is fast and will try and take you down with it so you might want to hold off crippling the arms until you've got at least one of its legs down to make sure it can't charge you once it's exploding and of course the death claw which is relatively simple but has one of my favorite behaviors of all the enemies they're weak to being attacked in the belly and thus seemingly try to protect their belly running bent over with their head down so you don't have an easy shot at the one bit of them that's less heavily armoured all of this makes combat more varied and interesting for everybody but it's also a treat for vat shooters as picking apart the right limb is now often a critical part of taking down the toughest foes which syncs up beautifully with the vat's limb targeting system so we've got a brilliant character build system and a fantastic world populated by the most interesting and diverse range of enemies in the history of fallout but there's one missing piece we need to address who actually lives here [Music] so at the start of this video approximately two weeks ago i pointed out the impossible position the creators of fallout 4 face at the start of its development and one of the many issues was that obsidium went and made the best game ever in 2010 and that couldn't help but shape parts of fallout 4 and the biggest way is at the highest level how the world of fallout 4 is populated because the game fully embraced a faction system and the factions are completely at the center of the game vastly more so than sean it's noteworthy for example that sean is a baby kidnapped in a world where a bunch of people have already been kidnapped so nobody else really cares that much about him the focus is instead on the people who kidnapped him valentine dr amari virgil the three factions you can get to help build the teleporter they're all far more interested in the institute than they are and shawn the entire first act is really much more about just establishing the various factions and the basis of their relationship with the institute with the third act entirely dedicated to working for or against the various factions the point i'm trying to get to here is in terms of core structured fallout quest experience the factions are at the heart of everything becoming more and more prominent as the game goes on if fallout 4 is going to work overall the factions need to work and apparently i just really enjoy the pitchforks because i'm about to say maybe the most controversial statement i've ever uttered in some ways fallout 4's factions are superior to new vegas okay while you're all putting together a bigger bonfire because now the first one isn't anywhere near hot enough let me be clear new vegas has the better faction reputation mechanic its factions have much more interesting in-depth law that rewards the player for engaging with them with rich backstory they're populated by a better selection of more varied and compelling characters and in general they are much better written but despite all of that fallout 4 has an ace up its sleeve and to explain what that is let me begin with a simple example in new vegas when you're exploring mccarran and the strip you can learn a lot about the monorail system characters explain to you that it's a very useful strategic possession for the ncr allowing them to move men in and out of vegas easily and if necessary project strength into the strip effectively controlling two areas for the price of one it's an important asset which has its own quest dedicated to it so what happens if you blow it up does the ncr's presence on the strip reduce to represent it's now hard to get there do we see more ncr troops passing through freeside now that's the only way in no none of those things happen miss new vegas announces that it happened over the radio colonel james shu will say it's a disaster but nothing in the world changes and this happens quite a lot in new vegas no matter what major events occur the legion driven out of nelson and cottonwood cove the sacking of camp forlorn home the death of caesar the assassination of president kimball heck gunderson promising to start the strip the leaders of crimson caravan and the silver rush being killed in revenge attacks the status quo always holds the ncr patrols do the same handful of routes no matter how well or badly the war is going for them the point i'm trying to make here is in new vegas like the vast majority of games you do big important things that you're told are going to be hugely consequential and yet the world just carries on you don't see the change represented in the world around you and this is where fallout 4 shines and in particular one of my favorite factions in the entire franchise fallout 4's brotherhood of steel and it's down to how they organically interact with the rest of the world you see at the start of the game the brotherhood of steel aren't present in the commonwealth in force just a handful of scouts but at the end of the first act they arrive with the pretwyn and vertebrate and they issue a threat that nobody should interfere in their business they say they're here to hunt down and destroy monsters where their definition of monster is a little bit on the broad side they're a heavily armed militaristic authoritarian group that press gangs farmers into handing over their crops and basically seeks to forcefully occupy boston and kill anybody who stands in their way so you know a few concerning things there in general when a faction rocks up in a game and announces that it's taking over but don't worry because their huge military is completely fine but don't get in our way or we will murder you that's a good sign they aren't to be trusted but here's the crucial genius bit that makes me adore how this faction works they actually follow through on all of their talk they do actually get out into the world and start killing monsters and not just in a handful of scripted events you'll run into them all over the shop and you'll find yourself feeling very relieved when you hear the sound of an approaching vertebrate because they genuinely do help their vertebrae down fire on the enemy knights will deploy onto the ground with powerful weapons and armor and they do a good job destroying groups of raiders ghouls super mutants all the things that ordinarily would be attacking you and this creates a really fascinating bit of storytelling because everything they say makes them sound like the bad guys they deny the possibility that a sentient ai could ever have the right to exist you're asked to shake down farmers and seize any valuable technology but they're actually helpful the railroad doesn't have the manpower to handle patrolling and is focused exclusively on its own goals regardless and the minutemen are dedicated to protecting their own holdings not general pacification of the region the simple fact is the brotherhood get out and kill a lot of bad things countless games and other media take on the question would you sacrifice liberty for security but i can't recall ever seeing a better representation of that debate being allowed to play out in the world without a single character in the game ever saying that's what you're seeing but it is they're literally an occupying army that the locals don't like or trust but they're also the only people in the world that seem to be making an impact on the wasteland and making your life easier as you travel through boston and the waste beyond it though to step back from the organic storytelling for a moment the lore of fallout 4's brotherhood is fascinating too because it's a bold new place for the brotherhood of steel but one that feels perfectly in character this is the realization of a dark place that we always knew the brotherhood could go to fallout one's brotherhood has such contempt for the average wastelander that they send you off to a radioactive ruin to die as a joke fallout 3's outcast treat the locals with open mockery elder lion's chapter was exiled for doing too much to help the local population the west coast brotherhood fought a war against the ncr and father elijah's entire career from operation sunburst to the events of dead money does not speak well to the brotherhood's respect for outsiders an insular narrow-minded refusal to engage with the world positively that made veronica consider leaving her home the possibility of the brotherhood mobilizing their massive tech advantage to go on crusader has always been there in fact as i say it's already happened they fought a war against the ncr between fallout 2 and new vegas so this is a really interesting place for the brotherhoods not engaged in debate as to whether they should be closed off or open to the world the same debate we've already seen happen in fallout 1 and 3 and new vegas but at a point in their history where they're aggressively pursuing their mission to capture or destroy dangerous technology and willing to mobilize their forces and occupy territory to get it done the brotherhood on crusade is a great setup for a story because they could be brilliant or terrifying depending on how they wield their power or perhaps whether you're willing to collaborate with them because they're not actively oppressing you and instead are actually making your life a little bit easier the question is are you willing to completely overlook the clearly stated wishes of every single local who do not like or trust the brotherhood one little bit now all of that was just one example of a storytelling device that fallout 4 uses a lot and that's narrative through mechanics and gameplay in brief this means that even if you were to ignore the words coming out of every character's mouth the gameplay will still impart a piece of the story to you now you've probably heard of the opposite of this where the story and gameplay are at odds like say you're told you're on a top secret mission but then the alarms go off and there's a massive fire fight but it doesn't seem to matter we call this ludo narrative dissonance fallout 4 features the opposite of this ludo narrative harmony where an impressive amount of thought has been put into crafting faction missions that inherently suit and inform you about the relevant faction so let's examine that supposition the first quest given by the brotherhood after they arrive in full is show no mercy where you get an invertebrate circle a group of mutants gunning them down with a minigun before landing and wiping out the remaining mutants inside the mission is only complete when everything is dead so if you'd paid no attention to the plot up to this point and had never played a fallout game before and knew nothing about the brotherhood what would you learn from this mission just from the gameplay one the brotherhood has access to superior technology two they deal with their problems violently three they are uncompromising and will as the mission says show no mercy and there you go what i was saying before about how terrifying a brotherhood crusade could theoretically be that's it right there the basics of what you need to know about the brotherhood to understand the faction embedded in a single mission's gameplay and just quickly while we're on the brotherhood can i just say i love the new design of the power armor how it's not just a suit but instead acts like a vehicle an entirely different type of armor that feels like a walking tank which it should because that's why the us army built it in the first place now there are some gameplay issues with how it works we'll get to them but just design wise it's beautiful and i love how big it is now it makes the notes feel appropriately intimidating but let's step back and examine a different faction see if this holds true elsewhere the first mission the railroad gives you is tradecraft and it is hugely different to show no mercy which it should be the brotherhood are a huge advanced army while the railroad is made up of a small number of elite agents they rely on secrecy tactics and intelligence so how does their mission go you begin by exchanging call signs with a second agent and specifying how you'd like him to help you you have a choice of approaches as the other agent is both a capable sniper and an explosives expert you then proceed to sneak into the facility through a sewer during the mission you can use several terminals to disable security your goal is to infiltrate a safe and acquire a piece of technology in short hugely different and what would we learn if we ignored every word that's written or spoken this is a group of agents they use stealth equipment and other sneaky tactics to outsmart their opponents and there we go that's a good summary of how the railroad really does operate what about the minutemen what does preston tell you to do crucially nothing he doesn't want you to do anything instead he wants you to go to small farms and ask them what needs doing which most of the time will be dealing with a small local problem a nearby pest or radar do that for them and their farm becomes allied and you can start building there because the minutemen are a faction of town builders dedicated to building a loose alliance of independent holdings so what do their missions look like they look like solving the local issues of a town so they can stay independent so just take all three of those missions side by side and look how different they are in execution there is literally no room for stealth and show no mercy you are literally flying around firing a minigun it is about overwhelming firepower tradecraft is about stealth terminals being sneaky and the minutemen quests are about accessing a new town that you can build in setting it up with appropriate resources and defenses so it stays safe going forward they all feel completely different and that feel holds true for the rest of the campaign the brotherhood missions are largely violent the sentinel site is filled with ghouls that you just have to mow down the railroad must be wiped out to the last man spoils of war add victoria they all have a similar thrust direct confrontation lots of unavoidable violence so what about the railroads saying during their campaign how do they deal with the brotherhood well as sneaky secret agents they can do it without a single shot being fired in rockets red glare you can use disguises stealth and charisma to infiltrate the pride winner plant the bombs and bring it down without a shot being fired it is perfect ludo narrative harmony and as for the minutemen how did they deal with the brotherhood well having recruited a whole bunch of towns they fire artillery from all their farms at the same time bringing down the prid win and even better they then have to survive a counter-attack on their main base the castle but the castle of course is a build site meaning literally the final boss of the minutemen run is in part a test of your building abilities the better the defenses you constructed the easier the fight is which is again for a faction all about building in towns incredibly elegant ludo narrative harmony and all of this is without pointing out that each faction gives you unique rewards that again fit the faction perfectly the minutemen let you build artillery that you can cool down nearby to every town you secure the more you recruit into the minuteman the more of the commonwealth you can hit with the artillery rewarding you for building the minuteman alliance and building up the towns you recruit while the railroad gives you access to ballistic weave some of the strongest armor in the game which can be applied to everyday apparel so you look casual but actually you're extremely well protected again perfect for the secret agents of the railroads and this sort of thinking just permeates fallout 4 it's everywhere like our perk magazines which are just beautiful by the way the art is just gorgeous are found in appropriate locations if you want the medical magazines the boost limb damage check medical facilities want the us covert top magazines the boost stealth you'll find them in government and army bases the unstoppables comic books in schools energy weapon boosting magazines research labs and power plants it's just another way that the world makes sense and how you learn to read your environment and make informed choices about which buildings to prioritize looting as you'll learn what loots you'll find and what magazines are likely to be there and okay i think we need a quick fire round to cover off a few things that don't for tell swear one you can sprint now which adds an extra element to ap management for that users and an extra reason to take agility even if you just want to shoot manually two quick looting oh bloody hell quick looting is amazing three you can cancel out of vats now which is really nice as you were locked in in three in new vegas meaning you could waste an entire vats around if the enemy just moved slightly or some scenery obstructed you four throwables are permanently set meaning grenades etc have been promoted from never used ever to really bloody useful five radiation now directly reduces your health bar that's a brilliant system and makes radiation feel much more real and dangerous than the abstract systems of three in new vegas and most importantly of all the vault suits are sexy and skin tight again feels like i'm wearing nothing at all nothing at all nothing at all now of course there are um other things that we could uh discuss there's the institute and the way they're dealt with we could um we could just uh pass over that the speech we haven't talked about speech and the game's intro is um there are some interesting choices dotted about the map by the way that suggests all sorts of unfortunate but you know i can't go into everything that doesn't work entirely properly in fallout 4 and then how i evaluate the game overall when we factor all those things in together because that would be ridiculous and it would take a whole other video essay just to oh no [Music] you

Channel: Many A True Nerd

Views: 1,711,180

Keywords: Fallout 4, Fallout 4 game, Fallout 4 gameplay, let's play Fallout 4, Fallout 4 walkthrough, Fallout 4 playthrough, Fallout 4 part 1, Fallout 4 discussion, Fallout 4 good, Fallout 4 review, Fallout 4 better, Fallout 4 is better than you think, fallout 4 lore, fallout, fallout 4 essay, fallout 4 video essay, fallout 4 vats, fallout 4 factions, fallout 4 brotherhood

Id: JQr70sDtxsg

Length: 92min 19sec (5539 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/cord1001010]

Fallout 4 has always been my favorite of the Fallout games - it’s not perfect, there are plenty of issues with linearity, and being a bit shoehorned into playing the vengeful widow type, but I love how they innovated with mechanics and base building.

New Vegas’ aesthetics, themes, and morbid cowboy-esque fun was far superior, but I enjoyed the search for legendaries, and getting to roleplay in my little Sanctuary compound - and to me, the roleplay added by new systems and settlements was so valuable in terms of me sinking into the world, and getting to create my own survival experience in a corner of the wasteland. I loved actually building creatively to see what it would look like to rebuild the world post-nuclear armageddon.

I don’t expect this to be a popular opinion, but I really hope new players give it another shot, especially with mods, all the cool DLC, and some time to cool down now that we can sit and just look back at it.

[u/deadsea29]

I think Jon made some valid points and despite my opinions about Fallout 4, I think Jon was successful j his goal of putting forward a perspective, or another point of appreciation, for Fallout 4.

[u/LiquidSean]

Wow I feel out of the loop, I didn’t realize so many people disliked FO4. At the time I feel like it was pretty well received

[u/xLMNS]

But... I already think it’s good..

[u/TJ_Marcus]

I loved his Fallout 3 breakdown. Probably gonna love this too

[u/Slapzilla]

I am excited to watch this. For me, FO4 is one of the most genuinely fun games I've played in recent memory: the exploration, the lore, the gunplay, the time spent putting together a build, the DLCs and so many of the characters in general are all pretty damn entertaining to me. However, in order to have that fun, I have to ignore the main quest and its patent absurdity as much as possible. The patent absurdity isn't even the problem: it's how unacknowledged the absurdity feels, the way your character pivots from wisecracking and being inexplicably competent in navigating the post-Apocalypse to fretting and being oh-so-worried about your missing child (even if you've been fucking off at Red Rocket for weeks). It just tests my credulity too much. Not to mention that what I really want is the option to explicitly and verbally not give a shit about Sean. Being able to do so would enable me to make sense of the way the game unfolds, especially as an explanation for why my character spent weeks fucking off at Red Rocket.

Anyway, looking forward to watching this.

[u/CorneliusHardcastle]

Started watching and then realised it goes for an hour and a half... ahh, not sure I'm ready for that. But I have been considering giving Fallout 4 another chance. I really barely put any hours into it. Played through fallout 3 about 175 times, NV about 40 times. Fallout 4 like 1/8th of a time.

[u/ADeceitfulBird]

I was talking to a friend the other night about fallout and he started talking about how shit fallout 4 was and how he hopes the next one will be good because it was such a shitty, crappy shit crap game. Meanwhile I've got like 1000+ hours in it and just about every piece of merch....🤫

[u/Lunaryon]

Gonna be honest, several of the things he mentioned about the Robots i didn't know.

I'm real tempted to do a VATS only run now