Fallout 4 (2015)

Got Fallout London working and I'm really loving it. It's my first experience with a total conversion mod for Fallout so wasn't sure what to expect but yeah... it feels like a brand new game. I'm getting some F3 / NV vibes too in the execution which I love.

It's definitely appealing seeing my home country as the setting for the game, the voice acting and intro is spot on for Fallout, the radio stations and ambient music is very fitting with church bells echoing faintly for suspense during dark interior sections.

The props and environments are really detailed too and a standout from the beginning, absolutely adore the ATTA-Boy and terminal re-designs. Looks like the ATTA-Boy is a reverse engineered pip-boy judging from the terminal entries. The UK equivalent of the Nuka Cola beverages are here too and I'm so excited to discover what else has been altered and added to fit the new setting. If the rest of the mod is like this I would not be surprised if we see this being made into a full size official spin-off one day in the distant future, assuming Todd can move away from the whole 'Fallout will only take place in the U.S' stance.

Damn it, the recent next gen update 2 from a few days ago means Fallout 4 on PC is broken again if you use mods, specifically F4SE script extender. You'll need the latest F4SE build. The website seems to have an older build so I used the Nexus page. Think you can use vortex to do the install for you but seeing as I installed the mod manually a few years ago I just did it again and replaced the files myself. All works again now!

If you do it manually make sure you don't copy the 'data' and 'src' folders across in their entirety as this might completely replace your folders which will likely have extra files in if you've been playing and using other mods. Not sure if this is actually an issue, the files might generate themselves when you launch the game, I haven't tested it as I didn't want to risk breaking my game. I went into each folder and copied the files over seperately which only took a few seconds.

I got some Fallout 4 questions for people mroe familiar with the game.

1. I am finding I'm wandering into areas that are far too high level for where I'm at (lvl 13), but very little in the game, even simply following quests, is informing me what areas are too high level. Am I missing something?

2. I am 10 hours in and have not seen a single store or trader. Where they at?

3. I keep running out of ammo, so I'm carrying like 1p guns and cycling through ammo. Can you craft ammo?

4. What is the main quest line? I literally have no idea. I've been following the Minutemen one but that just seems to revolve around the base building mini game.

I was having fun for a long while with this game, but now I'm being pretty aggressively level gated, and I'm not sure why.

Put a good few hours into this one today, and you know what? It's not half bad. Though I say that with the caveat that mods do fix one fundamental problem: The dialogue.

My experience with the PS4 version was thus: I hated the dialogue system, I hated the crafting, I hated the frankly unacceptable game-breaking bugs (like the square explosions and when the game crashed on me twice during the Deathclaw fight at the very start of the game).

I installed exactly two mods for my Xbox version: One to display the full dialogue, not just the truncated snippets that almost never bely the accuracy of the response, and one to improve the readability of the map. These massively improve the experience in a big way. I will say, though, that the limitation to only four dialogue choices at any given time, and the failure to show relevant skill checks in those choices, is a substantial downgrade from those in 3 and New Vegas. The choice to change this was braindead, to be frank.

The crafting isn't amazing, but I no loner despise it. At the time, I saw it as clear trend chasing. And it was. But taken in isolation, the idea of scrapping and rebuilding settlements is cool - even if it's something I'm probably going to ignore completely.

The technical issues are where the biggest improvements come. Quite frankly, the game is rock solid. No crashes, no bugs that I've seen, and overall just a smooth experience. It'll occasionally stutter when I'm passing into a loading zone in the open world, but it barely ever happens. Everything else just works great.

Overall, I'm really enjoying my time with this. I can already tell it's just not as interesting as 3 and NV, but it's also not the garbage fire I thought it was at launch. Will probably wind up finishing it.

Update on the modding situation: I went to continue my gameplay today and F4SE (Fallout 4 Script Extender) finally spat me out the version mismatch error.

F4SE relies on native coding and, second to the creator, it was broken in the same exact way SKSE had been broke back when the Anniversary Edition came out. Luckily it isn't as complicated than that (the Anniversary Edition, while being a stand-alone purchase, also pushed an update on Skyrim: Special Edition that broke everything for a while, even clothing mods).

At this point, I'd advise rolling back for the time being or wait a couple more days since creator ianpatt has already been at work for a pre-release - you can read more about it on the F4SE Mod Page. Second post in the forum details how to downgrade by hand.

If you want to auto-downgrade: Fallout 4 Downgrader and STEAM - Skip Next-Gen update are already out - one downgrades an already updated version, the other prevents your STEAM from downloading the updated version.

I'll post more when I see new updates on the whole thing but as far as I know, only F4SE dependent mods were impacted on top of some overhaul mods that didn't use pre-combines of textures and assets.

Paid $15 to play about 15 hours and the 15-year-old formula is showing its age.

Last played in 2015 on the PS4. Thought it was fine. After watching the show, I decided to grab it on PC with all the DLC and install along with 700+ mods. TLDR - even 4 DLCs and 700 mods cant save what is a very rough experience.

For anyone who still wants to have a go at it, here is what I did with good results:

• Spent $10 to buy the GOTY edition on sale
• Spent $5 to buy NexusMods premium for a month
• Downloaded and installed A StoryWealth mod collection