Fallout 4

Fallout Fever

April 22, 2024 by Belghast

The release of the Fallout Amazon Series appears to be a rousing success. It appears that critics across the board have given the show high marks, and similarly, long-time fans of the series are loving it. Tim Cain who worked on the very first Fallout game released his review of the show on YouTube and pretty much gave glowing praise for the level of detail. Sure there has been some minor controversy about the timeline of events and whether or not it reset the timeline of Fallout New Vegas… but overall folks have been happy. I shared my own praise of the show a few weeks back and I feel like I need to watch it again just to soak in all of the detail.

We are now seeing this Fallout love, translating into a rush of players to games like Fallout 76… which never really seemed to find its place and launched with a peak concurrency of 32k players on Steam. Recently it has been breaking those records with a new peak hitting just shy of 73k players. What is even more telling is… Amazon is giving this game away for free through the Microsoft Game Store and these Steam numbers are not even accounting for that. I’ve said recently that it seems to take about two years before a live service game is really worth playing, and now some five years later… Fallout 76 is in prime shape (pun intended) to welcome this influx of players.

The thing is… this isn’t just impacting the live service Fallout offering. The player numbers in Fallout 3 show an over 200% increase, New Vegas around 130% increase, and Fallout 4 similarly around 130% increase. This is translating to more than just players dusting off their existing copies because Fallout games are now seizing spots on the Steam Top Sellers Chart. As of the time of writing this Fallout 76 is 4th, Fallout 4 5th, Fallout 4 GOTY edition 9th, New Vegas 20th, and Fallout 3 GOTY edition down at 48th. I remember the Witcher Netflix series having a similar effect on sales of Witcher 3 boosting it by around 500%. While the Witcher series went off the rails and lost fans in later seasons, this is evidence that a good project surrounding a game will absolutely have deep impact on sales as it brings in a whole new group of fans.

Over the last week or so I have had a number of gamer friends reach out to me for my advice for where to start in their Fallout adventures. Namely how far back they should go… and as much as I hate to admit it my advice has been to skip the first two games unless they are already indoctrinated into the world of 90s CRPGs. The best Fallout game is New Vegas, so I feel like at a minimum everyone needs to play that one. There is merit however to start with Fallout 3, because while it is a very monochromatic wasteland… Three Dog is without a doubt the best DJ. Fallout 4 is a reasonable starting place if you are unwilling to deal with the jank of older games even though it has plenty of that good good Bethesda jank to contend with. My general advice would be to play Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and then Fallout 4 in that order… and if you find yourself craving more then maybe go back and do Fallout 1 and 2 if you can handle the downgrade in tech. Fallout Tactics was a game that I did not enjoy in the least so it isn’t going to get any sort of recommendation from me.

Personally, I find myself sinking further and further into Fallout 76. This is probably a bad starting place for anyone who cares about the story elements of Fallout. The lore of the game feels a bit too malleable, and while I am enjoying myself if you actually care about the story of the world… the other games are a much better option. What I wanted was to explore the content that has been added to this game over the years. I’ve poked at it off and on… and then got into the habit of logging into claim the various offerings throughout the years. However, I’ve never really played it as my main game and I am trying to find my way into that stance. I talked about it quite a bit on the podcast this weekend, but the community is very intriguing.

At some point, I need to dedicate some serious time to building up a proper base. I somehow ended up getting my original destroyed when I tried to move it, but truth be told it was sort of a mess. I would like to actually spend some time building something I am proud of. Above is an older screenshot and quite honestly… I just sort of kept throwing things at it without any real design goals. I’ve found a fairly flat area of land that no one seems to ever have a base… so I am going to attempt to build something more proper there. The post Fallout Fever appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Radioactive Nostalgia

April 16, 2024 by Belghast

Over the weekend I finished watching my way through the Amazon Fallout Series and I have to say… It nails the vibe of Fallout perfectly. There are so many things that are just “right” about the world and I have a feeling I am going to have to watch the entire series a few more times before all of them sync in. There are moments like Super Duper Mart that are pulled directly from the games, and then there are just set dressing and elements that are so familiar but not necessarily directly connected. For example the placement of first aid kits on walls in exactly the right location to where you find them in pretty much every fallout game. Then there are the sound effects and quite honestly just by those alone… I know exactly what weapon is being fired at any given time. Someone on this show clearly cared about these details and I greatly appreciate all of the loving work that they did on getting them right.

All of this built a strong desire to dive back in and immerse myself in the Fallout Universe. Now about once a year I end up playing some New Vegas because it is one of my all-time favorite games. Fallout 3 however is a game that I have not replayed in over a decade. So I went through the process of getting it up and running. I tried to install some mods and then got frustrated by the fact that apparently, you need to downgrade the current 2021 client… in order to get most of them to work. So instead I nuked everything and started fresh just playing through the vanilla game of the year client as downloaded from Steam. I’ve got to be honest… the game as a whole holds up surprisingly well. I mean it still has obtuse gunplay and is full of that good good Bethesda jank, but nothing really felt terribly off from the formula we have all gotten used to. Sure mechanically there are some missing features that we have in the more modern Fallout games like 4 and 76, but mechanically it felt solid. I’ve not played a ton so far, and unfortunately Steam seems to not be able to track actual time spent playing the game and instead tracks time spent with the launcher open. I think if I were to play this further I would need to mod it a bit. I had forgotten just how desolate Fallout 3 looks. In the later titles, they realized that barren wastelands were a bit uninteresting to stare at in 3D, but this first of the modern Fallouts is a bit “spartan”.

Last night I spent some time diving back into Fallout 76. At some point, I completely restarted the game and as such still have a lot of the early quest scaffolding to work my way through. I find myself with the itch to live more in the Fallout world so between 3 and 76 I figure I am probably going to be doing a lot more of that in the coming weeks. 76 is a title that I feel like I have never really gotten into the swing of, so it would be interesting to play it enough to really feel like I am experiencing the benefits of the live service side of things. I know it has been a constantly expanding game over the last few years so it will be cool to get through the original story and see some of the newer stuff. Have you watched your way through the new Amazon series? What were your thoughts? Has it also prompted you to want to spend more time in Fallout games? Drop me a line below. The post Radioactive Nostalgia appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Games of the Decade: 2015

December 23, 2019 by Belghast

Continuing the series we dive into some of the games that were important to me in 2015. There were a bunch of games that made the early version of this list, but in many cases I didn’t feel like I had a lot to talk about any of them. I’ve been trying to avoid expansions/dlc on the list, and as a result that knocked out Heavensward which took up a significant portion of my year. Similarly this knocks out Destiny Taken King which also was super important. The final list was whittled down to just four games but I feel like there is something special with each of them.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

For years I had heard wonderful things about the Witcher series, but I found them somewhat obtuse and difficult to get into. Maybe if I had played the original when it first was released it might have made a difference, but trying to make it with modern expectations was a nonstarter. I found the interface to be deeply cludgy and confusing. When The Witcher 3 released I was not expecting much from it based on my past experience with the earlier two titles, but I got a free copy with a new video card and gave it a shot. What I found was a deep and rich world that I really enjoyed exploring. I’ve not gotten anywhere close to actually beating the game, but it is on that list of titles that I keep meaning to restart from scratch and play through again. The recent release of the Netflix series is re-igniting that desire so maybe I will spend some time over the coming days giving it another shot.

Dying Light

Dying Light is one of those games that is almost impossible to explain without actually experiencing it. At its core it is a game about surviving the zombie apocalypse, but it is much more than that given that there are rich systems where you gain favor with various factions of survivors. The other aspect that is hard to explain is how important movement is to this game. It is a game that takes parkour to the next level as you try and find a path to run on that is safe from the endless hordes of the undead in the world below. There is always this tentative balance between staying in safety and dropping down into the places where you need to scavenge materials from. The total package is wildly enjoyable and now that the game has been out for quite some time you can pick it up on the cheap. If you missed it the first time, well worth grabbing especially since there is a sequel in the works for 2020 release.

Victor Vran

If you have read this blog for very long you will know of my deep affinity for “diablo-likes” and ARPGs in general. One of these that sorta slipped under almost everyone’s radar is a game called Victor Vran, where you take the controls of a Van Helsing like character that hunts demons and monsters. What makes this game interesting to me is that it has really good WASD controls and extremely interesting level design that works in old fashioned Wolf 3D era “secrets” that can be unlocked to find both new paths and troves of loot. The combination makes for a compelling action RPG that in some ways reminds me of early Isometric shooters like Crusader: No Remorse. You have a wide variety of attacks and special abilities and the levels are hand crafted instead of procedurally generated. This leads to a more structured game-play experience but also somewhat harms the replay value. This is now out on even more platforms including the switch, so well worth checking out if you too are a fan of ARPGs.

I love the Fallout series and have since I first played the original back in 1997. The Fallout community tends to have two distinct branches… those who hold up Fallout 3 as the best title and those who hold up Fallout New Vegas in highest regard. I like aspects of both but tend to fall into the New Vegas camp. Fallout 4 was not exactly the game that either of those factions wanted and as a result it tends to be a fairly divisive title. For me… the aspect that I love about it is Base Building, which is the nail in the coffin for other games. I love feeling like I get to have an effect on the world by linking together disparate groups of refuges into a larger community. When I play this game I more or less ignore the story-line that is forced upon you, and the constantly limiting choice paths… and instead play a game where I am rebuilding the wasteland. I am pretty great at making up my own story when I find the current options distasteful.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2015

2015 was the year that I went to my first video game convention in the form of Pax South in San Antonio. I got to hang out with my friends Ashgar and Rae and explore all of the nonsense that makes up a Pax while also doing various press meetings. I managed to abuse those connections to sneak them into a gameplay session for Gigantic which was probably the game of the show that year. If you start on the right side, the faces that are pointed towards the camera at the screens are me, Ashgar, Rae and then hovering above Rae and explaining the abilities is Lonrem. It was a pretty good year, that started with a bang. I greatly miss going to Pax South each year, but the timing just hasn’t worked out since 2018.

Listless Gaming

June 5, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was a fairly fraught evening with me needing to spend more time than I would have liked dealing with work stuff. By the time I shifted over into gaming mode I was struggling to find the fun in almost anything that I played. Initially I attempted to get into Dishonored Death of the Outsider and managed to make a tiny bit of progress… but in the end just wound up taking screenshots of the weird shit appearing in the game like this… that I can only term as some sort of a monkey baron? For whatever reason this game is struggling to hold my attention in quite the way that Dishonored 1 and 2 did and I am not entirely certain why. It could simply be that I am still not the biggest fan of Karnaca and greatly prefer the vibe of Dunwall.

Whatever the case I made it to about the halfway point of a mission before needing to shut down because my wife needed assistance with something. When I returned to my laptop I did not return to the game and moved on to rummage around for something else to do. Evenings like last night are frustrating because it feels like I squandered the opportunity to have a good time. There are times where my mind is just not in the right place to really enjoy anything so I sorta flail about until eventually giving up for the evening and going to sleep. I wish there was a button that allowed me to purge my mind of worries and just be present in the activity I happen to be doing… and before someone suggests it… meditation doesn’t seem to work for me. I just end up sitting quietly thinking about the same nonsense I was thinking about before I actively tried not to think about it.

So what did I do instead of playing something I had not experienced… I started a brand new game of Fallout 4. In theory I need to get Nexus Mod Manager set up on my upstairs machine and get all of the mods I like to use there. This whole remote playing everything is interesting because there were a lot of experiences like Fallout that I managed to make work downstairs… albeit in a way less pretty fashion. I have to say I could really get used to this whole being able to play games in full resolution and fidelity… from the machine that is most comfortable at that very moment. I need to drag my spare laptop to work and see how well this process works over the guest network there because in theory… it should be accessible from any online connection. I could even try tethering my phone and seeing how playable everything is over a 4G LTE connection.

I sorta always create the same basic character in Fallout 4… which is essentially a version of the same character I create in any game. Little details change but the rough outline of the “Belghast” archetype remains the same. Incoming spoiler alert for anyone who might not have played the game. I don’t even mess with customizing the spouse anymore, because I know a few minutes into the experience she will be long gone. I so rarely play female characters in games because they don’t really fit with the whole unified character thing that I tend to do.

I am not rejecting them because they are female… more that I am rejecting them because they don’t fit the character I keep wanting to play over and over in every single game. I do fine in titles that have a strong female character that you assume the reigns of… like Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn or Lara Croft in the new Tomb Raider games. However when you give me a game like the Mass Effect series that allows me to craft a tailor made character… I will almost every single time create a “Belghast”. I also have a lot of issue with the game if it impedes me from crafting this character… which I experience a lot when playing games without beard options or “pretty boy” features. Basically I am not really a fan of the whole Bishōnen thing. Belghast is a battle damaged character and as a result I prefer whatever form that representation takes looks that way… though I do worry that at times I am essentially creating a Marlboro Man.