Ceramic Fanatic

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Hey gang. Have you ever wondered how this awful comic is made? Well once I’ve forced a screeching, stillborn joke from my barren word-womb, Cory draws some pictures. Pictures like this.

Funny thing about Fallout 4‘s new crafting system is that eventually you’ll come to value coffee cups and wonderglue more than any amount of military ordinance.
It’s funny this is this seems to be one Bethesda that doesn’t get a pass for its quirky, well… Bethesdaisms, because it’s easily my favorite of the later-day, 3D shootbang Fallouts. Fallout 3 and New Vegas both had this weird disconnect. They looked and, in theory, played like shooters, but they still had all this leftover, abstract stats stuff from the earlier Fallout games gumming up the combat. Fallout 4‘s combat and leveling system is far less abstract. You’re already baseline competent with most of the weapons at level 1, with each “perk” being exactly that, a tangible increase in your effectiveness. It’s not exactly Painkiller, but F4 is an enjoyable shooter in its own right. The difficulty is still borked, however, with the difficulty levels being tied directly to your enemies’ difficulty level. Survival modes changes to healing are interesting, but they also come with a free ticket to bullet sponge city.

Unfortunately while simplifying the combat/level system was a strong choice, the changes to the games’ dialogue/interaction systems are almost uniformly terrible. The dreaded “four responses summed up by one or two words” system BioWare invented to ruin RPGs rears its ugly head, and for some reason skill/build orientated conversation options are completely missing. You can no longer use your scientific or medical knowledge to solve problems, instead most special dialogue options are just straight up charisma checks and random chance rolls. It’s a boring system that sucks a lot of the life out of the universe.

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