Making Fallout 4 minimally acceptable with minimal changes

C

Charwo

Look, Ma! Two Heads!
For some stupid pedantic reason, I keep wanting to fix Fallout 4. And by that, I don't mean change the main quest, cause while lackluster I can see it, but change the city of Bsoton. See there are mods for alternate main quest (Valkarie etc) there are good sidequest mods (Tales from the Commonwealth)but it's the WORLDBULILDING that's so terrible, the thing Bethesda's supposed to be good at.

Not all of it. Not nearly. Mond you I can barely mod crafting requirements ATM but I think where Fallout 4 FAILS and FAILS hard isn't the story is the worldbuilding. Boston needs to be a city-state. Not the whole of it, but the Fens in the West to the Docks in the East, with the Charles River as boundary on the North and south on the southern end more or less running parallel with Mass Pike East.

To justify not changing EVERYTHING, say Boston took a Catagory 5 hurricane to the face about a year and a half before the SS awakens and then took a severe glancing blow from a vicious Nor'easter that was more ice than rain or snow in April.

And that justifies why Boston is a warzone. It DID hold on, even prospered before the Insititute sabotaged the Commonwealth Provisional but due to the Insitutites terror campaigns Boston has shriveled as people go to places less likely to have Insitute monsters creeping about: Rhode Island, Cape Cod, Nantucket Island.

So all the damage you see to the interiors of Boston are actually very very recent. Those cars rotting on the highways? Two years ago they were still functional if decrepit.

It's apocalyptic again because of natural disaster, and the guys the city brought in to help keep order, the Gunners? Well, the money ran out and the Insitute bought them out. In this version, Diamond City is the refugee center, Moe's selling swatters there because he's an idiot but the vendors are all spread out in the Fens, as is Nick and everything but the inn. It's a giant refugee center for people displaced from the destroyed places like College Point and Salem and such and so forth.

In practice, this means a couple of things, at least for a base fix: Trinity Tower needs to be moved south out of Trinity Square which is fine, the NCPS have to be moved, new interiors created in the Fens, cleaning up several would be dungeons, and creating NPCs in populated areas, probably deleting Swan All together, although he might be able to be moved north of the Westing estate.

Instead of everything being frozen in place from 2077, change all of it so it WAS is somewhat good condition until two years ago and everything's gone to shit since then.

This I think would fix most of the worlsbuilding problems, that and deleting all the skeletons and trash where they shouldn't be.

Will the MQ ever be a roleplayers thing? No. Will the character ever be your avatar, no. But those aren't the problem, at least not by themselves. Other than shoehorning in the Brotherhood, the basic premise isn't bad. It CAN be fixed and not be a completely different game. At least that's my take on it.
 
Hello Charwo,

Well your fixes sound good regarding trying to make the world feel a bit more like two hundreds years have passed. Perhaps some buildings or block should be partially "renovated" and filled in with furniture other areas that were empty to begin with or had buildings but these have been collapsed are now used for new post war buildings that look pretty decent.

Also water pumps and purification machines, generators, and perhaps lamps to light up the settlements during nights.

And of course a walls surrounding the settlements with some of these having collapsed.

I am also for clearing out some dungeons and that these are still occupied by NPCs who try to make a living here.
Oh and prospectors in places such as factories who will tell the player that they claimed this place the moment he or she meets them.

I am not sure if there should be wrecks of cars that still ran two years ago before the disaster but definitely that a lot of them have been cleared from the inner city as their material was re used for other purposes.
The further the player gets away from the city the more wrecked cars and trucks he encounters.

Definitely remove a lot of the rubble, rubbish and the skeletons from places were people frequently pass or used to live.
Only in places barely visited or never visited before should there be piles of rubbish and skeletons.

But like you wrote, the campaign itself can not be fixed so a mod like this would probably most interesting for people who just want to wander around the Boston wasteland.
 
No, it was the story that mainly failed that game. If the story was good it could have been enjoyed as some kind of Mass Effect ripoff. Sure, the world building is shit. It was shit in Fallout 3. It will be shit in Fallout 5. Moving entire world locations in the GECK like that will not be as easy as it sounds unless you want to break a bunch of quests.

Removing clutter has likely already been done by someone else. Browse Nexus and find out before you waste your time.
 
Be careful with trying to move objects and clutter. The issue with that - and why Fallout 4 has an embarrassing lack of proper and polished quest mods over New Vegas and 3 - is that the developers used precombines for their outdoor locations. Everything is interconnected and getting rid of just one thing, even like litter on the street, can massively tank frame rate. It sucks but that's just how it is. Minimal changes that don't break the game, for me, would be the extended dialogue interface and the Nora Companion Mod, as well as other spice-up mods that add classic weapons and more things to do.

But you can't polish a pile of shit so much that it stops being a pile of shit.

Ultimately, the game needs a total rework. The plot device of Shaun isn't enough to convince me to do anything and you are basically given a pre-made character to work with. It stops being "What would I do, in this situation?" and it becomes "What would Nora/Nate do in this situation?" It removes the roleplaying out of a roleplaying game, or at the very least, it removes player agency.
 
Black Prince said:
Be careful with trying to move objects and clutter. The issue with that - and why Fallout 4 has an embarrassing lack of proper and polished quest mods over New Vegas and 3 - is that the developers used precombines for their outdoor locations. Everything is interconnected and getting rid of just one thing, even like litter on the street, can massively tank frame rate. It sucks but that's just how it is. Minimal changes that don't break the game, for me, would be the extended dialogue interface and the Nora Companion Mod, as well as other spice-up mods that add classic weapons and more things to do.

But you can't polish a pile of shit so much that it stops being a pile of shit.

Ultimately, the game needs a total rework. The plot device of Shaun isn't enough to convince me to do anything and you are basically given a pre-made character to work with. It stops being "What would I do, in this situation?" and it becomes "What would Nora/Nate do in this situation?" It removes the roleplaying out of a roleplaying game, or at the very least, it removes player agency.
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I don't understand this. Unless you're playing yourself, like as a survivor in State of Decay or as a ghoul who was nearly 100 years old when the bombs fell, you CAN'T play yourself. You have to invent a character. If you're making the decisions YOU'D make, you aren't roleplaying, because there's no role. You're just playing.

I LOVE killing raiders. I LOVE killing raiders, but I created a character who refuses to kill because there's less profit in it. He interrogates, he sells into slavery, he bounty hunts and occasionally when really incensed, he sells his evil karma victims to a cannibal named Butcher Pete. He wants to fight evil, mostly because it leads to less blowback and he feels no guilt. But mostly he wants to extract as much profit as possible for as little moral compromise as possible. He's a Blackhall, and he's a massive egocentric jerk, a downgraded version of Kain from the Legacy of Kain games, namely the first one. BUT, one concession I made with him is he has a soft spot for supermutants. He's HORRIFIED of being turned into one, so when I found this awesome mod that let you cure supermutants for 50 caps a shot.

And he does all the gentle, heroic things because he's highly sociopathic and he cares a great deal about the perks of a heroic reputation. But if you gave him 25-40,000 caps he'd gladly murder Lucas Simms, a guy he likes cause it's too much money to pass up.

The Sole Surivivor is more constrained but not THAT constrained. He was in the military but as any world war 2 vet or their children will tell you, most young men were during a World War. He could have ANY rank up to about Colonel, served in any theater, had any specialty from vehicle pool to dog trainer to field doctor.

You could make him the protagonist from the real version of Operation Anchorage, or a Chinese mole. Given his involvement in the 180th battalion, mine's name is Nathan (not Nate) Tercorien, he's Elliot's older brother, they're both from a small town outside of Rochester New York, he was a captain because he was a career officer unlike Elliot, and he pulled strings to have his brother put in the 180th so he could watch over him. Elliot's MIA, which was ruled likely KIA by artillery barrage that wouldn't leave enough to bury in a shoebox, hit him REAL hard and he was given leave given this was the loss of his only sibling and only surviving children are allowed to opt-out as per Saving Private Ryan. So Sole Survivor before the "Great War"

To fit him as a natural for being the general, he was headquarters staff, he's well educated on history, basic economics, political theory and very experienced in handling logistics.

Constraints have been with ALL Fallout protagonists that you have to negotiate. You need to figure out the Vault Dweller's relationship with other people in the Vault and how their childhood shaped them there. You need to rationalize how a high intelligence Chosen One, a tribal raised without any meaningful technology, knows how to work computers or even know those Silence of the Lambs quotes in Shi Town.

Also if you don't create a character and listen to them, there are no possible surprises. I was playing the Fallout 2 restoration mod and since I'm female I usually play female protagonists, so I made a male character. And then I got to the EPA and saw there was a sex change machine down there. I had no idea my Chosen One was trans, and neither did she until she saw it was possible and instantly was willing to die to fulfill that nameless longing that made her so nonchalant about death and danger and killing. And it actually changed her playstyle to some extent because until then, she wasn't afraid to die, just blase about the notion other than saving the village. Now...she wants to live. And she's a lot more conflicted about killing. Cause she's terrified of dying herself, probably for the first time.

Constraints can actually narrow the choice of possibilities and channel the creative influences.

The problem isn't the SS, it's the shitty shitty worldbuilding of 23rd century Boston.
 
Charwo said:
I don't understand this. Unless you're playing yourself, like as a survivor in State of Decay or as a ghoul who was nearly 100 years old when the bombs fell, you CAN'T play yourself. You have to invent a character. If you're making the decisions YOU'D make, you aren't roleplaying, because there's no role. You're just playing.
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Bethesda hasn't made a roleplaying game in years; they make reaction sims with vestigial RPG elements—which they aggressively try to remove more & more with each new iteration of their game template.
 
The hilarious part is that making a character a blank slate so that the player can make up their own character is easier to implement than having to come up with a backstory yourself. You literally leave a big chunk of the main character's persona up to the player.

So it's funny seeing Bethesda waste so much time in stuff that they literally don't need to do work because the first two games and New Vegas leave a lot of the backstory up to the player. The elaborate, shitty intros of Fallout 3 and 4 are so unnecessary and counter-productive to a RPG.

And it's not like they haven't done the blank slate character in their games because the Elder Scrolls series did it most of their games. Hardly much of your character is told by the game in those games.

Of course it hardly matters because people hardly react to anything you do in Oblivion and Skyrim. You can be the leader of hundred factions and save the world ten times over, and some random guard will say how much of a piece of shit you are. Reinforcing how these games don't react to anything you do. Morrowind was the last game they made where people actually react to what you do, at least the factions do.
 
Norzan said:
And it's not like they haven't done the blank slate character in their games because the Elder Scrolls series did it most of their games. Hardly much of your character is told by the game in those games.
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Depending upon where one sells a game... a sizable chunk of the population will either want total freedom to explore (left alone to figure it out)—or will want that they be told what their goal/motivation is—so that they are doing the proper action in the game. Polar opposites; how do you design for that?
 
TorontoReign said:
No, it was the story that mainly failed that game. If the story was good it could have been enjoyed as some kind of Mass Effect ripoff. Sure, the world building is shit. It was shit in Fallout 3. It will be shit in Fallout 5. Moving entire world locations in the GECK like that will not be as easy as it sounds unless you want to break a bunch of quests.

Removing clutter has likely already been done by someone else. Browse Nexus and find out before you waste your time.
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This. I had the most fun in Fallout 4 when I was not playing the main quest and pretending I was playing a new STALKER game. It was great, really. It is really great. However, Bethesda can't make a story worth a fuck. That's why they make lots of shit ones and throw it on-top of a generic one.
 
I can attest to that personally. I used to just walk around in the wastes; avoiding NPCs...Literally using it as a hiking sim; for a virtual walk in the wasteland.
 
Gizmojunk said:
I can attest to that personally. I used to just walk around in the wastes; avoiding NPCs...Literally using it as a hiking sim; for a virtual walk in the wasteland.
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Which would be nice if it had real animals and mods for taking out all the mutated crap. If I had access to a website that made it easy to import assets from Skyrim, you could EASILY make Fallout 4 a great exploration game. Fallout is UGLY, and Fallout 4 is the ugliest Fallout yet in terms of showing relentless decay and ruin. I know most people HATE Cabot House but I lept for jot that there was SOMETHING beautiful. Like if they made a custom ruined version of the Trinity church, not as a dungeon location but just beautiful ruin with bits of it's mosaics, maybe most of the stain glass intact.

If I want a post-apocalyptic walking simulator, then it's gotta be Shadow of the Colossus. Boston inspires NO wonder in me. It's just ugly ugly ugly. And it's not the engine or th textures. There's no ruin value

I mean is every sixth building looked like this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...1024px-Louvre-peinture-francaise-p1020324.jpg

then it would be a beautiful game, especially with green mods. But it's not, and Fallout is relentlessly ugly and has been from it's beginnings.
 
Charwo said:
Which would be nice if it had real animals and mods for taking out all the mutated crap.
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Not for me... Its only redeeming value for me was that it DID do a fairly spot on simulation of what the Fallout setting might have looked like about ten to twenty years after the war—success where it shouldn't have, because the game is set centuries later, rather than decades. The whole studio effort is ridiculous in proper context.

Fallout is UGLY, and Fallout 4 is the ugliest Fallout yet in terms of showing relentless decay and ruin.
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But this is certainly the point... If anything FO4 made the mistake of adding bright colors.

If done correctly, Fallout is supposed to be depressing as hell; that's where the humor comes in, to make it tolerable. The world is dead, and on the way out—despite any recovery effort.

Belgium.jpg
 
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Gizmojunk said:
Not for me... Its only redeeming value for me was that it DID do a fairly spot on simulation of what the Fallout setting might have looked like about ten to twenty years after the war—success where it shouldn't have, because the game is set centuries later, rather than decades. The whole studio effort is ridiculous in proper context.

But this is certainly the point... If anything FO4 made the mistake of adding bright colors.

If done correctly, Fallout is supposed to be depressing as hell; that's where the humor comes in, to make it tolerable. The world is dead, and on the way out—despite any recovery effort.

Belgium.jpg
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That I never had any time for. I didn't mind the total dead desert of Fallout 1 because hey, it's So Cal and California is more than capable of getting that dry and dead.

But I become less tolerant of that kind of aesthetic is very wet areas like the east coast.

Besides if you want a game based around exploration the exploration needs to be worth it. Ruins, at least some need to be breathtaking or have narrative consequences. If the technical documents netted some kind of breakthrough or making construction bots that began to really repair the Airport or you see Brotherhood patrols with little drones, you'd have some sense of progress towards a goal. I don't need a better gun, I need tech to make the world better, lost works of art to be protected, perfectly preserved houses due to automated features like in There will Come Soft Rains. Or the abandoned museum from the Time Machine or if they really want to do Lovecraft, MAKE INNSMOUTH A DLC.
 
When they were making Fallout, the marketing department complained that the music was depressing; [were they really sure of their choice?].

And the response was, "Have you seen the game? Everybody is dead...". The game has no trees, no lush green landscapes (anywhere); it's an irradiated wasteland from coast to coast... where a few people survived in the vaults, and relatively few survived outside of them.

The premise of the game was living with consequences, and the war is one of them. It's not a pretty place.

*I suspect that this was Bethesda's first unexpected challenge; being that it was not fun to walk around in it first-person. Reportedly, Todd removed a big chunk (half?) of the modeled gameworld. Fallout should never have been adapted to FPP; it's not that kind of game—it's a roleplaying game, and FPP makes it difficult to remain detached from the character and their predicament.
 
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Gizmojunk said:
When they were making Fallout, the marketing department complained that the music was depressing; [were they really sure of their choice?].

And the response was, "Have you seen the game? Everybody is dead...". The game has no trees, no lush green landscapes (anywhere); it's an irradiated wasteland from coast to coast... where a few people survived in the vaults, and relatively few survived outside of them.

The premise of the game was living with consequences, and the war is one of them. It's not a pretty place.

*I suspect that this was Bethesda's first unexpected challenge; being that it was not fun to walk around in it first-person. Reportedly, Todd removed a big chunk (half?) of the modeled gameworld. Fallout should never have been adapted to FPP; it's not that kind of game—it's a roleplaying game, and FPP makes it difficult to remain detached from the character and their predicament.
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Well, that's charming but turning everything into a desert is not a consequence of nuclear war. Turning into a verdant Chernobyl that will kill you with six types of cancer and possibly killing off 90% of the human population IS a realistic consequence of nuclear war. To play up the nasty is conceited, lazy, and makes a mockery of the real consequences by overexageration.

As I've explained to others, a demand for internal consistency without a demand for external consistency will make the writers lazy. Because the more you detach from reality, the more you can bullshit, which is why most fantasy utterly sucks. Whatever their intent, the fact Fallout 1 was set in So Cal and Fallout 2 was set during a horrific drought combined with the limitations of the engine, scaled back the stupid to plausible levels.

On the east coast, it needs to be verdant, like by 2085. Cause that's the timeline for superficial recovery of the Red Forest. Oh and they have tech that would work as birthing chambers in every high tech facility of Fallout 1 and 2 so healthy unmutated versions of at least livestock should be available from every Vault that didn't fail before it opened. And these would, for the most part, outcompete the mutated varieties in and around opened Vaults. That's a simple consequence of its worldbuilding. Even if the computers couldn't digitize DNA, which I think IC they can or they couldn't grow replacement organs, you could easily put nearly every animal over gram on file in a container not much bigger than an old school big screen TV
 
If you take the 4 and divide it by 2 it still has a bunch of dumb stupid shit in it but it does become a better sequel.
 
Charwo said:
Well, that's charming but turning everything into a desert is not a consequence of nuclear war. Turning into a verdant Chernobyl that will kill you with six types of cancer and possibly killing off 90% of the human population IS a realistic consequence of nuclear war. To play up the nasty is conceited, lazy, and makes a mockery of the real consequences by overexageration.ble levels.

On the east coast, it needs to be verdant, like by 2085. Cause that's the timeline for superficial recovery of the Red Forest.
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Then you do not understand the game/setting.

Fallout is a weird-world setting, where their future is [IS] the world of tomorrow land as assumed by the 1950's pop culture. This means that even the laws of physics are bent to their naive fear and obsession with the Atom, and with mankind's mastering of the world through technology... but also it was bombed to hell.

Those who emerged from the war are not necessarily part of that lost culture... but the wreckage of it is all around them.

It isn't about what would realistically happen, it's about what they assumed would happen; they could have assumed wrongly, and yet that's what happens. In Fallout, walking through glowing green goo, gave the PC a sixth toe; being dipped in it horribly mutated animals and people into lumbering hulks, conjoined monsters, and even a flesh blob that was able to meld with an Overseer's chair. This is B-Movie horror made fact.

Back when RADAR was new, sailors would stand in front of it on cold nights... because it warmed them. :eek:
But in Fallout's world, Radiation Ghouls like the warmth of nuclear reactor rooms.

The assumption of the war aftermath, was to leave an irradiated waste, not a lush green recovering world... a wasteland where everything is ruined because of it, and so it was.
Even the ghouls themselves came about because of the fear and hysteria about being deformed by atomic gas, and other nonsense.

*I'd link to the very scene in The Atomic Cafe where a woman explains to a barroom acquaintance about how she is not scared of being killed outright by the bomb, but is scared of "That awful gas that deforms ya"...; I'd link it, but the next scene is one of live pigs and sheep convulsing after forced exposure to a nuclear detonation... it's pretty sickening.

______

Edit: People are strange. Here is something somebody uploaded, that uses the audio snippet from that scene.
 
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My idea that works with what is currently know is: that Rad storms keep blowing in and killing off any rebuilding efforts that and raiders getting desperate because of food shortages making cannibalism more widespread, thus less people to supply the area with crops and thus eveyrthing still looks f**ked.
 
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