Fallout 4 Revisted
So after the "new" game of Skyrim I was playing was fouled by corrupted saves, I turned back to Fallout 4 to fill some time. I'd played through the game before, but not the DLC, so it gave me a chance to peek at some places and plots new to me, which was nice.
Nuka-World was interesting to me. I like the idea of an amusement park as sort of a fortress in a post-apocalyptic land. The different flavors of the park areas were neat. The story, though, is very... polarizing. If you're someone who played them game as a "bad" character, it's great - you get to explore joining/controlling raider factions, staging raids on settlements, and things like that. If you're playing a "good" character, though... not so much. You miss out on the raider settlement mechanics and the choice to free merchants from the raiders ultimately involves mass slaughter of raiders across the park. So, while the DLC doesn't require an evil character, it's most rewarding for one.
Far Harbor was more nuanced and morally grey. You can play nice with the townsfolk and help build up their defenses or strip those defenses from them. You can join the Children of Atom or essentially nuke them. And between them, there's a question of what to do with the head of a synth settlement. If you discover his past deeds, do you hold him accountable for them or play along to make peace with other factions? There's a lot more choice. And there are a lot more skill (well, attribute/perk) checks in the game from persuading in conversation to cobbling together repairs. While the ubiquitous radiation damage of the island is annoying, the expansion as a whole is actually quite good.
Both DLC zones suffer a bit, however, from being totally separate maps from the main game. If you're playing in survival mode, which deactivates normal fast travel, that's a pain. While you can get around that with summonable vertibirds on the main map, that's not an option on the DLC maps, and you still get warnings about main-map settlements being under attack and whatnot with no easy way to go back and deal with that.
There are also other little bits of DLC. Automatron brought in a story/quest chain that's not bad (but adds some wandering encounters to the wasteland that are brutal, especially for low-level survival mode players). The Vault-Tec Workshop has a few neat bits, but is overkill in most ways. You could sort of build your own Vault, but there's not enough real incentive to go that far.
The game's never been perfect, but it's still a pretty good open-world experience.
Nuka-World was interesting to me. I like the idea of an amusement park as sort of a fortress in a post-apocalyptic land. The different flavors of the park areas were neat. The story, though, is very... polarizing. If you're someone who played them game as a "bad" character, it's great - you get to explore joining/controlling raider factions, staging raids on settlements, and things like that. If you're playing a "good" character, though... not so much. You miss out on the raider settlement mechanics and the choice to free merchants from the raiders ultimately involves mass slaughter of raiders across the park. So, while the DLC doesn't require an evil character, it's most rewarding for one.
Far Harbor was more nuanced and morally grey. You can play nice with the townsfolk and help build up their defenses or strip those defenses from them. You can join the Children of Atom or essentially nuke them. And between them, there's a question of what to do with the head of a synth settlement. If you discover his past deeds, do you hold him accountable for them or play along to make peace with other factions? There's a lot more choice. And there are a lot more skill (well, attribute/perk) checks in the game from persuading in conversation to cobbling together repairs. While the ubiquitous radiation damage of the island is annoying, the expansion as a whole is actually quite good.
Both DLC zones suffer a bit, however, from being totally separate maps from the main game. If you're playing in survival mode, which deactivates normal fast travel, that's a pain. While you can get around that with summonable vertibirds on the main map, that's not an option on the DLC maps, and you still get warnings about main-map settlements being under attack and whatnot with no easy way to go back and deal with that.
There are also other little bits of DLC. Automatron brought in a story/quest chain that's not bad (but adds some wandering encounters to the wasteland that are brutal, especially for low-level survival mode players). The Vault-Tec Workshop has a few neat bits, but is overkill in most ways. You could sort of build your own Vault, but there's not enough real incentive to go that far.
The game's never been perfect, but it's still a pretty good open-world experience.
Comments
Post a Comment