Discussion What's your favourite video game you've been playing?

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I loved both Fallout 3 and New Vegas and in my opinion Fallout 4 exceeds both. In sheer scope and in gameplay. I can't think of a time when I was this satisfied by a game. The FPS elements are much improved and I hardly ever use VATS although it's still helpful when you're in a jam. You do still grind but literally everything in the game is useful. Just read up about crafting settlements.
 


Not as specific as I was looking for, but thanks anyway.

Honestly though, about only thing you didn't clarify is general and animation optimization. Are both smoother and crisper now?

Nice to hear that items obtained are useful, because after a few annoying and dangerous side quests in FO3, where what I gathered was more insulting than useful, I got the feeling they were mocking me as if to say, "Say hello to our little GRIND!"

That said, I enjoyed Skyrim, even without mods, despite not liking the repeat faces and voices, bugs here and there, and grinding of certain skills. I didn't particularly like the mage element either, but they made it so you could get by without it, and even take on the mages you HAD to encounter in other ways.

I know many say FO3 was well worth it once you got better gear and weapons, I just wasn't willing to go through what it took to get there, and early reports of FO4 seemed to convey that they used the same formula.

Oh, one last thing, I forgot to ask if there's a decent save system with which to try certain weapons, items and tactics, without having to replay hours of gameplay to go back to the point before you tried them?

 
Sorry man, I was on my way to play Fallout 4! :lol: The optimization is fine for me but I don't ever remember having problems with it in any Fallout game. The animations are pretty good. Nothing groundbreaking but pretty good.

The FPS elements are excellent but I don't like the scope mechanics. You don't need one though. I can easily do headshots with iron ( or ghost ring ) sites at fairly long distances. Necessary for
those damn supermutant suicide bombers with mininukes :fou:
.

The armor and weapon systems have been completely revised. No more repair necessary. Power armor requires fusion cores for power and they only last a relatively short time so you can't wear it all the time.

The settlement crafting system is just so in depth it's hard to explain. And it's awesome. Every item can be broken down for parts.

The save system is the same as always. F5 quicksaves and do it often. You never know what you are about to run into!

Overall impression is it's much less buggy than a typical Bethesda release as well. I love it. The other mods who are playing it also seem to be loving it as well. Our guy who is also a staff writer is very pleased to be getting paid to review it! I haven't played the other big releases this ( Witcher 3, MGS ) year to compare it to but I can't believe they are better. As an admitted fan of the universe and series I give it a 9.6/10. It lived up to my expectations and exceeded them resoundingly. The game is just plain fun!
 
They got rid of the repair system? Sweet!
It was a hinderance ,IMO. Armours broke pretty easily in New Vegas.

Frag, I found out that the game was far easier with a melee build than going for a firearm build. I'm talking about New Vegas, not 3, but I assume the mechanics are the same. I finished Fallout 3 with a weapons only build, but I don't remember it well enough, and I never thought about using melee weapons at all. I hated the combat system with guns too.
But in New Vegas, I opted for a melee build and the game was much easier. Note, I played New Vegas at normal difficulty while Fallout 3 was at easy difficulty (I don't remember FO3 well, since I played it a long time ago).
 
I am on the fence regarding the repair system.

Sure it was a bit of an annoyance in Fallout 3 until you rank up your repair skills, but it also added to the RPG element of the game which was why I bought that game in the 1st place. Nonbreakable weapons in Fallout 4 kinda makes the game somewhat easier... at least until I ran into a damn Assaultron. I someone makes a repair mod for FO4 I would give it a try.

Crafting system is a great addition to the game, but perhaps there is a bit too many options. I have a relatively large collection of modded weapons, but I have not bothered modding armor yet. I have some energy weapons, but I have not bothered using them... sticking to traditional ballistic weapons for now. I am not really into melee combat; I played FO3 multiple times and never really bothered with melee.

I have not been doing much of the quests, mostly exploring and revisiting areas after respawns to grab more stuff to break down for the crafting and settlement building system.


Major Quest Bug - All Platforms

There is a Settlement Quest to go to Monsignor where Fallout 4 has been confirmed to consistently crash on all platforms when you attempt to enter Monsignor.
 
combat in general is much more fluid. don't get what you mean my "crisper". there are unholstering and reloading animations that run fine, but i never noticed any problem with them in 3 or New Vegas.
you could pretty easily make it through 4 without ever using VATS, much easier than in 3 or New Vegas. but i still love the option and use it in probably 75% of my gun battles. using just the cursor to aim now feels more like any other shooter than it did before though.
in 3 & New Vegas VATS was not about fixing combat or any kind of "unspoken admission" about problems with combat. it was about bringing the advanced targeting mode from the earlier games to a 1st/3rd person perspective that worked great. true though they shouldn't have based the whole combat system around it's use as much as they did. it was pretty difficult to get through most gun fights in those games without it.
i never used any melee in 3 or New Vegas but it is much better in 4. there are some pretty cool swords, knives, and bash weapons that I just couldn't go without using a few times each. towards the beginning of the game it was a good option to always have available because ammo wasn't so easy to come by.

i haven't encountered a single fetch quest if that's what you mean by "grindy" side quests/tasks. the closest i could say any of them have been is an ongoing side-quest to find holotapes about a certain criminal an "ex-cop" is researching.
skills are about gaining levels through experience, not through grinding any certain items or enemies. crafting, winning battles, completing quests, choosing the right dialogue options, etc all give moderate amounts of exp. i've hit lvl 31 without doing any exp grinding at all.
most crafting items are pretty easily available everywhere you go, it's just junk that you can salvage for the appropriate materials.

4 is not any "easier" than 3 or New Vegas in my opinion, which sounds like was your problem with them. you are meant to start out weak and with limited resources. the whole purpose of good rpgs is to level up and make your character strong enough to get through the tougher areas/battles. a lot of quests and instances you run into are pretty much meant to be discovered but avoided until you have leveled up enough to come back and complete them. there's always super easy crap going on through the entire games that you can spend your time doing until you can handle the others.

the save system has been the same since Morrowind. you have multiple auto-save options, quick-save, and manual save options the same as all of the latest Elder Scrolls and Fallout games. you would never have the problem you are implying unless you just never bothered using them and disabled all of the auto-save features.
 
It's been a ton of Fallout 4 for me lately. I love that the shooting actually feels good now. I recently played Fallout 3 for the first time and found that, although it looked like a first person shooter, it didn't play like one. Fallout 4 is still as much of an RPG as the older games but they really improved the shooter mechanics.

It's good enough in that regard that I rarely use my VATS unless I'm having a hard time finding where an enemy is shooting from or if I just want to see some slow motion mayhem. In Fallout 3 I felt like I pretty much had to use it in every enemy encounter.

The other game I've been playing recently is Star Wars Battlefront. It's basically Battlefield 4 covered in a huge coat of Star Wars fan service. I'm really liking it so far and it's the best AAA PC port I have seen on day one in quite a while. I'm averaging 120-160+ FPS with maxed settings depending on which mode and map I'm playing on.

I'm running an i5-4690k at stock speeds with turbo boost mode enabled and HWInfo says each core is averaging about 80% usage. I'm also running 970s in SLI and HWInfo shows core usage at around 90% on each card.

Coming off Arkham Knight and Fallout 4 it's nice to finally play a AAA PC port that supports SLI again. It's also nice to easily get framerates well above 60 fps and higher usage percentages on my hardware than 50-60%. The game appears to do a great job of taking advantage of all available hardware.
 


I don't recall what the sys reqs were for FO3, may have been partly my PC, but I mean quick and snappy, vs sluggish and clumsy. One of the things I hate about GTA V for instance, is they made the movement and gunplay noticeably more sluggish than before. I thought it might have been the settings I was using, but lowering them to achieve a constant 60 FPS resulted in the exact same thing. Then I saw others confirm that they went with more sluggish animations, and I knew it wasn't me or my sys.

I also wasn't sure in FO3 if what I was experiencing was just not having leveled some skills very high yet. For instance even many shooters with RPG elements have skills you unlock that make raising and switching weapons, reloading, aiming, etc, faster. I also recall the 3rd person animations in FO3 were not at all impressive to me, and looked very cheaply made.

I don't recall if the initial side quests I encountered were actually rated by difficulty like some games do. There was one I got by talking to a barmaid at the start of the game that sent me to an abandoned restaurant or store, and there was FAR more trouble along the way than the reward was worth.

Skyrim can be a grind, but it's also pretty straight forward early on what you should and should not take on when you're low on skills and gear. FO doesn't seem to be as cut and dried in that regard, and that's the way I kinda prefer RPGs to be.

I don't know, I may try it later on after I get done with MGSV, SW Battlefront, and AC Syndicate, but I won't be paying top dollar for it, esp after the bad taste FO3 left.

 


I would say that if you didn't like FO3 you probably won't like FO4. Yes, FO4 makes a lot of improvements but it's still mostly the same formula. There is too much jank for some people to enjoy it but for people like myself the games's sheer size and the freedom to do whatever I want easily overcomes that.

No one really makes open world games like Bethesda. That's either something you like or its not but you pretty much know what you're getting.
 


I'l re-emphasize that it's not just the overall formula, but lack of polish in specific areas, primarily combat and grinding. Most here have acknowledged that combat is MUCH more polished now, enough so to make you rely on VATS far less if at all. Plus I think cutting out repairs would somewhat lessen the grind.

 
I played a little bit Fallout 4 on my cousin's PC, and indeed the shooting mechanics are far better than from previous iterations. You forget it's a bethesda game during the firefights. It's like how you can shoot in FPS games.

And the third person view animation and movement is very different from that of first person. Earlier, it was like shifting the camera angle back, but now, it's like a different mode entirely. It's better this way.
In FO3 and New Vegas, your character would kinda moonwalk if going in a diagonal direction. It's fixed here.
 


^^^Ding ding ding, we have a winner! Finally someone whom totally gets what I was asking!

Thanks Gman

 
Third person in FO3 and FO:NV was merely a "tacked on" feature of the game. Probably done so that people who wanted to play the games in 3rd person view could if they really wanted to, but it was not a core feature of the games themselves.

Generally speaking, I am not a huge fan of 3rd person games, but I have played some which have primarily been KOTOR 1 & 2, the Mass Effect trilogy and Star Trek Online (great for space battles, sucks for ground combat). Playing FO4 in 3rd person view has no appeal for me. I only use that view to checkout the armor my character is currently wearing.

I actually did try 3rd person in FO4 for combat just to check it out, but after a few tries I switched back to 1st person. I also have problems navigating around in 3rd person for precise movement.
 
Now that AMD has come out with a new driver that runs Black Ops III, AC Syndicate, SW Battlefront, and Fallout 4 better, I started playing Syndicate last night, and Black Ops III, though still a bit hitchy here and there, runs MUCH better.

So needless to say this has me even more psyched to try FO4, eventually.
 
Just to give you an even better understanding, I was able to headshot a raider on top of a tower and he was a long way off from where I was standing, with a rifle and aiming down with the iron sights. It's that much better. I don't think I could ever have done that in FO3 or New Vegas without a sniper rifle.

How is AC Syndicate on PC by the way?
 


Well, not that great on AMD, lots of hitching for me. I have a i7-950, 7970, and 8GBRAM, with same settings as Unity. The animations are more responsive now as has been mentioned, but lots of out of the blue radical frame drops. The worst bit for me is the frequent hitching, and it can happen at any frame rate. I'm also using the latest Cat 15.11.1 beta driver, which has Syndicate optimizations included, and did help, so I have to think this is on Ubi.

I run it at 1080p with everything on High using Vsync, HBAO+, and FXAA. I tried it with AO and Vsync off, but put them back on. It raised FPS at least 5 frames, but did nothing for the hitching. I see lots of people on Steam Forums even with high end Nvidia spec complain that it runs worse than Unity though. Gameworks is a mess as usual, and lots of guys even with a 980 Ti and 4790k are using FXAA.

As for the game itself, I've not gone far enough to play much yet. I thought I'd enjoy the carriages, but it's kind of a silly arcade feature, and hitches a lot for me. The hand to hand when you start out is very grindy and slow, it takes a lot of hits to wear them down, yet the break move beats down even harder enemies pretty quickly.

The first district seemed to be won too quickly and easily though, I was expecting something far more elaborate. Some of the level design is pretty good, but a bit underutilized. You see the same old gratuitous side tasks that are more filler than challenge along the way type thing.

Hard to give the game an overall rating yet having played so little of it, but Ubi need to issue a performance patch. It's not as well optimized as they say, just the animations.

 
Thanks for your input.

I've got Fallout 4 myself and I'm 10 hours in. Doing some fetch quests at the moment, to gain a few levels.

I've finished two more episodes from 'Tales from the borderlands' and I have to say, the gameplay elements are really lacking indeed. It's more of an interactive graphic novel now with QTE's and button smashes. I don't even know why they're including an inventory system now.
It's just really straight forward, no puzzles, no need to think. You just gotta be attentive of the game world, that is all. I guess they're just interested in story telling mostly but I just can't help the feeling of that missing puzzles and going to certain places to retrieve items, general gameplay elements overall.

The game isn't bad at all though. It's really great. No other telltale game I've played has gone with similar movie-esque sequences and what not. I suppose you have to sacrifice one for another.
 
Well I just tried lowering Shadows and Environment to Med in Syndicate, after one person on a 970 said he lowered Shadows to Med to get a solid 60 FPS (that's right, a 970), but I still get lots of stutter. Either it's garbage optimization, or the engine they're using is over saturated with textures. I get the feeling it's just a piss poor PC port job though, otherwise the consoles wouldn't even be able to handle it.
 
Just another update on AC Syndicate.

I'm now using the new AMD Crimson driver, which helped quite a bit. Carriage races are smoother now and more tolerable. Even after lowering res to 1600x900 and dropping Textures to Med though, there is still frequent enough hitching to make the gameplay experience frustrating. It also has lengthy freeze pauses at times, which is why I lowered res and textures, because some were saying VRAM usage was the culprit, but it doesn't really fix the problem.

That said, I found a post on the Syndicate Steam Forum showing Steam is listing since 11/25 what appears to be the same update file the PS4 and Xone just got, and at the top of it's release notes are stability and performance improvements. So hopefully that will be released soon for PC. If it is, I'll report back on the results.

https://steamdb.info/app/368500/history/
 
Skyrim has been by far my favorite game so far. I am a PC Gamer, so Skyrim on the PC, was just amazing, especially adding mods, just makes it that much better. I am a big fan of Fallout, and Fallout 4 is great. But Skyrim takes my #1 spot for best game.
 


Same here, Morrowind and Oblivion are right up there too, starting another Morrowind playthrough and Oblivion one too.
 
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