The Let's Play Archive

Fallout 4

by ddegenha

Part 129

Update 128

After getting Curie to come along with us our first priority is a beer run, since we're dangerously low on supply. The only reason not to empty out Buddy is weight, but we get enough to hold us over for a while anyway. There's no real Curie-related questing going on, so it's a good time to clear up a few things that are clogging up our quest box since Curie does like us being helpful. With that in mind we go out in search of the Lost Patrol, encountering heavy resistance as we finally locate the last member. His holotape points us toward a bunker in the far north of the map, so it's off to Outpost Zimonja as a starting point to finish the quest.

Vote on our next companion here and vote on our ending here. It's likely we'll do an additional stream this week since I'm going to be traveling for business next week and thus want to build a bit of a backlog. Still definitely going to do a stream on Wednesday.

Thesaya posted:

I am glad it worked out!
And yeah, putting them in the oven is pretty much to make sure they are properly cooked inside without burning the outside. Oh, and which seasoning did you go with? I think I gave you like four variants of it. But yes, you go ahead and tweak it however you want to, that is how family recipes happen!

We used some allspice, pepper, salt, and mustard. It was a near-success, especially as we didn't end up being able to make a gravy, but we still have half of the meat ingredients in the freezer so we're going to try it again. There will be fully successful meatballs before the end of this LP!


ultrabindu posted:

Those cats are gorgeous. makes me wish I lived somewhere that allowed pets.

Even though we're at the SHOCKING REVELATION part of the game it really feels underwhelming, just like every main quest in Fallout.

We have relayed the compliment to feed their egos. Now, about the story stuff...


ThaGhettoJew posted:

Having a emotionally connecting "main" story in such huge, rambling sandboxes is a challenge that the mainline Fallouts can't seem to handle. Having such a shapeless personality as the "Sole Survivor" to stand as our avatar makes it even worse. A stronger or more interesting person, like say in Sleeping Dogs (not Watch_Dogs), helps. Even the voiceless demon-slayer from Doom (2016) has a more accessible personality.

And I've said it before but having either Father or some aspect of the wee babby seanus as part of the story throughout somehow would really keep the player's mind focused on what is supposed to be our main reason for living in the weeks(?) it takes to get to this sort of end-game part of the plot. I could see getting radio broadcasts or finding recordings from failed Sean clones or Father occasionally bringing us back on track.

We really don't have much background for how Father was raised to believe in the Institute and give up on the Commonwealth. And even more basically we never got anything of any depth of who Sean is and why and how much we love him. He's the blank MacGuffin at the end of a quest tunnel we don't even spend a quarter of the game worrying about. And then he's bizarrely replaced by an unemotional/sociopathic technocrat who loves... Science... I guess.

And having rebuilt society into a slightly less on fire wreckage, saved several named people and slaughtered hundreds more unnamed ones, we get to push the big glowing Deus Ex plot-theme buttons and decide how many circuits real people should be allowed to have. We... win?


Still mostly a fun game though.

In the end I think it breaks down to timing and the nature of the game. I feel like the whole story of Shaun would have more narrative weight if you went directly from plot point to plot point, but there's so much going on that there are long stretches where you don't even think about it before getting pulled back. I can understand why they'd want to make it such a personal story to give the game a kind of gravitas, but at the same time that is its greatest weakness. Not sure what you'd have to replace the dominant quest with to make it a better sandbox game. The first two Fallouts, in my mind, did that better because you were in search of a general objective that might have been satisfied anywhere so naturally you went all over the place looking for it. Even Fallout New Vegas does a bit better since you're looking for revenge and answers.