Summary

Fallout 4 is an action RPG (I mean...) developed, published, envisioned, manifested, and summoned into reality by Bethesda in 2015. The fourth (I mean...) game in long-running series of post-apocalyptic romps, in Fallout 4 you play as the "Sole Survivor". The sole survivor of Vault 111. This time we find ourselves in Boston, a stone's throw away from DC proper.

I've played Fallout 4 before soon after it first released, but I didn't gel with it at the time. That being said I've been wanting to do a Fallout and it is the clear choice to cover. I love New Vegas and much prefer it over 3 and so I decided I wanted to give 4 a fair chance, loading it with mods to buff out the dents. Join me as we bring the powerful spirit of America back into the world!

Links

Playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXbBIoFOxaQvJrxX84xzLCamHCIR9vw4u

Below is a list of all mods used throughout playthrough and links to each.

Review

I've got thoughts so lock in. I have done my damndest to split this up into digestible sections. Still actively writing and rewriting this out. I think Fallout 4 has inspired the most text from me of any of the games I've played on my channel by far.

What's in a Game?

Fallout 4 is not a great game. A frequent refrain that I have seen repeated ad nauseum across both Reddit and the wider web as well as in real life among friends is the silly phrase "Fallout 4 is a good game, just not a good Fallout game". I'm immensely suspicious whenever I see exact or near-exact phrases like this get repeated over and over in different places. That tells me that people are not really thinking on their own. They heard/read something that feels right to them and they are turning around and repeating it to others. It's the fact that it's always exactly the same turn of phrase. Or like I said, near exact. Humans do not all think with one mind. I feel that to have a little turn of phrase that somehow everyone agrees on, it has to effectively mean nothing. There's a difference between shared sentiment vs clearly identical phrasing. What does "being a good Fallout game" even mean? That feels like such an obvious no true scotsman to me that I don't even know what to do with it. Fallout 4 is a Fallout game. Do you know how I know that? It has Fallout in the name and is a game in the Fallout series. It is a Fallout game. Whatever tricky little mental gymnastics people try to do to excuse bad game development practices and exclude F4 from the other members of the Fallout series is just silly. To me, it's obviously thinking with emotions. Which, to be clear, I'm not mad about. I'm not disappointed or anything. We feel the world through our emotions. They are as real as anything. I am just stating that is in fact what people are doing when they try to shield their eyes from F4. It hurts their feelings by not measuring up to other games they've made an emotional connection with.

But let's move past the F4 being a bad Fallout game silliness. Let's instead discuss whether F4 is a good game. I would say no on the whole. Does it contain good things? Sure. However, it contains many things. It contains a great great many things. I think first and foremost we need to talk about how F4 is a forever game. In my opinion it, and not for example the voice acting, is the original sin that most of my complaints towards the game can be levied. It's a core conceit of the overall experience. The game was developed with the intent that there would be some portion of the playerbase (even if it was small) would play F4 forever. You can see this in a thousand different ways. So let's go through a couple!

Radiant quests, radiant quests, radiant quests. They are everywhere these days. That thing that everyone agreed was the worst most shitty part of Skyrim. Why don't we do more of that? If I had a magic wand, on my long list of things I would do, somewhere on that list is an adamantine requirement placed on Bethesda. No radiant quests. None. Not some radiant quests. Not a couple radiant quests. None. They are garbage trash and feel demeaning to participate in. I am a grown adult and Bethesda's radiant quests are them waving jingly keys in my face demanding that the key's jingles enrapture me. Get fucked you holier than thou pieces of shit. I am not some starved child desperate for the smallest morsel of sustenance. I can go literally anywhere else. It feels so disrespectful. The second time an NPC says the exact same words as a previous one. The first time I notice some NPC asks me to go do something for them and their dialogue mysteriously contains not a single detail as to the actual location, situation, anything. Just so it can get reused in 17 different places. Just get fucked.

Another example of F4's desire to be a forever game is the oft-lauded looting system. People speak highly of the central loop of go out, explore, fight people, loot, improve your shit. That it's satisfying. But that central loop has no end point. You're not working towards anything. You get loot so you can get better loot. It's a classic MMO structure. You're not getting shit and upgrading it so you can pass some final test and show you have become master of the domain. You're doing it to do it. I know when I was able to talk Legate Lanius out of attacking the Hoover Dam using a long series of rhetorical arguments expressed through increasingly difficult speech and skill checks my first thought was "Umm...where the fuck is the loot? Why did he not give me a new gun that I can fuck with?" Ughhh. Do people have no class? I don't understand. Surely we can all see that if a system only exists to prop up itself, it doesn't really have a point, yes? Is the general concept of being able to customize your weapons a bad thing? Not at all. But making the core of the experience an enterprise that has no end effectively means you've removed the heart. My weapons and armor aren't allowing me more opportunities to play a role. They are allowing me to more easily get better weapons and armor. The different aspects of the experience are no longer in harmony; they exist in silos. And the most snazzy and polished silo is given to the least interesting aspect of the game. Moreover, the loot doesn't even have the decency to be interesting. Everybody remembers the unique weapons from previous games. Recompense of the Fallen. That Gun. This Machine. Euclid's C-Finder. Thump Thump. But praise be, Legendary Raider has dropped a stock-standard rifle that has a perk that I already got on it. Ooh and it adds 3% frost damage while I'm taking a shit if it's Sunday. Great. Super cool, guys. I just can't contain my excitement upon getting to the end of dungeon loot chest. For a role-playing game, you do remarkably little role-playing. But let's talk more about that.

Much blood, sweat, and tears have been put into describing whether choices in games matter or no. That steam tag of "choices matter" is more than enough evidence that it is a topic on people's minds. I think we need to go a bit more in-depth on what it means for a choice to matter but let's start with saying yes there's a clear difference between choices that do matter and those that don't. Do Fallout 4's choices matter? Hell no. There are so so many opportunities for your Fallout 4 character to remarkably have no opinion on things. Or to go back on your own dialog. You are afforded grace befitting a Disney princess. There was many a time I laughed out loud at some of the dialog choices I saw with my lovely little mod that showed the full line instead of the Approve/Sarcastic/No choices. I'd state an opinion. A character would retort "What?! Really?" And I would see one of the options as "No, I'm so sorry...forgive me." It's hard to point to specific instances of this. One I believe was when you're talking with Shawn at the point of divergence with the factions. But it's just something I picked up on. Another example is how we insist on introducing each of the faction options to the player, rather than trusting their previous decisions. I'm the General of the Minutemen. Why are you forcing me to do several Institute quests before I can actually tell them no? Have the courage to hide your content. You are afforded so many opportunities to go back on decisions and see nearly everything. I think one of the ways this is most evident is via the actual story structure. But let's wait on that and shit on the dialogue some more.

Dialogue and Role-Playing

So Bethesda, you've decided 4 options are cool and sexy? In that interface that previously could have like 8+ options at particular junctures of conversation? Depending on the perks you've chosen and previous decisions? That's a real interesting choice you've made. You wanna talk about choices that matter...I struggle to formulate my thoughts here. This to me is a very clear example of "stupid on the face of it". Where I'm struggling to understand even the initial logic that we're using. Bethesda decided to make a voiced protagonist. They are famously not lazy in the slightest. So in order to make their protagonist voiced in a way that fit with their development capabilities, they needed to massively pare down the complexity and scope of their conversations. You get a Yes, a Yes but Sarcastic/Mean, a Repeat What You Just Said Before We Go Right Back To The Question You Asked, and sometimes if we have been good little boys and girls this year a No.

So here's where I'm struggling. Because to me, this all is a non-starter. This isn't an ok that sucks, but I see what we're getting in exchange. Again...non-starter. Why do people play Bethesda or Fallout games? I have no statistics I can look at to get tru tru insight. So I can only describe my own preferences and those of people around me that I've spoken to. But I am a New Vegas man. And in addition, I am a speech man. I love being able to hit people with my rhetoric and get through quests in ways that feel like I've discovered a workaround to a proposed problem. I love feeling like I've discovered the vaunted third way (even though the path I found was fully intended to be there from the beginning). It just feels good. It's satisfying. And it's always been my first approach to a Fallout game. Not my only approach. I've done my fair share of meathead dunce playthroughs. But it's just my first one. It's the lens that I'm seeing these worlds through. So imagine my surprise when Bethesda tells me that they've taken that all away and in exchange, I can hear my little miscreant speak now. Awesome, Bethesda. Truly. Like I said, I'm struggling here. I'm struggling to understand why. Why Bethesda has done this. We threw away that apple pie you had on the windowsill and replaced it with a hair dryer. This object creates much more heat than that other one! Just a complete non-sequitur. A seeming complete lack of understanding of what the purpose of the apple pie is or what we were doing with it. Bethesda, you stupid gormless fucks, the protagonist has been silent so you can stuff more writing in there! There is nothing impossible or wrong with having a voiced protag as well as in-depth dialogue. But that is literally the purpose of the silence. It is a valve over here you can choose to turn off to give you more power over there if you need it. The money that you save not voicing the lines can be spent on giving your writers more time to flesh everything out. Again, if that's needed. Doing both is not illegal. If you wanted to be extra charitable one could also say that the silence is an invitation for the player to fill it with their imagination. Who would voice your Fallout protag? Who would play her? And if Bethesda's argument is "well people don't really play Fallout for the roleplay", I just...

But to speak on the actual individual conversation instances more, the 4 options just feels bad. I was struck by how many times I wanted to say something and the option just wasn't there. Contrast with a Disco Elsyium (I am physically incapable of speaking on a game for any length of time without eventually pulling it out as a point of reference. Not sorry.). There were many many a time when I was doing that let's play where I'm reading what someone is saying in my head, I speak out loud my desired response to them, and then I look down and lo there in the list of possible responses is exactly what I was thinking. It feels so fucking good when that happens. But when you are limited in every single conversation to 3-4 responses, the likelihood of that happening drops like a rock. Because at the end of the day we're no longer using conversation as a means of allowing the character to interact with the world (and therefore allow the player to play a chosen role). Rather conversation becomes a utility. We get info about what we need to do and then we confirm that the next stage of the quest is to start (or occasionally allow us to stop the quest if we don't want to do it). It has this flattening effect where I don't want to talk to anyone because I can see the shape of the conversation. I can see the wireframe and the illusion is broken. It makes it so much harder to suspend my disbeliefs when I rarely get a chance to actually say what I feel my character would. I'm less inhabiting a role, and more playing with an action figure. From the outside it may not look all that different, but the effect is profound.

Think of the best moments of F4's dialogue....woo that's stark. I genuinely stopped and thought to myself, "What are my favorite conversations from the game F4?" And there is nothing coming. Almost nothing stands out. And to be clear, it's not that I'm saying there aren't good individual lines. What I'm specifically talking about are good conversations. Good full moments. The thing you're ostensibly doing for a good portion of an RPG. This feels like amateur hour. What back and forth between your character and an NPC is actually good and well-written? I already felt like Obsidian eats Bethesda's lunch when it comes to writing, with both hands tied behind Obsidian's back. But I really feel the great flattening has taken something Bethesda wasn't particularly great at and reduced it further into a sort of gray ooze. Conversations blend together because they are all just serving the purpose of stringing you along from combat encounter to combat encounter. I'm desperate to talk to people because the only part of this game I give a shit about is role-playing. But literally the very instant I start talking to them, I just start rolling my eyes.

Story

What about the actual story? If the minute-to-minute conversations aren't great, surely they've at least made sure that the big picture is good and works? Ha! To generalize, the story of F4 is a turn from personal stakes towards looking at the big picture and getting involved with the region's movers and shakers. The structure itself is sound. Bethesda, in their infinite wisdom however, has decided that your character will no longer be a tabula rasa, a blank slate to project the player's roleplaying onto; In F4 you are Nate/Nora, a specific person with particular views and a pre-decided motivation. Your son's been kidnapped and you gotta go find him. I think I'm just going to ignore the whole player being stupid and not understanding timeskips bit and just take what Bethesda gives us at face value.

We have a sort of reverse of Fallout 3, where we're the parent looking for their kid. The problem here is that if we're just comparing F3 to F4, the starting conflict of your dad leaving the vault is a lot more open-ended in how you can approach it. Sure, you can follow right along with the path I put forward for F4. Where you're interested in the personal stakes (finding your dad) and over the course of your investigation you move on towards dealing with the larger powers that be in the region. But you don't have to. I don't think the opening of F3 is any great shakes. If I'm being perfectly honest, I don't think F3 itself is great shakes. That being said, I could also see an alternative starting path in F3 where you feel greatly betrayed by your father for abandoning you and so you set off on your own path and do whatever you like. The story is there and it's fine, but it also doesn't get in your way if you're wanting to draw outside the lines. F3's story setup gives you a lot more breathing room RP-wise.

In F4, I can't understand the Nora/Nate that ignores the main story and does the open world fuckaboutism. You are in a happy marriage cut short. You love your baby son. Unless you are openly just saying that your character is a sociopath, there does not exist a Nora/Nate that does not immediately go searching for their son. (And you cannot say that they knew there was a timeskip and that it was totally possible Shawn was already dead. They are canonically very surprised when you get to Father.) The reason I'm talking about all this in the Story section and not the previous Roleplay section is that this story setup forces you to be along for the ride and take the game as it is presented. We cannot make excuses along the lines of "Well I decided my Nate was this way and that and so I just ignored the main story and went off and did whatever." That order of events simply does not make logical sense. It is obvious wallpapering over a lesser story.

Taking that into account how's the story of F4 when taken on its own merits? Without cherry-picking it like we're true believers interpreting our holy text. Is it accomplishing what it is trying to accomplish? I don't think so. There's two conflicting big themes in F4. First, we have the Westworld synth thing. And then we have the Rebuilding Civilization. The game would really like for you to have a strong opinion on synths but I find it so difficult. First and foremost because Bethesda has picked a topic that I feel was played out back in 2015. By now, there has been so many robots being self-aware stories, and examples where it was done significantly better. What is F4 even bringing to the table here? Well, I think that it's interesting that some of the settlers that move to your stupid little settlements are synths. I guess that that's interesting. The big problem even with that though is that there's literally zero difference between the synth who's infiltrating and the insufferable normie. They both have two lines that they repeat over and over. Neither even has a name. Settler. They aren't people and give no indication that they are. So if there's an expectation that I'll have some emotional response to learning that I'm being spied on..."Those rocks are fine, but that rock is actually listening in on your conversations and reporting back to HQ." Sure, man. Whatever.

I think the other big thing I struggle with with regards to the synth focus of F4's story is that I just don't understand what we're doing. We've decided we want to create artificial life. We're gonna program it to feel exactly like a regular human. And then we get pissy the moment somebody says "Why did you give that hammer feelings? It doesn't like hitting the nails. It keeps screaming." And the Institute's head swivels 180 degrees around, fury filling their eyes, and they belt out "It's not a fucking human! If I wanna jab it with a hot poker and hear it's human-accurate screams, that's my goddamn American right!" I don't understand. What in the fuck are we doing? Why do they need to have emotions programmed into them? Why does the hammer need to feel pain? You can go on and on about how "Umm, well ackshually, they aren't humans and so when they scream it is not really real." My question is why exactly you are so hell-bent on hearing the hammer scream? Why is that such an important part of the experience that you absolutely must have it? Where the hell do you live so I can stay far the fuck away? That is not a thing that any normal human being needs or desires and I really don't think I should even have to explain that. I'll buy that having human-shaped laborers could be more useful that specialized machines. Sure, whatever. But why do they need to be able to feel fear? Why are we making them conscious?

So for me, a big part of F4's story isn't working. Not only do I not buy the whole synth thing in general. Because it feels unbelievable that we've got the Institute who seem to have no understanding of what it is they are doing. But also, I can't believe the other side of that particular conflict. Why does the Railroad exist? Why is there any significant force that, in a nuclear apocalypse, would put focus on freeing the robots? It feels so silly. Why do we care? You don't have to completely hate the synths. But I just don't understand why a faction would spring up with helping synths as their focus. Where is clean drinking water? Where is agriculture? Or a basic governing body? It just feels like we've skipped dozens of steps on the societal development tree and we've gone straight to higher ideological positions. Why do any of them give a single shit about the synths? Their basic needs are not being met. You can say that I'm being overly critical. That people are at a basic good, and that they can have moral positions. They can. They cannot, however, be expected to hold these moral positions when they are starving and have no roof. If you find a nice human that, even at the worst of times, is still only thinking of others. Good on them. But it hardly should be the expected outcome. The Railroad would make more sense if it were like 2 or 3 people who had 1 quest attached to them. That's totally something I could see happening in a Fallout world. But as a main faction, it's just ridiculous on the face of it. They and the synth stuff would make more sense, you know, if it were an isolated sidequest in another game...

Additionally, how does any of the Synth stuff connect to the theme of Rebuilding Civilization? It feels so separate to me. I'm not saying stories can't have multiple themes going on. But you would think they would at least in some way inform each other. I can understand the Institute as a concept. They were in fact the path I went down, when I first played the game. I liked the high science and I wasn't getting much from the other factions so I thought it might at least be more fun to be a bit morally gray. But them being so isolationist directly puts them against what the player has likely been doing, building up all their silly settlements. The synth creation and everything to do with them doesn't really connect to the actual actions the player is taking and the gameplay they are likely to engage in. There's a weird segregation between the story being told and the gameplay the player has likely been participating in.

Looking past the Institute v Railroad situation, how do the other factions fare? Well, this time around I did a Minuteman playthrough, so I can most confidently speak on that one. It's no good. There is some extreme weirdness going on with them. It definitely is clear to me now that the Minutemen exist as a pseudo-Yes Man faction. Where they are over here in the corner as a default. They don't have any strong opinions about anyone other than let's all help each other. And their actual quests are boring or nonexistent. I immediately jumped into them on my playthrough. I had decided from the beginning that I was going to be an America man who loved America. So the faction walking around with laser muskets whistling Yankee Doodle was obviously for me. Can someone explain to me why they go dark 5 minutes into the first act and only are seen again 5 minutes before the end of the third act? I genuinely thought I was running into a bug. I'd done a couple things for them, Preston immediately crowned me the big honcho and said he will literally jump off a bridge if anything were to happen to me, precious cinnamon roll that I am. But then afterward all they seemed to have for me were endless garbage radiant shit. There's like nothing actually going on with them.

The Minutemen feel like a good introduction to the general shape of F4 (helping the settlements), but it's like we don't actually do anything with them. I thought surely after we took the Castle, something would happen. But no, just nothing. It's exceptionally weird. Particularly because they feel like the bespoke option to me. You as the player are introduced to them immediately after starting the game in Concord. So for the total experience to be so bare is truly odd. Why are we leading with one of the worst options? Much has been said about how New Vegas' Caesar's Legion option doesn't stack up to the other factions of the game. I would generally agree. However, I would also mention that we hardly lead with them. You really have to go out of your way if you want to do the Legion path. You won't oopsie-shit your way into supporting them ever. Contrast that with F4, where I feel you're generally lead down the Minutemen path.

I can't speak as authoritatively on the Brotherhood of Steel in F4. I'm familiar with them in the general but I have never done their actual quests. Other than the first 2 or 3 introductory ones you do with Danse. I know I don't like their leather boots and goose stepping. It's unfortunate the drastic change from F3 to F4. Probably more accurate to their earlier lore on the whole, so I don't think it's necessarily a bad change per se. It did feel a little weird in F3 that we have the obviously evil Enclave vs the obviously good Brotherhood just trying to give everyone water. Not a particularly interesting setup. So probably for the best that we get them back to being more neutral or morally gray. Even though I feel we do kinda go past that in F4 with all the talk of the lesser folk and the exterminating we probably should do....Did the Brotherhood become the Enclave when I wasn't looking?

Pew Pew

So we're not roleplaying, the story ain't great, the game is desperate to hook you into it forever and ever which fundamentally is something that I hate...but is it fun? A question I have long labored over. I want to say yes. But I struggle to say yes. And I don't really feel like it's ok to round up to a yes if we're struggling to say yes. But no also does not feel right given how much time I've sunk into this game. There was certainly a self-imposition put on me when I decided to play this game. I would say that my interest in the game certainly does not extend to its actual playtime. The nearer I got to the end, the more I wanted to blow through it and get this behemoth off my plate. So there's maybe the latter half or third of the game where I was having less fun with it than the previous portion. But if we focus in on that good period, I guess it's fun enough. I just find it hard to isolate that good DNA from the recombinant trash it's surrounded by.

The actual gunplay is better than in previous entries, sure. I just don't know that every other part of the game withering away into dust is worth it. I just think of how many times in previous Fallouts a situation could be solved without guns. And all that is gameplay. It's not just narrative, it's not just story, it's not just dialogue. Sneaking around, finding back entrances, getting secret info by talking to randos around a location...all of that's gameplay. So sure the gun goes pew pew better than ever, but you're also excising large portions of your total gameplay stack to make room for that increase in fidelity. And if we start comparing F4's gunplay to the rest of the medium, to non-Bethesda games, I really feel it comes up short. So I dunno. It just feels like a loss, in general.

Sim Settlements

I'm gonna talk about this mod separately because while it did come to define a large part of my F4 experience, it is in fact a mod. And so rounding up in Bethesda's favor, using it to launder in goodwill, seems backwards. Sim Settlements 2 is an excellent mod. The overall best mod that I've experienced before. In a couple ways, but first and foremost just the overall level of effort that is clear went into it. I found myself repeatedly shocked that the thing I was experiencing did not require money. I did end up donating, for what it's worth. But a truly shocking level of quality for free.

I originally got the mod because I was looking for settlement mods. In my original playthrough of F4, I did not touch the settlement building at all. It wasn't what I wanted from Fallout and so I had no interest in even meeting Bethesda where they were. This time for my LP, I did want to do at least some of it. I wanted to give Bethesda the fairest shot I could. But given I was doing a modded playthrough, I assumed surely there was probably some mods out there that would do something or other to improve the experience. Sim Settlements 2 came highly recommended from a number of sources. I didn't go too in-depth on what all it did, but I saw that it added some levels of higher abstraction in terms of you doing the building. As well as adding some number of quests. Which seemed perfect to me.

Ho-ly hell. I did not realize going in that I was downloading another game. Both in terms of overall length of content and also number of ancillary little systems. It definitely extended my playthrough a lot more than I was expecting. And I already knew that F4 was likely to be the longest series I had done to date. Though some of the Sim Settlement stuff ranks highest when I'm comparing to base game, so the length isn't entirely unwelcome. In an ideal world where I wielded the life-giving flame of Prometheus and the sharp intellect of the blue-eyed maid Pallas....where a wave of my hand could remake reality in my chosen image, I would just start shaving off the worst parts of F4 and replacing them with the best bits of Sim Settlements.

ASAMs

So what's so good about this mod? Let's start with the actual core gameplay with the ASAMs. That's where the mod came from and where it starts you. When I said I did not like the settlement building, I had myriad reasons for feeling that way. Most prominently, it took a good chunk of Bethesda's effort away from the actual core RPG experience of talking and character-building and quest-solving. And it moved that effort over into a system that functions in no small way as another dead-end. Similar to the looting system. Me building the settlements up does not afford me enough role-playing opportunities to be worth the effort I'm putting in. There are systems for connecting your settlements together, Bethesda seems to expect you to do that. But there is such a steep drop-off in enjoyment from building up one settlement to building up a second settlement. And a third, a fourth, and so on...

The ASAM system abstracts away some of this base effort of creating buildings. Why should you, the player, personally hammer in every nail to the shitty shack that will belong to beloved NPC named...Settler? Thinking in terms of allocating plots to different types of buildings, and farming out the building effort to the settlers themselves feels so much more in alignment with the actual theme Bethesda is going for (Rebuilding Civilization). You're less of a handyman and more of an administrator. That one simple change recontextualizes a lot of what you're doing. It's still prone to becoming boring if you're doing it over and over (at least for me), but at the very least we're working on a higher level and so I'm afforded more of an opportunity to RP in my head that I'm doing more than I really am.

Headquarters Fit For a King Governor

But what's really notable in terms of gameplay of Sim Settlements is that the abstraction doesn't stop there. Something that I really appreciated from the mod is how it structures its gameplay over the course of its three chapters. In chapter 1, we're very much in F4 land. ASAMs are an improvement over default building but we're generally doing the same thing either way. We're creating individual buildings for individual people. "People" is of course doing rather a lot of work in that sentence. As we move into chapter 2 however, things start to get bigger and broader. At this point you've got a number of settlements under your belt. F4 normally would stop here, so far as I'm aware. You have individual settlements, and can set up trading between each if you like. Here though in Sim Settlements, we move into a proper administrative role. We start building up our own headquarters.

I like that the many quests for all the little special settlers does have a purpose. That being filling up your ranks in the headquarters. I didn't realize at first when I was messing with getting people for HQ that all of those people had great SPECIAL stats. So when I first did the HQ, I opened the doors for many a person named 'Settler'. Definitely made this stage of Sim Settlements harder than it needed to be. Who knew filling the government with a bunch of incapable morons is not a good idea? Once I did start to wrap my head around the HQ systems, everything started to go a lot smoother.

I thought this was a fun bit. It didn't have the largest impact on actual gameplay outside of the HQ. But it felt very good for my headcanon of being the governor of the area to suddenly be totally supported. I also very much enjoy the general concept of making this place your home, the whole system where you can use your various experts to allow you to not need to get the various upgrade perks (upgrading weapons, armor, etc) is very cool. By the time I was messing with the HQ, it really wasn't necessary. But it was still much appreciated. And had I started Sim Settlements earlier in my playthrough, I would have definitely made use of it.

I also just generally appreciate how much we trick this building out. It's a nice feeling, how customized it gets. It really feels like you're making an impact on the land and shaping it to your desires. You could say that you do the same with the regular settlement building. But I would disagree, pointing out that you customize these settlements, but it never really comes to much. Your settlement is still full of 'Settler'. And additionally, the fact that you can customize everything means we can't ever really refer to the physical layout of these places. Because it's determinant. With the HQ, you can customize it but it's a known quantity. We have these bespoke areas that we can walk over to and have a conversation in. People can say "Hey, let's go have a meeting in the meeting room." And then we walk over to the meeting room. Truly, we are in the future, but I must mention it because it is not the case in the base game.

War, It's Good for Everything

Moving on to the final bits of gameplay from act 3 of the mod, we have the war with the gunners. I didn't find this to be the most exciting thing in the world. Mostly, it just felt like a timesink. I like the idea of it more than I like the actual feeling of playing through it. It's definitely not bad and we're never suffering or anything. I think it mostly just feels a bit tiring, because by the time we get to this point in the game, I'm totally tapped out on F4 combat. It's become super rote and I'm looking for any excuse to hurry it along to get back to any semblance of talking and role-playing.

I do appreciate the general rising action. It's done better here than it is in the base game. Contrast the repeated invasions ending with the big attack on Quincy with the fart in the wind that is the attack on the Institute. Where I saw the credits roll and my only thought is "Oh, that was it?" I also think the system is surprisingly robust. I know they lifted a number of the mechanics from the raiding from Nuka World. But it's used to much better effect here. As well as making more sense with the character you are more than likely playing as. I'm just sayin', it feels a whole lot better liberating the land from raiders and gunners than it does smashing the blocks that you yourself set up (in the sense of raiding your own settlements).

The Actual Story

Moving past the gameplay and speaking entirely on the actual story of Sim Settlements. I love like all of it. There was 1000 different times something happened that just made me happy. I love Jake and I assume the mod authors also would like for you to love Jake, given how center stage he is. Contrast Jake with Preston though. They both fill a pretty similar narrative purpose, introducing you to the world and guiding you along the good path. Where Preston makes me want to jump off a bridge, Jake makes me want to jump into his arms. He's so charismatic and actually feels like a proper partner. He is a person with thoughts. He doesn't feel like an empty vessel whose only aim in life is to hand out miscellaneous quest bullshit. I enjoy seeing our relationship with Jake evolve over the course of the story.

The biggest point of praise I can give to Sim Settlements' story is that it feels like a better alternative to the base F4 story. I'm not going to go crazy and say that it literally is better than the base game in every way. But I do feel that it is a far better foundation to work off of than the base story is. I'm continuously confused on what exactly the overarching theme of 4 is. Sim Settlements is so much more focused. It has a clear narrative it is trying to tell. You start at the bottom and you work your way up into becoming a power in the area. And then you pass your final test of showing that you can tell foreign invaders to get bent. You are a commonwealth.

The only thing I'd really like to see is better integration with the existing power structures in the Commonwealth. I really like that we pull them in at the end as allies. That's good, but I thing we could go farther. In a world where we're working with the Sim Settlements story as a starting point, something I'd love to see is bringing in the factions and integrating them with your government. Why aren't I hiring the Institute bastards into my science department? Or using the Minutemen as the backbone of my military as well as the face of recruiting?