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[Samira Kernher]

AI isn't all that basic that I've noticed. I've found it quite good. I have died many, many times due to being flanked, grenaded, ambushed, and so on. They're also feel much more aware of stealthing players than the silliness of previous Bethesda games.

As Miz said, even raiders will fuck you up late in the game. Particularly with grenades, and mines. (speaking of grenades and mines, they actually feel very immersive. A grenade or mine exploding beneath you means you're death animation is going to be a leg or two blowing off, just like one would expect from stepping on a mine).

Also yes, Mizhara. I shrieked the first time a ghoul corpse got up next to me, and they still scare the hell out of me when they start creeping up on you from places you thought you had cleared. They're the main reason I've stuck with a shotgun as my primary weapon, since pistols and rifles really did not cut it in the beginning of the game when I first encountered them. And yeah, their animations are really awesome.

This is my favorite Bethesda game so far.

[Mizhara]

Basic... kind of. Compared to actual First Person Shooters it's kind of basic, but for open-world games? Kind of decent. I've been flushed out with 'nades, flanked, hunted down by search parties when not being quite as stealthy as I thought I was and so on. It's basic, but functional. Their movement in combat is much much much better than before, as they'll seek cover or dodge etc. Oh, and shoot from cover, leaning around corners and such.

I've seen much better AI and enemy behaviour in bespoke FPS games, and in -some- hybrids like the latest Deus Ex, but never in an open world RPG like this.

Edit: Samira, early on (or without a shotgun) you really want to get headshots on Ghouls. Keeping your nerves in check and lining up good shots saved me more than spray and pray when they're massing or lunging. Of course, if you've got the ammo for it, the combat shotgun kind of renders them trivial. Expensive slaughter, but slaughter nonetheless.

[Aria Jenneth]

Screw it. Purchased. With season pass for the DLC.

[Mizhara]

Just make sure you pick up anything and everything that'll count as or refine into adhesive. Duct tape, wonderglue, anything and everything. Also, veggies, since you can make starch with that stuff which in turn can be used as adhesive.

Fuckin' everything you make needs it. It's the most needed crafting material out there, I swear.

[Samira Kernher]

Until you start running out of screws.

Or ceramic.

Or anything.

Every time I put search on for a component I needed, I end up running out of a different one by the time I get enough of the other one. Hrng.

[Mizhara]

I've never ran out of any of those things before I run out of adhesives. I did pick that scrapping or scavenging or whatever it was called perk that gives me more rare stuff when I scrap early on, so screws etc are very easy to come by just from scrapping weapons I pick up. Ceramics and such, I just went into construction mode and scrapped damn near everything in Sanctuary (broken houses, everything inside whole houses and such) and I've still yet to run out of the basics.

Funnily enough, after posting that last post, I saw a loading tip telling me to always look for adhesives as it was used in almost everything and rarest to find.

[Samira Kernher]

Adhesives is the most needed for item crafting, along with screws. I did run out of adhesives earlier but I've had it on my Search selection for at least ten levels now so I have a good stock. Screws I've found hard because I don't have the 'get screws when breaking down weapons' perk and items that typically have screws are often relatively heavy and I can only hold so much with strength 1 + limited fast traveling.

Ceramic you start running out of when you really focus on settlement building.


Also, some screenies.

Wasteland Sami:
[spoiler][/spoiler]

WIP Sanctuary bridge fort.
[spoiler]

[/spoiler]

[Mizhara]

Spent so long in the character creation menu. I crafted myself a perfect survivor with a backstory and everything, reflected in her looks. Then about thirty minutes into the game, she looked pretty much like this and have pretty much stuck with it other than upgrading and modding the armor pieces on her to Shadowed/Pocketed.

[spoiler][/spoiler]

Time well spent.

[Samira Kernher]

Such raider

[Mizhara]

Such raider survivor

ftfy

My survivor is a sneaky sharpshooter. A ghost of the wasteland. Anything that survives as she passes by never saw or heard her. No one knows her face and one day when the wastelands have been transformed by the actions of this lone survivor, she will disappear simply by taking off her mask and there'll be one more settler somewhere living out her days with her dog.

Occasionally though, as new threats arise to threaten the wastes, the Ghost will deal with that and spawn new stories and whispered rumors.

[Samira Kernher]

Sneaky shooting best shooting.

[Mizhara]

Especially with a few perks adding to the crit multiplier, as well as damage percentage to the weapon. Headshots get stupidly powerful.

[Mizhara]

A mod that will replace the conversation system to a usable function, showing what you're saying etc.

Eight days after release.

Modders, you guys are fucking awesome.

Edit: I put a direct link to the mod instead of a discussion thread about it.

[Pieter Tuulinen]

Biggest tech advance in this game over the previous iterations in the engine is the view from up high. Holy heck. Get to the top of that Genetic Engineering place in Cambridge and look out over Boston - it's incredible.

Biggest art direction advance, for me, would be the increase in vegetation and colour. Boston is every bit as fucked up as Arizona or Washington, but the Capital Wasteland was terrible for looking like the fires stopped like, a year ago - tops. Boston looks like it's had time to recover - albeit at a lower level of diversity and fertility than before. Still not where things WOULD be after two centuries, I think, but it looks more alive and more familiar than the Capital Wasteland ever did.

Innovations:-

1. Buildable settlements. I feel like this is the biggest candidate for further development with Mods/DLC. Right now the system is just not as developed as it could be and that's a great niche for a "Hearth and Home" style development pack. More styles. More variants. Certainly more themes. I'd love to see a style of building where you actually forge new materials and use them to produce new looking structures, for example.

2. Roleplaying opportunities. Needs more factions, more companions and a greater depth of complexity in relationships. You can already task settlement inhabitants - why not have said inhabitants be more individualistic? Right now it doesn't matter who does what, where. It should - and you should have a more flexible management system than leading people by the hand to whichever job you want them to do - and more flexibility to managing your group of settlements as a whole. Another DLC?

3. More territory. More adventures. With the current density of unique encounters in FO4, it is going to be difficult to shoehorn content into the existing map - so we'll need to expand that map, probably. FO3 did with The Pit and that one set down the river, so we can probably expect that, too?

[Mizhara]

Yeah, ignoring UI issues and some tech issues that I've gone over ad nauseum FO4 certainly did raise the bar quite a bit otherwise, but I wouldn't call them innovations. They're iterative improvements on what we've seen before in previous Bethesda games, which in turn tends to be things modders added in previous games. Building homes and such was fairly quickly modded into the games, so Skyrim got a DLC for it, which in turn became a full thing in FO4.

As for roleplaying opportunities, they actually lowered them compared to previous outings. I'm a bit disappointed by the way they handled factions and how to interact with them, and how interacting with them affects how you deal with other factions. Followers reacting a bit to what you do is a good thing, but not innovative either as that happened already back in the previous Fallout outings.

One thing they did make all new (as far as I know) is how interior cells now interact with exterior cells. If it rains or there's a radstorm or something in an outside cell, and you're in an interior cell in that area, rain and thunder and even lightning flashes will occur in the interior cell as well. It'll even rain through holes in the roofs etc. You can even hear combat going on outside (or inside if you're outside) if NPCs are going at it near you. I'm not sure how much work that took, getting that ancient and endlessly hacked together engine to do these things, but I'm impressed. It's one of those little touches that takes a lot of work, and aren't at all necessary but just makes you nod in appreciation with a little smile as radstorms practically shake the building you're inside.

There's even rain occlusion in the exterior cells, letting roofs keep the rain off. Just a little pity the "you're wet because rain" shader still applies.

The various fog and environmental effects are also top notch. It's remarkable how much every area can change immensely based on the weather you're in. I haven't seen confirmation of it yet, but I've also heard there's an actual weather system in place where various weather (storms, fog, radstorms, rain, etc) actually moves across the map in patterns. Radstorms for instance supposedly are "born" in the Glowing Sea and move outwards throughout the Boston Wastelands. Take that as the rumor it is, until you see confirmation somewhere, but in my experience it might very well be true.

Edit: I am slightly miffed by the performance impact of some effects in urban areas. Go into the cities when there's some fog and god rays and you can see a steady framerate-locked 60 go all the way down to 30, depending on what you're facing. And this is with a gaming system that's pretty much top of the line. The game doesn't look -that- good that it justifies 30 or below on systems like mine. It seems to be well optimized most of the time, but these... less impressive bits are a bit vexing.