The weird stutters and hesitation of the game engine are slowly making me crazy. Especially in the city areas. I want to blame Gameworks but of course this is one Frankenstein of a game engine at this point so who knows what's wrong. It is possibly more demanding than Crysis 3 and it doesn't deserve to be.
It depends on whether you've tried playing it on lesser hardware like GF 860M or 6970. 860M has a nearly constant stuttering to it for some reason. Seems like something is out of sync with vsync. Perhaps related to Optimus.
It does run, oh, 95% great on a GTX 970. The sun rays effect causes stuttering at times though. I just turned that off.
I agree with this, but I'm bringing a FatMan to a knife fight with the hardware I'm packing
A 980Ti that runs reliably at ~1450MHz and a 4.5GHz 3930k with all eight DIMMs populated seems to feed the beast reasonably well. If it jittered on this hardware, I'd bitch a fit.
The 860M stutter isn't storage related. It feels like it's skipping frames and it's continuous. Detail settings don't matter. A web search shows other people seeing this too. I want to blame Optimus but who knows what the deal is.
But yeah on my main desktop with 970 the game is on SSD and there are obvious benefits to that. It runs very well on 970 + SSD.
The 6970 is probably just suffering from a lack of driver development effort. Maybe some effects are really poorly written for VLIW4. I wonder how the game runs on a GTX 580.
It probably runs just fine on the 580, albeit kind of slowly. Fermi is still fully supported. Hell NVIDIA still supports back to G80 (and I think even earlier on a separate driver). AMD just dropped all their pre-GCN stuff, even the DX11 compatible VLIW parts. Not that I blame them - it was the right call.
I just noticed the Crimson beta does work for 6000 series. Nice to get the new UI at the end. It sure is fast.
Maybe I was a bit harsh on how the 6970 runs FO4. It's not that bad. At 1920x1080 it's acceptable for this sort of FPS RPG. I think in some locations it has more hesistation/stuttering problems, but generally it is fine.
I’ve received more emails, comments and tweets regarding Trade Routes than anything else—so I made a video guide explaining them. Requirements, assigning a settler and canceling a trade route. Short & sweet, located here:
So I've put in about 46 hours now. Some of the quests are pretty engrossing. The main Bethesda storyline is actually interesting to me for a change. The Railroad, Institute and the Synths. But I have to say that going after yet more respawned raiders and supermutants is wearing a little thin. The "radiant quest" offerings are certainly not very appealing either.
I feel that Bethesda needs to reinvent themselves. This game is just too much like Oblivion/FO3/Skyrim. The world is too small and too dense. It's ADHD amusement park wasteland. Granted the cities are the best they've ever created. I don't mind the shooter focus, but the RPG elements are too limited, especially (as usual with Bethesda) player world influence. And what is with the horrible ambiguous dialog choices? They're mostly for show anyway, like in Mass Effect, since you can't really affect much beyond somebody's feelings. I suppose playing village nanny is a form of influence however.
Part of the problem too is that I'm not really into the Fallout aesthetic. I think it's rather silly most of the time. But I realize that part of the appeal for many people is the silly spoofy setting.
I do think the synths are really well done in FO4. I love how their skin blows away revealing the endoskeleton, reminiscent of Terminator. But it's a shame that almost every enemy in the game world has a fairly similar difficulty level attached to it.
And really it's time to get vehicles. Though that would mean having a world with size worthy of driving around in.
They're mostly for show anyway, like in Mass Effect, since you can't really affect much beyond somebody's feelings. I suppose playing village nanny is a form of influence however.
Two questions: Are you like me? If yes, does Fallout 4 repeat the pattern?
This is me playing Fallout 3, Oblivion, Skyrim (no FO4 yet) :
1. You start playing with expectations calibrated to any different RPG you played in the past (keep that in mind).
2. Suddenly you are level maxed out, and have main quest finished. Yet it looks like 75% of the map and side quests are unexplored... It's weird, considering how big the world looks on the map, and considering the detail/action density you experienced from areas you visited.
What happens now? To keep playing any game, you need challenge-reward-acomplishment cycle. But two RPG factors: character development and plot discovery, are now extinguished. They form an incentive to play. With the real incentive now gone, you end up inventing yourself a fake incentive. Exploration for exploration's sake. Squeezing the value of your purchase. Hoping it will get better.
3. The DLC phase.
Some DLCs contain interesting medium-size plots (as opposed to relatively big-size main quest, and small/tiny-size side quests). Some reset your character in some way (like confiscating your inventory) to partially restore the character development factor. The real incentive is kind of back, but in a half assed way, at best.
And there is another problem. Paradoxically, the more developped DLCs are, the more unimportant the main quest will look in your memory. The main quest, which was already rendered unimportant when you finished it prematurely. The feeling of acomplishment gets undermined further. You realize how oversold was the big plot at the beginning of the game.
4. Even the fake incentive expires eventually. Exploration stops generating entertainment above boredom treshold. You leave the game for good, still having 50% of map and side quests unexplored. You contemplate waste and mismanagment of enormous development effort.
Fallout 4 is basically the same thing as Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim. It looks, feels, plays and tells a story just as those do. It's not identical to any of those, but it's obviously iterations of the same formula. I think it plays like Skyrim joined with Mass Effect. Simplified RPG elements, simplified conversations, and they even have the voice actors who played Garrus and Mordin Solus and I swear the conversational gestures are similar too.
As for the way open-world RPGs eventually become hollow, soulless, emptiness - that's just how it goes I guess. Unless you can indeed come up with your own fulfilling motivations for endlessly playing. I keep dreaming of some kind of AI revolution but that seems extremely unlikely. I think Oblivion has the most ambitious NPC AI that Bethesda has let loose in a game world. They reigned things in after Oblivion.
I'm mostly here to agree with @swaaye; this feels and plays like every other "modern" (post year-2k) Bethesda title. For me, that's part of why I really enjoy the series: I became hooked on Oblivion years ago, not because of the drop-dead gorgeous graphics ( ) or the epic framerate ( ) or the stunning, immersive story ( have I 'd yet? ) but because of the "openness" of the world.
If all you do is concentrate on the main story, you're just letting the rest of the world go to waste. Even in my very first playthru of Oblivion, I found myself going through the first few story missions, and then deciding to go all ADHD on the world and started just wandering around. Who needs a story, when I can just wander the countryside, finding cottages, finding caves, find other stories? Not even necessarily missions, just stories: the way you find dead bodies, the notes you find in terminals and papers (or scrolls and books in the Elder Scrolls series.)
I will do a few story missions to get the game moving, and then I'll completely ignore the story for a while as I start opening up the map. Sometimes I get my ass handed to me, other times I find epic loot. For example...
There's a radioactive waste site indicated on east / central part of the map directly adjacent to a quarry mine...
The radioactive site is all blockaded off with big white rock slabs from the quarry. There's a single entrance to the site, guarded by a tripwire mine and a machine gun turret. If you RUN in there, it turns out to be a hidey-hole that has an EPIC radiation suit. I found it several days ago, and last night got to the point where I needed to traverse the glowing sea as part of the main story.
Rather than burning up a few fusion cells with my power armor, I just donned the radiation suit and snuck/walked all the way to the destination. I only had to fight once -- a pack of radscorpions that my companion decided to piss off.
Even when I'm on story missions, I'm typically a jerk and go hunting other locations "on the side" while I move to my final destination. And why not? The world expects you to.
Okay so I learned the hard way why fragmentation grenades shouldn't be "stored" on a companion. Me and Piper were checking out this waste dump when suddenly we heard fighting. This lone settler was surrounded by glowing molerats. I thought "great, I'll save him and convince him to join my settlement!" so I started killing molerats. Piper, always helpful, lobs 2 grenades towards the molerats which, remember, were surrounding this settler. So the molerats and the settler are blown to smithereens and I have no way of punishing Piper except loading her up with all the heavy stuff I find.
I got Piper to fully love me and got the "Lovers Embrace" perk. So the first time I sleep with her is in the hospital infested with supermutants; I lay down on the mattress and go to sleep, then when I wake up she is on the other side of the wall saying "oooh do we have to wake up". WTF was she talking to me from another room while I beat it for an hour?
The game needs a GUI for viewing settler assignments. Some settlers change names based on what they do (if you assign someone to be a trade route, their name goes from settler to provisioner or something like that). I read some people have different hats for different tasks, so all the farmers can have bandanas and the guards have miner's hats. Problem is that if a new settler arrives they can have a random hat and you can have this unassigned guy just running around
Piper sucks at stealth. How many times have I lined up the perfect sneak attack to the face to have her go Rambo and start firing all willy nilly with her pea shooter right before I pull the trigger Let me fire the first shot!
