I bet that every fan of the Fallout series, even those that played only the last 2 games, got hyped when they heard the next installment on the series announced, saw all the nifty new things like creating your own house, given the fact that you have the patience to build it or modding the heck out of your guns till your pathetic little Pipe Pistol becomes an armor piercing automatic rifle with a scope as well as a huge magazine in it to fuel your shooting spree. The crafting also made a nifty apparition, giving a second purpose to all the junk you gather as items needed for your mods.
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Fallout 4 takes place in Boston, action starting in 2077, where technology was flourishing, floating robots taking care of your family in almost every house. Suddenly, the alarm for nuclear threat goes off and you take your wife/husband and the kid, Shaun, to the nearest Vault, the Vault 111.
After you reach the spot, you can see a bomb in distance going off, its blast approaching menacing to your position, the ramp you’re standing on going down to slowly for your comfort but by sheer luck probably, you manage to get down right before the bomb’s power goes above your head.
Instead of a cozy room to stay in, you’re placed into a cryogenic room for a long time. Waking up a bit later due to an exterior element, you see your loved one struggling for the baby as someone else is trying to kidnap him. Being unable to move due to still being constricted by the cryogenic room, you watch in rage and fear how your second half stubbornly refuses to give up your son. The only outcome of this is an untimely death of your loved one and the kid still being kidnapped, followed by you being placed back to sleep. A random time later you wake up again, manage to get free from the room and get out, with only one purpose in your mind: Find your son.
Like in almost all Bethesda games, one of the first things you might notice is the possibility to switch between 1st and 3rd person views at any chosen moment. But unlike all the previous Fallout games, you will receive the most wanted prize in the past, the Power Armor, only after 1 or 2 missions, easing up the whole game’s difficulty in combat situations by a whole lot. The Power Armor is a whole metallic armor suit which protects its user by a lot of damage and can also offer lots of options in form of upgrades, like seeing everyone with a red glow, including enemies, which helps a lot during the night.
Like in other Bethesda games, you can have a companion that will help you gun down your enemies as well as carry your items for you. Your companion will also scavenge once in a while if you happen to miss the said object. You can also build a friend or even loving relationship with your partner-in-arms… or they can hate your guts. Each decision or actions completed will make them like you more or less. Once certain thresholds are reached in the positive side of the relationship, the companion will approach you, requesting a talk. Usually, these talks will end up in receiving a new quest which usually has to do with their own past. Once the final stage is reached, you will receive a perk that will be available as long as you keep that respective NPC as your partner.
Awesome Fact #10
Let the game know what you need.
Almost sure you will find yourself in the need of a certain part for that nifty mod you are about to create but don’t have enough and the traders are out of them. If such a thing will encounter you only need to press T while you hover over the mod or item you try to build and has the missing part. After that, if there is a piece of junk that contains the material you need, a magnifying glass icon will appear on the left of the object’s name, stating that one or more materials can be extracted from the object. The magnifying glass will also appear when you want to buy or sell items at vendors.
Awesome Fact #9
Gain a high advantage with VATS
VATS [Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System], can prove to be your best friend when you’re in various hard situation. While its default purpose is to help you aim and shoot down enemies it also has some other properties that will be covered a teeny tiny bit later. The VATS can be used to successfully get rid of the enemies around you. Depending on the distance and some other factors like the basic skills, perks and the weapon itself, you have between 0 and 95% chance to hit what you aimed at.
“ 0 and 95% chance to hit what you aimed at ”
The best benefit from it comes when you’re close to the enemies. Also, each successful shot will increase your Critical bar, which can be used to score a critical shot by pressing space before shooting the next bullet. The recharge rate of the said bar depends entirely on the Luck value. The targeting system can also be used at safely destroying grenades that are thrown at you as well as mines.
As forementioned there are also other abilities that VATS can perform. Those abilities can be activated by the perks and consists in showing you the best pathway towards the location of your quest objective or even make a mysterious man appear out of nowhere and help you at shooting down the enemies.
Some Legendary Guns can have the attribute of consuming less AP per bullet and allow you a far greater number of bullets in a VATS session.
Awesome Fact #8
Play SIMS
Well, it is not really SIMS but damn close to that! You have the possibility to create houses, plant fruits and vegetables, create water resources, energy, create trading points and so on.
You can also install a … much like in the Android game ‘Fallout Shelter’ in order to bring more settlers into your areas and even traders. You can set the small city’s population to do various task like gardening or act as a trader. Some various perks will help you with that.
Awesome Fact #7
Play mini-games on your PipBoy!
You can find scattered throughout the Boston Wasteland holotapes that contains games that were played in the 1980 like Missile Commander and so on, allowing you some well deserved break from fighting all those raiders and deathclaws.
Awesome Fact #6
Balance the competition against Power Armored enemies
Everyone that played a Bethesda game before knows that you can sneak and steal items. With the help of the stealth perk you can go behind enemies that wear a Power Armor and steal their Fusion Core, the battery that fuels the machinery. Without it, they will be forced to climb off it and fight you mano-a-mano.
Awesome Fact #5
Explore and be rewarded with rare items!
Everyone knows that the point of such games is to explore anyway. But if you’re one of this that would rather stick only to quests and avoid all the other potential dungeons, don’t. In almost all of the places there is a high change that you will find a Legendary type of enemy, be it feral or human, that upon its death, will drop a legendary item, be it armor or weapon, that will give a bonus, like a second type of damage or reduced cost on the Action Points than normal.
Awesome Fact #4
No level cap!
That’s right, if the previous games shoved a level limit, this time, due to the new skill tree, the cap has been raised and you’re free to go as high as you want. So choose what you want mostly at the beginning and worry about the other things later.
Awesome Fact #3
Increase your basic S.P.E.C.I.A.L skills with normal perk points
Fallout 4 suffered a dramatic change in how the skill tree works and how the points are received. Instead of a second menu that allowed you to add points to whatever skill you wanted like lockpicking or bartering, the game now has incorporated both the skills and perks menus into one skill tree and maybe as an apologize for this horrendous decision, you can increase your basic skills up to 10.
Each basic skill has 10 perks. Each perk for each skill’s level. The beginning of the game can make all the difference. You can choose to be charismatic to have better prices when buying and selling items as well as access to some persuasive chatting dialogues or you can go focus mainly on Strength and be a God at brawling and carrying junk.
Awesome Fact #2
Customize your companion however you wish
Another awesome thing that Fallout allows you to do is that you can change your companion’s armor, weapons and even command him to go inside a Power Armor. Be aware though that when you hand him a weapon, make sure that you also give him the ammo needed for that weapon, else he will use his own weapon.
However, there’s a bug apparently when commanding your companion to go inside a Power Armor while being in the Sanctuary City. The NPC will lose pathway and the only way to correct it is to leave the city either through Fast Travel or by foot.
Awesome Fact #1
You can craft lots of mods for you and your companion for your weapons, armor and Power Armor.
The developers behind Fallout 4 have focused this game a lot on the crafting part, making it more accessible than the previous installments of the series.
You can get junk off of everywhere you find them, in buildings, caves and so on, and turn them into ingredients for your mods. Each weapon, armor and Power Armor can be improved if you have the right ingredients and skills.
As stated above, you can turn a pistol into an automatic rifle or you can even change the munition type a weapon is using. The armors can be made tougher, add types of resistances to it like radioactivity or lightning, also made lighter or have more pockets for caring more loot.
As for the Power Armor, you can only add one bonus specific to each part of it: The torso, the head, left and right leg, left and right arm. Each part of the extremities can contain a different mod. You can also upgrade the armor to the PA making you last longer on the battlefield. Every old mod that you do not need anymore you can sell to any vendor for some extra cash.
Bonus Tips and Tricks
There are so many other things that I haven’t mentioned, maybe because they are not awesome enough but damn useful or just because I ran out of numbers. But here are also some other things you should know about the game.
– So far, there are known issues, on the PC version at least, with the names of the items. If a certain item, usually a weapon, is too modded, the name will extend too much, not leaving space to see its complete name. The solution to that would be to rename that weapon, in anything you want. For that you, only need to press T, and on the top part of the screen you can see what name you’re typing to it.
“ Feel free to jump from whatever height you want ”
– Holster your weapon! Something not quite known since it isn’t specified anywhere, I picked it up from a friend after I complained to him that friendlies turned warriors on me and made me a sprinkler. In order to put and take out your weapon in and from the holster, hold down the reloading button until the animation executes or else, history is bound to repeat.
– You can change the color of your PipBoy in the options menu and will be in effect only while you’re out of a Power Armor
– There’s no fall damage while wearing a Power Armor. So feel free to jump from whatever height you want without fearing of becoming a bloody pie … literally.
– Extremely moddable! Like every other Bethesda games, this game can be heavily modded and there are already out there dozens of mods, including some nude mods, granted, only for the female models.
And, this is it! A few nifty things that you certainly learned about now if you didn’t already knew them. Might come back with more, might not. You certainly wouldn’t want me to spoil quite everything about it, right? Right?