Be Excellent To Each Other

Clearing locations all the time starts feeling a little grindy.

So I need to be in workbench mode yes?

You can craft in this game, but, like… craft towns? What I said at lunch was that I resented being made to do level design also, but by that point I was just lashing out because nobody was feeling my flavor. I don’t need this to be as granular as it is. The interface for this is… not an interface. That’s me being diplomatic. This is Steam Greenlight, Survival-Game-Of-The-Week shit. None of this should work the way it does. Assigning people to jobs is frankly insane, grids are real and useful, there should be an aerial view, we can do this for a long time.

Well, Workshop Mode, but yes.

FALLOUT 4 Easter Egg Makes An Obscure Reference to ALIEN

While Easter Eggs in video games are designed to be rare finds for the observant player, it is more rare now to find a game that omits them these days. Open-world RPG titles like Fallout 4 provide all of the room for a developer to hide a little something special within that game’s environment. Players will find all kinds of references to movies, comics, and video games throughout the wasteland, and some can be more obvious than others. While we all know exactly what games “Red Menace” and “Pipfall” are referencing, some Easter Eggs are a little more obscure. One such reference was found by an Imgur contributor that goes by the name 1Times.

Throughout the game, players are able to collect junk items called Flux Sensors from all across the wasteland. 1Times discovered that one of these Flux Sensors has an interesting serial number marked on it.

It turns out “CM-88B 180924609” is, in fact, a serial number for a CM-88B Bison starfreighter named the Nostromo; the setting of the 1979 film Alien. For those unfamiliar with the film, the Nostromo is the ship that Ellen Ripley and crew work on, and where they are hunted by a lone Xenomorph alien. 1Times included a screenshot from the film to prove the serial number matches.

http://www.pcgamer.com/playing-fallout-4-with-charisma-luck-and-nothing-else/?utm_source=zergnet.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=zergnet_770550

Playing Fallout 4 with Charisma, Luck, and nothing else.

It turns out “CM-88B 180924609” is, in fact, a serial number for a CM-88B Bison starfreighter named the Nostromo;

You Likely Never Heard of the Best-Selling Game of 2015

Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 is no longer the biggest entertainment launch of 2015.

Bethesda’s Fallout 4 sold 12 million copies and generated over $750 million in its first 24 hours at retail on Nov. 10. Those numbers obliterate the over $550 million in 72 hours that Activision-owned developer Treyarch earned with Call of Duty: Black Ops 3.

Yet while Activision ATVI 2.08% has done a great job of turning Call of Duty into a mainstream game franchise that most people, including nongamers, recognize, the Fallout franchise is one with dedicated gamers but little pop culture crossover.

In Fallout 4, gamers play the sole survivor of Vault 111 and enter a world destroyed by nuclear war. The game has been designed as an open world adventure, allowing players to craft their own character and embark on a unique exploration of the New England Wasteland.

SuperData Research CEO Joost van Dreunen has been a fan of the Fallout franchise since day one because of its unique aesthetic and experience.

“Its popularity seems to come from an odd blend of narrative and action,” van Dreunen says. “As the franchise has grown more mature over the years, it has inevitably attracted a larger player base, but its popularity among livestreamers on Twitch and YouTube has further accelerated its momentum.”

Fallout 4 set the record as the most viewed game launch of all 2015 games, according to Twitch.

Mike Schramm, video game analyst at EEDAR, says the Fallout franchise has three main audiences. There are the old-school PC gamers who remember the original turn-based games. There are fans of Todd Howard’s Bethesda Game Studios, whose last three games (Elder Scrolls III: Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Elder Scrolls IV: Skyrim) were hailed as games of the year on their respective releases. And Fallout 4 is also attracting fans of the new PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles as well.

“Bethesda announced the game as a surprise back at E3, and the title has squarely remained high on ‘most anticipated’ lists since then, matching up to other big names like Microsoft’s Halo 5, Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate,” Schramm says.

The game was one of the most preordered titles of the year at retailers. And digital sales were also strong, with sales over $100 million across Valve’s Steam platform and Sony and Microsoft’s digital stores. Van Dreunen says the game sold over 1.2 million PC and over 640,000 console digital copies at launch.

Van Dreunen says the digital success of Fallout 4 launch sales shows more gamers are willing to forego disc-based copies of big game releases. In North America, SuperData Research reports that full game downloads on PC and console generate $4.4 billion in annual revenue.

Fallout 4 established a concurrent play record on Steam with over 470,000 PC gamers playing at once.

The companion app, Fallout Pip-Boy, became the No. 1 game on the iTunes App Store, and the mobile Fallout Shelter app has been a success on both iOS and Android mobile devices. Schramm says Bethesda is likely to expand its mobile strategy. The company already is developing a mobile Elder Scrolls game.

Van Dreunen says this launch is a “slam dunk” for ZeniMax. He believes the financial gains will likely go toward maintaining the company’s creative independence, especially now that the games industry has entered a period of consolidation.

ZeniMax Media divisions include Bethesda Softworks, Bethesda Game Studios, id Software, Arkane Studios, Tango Gameworks, MachineGames, Battlecry Studios, ZeniMax Online Studios, ZeniMax Europe Ltd., ZeniMax Asia K.K., ZeniMax Asia Pacific Ltd., and ZeniMax Australia Ltd. The company has a large suite of game franchises, including Elder Scrolls, Doom, Quake, Fallout, Wolfenstein, Dishonored, The Evil Within, and Rage.

Schramm says the company’s new strategy of officially announcing Fallout 4 after four years of development and then shipping it five months later could impact both the way ZeniMax markets franchises in the future as well as the entire games industry.

“ZeniMax and other companies may build AAA schedules in the future to surprise players with more finished titles from trusted studios, rather than showing relatively unfinished work early,” Schramm says.

This is a bit great, isn't it? Agree with some of the complaints on settlements - the way you assign people to tasks is rubbish, and placing structures is a bit of a pain in the arse. The rest of it works pretty well though

It doesn't seem to show in the game world, unless I'm missing something - only when it's in your inventory?

It doesn't seem to show in the game world, unless I'm missing something - only when it's in your inventory?

Sure, if you went out and cleared areas of ghouls/mutants etc then there isn't much backstory. However, if you delve deeper (read notes, read logs on computer terminals etc) then there is much more of a rich backstory there than I first thought.

I had a really shitty session last night. I'm just following the missions that the Minute Man guy in Sanctuary is giving me plus following up on any radio signals I come across during my travels, and last night every single mission I tried out or location I explored saw me getting utterly murdered all to shit. My initial encounters with super-mutants went pretty well, partially due to me being flush with energy weapon ammo, but now I'm back to normal guns and getting my ass handed to me. Not helped by the fact I just keep stumbling into camps with many and varied super-mutant types (the fucking suicide bombers can get to fucking fuck) or even just loads of raiders wearing fucking power armour exo-skeletons! I'm not sure whether I just need to do something else to level up a bit or plough some (any!) time into weapon crafting or if this is just the game now, but either way it was a frustrating and not entirely enjoyable few hours. I'm also becoming pretty suspicious of the quality of the quests in general. Every single thing I've done now has been a very minor variant on 'go to location, shoot loads of people, instantly finish quest'. Even the one at Trinity Tower that saw me rescuing a guy had a thirty second conversation at the end to explain the backstory and that was it; there's no richness to the characters or interactions which is what really made the last two Fallout games. I really hope the main quest raises the level of this stuff or there's a serious danger of me getting bored.

The bad guys level up as you do. You need to mod your guns, buy better ones or hope you stumble across a good one somebody dropped. I struggled at the beginning, clearing places of Raiders when my best weapon was a pipe rifle that did 26 damage... First trip to a weapons bench and I walked away with a rifle that did something like 64 damage. Still not hugely impressive but so, so much better than what I had moments earlier. I then got the gun nut perk and now I can kill most things I come across before they kill me.

The boy has a shot gun that does 195 damage, he had to mod that.

I killed a feral ghoul the other day and he had three fusion cores on him, which was unexpected.

Yeah it's not been uncommon for me to find four at once in a drawer or something.

Only read on once you have entered the institute !

Schramm says the company’s new strategy of officially announcing Fallout 4 after four years of development and then shipping it five months later

How many hours in and what level are you, JC? Out of interest, purely wondering at what point you went through the main quest.