I really like the redone “generic” enemies in this game, especially the raiders. really all the ambient npc dialogue is fantastic. the place feels so much more alive than fo3!
Yeahhhh, there's some pretty major problems with how the pacing and story is constructed in this game. YMMV on how much it bothers you. I tend to headcanon that they do lose the trail frequently and also my SS's heart isn't really in finding Shawn. She didn't want a kid, and going through a rather difficult pregnancy and birth while her husband was on tour and she was terribly isolated was...traumatic. So she procrastinates when she thinks she can get away with it. I also have so many branching saves cause i want to do missions with several companions. And Valentine ruined me and now I have A Thing for scruffy, and nice detectives. I don't know if you do any modding, but my favorite mod by a considerable margin is the Journal Mod. It's amazing for breathing some life into the roleplaying aspects of Fallout. Cause as much as I adore many of the companions, Valentine is the only one who's fleshed out enough to feel like a real companion (and you can't romance him??? WHY TODD???). The others feel like archetypes or templates and feel more like my OCs at this point cause I've developed them in fic and in my journal. (sorry this was rambly, I was just so excited to see this thread revived ;-;)
Yeah my main chilled out on WHERE'S MY BABY after a certain clue because even if she couldn't get to him at least she knew he was healthy and relatively taken care of, instead of an infant somewhere??? in the wasteland??? all small and defenseless?? Like she still wants her baby back and will shoot a lot of people in the face to do so, but she can take some time to breathe. And get better at face shooting.
I’m having to kind of handwave the getting sidetracked thing because my PC Marian (named after Hawke because if you can’t think of a name for your video game protagonist the answer is obviously to name her after a different video game protagonist) is very invested in getting her kid back. Spoiler: who wants backstory she and her husband had wanted a baby since early on in their relationship but their plans were delayed abruptly when he got shipped out, and when he got back they kind of rushed into it without taking the time to reassess whether that was still a good idea right now or if maybe his brand new shiny case of ptsd miiight cause some problems. a couple months into the pregnancy he lost his ability to hold it together and had some kind of freak out and they both started panicking over the possibility that they had made a terrible mistake, the fact that the return to normal they had been so desperately looking forward to was never going to happen, etc. things almost fell apart BUT they managed to work through it, learned to communicate better than they ever had before, became much closer, and the pregnancy and Shaun himself were a huge part of that process. he helped her through the pregnancy while she helped him process his trauma from the war. it was a whole bonding thing! they had finally pulled their hope for their own future out of the jaws of the world’s future! and then the world’s future went and happened anyway, and also Nate got killed and Shaun got kidnapped, and she is bitter as hell about that. so she SHOULD be charging full speed ahead on this. but I am ignoring that and pretending they hit frequent obstacles because I want to cover the Commonwealth in trade networks and collect every antique globe I see. sidenotes: Marian really cares for Codsworth and considers him family because of how supportive he was through the thing with Nate. she got him a few months before Nate got back and wasn’t quite sure what to make of him, whether he was a person or not essentially, but then during the times of chaos he became a rock of emotional support for her. she would travel with him more often but he doesn’t love fighting and is really more comfortable living in Sanctuary and taking care of the old place. this is also why she is so accepting of robots and other non-human people! her oldest friend is a robot! she learned how to shoot from Nate because he was afraid of her being unable to defend herself. I know this still doesn’t make it make sense for her to be able to pick up something like a missile launcher and start going to town, but it helps with my suspension of disbelief, ok oh boy that way madness lies for me. I’ve accepted the fact that if I ever want to romance Hancock (which yes) it’s probably gonna have to be in a different game because Valentine and Piper have dibs on my time in this one I’ll have to check out that mod, for prosthetic memory purposes if nothing else! and it is a FEDERAL CRIME that you can’t romance Valentine, I have no idea what the hell the writers were thinking when they made that decision >:V like ok let’s make a scruffy robotic noir detective with an awesome voice, glowing yellow eyes, TWO tragic backstories, and a deep love for humanity despite all he knows of its worst qualities, and then NOT let you kiss him? what the fuck, bethesda! he pulls out a screwdriver to adjust his own hand sometimes! he makes robot jokes!! he’s tormented by the knowledge that everything he knows himself to be is nothing but a shell and his natural state as he sees it is to be a blank half-person created as a tool with no free will! like come on!!!!
oh yeah and re:mods, I can’t recommend Salvage Beacons highly enough. exploration has become so much less stressful since I installed that one.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Full disclosure, I have full on stolen both Valentine and Hancock, filed off the serial numbers, and they're the most important supporting characters in my original fic now. Cause I can't get enough of those questions you were listing. And I love the potential dynamics it brings up, cause Valentine has all this existential angst ALL THE TIME and my Sole Survivor is just like, it could not be any more obvious that you're a person you melodramatic toaster. There is a Valentine romance mod, but it's kinda meh. I mostly got around it by having the romance be a real slow burn and they don't officially get together until a few years after the Institute and the Brotherhood are given the boot. And slow burn feels right for Valentine and Sole, as he and (in most cases) Sole are both still reeling from relationship trauma. We took different approaches to Codsworth, which I think is really interesting. Particularly once she's been spending time with Valentine and the Railroad, Darling is deeply creeped out by Codsworth almost but not quite sentience. I tend to interpret the bots (except for gen 3 synths which are just people) as pretty much non-sentient but capable of essentially growing a soul in some cases. It happened to Valentine and DiMA, it happened to CLEO and the barkeep in Goodneighbor, Curie gained it when she became Gen 3, but Codsworth still felt programmed. Also Darling was miserable Before, and Codsworth is a constant reminder of that life. Ugh this is making me want to return to some of my FO4 WIPs.
*eyes emoji* at that origfic (and WIPs), I haven't gotten to hang out much with Hancock yet but I know I want to see more of whatever Valentine's got, serial numbers or no :D and yeah my Sole is pretty much the same. like not only are you a person, you're a better person than like 90% of actual humans out I've met out here, come on dude. I haven't met Curie or DiMA yet - I'm guessing you meet them further down the main quest or the Freedom Trail, and I've been fucking around with sidequests all week. the contrast in the sentience levels of the various Mr. Handys you meet is pretty weird and kind of creepy. the ones at Greygarden that can't even talk are especially ???. what is their relationship with their supervisors like? did they used to be able to talk and can't now because they spent the last 2oo years in the company of only robots? are the supervisors sentient?? robot intelligence in the Fallout series is even more confusing than robot intelligence in Star Wars. Codsworth seems like a full person to me though. I think maybe he wasn't fully alive at first, but became so while you were in the vault. idk if you traveled with him enough to get it, but once you hit a certain level of approval you get a really touching conversation where he says he thinks of you as family and hopes you think of him the same way. also I absolutely loved that first conversation you get when you meet him outside your house in Sanctuary! he starts out acting the way you might expect from a half-sentient robot butler, talking about dusting the house and watering the garden and all, but then when you push him he breaks and it becomes clear he was retreating into that as a way to cope with the loss of everything he loved and all his purpose in life. how did he get complex enough to form that coping mechanism?? I headcanon that Codsworth had a few adventures in the 200 years you were frozen and unknowingly built a reputation for himself. It always seemed weird to me that Sanctuary was so untouched and uninhabited, and I think that's because of him - a long time ago, probably like 50-ish years after the bombs fell, some raiders or maybe just some settlers came across the place. this coincidentally happened when Codsworth was going through a bit of the anger stage of grief AND having a lot of trouble with the limitations of his programming and he basically cut them all down in a rage. one dude escaped, that dude happened to be inclined to creative storytelling, and a few years later Sanctuary has a reputation for being guarded by an insane killer robot. maybe a few small raider groups tried their luck over the years and he killed them too, sustaining the legend. he also mentions venturing out to Concord a few times and having rocks thrown at him. I don't know how that fits in with my urban legend headcanon, but it does indicate that he got out and about for a bit of potential personality development. I might rethink the friendship between Marian and Codsworth pre-war, though - now I think on it, he doesn't seem quite alive enough to sustain that at the beginning of the game. I'm making this backstory up as I go lol
I think they should have handled Hancock quite differently, having him be more like a Faction Leader than a companion, but he's still great. It's hard for me these days to remember exactly how much characterization is in the game and how much is the character I've made him, but he's a bundle of contradictions that I love: hedonistic yet ambitious, self-assured and confident yet still unable to shake his loathing for his younger self, slutty yet loyal and romantic, easy-going but with a viscous streak. After a bit of a rocky start (Darling was supremely unimpressed by the whole shank a guy in the street thing) they quickly become best friends and harbingers of chaos whenever they're together. Not quite! You pick up Curie from a random side mission (I suggest you look up the location so you don't miss it, it's very easy to miss). DiMA is one of the main characters in the Far Harbor DLC, which is by far the best part of FO4. I won't spoil anything, but DiMA is one of my very favorite characters in FO, even if I want to punch him in his self-righteous face 500% of the time. Yeah, I get where you're coming from. I think he feels more artificial to me because he just can't seem to grasp that my Sole's marriage was unhealthy. And it doesn't feel like he's just oblivious, more like he doesn't understand that relationships can be bad. Also he keeps treating her like the housewife she used to be despite the dramatic shift in her affect, dress, and behavior. Also, my characterization and backstories have morphed over time too. It's kinda surreal going through my earlier FO fics, because details and motivations and habits are all slightly off.
I’m currently kicking myself for not getting the DLC the last several dozen times they were on sale, haha. might just shell out for Far Harbor full price because I keep hearing how awesome it is (and also it’s set in my state!)
Yeah, if it won't break the bank, it's absolutely work getting, even at full price. It cleans up so much of the problems with the base game. The side quests tend to be much more involved, even the fetch quests have much more weight. Also the faction struggle is much better done. The base game has the problem of some of the factions, like the brotherhood and institute, are pretty much evil, but the game hedges too much about it. Far Harbor does what I think they wanted, which was to make a situation where no one was really right and no one is really wrong. There's also not a weird pacing problem that the Shaun Plot creates. There's so much great stuff in both the main plot and in the side quests (there's a murder mystery side quest that is one of the funniest quests I've done in a video game). And I also love it cause it's very much: You and Valentine are partners and for a lot of it, you're there supporting him which is a nice reversal of the main game, where he's your support (And holy shit does he need some support).
oh goodness, Nick just told one of the educational Mr. Handys at the oceanological society “Don’t be afraid to dream big, buddy. This isn’t all you have to be.” ;-;
that all sounds very tempting, I might just go for it. New Vegas ended up being overwhelming for me with the amount of content but fo4 is really making me miss the way factions were handled there. is it the sort of thing you can drop in to your main game mid-story or is it best to have it already when you start a new game? I’ve been delaying the Glowing Sea quest for a while while I clean up sidequests and mess around with settlements, to give you an idea of where I’m at. I also joined the Brotherhood and advanced their bit of the story a little (and I’m really annoyed there’s no dialogue options to convey “I’m only here for the power armor and to squeeze as much info about your plans as I can out of you shiny authoritarian jerks, but your guns are just a little too big for me to say so outright”). I just retook the Castle and I still haven’t run into the Railroad.
@vuatson You can just drop into it any time. It works best after you've completed Valentine's Eddie Winter quest, for story reasons, but it can fit anywhere. In my personal timeline it's after Darling has found the Institute but before you start having to make real choices about which faction your siding with. As for being overwhelmed, it's a lot more contained than either FO4 or NV (which I could never quite get into either, despite liking everything about the game conceptually). The map is rather small, and the early quests get you well acquainted with the island. There's a lot to do, but more because the quests are more involved instead of there being 5 million of them. Lol, same with the BoS, though not so much the power armor, as Darling's a sniper and refuses to wear anything but her Silver Shroud coat. She takes naturally to spying, and that's the only reason she spends so much time with the BoS and the Institute. But if you haven't, you shoulddef find the Railroad asap. You can pick up the quest marker either by people talking in one of the diamond city alleys or from a holotape in Hancock's office. The quest is "follow the freedom trail." It's a serious design flaw that you can full on miss them, despite being one of the major factions.
ooh nice, I'll probably end up getting it next weekend then! I definitely prefer self-contained complicated quests to the ones with bits branching off all over the place. I'm right in the middle of the Eddie Winter quest now, I've nabbed all the tapes in the central region of the map and we're going for the more distant ones whenever we happen to wander near them. I've been putting it off partly because I can't decide whether I should take Nick or Piper. I've been traveling around with Nick almost exclusively, but I also do like Piper a lot, and she seems like she might also have some interesting stuff to say on this quest. but Nick obviously has the most personal investment in it. my instinct is to take Nick but I'm waffling :P would you recommend him? also I keep getting distracted by settlement stuff - settlement building is one of those things that I know I'll really enjoy but also feels overwhelming for some reason. I think the limited amount of resources adds some pressure to get everything right the first time, plus there's the Too Many Options factor. I don't actually use the power armor very much. I don't like the HUD and also it falls into the category of Resources To Hoard and Never Use along with every chem in the game, lol. Marian just wanted to have it on hand Just In Case (mostly Just In Case she ends up having to fight the Brotherhood). she's actually kind of conflicted about the Brotherhood, because most of their immediate goals - get rid of these Super Mutants, clear the raiders out of that area - are right in line with what she wants, and she's ended up working with them on the ground from time to time when they coincidentally deploy a 'bird full of Knights near where she was exploring. personally speaking, she gets along with a lot of them! also, they offer a kind of order and stability that part of her has been craving ever since she woke up 200 years in the future. however, she knows what they want to accomplish here in the long term, and it is not going to be in the best interests of the people of the Commonwealth, the people she's somehow found herself responsible for. plus she's Not a fan of the military or anything that smells like it for Nate-related reasons. and their Elder is a big bag of dicks. and they're racist. her ultimate best case scenario would be to solidify the Minutemen as the governing force of the Commonwealth through trade and then allow the Brotherhood to open up an embassy or something in Diamond City or one of the Minutemen's settlements. she's hoping it won't come to all-out war. but she's gonna place some artillery as close as she can to the Prydwen, just in case.
also random headcanon: Travis Miles heard a recording of one of Three Dog's old broadcasts when he was a kid, and it changed his life forever
@vuatson hmm. I mean, I’m kinda always gonna be biased towards valentine, for most of these. Piper would be fine, but the companions tend to have disappointingly little to say about things around them. You’re gonna have a lot more quests to do with Valentine, so it might be good to set aside a few for Piper. That’s what I do with Hancock. Yeah, Darling likes Danse and his ground crew well enough (well she thinks Danse is a stick in the mud, but the kind that are fun to poke at). But the second she gets onto the Airship she’s like, holy shit these are a bunch of fascist assholes and I hate them. And fucking hell they’re grooming child soldiers. This isn’t about making sure raiders or supers doing have dangerous tech, this is about stockpiling supplies for exterminating ghouls and synths and all other undesirables. Like Marian, she desperately doesn’t want a war, cause the people who get hurt and killed in war are never the people who deserve it. But she wants them out of her ‘wealth and she wants Maxson and all his proctors dead.
hmm... I think I’ll grab Piper for a bit more sidequesting, then come back to Nick for the Railroad. maybe see if I can unlock Hancock along the way too. Marian actually doesn’t love Danse’s squad, though she doesn’t hate them either (and she wishes she could persuade the Scribe to talk to her about her doubts about the Brotherhood). Danse is nice enough, but uncomfortably fanatical, and she still doesn’t get why he sponsored her for Knighthood. and the other dude is 1) right to be suspicious of her loyalties and 2) an asshole. but whenever a random Vertibird squad happens to drop where she is, there’s a kind of easy camaraderie she never quite gets as the General of the Minutemen. I barely spent any time on the Prydwen - just did the first quest where you clear out that fort with the Behemoth - so I haven’t learned about any child soldier stuff yet. Marian’s gonna flip her lid if she finds out about that. her hackles did go all the way up at that one note from the quartermaster about their strategy of waiting until caravans come under attack, then swooping in to rescue them for better merchant prices. those are the Minutemen’s trade routes, gdi, she worked hard to set them up! and the bit about Maxson’s cultlike following back West is just creepy.
Sounds like a good plan! And Hancock's recruitment quest can be stupidly hard to find, it's listed under miscellaneous quests cause???? But look for Bobby No-Nose around Goodneighbor, and you'll get going in the right direction. What sort of relationship do Marian and Piper have? Cause while Darling likes her well enough, Piper wasn't the right sort of person to get past Darling's walls. So they're not really much beyond friendly acquaintances, with Piper utterly baffled as to why Darling enjoys spending any amount of time with Hancock. Darling also tends to be wary and mistrustful of people who idolize Before. She doesn't want to rain on anyone's parade, but it was not a good world and part of the reason she and Valentine are immediately click is cause he's one of the only people she's met who gets it. She doesn't have to try to awkwardly explain class warfare or concentration camps or corporate oligarchy. She wants that world to stay dead, and for this world to realize that it can be so much better.
(sorry for late response, I got distracted both by work and by... playing fallout 4 lol) so wait Bobby’s quest is how you get Hancock?? I’ve been ignoring that one for ages because it didn’t look interesting!! wtf game tell me these things >:V as for Piper, their relationship is sort of hard to pin down. for one thing, it doesn’t feel like I’ve earned the approval I’ve got from her - I’m at max level despite the relatively small amount of time I’ve spent with her compared to Nick, and it’s pretty much all from lockpicking. I wish she had a personal quest like Nick. it’s hard to get to know her when all she does is follow you around helping with your goals and not asking for anything in return except some parenting advice that one time. I’m trying to travel with her more so i can get a better feel for the specifics of their relationship. Marian’s got a complex relationship with the before times. when she first got out of the Vault, she was pretty shellshocked, and it took her a while to see the wasteland as anything other than a straight up hellscape with no redeeming qualities. not that she thinks the world was perfect back then, far from it, but she saw the new world as having lost everything good about the old one while keeping most of what was wrong with it. that’s a big part of her negative feelings about the BoS. they’ve preserved the US army’s rabidly patriotic arms-race ethos, the mentality that brought about the apocalypse in the first place. it seems to her that the fragments of humanity that were still organized and coherent enough to learn from their mistakes adamantly refused to do so. eventually though, she starts to see glimmers of hope. the Minutemen really help with that. first helping the settlers to build a new life right on top of the ruins of her own home, and then being asked to take responsibility for the needs of the whole militia and the ever-growing group of settlement citizens, both grounded her and helped her see the ways the apocalypse has brought out the best of humanity as well as the worst. and then meeting Nick helped her even more. he’s been through hell, even worse than she has, and he’s still one of the most kind and hopeful people she’s ever met. she still has a lot of nostalgia for her life before, but now the only thing making her wish to return to it is the fact that Nate and Shaun were there. she does indulge in that nostalgia a lot though. she loves meeting ghouls and robots who were alive back then - anytime she’s near Goodneighbor she’ll swing by to buy Kent Connolly a drink and reminisce about old Silver Shroud episodes. and she keeps any legible writing she can find from Before in a collection at her Diamond City house. she doesn’t want to go back to the way things were, but she does want to preserve what knowledge and artifacts she can from it. incidentally, Darling sounds awesome. have you written any fic or anything about her?
Yeah, I absolutely get everything Marian feels about Before and especially her frustration with how people don't seem to be learning, and I really do love the Minutemen. I wish the game reacted a little more to you doing things like building up the minutemen, with places getting safer and people getting kinder etc, but I can see how that would be a tall order in this kind of game. It's funny, Marian and Darling have quite a bit in common, and I feel like their interpretations on things have many similarities (loving the Minutemen, being frustrated by the BoS's rabid militarism), but they're reactions are pretty different. Darling's reaction to encountering fragments of the old world, writings, tapes, memories from ghouls and robots, isn't nostalgia, but a fierce protectiveness and a moral obligation to keep these fragile echoes alive. Her old house in Sanctuary Hills is slowly becoming something of an archive by late game, and she keeps a pretty thorough journal for when artifacts aren't enough to tell the full story. But probably the biggest thing is Darling has zero chill, and is stubborn and willful and god dammit if the world still hasn't learned its lesson after the bomb she will make it!! ...it's a good thing she has friends like Valentine and Hancock who have substantially more chill, otherwise she would have worked herself to death many times over by now. That workaholism is a mix her natural drive and work ethic and passion and a substantial amount of survivor's guilt. There's no reason she deserved to live over anyone else, and there's probably a ton of people who could have been better for the wasteland. Then lump on that enormous guilt that she prefers her life now, and it's not that she's grateful that the bombs dropped--she's absolutely not. But she'd never go back. I do in fact have a considerable amount of fic for her. Much of it is 1/2 to 3/4 finished, but i have most of my finished fic on AO3. If you're interested in reading anything, I'd be delighted! I think the only thing to steer clear of for now is the fic Lost at Sea, as it has Far Harbor spoilers. The others might have some minor or vague spoilers, but the main game doesn't really have much in the way of surprising plot twists... This is probably my favorite completed fic: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12975153/chapters/29662518 Also, cause I have no self control, have a pic of Darling: Spoiler: Mah Girl
