Fallout 4 EP27: Inventory Mismanagement

By Shamus Posted Friday Aug 5, 2016

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 205 comments


Link (YouTube)

I’ll talk about this whole Memory Den business when we get into it next week. Since we spent so much of this episode on inventory scrolling, let’s talk about that…

Rutskarn continues to theorize that inventory management is the next feature to get “streamlined” out of this genre / franchise. Given how important gathering & hoarding is to my enjoyment of this game, I find that really hard to imagine. Then again, when I heard about the 4-options-but-no-choices approach they’re using for dialog I thought that sounded pretty absurd as well. So I suppose they’re capable of anything. Here is how I imagine that conversation will go:

Bethesda Bob: So player feedback indicates people really hate how much time they spend scrolling through inventory lists, sorting items, and navigating nested menus to perform simple tasks. So you know what I think we should do for Fallout 5?

Bethesda Barney: Fix the well-documented and longstanding interface problems that have been frustrating our fans for literally decades? Maybe adjust our interface to be less of a gimmick and more of a system to facilitate play on modern HD displays?

Bob: I was thinking we could just get rid of it.

Why aren’t currently worn / favorited items listed together, at the top? Instead they are scattered around in alphabetical(?) order, which increases the odds you’ll accidentally sell, drop, or store something you’re currently using.

Even in the crafting screen, worn items are scattered around so you have to scroll up and down multiple times just to see what you’re wearing.

You can re-name stuff, which helps. You can name your armor “aaaLeft Arm” and “aaa Left Leg” to force it to appear at the top of the list. Well, some stuff. Other things can’t be re-named for some reason. Also, there’s a bug that’s been around since Skyrim that the name you enter is in ALL CAPS, but then it changes back to normal case after you’re done entering it.

Why are so few items visible on-screen? Why is this game STILL designed for 720p displays? Even consoles are HD now, and have been for years.

Related: Why is the crafting window so SHORT?! It doesn’t need to fit into the Pip-Boy area, so it can take up as much screen space as it needs. But instead it can show exactly SIX items out of the dozens you might be carrying.

Why is so much screen space wasted when looking at the pip-boy? Fine, I get you’re enamored of this stupid gimmick. But can’t you move the camera a little closer to the screen? There is NO REASON to waste HALF of the available screen space showing my character’s fingers working the controls.

Weight is such an important property of inventory. Often the player needs to drop some things to get under the encumbrance limit. Yet there’s no easy way for the player to answer the question, “What are the heaviest things I’m carrying right now?” They have to scroll through multiple lists of inventory: Clothing, Weapons, Junk, etc. You can’t sort any of these lists by weight. The only way to figure out what to drop is to scroll through all items in all lists. Otherwise you run the risk that you’ll drop a valuable weapon and then discover that you were carrying around a worthless bowling ball that was listed in the “junk” tab.

Adding to the list of crap you have to sort through is the fact that there are quest items you can’t drop, even after the related quest has been completed.

You don’t need to do what Josh does in this episode, which is grab ALL junk in order to do crafting. Any crafting table will draw resources from the shared inventory of the settlement. That’s actually a really nice feature, but the game could do a better job of explaining it.

There are tooltips that appear when you’re learning about inventory / crafting. But they appear at the same moment as the new screen being explained. These tooltips vanish on their own after an seemingly random interval. Sometimes they linger on-screen long after you walked away from THING, and sometimes they vanish just as you notice them. If you miss one, there’s no way to get it back. Other times you get a pop-up that must be dismissed. And the game seems to get confused if you’re moving fast and do more than one thing that prompts a tooltip. Whether information is presented in a can’t-miss popup or an ephemeral tooltip seems to be random, and I swear there have been times when I had both on-screen at once.

If you’re using (say) the 9mm pistol and you collect several more, the game gets confused if you sell the extras or mod the “one” you’re using. You can end up with your hotbar bindings being cleared, or linked to the old (pre-mod) versions of the weapon.

Anyway, that’s as many inventory problems as I could remember in five minutes. Let’s see how many you can come up with.

 


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205 thoughts on “Fallout 4 EP27: Inventory Mismanagement

  1. LotusGramarye says:

    Didn’t you know guys? Every soldier is trained in brain surgery as part of their basic training.

    1. Echo Tango says:

      Never know when a fellow combatant will get a hole blown in their head. Gotta know how to install a cybernetic core to keep them fighting until a real brain can be regrown!

  2. MichaelGC says:

    It’s pretty well-hidden, but you can sort the lists by weight (and value, damage output, etc.) by hitting ‘z’. Not sure what it is on a controller.

    Oh, and apparently you can use the Memory Den for real. If you go there without Nick and before you’ve confronted There-Are-Two-Gs-In-Kellogg, you get a freebie from Irma.* Which you can watch whilst humming showtunes…

    *I liked how Rutskarn’s comments on aspiring towards a natural-seeming movement and posture were immediately followed by Reginald smoothly rotating 90° around his major axis…

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      It's pretty well-hidden, but you can sort the lists by weight (and value, damage output, etc.) by hitting “˜z'.

      By hitting….Z?
      .
      .
      .
      .
      .

      1. baseless_research says:

        Ze weight is zoo much.

      2. It IS an underused key, since in Fallout 3/New Vegas it was used as “grab” and I can’t think of any other games that use it frequently.

    2. 4th Dimension says:

      It’s not even that well hidden, it’s right there at the bottom of the screen. It says in green text Z) Sort BUT it does not allow you to click on it so you have to use the keyboard button. Because apparently we are back in the days where mices where something you would not want on your table.

    3. Chris Davies says:

      What I really always wanted was a sort by newest first. I can’t remember how times I picked up an audio log, immediately forgot its name and had to search for ages through the useless misc item menu.

      1. OH GAWD audio logs are THE WORST in this game. 99% of them you can NEVER get rid of so the longer you play the longer and stupider and more annoying the list gets. And they NEVER are named anything that has anything to do with the DANG QUEST THEY ARE FOR.

        Dear Bethesda–those stupid logs are flavor only, they don’t actually contain anything you need to complete any quest in the game. SO MAKE THEM FRIGGIN GO AWAY AFTER I LISTEN TO THEM. Or have them be in the “DATA” category like they were in Fallout 3–neatly sorted into “listened to” and “not listened to”!!!!

        GAWD THEY ACTUALLY MADE IT WORSE IN FALLOUT 4.

        1. 4th Dimension says:

          While you can never sell them, I do think you can store most of them in containers in your base once their relevant quest is completed.

          1. I’ve stashed most of them in a footlocker at Home Plate. The only ones I’m still carrying around are for quests I haven’t started yet. :P

        2. Andy_Panthro says:

          The notes are often worse, because you end up with an inventory like:

          crumpled note
          dirty note
          ripped note
          torn note
          raiders note
          old note
          burnt note

          and then you have to look through them all because you have no idea which one you just picked up (and then it gives you no interesting information anyway).

          1. SPCTRE says:

            this is literally (yes, literally) the worst – it’s so insanely asinine that this problem persists for titles on end while it would be basically trivial to solve.

            just offload notes and audiologs into dedicated parts of the interface

        3. Tektotherriggen says:

          They could just assign a key to “play oldest unheard audio log”. Admittedly that’s quite a new idea, it’s only been around since System Shock 2.

          1. Hell, BioShock could have used that since that was “listen to last audio log picked up.”

            At the very, VERY least, Fallout 4 at least doesn’t have them as static objects you need to stand around to listen to.

    4. potatoejenkins says:

      Afair, you have to go to the Memory Den before ever learning of Nicks existense. Otherwise Irma will not let you use a pod.

      That means making a beeline from Concord to Goodneighbour, ignoring all quest hooks and fighting through one of the most dangerous areas in Boston to make use of a service unknown to the character/the player.

      P.S.: No value to weight sorting though.

    5. Disc says:

      I bee-lined for the place on my 2nd character just to check if you could do anything with the pods early on. All it amounts to is the Sole Survivor reliving the death of his/her SO and kidnapping of Shaun and coming out of the pod shellshocked like the trauma of the event gave them PTSD.

      Which could have had some potential, if handled well, but it’s just another thing never goes anywhere and might as well not have happened at all.

  3. baseless_research says:

    Ooh, time for a visit to lungfishopolis

    1. galacticplumber says:

      Ha! You wish this game was that well written, surreal, and captivating…

  4. IFS says:

    Bethesda’s failure to give the player any agency is a long standing problem in their games, starting I’d way with Oblivion’s main quest. In Oblivion you aren’t the main character of the story, that would be Martin. In FO3 you aren’t the main character of the story that would be your dad (until he stupidly kills himself and various other characters hand the role back and forth). And now in FO4 they came close by making the plot actually center on your character and their search for their son, but in the end you still don’t have any agency beyond being an errand boy. Its a step up from FO3 where you were alternately an errand boy or just following in the footsteps of the real main character for sure, but still feels insulting and condescending, like the dev doesn’t trust you enough to let you actually do anything that makes a difference.

    1. Viktor says:

      In TESIV, though, it was just a break from you being the “destined true hero of destiny”. You were still an active person, while Martin was basically a quest giver crossed with a quest item. The player was still the one doing all the important work, while the destined hero was in the background. It was a cool idea, and if the main quest were more engaging, I think it would have worked wonderfully.

      1. IFS says:

        Oh yeah Oblivion was perhaps the one time the player not being the main character worked, as it was clear up front that Martin was the guy who was going to save everything you were just making it possible.

        1. Plus, c’mon, it was Sean Bean’s voice. It almost made up for them making Patrick Stewart say “CLOSE SHUT THE GATES OF OBLIVION!!!”

          If they’d let you romance him, it would have made up for that 100%.

          1. potatoejenkins says:

            I still have a policy of not getting attached to characters played by/voiced by/having any kind of resemblance to Sean Bean.

            It’s not easy.

            1. djw says:

              Well, at least we knew exactly what was in store for him in the Fellowship of the Ring.

              However…

              I haven’t watched any of the Game of Thrones on TV, but I was quite surprised by Ned’s fate in the first book…

              1. Pretty much everyone was because of that little prick.

                Normally I’d use a kinder word, but it’s Joffrey. I’m trying not to use worse words. :|

              2. potatoejenkins says:

                I will always be surprised to see Mr. Bean not dying.

                It’s been a long time since I watched the show and it’s been even longer since I read the books. They are different, I like both.
                What worries me is the influence GoT seems to have on other writers. There is this weird trend of making stories dark, killing characters, painting everyone and everything “grey”, because it worked so well in GoT. I mean, that’s all GoT is about. And sex. It works for GoT, therefore it must work in other stories/media, too, right?

                Maybe I’m just imagining things.

                @Jennifer Snow
                Ayup, likewise. :D

                1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  Bad copy cats always work like that.Hey look,harry potter split its last book into two movies and made money,so if we do exactly that we too will make lots of money.Look,wow is making so much money,if we copy it verbatim we will take at least half of that.Minecraft is so easy,we should copy that,paranormal activity is so easy,lets copy that,…..

                2. Ninety-Three says:

                  TV’s Game of Thrones has plenty of copied DNA itself. While the books had more sex than most, the show dials it up to eleven as part of what is clearly some kind of HBO policy. Someone at that channel seems to have decided that sex sells, so every show they make has to have random, plot-irrelevant sex and nudity dropped into it.

            2. I’m not attached to the characters. I’m attached to the voice. :D

  5. Daemian Lucifer says:

    So,we want to confront the villain and get some info from him.How do we do this?By killing him,extracting his brain,putting it into a robot and then going inside the memories.And this is plan A?

    Man,I wish obsidian did this game,so that this would be a failsafe in the event that half a dozen simpler methods didnt work out because the player decided to shoot without uttering a word.

    1. IFS says:

      If Obsidian did this part there would probably also be science and/or medicine checks to improve the quality of information that you would get out of the brain, also low int dialogue options if you had looted the brain before knowing you would need it. Also more sidequests involving the memory den to begin with, maybe even one where you collect the brains of certain raiders you kill to track down a hidden treasure or something.

      1. Hector says:

        I can just see a low-Int character (as written by Obsidian) taking Kellog’s brain so he can be smart, too.

        1. James says:

          they could even add a option to take the implant and increase your int by like 3-4 but with the side effect of hearing Kelloggs thoughts and ideas on various NPCs or quests

        2. Sleeping Dragon says:

          Low int+cannibalism:

          -With all the cybernetic enhancements in Kellogg’s brain maybe we can recover some information even after his death. That was a really smart move.
          -Huh? (sound of chewing).

          1. That sounds more like whoever wrote the ending to The Pitt with the whole baby-eating option.

            You know, the only somewhat-competent writer Bethesda had during the entire development of Fallout 3.

          2. Coming_Second says:

            Ah, the Breakfast of Champions perk. Truly the work of people who want you to actually have fun with their game.

    2. MichaelGC says:

      Aye right – it’s almost as if they only included the failsafe! (I’d better emphasise “almost as if,” as I wouldn’t want to unjustly accuse anyone of having carefully thought things through.)

    3. MrGuy says:

      And the sad thing is, with better dialogue, you could have kept the design and had it make sense. All you have to do is make it NOT “Plan A.”

      Plan A should be “ask him to give us information about Shaun, and threaten him if we have to.” Make this clear through dialogue – “I’m not here for revenge,” “The past is the past,” “You were doing a job – I understand that. Just tell me where Shaun is and I won’t kill you for it.” Do everything you can in dialogue to have the player convey that he doesn’t want to kill Kellogg. Hey – you’re railroading me anyways. Why not railroad me somewhere sensible?

      That doesn’t mean Plan A has to work. You can still make me kill Kellogg. But make Kellogg start it. “Sorry – first rule of being a merc is not to talk about clients.” “I’ve heard about the trail of bodies you’ve been leaving to get here. I’m supposed to trust you to let me live?” “Do you have any idea what the people who hired me will do to me if I talk about them? There’s no way.” Eventually, at the end of the dialogue tree, “You just won’t take no for an answer, will you? Sorry it has to end this way” as Kellogg opens fire. It’s kill or be killed, and you kill him.

      After the battle, have a conversation with Nick. “I just killed our only lead. Any other ideas?” and have Nick suggest “He may be dead, but he can tell us something yet!” and have him explain the memory extraction plan.

      There. Same actions, same results, same crazy memory extraction scheme. Just less insulting. It’s really not hard.

      By the way, especially given that they planted a Fat Man right near Kellogg’s lair, how dumb is it to build a plot point around retrieving the (largely intact) brain of someone you might have reduced to slag with a nuclear weapon?

      1. Peter H. Coffin says:

        Argh. The Fat Man’s beginning to bother me. Weapon inflation.

        In FO3, there were like … two or something. And maybe 50 rounds in the whole game. You might never own one in an average playthrough.

        In FO:NV, there were a half dozen scattered around, and ammo much rarer than FO3. Still rare, but you’ll probably be able to use one a couple of times in a playthrough.

        In FO4, seemly any semi-successful bandit gang will have at least one, and Super Mutants carry the ammo around in their pockets. There’s HUNDREDS of the things, and I can only imagine that the next step is to start making some things IMMUNE to the darned things just so the player can’t solve ALL of their problems by just firing nukes at it.

        1. ehlijen says:

          Bethesda did put the design and production facility for the Fat man into this region (the fort the BoS of steel vertidrops you in), if that helps at all. So it’s presence and to some degree it’s spread had some method behind it.

          Whether they should have done that is of course a different question. After all, it’s the same place they invented power armour, and I’d be ready to bet we’ll see more such ‘this is where they invented fallouty thing X’ in future games.

        2. IFS says:

          If you played on Hardcore mode in NV you would pretty much never use the Fatman as its ammo weighed too much to be worth lugging around. Well you might lug it around for a bit to sell it, but it certainly wasn’t worth making a part of your arsenal.

          1. The Rocketeer says:

            Not a regular part of your arsenal. But if you’re making a trip specifically to assault something tough, e.g., Quarry Junction and the Deathclaw Promontory, faction HQ’s like McCarran or the Fort, or the assault on Hoover Dam, then it’s time to swallow the hit to your spare carrying capacity and take along the heavy launcher and its dense ammo.

            Especially if you had a hardcore character like one of mine, with Heavyweight and all three ranks of Demolition Expert.

            1. IFS says:

              Fair point, I know I had an Anti-materiel rifle I’d break out of storage when I was venturing out there. It’s ammo wasn’t quite as heavy as mininukes though.

              1. Brightroar says:

                Yeah, I solved all of my problems with Anti-Materiel rifle + explosive rounds, good times.

              2. Mini Nukes are 3 pounds/units each, while the .50 (B)MG rounds are 0.25lbs./units each. You can kill a lot more small stuff with a Mini Nuke, but if weight is a problem than the .50 BMG rounds are going to serve a lot better, especially when you also factor in weapon weight, which even with Heavyweight, the Fat Man is still 5 whatevers heavier than the AMR, with even more difference with comparable ammo amounts.

        3. Henson says:

          I must admit, I’ve played a lot of New Vegas, and collected a dozen or so mini nukes, but never found a single fat man. Bad luck?

          1. They’re hard to find in the world and extremely expensive at vendors when they’re there at all. If you’ve got the GRA DLC, the Gun Runners will have the unique version of Esther, but finding an actual Fat Man in New Vegas is rare at best.

        4. Syal says:

          Is it weapon inflation? I thought they just replaced the Rocket Launchers from the first games which every second Super Mutant would instantly gib you with.

        5. There were 9 Fat Mans in Fallout 3, which without repairing at an NPC might get you a fully-repaired Fat Man with one or two of them left for materials, along with the Experimental MIRV if you managed to find 5 ingame objects which are unmarked and not part of a major quest.

    4. I think it was less “Plan A” than “There Was No Plan”. Kind of like that horrible analogy Rutskarn made.

  6. Izicata says:

    The memories are encrypted, but only for one mind? If you have two minds accessing the memories, that somehow makes them not scrambled? I know this is technobabble, but this is not how encryption works.

    1. MrGuy says:

      Yeah. And all you really have to do is replace the term “encrypted” (scrambling a message algorithmically to protect its contents, e.g. with a cypher) with “encoded” (making a representation of something in one medium in another, like writing down sounds as marks on a piece of paper) here and it makes a lot more sense. Not perfect sense (the “two minds” thing is more than a bit weird), but better. It’s completely correct to say that memories are encoded in our brains as a pattern of connected neurons.

      I wonder if that’s literally the problem – someone who knows what the word “encoded” means wrote the scene. Then later an “editor” who doesn’t know what they’re talking about saw it and said “Encoded? You mean, like a coded message? That’s cool, but the word for using codes is ‘encrypted.’ Fixed that for you.”

      1. MichaelGC says:

        It’s rather more all-over-the-shop than that, I’m afraid. First they say that: “the mnemonic impressions are encoded.” There is a lock on the memories, apparently, and the encryption: “is probably meant to keep a single mind from accessing the data,” so they’ll try two. The first mind acts as ‘host’; the second mind is there to ‘drive’. If none of this is making any sense then you’re definitely understanding correctly.

        I think what they probably had in mind was something like adding another GPU onto your bitcoin mining rig, and they gussied that up with some vaguely ballpark-appropriate language in order to shove the plot forward to a point requiring the player to do something. (For a given value of ‘do something’, as we’ll see next episode…)

    2. Philadelphus says:

      Yyyeaahh, that bugged me a bit too. It’s a terrible encryption scheme too, since apparently all you need to crack it is a second living brain around. No guessing ridiculously long numbers or cracking passwords or anything that’s used in actual cryptography and would actually make it essentially impossible to break; you just need to find a second person willing to cooperate and bam, no more encryption. Plus, how on earth would the good doctor just know that anyway? She must’ve been reading the script just before your visit.

      Though it was kinda cool that the model shown seemed to be based on an actual human hippocampus, which actually is involved in memory formation. (Though something I only learned by reading that page is that humans actually have two hippocampi, one in each hemisphere of the brain, so it’s a little odd that you only get one.)

      1. IFS says:

        If I considered this a well written game I might make the excuse that the cybernetic implant may have taken the place of the second hippocampus, to help regulate and control Kellogg’s memories or something.

      2. It might have been interesting if the “encryption” wasn’t really there to prevent hypothetical strangers from accessing the data but basically there to keep Kellogg from independently re-writing his own instructions–he’d have to get someone to assist him with that.

        This would also make sense given the general contempt most of the Institute has for the people living in the Commonwealth.

  7. MichaelGC says:

    Oo – from the recent patchnotes:

    Jun and Marcy Long are no longer essential after completing “Sanctuary”

    Please use this information responsibly.

    1. baseless_research says:

      ….. I’ll be rà­ght back.

    2. Hector says:

      Am I the only person who actually liked Marcy?

      For some reason, I rather like NPC’s in games who don’t pretend to adore me, but send me on obnoxious quests (cough *Preston* cough). Marcy flat-out tells me that she loathes my very existence.That’s refreshingly direct and much appreciated!

      Plus, she actually has a personality. There’s maybe three characters in the game more memorable than her.

      1. MichaelGC says:

        If I’m honest it’s more the implementation that bothered me – it felt like Marcy kept constantly popping up to tell me she didn’t want to talk. Neither did I! Or that we weren’t friends. Which, fine, sure – I’m completely with you there, Marcy!: I also have things to do, and you’ve accurately characterised our relationship, or rather the complete absence of same. As indeed you did the last fifty times you interrupted me in order to bring this up…

        1. J Greely says:

          I had to move the weapons station in Sanctuary because whenever I used it, Marcy would stand in the doorway and repeat her lines over and over and over.

          -j

      2. Incunabulum says:

        Marcy is one of those characters that react completely appropriately – at the start.

        But then it gets on a person’s nerves later in a game like this when, weeks to months later, after you’ve *personally, by hand* done all the work to provide her with a safe place to live, food, water, all the good things, etc – and and she’s *still* acting not only like a bitch, but like you had no hand whatsoever in fixing things and are, in fact, just a leech on the community.

        Plus there’s the constant ‘what makes you think I want to talk to you’ lines – I didn’t want to talk to you either you counting pant, all I did was pass within 6 feet of you.

        Sturges even gets on my nerves at the start with his ‘are you willing to do any *work?’ line. Mutha . . . I’ve been doing *all* the work so far.

        1. Fists says:

          This.

          Marcy being distrustful and giving you lip is fine at the start of the game but it really just grates once you’re the lord of the high gods having built an entire city and killed enough people to populate two cities

        2. Henson says:

          “Do you ever get over to the Cloud District? Oh, what am I saying – of course you don’t.”

          1. He actually got killed by bandits (modded my game so there’s more of them in the world and many, MANY more types of them) right outside of Windhelm.

            Normally when that happens I crack open the console for a resurrect, but him? Hope he minds no burial whatsoever.

            1. Henson says:

              I love that the Interesting NPCs mod has a character who used to work for Nazeem, and he bitterly comments on how many goddamn times he had to hear that particular phrase.

              1. If I had that installed I’d craft a set of Ebony Armor just to reverse-pickpocket onto that person. :D

          2. Coming_Second says:

            It’s a line that gives me pause for its sheer ridiculousness to this day. Literally, every time I boot up Skyrim and hear it again, I stop and wonder. The way he says it, I imagine a grand, sprawling, Oriental-themed city, rigidly organised with stern-faced guards posted at ornamented toll gates to make sure beggars and foreigners do not pollute the wonders of its inner districts. I am standing in a primitive Viking town built mostly out of wattle and daub that I can walk from one end to the other in ten minutes. At no point in that journey do I think I am somewhere I shouldn’t be, or that I have transitioned at all. In fact, I can’t recall anyone else in Whiterun ever referring to a “Cloud District”. I think the guy might be genuinely disturbed.

      3. potatoejenkins says:

        I liked Knight Rhys from day one. He seemed to be the only sensible and sane BoS member who questions your motives (rightfully so) and is pissed you got promoted to the same rank as him after only one or two ops. I’ve come to call him Mr. Lambshade.

        The problem with Marcy is not Marcy. The problem is NPCs spouting lines whenever you walk past them. But that’s not something they can ‘fix’ since you also get quests and mapmarkers this way.

        And … am I the only one afraid of updating Bethesda games in general? New patches always scare the heck out of me …

    3. 4th Dimension says:

      Are those those assholes that you rescue with Preston? Huh I did not know they had anything to give me except few canned lines of dialogue. Serves me right for using Sanctuary basically only for farming while I do crafting and the rest in the Red Rocket. I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I slept in Sanctuary.

    4. galacticplumber says:

      As in it’s their responsibility to make use of it right now?

  8. Chaotic says:

    Why does this scientist have a vaguely european accent?

    Does europe exist? Do they do superior science there?

    Did she come here for a chance to show her superior training in a field that isn’t practiced anymore here? What exactly is the story that the game is trying to tell by making her have a vaguely european accent?

    Also wait, the Brotherhood of Steel has BLIMPS. Have they been to europe? What is in there, if anything? It seems to me like that would have been a significantly more interesting story.

    1. Incunabulum says:

      https://youtu.be/E3_b4JHHbDE?t=571

      She’s a businesswoman and its all about authenticity.

    2. GloatingSwine says:

      Apparently, and apparently transatlantic travel is easier than crossing from the west coast because Fallout 3 has the unspeakably Oirish Moriarty and this game has some professional Russians but Kellogg is the only person ever to make it from the NCR.

      (Bethesda might not have thought about this very hard).

      1. Philadelphus says:

        Though in a weird way, that’s actually kinda true to real life, where people were making trips across the Atlantic in sailing ships pretty reliably for hundreds of years before the same could be said of trans-continental voyages.

        Though that’s mostly before any sort of steam or internal-combustion engine, so I don’t know how true it remains in the Fallout universe where at least some people have those blimps and VTOLs.

        1. Incunabulum says:

          Yeah, but that was still between two fairly well developed parts of the world – while at the time E-W coast was one developed part of NA to what was basically wilderness. And the journey was taken – just usually it was done and intended to be a one-way from East to West.

          And at the start of American colonization that sailing trip it was still a long, arduous, dangerous journey that wasn’t done very often.

          Later, when the West Coast was more equally developed, people made the trip back and forth and the RR effectively merged the two halves.

          With the NCR being the advanced part of the country in the FO3+ time, you’d expect to see a lot more people from the West having made the trip East to make their fortune. Certainly more than a Russian who either crossed all of Eastern and Western Europe or Asia and North America (depending on which direction he went) and an ocean to end up in Boston.

          1. Philadelphus says:

            I’m thinking along the lines of “When were people able to reliably make the trip and come back, with a reasonable expectation of not dying?” People were traveling to and from the New World by ship within a few years of its discovery; Spain set up its first colonial city in 1496, a mere four years after Columbus’ voyage, and you don’t do that without a pretty good expectation of getting your money’s worth out of it, which necessitates people bringing stuff back.

            By contrast, land voyages back and forth across North America were not particularly common (as far as I know) until over three hundred years later, in the 1800’s. I don’t think you really start to see reliable back-and-forth trips until, as you pointed out, the trans-continental railroad in 1869 (which involves steam power, as I mentioned). It’s just a lot easier, in general, to make long trips with large groups of people over sea than over land.

            On the other hand, I’m not very familiar with Fallout lore, so it may be easier to make cross-continental trips in the Fallout universe (as dangerous and aggresive as the land fauna are, perhaps the ocean fauna are worse?), and there’s the whole inflated timeline thing too. And I agree, a Russian would be pretty out of place no matter which way they came from.

            1. GloatingSwine says:

              It would be considerably easier because the interstate network still exists even if it’s in disrepair, it’s not like the pioneer era where people were at best following a vaguely established wagon trail and otherwise crossing trackless wilderness.

              There’s a transportation network which at the very least has defined routes and regular shelter (truck stops and gas stations).

              1. Philadelphus says:

                Hmm, that’s true. That would help a bit.

                One of the big problems with making long journeys between developed areas prior to steam power/the internal combustion engine is provisions. With a sailing ship, you just stick all the provisions in the hold and they get carried along with you on the ship by wind-power””it’s free energy and you can carry a lot of goods because you don’t need to do anything other than load them in the hold.

                Traveling by land, you either need to carry it yourself, or have an animal do it (for which you need more provisions or places to graze…). You do have some ability to forage off the land, but that’s gonna slow down your travel and scales extremely poorly with increasing group size.

                Thinking about it in light of what you mentioned, I could definitely see some small groups making their way across the continent more easily than coming from Europe, since I neglected one key point: there likely aren’t that many sailing ships in working condition still around, nor people who know how to build them.

                (Wow, I just realized I just applied “But what do they eat?” to this problem, didn’t I? And then of course it makes sense, in this universe: the people coming cross-continent just scavenge the abundant stores of 200-year-old preserved food on their way. Problem solved!)

              2. That’s also where the Powder Gangers in New Vegas came from; they were basically chain gangs repairing the railways until the guards got lazy and then got dead.

          2. Actually, this is somewhat out of order. IIRC it was more like this:

            East Coast is developed.
            Jefferson becomes president and makes the Louisiana Purchase and funds the Lewis and Clark expedition. Slow dribbles of development head “west”–like, to Ohio.
            Buncha squabbles with Mexico.
            Civil War.
            More squabbles with Mexico until U.S. territory kinda looks roughly like it does today.
            Gov’t tries to get people to move west to settle the territory by offering them land.
            Lots of wagon trains etc.
            Gold discovered in California.
            Gold rush either via long arduous overland wagon train or sailing around the entirety of South America.
            Gov’t starts an almighty push for a transcontinental railroad (which results in a lot of shady dealings and economic disruptions among other things)
            Transcontinental railroad completed. Western seaboard begins to develop dramatically.
            Eventually Teddy Roosevelt comes along and there’s a Panama canal.

            1. djw says:

              Your timeline is a little bit off. The most significant squabble with Mexico the Mexican American War occurred before the Civil War. During (and a bit after) the Civil War the Mexican’s were busy fighting off an incursion of
              Monarchists from Europe
              . The USA was to busy fighting itself to help out, Monroe Doctrine or not. There may have been some squabbles about where exactly the boarder between US and Mexico is, but there were I think no major squabbles after the Mexican American War.

              The >California gold rush also started and finished before the Civil War.

              Construction on the transcontinental railroad was begun during the Civil War, but not completed until afterwords.

              1. djw says:

                Ugh, apparently if you screw up the html tags in your original comment you cannot fix them in edit. OR I just don’t know how to do that… the links simply disappear when I put them back in with the edit feature.

    3. 4th Dimension says:

      Better yet. WHERE IN THE FUCK did she find funding to come up with this kind of high level tech. I don’t think she is an Institute exile so she did not come from it. And that place does not look like an ancient installation since it’s in the middle of the city and is unique. If it predated the was you would think parlous such as that would be mighty popular. The more I think about it the more my head hurts.

      1. She works with the Railroad creating new memories for the synths they “rescue”, and also helping their undercover agents adopt new identities. Of course, this turns into “so where does the RAILROAD get its funding” but they do have a robot that predicts the future so maybe they just play the stock exchange or something.

        1. djw says:

          It also gets to my pet peeve, which is WHY does anybody think that replacing a person (or synths) memories with different memories is any different from murdering the original and replacing it with somebody else?

          1. GloatingSwine says:

            Because they did it in that one sidequest in Fallout 3 where you didn’t think very hard about it because it was a sidequest.

            But yeah, there’s no real explanation why they do the memory wipe thing, other than maybe it’s shortcut way for the synth to be able to fit in, because the one you escort in the RR missions is a hopeless ingenu who would be trivial to locate and retrieve because he can’t cope with life outside.

          2. Well, I’d ASSUME that they just gave them some new memories that’d make it easier for them to fit in with their new life, not completely delete their old personality.

            And people who have real-life amnesia generally don’t turn into a completely different person, either.

            There is actually a procedure by which people can “edit” bad memories to get rid of fear responses–all you have to do is take an adrenaline-blocking drug called propanolol. It prevents the memory from being “attached” to the fear response.

            http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/a-drug-to-cure-fear.html?_r=0

            So, no, changes to memories are not–not remotely–equivalent to killing somebody and replacing them with a new person. This is actually not how human memory works–you edit your memories all. the. time., in fact. When you remember something, you don’t remember the event itself–you remember the last time you remembered it. Individual memories aren’t single units of “brain storage” either, they are a composition of elements that are “reconstructed” anew every time the memory is accessed.

            Much of what happens to us is simply not interesting enough to get stored in the first place (although there are wild statistical outliers, of course).

            1. potatoejenkins says:

              Not saying I completely disagree with you, but: Would you still be the same person if you no longer think you are human?

              Is the synth whos been given the memories of beeing born a human still the same person just with a different identifier?

              Will their interactions with the world and future decisions they make be based on their personality or their memories? Do their, our, memories not define our personality?

              The RR does not just erase/replace limited parts of these synths memories. They wipe everything and replace it with something new. Like Father does in the end with the portable weapon mod dispenser.

              Edit: H2-22, the synth the player “saves” with the RR, will no longer have memories of beeing a synth. He will think he is a human and not remember the player or any other real interaction with anyone before the memory wipe. Amari/Desdemona act like that is normal procedure. Other quests (Human Error, the first Institute quest with X6-88) underline that.

              I can relate to Rutskarns feelings about the Idiot Savant perk. I get pretty much the same feeling when I remember the Fallout 4 Railroad is most likely named after/ supposed to be an ingame equivalent of the American Underground Railroad. Because those guys freed slaves, too. That’s pretty much the same, right?

              Edit²: In all fairness, H2-22 records a holotape for the player to tell them not to be sad about his memory wipe and that he will no longer be afraid after it. He will no longer be H2-22, but Bethesda wants to make sure you do not feel bad about/ think not too much about it.

              1. djw says:

                The connection between the pre-civil war underground railroad and the RR in Fallout 4 is reasonable though. Consider, the people who NAMED the railroad the railroad certainly knew about the history of the underground railroad in the Civil War. If you really believe that you are saving synths from slavery then it is the most obvious name to pick.

                Note that I’m not endorsing their view here, I’m just saying that it is far and away the most logical name for somebody in that organization to pick, given their belief in the organization’s goals.

                If the institute named them then they would be the Ludite Railroad.

              2. potatoejenkins says:

                @djw

                The connection between the pre-civil war underground railroad and the RR in Fallout 4 is reasonable though. Consider, the people who NAMED the railroad the railroad certainly knew about the history of the underground railroad in the Civil War. If you really believe that you are saving synths from slavery then it is the most obvious name to pick.

                (…)

                You are right, of course. It makes sense and it gets the idea behind the Fallout RR and their original ideoligy across. I should stop overthinking this.

                If you deleted a humans memories then there would probably be a lot of personality traits in common between the old person and the “new” person, because the “new” person is still using the same wetware.

                (…)

                Furthermore, its really annoying that you don't ever get to say this to any of the knuckleheads that run the railroad. I am half way on board with the idea that saving synths is a good idea… but if your just going to mindwipe them its a complete waste of effort, IMO, and is not really moral either.

                The whole mindwiping issues and morality aside: How does this help synths in the long run? How does turning synth into synth believing they are human help them find a place in society? How can people learn to accept synth when they never get to know one?

                Sure, it may happen by accident since a synths “cover” will inevitably fail, but what kind of reaction does such a involuntary reveal provoke? How does the synth cope with that kind of reveal (M7-97 is not happy for many reasons.)? They will not remember if the mindwipe was voluntarily or not and the RR is written like they not bother thinking about those kind of repercussions because “FREEDOM!!”.

                Oh dear, all those wonderful questions and they did not even bother to lambshade this stuff ingame. You can not only not ask questions, synth are a non-topic*. Despite everyone crying “Synth!” from the rooftops. I know it’s a post apocalyptic FPS, I didn’t expect a cyberpunk RPG, it’s just ……… frustrating how unfinished every aspect of the story is.

                (*I just remembered: You can ask Glory of all people! And she says: “As much as she (Desdemona) wants it to be so, synths are not human.” It’s very hidden though. I think one needs a lot of charisma and has to ask her questions the moment the player joins the RR.)

                It’s like they put most of the effort into their beloved Brotherhood of Steel, had to make something up for the other factions and then ran out of time. After, what was it, seven years?

                Not to mention my personal pet-peeve in fiction in general: If it’s a person/If it’s people, it must be human. … sometimes I miss Mass Effect.

                Sunshine wrote:

                You can tell the leader of the Synth refuge in the Far Harbor DLC that you're with the Railroad, and he says that it's a good effort but he object to their turning them into different people.

                Mh, spoilers (for a DLC thats been out for ages). I don’t mind having read this one though. More motivation to play the DLC. Also: HA!

                Edit: Apparently I’m too stupid to reply to the right comment. I’m sorry.

            2. djw says:

              If you deleted a humans memories then there would probably be a lot of personality traits in common between the old person and the “new” person, because the “new” person is still using the same wetware.

              The issue of what happens with synths depends somewhat on just how their memories and minds are constructed. If their personality is software running on more or less identical hardware platforms then wiping them is EXACTLY like killing them.

              Even if they are closer to human than that (each with a unique cluster of neuron like connections in their mind matter) then deleting memories will still change them substantially. I really don’t see the point.

              1. djw says:

                Furthermore, its really annoying that you don’t ever get to say this to any of the knuckleheads that run the railroad. I am half way on board with the idea that saving synths is a good idea… but if your just going to mindwipe them its a complete waste of effort, IMO, and is not really moral either.

                1. Sunshine says:

                  You can tell the leader of the Synth refuge in the Far Harbor DLC that you’re with the Railroad, and he says that it’s a good effort but he object to their turning them into different people.

                  1. djw says:

                    Good for them! I haven’t played the DLC yet though.

                2. potatoejenkins says:

                  Don’t forget: You are either with the RR and for saving synths or you are against the RR and against freedom for synths.

                  Those are the two options the game expects you to choose and the only two outcomes it reacts to accordingly.

                  1. djw says:

                    There is not really enough information provided to make an informed choice here, which is really irritating.

                    Based on wiki’s and past experience, I am for ballistic weave, and thus join the railroad…

                    1. potatoejenkins says:

                      Excellent reasoning. I approve.

              2. It’s also possible to radically change a human’s personality WITHOUT touching their memories, oddly enough. Happens sometimes with various kinds of brain damage–depressed people suddenly become upbeat, etc. Although the other way around is far more common.

                1. Philadelphus says:

                  Weirdly, some heart transplant patients are also reported to undergo personality shifts of various degrees.

                  1. Increased blood flow efficiency can have a lot of effects on your brain.

        2. How exactly would there BE a stock exchange? I didn’t think there were enough companies around (canonically; there’s a mod for New Vegas that adds one) for there to be any sort of stock around? :P

          1. That was an extremely dry, unfunny joke.

            1. Although I could probably make a killing in chipped coffee cup futures.

              1. Sunshine says:

                There’s always a buyer in Muggy Holdings, Inc.

                1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  For the few people who dont get that,this is why old world blues is awesome:

                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TfZEwvTma0

    4. Writiosity says:

      For those wondering: Europe is a wasteland. Like… properly dead. The European Commonwealth was destroyed before the Great War even happened, largely because they went to war with the Middle East over control of the last oil resources. They destroyed each other in the process, and that led to greater tensions elsewhere (US/China/Russia).

      The Resource Wars began in April 2052, the UN collapsed a few months later, everything went totally to shit from there, culminating in the Great War in 2077. The European-Middle-Eastern conflict ended in 2060 when the oil ran out and neither side had anything left to fight over. Europe devolved into mostly destroyed squabbling nation-states and most likely have at most a rudimentary standard of living 200 years on heh.

      So no, Europe probably doesn’t do better science, given it’s likely even more of a smoking crater than the US, even 200 years later :)

      Also, something Bethesda seems to have completely forgotten and/or overlooked (my money’s on the latter since they only seem to care about the nuclear side of the apocalypse) is that America was being utterly decimated by The New Plague before the Great War happened, that’s why FEV was even developed, it was originally the Pan-Immunity Virion Project, designed to deal with the Plague.

      “In 2055, the West Tek Research Facility started working on a new virus to kill the New Plague.[1] Despite their efforts, they were unable to find the cure and the plague continued to spread in the 2060s, fueling national paranoia. The government was using the Plague as an excuse to register civilians, claiming a symptom of the plague was “socialist thoughts” and advocating isolation: people should stay indoors, read books and avoid “Ice cream socials”. Furthermore, people were told that if they believed they were infected, they were to contact a disease control center, such as the disaster relief outpost in Point Lookout, for isolation immediately.[3]”

      And yet Bethesda shows stuff like Pre-war Sanctuary Hills, the speakeasy in Concord, and manifold other places that were still thriving and where people were associating directly rather than keeping to themselves (not to mention all the air traffic they think would still be flying in such a situation). Because Bethesda actively hates the Fallout lore at this point, they clearly believe it just gets in the way of their environmental storytelling shtick :/

      1. Philadelphus says:

        I was wondering, so thanks for the info. In that case it sounds like it would be easier to travel cross-continent than trans-Atlantic.

        1. Writiosity says:

          Yeah, because at the end of the day all you need to cross America is your feet (and guns, water, food, medicine… etc.). Crossing an ocean is super difficult if you don’t have modern technology and, more importantly, the oil needed to run it (which is why the Vertibirds don’t make sense… quite apart from the fact they were never even built or put into service until AFTER the Great War began).

          1. Sunshine says:

            I always figured they were micro-fusion powered, like the cars and everything else.

            1. Writiosity says:

              Doubtful. Microfusion was a late development, far too late to be rolled out widely or prevent the war. Which is something else Beth consistently gets wrong. The development of fusion tech happened largely as a result of power armour research… which itself only happened because of the resource wars… which happened because the natural resources ran out.

          2. Philadelphus says:

            Crossing an ocean is super difficult if you don't have modern technology and, more importantly, the oil needed to run it

            I feel like we must have different definitions of “super difficult” then, because people have been doing that for hundreds of years now, well before the advent of modern technology. I’m not saying it was necessarily easy (scurvy, inconsistent winds, wrecks, pirates, etc. were all possibilities), but starting in the 1500’s and increasingly afterwards the volume of shipping traveling between the New and Old Worlds was not negligible.

            (Though I fully agree about the Vertibirds not making sense.)

  9. Spojaz says:

    I feel like the memory den stuff would have made much more thematic sense with a mind-wiped Kellogg as the player character, rather than as some guy you either talked to for a minute then shot, or nuked without speaking to.

    You would get to explore your own memories (which is what the memory den is FOR), digging into the past you can’t remember, finding out about your time with your son “they even stole our time together!”, then transitioning from finding out about your past to finding Shawn. There could have even worked in a possible “am I a synth?” drama into the late game too.

    But then marketing wanted a idyllic start with the drama of nuclear war, the fanboys wanted a clean slate character, and the mirror scene with your spouse tested well in target demographics. With that the story turned to a garbage fire trying to reconcile what was already written animated and voiced with the new protagonist.

    1. MrGuy says:

      I want this as a mod so bad.

      I also want “take out the current main plot” as a mod so bad.

      1. GloatingSwine says:

        That’s easy. Just never build the relay and attribute the occasional cries of SHAUUUN! to tourettes.

    2. 4th Dimension says:

      Idyilic start can even work with the synth backstory. You are basically like Valentine. A synth who got the prewar memories of a frozen Vaulter. The institute found the Vault and recorded his memories and implanted them into you. You can even tie Shaun in by later explaining the original died during dethawing and they wanted Shaun to be raised by his dad or something. Then the plan falls through and you end up dumped in a vault with only the memories of being frozen before the war. You find your dead “wife’s” corpse but Shaun is missing so you set off after him.
      The memory den could be about unlocking your blocked institute memories with Valentine. You could even add some sort of technobable about how while your memories were deleted there are remains in both of you and by putting them together you could break the locks.
      Plus it would give you a stake into the Railroad subplot.

      Now this lacks some things but this is something I made on the fly. They have the memory reading and transplantation tehch in universe. They have robots that are indistinguishably from flesh people that might even think they are flesh people. They can do whatever the FUCK they wanted and they chose this dumpsterfire.

      1. Incunabulum says:

        You could even go full Blade Runner – there was no Nora/Nate. Your memories are completely artificial because the Institute thought that would help maintain control over the synths. SHAWN! isn’t your son, he’s just had himself put in that position in your memories to better control you.

        1. Sunshine says:

          I particularly like this idea.

      2. potatoejenkins says:

        They have the memory reading and transplantation tehch in universe. They have robots that are indistinguishably from flesh people that might even think they are flesh people. They can do whatever the FUCK they wanted and they chose this dumpsterfire.

        I always thought they were making synth/ testing memory transplantation to transfer their greatest minds into super resiliant, quasi immortal synth bodies. Mankind redefined etc.

        Nah.

        1. I don’t really see this as any kind of a positive for the person getting copied. It’d be like “hey, we just gave all your hard work/experience/lifetime of learning for free to this completely different person who ALSO got a superhuman body!”

          My response would probably be less “Sweet! Imma be immortal even though I, personally, will actually die!” and more “FUCK THAT GUY. FUCKING FREELOADER.”

          Plus I’m pretty sure anybody suddenly having my memories dumped on them would be all “WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?!? WHAT DID I EVER DO TO YOU?!?!”

          I just don’t see any upside to this sort of procedure for EITHER participant.

          1. Sunshine says:

            Much like (spoiler) in SOMA.

            That would work for the story if you reached the Institute and discovered that Father was actually the real you, making a backup because they’re dying. (It does ask why you were just left to figure out a hostile wasteland by yourself, but no more that already.)

          2. potatoejenkins says:

            I just don't see any upside to this sort of procedure for EITHER participant.

            Well. It’s the Institute. No upsides attached.

            And yeah, I was thinking about SOMA, too. How it works wouldn’t have been know by the public. For most it would’ve been an offer for immortality. In reality the donor brain would’ve been copied into the synth (who have no rights anyway) and the original donor would’ve been disposed of.

  10. Raygereio says:

    Chris mentioned items being in lists as one of the inventory’s bad points.
    I’m really curious what Chris – or anyone else – thinks would be a better layout for the inventory GUI. Lists may not look pretty, but they have usability benefits. They allow you to scroll through everything and sort stuff.
    Any other system that I can think of would not be as user friendly. Replacing item’s names with icons gets in the way of quickly trying to find something. And inventory tetris only works with a very limited inventory size.

    Why is the crafting window so SHORT?! It doesn't need to fit into the Pip-Boy area, so it can take up as much screen space as it needs. But instead it can show exactly SIX items out of the dozens you might be carrying.

    It couldn’t be larger, because they needed a giant display of the selected item.
    I think, just like with Skyrim, all of FO4’s GUI problems can be summed up as “form over function”. Everything was designed to look kinda pretty and usability was at best a secondary concern.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      I'm really curious what Chris ““ or anyone else ““ thinks would be a better layout for the inventory GUI.

      Pretty much every other rpg that has your inventory on one side of the screen with all the equipped items and stats on the other,so that you can quickly compare the two.

      They allow you to scroll through everything and sort stuff.

      So do the graphical inventories.The sorting isnt dependent on how you represent the inventory,with lists or with icons,but in how good you code it in.For example,morrowind had graphical representations,and while it was superior to this mess,it still wasnt very good compared to some other games,like neverwinter nights(which had multiple tabs you could sort any way you wanted).

      1. Raygereio says:

        Pretty much every other rpg that has your inventory on one side of the screen with all the equipped items and stats on the other,so that you can quickly compare the two.

        That’s a presentation issue. I’m talking way more basic:
        A list of item names.
        A list of icons.
        A grid in which icons of varying sizes are placed.
        Etc. The core method of displaying the contents of your inventory.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          When people complain about lists in bethesda games,they refer to lists of bulky names like we see here.

        2. Syal says:

          Chris did specify crappy lists. Defaulting to purely alphabetical sorting is ridiculous, I can’t think of any reason you would ever want that, especially when they’re putting proper names before descriptions. Pistols are under P, but you won’t find Greg’s Pistol there. Lists live and die by their sorting.

          I can’t think of a game inventory that was really convenient (my general solution to inventory management is keeping inventories manageably small), but I’d like to see concurrent lists; pull up the weapon tab and you get six lists, one for highest damage per shot, one for bullets held, one for damage per second, one for unique properties, and they’ve all got all the same weapons in them. You can scroll through one if you’re looking for a particular trait, or you can glance across the lists and see “Oh, the Particle Accelerator of Retaliatory Smacktalk is in the top three of all these lists, I’ll go with that one.” And then maybe you can shift the lists around so the front one is the one that shows up under any timecrunch conditions. Excel spreadsheets, is what I’m saying.

          Otherwise, Final Fantasy’s “name with icon for item type” works ok, as long as you can sort by icon.

      2. SyrusRayne says:

        As someone who has played the hell out of Neverwinter Nights, I would not describe its inventory system as good. Even calling it bad does a disservice to the bad inventories out there just trying to scrape by.

        1. It was better than Arx Fatalis’ inventory system, which while it was small was a PITA version of the Diablo-standard inventory.

          That being said though, I think Borderlands 2’s shifted design was pretty good; it showed you what went up and down compared to what weapon you currently had equipped along with a button to push to compare it to other inventory items/other equipped weapons, had a little symbol in the item card to show what weapon it was, and showed a number of stats on the weapon based on the various parts it had.

          It’s a lot better than what was in Borderlands 1, without any doubt.

    2. Echo Tango says:

      I think, just like with Skyrim, all of FO4's GUI problems can be summed up as “form over function”.

      Even with this presumed philosophy, there’s no excuse for how much space is wasted. Take for example, the screen when Josh is transferring stuff to his workbench in the first minute of footage. That’s a tonne of wasted space, completely outside both of the lists AND outside of the pretty little image in the middle! :S

    3. Incunabulum says:

      I’m thinking a *horizontally* scrolling list that is only 2 items tall – that way you can’t use the mouse wheel and the thumbsticks have an advantage. All items are displayed as a small card that expands when you mouse over it. Ensure there’s some jiggle to the card for a second or two when it does that. Then have your character in view and blocking at least 1/4 of the screen like this is some cool VR display that is showing your inventory in the game world.

      Have all this at a slight angle so that nothing is exactly horizontal so that mouse-drag won’t work.

      And when you leave the menu, make sure the camera moves and you character move so that you’re disoriented and facing a different direction than when you opened the menu.

      Fething Warframe man.

      1. Echo Tango says:

        Now you’ve gone and given them more horrible ideas to incorporate… ^^;

    4. Writiosity says:

      For some reason I can’t seem to link a page on Nexus and my comments are being sent to the abyss :/

      Anyway, since I can’t link the damn page, look up SkyUI on Nexus and check the screenshots. That’s basically how a PC UI should look, but Beth can’t be bothered actually giving PC users an appropriate interface, easier to just hamstring us with console limitations.

      1. Incunabulum says:

        SkyUI is actually a horrible PC interface – its just orders of magnitude better than the vanilla one.

        Not their fault, there’s only so much you can do without tearing the executable apart, and it adds a lot of functionality (like a value/weight sort – which, again, FO4 fails to provide natively and had to be modded in) but its still built on a gamepad driven base.

        1. Writiosity says:

          That’s my point. The actual devs DO have access to the core engine and are paid to make a good UI for their game. They can’t be bothered.

    5. Syal says:

      I'm really curious what Chris ““ or anyone else ““ thinks would be a better layout for the inventory GUI.

      The solution is bags. Put bags in the inventory list, and when you open it it’s a new inventory list, and then you can put another bag in the bag with another inventory list, and then everything is perfectly easy to find.

      1. swenson says:

        It’s the perfect solution, until randomly one day you can’t equip armor anymore.

        1. Syal says:

          Easily solved by putting the armor in a bag and then wearing the bag.

  11. SlothfulCobra says:

    It feels a lot like you guys are much more down on this game than you were on Fallout 3, which is weird. By all rights, this is a better game. The combat is more fun, the people look way better, the world looks way better, there’s at least the pretense towards worldbuilding and telling a story.

    Are you just tiring of Bethesda, or has the world around Bethesda moved on faster than they have to make this less interesting than FO3?

    1. Raygereio says:

      there's at least the pretense towards worldbuilding and telling a story.

      The problem isn’t that they try to tell a story. It’s the method of storytelling and the quality of the story that’s the problem.

      But yeah: This LP has been very negative in tone so far, and I doubt that’s going to change any time soon.

    2. Incunabulum says:

      I think its a matter of focus.

      Yes, this is a better *game* than FO3, but the story and the characters, and all the stuff *around the game* are, overall, worse.

      And for this group of critics those things have more weight than how tight the shooting mechanics are.

      1. Hector says:

        Also, for a competent studio, shooting mechanics should be a solved problem. They were a solved problem a decade ago, in games built around those mechanics.

        The stuff that Bethesda gets hilariously wrong is everything else about the game as an RPG – to the point where it almost seems like they just don’t want to make them anymore. And quite possibly, they won’t in the future. They seem to be almost ashamed of RPG mechanics and actively sneering at the idea of playing a role, or even building a character except as a side gimmick.

    3. Shamus says:

      I can’t speak for the others, but for me it’s just a matter of doing this job for a long time. I’m a lot better at zeroing in on problems and dissecting them than I was in 2008. I spend more time thinking about why a game isn’t working for me, which means I find more problems and things to talk about. Back in 2009, I had a lot more instances of, “There’s something about this that doesn’t work for me but I don’t know what it is so I won’t say anything.”

      Additionally, I think I’m a little more frustrated this time around. Bethesda has had several years to learn from their mistakes and make something better, and it’s clear there are some areas where they will never improve. It’s the difference between someone who is terrible at their job because it’s their first day, and someone who’s been at the job for years and is still terrible at it.

      1. Tizzy says:

        Novelty must be a factor. One cannot overstate how new FO3 was. It was a new take on the franchise, new mechanics, there was a lot to talk about. All these innovations (for good or bad) are now taken for granted.

        And SlothfulCobra mentions that the game looks and plays better. Well I certainly can’t tell from watching the LP, so I imagine the non-playing majority of the crew is in the same situation (even worse off in terms of graphical quality). So even though they have experienced the increase in quality of gameplay and graphics, it is not something that will naturally come up in the conversation. The bad story and bad interface, on the other hand, …

        1. Raygereio says:

          And SlothfulCobra mentions that the game looks and plays better. Well I certainly can't tell from watching the LP

          Come on, FO4 may not be a graphical masterpiece that melts your GPU. But it is a decent looking game and certainly miles ahead of FO3. If anything Bethesda’s art department deserve a pat on the head for figuring out that they can use more then one colour.
          It’s something Shamus & Co even praised several times so far.

          As for the improvement in the gameplay: Gunplay has gotten a ton better. Off course, we’re not really going to see much of that improvement because Josh is swinging a sword around and melee hasn’t really changed at all.

          1. In retrospect, the movement’s a bit more floaty in 4, thought that might just be due to graphics shifts causing Fallout 3 to run better on my laptop.

      2. Writiosity says:

        Especially so when they had a master class in how to do it from Obsidian, yet took virtually none of the advancements from New Vegas forward into their own. Hell, I’d say they actively looked avoided it, going by how empty 4 feels in comparison (I could list things for hours, but I doubt I need to).

        1. My experience was that they didn’t just try to avoid it, they actively said “screw that stuff that actually makes good RPGs” and designed in the exact opposite direction.

      3. evileeyore says:

        So Bethesda has promoted to their level of incompetence.

    4. MichaelGC says:

      Might be a bit of a sidenote despite the comparison, but I don’t reckon the Fallout 3 season was vastly more positive! It’s actually described as their most: “bile-filled series, where we heap shame and vitriol on a beloved and award-winning game,” although I’m not sure when that description was written.

      “Buckle up. The next several episodes are going to be rough,” says Shamus at one stage! So, there might perhaps be less of a delta than you’re remembering.

      1. IFS says:

        Honestly FO3 and Bioshock feel like the most bile filled seasons to me, ME3 was more angry resignation and Alan Wake was more boredom.

    5. Wide And Nerdy® says:

      I’m with you. But its because I played FNV first which quickly became one of my all time favorite games period. Then I played FO3 which was terrible and became the first Bethesda game where I just up and quit before doing a complete pass of the content (did the main quest plus some of the DLC)

      So FO4 for me is comfortable. Its a Skyrim caliber Fallout. Its easier to ignore the suck and enjoy the good for a while (partly by just avoiding the suck).

  12. Grudgeal says:

    Once again, the drama of the character’s voiced discussion with Valentine is undercut by Reginald looking like a hobo who’s just downed his fifth bottle of snake squeezins, strapped ten pounds of scrap metal to his chest for no apparent reason, and is about to go on a tirade on how lawn gnomes are behind the soil irradiation in the commonwealth. It really is too bad you’ve got no real option to act halfway as crazy as you look. I mean, story-wise.

  13. Tizzy says:

    Goodness is this plot shitty! I haven’t played the game, and I’m barely paying attention, but seriously, is this shit the best they could come up with? Some faction which magically cannot be located by anyone ever, so that the only way to find them is by taking a stroll in somebody’s brain?

    What a load of crap!

    1. guy says:

      There is a valid reason for why it can’t be found; their base is entirely sealed and has no way in or out except teleportation. Though, uh, apparently their chosen arrival point is directly above their buried base [i]for no reason[/i]. There is specifically no reason they couldn’t put it halfway across the map at the airport.

      1. Writiosity says:

        Entirely sealed except for the sewage tunnel basically anyone with power armour and decent weapons could easily storm.

        1. MichaelGC says:

          Ah good, I’m glad there’s an actual entrance somewhere. Everyone (in the game) seems to go straight from ‘they use teleportation’ to ‘there must be no physical way in at allz!!!1!1’.

          Right, yes, because there’s no conceivable reason why they might have more than one way to get in or out. Just look at the starship Enterprise! Totally & utterly doorless…

  14. Destrustor says:

    I still think the Morrowind inventory system was the best of the series so far, and all the ones I’ve played were played on console.

    Like, I don’t even get why it’d be considered preferable to have a list; an item’s name is a slight bit more taxing to remember at a glance than its general category. If you’re looking for that “Hargner’s vexation shield” you just picked up, being presented with a nice clean grid in which you can immediately locate all your shields at a glance seems a lot more practical than having to scroll to the “H” section of your boring listventory. Not to mention that if it’s been a while, you might have forgotten the exact spelling of “hargner” and waste your time looking in the “a” section for no good reason.

    Also, in a list you kind of have to go through everything to get where you need to go; in the grid you could just beeline straight for what you wanted.

    I’ve been a console player all my life and I still think the list is inferior in every way.

    1. 4th Dimension says:

      The main problem with grids is that the only information that they convey is the icon any MAYBE the name of the object. On the other hand if you want at a clance to know more table like lists are much better. Also while grids can stack more items in the same amount of space given the amount of things the normal player lugs around they are not invunerable to having to use scrolling.
      The main problem is that Bethesda keeps using the worst of both worlds. They use EXTRA large font for the list so it can be read on a TV and then they limit the list to a SMALL area of the screen further limiting the space and the number of times that you can see at the same time AND they don’t show any other information (DMG, WT, VAL etc) apart from the name unless you select the item.

      1. Morrowind was also the last PC exclusive they made–everything since then has been geared toward using a console controller instead of a mouse/keyboard, and boy does it ever show. :P

        And it’s not even a very good design for a console controller, either.

        1. Andy_Panthro says:

          Morrowind was on the XBox too! Slightly different interface though, but they managed to make it work (I assume, I played the PC version).

          1. I played a little of it (that’s what got me to get it on PC) on Xbox and iirc it was about the same.

            This was something like 13 years ago though, and that’s literally half my lifetime so don’t be surprised if I’m wrong.

          2. Huh, I never realized Morrowind was on XBox. I suppose you could KINDA classify it as a “port”, but maybe not really. It was the first ES game I played that didn’t require 3 hands.

            Although mostly what I remember about the Morrowind interface was that my map broke immediately upon installation and the map terrain never lined up with the actual overworld. I’ll leave it to you to imagine just how much fun I had trying to locate the goddamn dungeon entrances with a completely nonfunctional map.

            Many people complained about the quest markers in Oblivion as “dumbing down”. For me it was more like ZOMG THEY FIGURED OUT HOW TO DO GAME.

            1. I actually rebought it on Steam due to the QuakeCon sale (got a physical GOTY edition in 2009[?]) and it’s…strange…going back to before guaranteed hits and having to actually read quest text to figure out where stuff is.

              That being said, it’s going to be interesting grinding up Sneak and Marksman again just I can pewpewpew my way through a game that didn’t get the Skyrim-balancing in any way. :D

        2. GloatingSwine says:

          The only thing in Bethesda era Fallout that’s actually designed for a console controller by people who know what a console controller is good at is the companion command system in New Vegas.

          And that wasn’t made by Bethesda.

  15. 4th Dimension says:

    No weight limit:
    It’s not the solution for too many things in the inventory. It’s the solution for the problem where I have to spend a lot of time in any Bethesda game going home, sorting what I will sell and what I will keep and selling things (with the usual waiting periods for the vendor caps to refresh). I would love to be able to not be bothered with encumbrance limit. Like they are already allowing me to carry multiple of my own weight of bulky gear all over the wasteland, and it has been noticed that weights often make no sense. So why not ditch the entire stupid system?

    On the other hand inventory does still needs a LOT of work. While it is actually possible to sort things by pressing Z (at the bottom of every inventory menu there is a tip what each of the keys does and one of them says sort) to cycle through different sorting methods: Alphabetical, Damage, RoF, Distance, Weight, Value etc. it still lacks the MOST IMPORTANT stat. The value to weight ratio. The actual metric (sane) people use when deciding what to ditch if you will not keep the item for yourself.

    The reason the inventory text will NEVER be significantly larger is that it’s not a technical limitation. Consoles could output a gazilion of pixels and the text would still be rendered large since the size of the text is not dictated by tech but by console player’s ability to read the text on the TV screen that is MUCH farther away from the couch from which he is playing. As such TV almost always occupies much less of the player’s FOV than a computer screen (one of the reasons for lower FOV in console first games) and for a console player to be able to read the text it needs to be LARGE.
    So unless they are going to design two slightly different inventory systems for two different systems (like Witcher III did) we are stuck with lists and HUGE text.

    1. Loonyyy says:

      I agree. I don’t think weight limits make sense.

      You can carry a massive amount, and fast travel (Fast travel basically being a requirement at this point). That basically makes your weight limit not a real limitation, but a question of how much dicking around you’re willing to do to grab everything. And avoiding that problem by just taking the best stuff makes the game actively worse, by forcing you to try to calculate the value/weight ratio for every item, which is a game of inventory management and memory.

      I think it makes far more sense to limit what a player can actively exploit at one time, gear in combat etc. And I think if you put a much stricter limit on that, you could actually force a player to make real decisions about it.

      Instead, carry weight increases have a metagame use and feel like you’re being robbed, with these current systems, and you can still lug an incinerator everywhere.

      1. Well, the real reason to pick up EVERY DANG THING in THIS game is so you can use it for settlements/crafting. So, instead, they could do something like this:

        When you “clear” an area, you can assign a villager to go “scavenge” that location. This takes a certain amount of time and then you get a load of common-ish supplies, then that location is also marked as “scavenged”.

        Items that are placed in any “workbench” type (armor, weapons, chemistry, cookstation) in a location are transferred whole to your settlement/base when the location is “scavenged”. The buy/sell interface can access things in your workbenches.

        That way, the only things really worth picking up are rare things like, say, adhesive, or computer bits. Random junk once more becomes random junk. Instead of a weight limit, there’s a limit on the number of distinct things you can carry.

        You can only carry as many distinct useful items as you have quickslots. This includes weapons, drinks, food items, chems.

        You can only carry one piece of armor for each slot–maybe some more with perks.

        Once you’ve located and clicked on a workbench in an area, you get the option to send loot items to the workbench.

        This would change the game flow substantially–instead of it being “scavenge as you go”, you’d get to an area, kill everything, locate a workbench, THEN scavenge the place for anything immediately useful/valuable. Then when you get home, you send one of your lackeys to finish clearing it.

        Random wilderness encounters would be “pick up anything REALLY cool, the rest gets abandoned”.

        It would still have the scavenging for stuff aspect, (which is basically mandatory in Bethesda games), but it wouldn’t be so focused on YOU, PERSONALLY picking up 10000 tin cans.

        This could further have other interesting aspects like you only have so long of a window to “scavenge” a place after you clear it, and maybe you have to assign several villagers, and it takes more time if it’s further away from your base.

        If they made areas more dynamic (like, after you clear out the raiders, after a week or two Supermutants move in), this could also be nifty. Especially if they vastly increased the number of areas in the game that you could “take over” to include factory installations and so forth–they’re harder to defend than crappy little farmsteads (so your first factory acquisition is going to be a MAJOR resource drain), but they also produce materials on a schedule.

        1. 4th Dimension says:

          They didn’t even need to change the things that much. They could have simply allowed you to at any point when you are in your settlement send a cleanup crew into any location that has been marked clear for them to bring anything item there remaining, including scavenging all the corpses. If they want to have it have a downside, make it so that anything scavenged AUTOMATICALLY gets turned into components (unless it’s unique or something). So that if you want something to use you better pick it up yourself before sending the clean up crew which will then take a certain amount of time depending on how many settlers you have sent and how big was the installation and how far away.
          It would also incentivise you much better to spread the settlements for actual benefit to the player.
          Also allowing you to get the perk for inter settlement trading sooner would be kind of required.

          1. Speaking of perks . . . I really felt like there were a few that were super-useful and you’d be an idiot not to take them . . . and then the vast majority were just . . . there.

            I was pissed off by how awful Ghoulish was. It sounded neat–radiation restores your health! But you still take radiation DAMAGE at the same time, so it doesn’t so much “heal” you as cause you to split the difference between your red and green health bars.

            That and a lot of it was just arbitrary “hey, we gated the fun stuff for you!”

        2. djw says:

          I heartily endorse this scheme!

        3. Incunabulum says:

          The real problem is *people pick up every dang thing in this game* in the first place. Instead of playing a character; who is going to prioritize and/or cache because he’s not going to lug 200 lbs of useless junk over 10 miles back home. And most of it is useless as you don’t need to craft all that much after the beginning – buildings are made of common stuff.

          So I can totally see them dropping the weight limit because it limits what the *player* can do even as it enforces the limits a *character in the world* would have. All part of their shift from an RPG to an open world ‘look at the cool shit I posted on YouTube’ game.

          1. GloatingSwine says:

            The game isn’t going to react to you “playing a character”, it is going to react (a bit) to you hoovering up all the junk and building new guns/decorating your pad/building beds with it.

        4. That sounds like This Fallout of Mine or something like that. :P

        5. Sunshine says:

          “When you “clear” an area, you can assign a villager to go “scavenge” that location.”

          This is such an obviously good idea that there’s already a mod to do that.

          1. THIS MOD. I MUST HAVE IT.

            I will say one thing about the interface though–the quick-loot pop-ups are a definite improvement. Someone actually came up with a mod to put THOSE in Skyrim for you. I plan to wait for the remaster to come out then go nuts with mods and play it again. Quick Loot is on my List.

            1. There’s two or three for New Vegas as well.

  16. 4th Dimension says:

    @Chris and the Kid and his loyalty to “Commonwealth”
    I think what they tried to do here was to say that the guy doesn’t want to be raiding his neighbours, but since they never established any other subcomonwealth regional terms they had to use the Commonwealth. Also even if they had it would not have worked since most of their neighbors were SuperMutants Raiders and Ghouls and not other farms like it should have been.

    So in a properly made setting it would work (if he used the regional term) but not in a sandbox Bethesda game.

  17. Echo Tango says:

    Why is so much screen space wasted when looking at the pip-boy? Fine, I get you're enamored of this stupid gimmick. But can't you move the camera a little closer to the screen? There is NO REASON to waste HALF of the available screen space showing my character's fingers working the controls.

    Even better than just zooming in the camera a little, they could just have the camera continuously zoom in during the raising-you-arm animation, until the UI of the Pip-Boy fills the entire screen. I don’t mean the physical hardware of the Pip-Boy either – they could keep zooming in, until only the squared-off text of the screen / UI is on your TV / computer monitor. i.e. Have the end-state of the animation basically look like a modern, revamped version of what the UI screens in the original games looked like, but still keep the it’s-actually-a-real-device-on-your-arm of the Pip-Boy for the animation. Best of both worlds, I think. :)

    1. Incunabulum says:

      But look! You can see his fingers twiddle dials in response to what you’re doing with the PipBoy!! Its like you’re really there!!!

      1. potatoejenkins says:

        So … I’m actually ripping off my clothes, stuff them into a bulky machine glued to my forarm while simultaneously generating and devouring Yao Guai roast and Vodka en masse?

        I want that in 3rd person view please. With NPC reactions.

        1. Incunabulum says:

          YES! Totally immersive!! Most immersive game ever!!!

          1. potatoejenkins says:

            Unequipping* the Pipboy renders the PC unable to change clothes, weapons, eat or drink.

            It’s a deathtrap.

            (I know the player usually can’t do this. The image of the sole survivor, saviour of the Commonwealth, rendered useless and unable to survive by the absence of a prewar device around their wrist is still hilarious.

            I like the pipboy. I dislike its omnipresence.)

            1. Ciennas says:

              Actually… on the Xbox version, you can hit the select (or whatever the hell it is called- the first third selector key) and the pip boy get held up much closer to the screen.

              Personally, I hate how they don’t make the inventory make sense in the misc. Tab. I can tolerate a bunch of this stuff, but the mosc tab has a bunch of elements that should have been elsewhere or in togglable tabs. The pip boy games, collectables, and room keys and passcodes occupy the same room with each other and with quest items and lore notes. The easiest fix would have been for them to tag these items invisibly, and then pressing a toggle lets you see them all with headers or flip through the categories.

              It wouldn’t even have been hard.

              Frustratingly enough, I hate how mods disable achievements, even if they were crucial to the experience, like the one that actually writes out your dialogue.

              Further, I hate the consoles halfassed implementation with an arbitrary memory limit. If I want to fill up on 700 gigs of quest mods, that’s my own lookout, isn’t it? Especially since it was already being filtered through Bethesda’s curated mod site.

              1. potatoejenkins says:

                Right-clicking works for PC. Sometimes. Sometimes not. It also depends on the native FOV (FPS need a slider for that, imo. Yeah, I’m a spoiled brat.)

                The Misc section is the true “junk” section of the pipboy. It looks like everything with a “Misc Item” keyword got thrown in there. I do not know exactly how sorting works and how modders have fixed it (Considering the most popular item sorting mod needs patches I would guess they added new keywords. Don’t quite know, don’t use it.)
                I do know however that Fallout 4 has/had a problem with a keyword limit. Too many added keywords and the game started to act weird, items disappeared etc.
                Not giving keys, books, comics and holotapes their own keywords would’ve been a way to prevent that from happening. I believe they have patched that by now.

                Point is, if the vanilla sorting system was based on sorting by keywords, their options were very limited in the first place. And patching/overhauling this kind of stuff afterwards does not seem to be in their interest (If I’d be mean I’d say: because modders.).

                Frustratingly enough, I hate how mods disable achievements, even if they were crucial to the experience, like the one that actually writes out your dialogue.

                Further, I hate the consoles halfassed implementation with an arbitrary memory limit. If I want to fill up on 700 gigs of quest mods, that's my own lookout, isn't it? Especially since it was already being filtered through Bethesda's curated mod site.

                Oh yes, me too. They don’t really add anything, but they always sum up choices quite nicely. I haven’t bothered to reenable them however. I’m still trying my best to motivate myself to actually finish the game so I can play Far Harbor and stop dodging spoilers.

                I also try to dodge Bethesda.net, discussions about Bethesda.net and anything that could in any way lead to Bethesda.net beeing mentioned. Let’s just say I do not like it for too many reasons. The only good thing is: Everyone can get mods now. Well, everyone except PS4 users. I hope they work that out soon.

                (Mod limit: Don’t know wether that’s just Beth beeing evil, Microsoft being evil or hardware limitations. No idea how mods and memory on console work. Not to mention what Beth and Microsoft had to agree on to get the whole “mods on console” thing working in the first place. Afair, the disabled achievements have also something to do with that.)

                Edit: Oh well, now I’m curious after all. How is the community doing at Beth.net?

                1. MichaelGC says:

                  I don’t know anything about beth.net at all, nor any of the issues, but this vid happened to pop up in my YouTube recommendations, so may mean something to you! I haven’t watched it, and it’s not a channel I follow – just one of those longshots that YT recommendations take every now and again, I suppose.

                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za95GPjoWXI

  18. Tuskin38 says:

    Oh no, you saved while in Kellogg’s brain.

    There is a bug that happens, sometimes, where if you do that quit and load again, it won’t complete the quest once you finish the sequence, it will keep telling you to explore his memories, even after you leave.

    Only way to fix it is either use console commands to advance the quest, or load an older save from before.

  19. Viktor says:

    Fixing the inventory isn’t hard. Add a vendor trash tab and an important items tab. Anything you click ~blah~ on in the inventory goes to your VT tab and is removed from the main tab. Hit ~blah~ at a store to auto-sell all the VT the merchant has caps for. Important items are the inverse, stuff that you may not want to hotkey but you don’t want to dig for, like situational weapons or armor. Again, hit something on the main tab to move them over, though these don’t get removed from the main tab.

    Suddenly you don’t have to scroll through a bunch of useless crap to find the stuff you care about, and you can choose to sell something once and then never look at it again. There’s other fixes the system needs, but that removes the worst source of frustration IMO.

  20. VaporWare says:

    Trivia: You actually /can/ zoom in further on the PIP-Boy screen (as well as all the various terminals), but the feature is unreliable enough that I’m only /kind of/ sure it’s mapped to right-click on PC (sometimes I will find that I am zoomed in on a terminal and I can’t not be, or visa versa, apparently entirely at random but possibly also determined by whether or not I am currently in power armor, or maybe not, possibly, perhaps, on every alternate day ending in y divided by ???). Holding r-click also lets you tilt your arm around so you can get a better* look at the PIP-Boy model they’re so proud of!

    Not that any of that actually helps with any of the issues we’re talking about, but it’s handy if you need an effectively larger font for reading the contents of your inventory and whatnot.

    Does the fact that they /still/ never unflag many undroppable quest-items at the termination of their quests, leading to a steady accretion of random crap you can never, ever be rid of short of ripping it out of your inventory with console powers, count as an inventory issue or is that just general ‘Those Wacky Bethesdites’ since it also maps to ‘quest and script’ issues and probably a few other things?

    1. Incunabulum says:

      If quest items were sorted together as quest items (even if they couldn’t be dropped) then it would solely be a ‘more stupidity by the developers’.

      In this particular case its more stupidity by the developers coupled with a bad inventory UI that makes a problem that is worse than its component parts.

  21. “Why aren't currently worn / favorited items listed together, at the top?”

    A solution (and the best one iMO) for this would be to put the worn stuff on the “screen” with the limb/body damage, make it a Body/Limb/Worn screen.

    Anarchy Online has a worn window (first example I could think of), a lot of other RPGs also have a body that you drag clothes/armor unto a figure.
    You do not need to drag them though, but they could be listed on the same screen.

    And if they are listed there then they should not appear in the inventory armor or clothes list.
    Ad favourited should be at the top as you say Shamus, that does seem logical.
    Highlighting in a different color might also work, but a symbol would have to be added to assist those who are color blind.

    Another way would be to lock favourited and worn items so that you had to unware them or unfavourite them before you could sell/drop them.

    Heck, support all three ways and let the player toggle one, two or all ways in the options somewhere.

  22. “Adding to the list of crap you have to sort through is the fact that there are quest items you can't drop, even after the related quest has been completed”

    Holy shit I hate that.

    Quest items (in any RPG) should always once they no longer have a quest use be no longer a quest item.
    Make the item a junk item (no use but can be sold as junk or scrapped for it’s parts/components) .
    Make the item useful (a legendary part or item).
    Make the item a collectible (mount it in a display/put it on a shelf, whatever).
    Or a combination of the above (choices in a RPG is important).

    In Skyrim and Fallout and similar games it’s fun to put rare/legendary/epic weapons that you don’t use or that is no longer useful on display, that way you can go to your home and say to yourself, “that’s the Dagger of Bloodlust I got from defeating that demon”.

    “You can’t drop a quest item” is never something you want to see after the quest is done. I’d even call it a bug.

    1. This is something that the Unofficial Patches tend to fix at least partially. However, I’d love to have a mod where you get a secondary quest to track down the idiot who gave you the stupid item and then throw it at them while yelling “HERE TAKE YOUR STUPID JUNK BACK!!1!”

  23. “Why is so much screen space wasted when looking at the pip-boy?”
    Yeah. Though as VaporWare says you can zoom to a certain extent.
    But again this should be a user option. “No zoom / Half zoom / Full zoom” for example.
    That way Shamus could have his full zoom.

    Heck add a option called “Full screen inventory/lists” and I’m pretty sure Shamus would check that ASAP happily as would many others.

    Betesda has time to get this (and other things I suggested) patched in, heck they could even do it for the Skyrim re-release, there is still time. Reducing interface frustration will just increase the longevity of the game (and reduce the “need” for UI mods, which is a good thing).

  24. “Sometimes they linger on-screen long after you walked away from THING, and sometimes they vanish just as you notice them. If you miss one, there's no way to get it back”

    A way to fix this is to dedicate a button to “Help/Info” (even on a gamepad this can be done).
    When you look/target something and press the help/info key or button you get the tip about it or whatever other info there might be.

  25. TheBilbyGuy says:

    Ciennas mentioned that you can zoom the Pip Boy menu in to just the screen without any of the framing device on the Xbox version. I figured I’d throw in that you can do so on the PS4 as well, so you probably can on PC too. I don’t remember if the game ever told me I could zoom in, though, I just found it by experimenting with the buttons, something that becomes more difficult when you have an entire keyboard to work with. If anyone on PC wants to zoom in to see the menu better you can probably find the control in the key bindings list, I imagine.

  26. Artur CalDazar says:

    My biggest issue with the inventory as is is how notes and audio logs are items kept amongst quest items. I feel like they should have their own subheading under data.

    Also, Josh really missed out not going sarcastic for handing over the brain. It’s as absurd as the reality of your actions suggest.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Werent they placed in a separate place in fallout 3?I know that new vegas puts those in the data part of your pipboy,which is separate from the inventory.

    2. potatoejenkins says:

      Igoooooo~rrrr, fetch~ me the brai~n!

  27. Kelerak says:

    Not really the best place to talk about it, since there were no options for it in this episode, but can I just say I hate how tame the Sarcastic dialogue option is? It’s almost like they paid a twelve-year old to write one-liners and put them into the game. It’s just so bland and unthreatening, and the NPCs reaction to that option is usually just a vague acknowledgement that you even chose that option.

    For having that be 1/4 of your dialogue choices, it’s really odd that there wasn’t much effort put there, but then again, this is Bethesda we’re talking about.

    1. Ninety-Three says:

      I think it’s tame on purpose. As the crew talked about earlier, the response to every single sarcastic choice in the game is the NPC saying “Haha, but seriously now.” Bethesda started from the principle of “Branching dialogue is more work, so we can’t give the player much ability to control the course of a conversation”, and when that philosophy met with the “Always have a Sarcastic option” mandate, it logically created a bunch of weak sarcasm. If the player was allowed to be truly biting then the NPC should get pissed off which would require writing another dialogue tree.

      I feel like I just described a microcosm of the game’s problems. It’s not that they’re terrible developers precisely, all over the place Fallout 4 feels like a reasonable developer making a compromise between two conflicting ideas that shouldn’t have been in the same game.

      1. Coming_Second says:

        The game they wanted to make wasn’t a Fallout game. It’s that simple.

  28. Neko says:

    The poster child for inventory “streamlining” would be Bioshock, I think. Potions reduced to a quantity 0-9, quest items that you either have or don’t have, every person and rubbish bin contains no more than 3 items and you eat food the moment you come across it.

    It was awful and I hated it, especially for a “spiritual successor” to System Shock 2 where I had what I considered to be a pretty decent inventory system.

    I might be a little biased since I actually enjoyed Inventory Tetris in NWN and lamented the simplification of NWN2.

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