{"id":34860,"date":"2016-10-07T17:00:34","date_gmt":"2016-10-07T21:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=34860"},"modified":"2016-10-07T17:02:10","modified_gmt":"2016-10-07T21:02:10","slug":"fallout-4-ep45-brotherhood-of-seals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=34860","title":{"rendered":"Fallout 4 EP45: Brotherhood of SEALs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/X9MXZhF7UQ4\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=X9MXZhF7UQ4'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You know, the story of this place is kind of interesting if you read the computer terminals,&#8221; is probably the saddest thing to hear about an area of this game. It means someone actually came up with a good story, but nobody was willing to make it PART OF THE WORLD. Why? I dunno. I guess they spent all their voice acting budget on the moronic main story. <\/p>\n<p>To be fair, it&#8217;s possible that the terminal story would fall apart once it was converted into stilted dialog from dead-eyed characters and the player couldn&#8217;t react to the dialog in any way except to choose from one of four lame responses to continue the conversation. Maybe the problem with the story in this game isn&#8217;t the story, but the terrible presentation.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway&#8230;<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>In this episode, Josh fights a level-appropriate<span class='snote' title='1'>The game doesn&#8217;t give the Mirelurk the &#8220;skull&#8221; icon used to denote foes far above your level.<\/span> foe, and it takes over TWENTY attacks to kill the stupid thing. And one of those attacks is a critical. When you get to the late(ish) stage of the game and foes turn into damage sponges, the whole thing becomes a chore to play. This is on top of the bullshit where you&#8217;ll unload a power swing from your super sledge and some lame mook raider will deflect it with their little combat knife and take NO damage. I realize Josh isn&#8217;t playing optimally for the purposes of time, but he&#8217;s not <em>that<\/em> underpowered. If he dumped some time into gear and took different perks to double his damage (assuming that&#8217;s possible) it still would have taken <em>ten<\/em> hits to kill this non-legendary foe. <\/p>\n<p>This is why I favor stealth builds. Once you have the requisite stealth perks, you can kill everything in one or two shots. Of course, the downside is that if you <strong>do<\/strong> end up in a stand-up fight, it will take <em>even longer<\/em>, since you&#8217;ve been optimizing for stealth instead of damage. <\/p>\n<p>Under the hood, I don&#8217;t know what causes this. You&#8217;ll run into a mook that dies in two hits. Then a legendary that dies in six. Then a mook that takes twenty. What causes this? I&#8217;ve always assumed this was due to the differences in levels between you and your foe. In Borderlands, you can see when a foe is five levels below you or three levels above you, so you have some kind of context for why they might be exceptionally weak \/ strong. But Fallout 4 hides those numbers from us, so we have no explanation for why this supermutant is taking 15 hits when we killed one in 3 a few minutes ago. It just feels random. And when you&#8217;re up against something tough, it&#8217;s really slow and unsatisfying.<\/p>\n<p>For a game that supposedly sacrificed all of the worldbuilding, storytelling, roleplaying, player choice, diversity of character builds, and dialog in the name of &#8220;player empowerment&#8221;, the overall feeling of empowerment in this game is actually pretty terrible. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) &#8220;You know, the story of this place is kind of interesting if you read the computer terminals,&#8221; is probably the saddest thing to hear about an area of this game. It means someone actually came up with a good story, but nobody was willing to make it PART OF THE WORLD. Why? I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34860\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}