Game 72 - Fallout 4: Far Harbor - Week 133 - July 22

allout 4 Far Harbor

Fallout 4 was a disappointment to say the least. Everything that made prior entries great was thrown to the wayside in favour of streamlined mechanics. I likened it closer to a post-apocalyptic Far Cry, rather than a Fallout RPG. Go there, clear the settlement, loot, repeat. Stripped down RPG mechanics, dialogue, a lack of builds and perks. Characters are forgettable bar a few. All the things that New Vegas did better ignored. But even then, what Fallout 3 did best is sorely missed as well. Gone is the sense of wonder and exploration; turning over every corner to find some wacky wasteland settlement or pocket of goofyness. No mole rat races, Republic of Dave, ghoul stuck in a tree worshipped by savages, no town at war because they read a comic book where a hero and villain fight it out. None of it. The story was better than 3, but fell short of the branching factions and their charismatic characters in New Vegas. It had two redeeming features in my eyes; the verticality of Boston was awesome and The Glowing Sea was terrifying. Additionally the shooting was improved (which makes sense, mainstream appeal) but more so the Power Armour was fucking incredible. Turning it into a modable tank that you tinker in a workshop was a great feeling; especially that first scene (which should have been later) and when you get the jump pack and can bounce around Boston is a great climax. Still, the lack of RPG mechanics left it feeling hollow, and it kept me from coming back to play this DLC even though I heard high praises.

Rail rifle is still a banger of a weapon.

Not too long ago I got the itch and bought Far Harbor on special. Right off the bat I was reminded how terrible the voice acting. The problem with combining a voice actor and an extensive character creator is the voice has to be generic to fit all character builds. In this instance he just ends up sounding like a moron. “M....o....t...h....e...........r?”. “Could that be the password erhhh?”. Like what is that; he’s always asking some stupid questions when your enquire further. I hate it. The dialogue wheel of “good, bad, neutral and enquire further”. Mass Effect had it sure, but at least the dialogue was !@#$ing good as Shepard was an established character with some umph behind him. That’s a good comparison actually, both are pre-established soldiers, both a man on a mission; yet one is more convincing then the others. Stick to your strength Bethesda (I’m glad it looks like they are as the protagonist of StarField won’t have a voice).

Formula is outdated at this point. Go there, save them. At least in New Vegas there was somewhat of a sense that no one trusted you and you had to prove yourself. Here you’re not kept at arms length until you eartn Caesar’s respect. Not to mention he feels like a charismatic leader, convincing you that his goals and methods of debauchery are the right way; and the ends justify the means as a true tyrant would in real life, making him feel even more real. None of that is here. The native’s say they don’t trust you, but then instantly talk themselves into trusting you to save them because you shoot a few mud crabs. Like what? And that can lead to their downfall in several ways. Is everyone in this world stupid? Where is the paranoia?

More characters like my mutant dog breeder Erickson please. Wish he had more involvement.,,

So after receiving an SOS call my investigations to track Kasumi, a missing person that leads me to Far Harbor and DIMA, an ancient synth leading his people of Arcadia; where the person in question is staying. She asks me to help. On my path I meet the Children of Atom – interesting fellows with their submarine cult, I like it, but currently at war with the fishermen of Far Harbor. I liked it at first and decided to do the story. This lead me to revealing that the mayor of Far Harbor was a synth, replaced by DIMA after the original was abducted and killed. Dark, I like it. So I convinced DIMA to turn himself in, the right thing to do. To my shock, this resulted in Far Harbour destroying Arcadia. I mean what? Despite all my successful speech checks I had no influence to prevent the attack. Okay, you can’t talk your way out of everything, actions have consequences. Well having done a Railroad playthrough and Curie, I wanted to side with Arcadia. I tried to defend them and kill the fishermen; but they’re invincible. They just go sleepy sleep bye bye and then wake up. Arcadia is destroyed. So let me get this straight, not only can I not prevent the attack from happening I can’t pick a side mid-fight? That is utter garbage. I’m not sure why people said it was a return to form. They make baby steps not strides towards an RPG – does Bethesda even make them anymore? Is this Call of Duty or Fallout? So it turns out you need to do all the side-quests to prevent them from killing DIMA. How on God’s brown blighted Earth was I meant to know that? So I save scummed and 180’d to do the story last.

I have to mention that section. The one with the cubes where you repair DIMA’s memory. All I have to say is FUCK that section. TCL is blocked so you can’t move through walks. It’s easily the worst part of any Fallout game I’ve experience and drops the DLC at least 1 point.

Beyond that they attempt to add some skills because into the dialogue and quests where you can use them to repair, blow things up, or heal injured fishermen. But it doesn’t go very far beyond Far Harbor and feels pretty token. The island is pretty cool; its essentially Point Lookout but not as good (I miss my redneck mutants). Add it to the list of Boston and the Glowing Sea as a semi-interesting area to explore. The embedded narrtivie saw some improvements here; one highlight was restoring power to a family farm and uncovering notes of what happened to them after the Great War; before revealing a final cache of loot. The other course being the vault of robots beneath a hotle that hire you to investigate a murder. Full of eccentric brain robots and Mister Handys, this was probably the best part of the game – feeling like a nod to Old World Blues. More of that please; Fallout is at its best when it has goofy and dark embedded story telling of Fallout 3 mixed with amazing characters and faction politics of New Vegas. Oh, and it’s actually an RPG. Far Harbor takes baby steps but I’m still waiting for that perfect wasteland cocktail.

Fallout: New Vegas (again)

While Far Harbor scratched the itch, it didn’t quell it. So I decided to go back and do a modded playthrough. To my surprise, the amount of mods that make this game replayable is nuts. I’m not talking about quality of life but complete overhauls that change the game entirely. DUST for example turns it into a horror survival experience, one that I need to go back to.

Deathclaws. Actually terrifying in this game.

My third major playthrough this time I decided to do a Mr. House dumb big gun playthrough. In short the Courier got shot in the head, lost 100 IQ points. But he made a miraculous recovery of course and traded all those points for luck! In Goodsprings he shoots Jacob right away (derp); feels bad and helps defend the town. Then he hears from someone that the guy who shot him went to the big shiny city in the middle of the desert. So off he went, right through Deathclaw Valley. He runs into niles, and so does the Deathclaws following him. Leaving those two to sort it out he keeps walking. Eventually he gets to freeside and the lucky man he is, has the 2000 caps to walse right into the Strip. Mr House beckons him and tells him about Benny and off he goes, gets his revenge and returns to Mr House. The big man in the TV tells him to do stuff, and why shouldn’t he? But not before he rolls all the casino. He sorts out Caesar and upgrades the robots for Mr House and then on his way to Boom town he finds the freeside clinic. Naturally, the doctor recommends the intelligent implant; but he don’t need no crinkles on his perfectly smooth brain, so he gets every implant BUT intelligence. He makes the boom town friends of the House and the rest of dumb dumb’s story is yet to be told!

I decided to end it at the point that Arcade Gannon (still the GOAT companion) gets involved with the Enclave. As I want to go back and play Fallout 1 and 2, then play through all the Enclave and NCR quests so I get that extra flavour of references such as Shady Sands and the Boneyard.

But even in my short time I realise just how much better a game New Vegas is. New Vegas itself is a character, from the denizens to the layout and how it ties to the old world in substantive ways like The Kings and the hotels essentially being tribes from the wasteland. It’s so nuanced in clever. Every level up is an enjoyable dopamine hit. Because the perks aren’t just stat boosts, they have major changes to your build both in combat and tying your character to that world. Even the skill points are infinitely more enjoyable, having a dozen or more to distribute among several skills makes progression an endless joy. It makes the game infinitely more re-playable. Also I just have to mention the fact that it was only developed in a year!?!? Just imagine what Obsidian can do with a full dev cycle – I hope to god the rumours are true about them doing a “New Vegas 2”. It just goes to show that when I play Fallout 4, all it does is make me want to go back and play the better Fallout game.

Mods are a must.

Allsorts 2 - Hunter's Arena, BFV, Onrush & More

llsorts 1 – Oh boy, this is a long list. For some reason I decided to start clearing out my “free” PS plus games. So here we go…

Hunter’s Arena

Put this one in the graveyard dedicate to competitive multiplayer games with an interesting idea that die at debut or an inevitable slow death. Loadout, Dirty Bomb, LawBreakers, etc.

The game had a really cool concept with a martial artist MOBA meets Battle-Royal. You start the game by diving off a tower into an arena that is essentially a MOBA jungle, with pools of creep. Fight them, level up, attain loot and gear, then move to avoid the fog inevitably ending in a intimate climax with what land is left. The heroes are awesome, with some really cool skillsets that feels like a mix between a fighting game and MOBA champions.

Some personal favourites being Geonhong with his drunken kickboxing style (which will always be a favourite ever since Rock Lee used it) thrown in with some fire breathing of course. Mumyung, with his loki style daggers, clones and trickery. Dara and Ara deserve a shotout for there elegant long range blade weapons (think circle blades from Kingdoms of Amalur) and Wukong for obvious reasons. However, Yoongeon is by far my favourite. He has the most difficult skillset and would have likely been my main benchmark character. A dual sword wielding ronin looking fellow, he can switch to a spectral mode that hangs over his body kinda like a Stand from JoJo; this allows him to fight at range. All in all !@#$in badass.

So what killed it? Well the PvE just isn’t fun. Creeps make up the bulk of the fighting, with players often avoiding others to level up for a final fight; you don’t have the constant threat of PvP and ganking like other MOBAs. Unless not in the short time I played it. Not sure the West was the best market to start as the only sever is NA which is dead and laggy to the point of unplayability. I never made it to the end; but watching it the meta of jungle PvE then hide in a corner and let others eliminate each other is boring AF.  

Knockout City

Played this one for a good chunk of time and it had a cool idea but the formula just got boring after a while. For starters you spend way too long with bots at the start before it lets you verse humans (I’m surprised I even stuck it out it got that boring). Humans are far better as you’d expect, but idk, it just feels like its missing something. It’s clear they’re going for that fortnite and Rocket League audience; but while Fortnite had the build mechanic and Rocket League had the trick shots; Knockout city lacks the depth that these games have and keep people coming back for hundreds of hours. It was fun with a lot of potential, just missing that secret ingredient to make it stand tall above the rest.

Street Fighter 5

It’s just bad. It spits in the face of this giant franchise. 3D just never feels right, even as good as 4 was I didn’t like it nearly as much. I just don’t feel that same level of precision and technical fighting with the characters. I wish they would go back to 3D; do a classic remake and revamp the movesets and rosters. The initial launch lacking content killed this game at launch but even with it, the core fighting doesn’t feel satisfying and lacking the dragon’s punch it use to have.

Virtua Fighter 5

I never got into this series, always preferring Tekken for a 3D fighter and Street Fighter for 2D. But it was good for a laugh with some friends for an hour. We tried most the characters like Ryu Akira Yuki and Ken Jack Bryant and most feel like bland rip offs. It wasn’t until a mate chose E. Honda Taka-Arashi and spammed his sumo kick reminiscent of E. Honda's palm flurry that we had a good run with this all but forgotten fighter.

Fall Guys

This game is a blast; what can I say. Good fun obstacle course with rounds of elimination. You only need to look at one screenshot to know exactly what the game is about. I think that’s what has carried this game for so long giving it a wider audience and long-term success. My one gripe is that there’s no local co-op. If I was eight I’d have a blast with this game online but as it is; it doesn’t appeal to me enough to keep me coming back and play this with strangers. I understand that the game is built for 60 or so players. But it’s a party game, so why not release a mode that lets you have four, eight, sixteen people on the same screen. Hell give us the option to player with 2-4 players online as a group (split-screen). If it had that I’d still be playing it now. 

Predator Hunting Grounds

I love asymmetrical games and after Dead by Daylight I would have expected this to be a slam dunk. The themes, art, predator, characters and abilities all hit the nail on the head. The predator feels as it should - tough and stealthy jumping from tree to tree and blasting soldiers apart with shoulder mounted plasma cannons. The problem is a simple one to explain, but understandably difficult to implement on a budget. The shooting mechanics suck. This is a common problem in these games for the marines and I remember AvP got around it with the M56 smart gun. I mean sure it was fun, but that presented its own problems with a lack of variety and turtling marines. Give us more options, stims, adrenaline, shields, traps, etc. But most of all give us the ability to aim smoothly especially when the Predator moves so fast AND has ridiculous health. How can the humans win when they can’t aim and the Predator can be in your face in a single moment. Not to mention the NPCs guerrilla enemies are boring to kill. If this game had Tarkov level AI and shooting, it would still be getting played today; but as it stands its understandably dying.

Friday the 13^th: The Game

Not much to say here. Forgettable. Dead by Daylight but worse. Made by the same developer as Predator Hunting Grounds (IllFonic) so that explains a lot.  A friend told me Behaviour Interactive pitched a Friday the 13^th game, was denied and decided to make their own game which would be Dead by Daylight. Well, evidently they backed the wrong horse.

Onrush

I loved MotorStorm back in the day and this one hit hard where the MotorStorm shaped hole is in my heart. It’s tight, smooth and fun. Pick anything from bikes, ATV, muscle cars and trucks to dodge and wipe other vehicles off the road. The main noticeable difference here are the different modes and the team racing. Having two teams adds an awesome dynamic where you can get certain perks to buff your teammates, adding an element of class synergy to cars. This opens the door to a plethora of different modes such as capture the point where your team must maintain control of a moving domination zone. It’s just a lot of fun and one I’ll be keeping installed for when I want to scratch that racing itch.

Battlefield V

The 90s and 00s were marked by WW2 shooters. Call of Duty, Medal of Honour, Wolfenstein and many clones. It was so flooded to the point that WW2 fatigue persists to this day (at least for me). That doesn’t mean that an exceptional game wouldn’t break me out of that spell, but CoD: WW2 failed, and Battlefield V certainly didn’t succeed in its place. The game gave me BF1943 vibes in Europe. But it didn’t add anything new. Compare that to BF1 (still a dumb name) which added a fresh new setting that introduced a plethora of new changes such as mounted combat, train combat, bayonet charges and a surprisingly refreshing lack of automatic weapons. BFV on the other hands feels like a step backwards, re-treading old grounds.

WWE 2k Battlegrounds

I was never into wrestling growing up. I always thought it was lame and corny even at an age where that was acceptable to think was cool. But I did love the old games like smackdown raw. Pile driving my mates and picking up chairs to make them sit the F down gave me hours of entertainment. So I saw promise in this one especially because it wasn’t taking itself seriously. Instead it had a corny, cartoony bobble head theme that appeared at home given the costumes and characters of WWE. But just no, the game feels so clunky and budget to the point that even basic menu transitions require a lot of willpower to navigate. How a game feels so much more difficult to control then its PS2 contemporaries will always confound me. It was good for 30 minutes of fun and that’s about it.