Fallout 4: 16 Hours In

I've now spent over 16 hours with Fallout 4 (Sorry, I've been on mandatory overtime at work...) and I can say that while it has a LOT more to offer than Fallout 3 did, I'm seeing a sad pattern in Bethesda games.

I have now made several settlements, completed a few story missions, and a good handful of sidequests. My favorite new feature of Fallout 4 is the crafting system. It allows for a very nice amount of customization between all of my weapons, though there are some drawbacks. I'm still using two weapons I got within the first couple hours of my playing, one of them being my original 10mm pistol. Bethesda's choice to forego weapon degradation is an interesting one, as I've now modded my original gun to be my go to weapon in many situations.

I've spent a large amount of my 16 hours building settlements. I'm not great, but the tools offered are both nice and sorta limited. Having to place buildings from a first person perspective is fine, but only being able to do it from standing/walking around is kinda difficult at times. Moving the piece can be a bit of a crap-shoot as well as they don't move forward or backwards well. That said, you can rotate and stack pieces for days.

The movement and shooting in Fallout 4 are so much better than in the previous two Fallout games. Shooting feels precise and accurate, while fast and frantic at times. I've only encountered a couple glitches in shooting where the hit detection wasn't quite working right. Movement has been made much nicer too with everything working relatively alright. I haven't had any issues getting stuck yet anyway. My biggest issue with combat comes from running into a very high number of legendary and extra difficult enemies while having a relatively low amount of ammo. This may just be me, but it seems that the ammo in the Commonwealth is hard to come by sometimes.

The quests aren't too bad, though I've found some of them to be a bit tedious. Following NPCs around is just a chore most of the time as they move slow, albeit faster than in Fallout 3. Overall I've enjoyed the quests I've done to this point. My personal follower hasn't really gotten in my way or caused me any issues on any missions or wandering I've done so far.

A bit of a complaint now. Fallout 4 suffers from many of the same ridiculous glitches that Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Oblivion, and Skyrim all had. Followers disappear sometimes, the game occasionally breaks, framerate stutters often, and a host of others. Many of these are things we've come to know and love about Bethesda games, others, are annoyances that I'm beginning to find unacceptable. But, that said, this is a pretty straightforward Bethesda open world RPG for better or worse.

So, that's where I stand after 16 hours with Fallout 4. Would I recommend it? Yeah, I'd say pick it up, especially if you enjoyed Fallout 3 and New Vegas, as Fallout 4 provides many improvements over those games while keeping the developer's signature problems in tact. Here's hoping the next few patches will fix the issues a bit and make the game even more fun than it already is.

Fallout 4 Six Hours In

So, I got an Xbox One last year. I also got divorced, moved in with our sports writer, and we've dropped to a two man operation from the 4 we had. My personal life has been a rollercoaster over the last year, and I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. To that end, I'm hoping to be able to get back to doing this on the regular again. We've been playing a lot of board games as of late and while that's been fun, I've recently picked up my controller and began to play video games again.

Now for the reason you're all here. The title of the article. I've only spent around 6 hours with Fallout 4 so far, and I've got to say... holy crap. This game is wonderful. I've had a couple minor glitches with some enemies, random deaths, and some loot problems, but overall, I'm enjoying my time in the Commonwealth.

Fallout 4 is an improvement in every way over the previous generation's iterations of Fallout. The world is much more dense, which is fantastic. Combat is much more fluid, with the shooting feeling particularly nice. Customization has gone through the roof with both weapons and armor being customizable. Armor customization is a bit more limited in some ways, with several suits and outfits taking up all slots, where as others are very modular and allow swapping between any at any time. Weapons though, are completely customizable. Everything in the wasteland is made of components for customization or building. Weapons break down into several categories and each category has several upgrades for you to work towards. You can also store a limitless amount of crap in workbenches throughout the world, so you could in theory always have a stockpile of junk ready to go. I haven't spent much time with the settlement builder yet, but what I've done has been pretty great and allowed me to build some fun structures. I'll know more on that later I think.

The gameplay is basically the same as the last two games. V.A.T.S. is back and works wonderfully, the shooting and movement are spot on, and the game controls much better than the previous games. Dialogue is much better, with no clunky menus to navigate through, though you are limited (so far) to only 4 dialogue choices at a time. The looting has changed a bit and caused some issues for me as I'm still not used to it. Gone are the game pausing pop-up menus where your inventory and the container or corpse's inventory are side by side. Hover over something and a list pops up with what's there. You tap a button to take it, or another button to bring up your inventory to dump stuff. It's very nice. Visually it doesn't break any records, but the game looks great. I have found myself getting absorbed into the game quite a bit in my short time. Here's to more Fallout, but I probably won't get around to any more play time until Friday.

EA Sports UFC 2 Info!

Today, EA Sports officially announced what they were teasing at yesterday: EA Sports UFC 2 is coming soon. How soon? Spring 2016. If it lines up with the previous incarnation's date, look for a window between May 10th and June 21st. My guess would be June 14th, as that is almost two years to the day of the release of EA Sports UFC on June 17th, 2014. EA already stated that they expect this to be a biannual release. While not much information is available now, EA Sports did release a brief trailer for the upcoming game. They will have a full list of features this Friday, but until then, here is a list of the modes that we were able to screen grab from the trailer:

Continue
Customize
The Ultimate Fighter
Fight Now
Live Events
Custom Events
Ultimate Team
Knockout Mode
Quick Fight
Online Rivalries
Ranked Championships
Fighter Store
Career Mode
Skills Challenge
Practice Mode
At least one other mode that was unrecognizable at this moment.

Most of these modes seem pretty straight forward. The only ones that are open to interpretation are Ultimate Team, Knockout Mode, and The Ultimate Fighter. Ultimate Team appears to be similar to the card collecting game found in other EA Sports titles such as FIFA, NHL, and Madden. The Ultimate Fighter Mode could potentially be a branch off of the beginning of Career Mode in the previous EA Sports UFC, where your created fighter has to fight his way through the tournament/reality TV show in order to make it to the UFC. Knockout Mode could be more of an arcade fight, as opposed to a simulation style fight experience. Hopefully we will know more about all of the modes this Friday. Thanks for visiting and stay tuned!