Fallout 4 – Linguistic idea

I really hate the focus I’ve had on Fallout 4 lately, but I just had a small thought: why does everyone in this world have the exact same dialects one would find today? The language has not changed one bit; the grammar has remained the same, and the same goes for vocabulary, aside from in-universe jargon which is required to describe certain things, of course.

It’s just a bit odd. Two centuries pass and the English language remains the same? No. Separation of groups of people like that is bound to cause dialects to pop up which would be audibly different from anything we have today. Of course, there are radio stations, but I can’t imagine there being radio stations everywhere right? I don’t know.

I might as well use this post to vent about the Draconic language in “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim”, or just “Skyrim”. Concerning the vocabulary, what the hell is up with that language? It’s literally just English except encrypted! Its grammar is English, its sentence structure is English, and its overall flow reeks of English! It’s not a language; it’s a cipher, a kid’s invention, a fraud! It’s something I would have come up with back when I was twelve!

I need sleep now…

P.S. 1st of July, 2017: Perhaps the English language has devolved into something analogous to the fusion of iron in the core of a star; it has stopped “evolving” due to reaching a critical stage of non-evolvability. Nah, that couldn’t be.

On Fallout 4’s “survival mode”

I realize this is the billionth post I have made regarding Fallout 4, but I feel as though I have not quite compiled my thoughts on the “survival mode” Bethesda decided half-assedly to add to the game months after its release into a single post yet, so here it is; while I’m on the rage train after losing my week of progress last night, I might as well make this to finish my raving triad of a tantrum masterpiece.

The amazing new mode

If you still haven’t played survival mode, don’t worry; the only thing of substance it contains is the actual survival element, which, I will once again stress, is a half-assed attempt at “fixing” the old survival “Bullet Sponge Xtreme” difficulty.

Some of the mode’s features are as follows:

• Food, water and sleep “meters” are added to the game while playing with survival mode on;
• Fast-travel is disabled, meaning the player has to walk everywhere in real time;
• The player’s and enemies’ defence damage resistances have been substantially lowered and so take quite a lot more damage;
• Ammunition is no longer weightless, meaning the player and companions now have to take care not to bring useless ammunition everywhere;
• Players’ limbs no longer auto-heal after disengaging combat;
• Locations take way longer to repopulate;
• Illnesses have been added to the game, such as fatigue, parasites and infection;
• Companions no longer get up by themselves after being knocked out during combat. Instead, they must be revived using a stimpak or robot repair kit if they’re human or robot, respectively; and
• Killing enemies grants an adrenaline damage bonus every five kills.

There are more lesser features, but I will only comment on the ones listed here. If you want an extensive list of features and differences from the standard game mode, take a look at the Nukapedia article.

Food, water and sleep

This is probably the biggest feature of the survival mode in Fallout 4, and it is probably the one that brought my attention to it. In the survival mode, it is required that the player eat food, drink water and sleep regularly in order to stay alive. Refusing this results in penalties to S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats and action points (AP).

There is little for me to say about this feature, as I have no personal issues regarding it. If I had to be nitpicky, I would probably decrease the interval within which food is needed, as  a human being can survive for weeks without food.

Actually, there is one issue with this system: mattresses and sleeping bags only allow for a maximum of five and three hours of sleep, respectively. I’m sorry, what? Why would a mattress and a sleeping bag restrict the player’s sleep like that? I have slept a whole night in a sleeping bag before! It didn’t just limit my sleep arbitrarily to three hours. Likewise, a mattress is just an object upon which the player may implicitly lie down but which lacks a bedframe upon which it may rest. There is nothing else differentiating a mattress from a bed in this game. That’s a bit bullshitty, to be quite honest.

Disabled fast-travel

Here’s a feature of which I am not particularly a fan. In the survival mode, the player is denied the ability to fast-travel. This system functions exactly as it does in TESV: Skyrim and Fallout 3 etc.

While it may sound like it would add to the survival experience to force the player to walk everywhere, it gets rather tedious after a while. This is especially the case if the game keeps crashing every damn time I try to open V.A.T.S. However, it is not a bad thing in and of itself, although I will, once again, stress that it gets rather tedious after a while.

Increased player and enemy damage

This is bullshit. Seriously. I keep reading on the Internet that both the player and enemies receive more damage, making it even more of an incentive to stay out of the firing line. However, this has not been my experience. My experience has been that the enemies are still bullet-spongy. Many raiders still take several shotgun blasts to the face at point-blank distance with a fully upgraded legendary combat shotgun. I am not even joking.

If what I just said has not been the case of you reading this, you have been hallucinating. You belong in a madhouse. Enemies do far more damage than the player with a weapon much weaker than the player’s. You cannot tell me this is not the case, for I have observed such utter nonsense with my own eyes.

Massive ammunition

This is fine. I have no problems with this. There is little to complain about regarding this feature. I should not even have brought it up. Wait,,, cut that out. I sound like a little bitch again.

Non-auto-healing limbs

This is also fine.

Locations have longer respawn times

This is not fine. I personally like enemies respawning, but I do know a lot of people are opposed to it. The issue with non-respawning enemies is that it makes a game feel so… empty after a while. I do agree that overly aggressive respawn rates are annoying, though; respawn rates are an artform, and only the chosen may master the superior way of the Respawn. *cringe*

One of the first games that showed me that this could become a problem is “Drakan: The Ancients’ Gates“, a very unknown open-worldish game for the PlayStation 2. I guess the fact that it is a PlayStation 2 exclusive is probably a contributing factor to its effective presence in oblivion, which is sad; I am quite fond of the game, although it is a pretty buggy game, which is funny, seeing how Fallout 4 is also a buggy mess. However, at least the game can run for more than 20 minutes at a time without crashing, and it apparently did not even undergo beta testing! If you want to take a closer look at the game and its exploitable glitches, I would recommend Jasoya’s series on glitches and bugs in the game.

Illnesses

I honestly do not care about illnesses with the exception of two illnesses in particular: parasites and infection. The former results in having to eat more food in order to sate the character’s hunger. I do not think this affects the water intake. The latter, infection, is just a pain in the ass; all it does is cause periodic damage as “the infection spreads”. Whatever.

Other illnesses include fatigue, which results in the player requiring sleep more regularly; insomnia, which results in the player requiring more sleep when sleeping; lethargy, which results in halved action point regeneration; and weakness, which results in 20% more damage inflicted from enemies.

For more information regarding illnesses, check out this article on Nukapedia.

No auto-healing companions

For bitches like me, this is a problem. I suck at this game, so I run away like a pussy when my companion goes down, because when my companion goes down, I will certainly go down. This is just how things go. Feature-wise, however, this is not really a problem, and it is really my own fault for sucking so bad at this game. This is not a bad feature in and of itself. Per se. On its own.

Adrenaline

Yeah, I could not care less. To be frank, I hardly notice this. In fact, I notice this so hardly, I notice it not at all.

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That was all I had to say. Now I must install the mod that allows me to quicksave anywhere I want because the game is too fucking unstable for me to be able to handle its bullshit anymore.

Fallout 4 is !great

I love this game. I decided to return to this game after half-a-year of not playing. I love how everything is so technically difficult. And, by “difficult”, I mean “retarded”.

Seriously, everything in this game is retarded. I say that going by the very definition of the word; the technology involved in this game’s engine is so outdated, it can’t even handle out-of-disk-space situations properly. I thought games had that these days, but no, we can’t have that because that would require actual work being put into the actual game engine instead of making a game world and scripts for the various quests which I frankly don’t give a single shit about.

Essentially, I lost some time playing because I happened to run out of disk space while playing the game. The reason this happened is because I usually don’t take into consideration the fact that the game’s save location is, by default, forever in the “my documents” folder, which is fucking retarded. That’s on my SSD dedicated to my OS and core programs! Let me change the damn save location! Jesus! Honestly, it would take like 5 minutes of coding. It’s a string of characters! But no, we can’t have that, either, because that would require adding non-essential stuff not related to gameplay to the game, and that’s a waste of time, innit? It has to be another pain in the poophole added to the already exhaustive list of dogshit this game has to offer. 

Thankfully, I only lost about six real-time days of progress, because I did at least have the foresight to copy my save files over to a location on a disk which is not in any way going to run out of disk space any time soon before I started my new session. Well, actually, it’s more like five days, because this happened yesterday, but whatever.  And, by the way, that’s five days on which occurrences of gameplay have occurred, not five days of gameplay. That would be worse, because the save file has eight days of gameplay behind it in total, which, I admit, may not be all that much.

Regardless, I really hate how shit the game engine on which this game runs is. In conjunction with with terrible occlusion culling, sub-par pathfinding, ghouls spawning right in my face for no reason*, V.A.T.S. causing the game to freeze intermittently, enemies throwing grenades like they’re fucking supervillains or some shit, and an array of other issues, now including a lack of error messages when there is no disk space left to make the save actually, you know, SAVE, this makes actually playing the game an absolute pita at times.

Finally, I would just like to say to those who would probably go all “well, don’t put all your eggs in one basket and make some extra saves etc. etc. etc. blah blah blah”: I can’t. Why? Ask Bethesda. They’re the ones who made this arbitrary rule where I can’t make manual saves while playing survival mode, which denies the player control over the save function. To the dumbass developers who had the great idea of making survival mode but managed to fuck it up somehow: Good job! You sure did fuck that up good well good pulchritudinously! And, no, I’m not going to stop playing on survival mode, because I’ve spent my entire save game playing that mode, so it’s not like I’m just going to cop out like a dipshit because Todd Howard and his team troupe are being shitstains again.

You know, I might have to install a mod which allows me to mitigate this bullshit; at this point, it’s practically a necessity. Ooh, that’s another good point for future reference: If you’re going to make a game mode in which the player is no longer in control of the save files, make sure the fucking game works sufficiently well enough to warrant it in the first place. Okay? Thanks.

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* This happened during my second run-through of Dun-whatever Borers or whatever the fuck it’s called. It was past the door with the flashback in the first run-through. Creepy shit, but that fucked up too, because I think I managed to break that as well. Fucking hell. Everything in this game breaks! Even the deathclaw in Concord got stuck in the hole it’s supposed to crawl out of! What a joke.

Time for take three…

Since I am so unbelievably out of touch with the gaming community aside from GDQ and a few other areas, I did not know this was a thing until right now. Apparently, Take-Two Interactive, the publisher responsible for publishing such games as Grand Theft Auto V and Borderlands 2, has decided that enough is enough and that telling OpenIV, a modding tool ostensibly used in an array of mods for Grand Theft Auto V, to cease and fucking desist!

Oi vey, where to begin? First of all, I have never bought Grand Theft Auto V. I have never played it. I have never even seen gameplay of it aside from a few snippets here and there. The reason is simple: I have had other games to play. It’s really that simple. I also saw the torture scene everybody apparently freaked out about, although it’s a really lame scene people’s reaction to which I really cannot feasibly understand. Regardless, I did not want to spoil the game for myself in the case that I actually bought that which I now consider an overpriced game, especially considering the clusterfuck Take-Two Interactive just made.

So what actually happened between Take-Two Interactive and OpenIV? Well, apparently, Take-Two Interactive had a bunch of illiterate fuckboys sit down and write up a cease-and-desist order to be sent to OpenIV. When I say “illiterate fuckboys”, I mean that in every sense of those words, particularly the first, as lead developer GooD-NTS, in his post on the forum, openly stated:

This has pretty much single-handedly resulted in my decision as to whether to buy the game or not to buy the game NOT TO BUY.  Bye bye, not gonna buy!

To make things even worse, Take-Two Interactive has also managed to get their hands on Kerbal Space Program. As far as the game itself goes, that purchase has already been made, so it’s not like I will just stop playing the game just because another shitstain company has gotten their hands on another game I have had a good deal of fun with over the years. However, I will not be getting any of the DLC releases which are supposedly in development or soon in development.

To finish things off, I will emplore all those who read this to sign this petition on Change.org, which I have realized is just another shithole, but whatever. If you fancy yourself a few mods, stand up against this. Don’t be a cuck.