Aug 24, 2017 - Fallout 4 is a polarizing title—and that's putting it lightly. A few glitches, bugs, and lore breaks on the long, dusty roads of The Commonwealth. Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch. The same authors of the unofficial Oblivion and Skyrim patches return with the Fallout 4 patch. Hundreds of gameplay, quest, NPC, object, text, and placement bugs and issues are addressed in the mod. It's safe to use and shouldn't break the game unless you have a ton of mods, where incompatibility may exist. There are a few standout quests in Fallout 4 that every player remembers. Then there are those we would rather forget. Everyone can agree, however, that we need more quests to fill out the game world. That is the precise goal of Fusion City Rising, by Recluse and Thuggysmurf. Yeah I'm not sure on that yet. I'm taking the Minutemen as backers for the teleporter building thing. The Railroad doesn't interest me much. Do want to play an Institute game when they release a synth bodymod.I remember the 'East Coast' Enclave Vertibirds taking quite some damage before breaking down in Fallout 3. However in Fallout 4 they fall from the sky when anything gives so much as an angry glance at them. I know they were altered and made lighter so they could lift off with power armored soldiers in them, but it's ridiculous. Also, although the BoS in the Capitol Ruins used T-45 power armors, in Fallout 4 they use versions of the T-60b armors, so surely they must've had some improvement.Actually, the base X-01 armor WAS made before the Great War by the Government. It's why the Enclave has them.
The one in Nuka-World is a special, altered variant. I do like how a soda company had access to it while the whole of America was crapping their long johns in fear of Red spies. Also that they had the technology and materials to improve upon something the best of the government had made.Also on the topic of power armor, those fusion cores are a joke. They power entire buildings for 200 years without losing charge, but 5 minutes in your power armor and you've got a dead battery.I also found 3 power cores in the footlocker of someone working at the Federal Rations Stockpile building. Click to expand.Vertibirds have always been able to carry power armors aborde them since fallout 2 but the upgrade version of the advanced enclave power armor was much lighter because of the matteria it was made of. Also the advanced enclave power armor was invented after the war in fallout 2 it even says so on the loading screen in 4which again gos against its own lore right there x(.there are just sooooooo many lore breaks in 4 and many of them aren't even listed.don't even mention vault 81 the computer isn't the only lore break there. I could make a wall of text just by talking about all the lore breaks there. That vault is just one massive lore break.also i agree so much on the power core being stupid its to make the players wear them less but even then we don't wear them that often because they break down so often. Vertibirds have always been able to carry power armors aborde them since fallout 2 but the upgrade version of the advanced enclave power armor was much lighter because of the matteria it was made of. Also the advanced enclave power armor was invented after the war in fallout 2 it even says so on the loading screen in 4which again gos against its own lore right there x(.there are just sooooooo many lore breaks in 4 and many of them aren't even listed.don't even mention vault 81 the computer isn't the only lore break there. I could make a wall of text just by talking about all the lore breaks there. That vault is just one massive lore break.also i agree so much on the power core being stupid its to make the players wear them less but even then we don't wear them that often because they break down so often. Click to expand.I know the Vertibirds were able to carry power armor as early as F3 at least, but I'm considering the power suits in F4 to be a seperate thing. Slightly helps not being annoyed by the fact that they are bending the lore over their knee so hard it goes full circle.And you are right, the Enclave power armor was made AFTER the war. Apologies, I should've done my research. Ironically a terminal inside Nuka World said it was from pre-war. Oh my god, this game.I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the lore of Vault 81 so I don't know much, really.I've put all points into Nuclear Physics so it lasts a while. I use my power armor extensively in Far Harbor and the Glowing Sea. I kinda dislike how the weapon butt melee button is also the grenade button and the power core ejection button. I've wasted like 12 power cores already because tabbing out of the game and back in makes it think the alt key is still being pressed, meaning that if you want to quick melee someone it immediately farts out it's nuclear core.Also if you really want to nitpick, the entire plot of Fallout 4 can't really be happening because the nuclear blastwave passing over you while lowering into the Vault should also expand down, obliterating the people descending. Click to expand.I would like to see a new outcast faction that is loyal to Lyon's ideals.Lore variations bother me, but I also can see them happening in things like random terminal entries. The strength of Bethesda's titles lie in environmental storytelling (every location has its own story) and less on the overarching story. While I do enjoy NV, I prefer worlds with more longevity.I feel as though the East Coast brotherhood should have been the ones with the X-01s (since they defeated the enclave) and would have been a fine in-cannon way to bring in Enclave armor.Anyway, I'm sleepy, glad to see this thread still kicking. Just jumping into the thread.Been playing FO3 again. I was wanting to, but kinda hesitant to, because of its annoying tendency to crash and the fact I have to keep manually telling it to stop trying to use the 360 controller (I don't feel like unplugging it lol), but ah well.Forgot how fun this game was. So many people trash-talk it saying FO:NV is sooooooo much better, I'm not sure I agree.I've done 2-3 playthroughs of NV since the last time I've done a playthrough of FO3 and I have to honestly question whether I really like NV all that much more.One of the things I hated about NV was that trying to get a decent gun took so long and when you finally did find one, it costs so many caps that you'd need to save up for it for a long long time, and the better guns used ridiculously rare ammo. I don't even know what the point of some of the guns in NV are, when you can't FIND any ammo for them, or you have to make your own (which could be difficult and expensive to do anyways).In FO3, though, you get a decent spread of guns right out of the gate, though the better ones are still locked behind various things. Yeah, you can get an assault rifle early in the game, but it will be rather weak because the Chinese Assault Rifles are just better. Or you could quest the ultimate named Xuanlong Assault Rifle which is even better!The shotguns in NV were nearly useless because you had 1-5 shots until you had to reload and in a close-encounter battle, the very last thing you want to be doing is reloading, which made the single-shot guns useless (which there are many of in early NV). Never saw a point to the carbines either, because those used rare ammo that was hard to get ahold of and really didn't do THAT much damage. The Varmint Rifle was 'eh', it fell through the floor pretty quick.About the only gun from early NV I could actually see getting any use was the humble 9mm pistol. They're everywhere, and they can take out a variety of foes. That, and if you were lucky enough, you could find a MF Pistol (that one that recharges itself), but you'd hopefully get some weapon repair kits by the time you find one of those. Then you were set for quite awhile.Going back to FO3, I liked how it gave you a more diverse list of guns that you could go with at the beginning of the game, and allowed you to have enough ammo that you could use a variety of guns, but yet not so much ammo that you just spread lead everywhere not caring about ammo. The good places to get ammo had powerful enemies which would cause you to eat ammo, so you had to at least be somewhat careful.Through most of NV, I kept thinking 'I wish I could FIND a decent gun.' Then you get to Vegas. Wow, 5000 caps for a HUNTING RIFLE!? Oh wait, the Hunting Rifles use.308. News to me, these rifles look exactly like my dad's 7mm or.243,.22, or other similar guns. I've never heard of a.308 hunting rifle, ever. They used.32 in FO3. No, they wanted the only decent guns to ONLY use rare stuff like.308 or Govt ammo, which you could never FIND anywhere.I will admit, though, that I miss iron sights when playing FO3. It's much harder to aim without a scope (especially when your character won't even use the iron sights), and sadly you can't stick a scope on a gun. If you wanted a scope, it was either a.44 (who puts a scope on a pistol, anyways?) or a sniper rifle. Always thought that was weird; pretty much everybody I know of has a scope on their hunting rifles IRL.I just feel the pacing of FO3 is much smoother than NV. In NV, you start out weak as crap, can't find anything whatsoever, until you get to a certain point, then the game absolutely showers you with all kinds of junk. FO3 starts you off small and builds you gradually, and your skills and level means more than your actual equipment. I'm still wrecking people with my unique 10mm SMG for example. Thinking of moving up to energy weapons, but need some more skill in that (100 small guns, 60 EW) first. Some more ammo wouldn't hurt either.EDIT: Also going to add that I was considering FO4 for awhile, but I just didn't feel the pull towards it. It looks like they stripped a lot of RPG elements out of it, and they dumbed the dialogue system down to where you only get 4 choices to respond to somebody and you can't even tell WHAT your response will be (without using mods) exactly, etc.How's the pacing of the game? Is it more like FO3, or is it like FO:NV where the fun police come and tell you that you can only use slow, powerless guns through the first several hours? Fallout 4 is okay, the dialogue system is ridiculous but at least the sarcastic answers live up to the franchise. Power armos finally feel immersive and not just like a skyrim armor in fallout.The main quest is okay and it leave you with a decent freedom quite like new vegas, weapons are pretty cool but at some level the super mutants are so tanky most gun will feel useless.The alien pistol can finally be moded at the workbench so that you can use regular ammo. And the game have good melee weapons.talking about ammo: Less ammo types, less confusions, it's better in my opinion. Companion and romance system finally looking like a real one and not just 'go with from point A to point B'Now the dlcs:-Automatron: decent but short story, crafting robot is super cool especially for survival it's a game changer.-Far harbor, the best dlc in the franchise. And if you manage to drop a legendary explosive harpoon gun and use the flechette mod the game is over, you have a weapon far better than the fatman and you will finally beat the crap out of these tanky super mutants.-Constructions dlcs and Vault-Tec workshop: actually help a lot in survival, also pretty cool.Nuka world: Good guns, can finally roleplay as a raider. Good quest, very very good sub-plot.oh and legendary weapons and armor: most of them will be droped from random legendary enemies and most of them will be pretty shitty, for example: walking cane with bonus damage when you stand still. And some better: explosive round submachine gun, two shots weapons (basically shoot twice and does double damage for no extra bullet cost).So it's a good game but some stuff were kind of dumbed down (typical of bethesda.) like the dialogue, but at least the fact that the lines are voiced make it so much more immersive.The skills, but that doesn't mean skills are shit.Anyway the game is worth it, but not on ps4 since you can only have bethesda's shitty paid mods which are basically bad copycat of free mods available on pc and xbox.ps: Survival mode is lit, really lit, and quite hard. I'd say the case is the opposite; NV offers actual routes through its overworld (North to beeline for New vegas at risk of getting chomped by abominations, East the way around and there's some in-between like through Hidden Valley). Fallout 3's just a flat map with maybe the occasional ridge. Rivers aren't a real block. The only solid barrier on the overworld is that kind of dumb solid masse of ruined buildings around DC proper.You can get nice weapons from the get go, shittons of dynamite and even an unique or two in the first hour, and the arsenal will only get better as it goes. I mostly refer to Chance's Knife, Ratslayer, the fully modded up Vermin Rifle, a Plasma Pistol and 9MM SMG. And with the Courier Stash you get some throwing spears, a shotgun, a 10MM Weathered and a GRENADE LAUNCHER. If that ain't a decent starting arsenal. When you get to Novac you'll be able to steal That Gun right away. As for the pricey sales, y'know, that's what Barter is for?Sure, Fo3 has some really starting forgiving drops that are mostly just laying around or dropped by some chump (There's a Sniper Rifle just behind V101 LOL). However weapon Condition is strangely enough, way less forgiving in 3. NPCs able to repair them are rarer, there are no Weapon Repair Kits and you need to meet a Repair skill threshold to repair past certain points. However the weapon variety just kind of stops a bit in. You don't really have a reason to use any other weapons than the Sniper Rifle and Chiese AR. Weapons being unmoddable, there is complete fodder you'll shoot twice like the Chinese Pistol and all melee weapons but their top tier version. Well, and on top of that Uniques are the same weapon with slightly better stats and a fancy name instead of being that, Unique.Albeit, for when you've finished the glorified tutorial that is the Vault 101 part of Fallout 3 you're about to or already have left Goodsprings unless you talk to absolutely everyone and exhaust their dialogues, nick everyone's shit to sell and do all the quests which will take you a bit more time, so in a way the 'real game' starts even earlier in NV than in 3.As for Fallout 4. It's Skyrim with guns and an even less focused design. I can't assume for your taste and what you want in a Fallout title but I myself was sorely disappointed in the slow, creeping descent into cold hate as the 50 hoursish that takes to faff around a decent amount of time and do the Main Quest. They took some lessons from New Vegas, with a capital K 'Kinda'. Yes, companions aren't as shitty and there's multiple endings (except not really, won't spoil) and repsective different Main Factions, with, again, more caveats. You might be seeing a pattern here. It's classic Bethesda's step forward for each two steps back. You might like how that turned out, I didn't. A couple of pals who have Fo3 as one if not their favourite game eva and myself who has FNV there along the classics were dissapointed and more mad the more we thought about it, but again, you can only know by seeing by yourself. Wasn't there a free weekend recently? Free Weekends do not work for me because I only have 6Mbps internet; I'd never get the thing downloaded before the weekend was over, lol.But eh.I'm not saying NV was a bad game per se, I'm just not sure FO3 deserves the bad press it gets TBH. There are things in FO3 that I did really like even more so than NV. Now, that part about rare guns and junk in NV. Well you kinda need to know they are there, or explore every nook and cranny. But wait, you get punished by doing this.hard. if you try to go away from Goodsprings in the wrong direction. Yes there are danger signs, but you might or might not see them. My first playthrough? So, I just got to the part where you take back the purifier, and you know.That's what NV is missing.Liberty Freaking Prime.Okay, yeah, NV has that B-52 but it just wasn't as cool for several reasons (one being how ridiculous an aircraft submerged underwater for 200+ years being able to fly whatsoever), but Liberty Prime was probably the coolest thing to happen in any Fallout game to date.So sad that it was so short, but so full of awesomeness and badassery.Oh, and an unrelated note. Another thing NV was missing, were the car bombs. Haha.So I was derping around in DC and this Vertibird decides it's going to land next to 4 cars. That went real well for them. Pulled out a silenced 10mm and shot the cars.5-6 seconds later, BOOM. Only 1 of the troops survived and was badly wounded. (Almost) free loot!That, and setting off chain reactions. So fun, so.cathartic. Well, yeah, the ending of FO3 sucked, but at least they gave us a better one with Broken Steel, and dude, those guns you got in Broken Steel. Hooo ya, so much fun (even if overpowered as crap).I already covered the iron sights thing above.And yeah some of the stuff you can make was awesome. I mean yeah there's crafting in NV, but I'm kinda surprised that you couldn't throw random stuff together to make a new weapon like you could in FO3, I have no idea why they would remove that, as it was such an awesome idea.They did give you Alien Epoxy.I mean.weapon repair kits, lol. So I guess that's something? Would have been nice if they had done the same for armor, though. Jury Rigging is like a 100% must-have perk in NV because of how freaking hard is it to repair some stuff without it. I would go as far as to say it is the single most important perk in the entire list.Will admit I'm slightly sad that I can't make use of it in FO3 lol. Well the base game for NV was actually suppose to be much much larger but thanks to dead lines and because they tryed to port it to console at the same time not to forget that the ported console version of NV is so horrible.(which is one of the many reason i rage and flips out everytime i hear about a game in a beta or early release or when there are more important matters to fix being ported to console instead)'CONSOLE PORTING!!!!' (make your own god damn games again)also console porting to fallout 3 have also hurt the game in some major ways both NV and 3 was suppose to be much larger with way more content and freedom and even have way more endings too. Toad mention that there could be hundreds of endings for the side missions at the end like in 1 and 2 where you see what happend to the people and places you help or kill or ruin. But instead there wheren't a single one only a few pictures shown instead. I'm actually going to play Tale of Two Wastelands soon, and I'm very excited because I think it combines alot of the great elements from both games (I've never tried it before, but I hear alot of good reactions).The biggest win fallout 3 had (for me) over NV was the passive storytelling. What I mean by this is that every piece of the map had a story to tell if you could be bothered to find it. I felt like there were so many more stories that you could just find or stumble upon. I loved finding new terminal entries all over the place.As mentioned, I loved building guns too in FO 3. The rock-it launcher was sooooo much fun to find and build. The railway rifle was also insanely rewarding for headshots xD.As I've mentioned before, I like the different direction they took the brotherhood and the inclusion of the outcasts, but that is subjective story preference.I don't really ever play an RPG for the ending, but for the journey. So, the endings for either game didn't really worry me too much. However, if you enjoyed Liberty Prime, He does make another appearance in FO4 =3I'm a robot junky, so I loved him too, but I love all the robots. Needless to say, automatron was a great game addition for me in FO4.Also, if anyone knows a good wolf or fox ear mod for NV or 3, let me know. I'd like to play as a callistan in my next run. :This is one of the reasons why I loathe consoles and why I'm on the PC side of PC vs Console. I don't go all 'PC Master Race' on people, however I DO agree that the PC is vastly superior to consoles in every single way except for effort required to get it up and running.Then console people will then say 'Pssh, just keep playing your PC games, why do you gotta pick on us consoles? We're not hurting you!' Like heck consoles aren't hurting PC gamers. The things you listed in your last post are very good examples of why I hate consoles period.That, and you know, they are total ripoffs. They are PCs in a box with proprietary motherboards and OS's, with their own little clubhouse and the other kids aren't allowed in it type deal. Consoles only serve to split the gaming community up, heck, Sony still refuses to allow Crossplay when everybody else is doing it. Heck, even NINTENDO will allow that. I am not one of those pc master race guys, i really like console games too but when they don't bother to wait with the porting (which is the devs of that games fault) until after a game is don and then that becomes the main priority over all other then i get really pissed because they always just drops everything else and just staples it all together and they don't go back to it after then.but i am a little mad that there aren't as many console games being made as it used to be and that they mostly just port games from pc over to console instead. But there have been some very good big games being made to console, but mostly by nintendo. I am not one of those pc master race guys, i really like console games too but when they don't bother to wait with the porting (which is the devs of that games fault) until after a game is don and then that becomes the main priority over all other then i get really pissed because they always just drops everything else and just staples it all together and they don't go back to it after then.but i am a little mad that there aren't as many console games being made as it used to be and that they mostly just port games from pc over to console instead. But there have been some very good big games being made to console, but mostly by nintendo. Click to expand.Well, see that's the thing: Consoles use the same architecture as PCs, and Consoles ARE PCs. They use all the same hardware (obsolete hardware, even) that PCs do. You could, if you hacked it, load Windows10 on a PS4/XB1. You'd just need to crack the BIOS and write drivers for any devices built-in to the console's motherboard.And Nintendo ain't even innocent of this either; I've heard of people running Windows and Linux on the Wii.The only thing you're getting with a console, is a 5 year old computer running special clubhouse OS that nobody is allowed to do anything with.About 3-4 months ago, I built a Ryzen-3 budget system. It blows the PS4 out of the water, and can easily compete with the PS4 Pro. It cost me $500 (though I re-used the HDD and OS License, but yet I spent extra elsewhere namely the PSU and the Case). Not that much more than the PS4 Pro.I can prove it, because of a game called Final Fantasy XIV - it runs at an average of 26-28FPS in outdoor areas on a PS4. My PC (the one I made for $500!) runs it at a straight 60 FPS.A PC I built 6 years ago does 40-45 FPS, so my 6 year old PC is stronger than the PS4. Weaker than the PS4 Pro though, but still. 6 year old PC. Lol.Anyways, sorry about the tangent, but to be honest, the console market is actually hurting game development, because studios are wasting money having to develop a game 2, 3 times to port it over to other OS's when it really does not need to be necessary. If we'd just get everybody to use PCs, then all we'd need is Windows and Linux. Then 100% of everybody could play every game.Which means developers could put more resources into, you know, actually making games and making them good, and with multiplayer games, everybody could play with each other. Nobody'd have to be locked out of the action because of what platform they're on. Well, we can just get it back on track, then.Eh, from what I've heard of CC, it sounds like most of the mods there are shameless cash-grabs except for the Survival Mod, but that is priced to rip you off, so a lot of people hated it.I'd suggest mods myself, but eh, I tend to go more vanilla with Skyrim/FO. Maybe someday I may try modding, but eh. I find that a lot of mods. I dunno, for some reason they seem oddly out of place in the game world.But yet oddly I don't feel that towards something like Frackin'Universe.Maybe it's just the kind of game it is? Don't touch the creation club! What follows is a complete Fallout timeline of all events from every game.Note that the is not our own, but rather one that has soon after World War II. So, while it takes place in the future, it is not our future, but a future as imagined in traditional 1950s-style science fiction.Note that the timeline is only for the chronological sequence of the Fallout world events; birthdates are not allowed here and must be put in the page.Behind the scenesMuch of the following text comes from the timeline in, written by, which in turn comes from the original, created. Fallout 4 is a game set in the Fallout Universe which is an alternate history universe that diverges from our universe as the Nuclear Age transformed the way civilizations approached the problems of manufacturing. This universe didn't see the same sort of Space Age that ours did, and it did not feature the move from vacuum tube technology to transistorized technology. A good reference for this sort of universe can be found in the science fiction of the 1930's to the early 1960's, especially those that utilized nuclear power for their basis of the next generation of tools, vehicles and equipment. If you read the works of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Anderson, Pohl and Piper, to just pick a few, from that time period, then you will get a very good idea of how this sort of alternate history is founded. This is a world where television just never caught on and where radio remained king of the airwaves. Hollywood didn't budge much from its formulation of that era, either, and the influences were those going from radio to cinema. It is an alt-history that is very similar to our universe and yet distinctly different in many, many ways, and each game in the series uses that as its basis and then offers a view of what it left behind when it all went to hell in nuclear flames as the Great War with China finally went nuclear on October 23, 2077.In creating a universe for players, a game designer (without regard to genre) must take into consideration how that universe actually functions. Even when running a paper and pencil campaign, players will learn about the world they are in by interacting with other people, the environment and coming across hidden or lost information. A game world has a history as its foundations, and that history can and does gain reinterpretations over time as more is developed for that world in the way of interesting missions, scenarios or new places to go. All of that historical information, be it before the player arrived or after they have started to explore, forms the basis for this thing known as Lore.The function of Lore is to give a foundation for game play, and when a series of game sessions (or games) within a given universe are created, Lore must be a foundation for that new material. This does not mean that Lore is infallible. In fact it may be contradictory based on who is giving it out, what they are aligned with and how they view those who did the activities being recounted. Lore also encompasses technology, weapons, armor and all the artifacts that are mentioned by stories. Lore is also a point of agreement for those who form a civilized unit known as a Nation State, though all Nations start at the family level and that is where Lore is first learned. The Fallout Universe has Lore behind all of this and more, and it creates a diverse background that has been or will be explained to a player either via in-game materials or playing in prior instances of this universe.When new instances of material for game play arrives in a universe, it is likely to feature many things that are not in agreement with prior Lore, and Fallout 4 is no different in this than any other game in a series of games that has a Lore based function behind it. These discontinuities form into broad categories and they deserve an examination.RETCONA Retcon is Retroactive Continuity change in a series set in the same universe be it fictional or gaming. This is a break or discontinuity with prior established Lore that offers a change to prior continuity of Lore in the new instance.There is an Alteration Retcon that is a change that attempts to explain itself based on prior material or offers a ready opportunity to understand it where prior games may have established one thing but had no way to gain information from the new game area so that a new continuity is established. A simple one for this is the presence of cats in FO4. All prior games established that cats had perished during the Great War, period. The Commonwealth, by not having much contact with the outside world, didn't have a say in this belief as they were not tied in with anything much beyond their geographic region and the few contacts that were established most likely didn't worry about the absence of cats as something to talk about. Cats are present in FO4 and the belief they had perished was true up to this point and a reason that this notion wasn't shot down was that it was true for all the prior areas in the franchise. Geographic isolation and limited contact meant that the survival of cats in the Commonwealth wasn't really known to anyone outside of it. The continuity of the Lore in prior games has changed retroactively with FO4 as there is a reason for this knowledge not to be known outside of this play area. The Lore has been Altered in this case and a reason that isn't stated but relatively obvious covers it.When there is an addition to Lore that has been established, that is to say something new that is consistent with prior Lore but not seen in prior game instances happens, this is an Addition Retcon. In FO4 the category of Pipe Weapons are introduced as the cheap and makeshift firearms made from available components that are not seen in prior games, and are thus an addition to firearms classification. These expedient weapons actually should have been seen in prior games, but never were, and there is no way to explain why they weren't. Many reasons could be thought up to cover this, but nothing readily apparent comes to mind, so it just must be taken at face value that these weapons exist in the Commonwealth and are thus part of the Lore.Another class of retcon is when something is removed from the Lore via the present game. This can happen when events are described as happening in a different sequence or placed before established sequences without any rationale behind it. Or if events happened in a prior story or understanding of Lore and are then said to have not happened then that is a Subtraction Retcon. In FO4 there is a Brotherhood entry in their database that establishes that the potato has gone extinct after the Great War, and yet the potato can be found as an ingredient in Fallout New Vegas. The potato actually did survive, exists and the Brotherhood had to go through that region to reach the east coast, and thus had every opportunity to know that the plant existed, thrived and was available as something that could be found or purchased. Part of the reason this is done is so that the above ground Tato plant, that yields fruit as a foodstuff can be seen as some sort of mutated hybrid, possibly with a pre-war tomato plant, yet the Tato is not the potato which is a root crop, not a fruit crop.Another form of retcon is that of a Compression Retcon where prior activities are compressed into a very short sequence which may exclude some information or even add in new material that did not happen in the established sequencing of events. This can happen when getting an overview history from an individual or organization, and may be done to justify the way they act in the present by removing or adding in minor material to the past. In FO4 the Player Character undergoes this with at least one individual, and it is the PC that is not allowed to actually give a full accounting of themselves even in brief so as to try and establish doubt in the mind of the player. These sorts of retcons are rare, but they do happen.Now with all of that said, the actual creativity necessary to create a new instance in a series requires understanding the background and history of that setting in the established context for that series. If you read any series of stories or watch television or film series, the retcon will happen, even by those people who strive to give as much continuity as possible. Games are not immune to this and often breaks with Lore happen when better technology to run a game appear that allows for new or novel game play to happen. Games in a series can be judged by how well they handle these changes and their ability to explain either via setting or actual in-game material, the changes that are seen. Some changes may be trivial and others may invalidate entire prior games in the series based on what the change is and how well it is handled. Thus Lore can be seen as a constraining factor, particularly when better technology can make an older way of doing things obsolete.Creativity is unbounded, however, and while a new way can be implemented it can also be explained as to how things have changed since the prior instance of the game which supported an older interpretation. Vampire the masquerade concept art. This is an opportunity for creativity and creators should not see this as a problem but a challenge to create the reasoning and rationale behind the change, which can be done via a Compression Retcon that retells of events since that prior instance and the current state. This will indicate that there is a back story to the change that may or may not receive a full treatment, but at least it is there as a placeholder.And that brings on FO4, as it is rife with retcons large and small across the entire game, and fans will notice these as they happen and be left scratching their heads as to how and why these changes were made. As cited above there are cats, pipe weapons and potatos as examples, but these are not alone in the game, and there are much larger ones that are just dropped in with no backstory, no environmental explanation and no real rationale behind them, and these can be seen as a problem of creative focus and storytelling on the part of Bethesda Game Studios.A first example, and most glaring, is power armor and the newly introduced power armor frame to which the power armor pieces are attached. This frame is powered by the newly found Fusion Core that is not seen in any prior instance of the series. Furthermore the Fusion Core is now used to power Gatling Lasers, which had been established as being powered by expendable Microfusion Cells (MF Cells) in Fallout, Fallout 2 and Electron Charge Packs (EC Packs).in Fallout 3 and FONV, These energy cells (generically) are utilized like expendable ammunition in any other weapon and are depleted and the spent cell ejected from the weapon. Thus within the series there has been a Lore retcon to the Gatling Laser from its prior instance with Interplay and its new life in Bethesda and Obsidian adhered to that with FONV. While the Fusion Core is run down and finally ejected, the entire way the Gatling Laser works has been changed. Is there a good reason or rationale given for this? Is the absence of whole categories of energy cells in FO4 given? Energy Cells, the specific type, and not the general category, are not present in FO4 at all. The Gauss Rifle used to be a single shot weapon utilizing MF Cells that were in a cluster and replaced between shots, not a weapon with a magazine of specialized 2mm ammo as seen in FO4.These may seem like relatively simple forms of retcons, and they are. The purpose is to streamline game play by removing some prior bits of technology, re-purposing others and then adding in a final type that is utilized in specific instances. There is only an environmental consideration in the setting of FO4's history that could explain this, and that is the advent of Mass Fusion and the lovely fusion generators that appear to still be producing power over two centuries after the Great War. The setting also gives ruins of Municipal Plutonium Wells where, presumably, older nuclear material was dumped once fusion generators replaced the older nuclear generators. Yet this environmental explanation, if true, would undermine the very problems of the Institute in the ways of power generation. These generators represent a distributed fusion system that appears to pre-date the Beryllium Agitator used to get the large reactor going in the Institute. We know what nuclear reactors look like from previous games, and these lovely yellow devices with a fusion core in them are not attached to nuclear generators, but stand alone systems. This is, in theory, a known and trusted technology that has proven the test of time and the Institute would have used that same technology to create new power sources as they expanded so that each sub-section of the Institute would have its own reliable power supply.When changing the Lore of a region and putting it into the past it is necessary to then take into account how it will be seen and understood as time goes on. To remove certain types of energy cells and streamline game play, and by adding in the fusion core and putting in a number of places to get fusion cores that are active generators, the concept is then not propagated throughout the region. Even if these new power systems had a decade to be put in place, or even two, they would not totally supplant the older systems which were also reliable for the long term. One item, the Nuclear Battery, seen in FO3 and FONV is totally absent from the Commonwealth, yet these were not only able to power up drained energy cells (generically), but also served as a form of jury rigged lighting when attached to long life light bulbs or lamps. Those were seen in many places in the wasteland, and the large number of such batteries points to a widespread utility function of them for smaller devices. These were subtracted from the Lore in the Commonwealth, and no number of Municipal Plutonium Wells to dump these batteries would explain their absence as they clearly had a function that reached to much smaller and independent technology as they were portable. Thus no matter how long the Wells were taking in old batteries, the necessary functions of equipment and pure utility in long-lasting power for low power draining equipment would remain. They served a different purpose from Fusion Cores and removing them doesn't make any sense and, due to the high price of Fusion Cores, makes the Nuclear Battery a cheaper and better known alternative than trying to adapt older systems to them. And as a battery it has easy to access terminals that allow for it to be utilized in a number of roles that the Fusion Core just can't fill. The change to the Fusion Core with no real good back-up for why it wasn't used by those able to build technical equipment post-war, and the absence of the older Nuclear Battery means that these are breaks with the Lore of the Fallout series within Bethesda's own tenure as owner of the series.Equipment Lore has ramifications for plot, storyline, and suspension of disbelief, thus even a cursory glance at what is seen above ground and functioning reveals major flaws in the plot design of FO4, holes which are not explained in any way. A much simpler break with Lore is that of Power Armor, a new favorite as it moves away from being an enhanced wearable armor and turns it into something closer to a personal vehicle. This might be something closer to the combat suits of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, or what some of the personnel wear in David Drake's Hammer's Slammers series, or even be considered as a form of transition to a Mech Suit or Mecha form of warfare. To get that spiffy animation and entry/exit from the suit, plus feeling like you are wearing something with a lot of heft behind it, Bethesda decided to scrap preexisting Lore built up throughout the Fallout franchise, even during its own tenure which kept with the prior Lore until FO4. That Lore requires specialized training and fitting for Power Armor to put it on. It is possible to repair such suits without such training, but to actively wear it and use it does require training. That was always training of the 'fade to black, it happens off screen' sort, and was meant to keep what was special about Power Armor a secret from the player. Getting accepted by a faction (normally the Brotherhood or, in FONV, the Enclave Remnants) was a reward for helping them and represented the point in which the PC was now able to handle some of the best equipment in the entire game.In FO4 any illiterate farm hand, junky, Raider, or other untrained individual can just put in a readily available Fusion Core into a Power Armor Frame and walk off with it and the armor on it. Raiders do that one better by crafting their own armor (which isn't so great but what do you expect of Raiders?) to put on the Frames thus creating new suits of low quality Power Armor. And there are more than enough Frames, some with armor already on them, sitting unattended around the wasteland so that anyone who has any wit at all can quickly pick up Frame and start walking around like a pro! Is there a reason for this change? I mean beyond the spiffy animation and feeling like a tank while using the stuff? That's it, you are able to feel awesome! So is anyone else, including that illiterate settler that just jumped into your suit of Power Armor because you forgot to take the Fusion Core out of it. Heaven help you if they have a Fusion Core in their inventory. FO4 the game where everyone gets to feel awesome because.reasons? What are the reasons for this change in technology?A good start at cobbling together a reason is to see that the prior instances of the same armor had some sort of undersuit as part the entire deal. It doesn't look like the hard frame system of FO4 and this then posits something like a soft frame with servos that need positioning for each user, and that required training. By using a distributed, small set of energy cells (generically), the old Power Armor could have a long life in the field, take wear and tear and allow the user to mitigate the weight of the suit through the servos that off-set it by enhancing the wearer's strength stat. In theory, if the new frame system was made for the old armor pieces, then all an individual has to do, when the frame arrives, is take off the individual pieces of armor and place them on the frame, shove a fusion core into the frame and make the transition from the prior instance to the new instance. All military in use and precision, with requirements built into contracts that would take years if not decades to fulfill. The Commonwealth would be the source of this new type of frame and would see the first military replacement of the prior soft frame system with this hard frame one. This happened so close to the bombs dropping that it never got beyond the Commonwealth and even the Enclave didn't have access to it. Perhaps it was a test deployment for the entire military, including National Guard units, just to make sure everyone knew how it worked. Maybe it even had a training manual, though none are seen in FO4, but they are likely given how the military operates. The Brotherhood may have run across records of this in the Citadel and the first team in, that Danse mentions, found the specs for making this stuff and they then got a production line in The Pitt going for it.Yes a likely theory can be created to explain this, and it has its own constraints to keep it so that it is geographically isolated. Now to actually run a vehicle, which is what Power Armor becomes, takes no training, because.reasons! In the post-war vehicles are a bit on the scarce side, and no one has bothered to get bicycles up and running, which should be relatively easy compared to Power Armor. Thus the absolute knowledge of how to run a vehicle by those born after the war is zero outside of a few factions like the BoS, Enclave or NCR. Even with a self-adjusting frame, and all that good stuff, there is no need for any training at all to utilize Power Armor. Imagine if this stuff was deployed in the field in China and the Chinese decided to get a few sets by staging a raid on a depot where they were being unpacked. Grab a Fusion Core put it in a frame with armor pieces on it, and then use a Stealthboy sitting on a nearby shelf to get out or even use some form of native Chinese stealth technology that you brought with you. Is this actually how the US military would want such suits to work? I mean, really, just get in and go? What will the Drill Sergeant have to yell at you for at that point? And just how the hell do you deal with an enemy who has stolen the suit, speaks English well enough to fool you, and infiltrates a unit in a suit of Power Armor? ![]() As production of this stuff was a contract negotiated with a war on, safeguards would be in place to prevent this, and each trooper would be expected to be able to maintain their suit, as well. How to efficiently use it so that you don't run down the Fusion Core would also be taught so as to lessen the logistics requirements of these suits. And from Proctor Ingram we also get the idea that all these frames just don't fit all that well: One Size Fits All, Fits None Well. Want to adjust it? Bring it to her and she'll do it and, probably, train you to do it for yourself so you don't have to pester her with it. Fallout 4 Lore Breaks LyricsThat would solve the Lore problem: training from the Brotherhood, the good old fashioned method. All those other pretty suits you couldn't use until you got training.Ah, training rears its ugly head yet again. One of the major parts of that training would include actually getting past the safety interlocks of the frame to get into it in the first place. This is the case of 'You Are Assigned This Frame, Soldier, And Expected To Maintain It And It Is Coded To You' sort of deal. Just like in prior wars you got issued equipment to keep track of, the Power Armor Frame would be no different. Logistics, so the military could know just what happened to each Frame, what its expected use of Fusion Cores was versus how it was actually used, and so that individuals wouldn't go joy riding or accidentally 'lose' one. Hop in and go would only be for authorized personnel, which does not include that ignorant post-war settler or Raider. Thus to operate Power Armor an individual would need training, authorization and then be held accountable for the equipment, all of which would have an impact on the post-war world of FO4. What we get is the implausible hop in and go system that streamlines game play and gets you a chance to feel Awesome! When you haven't done a damned thing to deserve that feeling. And then push that feeling down when you realize that any fool with a Fusion Core can do this. But you still got that spiffy animation!Can the Lore of Power Armor be salvaged? Yes, and it would need a thorough going-over to do so. Would have been nice to get a couple of screens of this on a Brotherhood terminal or have some one tell you a bit about how the stuff works. A couple of screens of text doesn't require lots of game development cash, and it is way cheaper than voice acting it. The male protagonist, by story, already had training in Power Armor and an authorization for it. The female protagonist is a bit of a loss, unless you make her day career helping to make the things.remember becoming a lawyer was done by night school, so she did have an unknown day job.These times I am using the environment to help explain things is creative, though as a derivative of presented material, and attempts to fit the new Lore into the old system of Lore. These are instances that could be readily done by the game design team and introduced in a more explicit fashion to make for smoother retcons. Lore is not a constraint on creativity, in fact when Lore is changed an opportunity to explain the discontinuity or change is then available to explain just how far and deep the Lore change actually isRetcons can respect prior Lore, adapt to it and still offer the changes in an understood framework of knowledge and history. Putting in artifacts, removing others and changing yet others each creates a lack of continuity and that lack is not an obstacle but a challenge to a game designer who seeks to expand the constraints and limits of prior material. There is no need to drop them in without telling what is behind them if the environment can tell the complete story, which means more than just inference or guesswork. Small pieces of primary material be they holotapes, books, magazines or other sources of information in a game setting can do that, as well. A small or even tiny bit of explicit material can go a long way to understanding a setting and how it is both similar to and different from other, prior settings in the same game universe.Now if an alternate to the main history universe is being told, which is an alt-alt-history, then so be it, and a new continuity can be established that has few if any links to the prior ones. That usually gets some introductory material or a few bits and pieces that get to a major plot, depending on if the goal is just to explain or try to abort (or revert) an alternate history. That last usually doesn't work out so well and leaves a question of just why the game was made in the first place. The former, where there is a clean and explicit break allows for just some pieces of the old continuity to pass onwards and the rest gets chucked, thus allowing the prior continuity to be preserved without retcons.Prior history, prior Lore and continuity are not just a constraint for creativity but an opportunity for truly creative individuals to explain just why these changes are present in the new instance of a story in any form of media, games included. There will always be discrepancies in long running story series which can be traced back through the earliest written works of mankind. Yet these works, be they religious, historical or fictional in content, do not fail as works when they give a reason and rationale for the discontinuity with prior works. Thematically they can still adhere to the basis of those prior works, respect them and yet offer changes to them be they putting in that generations of mankind were longer the closer to the state of original grace they were in time to the shifting of weapons used in Victorian England when a well known team seems to continually shift their favorite side-arms. Fallout 4 Lore Breaks![]() Some require explicit and purposeful work in explaining changes, while others need merely show the shift in time to reflect the changes within a single time period. There are instances in Fallout 4 where the retcons seem to be just tacked on to try and assert that the potato didn't survive the Great War and to explain why the Tato plant bears fruit.a useless change, by and large, and unnecessarily tries to invalidate prior known facts, instead of saying that the Tato plant appears to be some sort of mutant hybrid formed by genes jumping between plant species in the Commonwealth. It is unlikely to be a major plot point in any future game in the series, true, but why change something that only needs simple abridging or demonstration that in the localized region a new, mutant plant supplanted prior varieties?For all that Fallout 4 offers an abundant world to explore, it seems to miss the mark when it comes to fitting in this region of the franchise into the entire past history of the series. Perhaps the design team wanted to showcase all the great stuff they created early on to the players, and lost sight of the necessary respect that must be paid to prior design teams to keep a coherent world in play. There will always be retcons in series, it can never be helped as even the best single author will screw up details between stories: it is a given. Recognizing that these are changes, working them smoothly into the overall world, and then utilizing that newly created material to expand upon the world, that is an ultimate goal of a retcon: to change continuity and establish a new continuity and show why it makes sense. More of that sort of thing would have meant changing timing of events, leaving the feeling of being truly powerful for later in the game and, perhaps, not changing minor things that worked just fine and were streamlined for design purposes alone. That last is pure laziness on the part of the design team.perhaps they thought the pre-war world was very streamlined and efficient. Yet the Fallout franchise demonstrates just the opposite, even within Fallout 4.
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