Oh, that sounds delightful! Something to look forward to.

>But it also allows you
>turn that pipe pistol you found into an SMG, a heavy pistol, or a
>semi-auto sniper rifle depending on the parts you add to it.

Who knew it would take an apocalypse to finally deliver on the promise of Modular Personal Weapon Systems? :)

> The old hand wave of saying that your character
>couldn't use power armor without proper training would have been a
>stretch for a pre-war military vet

Mm. Oddly, though, they seem to have just dumped that idea from the backstory entirely rather than just accepting that the player character already has power armor training. I mean, Tendo Choi there just blithely expects that this total stranger he knows nothing about will be able to climb aboard and go. Then again, maybe he's just clueless about it and lucks out that the person he's talking to is a vet. Broken clock, twice a day, etc.

(I'm not the only one who noticed that Fergus is really Tendo Choi, am I? :)

Also, on this line, I'm not sure the female PC is meant to be a veteran; her line about the man speaking at the veterans' meeting happens before you can switch (nicely done way of letting the player make that call for an established adult character, I thought), and whichever one of them you choose, the law diploma in the living room is still hers. So maybe she's just resourceful as hell. Personally, I prefer to believe they're both vets, but the introductory bits slightly imply against.

>So, by giving you armor but making it
>reliant on fusion cores, they've at least found a way to dissuade
>players from abusing it in the early game to just steamroll their way
>to Diamond City.

At least until one gets frustrated with the whole "scarcity of every dang thing" business and turns god mode on. Presumably not an option for console players, admittedly.

>Yeah, the better the environment looks the easier it is to get
>immersed, and then I run into someone and the immersion totally
>evaporates. Still, it's nice to have a conversation where the world
>doesn't seem to freeze and I get this glass-eyed stare from the NPC.

What's most interesting about the way the characters look in this game, I would contend, is that you can see what they were trying to do, with the facial expressions and body animations and whatnot, and how they didn't quite get it, but also that somewhere down the line somebody probably is going to get it. Possibly in whatever FO4's New Vegas is, possibly in Elder Scrolls VI, possibly in somebody else's game altogether, but it shows that the technology is reaching a point where making characters decently lifelike is probably just implementation now. Which is pretty cool.

>I'm rather ambivalent upon the whole "SimFallout" element, mostly
>because it seemed like every time I walked into Sanctuary, one of the
>settlers was begging me to go rescue his kidnapped friend. I've got
>enough firepower at the bridge to take down an army, and yet
>raiders/supermutants keep sneaking in and grabbing somebody. ARGH!

Heh, it's like a holdover from the Dawnguard expansion for Skyrim. "Honestly, do I have one friend in the entire province who can manage not to get kidnapped by vampires? Balgruuf, for Talos's sake, you have the second-baddest-ass húskarl in Tamriel after mine and a court wizard. Was it their day off?"

>Oh, the number of things I've had to learn about this game by reading
>online forums or the wiki. Example: You can use HTML tags when giving
>weapons unique names.

That might not even be intentional, knowing Bethesda. :) (Hard to explain in that rigidly-in-universe tutorial style they use, either way.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.