Likes and Dislikes - Settlements and Settlers
There are a few things new with F4 that were not around in previous Fallouts, going all the way back to F1 on the PC, before there was an xBox.
One of those new things is putting up Settlements, which goes hand-in-hand with recruiting and utilizing Settlers. This is, as far as I know, unique to the RPG games. I haven't played an online game since Everquest (dude! You're like, old!), so I don't know how they do things, but for this specific genre, this is a new thing. Well, you could build houses in Skyrim, but not whole settlements. Then again, you can't furnish and occupy your dwelling the way you could in Skyrim, so there's that. In fact, that's a Dislike: there's no place in F4 that I've found that I can call, and make my own space the way I could in F3 and New Vegas. Or even as Commander Shepherd.
I like being able to build buildings and furnish them and all the things that go with building settlements. What I don't like is the fact that gathering the necessary crap used to build those buildings and accessories is so time-consuming and tedious. The very first location you come to after leaving the vault is your old neighborhood. It's mostly thrashed, but there are some houses still intact that you can use to build a base of operations out of, including the house you shared with your family. There is also plenty of scrap in the form of destroyed houses, cars, dead wood, furniture, and so on, that you can collect and use to build stuff with. Scraping in-game is actually pretty automatic as long as you have a workbench in the area in question, and you go into "build" mode.
What I don't like is that there are so many perfectly junked up cars, houses, tires, and other materials all over the wasteland that you can't do anything about. Nobody likes a junked up wasteland, and I'm just the one to clean it up. I mean, after all, that's the main mission of one of the first factions you come to: rebuild civilization. If you live in squalor, that makes you a Raider, in my book. So basically, if you're outside a settlement area, that leaves you to collect coffee pots, hot plates, dishes, tin cans, ashtrays, empty milk bottles, and all kinds of junk; all of which you have to lug to one of your workbenches and store for future building use.
That's when you're not being shot at by Raiders or Gunners, slapped around by ghouls or Deathclaws, or eaten by mutated lobsters or bears. So annoying while you're trying to tidy up the wasteland. I wonder how Marie Kondo (
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing) would handle it.
Now, if you have a workbench, and you also have an armor bench, and a weapons bench in the same settlement (conveniently provided to you in Sanctuary, your old 'hood - if upscale middle class enclaves can be refered to as "'hoods"), what you put in one bench can be used in all the benches. Later on, you will also find chemistry benches, and power armor stations, which are also classes of benches.
Further into the game, as you establish trade routes, the things that are available to you in one settlement begin to be available to you in other settlements, which is a good thing. Also, your settlers, who don't really seem to have much interest in working to any great extent (more on settlers later), don't seem to bother the stuff in your benches, which is also good, because you can store your weapons and armor there as well. Which, as you can see, could be a handy thing.
There are a couple of methods for looking at the health and welfare stats of your settlements. One is through your handy-dandy Pip Boy, and the other is in build mode. The Pip Boy display will give you basically how many people in the settlement, their overall happiness level, and whether it's trending up or down. It's all dependent on the stats you'll see in build mode while you're at the actual settlement (the Pip Boy will show you the basics from where ever you are in the world). Things to keep track of include number of beds, defense, water, food, and so on. If you've played the game, you'll know that beds inside buildings bring happiness, whereas beds out in the open do not.
Eventually, you will put in booths for vending in your settlements, which I like. You have the scavenging booth early on, which should theoretically bring in scrap to build and mod stuff with. I have several booths in various settlements, but I can't tell if it's actually working. I don't like that you have to actually assign settlers to work the various booths, though I confess I have yet to actually put in a weapons or armor booth.
Since this post was about Settlements and Settlers, let's talk about the latter, since I've about exhausted my KSAs concerning settlements.
I don't like that the settlers are like a bunch of children, waiting for someone to feed and shelter them. In the real world, they're called "Democratic voters," but I play RPGs to escape the real world for at least a little while.
There is a fairly complex system for recruiting and assigning settlers to tasks, as well as keeping them happy. You have to provide shelter, defense, water, and food, and I think it even involves equipping them with better weapons and clothing and/or armor. So I've heard online, and it must be true.
More than 200 years after the world was destroyed by more nuclear weapons than you though possible, you'd think they would be more autonomous, and maybe once the booths are in, they get that way, but in the meantime, they're not. They're like animal babies in the wild, waiting for mom or dad to feed them, and all that. Finding salvage around the wasteland is laborious and tedious. Not to mention the snide comments from your traveling companions about wasting time with useless crap - "I'd just leave that if I were you." This is crap you need to build, and there's no help for it. And there is a lot of crap out there to find. You would think that people building a safe and secure settlement would be down for helping out around the place, but so far, they're more interested in seeing what you can do for them. "We don't have enough beds; we don't have enough water; we don't have any EBT cards to use at strip clubs and casinos." Okay, I made that last one up. You get the idea.
Okay, that's enough for this post. Future topics include: Modifying (modding) unique or legendary weapons, and not being able to unmodify any weapon. My next post will probably deal with something that's been bugging me for a while now: the sheer numbers of mutants, ghouls, raiders, and other nasty critters, as well as the re-spawning thereof. Off to work. It's interfering with my real and imaginary life.
... that was funny
