Fallout 4

I'm not sure I even see enough similarity in gore between the old and new franchises to bother bringing up the comparison to defend FO3/FO4. Did heads and limbs fly off? Sure. Were there nasty ways to die? Absolutely. But I feel that a lot of the comparisons stop there. The old death animations, crits and gore were somewhat humorous as often as not, while a lot of the newer stuff like dismemberment and decapitations seem more 'faux-realistic' with ragdoll physics.

I mean, after I headshot a raider for the millionth time and the head just pops off, I stop caring. FO1/FO2 deaths like that actually made me LOL. The 'full-auto' death-dance where the bullets ripped your torso apart, with the ribs showing? People just kinda melting into piles of goo? They just seem completely different to me. There was a strong thread of the absurd in the old games that I'm not sure I see in the new.

I understand that with an FPS it would probably be far too difficult to have a set of scripted death animations, but whatevs.

I may get hate for saying this, but I've always had this nagging feeling that FO3 was just a generic FPS with Fallout branding on it. I like the games for what they are, I'll play them, but it isn't like it was a seamless transition, so to speak.

Vorph_sl said:

Although I'm not quite sure what your playstyle is, since you mention both ammo and melee. You're right that melee and companions generally don't mix, since with melee you want to be sneaking and they will ruin that. One thing I can recommend though, use VATS as a gap-closer. You basically teleport to the enemy to land each attack.

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I don't want to run around and melee 24/7, and I don't want to have to stealth to make melee viable. I should probably rely on turbo, but meh. I'm actually very happy that we'll be getting a sprint ability in 4.

I've always felt that stealth benefits were too broad in 3, and should only apply to certain stealth-themed weapons. I'm also happy seeing the perk where stealth increases damage to a much smaller selection of weapons, as opposed to stuff like"STEALTH SUPER SLEDGE OF DOOM".

I didn't know anything about any sort of VATS "teleport". I did know that you couldn't target individual hit locations (bad) and that some melee weapons got special abilities (meh), but I never thought that VATS would even work with melee at range. /boggle. I'll have to try it.

In FO3 I felt like there was a lot of things working against melee in general and that it was highly situational. Melee targets that you don't want to melee against can close range pretty damn quickly, and I'd prefer to legshot a Deathclaw or generically crit-kill one with shooting before I try standing toe-to-toe in melee. Cazadors might be easier but fuck that poison, and shotguns work so well against them. And against ranged NPCs, it just seems vastly easier to just return fire instead of trying to chase them down. Again, I'll have to try VATS at a distance, but I've had a few situations where I've tried running into a group of raiders/assassins to melee and they just scatter like chaff while all the NPCs focus fire on me.

When I say 'playstyle', it's probably more like picking a weapon for the situation, but I'd like to melee if possible. I like having followers to 'weaken' enemies and then methodically finishing enemies off myself, but a lot of the time my followers kill quicker than I can get there, hell, at times I have to race them for shooting killshots lol. And if I try to cripple legs and then melee, half the time it's pointless thanks to followers and it feels like at that point it's easier to just stick with a ranged weapon.

The perk Tuco posted about the 50% damage reduction and bonus carry weight sounds interesting, as a large part of the reason I take followers is to be loot mules and to spread damage out. Right now with NV I'm a hair away from either taking no followers at all, or working through follower quests with only one follower at a time. That or ramping up the game difficulty I guess (I remember debating that in FO3 as well)