Revisiting Fallout 4 (and mod recommendations)

[Emphyrio]

Fallout 4 was close to being a great game. That's what a replay with the "Grounded Commonwealth" mod is teaching me (the mod removes diversity and girlbosses from places they don't belong (the entire game)).

Fallout 4 has really good dungeons, much better than Skyrim. Skyrim's dungeons were good, but they had two features they were frequently criticized for.

First was limited tilesets that repeated too frequently. Skyrim's level designers did a great job of hiding how often assets were reusued and mixing and matching to make interesting areas, but there were just too few to carry the game. If Skyrim had five areas (ice, cave, draugr, dwemer, castle), then F4 must have 5x more. And the designers apperantly have greater inspiration with the postapoc setting to give each location its own feel and story. For example they might take the tileset used for apartments and made a museum out of it.

The second criticism Skyrim dungeons got was that they were usually a straight line with a secret exit at the end. Many of F4's areas are totally nonlinear. They have multiple entrances, or they're above ground so can be approached from any direction. Some dungeons lead into other dungeons, and sometimes you can find a way to skip right to the "boss" and get the best treasure without fighting through fortified goons first.
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F4 has two big problems, and I don't know if mods are capable of fixing them. The first is the main story and faction questlines. They're ********. Whatever. The second problem is harder to ignore: the entire crafting/mod/settlement/trash collection cycle. By about level 15 or 20 you'll start getting bogged down and spending a lot of time in menus trying to sort what's what.

So back in Fallout 3 somebody decided that the game should be about collecting garbage. Like every new system Beth makes it was only a half-assed implementation, so you'd only need to find the few pieces of garbage that were useful to you, like lunchboxes to make bottlecap mines. In F4 they really ramped it up and now every piece of ambient trash contains raw materials that you need to craft weapon and armor mods or develop settlements. It's all useful for something, so you're encouraged to hoover up everything- pencils, glue bottles, oven mitts. Companions insult you constantly for picking up the trash!

The reason you collect all this crap is for crafting mods, and mods seem cool at first but the way they were implemented is bad. Armor has (usually) two mod slots visible in the crafting menu, but there's really five "tags" that determine what it is. The material (metal, leather, raider, synth, combat armor, etc), the size ("blank", sturdy, heavy), the hardness, the two visible mod slots, and legendary effects. By level 20 you'll start seeing armor with names like this: "Powered sturdy polished leaded metal left arm". By default the UI often cuts off such long names. This kind of crap starts dropping constantly and you need to keep checking each of your four limbs and torso to see what's new. People asked for segmented armor to return, and well here it is. Unfortunately there's no aesthetic benefit, it all looks like crap and you need to fill every slot to get full stats. There's also only a few pieces of clothing that let you wear armor above it. If you want a one-piece armored outfit like in F3 and NV- too bad, there's only a few and they suck.

It gets even worse with weapons. "Exterminator's ported calibrated silenced assault rifle" might be the name and you see it has a big drum magazine. Is it full auto? That's a big deal because the same bullet can do vastly different damage depending on which gun shoots it and what your perks are. A .45 from a submachine gun might do 11 damage while a combat rifle shooting the same bullet does 55. My guy has perks that give +60% damage to full auto guns. Several times I've picked up weapons that LOOK like big machineguns, and found that they're single shot. Miniguns don't count as automatics for this perk either.
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Are there mods that can fix my frustrations with the armor and weapons? It seems there's mostly just mods that make crafting more complex and so the problem would be worse. In my ideal mod, guns would be visually distinct so that automatics aren't identical to single-shots, and such things as "hardened receivers" that increase damage by a tier, but don't change the weapon appearance, aren't a thing. I don't even know what you could do with armor. It would be nice if the regular, sturdy and heavy versions of armor could all coexist instead of being straight upgrades.

[wndrbr]

I don't agree about Skyrim dungeons being good, they are garbage. Linear like a rail, poor traps, poor encounter design, no such thing as attrition because it's a bethesda game where nothing matters, poor tileset variety, and they always end with a goofy secret exit. Fo4's dungeons were indeed a massive improvement, except for the part where the settlers/minutemen/etc constantly sending you to Corvega plant, that stupid place gets repopulated with enemies on almost a daily basis.

Can't really recommend any big progression-related mods, I beaten Fo4 back when there were barely any mods to play. There's a mod that allows you to double-dip with certain weapons (i.e. minigun its makes minigun benefit from both Commando and Heavy weapons perks), but that's about it.

[gerey]

A few I can think of would be to "fix" the storytelling:

Start Me Up Redux - edits a lot of audio and text files so the plot isn't about finding your ******** child - there's a lot of poorly implemented options but the one I always pick up is starting the vault.

Roleplayer's Expanded Dialogue (RED) - edits and adds a lot more dialogue choices, expands skillchecks (but really, they're perk checks) so you can actually roleplay in the game, or at least as much as the systems in FO4 allow you to do it. The mod is "mostly" complete, but the author has stopped updating after he got bullied for removing AI VA from the game after the voice actress complained about her voice being the base for AI generated voices.

Grounded Commonwealth - removes all the girlbosses and obnoxious minorities so Fallout can more closely resemble the time period it is inspired from. I should mention that the mod does a lot of changes and most likely won't play well with many others mods. There's a way to smooth over compatibility issues, but your mileage may vary.

The "remake" of the Enclave mod is slated to be coming out this year, and I'm hoping it's good enough to provide an alternative faction to side with that isn't as poorly written as the ones in the game.

As for the other complaints - there are mods that replace unique weapons with models of other fanmade guns (usually ones that fit the aesthetic of the game), but those come down to personal choice.

Concerning armor and weapon balance, there's a lot of different mods that all try to accomplish different things, so this is also a very subjective choice. I'll have to dig through my tracked mods to see if there's any I'd recommend.

[junior]

rofl nice copypasta

[Emphyrio]

I couldn't find an existing mod to fix the armor/weapon issues the way I want. I'll probably have to make the mods myself.

For armor, a solution that would satisfy me is to make all of the armor sets one piece instead of five. There's not much of an aesthetic benefit to mix-and-matching. I hope this is something I can do without needing to mess with rigs and 3d models or whatever.

For guns I'd like to change things so that bullets consistently do similar damage between guns, and automatics are visually distinct from non-autos. And I want to add in guns from New Vegas that are missing from FO4 for no good reason especially 40mm grenade launcher.

[gerey]

For guns I'd like to change things so that bullets consistently do similar damage between guns

Consistent Weapon Damage - "Makes the automatic receivers do the same damage as the semi-automatic equivalents."
TRUE DAMAGE - "Automatically balances all your firearms according to weapon type and caliber."
Wasteland Ballistics - "Adds a wound mechanic to bullets based on the caliber, shape, mass and speed of their real life counterparts."

and automatics are visually distinct from non-autos

I don't think that's really possible to do with the way Fallout 4 handles guns. At best you can make unique weapons different from their mundane counteparts.

And I want to add in guns from New Vegas that are missing from FO4 for no good reason especially 40mm grenade launcher

Your best bet is to follow the team working on the New Vegas remake in Fallout 4 - they tend to release weapons they've recreated for the project as separate mods. There's a bunch of other people that have "ported" New Vegas weapons to FO4, so you'll have to search the Nexus if you want something specific.

Here's a mod that puts the M79 grenade launcher into the game.

[Emphyrio]

I don't think that's really possible to do with the way Fallout 4 handles guns. At best you can make unique weapons different from their mundane counteparts.

I think what I'll do is basically remove the "auto receiver" from 10mm pistol and the non-auto receivers of the "assault rifle" and add in mod weapons like 10mm submachinegun and .223 service rifle to fill those roles instead.

Something like this

► Show Spoiler

Tier 0
.45 Pipe submachinegun
.38 pipe revolver
.223 pipe bolt-action rifle
Pipe shotgun
Laser musket

Tier 1
10mm pistol
.38 normal revolver
.45 normal submachinegun
Doublebarrel shotgun
.223 bolt rifle
Gamma gun

Tier 2
.223 pistol
10mm subgun
.357 revolver/levergun
Pump shotgun
.223 service rifle
Wattz laser
Plasma pistol
.308 bolt action

Tier 3
.223 machinegun
.223 carbine (auto)
.44 revolver/levergun
.308 CETME
Auto shotgun
Auto laser
Auto plasma
.50 bolt action

Tier 4
Etc.

It will probably be better if combined with a mod that changes the +20% damage perks to something more subtle. Especially because "big guns" are still problematic.

[rusty_shackleford]

FO76 has an all around superior weapon/armor modding system iirc, if you're looking for inspiration. It's similar, but better.

[Emphyrio]

I am pleased with how easy it is to mod the weapons and mods. I've already changed around the calibers so that they're doing consistent damage between guns, removed the receiver mods that do nothing but boost damage, and made each gun either only single-shot or only automatic. Everything is tested and working without any problems and raiders are dropping the right ammo. Now I just need to add guns from other people's mods, which I hope won't be hard.

[Emphyrio]

OK, just adding a gun from another mod into my mod is extremely difficult and frustrating. I can spawn in the gun but it usually shows up invisible and with no mods attached. It shows up correctly in the CK render window. I got the gun to not be invisible one time but the mag and sights didn't appear and it wasn't aligned correctly when aiming but after I "fixed" those issues it was invisible again.

I keep getting the error "LOOTJOY: Function keyword 'remapNode' (0004f62c): unable to find matching target connect parent" or "unable to find matching source node".


edit: finally got it working after SEVEN HOURS. wtf is the point of a "duplicate" function that doesn't duplicate? Had to manually fix about a hundred missing things.