Recent reviews by Werewolf™

I'm not sure where to start with this one. Do I enjoy playing the game? Yes. What do I like about the game? I don't know?! You see, when I try to think of all the 'pros' and 'cons' to this game, I come up with far more 'cons' than 'pros'.

I've tried to be fair by including possible fixes to these issues where appropriate:

• For a game that is (in part) about trying to work out who the imposter(s) are, people are far too quick to jump to accusations and to band-wagoning against the first person accused. Asking for evidence can be seen as "sus". This is probably more common when playing with random people on the internet rather than in a group with friends.
  
• Quite often people will just spam the colour of the person they are accusing rather than saying why they are accusing them. Occasionally they might add "sus" but it's still "Green sus" ad infinity.
  
• The game needs to do something about players who leave during a game, though I'm not sure if punishments are the way to solve this, or what punishments would be appropriate. All I know for certain is that some people will have connection issues and they shouldn't be punished.
  
  • I suspect that a lot of the players who disconnect at the start of rounds is because they didn't get to be the imposter. We could possibly fix this by adding a preference system where players could opt in or out of being an imposter, so long as it was clear that opting in to be an imposter is not a 100% guarantee that you will be.
    
  • We then have dead players who disconnect because they have died, leaving their tasks undone. The game does thankfully account for this by taking theirs away from the total list.
• The game needs different icons for how players have died or left. Right now if a player dies, is ejected or leaves, then there will be a red 'X' next to their player icon.
  I think the game would benefit from using separate icons to indicate whether the player was killed, left or ejected. I would suggest:
  
  1. A gravestone for a player that has been killed.
     
  2. An open airlock (or other map appropriate icon) for someone who has been ejected,
     
  3. A disconnected Ethernet cable for someone who left,
     
  4. A boot for someone who was kicked,
     
  5. A 'No entry' icon for someone who was banned.
  If a player leaves after they have died, the icon should stay as the dead gravestone icon.
  
• The game would benefit from making it clearer when a meeting is an emergency meeting, or a reported body. At the moment, you get 2 very similar screen splashes then the same voting screen with “Who is the Imposter” at the top. I think it would help to replace that “Who is the Imposter” text with "Emergency Meeting" or "Body/Bodies Found", again as appropriate.
  
• I think it would also help if the chat marked when meetings happened, similar to the 'Player voted' notices. Maybe meetings could start with "(Player) reported the body of (dead player) in (location).", or "(Player) called an emergency meeting."
  Then at the close of the meeting, post the result in chat - "(Player was voted out." or "No players were ejected - Skipped / Tied vote."
  
• The game might have a little too much rule customisation to it. That in itself isn't a bad thing, but maybe they could set it so increasing one thing has a mirrored effect on something else.
  
  1. For example, if you increased the amount of discussion time then it decreased the amount of voting time. Likewise increasing voting time would take away from discussion time.
     
  2. Another possibility could be if you increase player movement speed at the cost of player vision range with it. Or you have slower players who are able to see further.
     Just 2 examples, but something to think about.
• On a related note, players don't have any way of checking game rules once in game. If you are the 10th player joining a server and the host is trying to start ASAP, then you have just 5 seconds to read through a lot of text. This could be solved by simply listing the rules on the map page, which players can already check at any time.
  
• I like that ghost players still have something to do once they've died, but it is annoying when all the remaining living players have finished their tasks and are waiting on the dead to finish their tasks, who are essentially a team they can't communicate with. At least living players can call meetings.
  Again I have a couple of ideas on how to fix this, but neither is perfect:
  
  1. Set it so when a player dies, all of their tasks are immediately completed. However this could lead to a deadlock situation where an imposter kills the last crewmember simultaneously triggering a crew win and an imposter win.
     
  2. Set it so the person who reports a body inherits any remaining tasks the dead crewman had. The 2 problems here being that not all bodies get reported, so who would gets those tasks? And if players knew that reporting a body would mean they might get more tasks, then that might discourage them from even reporting bodies in the first place.
     
  3. Make the dead players do simplified versions of the tasks they had left. For example, if they are fixing wires then they only need to connect 1 or 2 wires instead of the usual 4.
• There is no AFK kicker. I was in a game where I was one of the two imposters and also the host. I was dead and the other imposter was AFK. The crew won because there was nothing stopping them. I mention I was host because outside of the vote menu, I could not kick that AFK player.
  To be fair, allowing hosts the ability to kick other players mid game would be a bad idea, so I would suggest that all players can at least flag others as AFK. If that marked player does not respond in time, then the game can kick them.
  
• My last ‘con’ point is all the small bugs like disconnection errors and players who can't vote despite being alive. Thankfully not too common, but they do crop up from time to time.

• Working out the identity of the imposter(s) is immensely rewarding especially when you trick them into admitting something they didn’t want to. It just doesn’t get old.
  
• Equally being the imposter and getting away with it is very satisfying, especially when you have gone several rounds of voting, managing to convince the crew you are one of them.

So yeah when you look at all those 'cons', you would wonder why someone would recommend buying this game. I think it's one of those games that has one or two big 'pro' points, and lots of little 'con' points. Is it fun to work out who the imposters are? Yes. Is that a big 'pro' point? Maybe so.

I'm going to close out with a suggestion for a new feature - some form of safe or sus flagging system. All this would be is something players can use to mark other players as either "Safe" or "Suspicious." If you've ever played Minesweeper this is the same flagging system, marking where you think is a mine is, except you are marking people as either safe or as a possible imposter.
Each player would only see their own and it would not be broadcast in chat. Maybe it could be done by simply changing the boarder/window colour in the chat, or adding Angel + Devil icons which go in place of the red X icons. When those players die/leave/are ejected, then the icon updates accordingly.

A beautifully simple game. Build train track and watch as passengers go from A to B.

Then watch as more stations get added and the number of passengers wanting to go in different directions increase.

Then start to panic because all of a sudden some obscure station well away from the rest is about to overcrowd and cause the game to fail because it's not connected to any other stations.....

As of the time of writing this, I have played 1,093 hours of Fallout 4 over 7 play-throughs, so it's clear that I certainly liked this game. I played 5 of those play-throughs without any mods. I've never used the Creation club at all, so any mods I have used have come via Nexus mods. I didn't start adding mods until I had gained all the achievements as doing so blocks achievements from being earned.

Having now modded the game I can say that certain mods are needed, notably the 'Fallout 4 Unofficial Patch'. Just looking though the patch notes shows how many bugs were left in the game at release, and even after DLC's and patches, how many bugs there still are.

But I just said I played the game all the way through 5 times without mods. I wish I could be more descriptive as to why I keep playing the game so much, but I don't think I can other than explaining what I did through each play-through.

1. My 1st play-through was an open minded good guy. Went with the Minuteman ending.
   
2. This time around I wanted to do an 'opposite' run. Every perk I took in the first game I was 'banned' from. I also avoided all companions, side quests and factions where I could. Played the bad guy and went for the Institute ending.
   
3. My first Survival mode play-through. Prior to this I had played on 'normal' difficulty and first 20-30 levels were brutal. Once you have it figured out though, survival mode is quite easy. Went for a Brotherhood ending notably to use their Vertibirds to compensate for the lack of fast travel.
   
4. This play-through was more of a 'finishing off' job. I wanted to see if I could sequence break the game and used the console to give myself all the perks, ammo, armour and weapons I wanted right from leaving the vault. I also set the game to 'Easy' difficulty. For the sake of it, this was the Railroad ending.
   
5. Play-through number 5 was my first No-Gun play-through, instead I chose to only using melee and throwables. Back on survival mode as well. Just like before the first 30 or so levels were brutal, even more so now because I didn't have guns! That changed at Lv35 when I killed an enemy holding an 'Instigating Pole Hook'. On a Stealth/Blitz based build, this already OP weapon became insanely OP. It ended up being the only weapon I carried beyond grenades.
   
6. Number 6 was my first modded run. The main mods I used were to disable VATS and the throwing arc for the 'Demolition Expert' perk, and to boost up the Minutemen into an actually viable force
   
7. Finally my current play-though. Heavily modded to make it harder, such as by making ammo and health items rarer, making caps have weight, 50% less exp from everything, no using power armour at all, as well as adding a tonne of ghouls and making the BoS and the Institute much more powerful. I'm going for the Institute ending.

As you can see, the each play-through was more based on which faction I picked or how I chose to interact with the world. That's why I have so many play-throughs. Because I have gone with a challenge in mind, and gone out to see if I can beat the game by those rules.

The question remains though, is it a good fallout game? I don't think I'm the best judge on that. Fallout 4 is the first Fallout game I've properly played which to many in the Fallout community is an important thing to declare. There are people who say this is not a 'proper' Fallout game because it is more of a FPS than a RPG especially when compared to previous iterations. I personally dismiss this as a 'No true Scotsman' fallacy. If the game can transform from an isometric 2D game to a 3D game, why can't it transform again from RPG to FPS?

That said, it very much is a FPS. A lot of the quests boil down to "Kill this person / people / beast" or "Fetch this item and kill everything in your way". Even travelling from location to location has random encounters which quite often can end up as shoot or be shot which arguably is actually consistent with the world being presented. It's a harsh, desolate wasteland where people fight to survive. People raid to survive to it make sense that a lot of the random encounters you face are people trying to kill you.

But this is where I can see the RPG argument coming back. Why does every problem have to be solved with a gun? Why can't I talk my way out of a fight, or intimidate my foes into surrendering? Why can't I find some secret info on who I am talking to in order to blackmail them into doing what I want?

Well to some degree you can, IF you invest in the right perks which are high up the skill tree. And even then they don't always work. No, guns are the default answer because you need to carry a weapon of some sort to defend against the wild animals.

Having seeing what was implemented in past games such as the Karma system from F:NV then yeah, there are features that probably should not have been taken out, but I don't think taking those things out stopped it being a Fallout game. So you took the icing off the cake, it's still a cake.

Well on the whole, I've found the game enjoyable and certainly it has been a big time sink for me. It's a good game despite its bugs which I admit is a quite cliched statement about Bethesda games, but if it happens to be true then what else am I to say?

As for it being a good Fallout game, well if you can get over the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy then yeah, it's an enjoyable enough game.

But to be honest, I think the only real way to decide if you like something or not is to try it for yourself. If you want to wait for it to be on sale then go for it, though I think 2 hours is not enough time to decide if you like the game well enough to keep it or get a refund.

The single player game is absolutely fine and worth paying for. The online services offered are OK in regards to what Rockstar advertise. Technically they do deliver on that part.


Windows 10
The first is the installation issues with Windows 10. I had originally got this game on day 1 and installed it on my Windows 7 PC. Since then Windows 10 came out so my PC updated to Windows 10, and the game still ran so I didn't have an issue.

However, recently I built a newer PC that is much more powerful then my older PC. As I knew that GTA5 would run on Windows 10, I downloaded it again. All I wanted to do is load up the single player so I could see how my new PC would cope. To see if I could get 60fps with maximum settings, or weather I would need to lower some again like I did with my old PC.

After completing the 73gb download I attempted to run the game. The launcher popped up, it signed me into the Social club, and............ nothing. It just sits there with a black launcher. It has the Rockstar logo at the top, I can open the Steam overlay and the close/minimise buttons are there, but that's it. I just have a small square in the middle of my screen doing nothing.

Of course I have gone though Rockstar support and tried everything suggested. Updated the Rockstar social club installation. Latest GPU drivers, running the launcher and game as an administrator and in compatibility mode. Nothing works.

Online
I suppose really the title should be 'Hackers'. Or modders. or Script kiddies, whatever you wanna call it, it's all the same. The online community is flooded with people who use 3rd party programs to mess with other players. I used to report players when I saw them doing stuff, I'd even record them if I could to use as evidence.

It didn't make a difference. To some degree you could avoid them by sticking to the game and activities and not going into the main open world, but you couldn't do that all the time.

I might have been nice if Rockstar actually responded occasionally to say "Hey that person you reported, we've banned them" or something to that effect. To have given those people who reported others some feedback to confirm when their reports were actually effective. I know that adding a feature like that isn't a simple task, but the lack of any feedback meant you had no sense that anything you were doing was worth doing.

I said above that the online services offered are OK in regards to what Rockstar advertise. It's a hell of a grind house and they will push their Shark cards to make money. I'm OK with those to some degree because game sales won't pay for the servers forever. That said, the payouts you get for missions are embarrassingly small. Want a new car? $15,000,000. Payout for the mission? $15,000. So you'd need to do 1,000 missions just for one car.

Of course that's generalised and some missions pay out more than others, and not all vehicles or buildings are that expensive. The point is, it takes a LOT of grinding doing even the good paying missions to get anything you want, and they could reduce that grind somewhat. It's hard to mathematically quantify given the different payouts and different costs, but if payouts were doubled or even tripled there would still be a grind. It would just be a fairer grind.

If you can get it to run, then maybe get it on sale and play the single player. Avoid the online mode. The problem with that is you can't find out if it will run without buying first, and time with the launcher open counts towards the 2 hour refund limit.

This is a bit of an odd game. It's basically either a power trip (if you set it to easy) or a challenge (if you set it to hard). Thats not even factoring in if you are running the country you live in. I've created crime free utopias, facist ragimes, liberal societies... if you know what sort of world you want to create, you can. You just need to know how, and the games make that easy to find out. Not easy to solve though!

PASS THE WHISKEY! This is a good game with promise. Because it's built on the Source engine you know it will run on lots of systems and there will be dedicated servers, which means mods! There is also the potential for new community maps to be made, which is always a great thing.

There could be a few more weapons, even if just different versions of the basic 3 in game already. Main things I'd like to see are a rapid fire pistol (technically you can do that already, but I'm thinking that but by default), swords, sniper rifles and horses. They already have the model for horses in game, why not add a mechanic for riding them?

This is fun in a nerdy way. You can go the simple route and just launch a big rocket and see how far it'll go, you can go the full NASA route and try reach the moon and explore space, or you can troll your crew (Krew?) and load a rocket with a tonne of fuel, launch then point it all at the ground.

I have to admit.... like doing the last option a bit too much

It's surprisingly addictive! There is a definite excitement when you complete a string of hits, as it punishes you for mashing buttons.
The fighting animations are nice too, your little stickman does not stick (pun) to the same style all the time, And the little slow motion bits make this game gory but in a nice way.

Only criticism is the interface. It's all done though the mouse which is not surprising considering the main game does the same, but would it really have hurt it to allow me to type a name and press enter? Or Esc to pause!?

Oddly addictive. You are flying a solar powered ship and heading full speed towards the setting sun on the horizon. As the sun sets, the shadows or the various obsticles get bigger meaning in later sections, you have to hope you can make it though a shadow without your battery running out.

Do what you like. Seriously, do what you like. Nuke 1000 babies? Done. Throw props at destrucable buildings? Done. Play some Deathrun? Done. Combined with Source SDK this has UNLIMTED POTENTIAL.

Or, you know. You could just spawn flatgrass and some zombies.