I've been playing through Fallout 4 again, inspired partly by watching a bunch of ItsJabo on YouTube and partly because I'd been meaning for quite a while to go back and check out the Sim Settlements (2) mod. Other than Sim Settlements, this has been a mostly vanilla playthrough, plus some bug fixes and so on. Some thoughts: - Fallout 4 is good. - I think playing on Survival _with_ saving and fast travel is a much more fun experience than either non-Survival or vanilla Survival. Mostly I think this is down to flow: the saving thing is fairly obvious, but the fast travel is maybe a bit more subtle. - Losing a bunch of progress because you haven't touched a bed creates some obvious breaks in flow; I like the idea in some ways - naturally and engagingly reducing save-scumming is on paper good, and clearly some people take this idea and run with it, like in mods for FO3, FNV, and FO4 itself (notably _Frost_, which I also need to try). I think in practice though it just proves too annoying, especially with how often you end up waking up from a 1-hour nap hungry, thirsty, and ill with something that requires antibiotics (making you _more_ thirsty again). A tax on saving is again in principle interesting, but implementation is everything. - The fast travel thing is a little more nuanced: you might think that forcing the player to trek through the game, i.e. to actually play the game, should produce more flow. And in some ways that's true - Bethesda's approach to random encounters is pretty good, so there's a lot to be said for walking through the game! However, quest design doesn't quite support this. #todo - The way needs are implemented in Survival is not as good as New Vegas'. I think this one might be more down to taste, but having a continuous meter that you could check meant both that you could plan a bit better, and that often play was not interrupted quite as jarringly. For instance, consuming something that did a bit of hunger and a bit of thirst would reduce both those bars, buying you more time on both. It doesn't _seem_ like that's how it actually works in FO4; if it does, then that just emphasises how much the full-information approach changes the player experience. Quest design doesn't support prohibiting fast travel. Long story short, many quests - especially the Radiant ones, hence maybe the name - have you shlep from one side of the map to the other and back again. This is, again, good in theory for exploration; why not check out some unexplored locations that fall roughly on the straight line from Quest Giver to Quest Target? However, I think it's still not quite enough incentive to pull together cohesively. You end up having explored or having decided to skip a lot of locations (either explicitly or implicitly - sometimes you make a conscious choice e.g. you've explored it previously, and sometimes it's implicitly - you train yourself to skip it by walking past it repeatedly at other times). What would better support a ban on fast travel? More deliberate 'quest hub' design. I think there's worse (e.g. World of Warcraft - walk into town, click on all exclamation marks, leave town) and better ways to do this - let me elaborate on 'better'. Ideally I think you would arrive at a 'hub': yes like Diamond City or Bunker Hill, but even things like some of the settlement locations; it doesn't have to be a major landmark per se. Then there would be maybe a little scene that plays out, or you talk to vendors, and you have 1-2 quests lined up. The following quests then have you trek out and back from this settlement in short-to-medium loops that gradually form ~360 degrees around the settlement, such that by the time you 'finish' a hub you've explored a large ~circle of the map. (The map is then composed of such circles.) _Ideally_, some of _those_ trips would themselves kick off quests, which link in to other loops appropriately. **Legendaries** Survival is much better for this than non-Survival, as you just see way more. However, there's just _so many_ dud ones. - There's a mod that makes Legendary effects more like weapon mods, in that they can be taken off / swapped / added to weapons. I think this overshoots in the other direction - sure, you'll still be excited to see a good legendary _effect_ in the wild, but with the number and variety of unique/static legendaries, I think you end up with your 'final' gear quite quickly. - I like Fallout 76's approach of letting legendaries have more than one effect. That has three key benefits: (1) The power cap is much higher, which is exciting! (2) The power _floor_ is a bit better too: you have more chances _per legendary_ to roll something useful. (3) It maintains the 'chase' aspect of finding the ideal bit of gear (vs the mod approach above, which doesn't really.) **Settlements** Okay, this is the big one. Sim Settlements 2 is a great mod. It's incredibly ambitious, has some great voice acting, is quite a lore-friendly and even lore-enhancing central premise, has a lot of entertaining content (sidequests etc.) to enjoy, and more. **The UX for settlement building is terrible.** Having a dedicated segment of the Build Mode menu would be forgivable if it wasn't all the way at the end. The amount of time and key presses I've spent shifting from stuff in the Structures menu across to stuff in the Sim Settlements menu is inexcusable. Mostly that would be resolved by sorting various things into other segments. The overall functionality, however, is too scattered for that solution. Just on the settlement side of things, there's: - The holotape menus, which are _extensive_ - The city planner's desk - The ASAM menu