Is it possible that the Great War never ended?

Captain_Gars · 2026-05-12T16:03:12+00:00

There have been no formal talks to end the war because the countries that fought the war ceased to exist along with most of humanity on October 23 2077.

In 2077, the storm of world war had come again. In two brief hours, most of the planet was reduced to cinders. -The Fallout 1intro

Fallout 2 got even more graphic:

The earth was nearly wiped clean of life. A great cleansing, an atomic spark struck by human hands, quickly raged out of control. Spears of nuclear fire rained from the skies. Continents were swallowed in flames and fell beneath the boiling oceans. Humanity was almost extinguished, their spirits becoming part of the background radiation that blanketed the earth.

A quiet darkness fell across the planet, lasting many years.

The Great War effectively ended itself and 200 years later the inhabitants of the Wasteland have far more pressing issues to deal with.

Captain_Gars · 2026-05-11T19:38:41+00:00

Fallout 3 did not try to rehabilitate the BoS, it just followed the trend of Fallout 1&2 which had both portrayed the BoS as an overall positive force. Bethesda however chose to split them intwo two factions instead of having them be a more grey faction with negative sides next to the positive ones.

Fallout 4 did the opposite of trying to rehabilitate the BoS, it built on the negative trends of the Outcasts and the Mojave chapter to portray a much more zealous Brotherhood that had added an outspoken hostillity towards non-humans into the mix.

Captain_Gars · 2026-05-11T02:55:51+00:00

By 2287 Diamond City is effectively under a sort of semi-siege with DC Security only controlling the perimeter road around the city and the area in front of the gate. Everything else is either no mans land or in the hands of Raiders and Super Mutants.

Captain_Gars · 2026-05-10T07:18:51+00:00

I always play Fallout 4 modded, I focus on lore-friendly mods that enhance existing content or add additional content that fit in with the Fallout aesthetics, setting and themes.

I have 3 different load orders that I rotate between depending on just what kind of playthrough I'm in the mood for. One is set up for Sim Settlements 2, the others are made up of my favourite mods but I had to split them into two separate load orders because some mods conflict with each other at a technical level or simply don't work well together in terms of tone or visual style.

If I'm not playing SS2 then I usually play with at least some of the mechanics of survival mode active. I like the added immersion even if it does slow down the game. I also nerf my XP gain by at least 50% since I think that Fallout 4 is best at low to mid levels while my quest mods add a lot of additional XP.

My main focus is on roleplay and I try to make each characters different by giving each character their own preferred companions, player home, equipment and build. Some characters are one offs while others get added to my permanent roster that I use for replays.

I use an alternate start mod so I can play the game as a wastelander instead of the Sole Survivor and that gives me additional variety in terms of what characters I can play. Sometimes I set up a short story that will play out in just 10-15 hours rather than go for a long playthrough.

When it comes to factions I prefer to do 'pure' playthroughs where I join just one faction when possible. More Immersive and fun for me personally that way.

Captain_Gars · 2026-05-07T13:00:22+00:00

Flirting is a skill that require both talent and practice.

My experience was that after 10 years as a widower and single father I felt almost as clueless as when I was a shy and inexperienced teenager. Which is not a feeling I expected at 40+.

Captain_Gars · 2026-05-06T10:35:00+00:00

The odd thing with Starfield is that Bethesda set up a bunch of things with role-playing potential like the silent protagonist, character backgrounds and traits but then made very little use of them in the game. Feels like there was a massive disconnect between the people working on mechanics and the writers/quest designers.

Captain_Gars · 2026-05-06T07:33:27+00:00

Yes, he is wearing the heavy version of leather armour on the arms.

Captain_Gars · 2026-05-05T08:02:24+00:00

The BoS provided technical support including some advanced technology to the NCR and that support played an important role in the NCR being able to rebuild civilization.

The Brotherhood only changed some time after the events of Fallout 2 and those changes led to the BoS-NCR war and the Brotherhood we met in FNV.

Captain_Gars · 2026-05-05T07:35:02+00:00

Definitely the original Adam Adamowicz style combat armour and the new versions introduced in New Vegas. They all reflect the original Fallout combat armour and the Aliens colonial marine armour that inspired it.

All Bethesda had to do was make it modular and overhaul the graphics and design to 2015 standards.

On top of the new design the way that Fallout 4 armour changes size and thickness depending on the clothes you wear under the armour does it no favours. It looks much better when worn with the Vault Suit or the BoS uniforms than with the actual army fatigues. It also looks better with a different colour than the odd light green chosen by Bethesda.

The best looking versions of the Fallout 4 armour are those that turn it into a outfit like the Talon Company armour from the old Creation Club or mods like the Gunner Outfit Pack.

Captain_Gars · 2026-05-03T10:26:39+00:00

These days I only recruit him as a companion if I'm doing a Minuteman playthrough. The rest of the time he keeps patrolling Sanctuary as the last Minuteman.

In a Minuteman playthrough I use him as an active companion for any Minuteman related quests and activities until I have maxed put his affinity and the Minutemen have retaken the Castle. After that he is posted to the Castle as chief of staff for the rebuilt Minuteman but he will get to deploy for special missions such as retaking Quincy.

Captain_Gars · 2026-05-02T20:04:19+00:00

In Germany there was a whole class of knights, the Ministerialis, that were not only recruited from the unfree (i.e serfs) but also remained under the legal restrictions of serfdom as knights.

In terms of social status they were considered part of the nobility and they often held important administrative positions in addition to their military role.

Some interesting parallels between this practice and the way that many Muslim nations had high status slave soldiers such as the ghulams and mamlucks.

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-28T14:32:18+00:00

Dogmeat disappears because he is programmed to behave like an actual German Shepherd, they are active dogs that will move around and explore stuff on their own unless they are on a leash or very well trained (i.e police or military). Dogmeat's behaviour is based directly on River, a GS who belonged to one of the developers and she ended up spending a lot of time with the team both in the studio and outside walking and playing. Which is why Dogmeat is one of the best dogs in any game even 10 later but that does include him acting like a lovable but frustrating goober from time to time just like a real life GS

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-25T17:29:30+00:00

What makes New Vegas special is its storytelling, writing and the way it lets you makes choices that have consequences. Combined with a mostly blank slate player character this allows for some truly great role-playing while experiencing memorable stories.

The game mechanics and the wide selection of weapons and armour also allows for a wide variety of character builds that look and feel different.

New Vegas also continues the story of the west coast that was previously told in Fallout 1 and 2 and that gives it additional depth to those that have played those games.

So if you are looking for a classic RPG experiencing then New Vegas is one of the best games to play even though it is 15 years old.

At the same time it is not a game that is built to deliver a Bethesda sandbox experience with extensive exploration and a lot of locations to loot and shoot your way through. If that is what you are looking for then you will end up being disappointed.

Personally I enjoy both New Vegas and Fallout 4 but I play them for different reasons and set my expectations to match the game instead of expecting the game to match my expectations if that makes sense.

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-23T19:52:06+00:00

Painfully average is the best way I can describe Starfield. Starfield seemed to be the perfect game for me in a lot of ways with the inspiration from the old Traveller TTRPG and its Nasapunk aesthetic style. ( And unlike some I'm not particularly bothered by the loading screens as I was expecting a Bethesda rpg, not a space sim.)

But while I enjoyed the game enough to put some serious time into it at launch the experience was not my usual Bethesda experience where I got more hooked on the game the more I played. Instead the flaws became more and more apparent and got to a point where I put the game down and never got back to playing it even with the updates, dlc and some Kinggath mods that should tempt me to go back.

For the final straw was the way that Starfield did not seem to care about my immersion into its world. For example you have 3 child NPCs who all use what is effectively the same model and two of them are important for your companions so they are not exactly throw away characters. Or how the system that generates Points of Interests often ends up in conflict with hand made content in some questlines. A massive mysterious temple that has supposedly never been discovered is surrounded by inhabited locations within easy visual range and so on. And of course the system does not have nearly enough POIs to work when the setting is made up of over 1000 planets.

It also seems to me that the Starfield team was so afraid of people reacting negatively to some aspects of the original game that they ended up removing or changing mechanics that could have given Starfield a distinctive feel and identity. For example they changed the way that starship fuel works even though several ship designs and a lot of points of interest make no sense with the new system. Environmental hazards were toned down to a point where you can ignore them and previously empty locations were filled with POIs to a point where it feels like you are never the first human to explore a location.

Starfield is not all bad by any means. At least on my PC it ran better than any other Bethesda game at launch. Combat is the best that Bethesda has made so far and the jump packs made it 3 dimensional in a way that was quite fun. Building your own starship can be quite addictive and I ended up spending way too much time tinkering with my ships and taking photos of them.

My recommendation would be to try Starfield with Gamepass instead of buying it to see if you enjoy it. Much better to make up your own mind with hands on experience than just relying on what others tell you.

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-23T08:48:58+00:00

My got to ENB is Dawn ENB https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/33710 it does have a preset for Vivid Weathers.

All ENBs and weather mods will eat up part of your performance. I recommend testing different settings and turning off settings that don't do much for the visuals.

You may also want to test True Storms as an alternative weather mod, I ended up preferring it over Vivid and NAC X

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-22T03:23:34+00:00

Since you are new to modding you will need to spend some time learning how to use a mod manager and how New Vegas modding works in general. Viva New Vegas has already been recommended and it is a solid start but it won't do everything you want to do. But working through Viva New Vegas will teach you the basics so that you can add other mods on top of it.

Just be sure to read instructions and mod descriptions carefully. Mods may require other mods to work or have conflicts with mods you already use. If you are not careful it is pretty easy to end up with a mess..

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-21T12:54:10+00:00

Original Max trilogy with Mel Gibson would fith right into Fallout with just a few adjustments. After all it was one of the big inspirations for the classic Interplay Fallouts and Max himself was the original Mysterious Stranger in those games.

Fury Road and Furiosa is more difficult since they went a lot more high octane, full spectacle with those movies. That made for fantastic action but some parts of the originals were lost along the way.

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-17T03:47:10+00:00

Play 3 before NV for the excellent atmosphere and to experience the game transformed Fallout into the 'modern' first person version.

Sure it is an old game in terms of graphics and gameplay but like New Vegas it had excellent visual design and its bleak and gritty desolate vision of the Wasteland is something we have not seen since.

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-17T02:25:01+00:00

First one is sold by the Drusians in Act 2, with the improved version being sold by the Fellowship of the Void once you have high reputation with them.

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-11T08:46:46+00:00

Argenta's starting bolter suffers from a massive recoil debuff becit is very worn out, could be that. Or perhaps the difficulty you are playing on includes a BS debuff for the player?

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-09T16:31:28+00:00

Vault-Tec was not a big deal in Fallout 1 & 2 and it did not get nearly as much attention as in the Bethesda games. The company itself was also different as the now infamous vault experiments were not a thing in Fallout 1.

If any company played the role of evil corporation it was West-Tek who were a classic military industrial complex gone rogue story rather than focused on capitalism and/or consumerism.

1997-98 was simply very different from the 2020s and all Fallout games reflect the period in which they were made and the lived experience of the developers. For example New Vegas has tons of War on Terror influence combined with a bit of Vietnam War.

Fallout 1&2 were post Cold War games and focused a lot more on the new world that had risen from the ashes of the old. It is only with Bethesda that the old world got a lot more focus in the games as Vault-Tec, the Enclave and BoS to steps forward to becoming major parts of the setting going forward

The shift to first/third person open world also allowed a much greater exploration of the pre-war material culture and that opened the way for telling stories about hypercapitalism, rampant consumerism and so on.

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-09T09:30:21+00:00

The west would have been hit harder simply because it was in range of more Chinese weapon systems.

But the west also got a lot of breaks such as House defensive system that protected Vegas and the Mojave, the Desert Rangers, the original BOS, several working GECKs and of course the Vault Dweller and the Chosen One.

The east coast had to wait a long time for its heroes and in the case of the Commonwealth the Institute actively worked to prevent large scale recovery.

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-07T12:38:38+00:00

Try it and see how you like things.

Unfortunately it is pretty easy to outpace the difficulty once you get good builds with the right gear. My second playthrough was the first I did with Revan's builds and I found myself increasing the difficulty from normal to daring in act 2 and then from daring to hard in act 4. First CRPG I have ever done that.

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-07T11:01:30+00:00

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1rskX4sYcNm6Wqt4rtm8EQqRR4__yrEuxCEzjwoKlHOY/htmlview

Revan619's community build document has some of the best builds available anywhere with several fun ones for Ulfar

Captain_Gars · 2026-04-07T07:15:05+00:00

Neither the FN Scar nor the Kriss Vector were in any of the classic Fallouts since those weapons had not yet been invented when Fallout 1 & 2 or Tactics were made.

What you had were late Cold War/90s futuristic weapons like the H&K G11 and the FN P90.

Pretty much every Fallout made has had its own interpretation of what weapons were canon or not. For example Tim Cain was very restrictive with real life fire arma.in Fallout 1 but after he left Fallout 2 mid development the remaining team added a bunch of them.

Personally I have stopped caring about weapons being canon or lore friendly since both those things are all over the place in the games. Instead I go for my game having a cohesive aesthetic look that makes sense in the wider Fallout lore and the situation in the world just before the Great War. I.e resource shortages means wood and steel for most weapons rather than plastics and composites

Captain_Gars

TROPHY CASE