Settlement building is a relatively new feature for the Fallout franchise, as well as Bethesda as a whole. New as it may be, it has been met with some praise, though not without controversy. Let’s talk about Settlement Building.
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0:00 Intro
0:24 Gameplay element
3:24 Plot element
5:12 Settlement building future
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Here’s what I would do with settlements (this is also what I would do for the next Bethesda Fallout game too btw):
1: Build the entire game around it. If you gone make us the leader of a faction, then let us LEAD. That include taking decisions around logistics and navigating politics. (This covers about 95% of what I truly want.)
2: You only get one settlement. The player can do what they want with it, but there’s only one.
3: No random settlers. All settlers are named characters with actual backstories that was recruited on purpose and have good reasons to be there.
4: Give as many options for roleplaying as possible. Not everyone wants to play as Johnny Fallout, some might want to play as a raider, or a hunter, or a doctor, teacher, priest, mayor, warrior, mechanic. So many options.
5: Let us build doors inside the houses so we can have real rooms and add some windows, so the rooms aren’t so damn claustrophobic.
6: Make it easier to put stuff on tables and shelf. Is it too much to ask for books to be in the bookshelf?
7: Let NPCs (and player) interact with the items. If there’s a dart tablet, I want to see NPCs play dart. This include letting the player sett criteria for what/when a space is used.
They don't feel like Fallout to me and I wish they left the settlement building to mods. In some FoNV runs I like to enable my settlement mods and in other runs I don't.
I do like the settlement building aspect of the game, in fact I probably spend way more time building than questing. Now, that being said, you do make some very valid points. My biggest problem is the fact that in 200 years we haven't even cleaned up the place? And noone has even though about making better homes or even things like hardware stores, or some sort of manufacturing?
My main grit with settlements is that in order to make anything cool you'd need A LOT of materials, I usually just pimp out the original house of Nora and Nate, then I make it so that only I can enter it and I fill it with all my power armors, crafting benches and a buncha boxes stacked on top of each other
I really do not like the settlement building system, especially in fallout 4 because it focuses so much on it. Whenever I play and rpg I don't want to be building anything. I want be out exploring and collecting and doing quests. I'd much rather have a pre-made home base for me instead of making one for myself. I do kinda like how skyrim di the building in hearthfire where you make a base but everything is pre-made.
Cool. God bless.
I really love settlement building. I'm not sure I would have even liked the Fallout series if it weren't for the settlement building mechanic. I like it for the story too now, but it all started with settlement building. I feel like improvements need to be made mainly in the way of settlers. They're just stupid and boring. It would be nice if they had their own stories and such, but I understand that they have to focus their time on the rest of the game.
4:12 There is an entire location that is tied into a main questline that is referred to by several people as being the latest notable example of just that. It's why the two only remaining towns are so noided about them being next
“There were towns, but the Institute destroyed them.”
Uh, isn’t that exactly what happened to University Point?
I love the idea of building settlements and spend more time doing that than actual quests in Fallout 4. I do think the system should and will make a return but I think that certain aspects of it should be locked behind Charisma perks. After all, it doesn't make sense for a particularly average person or a very uncharismatic one to be putting together towns all over the place, whereas someone with high Charisma could definitely be seen in that role.
Settlement building is a cool mechanic and I would like to see it continue to return but I think Fallout needs to embrace Sim settlements. Settlement building should not be something that takes hours and days of work it should be something that can be hands off if the player does not want to engage with it. And Sim settlements mod allows settlement building to automate itself to a decent degree. I truly believe that if there is going to be another Main Line Fallout game Bethesda needs to reach out to the devs behind the Sims settlements mod and higher them because Bethesda will never on their own make something better than what has already been made and it is not worth it to reinvent the wheel when these developers have already done the hard work and know how to make this system better
This is honestly why I am looking forward to Starfield. To see how much they've improved it.
Settlement building and settlers in combination with a wide array of mods are the sole reason I got over 1 thousand hours in fallout 4. I love it overall but some tweaks here and there and options for automatization would be neat.
Dude I love the settlement building system in 4! I would spend over a month building all of my settlements(including the DLC)!! My favorite is vault 88. However I will fully admit that it could’ve been added to the main story a little bit better. You forgot to mention that the settlement building system is used against the brotherhood & The institute if they’re your enemy(by using artillery fire against the BOS & of course building up your castle will make the final battle a lot easier for the Minutemen). Also I LOVE your idea here 4:36 , Bethesda should’ve done this. Plus some settlements should’ve been removed like coastal cottage and the swamp area in the south. It would’ve been nice to rebuild Quincy and university point.
I think a good way to go for the next fallout game is to have the 76 style place a camp anywhere but also 3 or 4 actual settlements at fixed locations for people to populate with settlers. maybe have some of those settlements be more established buildings at first, like converting an old mall into a town or something.
Considering that both F3 and NV had popular mods that were adding the same idea, its no wonder Bethesda added it to 4. Its something that I always liked from the mods mainly cause the player homes were always poorly placed for late game or just placed in places that I never went back to. So being able to make your own is a great idea, just done a bit wrong in 4. The best player home mods were the 1s you could move or take with you like the truck in NV.
Idk i like it because i finally feel like a real faction leader, you know equip your people for the war, build things in the towns, establish comercial routes, create a robot army or bomb a place with artillery if it want , for me it's a good way to make me feel like I'm the real leader of a faction and no a fucking dog that only deserves command one random guy, yeah i prefer that people build they're own house and shops but i like the control of the settlement style and the defence.
Sadly Bethesda doesn't thinks that you build a great faction and you never feel that you're in war whit any faction, you know they can do something like attack you're cities proportionally of you're defense level but no nothing, and that sucks, is create a masive faction for nothing is try to spawn mutants to attack my settlements but for some reason the people is inmortal if you're not playing a formal raid, raids that are instantly eliminated for my defense sistem.
So yeah in like the construction sistem but Bethesda ruin it with inmortal persons and a stupid farming based on collect trash in Kazakhstan to build a lamp
Settlements SHOULD have been an endgame feature. Not a core gameplay element. Problem is commonwealth feels super unpopulated bc half the map is dedicated to settlements.
big issue I would consider is that multiple DLCs are fairly focused on settlement building, I think only Nukaworld, Far harbor and Automatron are not solesly focused there, even if, ofcourse, in this order are leaned more to this mechanic, like for example only reason to build any robot from automatron is to just use it in settlements, I never felt need to get one as companion, maybe someone who dont want to make companions dislike them may build one too, but I dont think many of such people are there
contraptions and wasteland workshop are adding only and only settlement things, and vault one adds really only settlement to use, some more disapointing and others less
I enjoy building settlements, and as such I have no issues with things others may, despite of this, I found some things be quite weakly made, I dont count things those are fixed by mods for those, as with mods you can get whole different game entirely too, also just keeping settlements safe and prosper is chore, you need to get bunch of resources, build farms and water pumps, beds and defences, even then you get constantly called to attacked settlement or some settlement needing your help, in next game I would like to settlements be more self sufficient once you make them decently built, yet still letting you make them as you like them be, maybe less settlements and more NPC owned towns, yet letting you having own settlements belonging to your faction or such
thing that should surely change in my opinion is that to let you build not only from first person, and also letting you stop time when building so you dont get attacked constantly somewhere when tryign to precisely place that one lamp
also building settlement is not really rewarding other than what you make as part of roleplay or for sake of building itself, only way how to make it significantly rewarding is having raider settlements from Nukaworld and having tribute chests built, and even if you can use them after you betray raiders and free settlements, you cant build new ones anywhere, so also having settlements produce more than jsut food, water and junk, mostly used again for settlement building since you dont need to repair guns and stuff, would be great, maybe some legendary weapon got only from settlement drop system
Fallout 4 doesn't feel 200 yrs after the bombs instead if feels like 50-70yrs after
I liked the settlement building, but it feels out of place. Bethesda made a decent system, but failed to integrate it into the rest of the game.
If you look at the story of the game and the settlement system together, it makes sense. There are a lot of recently evacuated locations, including some of the ones you build in, such as University Point, and the general feel of the Commonwealth is that of a heavily populated area lacking mostly in law and organization.
However, the game does not react to your settlement building, at all. There is no reason to build a settlement, especially one that provides a livable amount of beds and food, the game just kind of expects you to do it because you have the option.
The lack of reactivity ruins the settlement building, and instead turns it into a pointless material dumping grind. Because honestly, that is all it is beyond a cosmetic level.
My personal theory was that the settlement system we got at the end was not the one that was initially planned. I think we were supposed to have just a few settlement locations that would be built up closer to 'Hearthfire' from Skyrim and then an interior house, Home Plate, that would allow for custom furniture placement and things like that. Then at some point the current system got implemented and suddenly they decided to center the game around it with Settlements all over the place.
My changes to the Settlement system would be – fewer Settlement locations, a menu section for placing game world items like plates and toasters, and more items the settlers will interact with when you build them.
university point is a settlement that the institute destroyed
I always thought it was a shame that your settlements could only be aligned with the Minutemen. There are three other fairly boring factions you can side with, but your settlements are boring Minutemen outposts.
I think it's a bad precedent. It continues the trend of Bethesdas games becoming more and more like Minecraft and less like roleplaying games. Could you imagine New Vegas or Morrowind with a feature like that? It would completely detract from the main story. I personally have zero interest in it and never bothered with it.
The only saving graces of fallout 4 were the settlements and how they made power armor work. Settlements would likely be better if fallout wasn't going in the direction of casual play . Actually allow you to completely clear a settlement to bare earth and start working to found a town set up industry the settlers work at. let building materials get better as your local economy gets more sophisticated eventually ending up with virgin building materials that actually makes sense
Really think they went waaaaay too far into “quantity” over “quality”. I would’ve much preferred like 4 or 5 settlements areas you can build at that are more fleshed out and maybe even have unique quests that occur, didn’t need 20+ areas to build
Sturgess is a synth so who cares if he hits the same wall over and over? At least he isnt killing everyone.