Dropping the Radioactive Potato (for now).

I've been playing Fallout 4 for a while, at this point, and I feel like I can say I've gotten a decent amount of milage out of it. I put about 40-something hours into it, largely dicking around, and, well, it's certainly a Fallout game. Everything that the Fallout 3+ franchise has been, has been too - with the addition of making buildings.

I really am thinking about what the game allows you to do - it expands the level cap out forever, but also hides a lot of rudimentary community building tools behind the Perk system which means that you're always choosing between being better at playing the game and being allowed to access the game. I've been a little disappointed by the lack of access to certain kinds of building materials - no glass, no windows, no metal grating - and the difficulty of accessing good places to build. Like, there are some good locations, and a lot of miserable, uninteresting locations which really makes me wonder why they're there.

So, I find myself trying to build a really cool base of operations and I'm really hampered by all of these invisible rules - tiles don't match up, it's difficult to build foundations and/or stair that connect to where you want floors to go, I can't tell at a glance who's assigned to what, or what has someone assigned, workshop management is a huge chore, moving food between settlements is a trial, land management is difficult, growing space is incredibly scarce, and so on. I devoted myself back to the grind, and the game stopped letting me save my files. I fixed/worked around that and the game ended up crashing and told me to update it.

I was just like, man, forget this for now. I'll come back to it with a much more reasonable focus, and hopefully after there have been some patches and DLC that include new building material. What I'm really hoping for is that this kind of community-building, world-building approach catches on even more with future games, whether it's this model or another one.