Having stumbled over a couple of new quests as I wandered around the map… it seemed only right that I work through the other new quests they’ve added to the main game… so, having reached the point where you really need to make a hard save before you head down one of the paths to the end of the game, I really ought to be levelled up sufficiently to attempt these without much difficulty… lower level 40’s ought to be enough.
The added bonus here is that this will help me hit Level 50 before the end game missions and then move onto the DLC… it will also give my large settlement time to crawl towards 100% happiness.
May 8th
Having completed the side-quest I was working on… I add some extra defences to Sanctuary and start the process of adding content in one of the buildings to increase the size of the settlement itself till it gets classed as a “large” settlement needed for the Trophy.
I have also decided to use these new quests to take a different character along on, which has the added bonus of completing another Miscellaneous objective which counts towards the 50 that I need to complete for yet another Trophy… I’m in the high 30’s for this, and make a mental note to check my counter next time I hand over some Technical Documents to a Brotherhood Scribe.
NOTE: Handing documents to the Scribe do not count as completing a Miscellaneous mission… I’m at 40 after a couple of side-quests that I’ve done each time I work through the game… nothing new to see here.
Working on the new missions… has mixed results, each of them seems to gift you a decent weapon at the end, or a new suit of Power Armour.
The 2 that I’d done before had gifted me some cool weapons… that I only ever used in those missions, a very powerful flame thrower and a suit of fireproof Power Armour from the Saugus Ironworks, and a Tesla Cannon from when I took down the Enclave base in The Glowing Sea.
The first new quest I took on leads to a question… in Starfield there is a quest where you discover a secret base of a quasi-superhero who strikes fear into the hearts of space pirates, the mere presence of their ship will occasionally send them running away, and you get a cool outfit with it… now… did Bethesda copy this idea from the community quest in Fallout 4.
It involves a character who strikes fear in the heart of Raiders with their presence, as they own a very unique set of Power Armour, which you stumble across after linking various broadcast towers and following the signal around… it’s a cool set of Armour and it now sits in my home base in Diamond City.
Next up a new Merchant has appeared in the Commonwealth, a store I had stumbled over but which wasn’t occupied by anyone so I largely ignored it… their partner in the store has vanished, shortly after a new store opens in a Raider base in an old shopping centre… guess who owns that.
Time to track them down and deliver the original Merchant plans for a new weapon, which is also your reward for completing the quest, a Grenade launcher gun… potentially useful, but a little heavy to carry around.
Finally for the day the last “new” quest… Kill Pyro… now I’m Level 45 at this point, but there are still enemies that I will avoid at all costs… any sign of a Deathclaw for example and I’m giving it a wide berth, if I can avoid it I will, but this quest…
Pyro is marked on your Map, and he’s in Power Armour (which, naturally, is your Reward for completion) and I wandered up to the location, fired one shot with my .44 Magnum… and the quest is done… maybe I missed something here, but that doesn’t feel worthy of adding to the main game.
Still… 2 more to look at over the weekend.
Hallows Eve… doesn’t kick in for me the way it should… it ought to be a messed-up radio transmission that evolves into a beacon which leads you to the Harbormaster Hotel, where a Halloween party took place that went a little awry.
A poisonous gas has been released into the building and all the attendees are now Feral Ghouls, you need to find the combination to the door at the end of a hall to shut the gas off and escape… the reward for this one is a different head for Power Armour… which is not worth it.
Finally, we have a Gunner faction quest in (or around) the Glowing Sea with yet another Tesla Cannon as a reward… due to the weight of these things, and that I tend to carry more weapons than I really use, both of them have been left behind.
Here you’ll bounce from location to location extracting data from PipBoy’s to eventually reach a crashed airplane where the boss is wearing Power Armour and wielding the cannon… half decent battle… but much like the other new quests you have to wonder why they’ve added these 7 in particular, surely there are better ones than these.
May 20th
I’ve been ripping through the DLC… the Wasteland Workshop proves to be annoying as, to build all the cages, you need meat from a lot of creatures and some of this is as rare as rocking horse droppings in the shops and stores around the Commonwealth.
With the Vault Tec workshop DLC, rather than waster time creating the machines with which to test our new Vault resident, I skip all that… seems you can become Overseer quite quickly if you kill the current incumbent and just wear the outfit.
Far Harbor is obviously more-chunky in scope, a new play area… but I’m almost rushing and don’t take the time to complete a lot of the side quests, so sadly both DiMA, the head of the Synth Sanctuary, and the young women I’ve been sent to find, are both killed when the town of Far Harbor attacks the Sanctuary.
More time is spent wandering the island looking for creatures to kill to hit 30 new creature kills than anything else.
May 24th
As with my Hellblade piece, this is being written considerably later than when I completed the game… it’s now early July and I finished this on May 24th and it’s going to shorten the whole Nuka World DLC section as time has passed.
I really enjoyed the Nuka World DLC, it was a fitting finale to the whole game… from killing a whole host of new mutated creatures, to helping simpletons think they’re flying to a distant planet when in reality they’ve just been on a weird fairground ride… it’s an interesting location to explore and, eventually, rule.
The only downside is taking over settlements in the main Boston part of the map, sure it made Preston hate me (and thus the number of settlements asking for help dwindles) but it takes you out of the new world.
Collecting a variety of different Nuka Cola drinks with all new power boosts is a good idea, knowing that I needed to kill a set number of new wasteland creatures whilst under their effects meant I was drinking these from the off to the point where the Trophy for killing under Nuka Cola influence popped fairly early on.
While I had a blast every time I play through this DLC… I’ve never felt the need to collect the various new versions of Power Armour that litter the world, the Nuka Cola set on display looks great, and I’m also aware of a glitch that lets you pass through the case it’s housed in… but even in the main game I never really used Power Armour as much as many seem to, so why collect 40+ computer panels to unlock it?
The DLC is all a mixed bag here, some (Contraptions, Wasteland Workshop and the Vault Workshop) feels irrelevant to the game, Automatron has a feeling of Mehrunes Razor from Oblivion about it, in so much that it’s fairly short and set in the main game area… Far Harbour and Nuka World are the only two sizable chunks of content and really the only ones that should have been released… fun, but I can wait a while (and may have no choice in this matter) for the next Fallout title.