» Sat Dec 05, 2015 12:19 pm Hello everyone, we are Dylan and Chao! We ran an experiement in Fallout 4 in which we compared two different styles of play in the game. Dylan focused on attributing all upgrade points to Strength, Endurance and Luck, while Chao built his character by spending his points on Charisma, Intelligence and Agility. The idea was that Dylan’s character would focus on a more brute style of play, whereas Chao’s character would be a more stealthy, calculated play style. Perception was optional for both of us. Besides the requirements for attributing points to perks, there were no restrictions on how to play. Dylan, though a frequent video game player, has never played a roleplaying game before while Chao is more familiar with the gaming style.
In order to keep consistency of the project, we both started a new game at the very beginning. From Nov 20th to 28th, we scheduled to individually play Fallout 4 one to two hours per day until we reached 15 hours of gameplay. To track our gameplay, we took photos of the data page on the pip boy and kept notes.
Since Fallout 4 is an RPG with vast content and various pathways for game progression, there were tons of differences between our characters at the end of the 15 hours of game play time. We were interested in learning: what perks are good/worthwhile? what is the difference between the two character builds? and provide advice for someone who is new to Fallout.
Dylan:
Being a relatively avid video game player that’s new to RPG style games, I was released into the world of Fallout 4 with little to no instruction or preconceived notions about the game style itself. This was a benefit and a drawback to my success in the game. When I started, I had no idea that most people cook their food, pick up most junk items they find, and add mods to their weapons and armor. Without any desire to do these things, I was able to move through the game at a pretty rapid pace, spending almost no time on the more intricate aspects of the game; however I found myself at some points underequipped to handle situations I was in; sometimes left without ammo or weapons too weak to be considered effective. For most of the game I was using weapons that I didn’t mod and eating food that I killed or found uncooked to heal myself. This style of play was not only exemplary of my knowledge of the game, but also my character itself; I only upgraded Strength, Endurance, and Luck, meaning my character developed in parallel to my guns-blazing approach to the game. For example, I probably attacked a dozen Deathclaws or assualtitrons in my time playing that I inevitably had to run away from to survive. My only weapon mods throughout my 15 hours played were made on melee weapons—being that I only upgraded Strength, Luck, and Endurance, I wasn’t able to mod any ranged weapons. This sort of forced me to continually attack stronger and stronger opponents so I could get stronger weapons. While these limitations hindered my progression at some points, they also provided me with a unique edge to keep pushing me forward. With my characters attributes, I was able to carry a lot, I was harder to kill than another character with different attributes, I had a lot of action points, and ‘Idiot Savant’ (the perk that has a chance to triple your experienced earned randomly through the game) balanced out the reduced amount of experience I got from having lower intelligence. I found the perks and attributes that I chose were conducive to a more traditional first person shooter game play style, where the only thing you really worry about is not dying.
The perks that I found to be most useful throughout my gaming experience were the perks upgrading the criticals: ‘Better Criticals’, ‘Critical Banker’, and ‘Mysterious Stranger’ saved me in a jam quite a few times. Also idiot savant was very helpful as a substitute for intelligence—the rate at which I leveled up wasn’t really affected by my low intelligence (intelligence increases experience earned for each quest). Actually, for one of the more major quests, idiot savant kicked in when I finished it, so I leveled up 2 levels at once. A difficulty I faced was the lack of certain perks, you can’t do much with settlements or mods until you get certain perks like science or local leader which I didn’t have in the Strength, Endurance and Luck categories. Also, some perks that I chose were not very helpful at all. I didn’t have ‘Pain Train’ for very long, but since I was hardly in my power armor and it doesn’t work on all enemies, it didn’t help much. ‘Cannibal’ was more of a novelty than anything else, I was never really at a loss for food after the first hour or so. ‘Scrounger’ might have been helpful, but it doesn’t tell you when it activates, so I can’t be sure of its effectiveness. And I don’t think the perk ‘Ghoulish’ did anything at all noticeable.
After 15 hours of game play of only upgrading Strength, Endurance and Luck I ended up at level 23 with a moderate understanding of the game and its nuances. I never really spent caps, crafted mods, cooked food or crafted chems. I feel like I could play this game forever and never completely understand how everything can be used and what has value in spending time on. That aspect of the game is the most alluring part; it takes a certain level of ingenuity to progress and play it well.
Chao:
For this project, I built a character only spending points on Charisma, Intelligence and Agility. After 15 gaming hours, I ended up at level 20. The very first perk I chose to add was ‘Lone Wanderer’, which increased my carrying weight and also let me take less damage when traveling alone. Since my character is an extremely weak traveler, with almost no strength at all, the increased carry weight really helped me a lot while I was exploring and collecting junk. The 'Gunslinger’ (increases non-auto pistol damage by 20%) was also quite useful at the early stage since there were only 10mm pistols at the beginning. Since my character had high agility, I decided to build a stealth-style character who is proficient in sneak attacks. According to my combat stats, I did 136 Sneak Attacks totally and they were mostly done by sniper rifle. The perks I liked the most were ‘Gun Nut’, ‘Science’ and ‘Ninja’. ‘Gun Nut’ and ‘Science’ made it so I always had weapons with high-tech mods and increased damage when I sneak attacked from long distance. Also during close combat, those moded-weapons were powerful enough to deal with normal enemies, like ghouls, raiders or super mutants. The ‘Ninja’ perk directly increased the damage of sneak attacks. You might notice that I did not add too much points to the ‘Sneak’ perk. The reason is that this perk lowers the possibility of being detected in a normal or close range, but I did not worry about close combat since ‘Gun nut’ and ‘Science’ would provide me with relatively high damage weapons to use from a distance.
Other than those offensive perks, ‘Medic’ is also one of the most-used perk which brought more efficiency to Stimpaks and RadAway. However if you would like to build a tough-guy who is happy with eating corpse and totally immune to radiation, then just skip it. In my case, the general healing methods I used was using Stimpaks and cooking food. At the early stages, there were a big number of rats and radroaches everywhere and they provided an effective meat material for cooking and healing. In addition my combat strategy tended to be stealth and sneak based so I did not have to constantly refill my health or heal rads. (After 15 hours playing I only used 2 RadAway totally)
In terms of commonly used weapons, I only had 4 weapons in my roster: A highly-moded 10mm pistol, the righteous authority acquired from Paladin Danse, a highly-moded sniper rifle and a shotgun taken from a legendary enemy. Normally I would start my attack with a head shot by sniper riffle while I was not detected. If enemies were cautious and coming close-by, I would switch to shotgun or the righteous authority and use V.A.T.S. to kill them. In addition I add a silencer on my 10mm pistol, which I used during sneak attacks. Since I only finished 2 main story quests, I had not encountered any advanced weapon yet.
The play style I had during this 15-hour gameplay was quite relaxing and slow-paced. After 15 hours playing I only completed 2 main quests and 20 quests totally. The most time-consuming event, in my case, was collecting junk and constantly storing them to the workbench. I found that it was not easy to focus on completing quests while exploring. Whenever I was on my way to complete a quest, there were always un-discovered locations and side-quests which easily drew my attention. In terms of other game content, I didn’t spend much time building settlements, but I did try to build a few supply lines because I added one point to “Local Leader”. I never went deeper into the settlement-building system, but I have heard positive reviews about it - some people love it.
Summary
After 15 hours playing, both of us succesfully built a unique character with different combat strategies, healing methods and perks. At the very bottom of this post there is a table of some significant stats of our characters. Comparing the stats, we found that Dylan’s character, who has high level Strength, Endurance and Luck, is more proficient in fighting enemies. High strength and endurance ensure the toughness of the character so he could run into combat “guns blazing”. However Chao’s Character is better at sneak attacks. It obviously takes more time to fight enemies sneaking around or looking for better spots to snipe. The difference of combat efficiency allowed Dylan to complete more quests than Chao did. Since Dylan’s character was stronger, he’d run into combat more willingly and therefore need to constantly heal himself; he took significantly more stimpacks, radaway and food through the 15 hours. Thanks to the sneaking strategy and “Lonely Wanderer” perk, Chao’s character took less damages during combat and he does not have to constantly worry about healing.
If you’re playing this game for the first time, it can be a bit overwhelming. We suggest that you plan out what style of player you are and reflect that in your characters attributes. The best way to do this is to figure out what parts of the game you enjoy the most, and expand your character in areas that facilitate that style of gameplay. Also, think about how much each perk might help you out; while we were playing, each of us found a few perks that we invested upgrade points on would’ve been better spent on other perks. Also, there is a lot of value in picking up certain peices of junk depending on what they are comprised of (screws, gears, and springs are all very useful in upgrading guns and crafting things in the first few hours of the game). Also cooking your food can help heal you without exposing you to radiation, or it can even heal radiation. Between Strength, Endurance and Luck, we believe that Luck was the most worthwhile to upgrade. For Luck, there are plenty of useful and fun perks to spice up your gaming experience. The ‘Mysterious Stranger’ perk adds the possibility of a mysterious man in a trench coat showing up after you use V.A.T.S. that auto-kills the enemy you were shooting at. It’s so awesome when he shows up- especially when youre particularly low on ammo or fighting a pretty strong enemy. ‘Idiot Savant’ is also an awesome perk to spend upgrade points on; it occasionaly gives you 3x the experience (or 5x if you get level 2) when you do something that awards experience. A drawback to the ‘Idiot Savant’ perk is that the higher your intelligence is, the less likely you are to receive that experience boost. Also, the ‘Better Criticals’ and ‘Critical Banker’ perks are very useful in increasing your effectiveness when using V.A.T.S. in combat, making criticals more powerful and adding the ability to store criticals to use later. Between Intelligence, Charisma and Agility, we believe that Intelligence is the most useful perk. Charisma and Agility do provide some good perks, like “Lone Wanderer” and “Ninja”, however a high level Inteligence build will give players the ability to mod many more types of weapons in the game. Also there are several perks under Intelligence that are pretty useful and they can improve a character’s combat strengths. For example with “Radiation Weapon” upgraded, the efficiecy of fusion cores are highly improved. The “Nerd Rage” is quite a life-saving perk which increases damage dealt and decreases damage taken when the player’s health drops below a certain level.
There were also other differences which were caused by personal play style. For example Chao spent more time collecting junk and looking for caps while Dylan discovered more locations and completed more quests. There are endless possibilities for the game, meaning each player gets a different experience. This is what makes Fallout 4 such an appealing game; no two players will have the same experience and your gameplay style can be whatever you want it to be.
Here is the table presenting the comparison between our relevant stats:
Dylan (Stre, Endu, Luck)
Chao (Inte, Charm, Agility)
Hours Played
15
15
Locations Discovered
87
79
Locations Cleared
23
24
Caps Found
2452
3641
Most Caps Carried
2202
3541
Junk Collected
731
2201
Chests Looted
158
261
Magazines Found
11
8
Food Eaten
142
13
Stimpacks Taken
58
31
Rad-x Taken
12
0
RadAway Taken
23
2
Chems Taken
17
0
Fusion Cores Used
4
0
Mines Disarmed
3
15
Persuasion Successes
3
8
Bobbleheads Collected
4
2
Mysterious Stranger Visits
17
0
Bright Ideas
64
0
Quests Completed
30
20
Misc Objectives Completed
4
5
Main Quests Completed
7
2
Side Quests Completed
4
3
Brotherhood of Steel Quests
11
13
Minutemen Quests Completed
7
2
People Killed
188
151
Animals Killed
54
61
Creatures Killed
269
313
Robots Killed
7
1
Synths Killed
27
18
Turrets Killed
37
27
Legendary Enemies Killed
7
15
Critical Strikes
61
139
Sneak Attacks
26
136
Weapons Disarmed
0
23
Weapon Mods Crafted
8
8
Food Cooked
11
52
Items Scrapped
203
133
Objects Built
163
86
Locks Picked
31
38
Computers Hacked
7
8
Items Stolen
33
14
Please feel free to shoot us any questions or comments about our project or gameplay. Any feedback will be much appreciated.
