I don't know about you, but I'm the kind of player that likes to have a home, and furniture to place all of the junk I've collected in/on every once in a while. I know most of the world clutter in game now will help to serve a purpose, but I'd imagine we can also just swing stuff around twirl it magically in the air, place it on top of dead corpses etc.

This time around though, I am hoping to see that we have some sort of item position manipulation. I'm sure while building our settlements we'll be able to build little decor things like bookshelves, wall shelves and things of that nature, and this time around I'd like to properly be able to manipulate objects into sitting on my shelves the way I'd want them too without being at the mercy of trying to swing them wildly in the air to get the angle of the item right, and then slowly trying to line that book up on the shelf only to have it shift angles on me because it lightly touched the bottom of the shelf before i let it go. Trying to place a teddy bear sitting on a shelf, or desk was a little easier but even that still had its hitches.

Does anybody else like to take the small items and strew them about their place for added personality? Do you guys feel that there could be a cleaner way of trying to place things the way you'd like them?

Thoughts?

I asked myself this today at the garbage dump. I looked around and said "MAN I WANT TO PUT ALL THIS HERE IN MAH BACKPACK"

Yeah I'm one of those players who likes to scatter garden gnomes, nuka toy trucks & teddy bears around my pad. However the physics in Fo3, New Vegas & Skyrim was totally messed up, things wouldn't sit properly on the shelf & kept flying off when the scene loaded. So frustrating! Would be nice if Fo4 caters for the player who likes to be meticulous & possibly autistic when home making in the apocalypse.

They need to add two feature to their "item grab" mechanic: rotation & distance

Simple controls like: While holding an item

Ctrl+Mouse move [left, right, up or down]: to rotate the item in that direction

Ctrl+Mouse wheel: move object towards/away from you

In Skyrim I used console commands a few times to position & rotate items.

Yeah, even something as simple as that. Hold button, move mouse/thumbstick to rotate.

Would make life so much easier.

Homes in TES were neat. I remember the one you can get, but find out that it's haunted; and have to clear out the ghosts.

Homes in Fallout have always seemed terribly out of place for a person on an urgent mission to get home; and in FO3, on an urgent mission to find their dad. So in FO3's case, no, I never bothered with a player house. FO4... It depends on the plot I suppose. If it's an urgent mission ~again, then no.

I got the impression that they have greatly improved item placement control.

humm not sure. The only video I've seen showing item placement was settlement building, and that looked like a different mechanic than the "grab item" mechanic.

*shrug* I could be wrong... It's been a while since I've gone through the videos.

Hmm. Having a safe & stable base to stage out of seems like something that would aid your "urgent" mission. Well, as long as the mission itself isn't a continuous trek forward with no going back. (Like "you must reach the East Coast!".... yeah, having a base there wouldn't work well. )

(meanwhile, at a meta level - I'm a monumental packrat. If I didn't have somewhere to stash ALL The Stuff, I'd likely go crazy. Every playthrough of FO3 after my first one, I've made sure to tag Explosives so that I can repair the bomb and get the Megaton house the instant I leave the vault. Gotta have storage. Just gotta. Morrowind & Oblivion, a basic functional house mod is part of my standard mod set. Skyrim, it's easy enough to get Breezehome at the start, without needing much storage until then since you sell all the excess stuff to get the purchase fee. NV I've only played once after the first time, so I don't remember what I do there until I can get the Novac room. Although I've got a couple small Goodsprings house mods in my mod collections.)

In the first two Fallout games, your PC was a constant nomad; your home was the vault/or the village. In FO3, the PC's home exiles them; [I never once made it back to the vault]; I'm not sure if they let you stay there again. I saw the mission as to find Dad; and perhaps establish a house after that.

And I guess there wasn't quite as much stuff to stash + you had companions. (Although, didn't game 2 give you the car to store stuff in? It doesn't need to specifically be a "house" to fulfill the desire to have some safe place to stick things.)

Given that the search seemed to involve going various directions from the "hub" that was Megaton..... (Plus, they handed that house to you pretty easily, from the glaringly obvious "disarm the bomb!" quest - I can't see a lot of non-evil characters skipping that quest, plus it's given to you by the first dude you see on entering the town. Once you've got the base, turning Megaton into your central staging area is an obvious conclusion, even if you weren't thinking "house" before that.)

I guess, in the end, it depends on what kind of player one is - I get distracted by sidequests in these games (well, or see them as something I should be doing along the way), rather than just doggedly pursuing the MQ to the exclusion of all else. (Even FO:NV seemed to work that way - reach the next settlement, there's several tasks for you to do before continuing on after your revenge against Benny. That game was a series of sidequest hubs, though, rather than a central one. At least until you hit Vegas.)

Or it may just be that I'm a jaded cRPGer, and I know that you want to do all these things to get resources/level up/etc, or you frequently won't be able to survive the MQ. Plus having fully internalized the "http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TakeYourTime" aspect of the genre.

I had the same issue the first time I played 3. Didn't have time to furnish a house I've got things to do! I accidentally beat the game because I was just caught up in the rush to find my dad and help him finish my mothers project and it made the game feel so short that I didn't play it again for a year or so. Later I looked at it a different way. When I leave the vault I head right to Megaton but after talking to people there I realize that while I want to find my dad and get some answers I'm more curious about the world outside so I take my time and do side quests and explore.

Eventually I end up helping 3 Dog fix the radio signal so I can hear more of that sweet music while I'm out in the wastes and that leads me back to looking for dad. Then he sends me to Rivet City and I have a few adventures while walking there and meet more people to help. This leads me to the Jefferson Memorial and discovering Dad went to a vault to try and find a G.E.C.K. but I don't know exactly where that vault is (I tend to ignore the 'go here' arrow quest marker). Time do some more exploring with the clues I have. Maybe take a hint from 3 Dog and help out some towns along the way. Doing it this way has made the game a lot more enjoyable for me.

Don't remember from Fallout but Skyrim had two bugs regarding placing items, first was that you could not orient many items by grabbing a part, say you grab an sword by the hilt, you expect the point to face down. In Skyrim most items did not rotate around center of mass depending on grab point, they used an fixed lifting orientation who was usually upside down.

Secondary, then moving and dropping something the game did not remmber the location you dropped it but the orientation before.

Drop something on the floor, lift it up on a table, do with another item, move it twice and see.

None of this problems existed in Oblivion, only issue in Oblivion was that items was to bouncy like an ball and had too low mass so you could kick an suit of armor and it bounced off two walls.

Ugh in Skyrim after you dropped an item out of your inventory you had to leave the cell and come back before you could place it. I hope they fix that. Also, in Lakeview Manor you clear the dining room table of stuff and it re spawns! I hope they fix that too lol