I mod a worryingly growing list of communities. Ask away if you have any questions or issues with any of the communities.

I also run the hobby and nerd interest website scratch-that.org.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Adding ancient eldritch gods into Fallout, with such large and sprawling plot lines was a huge mistake.

    People will say, “Yeah but what about the ghost in Fallout 2?” Yes FO2 had one side quest with a ghost. It was a one off, with no huge backstory propping it up, it wasn’t constantly revisited. It didn’t change the whole vibe of the world. It was one side quest that made you go “Huh that was weird.” and was quickly pushed aside.

    In comparison, including eldritch horrors in a front and center way, with quests like the Cabot questline being the most egregious. There is also the Dunwich building, the Dunwich mine, the cult and eldritch creature in FO76, and more.

    Any one of these, one their own, as a one off isolated thing might be alright. The Dunwich building especially works as a weird unexplained oddity. It is the dose that makes the poison though, and now there is so much Lovecraftian stuff packed into Fallout that it has changed the texture of what Fallout is. The more the Lovecraftian stuff is added, the more of the original “an apocalypse of our own making” 1950s militarist, corporatist setting gets diluted.


  • Homefront: The Revolution is actually a super fun game. Dare I say…a hidden gem?

    It has an atrocious metacritic score for a few reasons. Mainly, some of the enemy AI was broken on release, which is fair, but it’s long since been fixed. The other big issue is that it’s a sequel to a genuinely bad game and most people didn’t bother playing it, and most who did came with the goal of trashing it.

    However, this game is fun if you want something kind in the modern Far Cry style vein, but set in urban environments. It run on the Crye Engine and the gunplay is rock solid; the shotgun in this game is fantastic. The guns all have absolutely preposterous alternate fire modes. The assault rifle has its upper swapped out to turn it into landmine launcher.

    The story and setting is a complete reset compared to the first game. It isn’t just a lazy “Red Dawn but China North Korea”. There is an elaborate alternate history backstory going back to the 1950s that sees North Korea take the role of the high tech manufacturing hub for the west, eventually becoming what some in the west in the 1970s feared Japan would become- a powerhouse of tech that was rich and had a grip on all western nations because of it. Then this cyberpunk reimagining of North Korea takes over a poor and downtrodden USA after the U.S. had made so many bad choices that NK could plausibly send “international peacekeepers”. Absolutely nuts plot, but so weird and strangely high effort. Also means the bad guys are coded so cyberpunk and have all kinds of drones and stuff.





  • The guns in the original games would share ammo pools if they were of the same caliber, the article described a simplified pool by class of weapon.

    So now rather than separate 5.45mm and 5.56mm you have “assault rifle ammo”. It sounds minor, but one of the aspects of STALKER has been inventory management and making the choice when to main one caliber. At least for me. Hence my waiting on mods.

    As for the minimap, the article is describing an additional always on compass with quest markers in the style of the modern Fallout games. I hope to be able to turn that bit of visual clutter off, and also hope that the game isn’t designed so much with the assumption I’m using it that I can’t find objectives without it.