Bethesda make big, divisive and generally extremely good games, but they really don’t seem to know what a PC are. While we’re certainly used to PC builds of their historically PC series coming out looking like they were sloughed off a console, hastily scraped off the floor, then dumped on a desktop, it still grates. It’s no surprise that the in-game graphics options are negligible, requiring multiple quits and restarts to tweak to satisfaction. It’s certainly no shock that the UI is blatantly designed to be viewed from a sofa, so madly huge and clumsy for us with our noses pressed to the monitor. But it’s pretty shoddy at this point that standard settings like FOV, particular widescreen settings, stuttery framerate limits, and switching off their perennially ghastly mouse acceleration, are hidden in .ini files. Fortunately the smart folks making Steam guides have it all figured out. I’ve explained a few of the fixes below.
I’ll start with intro skipping, since you’re going to want that gone if you’re testing any of the below. To get rid of that needless fizzing screen, head to the Steam directory where you installed the game (something like ‘X:[your steam directory]steamappscommonFallout 4DataVideo’ where X is the hard drive on which you install Steam games). In there there’s a file you need to delete:
GameIntro_V3_B.bk2
Field Of View
FOV is the biggest issue for me. While I’m not generally one for fiddling with such sliders, playing Fallout 4 feels like I’m looking at everything through a toilet roll. Some hint of peripheral vision would be nice, and fortunately achievable if you’re willing to twiddle under the game’s bonnet.
To fix this, you’re going to need to adjust three different files. Firstly, find your Fallout4.ini file, which you should find inside ‘C:Users[name]DocumentsMy GamesFallout4’
Open the file in Wordpad or your preferred text editor, and then scroll down to ‘[Display]’. You need to add a couple of lines:
fDefaultWorldFOV=XX fDefault1stPersonFOV=YY
Fallout 4 Best Quest Mods
Replace XX and YY with your desired field of view setting for third and first person respectively. 90 is a fair bet, and where most games would have already had it.
You then need to repeat the step, but this time in the FalloutPrefs.ini in the same directory.
Then thirdly, you need to head to the Steam directory where you installed the game, and into ‘steamappscommonFallout 4Fallout4’. In there you’ll find another file called ‘Fallout4Prefs.ini’, and you add the same two lines under ‘[Display]’ yet again. Importing pst into windows live mail.
Save all those files, and it should all be set. Here’s a before and after. The man rudely moved, but you can see how much more is on screen.
Before:
After:
Mouse Acceleration
Getting rid of horrid mouse acceleration is in three steps as well. Start off with the Fallout4.ini file in My Games, and this time scroll down to “[Controls]”. Under there you need to add:
bMouseAcceleration=0
Second, the Fallout4Prefs.ini in the same folder, and under ‘[Display]’ add:
bForceIgnoreSmoothness=1
Then finally you need to find the game’s install folder for Steam, which will be something like ‘X:[your steam directory]steamappscommonFallout 4Fallout4’ where X is the hard drive on which you install Steam games. In there you’ll also find a Fallout4Prefs.ini, and you need to add the same line under ‘[Display]’.
bForceIgnoreSmoothness=1
The excellent post by Gabi also details a few more fixes and issues that you can address, so if you’re struggling with anything else, take a look.
The team behind The Capital Wasteland Project, a mod to recreate Fallout 3 inside Fallout 4, has canceled the project after consulting with both Bethesda and outside legal counsel. “This was honestly one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make,” the project’s lead programmer, NafNaf_95, tweeted yesterday.
In a statement circulating on Twitter, NafNaf_95, whose first name is Nathan, tried to explain why the team pulled the plug.
“Recently we have communicated with Bethesda regarding our planned method to implement the voice acting and the other audio from Fallout 3 into the Capital Wasteland,” he wrote. “During this conversation it became clear our planned approach would raise some serious red flags that we had unfortunately not foreseen.” As a result of both not being able to use the existing voice acting due to licensing issues, but also not having the resources to record new dialogue, as other sprawling mods do, Nathan said the team decided to call it quits.
“Bethesda didn’t technically shut us down,” Nathan told Kotaku via Twitch message. “But a few members of staff heavily hinted at our methods being illegal.”
Bethesda supports modding through its official portal, and has generally looked the other way on unofficial mods that remix its games. The problem, Nathan said, was the fact that Capital Wasteland was planning on using the original game’s voice acting, which has performances from Liam Neeson, Malcolm McDowell, and others. Since this content was only licensed, not owned outright, by Bethesda, Nathan said, it would have greatly increased the project’s risk. (Bethesda did not respond to Kotaku’s request for comment.)
Fallout 4 Team Fortress 2 Mod
Advertisement
“Basically everything we were doing was sketchy as all hell.”
According to Nathan, the Bethesda employees said a better path forward for the project would be to emulate Beyond Skyrim, a fan expansion of the base Elder Scrolls game that added new areas with unique quests, dialogue, and music. But a project in this vein would have been beyond the capacity of Capital Wasteland’s five-person team (supplemented with a small group of additional volunteers). “And realistically the small team I had didn’t have the manpower,” said Nathan, who worked on one of the Beyond Skyrim mods.
Advertisement
After the bad news from Bethesda, Nathan contacted a lawyer who, he says, backed up Bethesda’s stance. “Basically everything we were doing was sketchy as all hell,” he said. Feeling the project had too high a probability of being shut down, the team decided canceling it was the only option.
Advertisement
Since his conversations with Bethesda and the attorney, Nathan said that he spoke with the team behind another mod, called Fallout 4: New Vegas, that was planning on dropping New Vegas’s voice work into Fallout 4. That team, he said, has since decided to take on the task of re-recording the game’s 90,000 lines of dialogue.
Capital Wasteland had its first official project progress update in April 2017, though work on it had been going for several months by that point. Nathan calculated that even without the extra task of recording new voices, the project still had over two years’ worth of work left until it would be complete. “It’s a huge risk to spend years of our lives working on something like this to have it potentially shut down,” he said.
Advertisement
Even so, it was far from an easy decision. “I’m personally feeling the worst I’ve felt in my life,” Nathan said. “The only thing worse was losing my childhood dog.” Currently tending bar at nights, he said he might shift back to working on the Beyond Skyrim: Cyrodiil project while he tries to re-orient himself now that one of the big focuses in his life has been shelved. “To all those people sitting at home going I told you so, looks like it paid off,” Nathan said. “Enjoy my misery.”
This may surprise some people (considering that the games only been out for a few weeks), but theres already hundreds of PC mods out there that make Fallout 4 even better. Some of them improve the texture quality or add extra details to the environment, some add extra characters and quests, and some even fix gameplay issues that were originally ignored by Bethesda. Then.. there are the other mods, the ones that make all the characters naked, or give all the female characters massive boobs. Though these are made for a very specific audience (*cough* teenage boys *cough*), theres no denying that they do help make Fallout a sexier place to explore. Of course, Fallout isnt meant to be sexy, and in some instances these mods do somewhat spoil the atmosphere of the game, but if youre just looking for something to spice up your adventures then these are the mods for you. If youre sick and tired of spending all your time in the company of radiated mutants, ghouls and all the other toothless cannibals of the wasteland, here are 12 mods that make Fallout 4 way more steamy than you ever thought possible.
12. Full Female Nude Mod
Creator: Art-of-the-body I doubt this one really needs much explanation, the titles a bit of a giveaway. Fallout 4 Full Female Nude Mod does exactly what it says on the tin: it removes preset underwear from female characters rendering them completely naked. If youve ever wanted to know what its like to run around the wasteland in nothing but your birthday suit, then this is the mod for you. Without going into too much detail, its pretty thorough in its articulation of the female form, so much so that everything youd expect to be there has been included. It really is the genuine experience. (Download)