4 comments on “Spectacle Island

  1. I kinda want to check out the new DLCs and find some of these areas, but I haven’t played in months and my character is a complete stranger now. Would have to start over, and ugh…

  2. I may be wrong, but I think Spectacle Island is part of the main vanilla game. You should be able to see it from the Castle or Warwick Homestead.

    I agree that level scaling is a sucky mechanic in general. It was especially awful in Oblivion. Skyrim was a bit more subtle and FO4 is even more subtle. Well, maybe “subtle” isn’t the right word. It’s not like high-level enemies start wearing power armor and toting gatling lasers, but at about level 60 you start seeing more veteran-class raiders and super mutant masters/overlords. The Gunners start increasing in rank — you’ll see more sergeants and an occasional captain. The human enemies are a bit better equipped. They wear more combat armor and start using assault rifles, combat shotguns, etc.

    By level 90 or so, the Gunner ranks tend to rise. You’ll see a lot of captains and majors, as well as occasional brigadiers. They and the raiders will be using more weapon mods. Animals become more powerful with titles to match. It’s rare, for example, to see common Deathclaws. When you encounter them, they’re nearly always Alpha, Matriarch, and the like. By level 100, Mythic Deathclaws are pretty much the norm.

    Of course, you’ve been leveling, too. By now, your armor and guns are benefiting from more mods, and if you’ve been managing your perks right, you should be insanely powerful. Come to think of it, if the enemies didn’t level, you wouldn’t have any reason to play. You’d just one-shot everything with a 10mm pistol.

    But it’s not like everything levels. If you discovered a place early in the game, the enemies will typically be the same level they were when you first encountered them. Good examples are the raiders at Corvega plant and the Federal Radiation Stockpile. The super mutants in downtown Boston and Cambridge remain about the same.

    Some places, though, don’t follow this rule of thumb. The enemies at salvage yards will level no matter what. So even though you found weak super mutants and Gunners earlier, they grow with you. I have no idea why this is the case. Maybe salvage yards have special radiation or better Blamco Mac and Cheese.

    The most worrisome enemies are super mutants. In certain locations, they’ll nearly all be Warlord-class and very hard to kill. Also, you’ll start running into “charred” feral ghouls with a gazillion hitpoints and lots of damage. But if you’ve been focusing your perk choices and doing your armor/weapon modding correctly, and if you play to the advantages of your “class” (sneak-assassin, etc.), you probably won’t get mauled.

    It all works out really well, in my view. I don’t mind level scaling at all in FO4.

  3. As for the DLCs, you might like Far Harbor. It’s fairly strong in terms of story-telling and has lots of conversations. In fact, you should be prepared to pass numerous speech checks, some of them quite high. Otherwise, it’s disappointing. To be as pricey as it is, it ought to have more unique locations, interesting loot, and so on, but it’s a dismal, mostly empty place with little to keep you there once you’ve seen it.

    The Automatron DLC is less ambitious but more interesting if you like the idea of constructing any kind of robot you want. The story is not especially deep, but it has a funny ending (it was funny to me, anyway).

    Neither DLC is worth the retail asking price, so wait for a sale. I can’t speak to the other offerings like Wasteland Workshop and Vault Workshop, since I didn’t get those. I suspect they’re overpriced and wildly outclassed by any of 10,000 free mods.

    I don’t have Nuka World and I do want it, but not at full price.

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