During the character creation process I thought you were going to play the couple for some reason and designed both characters but ended up through chance selecting the male character.
Then during the introductory chapter you get a literal case of fridging to create some character motivation for your character (and presumably to save a fortune on having to create a believable companion you talk to and who has a shared history with you).
So I rage-quit and started again with the female character. The revenge plotline worked a little better this time but then it became clear how the storyline is aimed at the male character's background.
The female character is a former lawyer who has spent the last year being an at home mother. Therefore in the course of twenty-four hours the suburban housewife moves from playing with her baby to witnessing the end of the world and then doning a suit of power armour to kill every member of an armed post-apocalyptic gang. Ain't no thing!
Before the end of the week, the tragedy and trauma that tinged the first day when she was beating radroachs to death with a baton has gone and now she is now a bad ass gunslinger using a saw-off shotgun to blow the heads off ghouls and being appointed a general of her own militia/warband.
Rather than try and wrestle with it I've decided to just roll with it and assume that inside this woman was some kind of Dirty Harry character that was screaming to be let out.
I finally found a hairdresser! My character now has the asymmetric wasteland-riot grrl haircut that reflects her new life. She is also sporting a pair of Kurt Cobain style Jackie O glasses which now makes the cut scenes quite strange.
The radiation storms that roll in from time to time are pretty scary and the first time one happened I thought they were like the pulses in Stalker and rushed indoors. Only to keep irradiated because apparently being in a shelter doesn't protect you from storms.
Wearing a gasmask however does seem to do the job so maybe it is meant to be more about the poisoned air.
The start of the Shadow of Steel event is amazing. I genuinely had this moment of surprise, awe and trepidation as this huge airship appears.
It is also well-written and structured, coming as it does after a very internal moment in the kidnapped baby story.
The taking of Castle is really poorly designed. Preston starts going on and on about it but it's actually quite hard and he leaves Sanctuary when you give into his nagging and you can't hand in settler quests until you complete.
Also Preston was killed during the Queen battle and as a result respawned in Sanctuary and then had to run all the way back to Castle, which meant the quest was broken but was paused in a non-sensical way for about ten minutes.
I hadn't thought of dialing down the difficulty level for the duration of the quest. Silly me.
I have a pile of .38 ammo but apparently there are no decent weapons that use it.
My battle to restore civilisation has entered a bathetic phase.
All of my settlements are crying out for beds and instead of aluminium or fiber optics I am now desperately searching for oven mitts and pillows.
I'm even getting excited when raiders choose to wear a sack hoods because they generate cloth when scrapped.
My issue with .38 ammo has been resolved on the crafting table. Turning a pipe pistol into an automatic and minimising the recoil and adding sights, creates a pretty handy weapon. Taking the Commando perk then makes the weapon do enough damage to be worth using.
Lucas Miller, the armour travelling merchant, sells cloth wholesale. Beds ahoy!