#fallout frost

Baby, It’s cold outside…

For clarity, I've yet to play Frost but from what I've seen it seems to center itself in the same theme of Letting Go as Dust.

And I got to level 70.

I finally quit because the game was taking a literal hour to load save files. Fallout 4 takes forever to load saves anyhow, but you can get around it with the quick save/quick load, and it isn't nearly as bad, but some combination of my graphics card, Frost and Mod Organizer 2 (which is very clunky compared to Vortex) made it just drag.

I don't have a lot of screencaps, so forgive their random nature.

The game is punishing, and that's part of the point. Early in there's some excitement about how hard the survival mechanics are, but the mod philosophy is solid anti-fun, and after awhile, that just grows old.

Set six years after the war, the game jettisons as much of the wilder stuff as it can manage. Super Mutants and wilder mutated monsters aren't lore-friendly at that stage, so its mostly animals, people, and ghouls, who are constantly bolstered by the radioactive air and thus follow zombie-headshot rules.

Where the anti-fun aspect falls into place is the mod is obsessed with keeping you from getting any of the coolest gear because "it has to be there" for the main game story, despite it being super easy to do stuff that would throw the main game off kilter.

So most major locations are blocked off internally.

I see it for things like the power armor suit near Sanctuary, which is frozen solid in a clever solution to the problem, but I can't dig into ArcJet to get the Rock-It launcher? Seriously?

It gets extra obnoxious with the Nuka-World section, because huge chunks are blocked off, and both exclusive power armors are non-available. The entire marketplace in Nuka-Town is gone, just inoperable doors.

And the mod relies far too much on journal entries to tell what story it is. The journal entries come in basically two flavors: 1) tales of sorrow and death that are so common that you quickly get bored of them and 2) ramblings by now mad cultists, of which there are many. The main barrier to forward advancement is familiar places being blocked off with locked doors, the keys of which are at random locations you just have to stumble across.

You can't just go to Parsons' Asylum and find a way in. No, none of the many Maldenman guards outside have the key to the door. Nor is it at the end of the Malden subway line where I stomped the mutant thing they worshiped into the ground. It's apparently at the end of the "military storyline", a thing that (to be fair) I did not bother with because dealing with the conversational options with the few NPCs who will talk is a confounding mess of non-sequitor responses, because half the characters use randomly clipped together dialog from the main game and none of it is translated well.

It's not without its charms. For the first forty levels or so you're likely to enjoy it if you're really into hardcore survival experiences, and while most of the coolest gear was rendered nonexistent, a few things, like the syringer, were majorly improved. The boat fast-travel mechanic was neat but crafting fuel was stupidly inefficient.

I strongly recommend new players get the syringer-centered perk that replaced VANS the moment you can. Syringes are the only ammo with no weight, and for most of the game you'll want to keep a pack of venom and bleed-out syringes. One shot from either will take down a human or smaller sized living enemy (ghouls included) and the venom syringes are guaranteed kills on Deathclaws and Bears if you can keep out of reach long enough for them to succumb.