Finally got the time to check the new free story expansion and immidiately got a deja vu: when I played the last one, it was also my first experience with levelscaling. I went in all sneaky... and got instagibbed by a lvl100 mosquito 5 mins in. Did I learn from that? Nope, this time I was instakilled by a lvl100 cave cricket.
Oh well, this game is power armor only once you go past lvl100 now I guess. Again. Indoors at least.
Although the game now offers 2 free loadouts, where you freely setup stats and perks, switchable at any hub and trainstation. A dedicated PA build to switch to is now possible.
Writing is solid to good again, way ahead of Todd's and probably on par with Niu-Obsidian. The big bad's "sacrifices for the greater good" holotapes were awsomely done and they picked the perfect VA for that. Gave me vibes from "that New Vegas vault".
It suffers a bit from being chopped in two parts with a several month development gap in between tho. You need to play it as a whole, so you still remember details from the beginning. Because, sad one has to even mention it, they know the basic concept of setup and payoff.
And in the end you can even be a massive dick and turn this BoS into the xenophobic crusading assholes we remember them as. And it would even make sense considering the massive PTSD the player char must have by now.
I'd rate it a solid 3.5 trolls, but since it's free AND from Bethesda, I'll make it a full
.
Well worth the bandwidth.
Also, a few earlier mentioned story hickups aside, it might be possible now to even ignore most of the old mainquest and just stick to Wastelanders/BoS/Allies content and reach lvl50. You still have to do the Responders innoculation and Rose's first quest, but that's pretty much it. Aside from Becket's fiddy cal, Slugbuster and the new PA, nothing is really endgame equipment worth waiting until you lvl50 anyway.
Also, the legendary ammosmith perks makes using heavy weapons a lot easier now. With that and ammosmith I got about 400 bullets of .50 cal out of 10 steel/lead. Before super duper. That's quiet reasonable now.
Welp, see you next year game!