Fiery orange Blight mushrooms cling to the trees. Black Aster flowers grow from the cracks in the roads. The island is full of fresh new flora and fauna. Combine that with tall stands of thick-trunked pine trees and it’s almost enough to make you want an Alan Wake reboot. The fog itself isn’t so much cloaking the island as it is draping it in negligee. Godrays push through the fog in bright, spoked, sunny angles. While the game engine is obviously straining, the scenery is striking. I decide to cut loose and do a little sightseeing just outside the edge of town. Do I tackle the sidequests? Drive down the main storyline? Do some free roaming? What to do? That ol’ open-world game metanarrative is alive and well in Far Harbor. The first problem to solve: guessing which way to go. In proper, overreaching RPG fashion, I talk to a few folks and my mission log is immediately overflowing with entries sending me every direction across the island. There must be some nasty cliffs around here if fall damage is a benefit of cooking up some local cuisine. I cook up some poached angler, which gives me +15 Action Points and reduced fall damage for 20 minutes. I find a cooking stove on the dock, right next to a mirelurk they’ve got slowly boiling in a big glass vat. I’m not into heavy armors, but it does look like a fireman’s face mask mixed with a black TIE Fighter helmet from Star Wars. I’m somewhere in the 40s, so that many caps is a fortune. Far Harbor, as a DLC, is meant for high-level characters. The guy wants 18,800 caps for it, so, no thank you. I also spot something called a Recon Marine Helmet in the next shop over. You know, one of those Giligan’s Island beauties with fly fishing hooks all around it. I manage to snag a fisherman’s hat while I’m at it. I grab a legendary version of that Pole Hook called The Fish Catcher. There’s even a Pole Hook, like a Meat Hook with longer reach. I’d grab one of those meat hooks if I hadn’t already lifted one off a dead islander. It’s not good armor by any means, but I like to travel light anyway.Īfter the fight, I head right over to the weapons shop. So I throw on one of their winter jacket and jeans combos and pull on a wool fisherman’s cap. I strip the dead townspeople of the clothes off their back. Thankfully the Gulpers and Anglers are too big or too stupid to come after me under the pillars of The Hull, so I survive, pumping semi-auto gunfire into all of them. I end up down on the street level in the fog. The townspeople are throwing Molotov cocktails, but only seem to hit the fence in front of them-or me. Dogmeat got stuck down in the fray and immediately had to take a knee, whimpering. A few unlucky townspeople try to go toe to toe with them. Half a dozen of these Gulpers and Anglers swarm the town’s walls. Bethesda went into overtime and rereleased the Far Harbor DLC with a fix. As soon as you hit a patch of fog, the game turned into a slideshow. I’m not one to bellyache about frames per second, but it was bad. Prior to this writing, the fog slowed framerates in half on PlayStation 4. Especially the things trying to kill you. Maritime terminology permeates every aspect of this island, even the things trying to kill you. The Swamp Thing-looking creatures are called Gulpers and Anglers. Swamp Thing-looking creatures come loping out of that fog-a more mystical fog than I’m used to from the Commonwealth. The other person looks like Luke from Gilmore Girls with a fisherman’s beard and an itchy trigger finger.Ī warning bell rings and we run to “The Hull,” which is apparently the front gate of Far Harbor facing inland. One is a woman with short white hair and a level head on her shoulders. I’m fresh off the boat when I meet a two-person welcoming committee. The boat pulls up to the pier and the mystery of Far Harbor begins in earnest. It’s foggy, foggier than a radstorm it’s rocky, like Skyrim rocky and it’s gorgeous in Fallout’s broken-down beauty kind of way. I borrow their fishing boat which takes me further up the coast to the largest landmass developer Bethesda has ever put into downloadable content. Heading up the northeastern coastline toward Maine, I reach the parents’ seaside home.
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