James' Journey - Quest Review in Description
Version Played: 1.0
Runtime: 2 1/2 Hours.
A Man of many Memes once said "These Things; they take time."
Having been working on this mod since first being part of the Creation Kit Beta, Culinwino3000 seems to agree, and the quality of James' Journey shows it.
To summarize the plot: An Old Man's wife has been killed for being an Old Man's Wife, and the player, alongside two other companions, join said Old Man on a quest for Vengeance.
While I might be one to sneer at the trite "My Wife is Dead" setup, the Writing and Voice-Acting is a saving grace, and the plot does manage a few, if not predictable, twists.
With a few exceptions, every character is fully voiced, with great Microphone quality and acting skill. I found myself greatly enjoying the presence and remarks of my companions. A legitimate effort was put into giving them distinct personalities; Denton in particular, I greatly enjoyed. Not every line is a Homer (in either Acting or writing) but is overall an excellent component of the experience.
A notable exception to this is James himself. According to the mod page, his voice actor had fallen ill before his lines could be recorded, which unfortunately causes one of my biggest gripes with this mod.
Fallout 4 has an odd problem where if no voicefile is present for a line of dialogue, you must wait *several* seconds for the game to assume you had enough time to read the subtitle. Unfortunately, the time the game gives is far longer than it should take the average person. The result? James causes conversations to draaaaaaaaag. Even worse, when James speaks (which is often) he typically has [i]a lot[/i] to say. In my Playthrough, his dialogue alone added several unnecessary minutes to the overall runtime.
In addition, I semi-frequently ran into situations where either whole conversations between multiple characters would completely start over, or dialogue would fail to trigger. (The latter which happened in infuriating number of times when escaping the raiders with Denton.)
These bugs, while annoying when present, did not stop me from enjoying the mod as a whole however.
There is quite a bit of combat evenly spaced throughout the mod. As an obvious balancing factor of having three compaions, you typically find yourself fighting 10s of them at a time. The combat sections are very linear, but they serve their purpose, and there's always something a bit entertaining about cutting down a hallway full of ghouls alongside your companions.
Most of the combat areas are your typical tunnels, ruins, and bunkers, but there is one area I feel I should talk about, and that is The Fire Raider's Lair. Functionally, it's much like the other areas. Just hallways and rooms filled with enemies.
However, the author had made the decision to fill this particular area to the proverbial brim with Shadow-Casting lights. This causes performance to take an absolute [b]nosedive[/b]. I have a fairly powerful system (Gtx 980, I5-4690k) and my fps was cut down to 30 and 40 fps throughout this entire section. I can only imagine this area would be completely unplayable on lesser systems. Which is a shame, because no other area in the mod (or the vanilla game) is nearly that intensive.
The section itself was fairly enjoyable, fighting Flamer-wielding enemies in tight spaces is not your typical combat experience, but it was totally marred by the abysmal performance of the area.
And honestly, the lights didn't even look that good. This is a no-winner scenario.
Authors, please. Don't put ridiculous amounts of shadow lights. There's a reason not even Bethesda does that.
Despite these hiccups, James' Journey is a fantastic Quest mod. As with Culinwino's Journey to Vault 79, the Author knows how to pace a good journey. Keeping the action and plot quick, without being overbearing, (provided James isn't talking.)
I have to say I'm greatly looking forward to Act 2.
[center][size=6][b][/b][/size][/center][center][size=6][b][/b][/size][size=6][b]RATING: ★★★★[/b][/size][/center]
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