Bioshock...hee...
It was just a remake of the same old "war never changes" thing that's been part of Fallout since the start.
As for Dogmeat, congrats! Save OFTEN. He dies a LOT. He has a tendency to run right into packs of enemies, who will focus on him before they attack you, even if you run right after him and get in the middle of it all.
Dogmeat is durable, but he will die quickly under sustained fire. And deathclaws MURDER him. It took me ten tries to kill a deathclaw before it could kill him once, and I had a head start on the 'claw. Dogmeat heals very quickly out of combat, and you can feed him a stimpack if need be...but it's hard to do in the confusion of combat.
Best thing to do is tell him to 'stay' if you're going into very dangerous territory. Dogmeat is at his best against light to medium armed animals and humans. He can survive supermutants as long as you kill them quickly while they're distracted by him. He can solo little annoying things like radroaches, molerats and even normal radscorpions (NOT giant ones and NOT those Yao Guai things), which mean you don't have to use ammo or degrade weapons over those things. He can usually solo raiders too, as long as there's just one at a time.
He can find stuff too, but I haven't yet found this to be terribly useful. Since the things you tell him to find are usually in something hostile's inventory, he tends to just lead you straight into a combat situation.
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