Fallout 4
Open World Shooty "RPG"
1 Player
System: Playstation 4
Developer: Bethesda Softworks
Year of Release: 2015
Beaten: November 27th, 2015
Bethesda. Bethesda never changes. Literally. This is pretty much the same engine they used to make Oblivion. Sure, they polished the old girl up, but god damn. It's getting old. There's a trend of apologist behavior surrounding Bethesda games. "Well it is a little better in this way." "They just simplified that to widen the audience." "Well, of course it's going to have bugs, it's a Bethesda game!" At what point do we stop accepting these glaring issues that have plagued almost every Bethesda game? For me, I think I've reached that point. Most of my major complaints about Fallout 4 aren't so much things it does wrong, but things that it just fails to do entirely, ideas that are touched on, but never fully realized. Or even just simple gaming conventions that should be standard for the sort of game Fallout 4 should be. That said, I've spent well over one hundred hours with the game, and will definitely be playing the DLC whenever it comes out. I'm going to be getting very spoiler heavy, as a lot of my gripes revolve around the plot, or at least the plot's structure, so you've been warned.
Fallout 4 looks great, in my opinion, I'm way more about aesthetics than actual graphical power and man, Fallout 4 has some really beautiful set pieces. That weather and lighting system they added in really does add a lot to how great everything looks. World design too, my god, if Bethesda does one thing well, it's create interesting worlds to explore (don't know what happened with Oblivion though). The gun play was refined as well, New Vegas added iron sights, but 4 makes it feel like an actual shooter. This is a two sided sword, because while combat is more fun for the most part, they took the shooter aspect a bit too far, maybe. Ultimately the game fails in a few ways, and I'll focus on those. Overall Fallout 4 is great fun to play, it is too simple in many ways, and they completely ignored good storytelling for the sake of accesibility for all.
Player agency. There's only a handful of instances of actual choice throughout the game, most of those instances being "yes I will take this quest" or "no I am not interested in your quest". In a Western styled RPG, this makes no real sense to me. In almost every single quest there's one outcome, and you will come to it unless you outright ignore it. At most you might be able to continue the conversation sassily as opposed to straight faced. This isn't choice. There is no character building. There is no sense of an actual real world here. People exist for you to find, help, and ignore until the end of the time. Even just slight branches in quests would have been appreciated. As I said before, there are a handful of instances where you can choose different things, but it falls into the "too little too late" category for me.
A beautiful broken world. How is this a complaint you ask? Well, I mentioned that world is beautiful, and a joy to explore, but there are some serious issues here. Firstly, they switched over to a junk is the most precious stuff ever sort of mentality, and as such you don't really find much neat stuff anymore. Mostly you'll find a gun and need to mod it on your own. Sure you might find some premodified armor and weapons, and you can strip those mods and put them on your weapons, but eventually it just got old. "Oh, I'm at the end of this area, here's the treasure chest (literally a chest) and maybe a terminal with some possibly interesting story bits here." It's just so... lame.
Over reliance on accessibility. This over abundance of accessibility has really done a number on this game. This is a minor point here, but have you thought about your companions? Assuming you're like most players you at least recruited a few different ones throughout the course of the game. Each with their own story, goals, lives. But in order to make things simple for you, you can order them to wait for you anywhere. Working for the Brotherhood? Go wait at this farm with no one in it. You're trying to cure your addictions? How about you go run the chem shop back in Sanctuary. Oh, you'd like to solve some 200 year old mission the person who's personality got implanted in your robot brain? Naw, I know this gas station you'd love to hang out at. This is ridiculous. I actually felt kind of bad sending people to wait at various places because they have shit to do. But because it would be too difficult to program them going about their own lives and just adding a companion page to your pip boy allowing you to locate, or even just request they rejoin you, you just put their whole life on pause. Force a Super Mutant, a militant hater of all things unnatural, a synth, a robot, a lady who was once a robot, a dog, a ghoul and a drug addict to all share a room!
My favorite part of this game? Items respawn. Functionally that's a god send, after you raid a place, just wait some amount of in-game time and the items will respawn. This is great for settlement building, and restocking ammo, but... where is this coming from? How does pre-war money show back up in buildings that I cleared out? This makes NO sense. I get it, from a gameplay perspective, but it just wrecks the believability of the world as a whole.
Poor story telling. The best stories in this game come from 200 years in the past. Either as little posed skeletons chilling with some antifreeze and bourbon bottles, or computer entries that shed some insight on the pre-war world of Fallout, these stories are usually the most interesting. Except, how the fuck is all this shit from 200 years ago still here and in working condition? No one is cleaning out places. No one is trying to actually rebuild a damn thing. No one is doing fucking anything about this situation! It's been 200 years, bullshit humanity wouldn't have already made at least a bit of a come back. Sure Super Mutants and ghouls and raiders are scary, but they can be dealt with, and 200 years is a damn long time to tell me not a bit of progress has been made. Sure, there are places like Diamond City, but come on, that place is a shit hole. Don't even get me started on how everyone's diet is mostly 200 year old food.
The main plot sees you discover that this scary Institute is behind every bad thing that's happened since the bombs dropped. They took your son, and ignoring the entire "I need to find my son, right after I check out this destroyed mall..." aspect of the game, it's so underwhelming when they reveal what happened. They try to force you to care about this unlikable guy who's beyond stubborn. No matter who you choose to side with of the four factions in the end you're going to destroy at least two of them. There just is no choice. No ability to work them all to your benefit, or to convince them to work together. The Brotherhood would not just blow up the Institute, they'd raid them and take everything of value. It just makes no sense, especially when I could think of ways to make all of these factions work together, even if it is an uneasy alliance, at least I'd have a fucking say in the matter instead of this bullshit "we'll follow your lead because you've impressed us so much, but actually this scripted event is GOING to happen."
I haven't even talked about settlements. It's so fun, for me, to build this crazy post apocalyptic towns, but ultimately, there's no real gains to be had. Sure you can get some cash flow, but that quickly stops mattering. You can set up shops, which is kind of nice, but it doesn't really add up to anything. The only quests related to settlements is "oh no *insert baddie* is attacking! Please save us!" type of shit and it's just so disappointing. Why isn't there a quest line dedicated to rebuilding civilization? That pushes you to want to build something that matters, to link them with trade routes that make sense and help other parts of the Commonwealth grow, to make sure the people living in these settlements are like minded, or at least can work together to maintain order in this ruin of a planet. WHY DID YOU DROP THE BALL IN EVERY REGARD BETHESDA?!
Argh. I'm not even going to mention how shallow and lazy the new perk system is, or how VATS seems pretty damn busted now, or how the game is still OH SO CLEARLY still on the Gamebyro engine, or any of the hilarious glitches, or how fucked the new dialogue wheel is, or how ghouls are just zombies now, or how power armor was changed kind of awkwardly. I'm done. I think I've painted a fairly clear picture of my problems with this game, even if I do have more I'm not getting into too much.
At the end of the day, this game is still fun, and that's what matters most. It kind of sucks seeing this rich setting being wasted by idiots who think Fallout must be set in a wasteland (don't set it 200 years in the god damn future Bethesda!) and that the RPG elements are slowly slipping away (this was obvious even in Skyrim) but it's still... fun... right? Ugh. It is. But it's just so disheartening when games can be so much more then this, but they settle for less because it's easier, and honestly probably sells better. I yearn for a time when developers pushed themselves to do better, to truly innovate, to create something memorable. The world is there, it's just waiting for a developer who has actual vision, and a desire to create something great in every way to bring it to it's fullest potential. Maybe we will get lucky and Bethesda will outsource the next game to an outside company like New Vegas, they managed to take the shambles of Fallout 3 and make it feel like an actual RPG again. I recommend checking out this game, I mean you already have more than likely, it's fucking Fallout 4 right? Just know, there are a lot of little problems, alongside some massive problems, that drag down the overall quality of the game for me. However, if you're the target audience for this game you don't give a shit about any of that now do you?
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