DLC I Beat: Fallout 4 Season Pass

Fallout 4 Season Pass
Open World Shooty "RPG"
1 Player
System: Playstation 4
Developer: Bethesda Softworks
Year of Release: 2015
Beaten: August 31st, 2016

It's a sad state of affairs we find ourselves in. In regards to how RPG's have become streamlined action games. In regards to Bethesda continual slide into mediocrity. In regards to how downloadable content is handled. In regards to the practice of overpricing games and downloadable content. In regards to the lack of communication in the world of video games. In regards to the Fallout series as a whole. In regards to the current elections. Truly, this is a time of chaos.

When Fallout 4 was first announced I immediately fell into something resembling the "Sonic Cycle", wherein I get beyond excited for a Bethesda game, then after release quickly realize how much the game lets me down. I'm not going to regurgitate my disappointment in Fallout 4, there are many flaws that hold back the game for me and yet I still logged an obscene amount of time into the game. Why is it that I find myself going out of the way to complete this game 100%? I did the same with Skyrim and played well beyond my growing tired of it. I suppose I'm a junkie.

This is largely a review of Nuka-World, the recently, and last, released bit of DLC for Fallout 4. But I'd like to take the chance to address the season pass overall. I am beyond dissatisfied with how DLC has been handled for a while now, and at this point it can only be described as hideous. This season pass was released alongside the base game. No information was given. Not the amount of content, not the size of the content, not the approximate release dates for the content. This is a major issue. You should not be selling something without giving any information regarding the content. Especially when the cost of entry is thirty dollars, more than the previous two games which added a substantial amount of content, and arguably some of the best to be found in either Fallout 3 or New Vegas. As if thirty dollars wasn't enough as the release of the first bits of content were drew near they announced the price of the season pass would increase to fifty dollars.

The tactic worked, and I ordered it for thirty dollars day before the price changed. They announced the first three packs, and that a nebulous amount of other packs would be included in the pass. Still, paltry amounts of information was available and now this pass cost nearly as much as the game. It stands to reason the DLC should cover nearly the same amount of content as could be found in the base game. Foolish hopeful naivety. First came Automatron, which I reviewed previously. It comes with a handful of new missions, a new group of enemies and a new mechanic in the form of building and customizing robots. A decent bit of small content. Next came one of the more useless packs, the Wasteland Workshop. This bit should have appealed to me, but by the time it released I had grown quite tired of the construction aspect of the game. While I enjoyed building, ultimately, there was absolutely no point. Adding more possible items to construct as well as the ability to capture anything and force it to fight other things in an arena did little to draw me in. The last of the initial wave was Far Harbor. While many claimed this wasn't a very good bit of game, I disagree. This might be some of my favorite bits of Fallout 4. I almost wrote a blog about it, but wound up getting distracted. It adds a significantly sized new piece of land, with a decent amount of areas to explore, new groups to interact with and new weapons and enemies a plenty. I really enjoyed the desolate landscape of Far Harbor.

Eventually they announced the next group of packs to be released, two more like the workshop and another full sized bit of content. Contraptions Workshop is... even more worthless to me than the Wasteland Pack. It adds more little contraptions to set up Rube Goldberg machines and manufacturing pieces to make your own bullet printing machine. Again, considering building settlements leads to nothing, this is pointless. The next bit made me personally groan, but the idea was nevertheless enticing. The Vault-Tec Workshop. If I'm being honest this one is a bit more like the Automatron DLC. You find an abandoned Vault and are tasked with clearing out the area and finishing the job. You get to build your own vault! Which is actually tremendously annoying due to how construction is handled. They also made promises of testing your vault dwellers, but it really was just a short series of linear quests involving "torturing" a single vault dweller repeatedly. Needless to say I was not impressed. The final bit that got released was Nuka-World, taking place in a Nuka-Cola themed Disney World. This worried me, because they also announced this DLC would be raider-centric. And oh boy is it ever.

My main character in Fallout 4 has been through a lot, she has visited and cleared every area in the game, and attained every trophy and every unique item. You know one thing she never did? Fall from grace. After waking up and finding her dead husband and missing baby she grabbed his wedding ring and never let go. She was a force, possibly the sole force, of good in a land beyond saving. She rebuilt the minutemen, steered the brotherhood towards righteousness, rescued as many scared synths as possible and helped every single living person who meant well. Within minutes of starting Nuka-World she was forced into the role of raider queen. How dare this game continue under the guise of an RPG while forcing this kind of character story rape on a player. My role playing was tenuous at best, consisting of mostly traits in my head that the game struggled to reflect. To have the game force my character to betray everything she stood for immediately ruined my experience.

To many, this will be a minor issue. Even more still when you consider you can obtain a quest almost immediately to eradicate all gangs from the park, but this in turn stops you from completing the bulk of the quests in the DLC. Which is what I had paid for in the first place. While Fallout 4 had left me disillusioned before and even made me question why I continued to play I never stopped having at least an ounce of fun. During Nuka-World I often found myself longing to just turn my PS4 off. This depressed me as a game built in the style of some of my favorite all time games was wearing my patience thin. As if forcing that thug life on my character wasn't bad enough they forced that influence to leak into the commonwealth proper. I had previously commandeered each settlement, now I was forced to turn them into raider camps to make progress in the DLC. I had to turn on once friends and intimidate them into feeding a bunch of pieces of shit I neither liked nor respected. This DLC turned me into a monster.

Aside from learning that the guy who made Nuka-Cola was involved with some shady dealings nothing of worth is learned about the world at large. Three gangs are trying to team up, and by the end of it one gang turns on the other. You decide by doling out territory throughout the missions. The finale was disturbingly flaccid. All that I did was run straight through the area, one shotting each henchmen I ran into, if I didn't ignore them entirely. Upon reaching the rooftop I immediately destroyed one of the two bosses with VATS crits, and then melted the other to goo within a clips worth of shots. That was it.

Worse still the new area added in is not only smaller than Far Harbor it is FAR emptier. Outside of Nuka-World proper (which consists of five uniquely themed areas which are decent on their own) there is nothing of value. My favorite area outside of the park is a highway gunner hangout which had potential for a quest line, but didn't. It merely hinted at the gunners struggling to gain a foothold in the area. You are forced to be a raider, but can't choose your alliance. I can't think of anything more to say about Nuka-World. It was empty and forced my character to take a complete 180 as a character for the purposes of completion and none of the quests felt very inspired. There is a cult from the Hub that goes nowhere. You run into a fan of Nuka-Cola from the capitol wasteland that has a semi-neat outcome, but ultimately leads to underwhelming rewards (nuka flavored mini-nukes, wow). The gangs have different personalities from well ordered money orientated hitman, to serial killers, to... wild animals essentially. My simultaneously favorite and least liked part is a quest involving essentially Tarzan who was raised by Ghoulrillas and you team up with radiated immortal gorillas to take out gator themed Deathclaws!

Fallout 4 will go down in history as an underwhelming example of what happens when a game studio just gets lazy. The soul of the game is so faintly to be found in the base game or any of the downloadable content. At thirty dollars it's difficult to justify purchasing the pass, at fifty it's fucking insulting. Wait for the Game of the Year edition, or if you're like me and "lucked out" getting the thirty dollar pass at least the content could almost be argued to be worth that amount. I really hope Bethesda outsources any future Fallout games, they don't deserve to fuck with the universe anymore. Hell, just release mod support for PS4 already and i'd be at least a little contented.