I tried writing two reviews for Fallout 4 before this, with no success, partly because of the number of arguments I’ve got swirling in my head, and partly because it’s difficult to pull the game apart.
I think the main reason it’s hard to dissect it is its place in the Fallout/ Elder Scrolls franchises. It’s the only single-player title part of either universe launched by Bethesda in the past fifteen years, so it catches the collective disappointment and frustration with the “stagnant development”. I also don’t think Starfield has done a lot for people to quench their thirst for good, open-world games, meaning that games like Fallout 3 and New Vegas thrive in the minds of fans and Fallout 4 feels a blotch of untapped potential.
I like hbomberguy, but I think his “review” of Fallout 3 highlights an interesting bit of psychology. I’ve written somewhere that all relevant Elder Scrolls games (Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim) are very similar. This applies tenfold to the Howard Fallout titles; Fallout New Vegas is similar to Fallout 3, with the only notable differences being Obsidian’s more linear, hub-based approach to quest design, and the hours of content. New Vegas has much more side content than 3, and, unfortunately, more than 4, which leads to these goofy comparisons between titles, and the “Bethesda conspiracy” related to the chaotic development of New Vegas. This is one of those instances in which the fan base makes a game retroactively worse for newcomers; nonsense like Todd Howard himself sabotaging Obsidian’s 2010 launch makes New Vegas look like an inferior product because fans can’t be bothered to fact check.
If you think this preamble is drawn out, consider that Fallout 4, in many respects, has the same campaign as New Vegas, but set in an open world that doesn’t suck. You have three factions vying for dominance with a possible fourth one that represents the player. The player hunts down a guy for revenge up till the second act. Killing him opens the door to another faction, which opens a new questline. The factions are thematically aligned, with the Railroad and Brotherhood of Steel looking like the NCR and Mr. House respectively, the Institute looking like the Legion, and the Minutemen looking like Yes Man. Both game’s last act feature a battle (or more) between factions, and the Brotherhood of Steel’s final battle against the Institute is copied from Fallout 3.
The only real difference between New Vegas’ approach to world building and Fallout 4’s is that faction conflicts existed before the player’s intervention. In the latter, half the factions don’t even have a presence in the Commonwealth.
Nostalgia is a bitch. It makes people say “I’ve played it yesterday and is as good as I remember” after downloading fifteen mods to launch the game. Due to the unstable nature of the engine, none of the pre-Fallout 4 games function without modifications to the game’s files. I think New Vegas is, by a large margin, the most unstable one in twenty years of Bethesda, and Fallout 4 is the most functional; the only Howard-related Elder Scrolls or Fallout I can launch without tinkering with files, or abusing the console. It’s also the only one where unmodded combat doesn’t give me a headache.
And… well, we’re not playing these games for the combat. We’re not playing to roleplay either; people are drawn to the open exploration and environmental storytelling. Much has been said about the “loop” of dialogue, exploration, fighting, and crafting cupboards and fridges. Settlement building hasn’t done much for the roleplaying aspect of the game, but it did give us something else to do during the loop, which, for a certain type of individual (me, it’s me), it’s a nice creative outlet. A time consuming one, too, because the interface’s UX is unfriendly at best.
The “roleplay” debate has always fascinated me. I understand it for the Elder Scrolls franchise, which has builds, but the first-person Fallout games have one build: shooter with high Speech/ Charisma who passes 95% of dialogue checks. You’ll hear boomers talk about “meelee builds” for these games, which aren’t builds as much as refusals to engage with the game’s core mechanic. It’s like playing Oblivion and refusing to fast travel.
But no, first-person Fallout doesn’t have builds; it’s the same thing with a couple of different flavors. Being a gunslinger isn’t that different from being a commando with automatic rifles.
The only thing that frustrates me with Fallout 4 is the opening act. We’re trudging through 30 minutes of intro, then work our way through the same restricted map zone because of ammo scarcity. It’s funny that people complained about available power armor so early in the game even if no player will have the necessary skill and number of fusion cores to play with it for more than fifteen minutes. It’s just for tutorialization, but it’s poorly implemented because it lumps together every important mechanic in a sequence of linear four hours.
A downgrade from previous entries is the protagonist, who is forced by circumstances to be a good person, driven by the extraneous hope their son is, somehow, alive, naively pushed around by factions who have a bone to pick with the Institute. And the plot twist isn’t that the son is dead, but that he is the psychopathic leader of the Institute, who left out the Sole Survivor to see “what would happen.” This further reduces the dramatic impact of the plot, making it about stupidity.
War never changes because people are dumb and naive. This isn’t a bad idea for a theme, but so much of the plot is pushed forward by “good intentions”. The Brotherhood of Steel aren’t insane bigots, they just want to “preserve technology for the good of mankind.” The Institute isn’t a group of unhinged scientists driven to the brink of exasperation by isolation from humanity, but Europa Universalis players. The Railroad isn’t a bunch of weirdos with a kink for robot sex, but “liberators of synths”. The Minutemen don’t even have anything going for them, they’re just a random quest generator.
This on-the-nose writing bleeds into the Far Harbor DLC, which is a shame because Far Harbor is a wet dream for Elder Scrolls players: a remote island with survival challenges, monsters, and cool dungeons, and an alcoholic companion to boot. But Far Harbor suffers from the same issues because it’s the same template. Three factions vie for domination over a radioactive patch of dirt. Like, I get bickering over the Commonwealth, which is fine, it just has a problem with supermutants and the Glowing Sea is too close. Far Harbor, the island, is a shithole, and people act like it’s their God-given right to claim it for themselves. And again, the Atom boys and girls are the Legion; their faction starts with a chick who shoots a rando in the head for no reason. The “people of Far Harbor” (confederation of the homeless) are the NCR, and would like your help to colonize the rest of the radioactive dirt, wrestle it away from ghouls and beasts. Acadia is led by a technologically-modified synthetic human who keeps a bunch of robots around. Do I have to spell it out?
At least Far Harbor has thematic cohesion, which is why Fallout 4 enthusiasts prefer it over the main campaign. DiMA is a compelling anti-hero who gives me strong Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep vibes. His connection to Nick Valentine (who is the only great companion in the history of the Fallout franchise) is a nice touch because it humanizes the unhinged robot from Acadia. Far Harbor had the potential to bring all the themes of the main campaign to a close. Do synths deserve the same rights as the living? Can we trust them? What are the implications of trusting synths with positions of power, and what does “war never changes” mean in a world where synths are a part of us?
Unfortunately, the game lacks the paranoia inherent in this type of stories; normal people are trusting and the few who are not are portrayed as crazy. One of the only programmed encounters in the game happens in Diamond City, where an insane guy shoots another guy because of synth paranoia, and the incident is swept under the rug without much fuss from the residents. I don’t know, if I had to live in a world where I didn’t know if the guy who cuts my hair can explode at any time due to a malfunction, I think I’d take my chances someplace else. Nick Valentine exists as the epicenter of these concerns, being an obvious synth, but holding onto moralistic ideas and retaining the personality of a “hardboiled” detective from before the bomb. But Nick is not the protagonist, so he’ll need to run with whatever choice the player makes regarding DiMA, meaning we don’t get to see the other side of the argument.
The argument itself, answering the questions I posed above, is murky because Bethesda clings to the idea of letting people think about this for themselves, which is fine in a story that takes ten hours, but frustrating over the course of one hundred. Because at no point do I get the sensation that there’s a good conclusion to my inquiries. Is the Institute wrong? I think so, but my protagonist doesn’t. Are the Railroad goofballs? Yeah, but their faction ends with me infiltrating and blowing up the Brotherhood of Shit’s flying base, which I’m always going to do if I ever replay this game, because the BoS is the worst, most disgusting and over-used faction in the franchise. I just hope–pray–for a Fallout title or IP that doesn’t include those fucking idiots, it’s so stupid that I have to watch a bunch of communist bigots dressed in tight leather talking to me about “preserving mankind” by hoarding technology and using it to rain war on the poor sods who grow carrots and a razorgrain in my backyard. And Danse can suck a dick; I can’t believe he’s a synth to drive home the point that “synths are humans, too, when the guy is just as tight and bigoted as any other BoS nut. The whole BoS saga should’ve ended with New Vegas, with Father Elijah’s descent into crazy town after his defeat in Sierra Madre, and with the Courier blowing up the BoS base after receiving mixed signals from Veronica for fifty hours.
Nuka World amplified the narrative problems by getting rid of synths and replacing the three factions that resemble the main ones from New Vegas with three bandit clans. Nuka World is cool if you’re looking for more play time; it’s kinda bad for settlement locations, but the dungeons are nice after my fiftieth supermutant hole.
The robot DLC is good if you’re looking to build a companion that will mop the ground with most mobs in the game, but to get there you have to trudge through a few hours of a campaign that revolves around the question of whether or not robots have feelings. Like, no, but I appreciate the attempt. Ada is still the best companion in the game because she shuts the fuck up if I need her to. I like to imagine using Ada to open my beer cans after a long day of using her to saw the logs I use to build outhouses for those sods with the carrots and razograin.
I have around 600 hours in Fallout 4, and most of those were spent dealing with settlements. I think the system collapses after building, like, one, because you get random side quests notifying you that one of your settlements is under attack. I think Bethesda didn’t know whether they wanted the settlements to be like Minecraft or like Rimworld, so we were stuck in this awkward middle where you need mods to make settlement building more functional.