PC

In Fallout 4 the future is here, and damn is it as bright as the splitting of the atom. After the bombs fell over Japan during World War 2 the world of Fallout took a very different turn. The high concept fantasy of 50s science fiction took a foothold in the real world, with atomic energy harnessed for the sake of making every day life easier with everything from robot butlers to cold fusion cars. It’s not perfect, cold war fears have come to fruition. China has taken the place of Russia as the world’s most fearsome communist super power and they’re engaged in an increasingly terrifying and hostile struggle for natural resources with the United States. Even so, for married couple Nate and Nora the world has just gotten a little better as they celebrate their recent bundle of joy Shaun, the war baby born to this returning veteran and young lawyer. They make up the snap shot of the perfect 1950s nuclear family. For them, the future is full of love, life and possibility.

Until doomsday comes to their doorsteps and the bombs drop mere miles away from their perfect little suburban community. Panic spreads, the townsfolk rush for their nearby ‘Vault’, a nation wide corporate project meant to ensure the brightest and best of America’s future survive the apocalypse. Nate and Nora grip their child Shaun surrounded by their friends and neighbors, watching the city of Boston mushroom into a cloud of nuclear fire as they sink down into Vault 111. They assure one another that everything is going to be alright, that their future is protected, that they’ll see each other on the other side.

This is the start of the Sole Survivor’s journey.

Okay so as epic as the opening to Fallout 4 sounds, and as big of a set piece as it actually is, it’s really no more than a ton of cosmetic and spreadsheet decisions meant to start you off on your journey. The game provides you with an overall goal. After taking a frosty 200 year nap, your son is missing, your spouse is otherwise indisposed, and you must go on a journey to get your little love baby back. It’s a functional premise, a parent struggling to get their child back has given us some of the best revenge movies such as Death Wish and Taken, and I think ‘revenge’ movie is an appropriate parallel for Fallout 4 because you’re mostly going to slaughter and maim your way to your child with little else in terms of player choice. As far as modern RPGs go, a genre where it’s now hard to tell the difference between a role playing game and a first person shooter or third person adventure, Fallout 4 throws down its stake with the rest of the trigger happy lot. As far as being the next evolution in Bethesda titles, Fallout 4 feels like the most logical next step after Skyrim. As for being a Fallout game, the fourth numbered entry in the series feels as though it falls short in several ways.

It’s difficult to succinctly talk about Fallout 4’s failures and triumphs simply because it’s a game that goes through a lot of effort to try out a lot of new things. Some of these attempts to keep the franchise relevant and engaging are fairly successful, while others I believe are quite disastrous. Bethesda really took a ton of exotic ingredients in this game and congealed them into a stew that isn’t always palatable. There are bits of the survival game genre in here. Some clear influences from BioWare styled RPGs. Elements taken from various video game and television genres of horror. You can even tell there are influences from Obsidian’s New Vegas. While I don’t believe the grand experiment that is Fallout 4 always worked, I do at least applaud Bethesda for trying a bunch of risky mechanics that divert them away from formulas already established as successful in Skyrim and Fallout 3.

I’ll start with the central narrative of the game, as that feels like the most natural place. As mentioned, the overarching quest is to get your son Shaun back from a shadowy secretive organization that took him for shadowy secretive reasons. You don’t get much to go on other than the face of your nemesis, a big bad who shares the same name as a major cereal brand and a historic museum. There are some easy parallels to Fallout 3 and Skyrim to be made here. The quest to find your father and the quest to find an evil dragon nemesis all rolled into one. Now I understand the usual ‘deal’ of any Bethesda game is to ignore the main quest and just do as you like, but I was never that cynical, I actually enjoyed Bethesda’s other main narratives, or I did until Fallout 4 anyway…

The game has a nasty habit of insisting I care about things I simply don’t. They asked me to care about the fate of my spouse, they asked me to care about my son, they asked me to hate the main villain, and the simple truth is I just didn’t give a damn. I didn’t give a damn because I simply didn’t know these people. Everything was so shrouded in secrecy in this game, from my main nemesis to allied factions I was meant to join to the fate of my child, I simply couldn’t find any emotional investment. I was invested in killing Alduin in Skyrim simply because he made the occasional pop in to taunt me and torch folks I was just drinking a mug of ale with. I was invested in finding my dad in Fallout 3 because I got to spend an extensive amount of time interacting with him. Fallout 4 keeps everything behind a closed door, and when it finally opens it I find the game wants to rush me through it so fast I barely have a chance to process it. There is a major distinction between generating mystery and hiding information vital to understanding of the world, it doesn’t actually generate mystique or intrigue. It’s a poor writing choice where the end result is confusion and frustration with trying to engage the narrative in any meaningful way.

The core ‘boogeyman’ in Fallout 4 is an organization called The Institute. I don’t feel this is much of a spoiler as they are mentioned in Fallout 3, but these guys are all about developing ‘synths’; synthetic humans, that look and feel like the real deal and can replace your loved ones overnight. The issue with the Institute is they’re such a boogeyman mention of them borders on irritation. It robs the game of much needed personality. Part of the pleasure of Fallout is discovering the various quirks and idiosyncrasies of the different settlements you’ll come across. The odd politics of the kid driven Little Lamplight or the raw tribal nature of the Red Canyon.

Sure in Fallout 4 you may find a city that is driven by crime or a city that is slightly less driven by crime with a tinge of baseball, but it seems every single camp you come across in the Commonwealth is shaking in their boots over the same exact thing. The Institute. So instead of engaging in a fun new lore I would inevitably run into fearful mentions of the Institute, the Institute, the Institute. Then once you finally arrive at the doors of this big scary nemesis it’s rather anti-climatic, it lacks the punch of seeing the Empire in Star Wars up close for the first time. There’s nothing too shocking or awful about it, the Commonwealth is the hype-man for the Institute and the Institute isn’t as revealing as you would hope. As initially cool as it may be, certainly the most cyberpunk thing of this title and the type of grand spectacle you expect from Role Playing Games, it quickly reverts back to Fallout 4’s pesky ways of abruptly shooing you on to do whatever mundane damn thing needs doing.

Then of course there’s the new dialogue system. Where prior Fallouts gave you a wealth of conversation options that could change the game’s tone and your relationship with characters, Fallout 4 has boiled chatting down to four simple choices that almost always invoke the same canned responses. You can generally snark your way up, ask for more information, be a dick, or be a helpful eager to please pet. I tried to play the game as the Commonwealth’s knight in sun bleached rawhide armor, but with no dynamic choices I ultimately felt as though I had no sway in crafting my personality. Most perplexing is simple acts such as gathering information or learning your next goal point in a quest was often tied to Charisma checks. If it’s one thing I learned in all my social interactions with people it’s that they love talking about themselves, so I found it odd the folks of the Commonwealth were so tight lipped with innocuous things such as “What do you do for a living?” or “Can you tell me what time it is?”

So the core story is lacking, and so are some of the game’s distractions. But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention there were a few quests in here that were glorious examples of the fun and sharp writing the game could be capable of. I noticed the game excelled most when telling stories or generating environments that felt very classic Fallout or era appropriate. There was the one mission where I engaged in a waterfront drug deal gone South that perfectly captured 50s noir and and the feel of films such as, well, On the Waterfront. There was a very cloak and dagger mission reminiscent of Ian Fleming Bond. There was feasting eyes on how Fenway Park had been converted into the baseball-centric shanty town Diamond City or trudging through the landscape of nuclear desolation that was the Glowing Sea. These were all things that either blew my mind, gave me a visual treat, or where I realized I was having a lot of fun, after trudging what previously felt like chores.

Then there’s the various background stories. It could just be me, but I feel as though this Fallout includes a ton of lore and short little tidbits from before the war. It’s appropriate too as you are, quite literally, a pre-war survivor. One of the most touching moments I had in the game was in reading the logs of a pregnant runaway teen, coming across her skeleton left in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, I realized she died scared and alone. The little stories of the ‘People time forgot’ added some much needed atmospheric touches. I also dug the fact that over the course of the story, you could read the terrified logs of Raiders as they came face to face with the reckoning that was the Soul Survivor, quaking in their boots at this 200 year old anomaly come to the Commonwealth to gum up their operations.

I feel this provides a natural transition into another topic of contention, the game’s various factions. We’re not talking Fallout 3’s Brotherhood of Steel versus Enclave here or even New Vegas’ Caesar’s Legion vs NCR vs Great Khans. As I’ve said, this game is the next step up from Skyrim, and factions in Fallout 4 pretty much functionally act as the guilds of The Elder Scrolls. Well. Sort of. You’ll find yourself with the option to ultimately interact with four different factions with four different viewpoints on the ‘Are Synths human, or are they tools?” conflict central to Fallout 4. The issue with these four guilds is they are shrouded in secrecy. Okay, so the first group you enter isn’t exactly a closely guarded secret, but they have so little presence they may as well be. When interacting with these groups you will often find yourself faced with this question; “You have no idea what we stand for and I have no inclination to tell you, but would you like to join us?” So essentially you’re stumbling in the dark.

What’s worse is these guilds are core to the story. All four of them. There’s a major decision late into the game that irrevocably changes the world and the player’s interaction with these four groups. So what’s the point in being so opaque with who you’re able to join? What’s worse is you can find yourself forever locked off from skills, perks, crafting choices and quests due to decisions you may not even know you’re making. This stands in direct opposition to Skyrim, and the spirit of RPGs in general, where guilds were largely irrelevant to the narrative yet you could pretty much join any group whenever you wanted on your own terms. It’s a very confusing and frankly frustrating design decision that illustrates the needless ambiguity of the entire game.

Bethesda also claimed radiant quests would be far improved from Skyrim’s “find five items, return them to me” recurring quests. I actually think the Radiants here are an extreme nuisance. They’ll send you to clear the same dungeons you’ve already stripped bare, a few are timed, and you can actually lose resources if you don’t do them. I very much preferred getting a Khajiit high to their tapetum eyeballs with Skooma than I did permanently losing otherwise invincible settlers because I couldn’t be bothered to be pulled away from a far more interesting, far more engaging questline, or was trapped in the middle of a long dungeon when I got the alert. Oh, did I mention some of these radiants aren’t all that optional? To avoid them you basically have to refrain from interacting with certain NPCs and locations, I found myself intentionally blocking off content just so I wouldn’t have to deal with radiant quests.

I spent a bit of time on the story aspects, though I do feel talking about the factions is a reflection of player enjoyment and has quite a bit of mechanical function behind it. Let’s talk about how the game plays. Frankly, this is Skyrim with a few more animations added to your character and a lot more projectile weapons. Everything functions almost identically to how it did in Skyrim and New Vegas, from crafting to combat. The key word being ‘almost.’ There are a couple of changes that are practically head scratching. The most egregious I believe being the new perk system.

Perks, for the Fallout uninitiated, are constants to the series. Small edits to your skills and abilities meant to strengthen you in certain aspects of gameplay, and weaken you in others. Perks are now directly tied to your S.P.E.C.I.A.L., your stat build for your character. In essence Bethesda has now implemented a ‘Skill Tree’ in Fallout only, not quite. You can grab pretty much any perk you want at any time, as long as you’re level appropriate and you have the right stats into that line of the SPECIAL tree. There seems to be very little rhyme or reason as to which perks stand where, with weapon perks spread out all across the Strength, Perception and Agility stats, while social perks are mostly stuck in Charisma but you’ll occasionally find them in Luck or Endurance. There are some perks that are also most definitely more useful than others, and yet more that are simply game breaking. I found the right combination of the Gunslinger, Mr. Sandman and Sniper perks simply broke the game in my favor and made me unstoppable, while Lead Belly – which allows you to consume more alcohol – was one I can’t imagine vital to any gameplay.

Weirdest of all is that many of the ‘perks’ are what allow you to do things like pick locks, hack terminals and craft. For players that want to ignore the crafting and only focus on exploration and combat, this isn’t a big deal, but for me this was very jarring. I can’t really name a single other video game, RPG or otherwise, that directly tied crafting to your main stats. Crafting is usually a separate set of stats, even in Skyrim, and to me it simply makes more sense that way. I also much preferred when my skills leveled up in Bethesda’s previous games based on how much I used them, instead of forcing me to dump points into a SPECIAL stat didn’t favor. I started the game with a high Charisma/Agility/Intelligence build, as I like to fast talk my way and sneak past most encounters, but I found myself dumping a needless amount into Strength and Perception simply because it supported all of the game’s brand new toys a bit better.

Of all the violent, bloody, corpse stacking video games I’ve played in 2015, nothing seemed to stack on the body count as high as Fallout 4. You will fight an absurd amount of enemy waves that, in a sense, kind of do recall those overwhelming odds of earlier Fallout’s and 90s/2000s RPGs in general. Yet the waves tend to be incredibly easy. Molerat’s and Ghoul’s? Done in one shot. Raiders and Mirelurks? Just hit that weakspot. Super Mutants? One usually has a ticking nuke, find that guy and blow him up. Harder difficulties didn’t make it more challenging, it just gave me a bullet sponge in a game that was already chewing up a lot of my ammo. Fighting wasn’t the problem, one shotting wasn’t even the problem, it’s just there were such absurd numbers of enemies even all well placed headshots meant I was counting bullets. I was a demon in Metal Gear Solid 5, a beast in Bloodborne, a master assassin in Syndicate, and yet no game made me feel as though I were literally slaughtering my foes like Fallout 4 did. I trudged across the Commonwealth as the Sole Survivor, young lawyer, newly minted mother, grieving widow, blood soaked munitions expert. The game puts the Massacre in “My lord what a bloody fucking Massacre.”

If nothing else, dungeons are more fun to go spelunking in and pillage than ever. It’s far, far more varied than the “collapsed subway station’ of Fallout 3 and the ‘undead infested trap filled catacombs’ of Skyrim – though honestly there’s still a lot of that too. Even so a high school felt like a high school, a water treatment plant felt like a water treatment plant, the high tech ArcJet labs had a decidedly different feel from the radiation infested Polymer Institute.

Even though dungeon diving is always a core component of RPGs, it tends to be one of my least favorite things in all RPGs. Simply because I find the shadow kissed ruins you often traverse lack any kind of variety or creativity. Fallout 4 is the opposite. Often when I saw a new type of landmark I was eager to get inside and witness its post apocalyptic decor, solve its puzzles and, most importantly, grab some unique loot. Hubris Comics was perhaps one of the most fun ventures I had exploring, and I’m not just saying that because I came out of it with a battle worn Grognak the Barbarian loincloth.

The graphics are the best I’ve seen them in a Bethesda game. It’s certainly better than Fallout 3 and a slight improvement over Skyrim, but the operative line is ‘in a Bethesda game.’ Frankly, especially stacked up against other RPG titles released this year, Fallout 4 was always going to feel a little dated in the graphics department. Bethesda is still using the same exact engine they built those earlier games with and both in graphics and game design it’s really beginning to show the wear and tear of age. I really, really hope for the next in-house Bethesda title they just straight up develop a new engine. I suppose if there’s one thing to be had it’s that the Commonwealth is kinda more colorful than the Capital Wasteland or Skyrim. Kinda. Audio design is awesome, with guns having a satisfying lock, click, pull of the trigger. The music is sadly the same exact, I mean the exact, Ink Spots fare you’ve been listening to over and over since entering the Capital HACKIN AND WHACKIN AND SMACKIN. I much preferred to leave my radio off letting the game’s pleasing Inon Zur composed ambient tracks play out instead.

With previous Bethesda games I’ve gotten a bit lucky as far as glitches go. I only played two others on release, Fallout 3, where I found NPCs suffering random death but only thankfully after I was done with them, and Skyrim, where I suffered no on-launch glitches. Though I did get a few major glitches from the infamous patch 1.3 which made for dragons that flew backwards and reduced my Nord’s resistances to nil. Still I’ve maintained a pretty respectable ratio of functional gameplay to glitches in my past with the company. That is, until, Fallout 4.

The glitches for me on the PC version have been almost nonstop from the very top of the game to my most recent save files. They range from the relatively innocuous, NPCs clipping through terrain, junk randomly appearing on my base, to the creepy, denizens of Sanctuary standing in my vast melon field soaking in the rain like that scene out of the Faculty and Dogmeat melting into the Earth, to the annoying, settlements being attacked by nonexistant enemies and Diamond City denizens treating me as if I’ve killed one of their own despite having a Murder stat at 0.

Then there are the flat out detrimental to gameplay. Power Armor, settlements and other property not properly registering as being owned by me. Unique characters disappearing from the game. Quests completion not triggering and require I reload a few saves back. Keep in mind this is with a virginal, out the box copy, with no file or dev tool modifications, so everything happening is on Bethesda’s end. I know glitches are to be expected in a Bethesda game, and this can be fixed with a few patches (though I dread another occurrence of Skyrim patch 1.3), but I was pretty floored by the fact the glitches in my game made for a neverending story of technical mishaps. This, paired with the ill thought out radiant quests, frankly made me want to stop playing the game altogether.

In painting with the colors of other games, the Companion system also sees some significant changes. From a page out of BioWare with a dash of Obsidian’s New Vegas, Companions are no longer based in alignment but a series of preferences and dislikes. Okay, so there’s no “overt” alignment system, but you can still more or less assign to them traits dictated by alignment. You have your agents of honor and compassion such as double agent Deacon, colonial soldier Preston and fiery reporter Piper. Then you have your morally corrupt edgy loners in the MMA fighter Cait, soldier of fortune MacCready and violent super mutant Strong. Fallout 4’s Companions are simultaneously the best and the worst party allies to come out of Bethesda. From a narrative perspective, they are well written, colorful and well involved in the events of the game. Their side missions and road trip confessions really fleshed them out, from the robotic Curie and her dire need to understand the human condition, to the Brotherhood of Steel patriot Danse, looking to bring order to the Commonwealth.

Yet the approval system assigned to Companions made it needlessly difficult to get to know them, and also required a fair amount of trial and error since a Companion’s personality didn’t always match up to their likes and dislikes. For example, intrepid, spunky reporter Piper loves talking about breaking the rules and getting on people’s bad side, but dare insult someone or steal a box of Sugar Bombs and she’ll look down her nose. Curie as a technological construct is the target of the Brotherhood of Steel’s ire, yet she’s always eager to help them. In most games with characters who fall across a moral spectrum, you’re usually forced to choose one path and stick with who you get as an ally.

Fallout 4’s design basically allows you to nab anyone, but you’re more conforming to the desires of your Companions rather than building a crew of like-minded individuals. Around Curie, I’m a drug counselor and shelter missionary. In Cait’s presence, I’m not just a drug pusher, I’m my biggest client. What’s worse is since some of the ‘evil’ aligned characters disapprove of seemingly generous actions and are quite literally edgy loners, they’ll disapprove of you and even hate if you complete a quest. Since there is no alignment system, there is typically no ‘evil’ way to resolve a quest line, which means your only options are often to send a character home or let the completion objectives be. One of the more negatively minded companions completely restricts you from playing the game in any kind of practical sense. When he’s onboard you can expect to not use power armor, not pick locks, not hack terminals or generally do half the things required to complete a dungeon. It verges on nonsensical how these companions react to you at times, and it feels like it’s because Bethesda was lost without a proper alignment system.

To round this off I would like to discuss Fallout 4’s crafting systems. From settlement building to power armor repair to weapon modifications, Fallout 4 seemingly had it all. I didn’t enjoy my first 24 hours of Fallout 4, feeling like I had been saddled with chore after chore, it was only after a full day of game time that the dungeons, side missions and side stories began to engross me. So what made me come back after each quicksave and logout? Aside, of course, from a responsibility as a reviewer? It was the crafting system. I loved making everything I could make. I loved creating guns with a satisfying pull of the trigger and the planning and town zoning that came with creating my settlements. From the low rise apartment complex, power armor launch bay and wind turbine field I built in the key ‘Sanctuary’ settlement, to the easy going farm life of Sunshine Tidings Co-op, to turning a simple railroad way station into a wasteland fortress, this is where I no doubt dumped many of my 99 hours into the game.

Like all the other elements however, the crafting systems in Fallout 4 were far from perfect. Simple construction projects could turn into major wrestling matches with the strange limitations of Fallout 4’s building systems. Certain structures would easily snap on to others, a scant few allowed for Minecraft style clipping, yet the vast majority of the building tools felt severely limited. There is a great amount of imagination out there when it comes to the structures individuals managed to create in Fallout 4, and though I preferred a more practiced approach to my aesthetics, I could still get a bit ambitious with the kinds of things I wanted to build.

Make no mistake, Fallout 4’s architectural triumphs are in spite of the mechanics. To this day and forever more my low rise apartment will have an outdoor garden component, because I couldn’t complete as simple a task as constructing a fourth wall. Similar to the factions and the companions, there is a lot about crafting the game straight up chooses not to explain. I remember the first time I ever wanted to do something as simple as run a light to my garage I had to gather up a large amount of materials, generate a couple of saves, and experiment until I got it right. Now I can connect a building like a pro electrician, but it shouldn’t have taken that much to learn in the first place.

Armor, weapons and power armor crafting are a lot more straight forward. The stats and abilities you’ll get from your mods are told before you even do it. The pitfall, because in Fallout 4 it seems there isn’t a system without a pitfall, is the combination of perks and crafting materials you’ll need to craft successfully. Gone are the days of smithing 200 daggers at Whiterun’s forge. Now you’re going to need about six points in strength and perks dumped into blacksmithing and armorer if you want to create your stealth assassin agility gear.

There are also certain shared materials across the crafting systems that make for some annoyingly expensive components. If you intend to really play with weapons and power armor, and perhaps even building a few pieces of furniture, expect to raid your local car manufacturing plants and hospitals a lot to scrape together the aluminum requirements. Meanwhile other shared resources such as Steel and Wood are thrown at you in droves. I can’t really tell why certain materials are so rare and others are in abundance, it could be for balancing purposes, but it’s my honest belief that given the availability of most other materials, even the rarest of the rare, is it was just poor planning.

Fallout 4 is a game that takes some getting used to. Bethesda experiments quite a bit with their formula, trying a lot of new ideas and presumably seeing what’s going to stick in the long run. Because of this Fallout 4 has a nature that clashes with itself. At times it feels like it’s being too many games at once, side quests will create some wild tonal shifts in both mood and characterization. A couple of the design choices fit like a glove, power armor for example truly feels like something special as you trudge around with a satisfying stomp in your metal boots as you watch the world move past with a special computerized HUD that makes you feel like a legit mecha pilot. Others such as the Perk system feel flatly clunky, a step backward in game design.

I’m not complaining about Fallout sampling other works for inspiration, it’s a key part of the creative process in finding ones own voice, and I love Fallout’s brand of pastiche and parody. However it was painfully obvious when Fallout riffing off the stylings of Metro Last Light, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., The Walking Dead, Mass Effect or perhaps most obviously, the realm of the ‘survival’ game, your Rusts and your Minecrafts. While some of these injections of inspirations and ideas added a little bit to the gameplay experience, and I personally spent tons of hours in the world editor building to my heart’s desires; admittedly with a few frustrations at the builder’s limitations, I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that Fallout 4 was always at its utmost very best just being a Fallout title.

As cool as my first radiation storm was, they soon got to be a petty annoyance and lacked that ‘oh shit!’ feel of the storms in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. While the first overwhelming rush of ghouls was scary and intense, I later found myself bored of the Metro like stacked odds and found myself lusting for that next Vault-Tec Dungeon with a quirky and fun yet dark undertone only Fallout could provide. My greatest moments of joy always came from going completely off map. Exploring a lighthouse or storming a pirate fortress not because some town guard or settler felt like they needed to grab my head and point me to it, but because I found it on my own and was allowed to wonder ‘what’s waiting for me there?’ A gameplay style Bethesda used to facilitate well, and not so much with Fallout 4.

Fallout 4 feels like a natural evolution of a Bethesda game, but it doesn’t feel like a very good Fallout game. When you stack it up against Skyrim then you can see how Fallout 4 is the next ‘logical’ step in Bethesda’s evolutionary line. Skyrim’s weapons crafting is there. Skyrim’s factions are in here. Skyrim’s ambient, randomized world is there. I can’t deny how super addicting the game world was for me either, the carrot stick mechanics that entice you into most Survival games and MMORPGs are present and very strong in Fallout 4, so I was always after that next treasure or Companion perk or crafted weapons.

However the moments where this game felt like a true ‘Fallout’ title were few and far between. Which is unfortunate, because those moments, when I stumbled upon the dirty green and rust red Diamond City,  when I trotted through an apocalyptic graveyard toasted a golden atomic glow, that’s when I felt the magic all over again. The crafting and the companions and the perks and the weather effects and everything else that was simultaneously a fix and a nuisance to this title melted away, and I was a kid playing Fallout all over again.