- Intro -
It seems like the number 4 is a cursed one in the games industry, for Bethesda especially. First there was TES IV: Oblivion, and now Fallout 4 has fallen flat on its face.
More so because Bethesda listened to their fans, not the classic Fallout fans, despite all the criticism of Fallout 3, and went their own way once again. They continued to hamper choice and consequence, and the core mechanics, like no other, because I suppose Fallout 3 wasn’t simplified enough.
It was still considered “confusing” if we go by what Bethesda said here. - (
https://bethesda.net/#en/events/game/fallout-4s-character-system/2015/09/24/31)
Now, it’s not even recognizable as an RPG system, but as a FarCry 3-esque leveling system.
Example: Ranged combat was considered mediocre, which was fixed and is now alright, but the cost is the combat now takes the majority of playtime.
And then there’s Nexus Mods, where fans remade Fallout 3 into a slightly more modern title and indirectly pointed Bethesda in the direction to take. For one, the settlement building system. Once a mod in Fallout 3, it’s now a major feature and advertisement point of Fallout 4, and as we’ve come to find out from Bethesda’s blogs, also because one of the dev team noticed his children playing Minecraft and was inspired by it.
By listening to the unsorted mess of criticism and fan requests for Fallout 3, and browsing the Nexus for ideas, it seems Bethesda didn’t have the time or desire to work on what mattered, so they filled the gaps with procedural content to pad the playtime before half-assing it on the handmade content.
What results is a violence-pandering mess with an ingrained kill-loot-return system, with no room left for personality. The kind of compliance that became an undoing for Bethesda this time.
- General Story/World -
Fallout 4 is a story about people, sometimes synthetic people. Fallout 4 is also a very personal story, not the player’s anymore.
The game opens with a live-action introduction narrated by the protagonist instead of Ron Perlman, detailing the conflict leading to the Great War from his point of view. The sole point of this intro is to hammer home that America is strong with nuclear energy, and that the Chinese are invaders, but the protagonist is afraid for his wife and son. Not only is it a drag to hear, it’s also misleading because it’s told from a personal perspective instead of one coming from a neutral perspective. And it degrades the value of the “War Never Changes” line, the most poignant phrase Fallout has, by using it twice after the intro is finished.
Remember the “Press F to pay respects” thing from Call of Duty? Fallout 4 does the same thing if you check the clothes in the closet.
Once the intro is over, the character creation screen is presented, this time as a Sims 4-esque face sculpting tool. However, because of the way the story is written and presented, this system is not about choosing the look of our character, but the family member who will, very soon, be on a quest to find the McGuffin the drives the story, Shaun.
No matter who you choose, you’re always a middle-age veteran, if you’re male, or a lawyer with a new child, if you’re female, and you’re always living in a middle class suburban neighborhood with a nuclear powered car and a robot butler, who is sentient for some reason, but that’s for another time.
Anyway, the intro content consists of a tiny environment -- the protagonist’s home -- where only two dialogues take place. The first with the Vault-Tec representative, where the SPECIAL stats are filled out, and then with the player’s spouse, where no matter what you choose, Codsworth calls both of you to the TV.
Fast forward a few minutes, and as both characters stand on the platform leading down to the vault, the first nuclear explosion occurs. One that is close enough to, if not burn everyone to a crisp, at least blind them or pummel their bodies with radiation. The child too, which opens a gaping plot hole later in the story, but again, we’ll get to that.
The fact that the blast wave only reached the elevator after the people standing on it were deep enough down to be saved from death I’ll also leave for now, but it’s quite an indication of how railroaded the rest of the story will be, and how much sense it will make.
Afterward, the protagonist, along with their neighbors, spouse and child, are cryogenically frozen, for the purposes of science, and the central story. Centuries later, after thawing out and escaping the vault, the player is pushed out into the wasteland with the main goal established: Find the son, and avenge the spouse.
Now, unlike Fallout 3, where you can make up any number of reasons not to go after your father, such as he’s a deluded asshole, the thing that pushes the player into the world in Fallout 4 is a time-sensitive mission. Something that contradicts Bethesda’s maxim of “maximum freedom for the player”, especially when the protagonist brings up the ‘Shaun’ subject so often.
- Gameplay -
Among the notes Bethesda took from New Vegas was how long to make the intro to the game. While it is brief compared to the intro to Fallout 3, taking about ten to twenty minutes versus near an hour, it leaves little room for roleplaying, unless always saying ‘No’ only to get pushed into a result you can’t change counts.
The new dialogue system’s camera also has an issue with going off target and focusing on completely irrelevant things instead of, you know, the NPC you’re talking to. Bethesda’s touted multiple-NPCs-in-dialogue claim also doesn’t get used very often, with just one time where it’s in any way meaningful. And then there’s cutting off dialogue by walking away, which works well, but then you get that one NPC who will break off even if they started the chat.
Classic “Is it a bug, or a feature” issue, but credit where it’s due otherwise.
However, the elephant in the room is not the glitchy camera or NPC AI, it’s the now infamous four-button dialogue system. There are those who remember this negatively from Mass Effect, and positively from Alpha Protocol, but Bethesda has learned nothing from either. There are always four responses maximum, and in turn, two different choices can lead to the same result.
While Mass Effect got away with this by putting options on a six section circle, taking away selections as needed, and hiding more options behind certain selections, Alpha Protocol, because of the timer on dialogue choices, gave a description brief enough to make a judgement call on.
In Fallout 4, the one to three word descriptions are often too vague, and sometimes can make the character say something completely different than what you think. Not only is this bad design, but Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a 2011 game, showed how to make this work. Put the descriptions on the left, and the textbox on the right, with your dialogue listed in full in the latter.
And then there’s the loss of Skills, which puts all the weight of dialogue checks on the Charisma SPECIAL stat. Perks are never put to use in dialogue where they could be, for example using Robotics Expert to shut down Ironsides, and the ones that do affect dialogue do not do so with direct effects. Just passives that improve the chance to succeed when a check comes up.
What’s more, these dialogue checks are not shown with numbers, but colors, and they do not change even if you have Lady Killer/Black Widow maxed out.
In terms of the gunplay, Fallout 4 is a tremendous improvement compared to Fallout 3, though I can’t say I fully agree with this change. While there is a lot of flash in the gunplay with better animations, sounds, battle effects and the like, all that was really done was a toning down of randomness to bullet hit detection and the weight of stats on how good non-VATS aim is.
By all accounts, it’s a modern FPS. A very basic one though because of the loss of special ammo, among other things. It wouldn’t have been hard to put this feature into the game, not just for immersion but for dealing with the still present bullet sponge enemies. There’s also no prone state, just a crouch and a ‘Hold Breath’ function for steady iron-sight aim.
The new leveling system also adds issues to the gunplay, with automatic weapons, even huge ones like the Minigun, stuck with low per-shot damage until several points are invested in their respective Perks; the melee combat, working off Skyrim’s animations, feels a touch better thanks to the animations.
In terms of enemy AI, it’s a step up, but not far enough of one. While enemies have new moves and attacks -- Deathclaws will bob and weave, as well as throw environment clutter, mole rats and radscorpions dig underground then pop up when at low health, and humans will now use cover and throw grenades to flush players out of hiding -- in practice, it only works half the time.
Enemies can still get stuck thanks to pathfinding or other issues, and melee enemies will always charge your position, even if you’ve riddled them with bullets/energy all the way, as though they know it’s their destiny to get left-clicked to death.
The same applies to Super Mutants and Synths, the former of which have a new type: Kamikaze Mutants. Just like melee enemies, they’ll charge right at you, completely self-aware of their destiny, hoping they take you down with them. I’d like to know who thought this was a good idea, even if it works in the player’s favor when a successful hit on the bomb they carry is made. Lore-wise, it’s a contradiction.
And then there are the flying enemies. They’re smarter than the ones in New Vegas, sure, but if you get any sort of lag while fighting them, the stronger types will deplete your health in seconds. In turn, VATS becomes the best way to counter their speed and hit them.
- Presentation -
For Fallout 4, the artists and level designers put together a beautiful environment with lots of potential to build the idea of a working society in this new world. While more amazing, not everything works, as the coasts and whole north side of the map can prove, as well as the rundown city environments. They don’t look as convincing as the slices of Washington D.C. and New Vegas, and the verticality doesn’t help. Not only is the verticality wasted potential with the shoot-and-loot gameplay, it makes little logical sense to use buildings that are breaking apart and look about to topple over as shelter.
Speaking of buildings, the interiors in the game world are painful to go through. It’s clear the Skyrim mold has been recycled here as many of these places have only one route through them, with the handful that don’t being a mess of hallways, samey rooms, and multiple floors. Thanks to the Pip-Boy’s 2D map, and poor UI, these floors aren’t displayed well either.
And then there’s south part of the map and the Glowing Sea. It looks like the surface of another planet because, once again, the artists and world designers overreacted with their ideas of what a nuclear detonation would do to the site of the impact. Moreover, there’s so little to this area besides random pieces of ruins over badly textured hills that the ever-present green tint becomes as much an annoyance as it was in Fallout 3.
In fact, the whole trip south is like watching the game go downhill. A great metaphor for the Fallout 4 experience, and its presentation.
And then the UI…oh boy, the UI.
The one positive I can give is the colors can be fine-tuned, but even that is half praise because of the color coded speech checks. Those don’t change color if you change the UI color, so any reds, oranges or yellows will hide the respective checks.
Otherwise, Bethesda seems obsessed with cramming the pause menu UI into the Pip-Boy. Unlocked Perks, stats, inventory, the previously mentioned 2D map, everything besides the Perk Chart. Now, the problem isn’t that it’s a gimmick Bethesda uses because they like the device. It’s how unintuitive it can be to use.
For one, because it’s an in-game object, standing in certain angles will cause light sources to flood the screen, making it impossible to read. The limited zoom on the map screen also gives misleading impressions about the size of the world, and coupled with the small screen size, this means many more screens to juggle, or in the case of the Misc. tab in the inventory, one that holds numerous different things. Speaking of inventory, both armor and weapons, when modded, are sorted by the mod’s name instead of the core weapon’s.
In game, the edgy lines and generic icons of the UI do the job they need, but then comes the settlement building UI. It’s a mess. Not only is it impossible to navigate with a mouse, the menu has a lot of sub-categories instead of a box with icons or a wheel menu. It’s also easy to forget where a desired item is, it’s impossible to favorite items for quick recall, and only possible to place anything is first-person mode, one by one. It’s much more time-consuming, and inconvenient, in turn, which is good for marketing purposes where players won’t realize right away.
Lastly, the gore. It looks cartoonish in this game, with blood you could mistake for cherry syrup, and only decapitations and dismemberment follow even the biggest explosions. It’s strange to say, but this is all a step down from Fallout 3, and especially from the critical hit animations of Fallout 1 and 2.
- Music/Sound -
My take on Fallout 4’s music? Aside from a few good tracks, such as the Railroad’s interior theme “Covert Action”, nothing is lost by turning it off. The soundtrack is a huge mix of piano, synth piano, pipes, accordions, drums and strings, among others, which gets shunted aside at the faintest hint of danger and the onset of the battle themes.
With the general sound design, for every great sound effect, such as the many animal noises, especially the Deathclaws, there are numerous others that seem off-point; the .44 magnum sounds weaker than the 10mm, as well as the plasma rifle versus the ones from games past, and the percussion from explosions is weak compared to games like Battlefield.
- Lore -
Because Bethesda owns the Fallout IP and has made the latest game a continuation of the main line versus a spin-off, the lore contradictions on display in Fallout 4 spread all the way back to Fallout 1, and even cross into Bethesda’s efforts.
*The sentient Mr. Handy - In the world of Fallout, AIs are literally a big deal. Only room sized computers, the kind we remember from the 1940s that filled entire rooms and ran off vacuum tubes, could handle such a program, hence ZAX in Fallout 1. In Fallout 2 we had Skynet, which could become mobile once a Robobrain bot was acquired for it to download into.
In Fallout 4, Codsworth, a maintenance robot, is somehow much more than both of them, able to reason, determine right and wrong, have opinions on various subject, you included, and has a personality. Why? Why is he leagues beyond the military Mr. Gutsy models or ZAX type AIs, and why is such a thing on the market for general consumers? Never answered.
*Iguana bits - Long-time Fallout players will know this one as slang for ‘human flesh’; real iguanas are nowhere to be seen in the game. The term originated from the first Fallout, and were things made by Iguana Bob from the remains of corpses supplied to him by Doc. Morbid of Junktown. The inconsistency has carried over many games, but a west coast slang term would not be something so easy to carry onto the east coast, much less remain in use for another 120 plus years.
*The kid in a fridge - While actually a ghoulified kid, for 200 years he’s survived without food or water, and when you rescue him, he has no psychological or physical trauma from the experience.
This is contradicted in the very same game it appears, specifically in the ‘Duty or Dishonor’ quest. During that quest, you find out that the BoS initiate Clarke fed feral ghouls with Brotherhood provisions so they’d remain calm and so none would die, which indicates why ferals hunt and stalk wastelanders. Not because of brain decay, but sustenance. There’s also the Slog settlement, a place where non-feral ghouls produce their own food and have integrated into the Commonwealth economy and trade routes. If the settlement is not producing enough food, they’ll suffer as regular settlers will.
And then there’s Pete ‘Not Interested’ Hines, who hinted that the ‘Kid in a Fridge’ quest was just for fun. (
https://twitter.com/DCDeacon/status/668832355608563712) Originally, just for fun events like special encounters or dialogues had their own place in the Fallout world and were considered non-canon, or were later declared stupid or unfitting in the Fallout bible. (Fallout 2 had a lot of this.) The same could be said of this quest, except Bethesda has never seen the need to acknowledge it as such, or its flaws.
Third, this is a case of a bad joke hurting the lore akin to Coffin Willy from Fallout 2, only worse in this case since it’s clear this kid wasn’t lying about how he was in there, whereas with Willy there was enough room to handwave him.
Why this quest pops out like a dead pixel on a monitor though is, from a gameplay and writing standpoint, it’s one of the better ones in terms of how a player can progress and complete it in terms of role-playing. This is in contrast to the many other, more sensible quests in the game which for some reason don’t offer this same experience.
- Final Thoughts -
The biggest problem of Fallout 4 isn’t its half-baked story, or lore contradictions with itself and past games, or lackluster gameplay, or the horrible presentation and UI, but its lack of redeeming qualities. If the game had a better presented story and gameplay that was closer to the series roots, I could’ve forgiven most of these flaws.
As it is, there’s no reason to play Fallout 4. There’s nothing Bethesda Game Studios is famous for that other studios haven’t improved on; ‘open world’ is now a more common feature than ever, with developers doing as good a job as them, (Dying Light’s Techland and FarCry 3’s Ubisoft Montreal) or even better (Grand Theft Auto V’s Rockstar North).
Fallout 4 is simply outdated, and the attitude Bethesda has taken with this entry feels like a dangling of the concept over the abyss.
That said, it was both funny and amusing at times watching this Brazilian soap opera progress as it did. It was obvious from the first look that the series was going downhill instead of up with Bethesda throwing in every big gimmick they could in the drive for easy money. Although that paid off, the mixed reviews across the board won’t help their future reputation with the general public.
On a more serious note, let this series die and don’t look back after this. There’s plenty of godsends in the RPG market besides this series. InSomnia, The Fall: Last Days of Gaya, Age of Decadence, Underrail, Wasteland 2, Olympus 2207 and others. While nothing may surpass Fallout in terms of world building, quest design or engaging lore, all of these other efforts should not be overlooked.
Just as well, there’s the efforts of the fan communities around the globe for the older games. Fallout 2 has been fixed up and made more playable, and two total conversions -- Fallout: Resurrection 1.5 and Fallout: Nevada -- exist for the engine. Mutants Rising, fingers crossed, will be joining them someday.
And let’s not forget the many quality mods for Fallout: New Vegas.
The people behind these works nailed it, and they deserve a look too.
