Fallout 4 garnered a lot of flak at release, and with good reason. When quantifying what makes Bethesda RPGs good, it is the freedom to do what you want in an open world full of micro stories (some of which are quests, some of which are oddities to stumble across) and varied locations that usually make up most of the appeal. For a Fallout game, stretching all the way back to the original 1997 classic developed by Interplay, it is the lore of the world and the breadth of role play that is its most attractive feature. While many will condemn the death of Fallout with the Bethesda releases, this is only a half truth. Pretty much every subsequent Fallout game has veered away from what the original was, including what made it so great. The original Fallout was an incredibly dark and morose game that, while not without humor, was certainly a far cry from the quirky character that Fallout 2 would introduce. It was oppressive for a lot of it, and it wouldn't be until Fallout 2 that the series would let loose a little in the way we traditionally think of the series. Fallout 3 restricted things some and felt largely like a mod of Oblivion in its new combat system, but it still had a lot of that Fallout character and humor, with plenty of interesting quests and a good locale in Washington, DC. Fallout 3 faltered on the role playing that made the originals so great, appealing far more to the Elder Scrolls perspective of "don't restrain the player despite their decisions", but still included several key moments that gave variance to multiple playthroughs. Fallout: New Vegas lost some of the Bethesda trademarked freedom of Fallout 3 in favor of far more role play and a far better story with more diverse characters and situations, calling back to classic CRPGs while retaining the modern (for the time) RPG shell. Fallout 4's failure was hardly appealing to the Bethesda RPG enthusiasts while abandoning a lot of what Fallout was traditionally. Fallout 4 has many sins, but if I'm being honest, its biggest sin was that number 4 at the end of its title.
See, Fallout 4 isn't actually a terrible game. It certainly isn't a great game, but there is more to like here than there isn't. What Fallout 4 is is easy to comprehend, and what it isn't is a mainline Fallout RPG. Fallout 4, as a matter of fact, is one of those odd 'hybrid' RPGs, the kind that have experience points and perks, but little else in the way of a traditional RPG framework. Fallout 4 has more in common with Borderlands or Rage than it does with Fallout, at least as far as gameplay goes. You loot and shoot and explore a wasteland to your heart's content, not overly worried (with a few, measly exceptions) about morality alignment or having a definitive place in this world. Factions exist and vie for your attention while bemoaning any inconsistency with their ideology you dare to commit, but it takes following the main plot of the game quite a ways before any of these factions become off limits. You can become a prominent member of the Brotherhood of Steel, the general of the Minutemen, and a pivotal if not bequeathed member of various other factions that I will leave out to save from relatively late or mid-game spoilers, all at the same time. (The Brotherhood of Steel is mid-late game as well, but at this point if you didn't think they would be in this game you are probably also not at a loss knowing they are in here). The game, frankly, doesn't care about your choices until it red flags you that you are entering the End Game. Fallout 4 wants to give you the most flexibility it can for as long as it can, and that is because it doesn't want to be an RPG so much as something like an RPG, relying on other strengths instead.
The most obvious strength is in its combat. The Bethesda Fallout games have been lambasted for being "Oblivian with guns", a not so appropriate simplification of what those games actually were. Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas had some sloppy combat, partially due to meek feeling guns and partially do to their insistence on using accuracy percentages like this was one of the table top RPG progenitors of the genre. Aim in a straight direction in one of those games without touching the mouse/joystick, and shoot. Your accuracy is calculated by what type of gun you are using and your proficiency in that type of gun. While the varmint rifle in New Vegas will be largely accurate regardless of your skills, it still has an odd inconsistency to where exactly the shots will hit, making even mid-distant targets something of a dice roll. The older Bethesda Fallout games dealt with this by introducing VATS, a system that allowed you to freeze time, pick out the body parts you wanted to shoot for with the accuracy numbers calculated in, and use AP or action points to execute the action. It allowed for those that couldn't shoot or were unwilling to wrestle with the awkward game feel to still play the game in a more old school way. The only real issue with the system is that the amount of AP you had was somewhat neutered to try and prevent you from over relying on the system without pumping a lot of points into certain stats or picking particular perks. It was a limiting design choice I can't say I totally agree with, but it was certainly serviceable and helped several people I know who are less accustomed to shooters to get into the series. Fallout 4 retains VATS, albeit replacing a total time stop with a slowed time instead, while also improving the shooting tremendously. It isn't the end-all-be-all of shooter game feel, but it is at least now up to snuff with contemporaries, and the change this has to how the game feels is huge. Running and gunning is now fun rather than a means to an end, and can easily be the core loop itself now, although I'm appreciative it isn't alone. I played a lot of my most recent of three playthroughs using primarily a sniper rifle with a .50 cal modification, a gun with a slow reload time and precise aiming, because I wasn't worried about missing my shots. As far as immediate game feel, Fallout 4 beats the other Bethesda titles easily.
While Bethesda games have always allowed you to grab anything not bolted down to carry around like you're some walking garbage can, it wasn't until Fallout 4 there was much of a sincere use for the function. Crafting and the settlement system add a use to all that junk littering the wasteland, allowing you to modify your guns, cook food, make drugs, and build a place for the roaming settlers of the Commonwealth to live in some sort of harmony. The settlement system will largely be up to taste, as it can be somewhat cumbersome to reckon with the interface. You walk around placing your generators, water pumps, beds, walls, ceilings, etc. for your settlement, all at the cost of the junk you've hauled from your travels. The settlement system can be somewhat flaky, with happiness levels sometimes going down without much in the way of direction as to what it is you should be fixing, but it works well enough that if you are into this sort of thing, and always wanted it set in the Fallout universe, you now have it and with enough flexibility to get creative with it. The new need for junk may put a heavy tax on your weigh limit - a mechanic that is looking more questionable here than it has before - but there are a few perks that can help you with leniency in this department (or, as I've traditionally done in Fallout games, you could become an alcoholic, as alcohol temporarily buffs your strength stat). The crafting works rather well, although it does act as an excuse for low weapon variety, as now you can modify any variation of the pipe rifle into every non-heavy weapon type gun you could want. The looting of weaponry is certainly a lot more fun than crafting your little plank of wood with a metal pipe and spring, but modifying guns does allow those favorites to scale as you face stronger and stronger enemies. And stronger enemies are certainly out there. Fallout 4 introduces legendary enemies, with a guaranteed high quality drop (usually with some above average modification on it) and a big health pool. Legendary enemies are a neat addition, but they are incredibly common, found in just about every nook and cranny of the Commonwealth.
Exploration is where we start to get into muddy waters with Fallout 4. The areas in post apocalyptic Boston have their places, with torn up schools, repurposed monuments, and, yes, vaults to explore. There is certainly plenty here to play around with, but what you want from those places is where we are going to find the divergent path on whether you will like this game or not. Fallout 4 is more or less an open world action game within the Fallout universe, rather than a true-to-form RPG. Exploring these areas is fun because exploring destroyed areas is fun, but if you're looking for kooky stories from before or after the bombs fell, you are going to be sorely dissapointed. There are certainly cases here and there, such as finding out what a group of quarry miners were digging for and why everyone was acting so weird while they were doing it (with your own, oddly hallucinatory flashes of the past as you progress), and there is that neat quest involving a flying pirate ship populated by robots, but those types of things are few and far between when compared to past titles. There is a strength and weakness to exploration in Fallout 4. The stories are largely lacking (none of the vaults here match with the best of any previous game), but the locations themselves are interesting. The glowing sea is one of the coolest locations in a Fallout game to date. It is a massive, radiated zone in the southwest corner of the map where the bombs outside of Boston fell, that stretches well beyond that proposed map limitation, making the map quite a bit bigger than it appears on your pip-boy. The place is heavily radiated, but definitely traversable so long as you come prepared (either with a lot of drugs, a hazmat suit that weakens your defense, or the power armor, which has been revamped in this game). The sorta-but-not-exactly biomes of Fallout 4 are more diverse than recent games (and I'm including Skyrim in that assessment). You have a lightly forested northern section, the urbanized area in the middle that quickly becomes a full-on city, the irradiated wasteland of the glowing sea to the southwest, and the marshlands to the straight south and southeast. You could even snip at this a bit more, including islets to the east, as well as the beach areas along the eastern coast. The variety of locational aesthetic helps the game along where neither of the previous Fallout games ever let up in their monotone style.
Graphically, Fallout 4 is probably the best looking Bethesda game out there, but that comes with the usual grab bag of caveats. Graphical glitches are a plenty, as is pop in, and looking at a texture too closely - but not so close as you would venture in a more polished game - and you'll be seeing blurriness. There is a massive free DLC pack for higher resolution textures, but I didn't bother, and as such won't criticize the texture work too much. What I will say is that the Creation Engine once again shows its age. That isn't age in the traditional sense, where the engine is just not up to snuff for contemporary graphical output, although I'm sure that's true as far as I can tell, but moreso that the engine has been tortured and twisted so much that there are inherent problems from over a decade ago that still make its appearance here. High refresh rates will lead to glitches such as not being able to access computer terminals sometimes, requiring some finesse (and a quick save that you will absolutely use at least once through your playthrough) in order to trick the game into performing the required animation to access the computer. That isn't all as far as frame performance is concerned. Framerate tied to animation execution is a cardinal sin for game programming in my book, and I'm at a loss as to how this happened here. It may be that the creation engine requires enveloping the game logic within the frame drawing loop, as is apparently happening here, but you honestly cannot be sure. I'm willing to apply blame to the engine for this, in lieu of the programmers, since those developing this game absolutely must know better, and so this must be a limitation rather than an amateurish oversight. Regardless, its affect on the game is minimal, although noticeable if you are keen to that sort of thing. When the graphics do decide to work properly, they can often look really good. The blue skies on a clear day are sharp and add a beauty to the landscape, one of wiry dead trees and rusted cars sitting tireless on the road. It reminds me of winters in Oklahoma, with little adjustment on my part, if I'm being frank. Rain will come occasionally, and while it isn't the best rain I've ever seen, the variance adds some much needed life (no pun intended) to the wasteland. The most impressive addition is radiation storms, milky green clouds that will irradiate you as lightning snakes through the lumpy clouds overhead (as long as we are making Oklahoma comparisons, have you ever seen clouds before a tornado?). Fallout 4 has a decidedly more realistic atmosphere as far as the environment is concerned, and it works wonders in lubricating the fun of exploration.
As this review has progressed, we've slowly slipped into more and more critical waters, and now is the time to strike at the heart of the issues with Fallout 4. Role playing is absolutely out of the question, and not just that, but variance in character creation means little if anything from playthrough to playthrough. Dialogue has been restricted to four dialogue choices, usually following categorical guidelines of (clockwise): ask for further information, be a jerk or say no, be nice or say yes, and say something sarcastic (the most made fun of choice) or, more accurately, some pathetic attempt at humor. If you play through this game continuously hitting "down" on the dialogue trees, you are hardly going to run into any problems. Hitting "right", the jerk route, will almost always get you to the same outcome. Your choice is almost entirely an illusion, except where persuasion checks are concerned. Asking for further information is just about the only real choice you have, and while it certainly has its uses, the asking does not an RPG make. Persuasion checks, the one outlier, do not gain you much information at all, or even change the course of events except in already telegraphed "important conversations", usually to do with the main plot. Usually, they simply elaborate a little more on their intentions than they would normally. It is perhaps the most limited dialogue system I've ever played within an RPG, outside of, maybe, a text adventure game and even then I feel like I'm stretching criteria. The make-it-or-break-it of Fallout 4 is whether or not you like the world or the game of Fallout. My preference is most certainly the game, but, as Fallout 4 proved, I like the world a heck of a lot. My inability to inquire with the world's inhabitants was a constant annoyance, but the world was still out there, and I was able to explore, to read old emails and notes and discover the little touches of environmental storytelling that always permeates Bethesda games (one of their few subtle strengths). If that compromise is one you think you can make, you may just like Fallout 4, but it is such a big ask I'm not surprised at the ire that coated the game's reputation at release. This isn't Fallout 4, it's a massive Fallout side game, one worth your time if you love the world and the lore, but one that equally is not going to scratch the same itch.
The dialogue system has an out by the merit of what the game is. It isn't really an RPG, truly, but an open world shooter with RPG mechanics. And that's fine with me, for the most part. Unfortunately, what hasn't changed from previous Bethesda RPGs is a total lack in the main story. Fallout 4's story is abysmal. Not just bad, which it certainly is (I'd argue similar for Fallout 3 and Skyrim, though I have a profound love for the former and an appreciation for the latter), but mind numbingly frustrating. There is a crossroads Fallout 4's story seems to want to meet at, one were plot inconsistencies clash with choice inconsistencies, with character issues and with so many leaps of logic you can hear the writers panting as they try to quickly tape over the messy bits as you go. There's an attempt at subversion I won't get into (to keep away from spoilers) that feels so sloppy all motivation to see the end of the game drained for me. I did see it through, all the way to two of the endings, with most of a third done as well, but to no satisfaction. Elements of this story could have worked, and if they wanted to retain a twist I had one in my head I thought would have been cool that I'm sure most people probably thought of during their playthrough, but everything lands with the thud of necessity over passion. They needed a story, they relied on pulp science fiction while forgetting the fun you're supposed to have with it, and what we got was a mess of ideologies and sloppy surprises that, in retrospect, shouldn't have been much of a surprise. What's worse, is that the plot is nearly a rip off of another Bethesda game's plot, although one I won't mention out of respect of not spoiling the game.
Fallout 4, in a striking contradiction, relit my appreciation for the Bethesda RPG after The Outer Worlds had made me think that the genre had long since passed out of my appreciation. The Outer Worlds, make no mistake, is the better game, but it had missing elements that left me feeling a tad bit undernourished. Fallout 4 has similar, if more severe, issues to it as well, but reconnected me with the exploration and world tone I'd missed during The Outer Worlds, and it turns out that means a lot to me. I think the genre is largely dying still, but there is a faint possibility for its future. Their freedom, mostly in exploration and breadth of world, are their strengths, strengths that are difficult to maintain as the gaming industry continues to blow hot air into the bubble surrounding it that will, inevitably, burst. But with attention to detail and story, this genre can carry on, because that's where we are sparse the most. I don't care who does it, whether it be Fallout 5 (stop, don't mention the number 76 to me again) or The Outer Worlds 2, there is a place for this type of game. I just hope they focus on what we appreciate, and not what they think will dazzle us.
7.0
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