TL;DR – After learning (some of their) lessons after Obsidian’s F:NV captured the popular imagination in ways that Fallout 3 failed to achieve, Todd and the gang at Bethesda hit out with a game that’s an evolution of the formula in every way bar one. Unfortunately the one element of the game they neglected to improve was the role-playing side of the game, which for an RPG is a significant Achilles heel. Now that’s not to say that Fallout 4 fails to offer a better main quest than Fallout 3, but in every other way it’s a step backwards for RPG fans. For everyone else however Fallout 4 is a pretty big step up from it’s predecessor, with significantly improved combat, a big visual upgrade, much less crashing-to-desktop and the addition of settlement building which is actually one of the most enjoyable (and optional) parts of the game. There are myriad tweaks to the game which have been made to make it feel like a true sequel, and were it not a handful of bizarre narrative decisions Fallout 4 likely would have been heralded as a return-to-form. Instead it’s the Skyrim of the Fallout series, a much more popular entry that’s great fan to casual fans but lacks any meaningful RPG elements to appease the rapidly diminishing fanbase of genuine RPG fans that made Bethesda a successful developer in the first place.
Quick Note – These days you can still buy the Fallout 4 base game, but honestly the GOTY edition is the version you should get the base game is a noob trap. Sure the base game goes on sale for slightly cheaper, but if you decide to grab the DLC (which I’ve reviewed here) then you’re going to need to re-buy the GOTY edition anyway.
Fallout 4 (Fo4) is a game that’s garnered a mixed reception in the years following it’s launch, and honestly it deserves it. While the game is a massive leap forward compared to Fallout 3 and even Fallout: New Vegas in many ways, it’s barely an RPG in any meaningful sense of the word. Sure it has some of the trappings of it’s predecessors, with the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system returning, the option of fighting through or talking through many quests and the return of the “choose your favourite faction” ending but these all come with significant caveats. Firstly while the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system (which forces players to build a character via putting points into Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck) is back as ever, it isn’t accompanied by skill points at all. For those who haven’t played a previous Fallout game, this might not sound like a big deal but believe me, it is. You see the S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats were designed to form the skeleton of your character and as such influenced how you would play by giving you an early bonus to certain skills, while making you weaker at others. For example if you put a bunch of points into Strength you would be a powerful melee character, or if you put a lot of points into Charisma you could be a silver tongued deliver that would be able to persuade your enemies to give peace a chance or just extort those damsels in distress for extra quest rewards. This would then give you a natural gameplay focus, with various perks and occasionally quest outcomes being dependent on having the “right” kind of character. While it is true that towards the late game you could still put a bunch of points into say, gun-fighting while playing as a character with the grace and dexterity of a blundering imbecile, you would be constrained by the level cap from being an expert at everything and thus would be putting yourself at a disadvantage. In Fallout 4 however these skills are all gone, so everything is determined by your S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats, which means that instead of managing 13 skills + 7 stats you’re now managing… 7 stats. To somewhat mitigate this simplification of your ability to influence your character throughout the course of the game, you now get a perk after every level and these perks only require you to have a perquisite amount of the corresponding stat. In less pretentious terms, if you want to shoot the bad men betterer you don’t need to worry about distributing points between the various weapon skills (Guns, Energy Weapons, Big Guns), only having enough agility/perception to unlock the +20% more shoot gun perk. Similarly lock-picking and hacking are now just perks under the Agility and Science skills respectively, instead of being their own skills. Speech? Entirely handled by the Charisma stat. Bartering? Just a perk. Unarmed and Melee weapons? Both just +% damage perks. You get the idea. Now to be somewhat charitable to the perk system, it does give each perk multiple levels (e.g. +20% bang gun shoot, then +40%, then +60%, then +80% & ignore 15 bad man armour points etc) and many of the perks from the previous games are nestled within it as well. So there’s still a smidgin of depth to the system but… once combined with the other tweaks you’ll see why Fallout 4 didn’t win RPG of the year.
You see Todd’s brutal snub by Geoff “Dorito Pope” Keighley wasn’t just over this modest change, nor indeed because Fallout 4 is a bad game. It’s actually kind of fun in a mindless sort of way, much like Skyrim which I also reviewed and thought was a bad RPG but a fun little game. In fact I even mentioned that I spent the first 30 hours of the game immediately after buying it on release (supposedly with a friend but he bitched out at the ABSOLUTE last minute) having a great time. Then the trance wore off and I couldn’t help but wonder why the hell I’d been playing it for two days straight, or why I’d bought the PS4 version like the gigantic philistine I am. The thing with Fallout 4 is that despite it’s slow start, it goes start to sink it’s claws into you and won’t let go until you start to realise that every single quest is basically the same and none of your choices matter and you don’t need any more loot because your build is already great and blah blah blah. Even writing this review I found myself weirdly engrossed by the game, 7 years later and while on my 4th playthrough because it nails the “just one more thing” feeling in a way I haven’t experienced since Civilization 4. So why did I start this mutually assured waste of time review by putting the boot in? Well for the simple reason that Fallout 4 is a fun game until you start thinking about it or trying to treat it as an actual RPG. Which is a deal breaker for some, but considering how many people earnestly tell me that [INSERT POPULAR GAME YOU LIKE HERE] is good I can’t help but imagine the sentient gamer is a rare and oft-bullied minority.
So the removal of the skills system aside, what makes Fallout 4 such a lousy RPG? Well the first significant issue is the fact that the guys at Bethesda thought it would be super cool to have a voiced protagonist for the first time in the history of the series. This of course means that you get to be IMMERSED, but unfortunately your character never really says that much and I don’t think it was really worth it. Of greater concern is the fact that by having your character be voiced, each line of dialogue cost money and as such Bethesda dumbed down the dialogue system by having you only be able to respond in 4 ways to each situation. To be fair other RPG’s such as the excellent of slightly janky Alpha Protocol – Coincidently also by Obsidian FYI – handled this limitation without any difficulty, BUT Bethesda totally made a hash of it by having each option always fit the same pattern. By which I mean, someone says something to you and every single time your options are as follows: Pwecious widdle carebear, Dickhead, Question, Neutral-ish response. Then to compound the cock-up even further the question option often doesn’t advance the dialogue at all, so you only really get three options which are Yes <3, Yes and Go Fuck Yourself. To give you an idea of how this works in gameplay, some loser will cry about something and offer you a quest to rescue their waifu body-pillow from a raider camp – to which you can agree nicely, agree normally, ask who their waifu is and tell them to get a life (declining the quest). That’s the extent of the role-playing across the ENTIRE game. Even the speech options fit into this pattern, with certain options occasionally being coloured from yellow to red (corresponding to difficulty) and offering you a bonus if you succeed or a less optimal outcome if you fail. Asking for more money (hitherto controlled by the barter skill)? Well that’s the neutral yes option but now it’s a different colour. Intimidating someone (hitherto dependent on either your Strength, Faction Rank, Weapon Skill, Perks etc)? That’s now the dickhead option but a different colour. So you’ve got less character differentiation thanks to the loss of the skills system and a considerably reduced pool of options in every single conversation within the game. Then to really give those bespecactled RPG loving nerds one last slap in the face, most of the quests are basically the same. You know how in Skyrim it felt like every quest basically boiled down to kill these bandits/viking zombies/dragons? Well in Fallout 4 every quest is basically “go to this ruined building and shoot all the bad men/radiation zombies/angry shreks within it”. Sometimes you also need to pick something up, which will basically always be held by the boss bandit raider/zombie ghoul/shrek super mutant.
Alright so Fallout 4 is a shit RPG and even if it has the same “choose a faction” approach to the main quest as F:NV did (whether it’s a homage or the equivalent of copying the smart kid’s test answers I’ll leave up to you dear reader) it manages to make a mess of it too. You see in F:NV the factions offered a real choice between Deus Ex Machina Howard Hughes, less cool America, the blatantly unfinished faction and the cop-out “oopsie woopsie you failed all the other quests” faction which all had various competing quest lines that gradually drew you into a big final showdown involving basically every faction (including the little subfactions) in the game. It did this by having each major player offer you competing quests throughout the main story, while also offering you the ability to swap the various sub-factions towards one big power or another. Towards the end of the game you’d inevitably have picked a side as a consequence of all your other choices and all that would remain was to make one last throw of the dice and determine the ultimate fate of New Vegas and the Mojave once and for all (Chris Avellone’s “well fuck you none of it ACTUALLY mattered ahahaha tunneller (snakes) rule” notwithstanding). Fallout 4 on the other hand tries to emulate this but uh… none of the factions are ever in competition with each other? Like sure in F:NV you could do a NCR quest and then a Legion quest, but you’d be earning and losing reputation with both factions and once you started hitting the point where each faction had competing objectives things got messy. In Fo4 though all the RPG elements have been stripped back though so there’s no reputation system or morality system (the latter of which was Fo3’s attempt at having quest outcomes matter, mainly by having one of two random groups of infinitely respawning retards keep trying to kill you for no real reason) to worry about. The quests don’t even interfere with each other either, so you can help faction A rescue synths then return to faction B to enslave some synths then hit up faction C to genocide some nerds from faction B and none of it really matters. That is until you’re 90% of the way through the plot at which point the game goes “Yo what’s up? It’s time to pick a faction for the ultimate victory” and then you wipe out at least two of the other factions. Even if you’re really high-up in the ranks of them and probably could have overseen a more diplomatic solution if the game wasn’t for mouthbreathers if your character had been so inclined.
At this point you’re probably wondering how after all this I can still say that I enjoyed Fo4, and for good reason. The answer is simple though, and it’s that Bethesda half-assed the RPG elements of the game specifically because they were confident in the rest of the game. Well OK not really, but still the rest of the game is actually enjoyable in it’s own way – hence why I described it as mindless fun earlier. For all of the effort that Bethesda didn’t put into making a good RPG, I’d say an equal portion went into making a good “wander around while looting and shooting” game. One of the first things anyone playing Fo4 will notice, assuming they’ve played either Fo3 or F:NV of course, is that the combat has been significantly improved. Not only is the gun-play more enjoyable, but we’ve now got baked in weapon mods (in a more extensive fashion than in F:NV by the way), alongside the ability to bash enemies at close range with your gun. Enemies have less of the bullet-sponge effect, especially in contrast with Fo3 while there are also some enhancements to their behaviour including the ability for them to take cover and for certain enemies types to burst out of the ground/terrain or charge you while leaping over cover. In addition many enemy bases populated by human enemies have traps littered around to keep you on your toes, including tripwires and mines. While this latter feature was also in F:NV and Fo3, I’d argue that Fo4 makes particularly good use of it. Then there’s a subtle but significant tweak to VATS, in that no longer pauses the game and in most cases won’t be enough to save you from getting rushed by a melee enemy making the whole thing feel more tense. There’s also a little tweak to the radiation system too, which previously gave you an ever increasing debuff as you got more irradiated but now radiation covers up an ever increasing portion of your health bar in red – effectively reducing your max health more and more until you chug a radaway or go pay a doctor. Finally the game has added a survival mode (just like Skyrim’s but without that CUNTING warmth system) and significantly reworked how Power Armour… works. In both Fo3 and F:NV you had to get specialised training, after completing some specific quests, which then gave your character the ability to equip power armour which was just an improved version of regular armour. In Fo4 by contrast, power armour is an additional layer that enables you to stomp around in your armoured treads and feels like a significant upgrade. Not only can you wear your existing armour underneath it, but each piece also has it’s own independent health bar and can be upgraded just like the other weapons and armour in the game. It also makes you immune to fall damage! Alas there are two draw backs to using it, namely the fact that your power armour has a fuel bar (represented by fusion cores which are relatively uncommon items scattered across the world) and you can’t use certain terminals or crafting stations while in it. The latter is a seemingly minor drawback, but needing to exit your armour, then probably get told you’re now over-encumbered (because power armour increases your carrying capacity a fair amount), then do whatever you needed to do and get back in the power armour happens just enough that it’s a noticeable drawback. There’s even a mod solely designed to bypass this limitation.
Alongside revisions to combat and making the game much more visually impressive (that laughably bad combat armour notwithstanding), Bethesda also nailed the settlement building aspect of the game. Now fans of the previous games who enjoyed the settlement building mods will know roughly what to expect, but Fo4 takes it to a new level by making it part of the base game and by giving it an actual reason for players to engage with it outside of it being enjoyable. Before I get ahead of myself I’ll just be clear, yes you can build multiple settlements and yes the whole process is both intuitive and comprehensive with a snap-fit mechanism for designing structures alongside myriad little props and dohickeys to scatter around your base. These include everything from stores, crafting stations, entire structures, bespoke structures made out of various parts, fences, gates, terminals, lights, defensive turrets and so on and so forth. Basically everything you would really want is included in the base game, and then if you bought the GOTY edition then the game also lets you build and customise robots, tame various animals, setup arena fights to the death and build a bunch of shiny pre-war stuff that isn’t all wrecked. Of course your base wouldn’t be a base without useless NPC spongers citizens/lackeys and as such you’ll need to setup a recruitment broadcasting tower, then make sure your settlement can fulfill all the needs of it’s inhabitants. Oh yes, you heard me right. These settlements aren’t entirely trouble-free and as such you need to make sure you’ve got enough beds, water, food, defence (a combination of turrets, traps and guard posts) and power to keep all the cool stuff working. Fortunately this is fairly easy to do as you can always see how much of every resource your settlement is producing and if there’s a shortage of any specific resource it’s indicated by that resource being highlighted in red when you’re in building mode. Of course you’ll inevitably start building a bunch of stuff you don’t need, like decorations, doors (that the little shits ALWAYS leave open), containers that dynamically show their contents (like display cases, mannequins and magazine racks) and so on. Don’t get too comfortable though, as once your settlement starts growing it’ll inevitably start attracting the attention of raiders/ghouls/mutants who will occasionally attack it and then you’ll need to come back and defend it. This can get a touch overwhelming in the latter stages of the game as you can build dozens of settlements (albeit only in designated spots) and so you might defend from an attack at Boaby Stencher’s Farm only to need to rush to Spunk Garglers Ranch as it’s now under attack too. On the plus side you can share resources between these settlements (once you’ve unlocked the pre-requisite perk), so generally once you’ve stockpiled enough building materials and food/water in one place you’re settle to tinker away to your hearts content in the rest.
Which neatly ties into the other big change in the gameplay that this settlement system has brought about, namely the fact that every random item in the game which was hitherto junk now has a purpose. Previously you’d ignore all of the tin cans, empty bottles, plates, coffee cups and so on because they just didn’t have enough monetary value to justify grabbing them all and taking them back to a vendor. Now however each item is made up of between 1 and 3 components, which are available for use once they’ve been scrapped at your settlement workbench. What this means in practical terms is that if you want to get that weapon/armour mod, or build that thing you’ll now need the corresponding resources. So you’ll be grabbing a bunch of random junk constantly throughout your travels because there are decent odds that when you inevitably return to your base (because it has a machine that cures your radiation poisoning for example) you’ll be short 3 gears of building that missile turret that you need to increase your defence because you got 2 more settlers to join while you were away who both needed beds and food which mean that you’re now a more tempting target for raiders. In this way the gameplay systems all eventually orbit around the settlement mechanic, as once you start building it’s hard to stop and then you’re constantly sallying forth to get just more X or do one more quest to level up so you can get Rank 3 of the make gun gooder perk and… You’re trapped! Todd and his gang have you ensnared in a fiendish gameplay loop where you’re constantly creating and setting little goals for yourself which keep you coming back for more even though it’s 3am and you could’ve sworn you had a life outside of playing videogames. Oh and also the act of looting things from containers and corpses no longer requires you to jump into that little barter menu, instead a miniaturised version of the contents appears and you can grab or ignore everything quickly and easily. It’s a small change but considering how often you’re grabbing random junk (or weapons/armour to feed your buying random junk habit) it’s a really appreciated one.
To summarise then Fallout 4 is simultaneously a big step forward and a giant leap backwards, ultimately culminating in a game that I can recommend but only to those of you who can safely switch off your brains. If you start asking questions about various elements of the plot (such as why one of the factions keeps making super mutants for no good reason) then you’re going to find yourself frustrated by a RPG that totally fails at being an RPG. Instead you need to approach Fo4 as a serviceable FPS game that revolves around building up your own little town(s) and lets you customise them extensively, making up your own little story as you go. While there are some decent quests sprinkled throughout the game, most of them just boil down to “go to X, shoot Y, go back to quest giver Z” and so it’s not a game about quests or narrative but instead blundering through a large hand-crafted world, grabbing better equipment, daydreaming about your next perk choice and then going back to base to build some crap no one but you will ever care about. As such Fallout 4 gets a recommendation from me, as someone who spent plenty of their childhood dicking around with model kits (shout-out Airfix) and city builder games the ability to build settlements in a FPS game is something I found weirdly entertaining. For those who don’t care about this aspect of the game however, Fo4 provides either an alright time exploring and shooting baddies in a Retro Futuristic slice of 50’s Americana, or a total train-wreck of an RPG experience. My earnest advice would therefore be to only care about the game if you are the type of weirdo who wants a FPS/City builder hybrid. Fortunately I am so I’m having a good time and those chumps at Interplay can SUCK IT.