TL;DR – Fallout 4 has a grand total of 6 DLC’s (well 7 if you include the HD texture pack) which vary wildly in both quality and scope, so to give each one it’s own turn in the spotlight I’ve decided to break up the DLC review into two component parts, just like I did with Fallout: New Vegas. In part #1 we’ll be looking at the smaller Contraptions Workshop and Automatron packs, alongside the larger Far Harbour DLC which is more akin to an expansion than anything. While the first two are predominately concerned with giving you the ability to build more things at your settlement and maybe a quest chain or handful of new enemies and if you’ve been good, it’s Far Harbour which is the real standout here. Not only because it’s much larger and takes place in an entirely self-contained area with it’s own unique enemies, quests and locales but also because it’s the closest Fallout 4 comes to actually being an RPG. That’s not to say it’s a slam dunk roll away success, but it’s still pretty impressive for a game that was barely an RPG at all in the base game. Honestly if it wasn’t for Far Harbour I probably wouldn’t have recommended that buyers just grab the GOTY edition in my Fallout 4 review (which you can find here), but it’s good enough that paying a little extra is well worth it in my opinion. As for the other two? Well they’re nice to have but not essential by any means.
Quick Note – Automation’s quest chain automatically activates once your character reaches level 15.
Following on from my earlier review of Fallout 4, I thought I’d get my full money’s worth and take a look at the DLC for the game as well. This time we’ll be taking a look at Automatron, Far Harbour and the Contraptions Workshop Pack with the remainder (Nuka World, the Vault-Tec Workshop Pack and the Wasteland Workshop Pack) coming next week. Starting things off in alphabetical order, the Automatron pack gets a dizzyingly high rating of “it’s alright” out of 10 from me, your humble truth-seeker and scribe. The reason I’ve chosen to bequeath the Automatron pack with such a rating is simple, it adds an alright quest chain with the occasional challenging fight and makes some tweaks to the larger game world which give the player some new enemies to fight and the ability to create and upgrade robots. This latter part is really the star of the show, with the quest chain basically serving as a way to justify how you’ve discovered the ability to make a robotic workbench and then make a variety of different robot types. Fans of Fo3 and F:NV who experimented with modding might think this sounds familiar and honestly it is, as the RobCo certified mods basically let you do this in both of those games. The main difference this time however is that Bethesda have expanded the concept, so you can not only make robot companions but you can also assign them to settlements and decide which parts they have (which gives you the ability to make some abominations). Basically once you’ve finished the relatively short quest line, you’re given the ability to create new robots for crafting materials and are then able to decide what head/arms/body/legs they have, with the system being broadly analogous to how Power Armour works. This is due to the fact that each arm and each leg are treated separately (unless you’ve chosen the hovering jet that Mr Handy’s have for legs) and each part not only has a variety of types, such as Robobrain treads or Protectron Legs, but also various suboptions which essentially act as armour and weapon upgrades. There are also some other effects such as the ability for your robot to give you a bonus to stealth or regeneration outside of combat, alongside some upgrades that are slightly overpowered but give that part a small chance (generally 2%) of breaking after use. You can build basically as many of these robots as you want, and they’re treated by the game as settlers for the purposes of your settlements (so yes, your Protectron can “choose” the humble farming life). Unfortunately they don’t work as shopkeepers because Fallout 4 is an inconsistent game at best, but everything else works.
And while that’s all admittedly pretty cool, the other additions from the pack aren’t particularly huge. As mentioned you get a modest quest chain which serves as your introduction and it brings everyone’s favourite Fallout 3 character, the Mechanist into Fallout 4. Unfortunately(?) the Antagoniser isn’t here to summon giant ants to aid you, so instead you’re tasked with saving a caravan of traders, which gives you an Assaultron companion and then begin hunting down the Mechanist. To do this you need to gun down some robots at the General Atomics factory, hunt down 3 robo-brains (not as easy as it sounds) across 3 separate locations, before finally assaulting the Mechanists layer. These locations and encounters are generally enjoyable, with most parts of the quest being pretty short but there are two large dungeons here which provide some unique items and can be challenging especially for those hovering near the level 15 mark. You also get to see a variety of new robot modifications, generally themed around unfinished robots that are missing their armour and are instead packing a variety of new melee weapons. Once you’ve finished up the main quest chain you’re able to keep your new companion and are rewarded with the Mechanist’s outfit & lair, alongside receiving all of the potential robot modifications that are available. You’ll probably have also looted the full suit of T60 power armour that a certain troublemaker drops, alongside their unique tesla gun that’s useful for clearing out mobs of enemies. Aside from this main quest the DLC also adds a new raider gang called the Rust Devils, who are basically a geekier version of the raiders who employ more robots, alongside an endless amount of radiant quests that involve tracking down the Mechanists remaining robots. That’s about it for the Automatron DLC, which I consider to be enjoyable thanks to it’s robot building abilities and decent main quest line. Sure there’s not a ton of content on offer, but it’s far from the worst of Bethesda’s offerings and the ability to turn Codsworth into a sentry bot is honestly worth the extra 500ish megabytes that the game demands from your Fallout 4 installation.
After finishing up Automatron I dove into Far Harbour, which actually took a surprising amount of time. This is because to unlock the initial quest for Far Harbour, you either need to hang around Nick Valentine’s detective agency after getting to a certain point in the main quest of Fallout 4, or just stumble across the quest organically. I thought I’d mix things up by trying to get it to trigger organically, but I can safely say that finding the Nakomi residence can be a real pain in the ass if you only have a foggy memory of where it is. To cut a long story short, it’s hidden away at the absolute uppermost North-Eastern corner of the map and isn’t marked on your local map until you’ve basically stumbled across it. As a consequence I ended up “wasting” an hour or two exploring every point of interest on the eastern coast before finally finding it. Once there you bumble around the house, picking up a few audiotapes before finally getting permission to take the family boat to Far Harbour. After your arrival to this entirely new island you get a quick bit of exposition basically confirming that there are three settlements, a normal-ish town, a synth sanctuary called Arcadia and then a Children of Atom cult base. The town and the cultists hate each other, while the synth’s are cut in the middle trying to be reasonable-ish. Unfortunately one of the faction’s is unintentional sitting on Thermonuclear missiles and as a consequence even if Far Harbour and the Cultists don’t just genocide each other the old fashioned way, there’s a pretty significant chance that once both realise there are nukes lying around it’s all going to end in tears. Much like in the base game’s main quest, in Far Harbour you get to determine which (if any) factions are going to emerge victorious from the inevitable final confrontation, which gives this DLC some replayability. As a bonus, the quests themselves are also pretty decent as far as the game goes, with Far Harbour allowing a good level of choice and some actual consequences for failing or succeeding speech checks outside of not getting more caps from quest givers. Alongside an unexpectedly strong narrative thread, this DLC also contains a decent amount of content because as previously mentioned it takes place on an entirely new island which features entirely new factions, quite a few new enemies, a bunch of new locations to explore and some new weapons/crafting recipes/random buildable objects for your settlements. It also gave my character a surprising amount of XP per quest and a significant amount of cash once I started working my way through the side quests. One of these is a particular stand-out as you end up playing detective for a bunch of rich people who’ve locked themselves away in a vault, and one of them has just been murdered. It’s not a particularly massive brain-teaser to figure out, as the game’s quest markers are embarrassingly adamant that you can’t make a mess of things, but it’s still an enjoyable diversion and I ended up with over 1100 bundles of pre-war money as compensation (worth about 3300+ caps depending on the vendor and your perk choices).
Far Harbour can then be considered an equivalent to Point Lookout in terms of DLC content, as while many enemies are re-used (including some random Super Mutants who are on the island because… reasons) there’s plenty of new content to play around with in a brand new setting. It’s not going to turn the world on fire, but I did find the new wildlife to be challenging to deal with on occasion and I also have to confess that the new fog effects looked great and helped lend the island a sense of foreboding and menace. When combined with the island’s rather liberal approach to dosing you in rads, it’s fair to say that Far Harbour is not for the player who is faint of heart (I almost shit on multiple occasions due to massive beasts dropping from trees and bursting out of lakes) or playing on the lower levels. As for how our hero’s saga ends, well it is entirely up to you. What I can say is that there are multiple options to decide how things will end, each of which will have significant ramifications and none of which offer an entirely clean ending. At best you’ll have to get your hands dirty to enforce a level of peace and at worst you’ll be genociding at least one of the three factions. One of the better aspects of this ultimate choice is the fact that doing the side quests (and even progressing along in the main quest chain for the base game) will influence which options are available and whether or not you’re able to pull them off. It also offers some a modicum of roleplaying opportunity, as your character can become a devoted member of the Church of Atom, a mercenary or a peacemaker with each run being fairly different. It’s therefore a strong entry and while not much of an RPG compared to normal games in the genre, it’s still a leap forward for Fallout 4. Last but not least I’ll just mention that you can find a unique-ish suit of power armour and can gain access to a handful of new workbenches, for creating some new settlements. With all that being said, let’s move onto the final piece of DLC I’ll be looking at this week…
…The contraptions workshop of course! As one of the Workshop packs it’s fairly light in content, due to the lack of quests, new areas or new enemy types. Instead it solely focuses on adding new content to settlements that you can fanny around with, in this case a couple pieces of decorative junk and the ability to create production lines inside a settlement which let you turn junk into (almost) anything. The way it works is simple on paper but can be tricky in practice. Basically there are multiple types of conveyor belts, production devices and storage containers which all can be connected to each other and once they’re powered up, you just need to connect a terminal and then the system will largely begin to operate as intended. To give an example, you can build an ammo forge which will create most ammo types from raw materials, such as x10 .45 bullets from x1 fertilizer and x2 steel. You can just drop these in manually, but the intention here is that you’ll produce a hopper (for dropping items), a sorting conveyor belt (to push out those not containing the required materials) and then connect these three things together with conveyor belts. Once setup there is a certain degree of catharsis from watching everything flow by and begin the process of getting turned into the ammo type you’ve selected, but of course things can get more complicated from there. Why just have the bullets flow off the production line and onto the ground when they could go into a storage device that connects to the end of the conveyor belt, for example? Or maybe you’d rather have a tripwire that automatically starts and ends production once you trigger it. Then of course you’ve got the prospect of building machines that can produce anything, but each type of good has it’s own machine. You’ve got a food processor, gun forge, ammo (and energy ammo) forges, an armour forge and so on. Now you could have each one operate independently, but you can also string a bunch together into a fully conjoined production line for maximum factory shenanigans. To be entirely honest aside from ammo, explosives and maybe food this whole DLC is more giving you an excuse to faff around like this more than it is actually providing anything of particular use. Sure you can configure a production line to produce junk items that have a vendor value higher than the cost of their components, but this seems like an extremely convoluted way of earning a bit of extra money in a game with procedurally generated quests.
But before you begin trying to recreate Factorio in Fallout 4, there are a few caveats to bear in mind. Firstly and perhaps most annoyingly, as production objects are controlled by a single terminal you can’t have a singular production line produce multiple types of ammo at once. Instead you’ll need to assemble multiple production lines, as otherwise all connected production forges will produce the same thing. This also applies to the other types such as the food processor and weapon forge. Secondly you’ll be restricted by perk choices from choosing certain outputs, which won’t even show as being potentially available but locked off. For example if you don’t have Gun Nut rank 4, you won’t see .50 calibre rounds as an option from an ammo forge (as you can see from my screenshot above). Thirdly you’ll need to basically dump each material into either a hopper or a container connected to a vacuum belt for the production process to start, so it’s not entirely automatic. Fourthly when setting up the conveyor belt sorters, they only accept the raw material for determining which items to sort – so if you don’t have Steel but instead have an object that’s solely compromised of Steel, then that won’t work. Fifthly and finally, all of these machines require power and a decent amount of space. Plus they only go in a preset direction, so there will be some fiddling to do before everything works right. Now none of these problems are insurmountable, but it essentially means that this DLC is either a brief but amusing gimmick or will require a significant time investment. As for the rest of this DLC, well it’s pretty light on things you might find useful. It does add elevators, a fireworks launcher, logic gates which utilise power flow in different ways and some new ways of displaying items (cases, gun racks and mannequins that can wear any armour) alongside the ability to send settlers to the Pillory stocks and two new traps and some signage. That’s about it though, so this DLC isn’t particularly big and if you don’t care about the new forges and conveyor belts then you’ll probably not care about it at all!
So after diving through three of the Fallout 4 DLC packs at dizzying, breakneck speed I can safely say that they’re all good to have but I’d recommend them to various degrees. Frankly the contraptions DLC is entirely optional and is basically a waste of time unless you’re really into the prospect of watching a production line whizz by. On the other side of the spectrum is Far Harbour, which I consider to be basically essential for anyone who enjoyed Fallout 4 as it’s both a well balanced quest chain with plenty of player agency and an enjoyable additional dollop of content with multiple unique enemy types and new areas to explore. Then sitting pretty in the middle is Automatron, which is great if you want to have an Assaultron or upgraded Codsworth as a companion, but is otherwise just kind of OK otherwise. Sure the additional quests in Automatron are enjoyable enough, but it’s a fairly short (if occasionally challenging) piece of content that I would otherwise only consider essential for The Mechanist fans or those who are easily excited by the prospect of building your own Protectron settlers. For everyone else Far Harbour is the clear winner and the best DLC of the bunch (Spoilers: including next week’s lot), while contraptions is basically a cute little time sink that’s barely worth paying for. Therefore Far Harbour > Automatron > Contraptions Workshop.
