Fallout 4 (2015) by Bethesda Game Studios

These kinds of bugs...

I picked this up again to kill some time while waiting for Obsidian's upcoming The Outer Worlds, but set it back down and uninstalled it once again after only a couple of hours.

Unfortunately Fallout 4 falls far from the quality of its predecessors. It features some notable graphical improvements and a voiced protagonist, but provides an extremely buggy experience (see, uh... all images in this post), with a clearly aged and no longer acceptable engine. The shooting feels too loose, movement feels too imprecise, and there are notable frame drops indoors which I could find no way to alleviate.

...are unfortunately ubiquitous...

In addition to this, the factions are much less interesting than those found in New Vegas, and the writing overall is weaker. The main plot is contrived and tries too hard to be clever and twisty. The dialogue is poor and unbelievable, and the player's ability to maintain agency through dialogue is severely damaged by a lack of meaningful roleplaying. The quest design is also very straightforward; solvable in only one way (which usually involves shooting), and almost never presenting the player with any significant moral problems that are anything more than window-dressing. Nearly every side quest or main quest I picked up was instantly forgettable, and most of my enjoyment from this game came from wandering the world, looting areas for new gear and materials with which to mod my current gear, leveling up, and enjoying Inon Zur's wonderful soundtrack. I had to go out of my way to actually enjoy the game, as it kept pushing me towards it's bad quests and, what is perhaps most game-breaking for me personally: The game constantly pushing you towards the monotonous, inane, and janky settlement management. Surely there are some people that enjoy this kind of thing, but when I play a Fallout game I want to explore, roleplay, level up, and gather loot to become more powerful in order to affect the world more strongly. I don't want to be called on to help idiots defend their settlements regularly, I don't want to build walls and houses. I want to be free to explore at my whim without having these silly obligations nagging at me and breaking my flow within the game's core loop of exploring, looting, and leveling up. It seems Bethesda learned nothing from all of the complaints about Grand Theft Auto IV's constant demands from friends to go bowling.

...in Bethesda's latest broken mess of a video game.

This is an experience that puts all of the emphasis on looking pretty and listing its features in a neat sheet of bullet points that probably looked great in a boardroom, and none of it on the core experience Bethesda has provided which players had come to love in games such as Skyrim and Fallout 3. It has no narrative punch and it lacks whimsical, gritty heart that Fallout 3 successfully emulated and Fallouts 1, 2, and New Vegas exhibit so well. Fallout 4 wastes a potentially intriguing premise and setting on skin-deep bells and whistles that offer no real payoff or enjoyment, and it gives the player no strong themes to dig into and think about. If you want to kill some time and have a high degree of patience for bugs and poor optimization, then you may want to take a shot on Fallout 4. But if you're looking for a good roleplaying experience with a compelling open world, you should play New Vegas instead.

⭐

Fallout: New Vegas (2010) by Obsidian Entertainment

New Vegas is such a genuine, realistic, deep world that it becomes so hard to tear yourself away from it.

"What!? Dude, there are giant scorpions and ghouls who have adapted to radiation and live for hundreds of year! There are freaking aliens! What the hell are you talking about!?"

I know, I know. That sounds like a ridiculous thing to say—that a game with such a far-fetched premise could feel like it deserves to be taken so seriously. But this is a world that is based mostly in logic, despite it's more campy weirdness. Let me explain that.

Each character, settlement, and area are based logically. In Fallout 3, people have built a bunch of walls around an unexploded nuclear weapon—it's called Megaton, and it's the first settlement you see after leaving Vault 101. Have you ever asked WHY the hell they did that? It makes no sense. It's literally a bomb! The water around it is irradiated. If this were real life, why the hell would anybody build a town there? There's no logical reason for them to do so—Bethesda simply did it because it was a neat idea and it makes for a nifty looking town. Even the town's name doesn't make any sense. Why would you be proud enough of settling around this bomb to call your town 'Megaton' after these bombs have destroyed your entire world? The logic behind the settlement completely falls apart if you think about it for more than 2 minutes.

Fallout: New Vegas's comic relief often hits the mark.

Usually, you're so into the game that you don't consider things like this, but they can begin to weight on your subconscious and your ability to suspend disbelief. You stop caring so much about the setting. You begin to have a bit less fun. You care about the story and characters less and start treating it more like a game. You begin to feel less of an emotional connection to the game. Eventually, you set it down for good, no longer interested. This was my experience with Fallout 3.

In New Vegas, however, each settlement and character is grounded with very realistic motivations. Novac is a settlement based in an old motel, which people began to settle organically because it's down the road from Repconn Headquarters—an old robotics manufacturer that, although equipped with dangerous security systems, features tons of old technology to salvage and trade. The name of the town itself is short for 'No Vacancy'—taken from the half-broken sign out from in front of the derelict motel in which these people have settled. Every bit of this place has a reason for existing, and the fact that it does makes it feel like a REAL place to you. You take it seriously, its inhabitants feel more like real humans. You start to forget that you're playing a game and you become more immersed.

New Vegas's well-rounded cast keeps things interesting

The entire game features this kind of lovingly crafted fiction. The characters are no different. They have real, poignant histories. They are funny, and irritating. Reliable and flawed. The factions are equally legitimate—I particularly loved how the NCR had their bases situated in realistically-feeling locations along the river. The quests and side quests are so deep they give you a myriad of ways to deal with problems, and they're universally well-balanced and solvable by all roles. Stealthy? Sneak through, quietly killing your foes on your way to your objective. Not combat-oriented? You can hack computers, lockpick doors, or smooth-talk your way without fighting. Or, if you're a madman, go in swinging a giant hammer, or blowing everyone away with a giant minigun. Be good or evil, or something in between. Chaotic good? Go for it. Lawful evil? Equally viable. The game will mold itself to you, and its storytelling does not suffer, no matter what role you choose for your character. No matter what story you think up, the game will go along with you. It is fantastic at that.

This is one of the most brilliantly crafted and written experiences in the history of gaming. It's buggy as hell, so you'll want a fan-made patch full of bug-fixes. And its graphics have aged very poorly. The character are pretty poorly animated and the textures are muddy, so you may want graphical mods, too. But aside from that? If you like RPGs, this is absolutely not to be missed. Buy the Ultimate edition at full price without a second thought.

⭐⭐⭐⭐