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.

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