K-SCORE: 40
Developer/Publisher: Bethesda
Director: Todd Howard
Writer/Designer: Emil Pagliarulo
Lead Programmer: Guy Carver
Lead Artist: Istvan Pely
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“Fallout 4 didn’t need to be bigger than Fallout 3; it needed to be better.”
In Bethesda’s flagship post-apocalyptic franchise, wasteland refers to the land in which you’ll waste your time. Trust me. I know. For I’ve now wasted far too much of mine in a world that at times feels too broken and at times not broken enough.
“Well, that was pointless”
After having sunk enough days into Fallout 4 that even I am confident I’ve pillaged and plundered such a huge percentage of the massive game’s content that it can be placed confidently in the “beaten” pile, I am filled with a disappointing amount of regret. The reasons are numerous, and I fully intend to get into the specifics shortly (read such lengthy rants at your own risk), but the biggest factor is that Bethesda (and not for the first time) has failed to uphold one of the most basic tenets of game design. The amount of content contained within a game should match the endurance of its gameplay. Now, that’s easier said than done. Some people might get bored of a game after a few hours when others are able to play it to literally no end. I still climb the ladder in Punch-Out now and then and there’s really only five things you can do in that game: punch face, punch gut, dodge, block, and giggle at the racial stereotypes. And even though Bethesda somewhat leaves the length of time you play (and amount you complete) up to you, it’d be hard to argue that they don’t encourage you to burn hours and hours and hours on the game’s areas, options, and crafting systems for tiny payouts. Very often all the killing, collection, and construction leaves the player shrugging his or her shoulders and saying, “Well, that was pointless.”
“I killed over fifteen hundred members of it, and somehow, they kept coming up to me, asking me for help painting their walls and tracking down their lost trinkets.”
If you take away but a single thing from my analysis of Fallout 4, let it be that the loot-glut continues to be the chain holding back the entire video game industry, but if you take away two things, let them be that and that it’s not enough to create a world and a system for character interaction. You have to actually put meaningful content into that system. And there’s Bethesda’s problem in its essence. They’re using the same janky game engine they’ve used in all of their games for over a decade now, and though that engine creates some amazing experiences, it doesn’t necessitate high-quality quests, characters, stories, and locales. Those are still in the hands of writers, and Bethesda just appears to have a team of lackluster storytellers taking a backseat in their studio to programmers who spend years working on NPC schedules, writing code for creature difficulty scaling, auto-populating huge constructs with loot, and so on. In Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, I was blown away by the magnitude and the life within the Imperial City, that NPCs moved around from their jobs to their homes and sometimes had secret lives you could discover, so much so that I didn’t really care that the best way to optimize your character was to never stop jumping (literally). Yet that was ten years ago, and nowadays I’m just not impressed. Fallout 4’s world feels no more lifelike than Tamriel did in 2006. The glitches of Fallout 3 that might make you see a radscorpion twitching endlessly inside a super mutant were forgivable because you were still awestruck by the size and amount of detail in the game. Well, it’s not forgivable anymore. Fallout 4 didn’t need to be bigger than Fallout 3; it needed to be better. It needed to have expanded gameplay features, many more fun, more rewarding activities to do within the huge setting, more refinement, more polish, so that we could look back on Bethesda’s earlier games and say, “that was just a baselayer.” Sadly, this entry has me saying instead, “Maybe this is just the best they can do.”
(Onto those specific rants I warned you about.)
Much of the features of Fallout 3 have been ported to the new consoles for Fallout 4, which is especially disappointing when the features sucked back in 2008. To make matters worse, fans already endured more than a game’s worth of that stuff because Fallout: New Vegas copied most of Fallout 3’s mechanics as well, and just built another world around the same idea. To see the Pip-Boy return in basically exactly the same way as before is incredibly disappointing. Tracking your quests is doable, but far from efficient. There’s no way to see your perks and stats other than in a giant list of esoteric names. The map is atrocious. The world map lets you at least point yourself in the direction of the landmarks you want to explore, but does nothing to indicate your best bet paths in getting there or what kinds of obstacles you’ll meet along the way. It’s frustrating running ten minutes through The Commonwealth only to find yourself at your destination, tragically two-hundred feet beneath a broken freeway overpass with no idea of how to get up to where you need to go. The local map feature, which is supposed to give you more detail, is hilariously useless. I can’t believe it was even inserted in its current state. I’m not sure any Fallout 4 dev touched any aspect of it when they kicked over the old Fallout 3 game engine and started building stuff.
BZZT - MY OPTICAL SENSORS APPEAR TO BE MALFUNCTIONING - GLITCH INTERJECTION
Periodically when sorting through weapons in the weapons workbench, the name of the weapon would shift to all caps. The only way I found to correct this was to delete the entire name and retype it, which is really not what you want to do for something named “Night-vision enhanced hardened recoil compensated .308 combat rifle.” It was the first time this happened that I discovered there’s a character limit to creating item names that’s far shorter than the character limit for the names the game gives the items.
Worst in the Pip-Boy though, is, of course, the inventory. Holy shit. I use to call myself a completionist gamer, as if that was the best way to describe my skillset and style of game player. Now I might have to revise that to highlight my greatest strength: INVENTORY ORGANIZER. Fallout 4 necessitates dozens of hours scrolling through lists of your items. It sorts them into the categories: weapons, apparel, aid, misc., junk, ammo, and mods. That’s all the help you’re going to get, and it’s not enough because now you’re picking up literally hundreds of thousands of items. What you want to pick up, where you want to store it, how you want to store it, when you want to return to a location to store it, what you use it for, when you sell it, to whom, what you sell versus keep, how much adventuring you can do before you return to sell your items, how you’re able to remember what you have, how you can turn what you have into other stuff you want, represents all - ALL - the challenge in Fallout 4. Somehow I survived it. I’m a master. I had a system for keeping track of my garbage the likes of which I will never be able to explain to another person. If this was actually important work (instead of outrageous video game bullshit), then it would take me weeks to tutor another player in the best ways to keep track of one’s heaping mounds of salvage. Here are some examples of things I taught myself to try to hold back the tsunami of useless shit that was to be found everywhere:
You’ve got to build magazine racks to store your skill mags, so that you don’t need to scroll for five minutes past every issue of Grognak the Barbarian you’ve collected to listen to that Railroad holotape.
There’s no reason ever to take (take, in this context, meaning ingest) chems, but they weigh very little and sell for a lot, and weight to value is the one non-displayed ratio that matters. Pick them up and store them in a workbench in whatever settlement you call home. Hybridize them for experience and sell them off in bulk when you get a chance or have something you want to buy.
Combat Rifles, Hunting Rifles, Combat Shotguns, Double-barreled shotguns, and Pipe Rifles all weight too much to be used as a source of income. If you’re looking for caps or the mats that come from scrapping weapons, pick up only the very small 10mm pistols, .44 pistols, laser pistols, etc. or the very large, fat men, missile launchers, and flamers.
Once you hit 20,000 caps, stop picking up anything you just intend to sell unless it weights exactly 0 pounds or 0.1 pounds.
If you’re storing weapons to reduce the size of settlements, be sure to name them with “...” or “---” so they appear at the top of your inventory list. It’ll save time of scrolling through items you don’t want to access.
Rename all legendary weapons in some consistent way so it’s easier to find them. Those are the guns you’ll actually be firing.
Once you get fifteen fusion cores, wear power armor all the time. You’ll never run out of fusion cores beyond a certain level, the armor increases carry weight (most important stat), and it means you don’t have to worry about the entire section of gear that is regular clothes and armor that’s been broken down into pieces.
After making supply lines with local leader rank 2, the settlements share junk resources, but not actual inventory; learning this will break your heart, as soon as you know what the hell it means.
Junk is the bane of the world. If you’re going to do any crafting though (Fallout 4’s only new feature) you have to become a master of collecting it. Spend your first ten hours of gameplay reading the materials contained within every piece of junk. That way, after enough time, you’ll learn the essentials like:
a research test tube is a valuable source of glass whereas a test tube is useless because it’s way too heavy
aluminum cans and tin cans are great
gas canisters are garbage
aluminum canisters are mediocre
toy rocketships are useless
desk lamps suck
desk fans are okay because of the screws
there’s no good source of concrete that doesn’t weigh a lot
cigarettes are far better than packs of cigarettes for cigarettes weigh nothing
pencils, pens, and chalk also weigh nothing
only a sucker picks up the deathclaw hand
a ribcage is a good source of bone on the other hand
leave the typewriter for it only looks like it has a lot of useful parts
don’t be fooled by Jangles the moon monkey for he belongs with the metal bucket inside a metal bucket
if you see a scalpel on a surgical tray, pick up the tray and leave the scalpel
don’t confuse coolant and Superthaw antifreeze and don’t expect either to yield much more than plastic, and don’t expect there to be a lot of uses for plastic
yes, the 80lb curlbar weighs 80 pounds, no it doesn’t yield a lot of lead, no you don’t need lead
believe it or not, wood is the limiting factor on constructing everything you want to construct in your home settlement, so there are few items more valuable to pick up than the battered clipboard
make your own adhesive with vegetable starch
don’t forget to deposit your vegetable starch in your workbench after you’ve made it; it’s heavy and there’s never a reason to lug it around
there’s no difference between any of the colors of paint or any of the letters of wooden toy blocks - you probably want the blocks, not the paint
collect one assembled giddyup buttercup if you think he looks funny and leave the rest; not worth the weight
When you store all your junk in a workbench at once, remember to take out your Pre-War Money!
Gold bars are worth more in caps than they are in raw gold. Gold watches are the reverse of that
go to the Jamaica Plain Townhall Basement and deactivate then reactivate then deactivate all the laser tripwires over and over again so that you can stop picking up microscopes and ProSnap cameras
Starting to sound ridiculous? I’m just getting started! This game was relentless with its inventory and I will be too! Here:
Don’t confuse .38 ammo with .308 ammo. You need the latter, but the former is equivalent to 1 cap.
Vendors don’t have many caps to give you. Suck them all dry. Be wary when you’re approaching one or when you’re making a trip to Diamond City, Goodneighbor, or one of the settlements where you’ve built vendors. Only sell weightless Pre-War money or chem concoctions if you’ve already dumped your fat men, flamers, Chinese officer swords and other weapons that sound like insulting names for people.
Buy shipments of wood, shipments of screws, shipments of steel (a few times), and shipments of concrete. Everything else cost too much and you’ll find enough of it.
The auto-naming and manual renaming systems on the workbench were programmed by weird sadists. It’s a glitch. You can’t rename Ashmaker or half a dozen other legendaries. Be sure to scroll up after removing weapon mods by building other ones. Never sort through your list of mods, just hope you have what you want, and don’t, under any circumstances, whatever you do-
The armor bench is useless except to increase affinity with Codsworth, X6-88, and Paladin Danse for which the power armor station works just as well.
The cooking station is even more useless. Use it to generate experience before generating caps with all your creature meat. Don’t eat anything. Don’t drink the water; sell it.
At the beginning of the game, strip everything from every human you kill. In the middle, leave behind everything they’re wearing. Towards the end, take only the ammo and stimpacks.
Can’t find where you’re carrying extra weight? Check your “Aid” section. Those Nuka-Colas cost a half pound each and there’s no use for any of them, even the Quantums which were brought over from Fallout 3.
After your Charisma hits 10, the only piece of headgear you need is the Ushanka hat. If you want to look even dumber, kill Tinker Tom and steal what he’s wearing. It does the same thing. Apparently Bethesda thinks intelligent people wear antennas and flashlights on their heads all the time, and they sleep with them on.
Feel like you’re heading back to drop off gear too often? Well, you are. But try dropping off some of those grenades and mines next time you’re home. You never need or even want to use mines. Frag grenades are on most enemies. Other grenades aren’t useful and a pain to equip. And all of those explosives weigh a half pound each. Consolidate and simplify your ‘nade situation people!
Strong can carry more than most human companions, except Danse in power armor, but never roll with Danse because it’s so easy to gain affinity with him just by getting in and out of your power armor. Which, by the way, Strong will hate, so never roll with Strong except one long trip where you don’t get in and out of your power armor or pick any locks. Mostly you want to use Dogmeat. He loves unconditionally, carries a ton for you, and doesn’t count against the Lone Wanderer perk, allowing you to carry even more! Also, don’t roll with Dogmeat. People shoot at him and that inspires real-life rage. Build him a dog house in your house and close off access to anyone but him.
The inventory is… a problem. Like I said, it’s the only aspect of the game I found challenging. The above tips represent a tiny fraction of all the advice I could give related to inventory management in Fallout 4. Here’s my advice on combat:
Take highest damage rifle, target area of enemy labeled: “head” or “face” and fire. Repeat as necessary.
I played the game on Very Hard, the hardest difficulty in the game (except Survival, which isn’t harder, but rather different - different in that they gave ammo weight, which alone would render the game unplayable), and never did I struggle to complete quests, explore areas, or defeat enemies. No behemoth, Yao Guai, or Legendary Synth Patroller could do enough damage or survive long enough to defeat me. After I had a few decent guns, I was just picking and choosing how to kill my enemies for my own amusement. I didn’t need companion help (they just blew my cover or got in the way of my bullets). On the very rare occasions I encountered something with too much life to be blasted apart by my five-crank instigating laser musket or double-shot gauss rifle in a single blast, I could just take out a kneecapping smg, fire off a couple of my thousands of stored rounds, watch my opponent fall to the ground crippled, and then stand behind them all day taking cheap shots to the cerebral cortex. The higher difficulty probably just scaled up the enemy life and damage, and if they can’t move because they’re legs don’t work, and can’t see me because I’m crouched behind them, the only thing affected by difficulty is the number of bullets it takes to get to the bloody center of the irradiated glowing-one tootsie-pop. So the limiting factor to my success, even for the toughest of fights, was the amount of ammunition I had, and ammo can be bought if for some reason you’re not finding enough of what you need (unlikely) which just ties back into the loot and inventory management systems. As soon as I started buying 2mm electric cartridges, the only way I was losing at anything in Fallout 4 was if I locked out a questline by angering the wrong faction at the wrong time, glitched out my game, corrupted my save files, or just lost my human willpower to finish.
BZZT - MY OPTICAL SENSORS APPEAR TO BE MALFUNCTIONING - GLITCH INTERJECTION
Towards the end of the game, I was running solo, having finally maxed out affinity with every companion and gotten their perks. Last was Paladin Danse, who I sent home to The Castle right before taking on The Institute. By this point, he’s an enemy of The Brotherhood of Steel, but I was working for them. He decided to walk across The Commonwealth to get to The Castle, and, by coincidence, walked right into the path of Liberty Prime throwing nukes and shooting lasers from his eyes at anyone that crossed him. Not following? Well, know this. Companions are essential and can’t be killed. Liberty Prime is invincible, can’t be killed. I had to stand around watching two immortals battle for all eternity in front of the Bunker Hill monument. The only fix I came up with was to snipe Paladin Danse so quickly and so many times that he kept falling to one knee, “down” but not dead. In the tiny second where he knelt, Liberty Prime got a step closer to his actual mission target. Hardest thing I did, well, except for killing Deacon when he was stuck in that building in Cambridge...
The expansion of content in Fallout 4 exists in its crafting features. Where most of the game stays Fallout 3, simply being moved northeast four-hundred miles, the crafting is expanded wildly. Not only can you customize your guns, cook food, build armor mods, upgrade your power armor, change the color of your helmet’s headlamp, combine drugs to make more dangerous drugs, and turn a baseball into a pitchable explosive, you can build entire towns in which to do all of that. And you can accrue followers, named and unnamed to stay in those towns and mill about watching you do all that. And you can build little houses for your followers and put lights and TVs and beds in the houses, and radios. And you can put potted plants next to the doorways and American Flags and statues of lions around those houses. And then you can plant “tatos” (never was sure if they were tomatoes or potatoes) and have your companions and settlers tend to the crops. And la-dee-da, Fallout 4 has become Farmville in the apocalypse only without real friends.
The building features are actually decently intuitive, not that I’m a connoisseur of Minecraftian mechanics. I did my best to have fun with them, thinking that if I was going to get the most out of the game, I had better commit to building some settlements since so much dev time was spent on them. There are a staggering number of settlements and all can be stripped down and built back up according to your imagination. There are some annoying issues, like pieces not being able to snap into other pieces like they should and having only one or two truly crucial pieces for terraforming the world, but the main problem again is the meaninglessness behind the settlements. You build them up and assign your settlers jobs and the people become more or less happy according to some formula no one in reality seems to actually understand, but it doesn’t do anything for you. Building itself gives experience, and it actually generates so much experience that to skip out on building entirely would likely mean you’re missing a lot of potential level-ups as you playthrough the game, but the levels don’t mean too much since enemies scale with you yet again. And you know what’s faster than building sensible, well-constructed houses, walls, turrets, and towers? Building statues. It’s quantity over quality to the bitter end, and it doesn’t care if you take nine concrete block formations and arrange them in a grid or if you scatter them across a beach, obstructing everyone’s view and walking paths. Once I had a crapload of extra copper, I used to go to Spectacle Island (because it had the largest space cap) and build thousands of statues of baseball players because I realized building statues generates a weirdly large amount of experience. I’d say ten of my 88 levels came that way.
BZZT - MY OPTICAL SENSORS APPEAR TO BE MALFUNCTIONING - GLITCH INTERJECTION
I noticed a huge number of glitches regarding how people moved about the settlements you built, from people being unable to use stairs, to creepy gatherings of everyone in the settlement outside bar vendor stations in the middle of the night, but nothing was worse than Nick Valentine in my home at The Castle. No matter what job I assigned him or how I pushed him, Nick picked out a spot near my power armor sets and walked in a tiny circle, pirouetting to no end. “Any progress on finding those Eddie Winter holotapes?” He’d ask me. The game didn’t have an option for me replying with, “Any progress on you relearning how to walk in a straight line?”
In its relentless pursuit of jangly-ass craziness, there was an achievement, a PS4 trophy, in Fallout 4, to get 100 settlement happiness. Otherwise, the settlements had no use that I could discern. Sure it was a place to store your stuff, but it’s not like the other games lacked for those. Sure you could build vendors, but even the best vendors were worse than what you found at Goodneighbor and Diamond City. Sure they got attacked periodically, but if they won or lost the subsequent battle, if you helped or not, seemed to affect nothing at all. So I set up some 20 settlements to be self-sufficient but the only time I spent in any of them (except my main base) was when I got this achievement. Apparently, what the crazy NPCs of Fallout 4 want most, is to all be doctors, living with other doctors, and selling doctor services to no one, around lots and lots of basketball hoops. Once I built such a settlement, I had to wait around as the happiness slowly ticked up. “And by slowly I mean fucking slow!” The settlers got sad if I left. Aw, isn’t that sweet? So I sat around for literally hours, usually doing website work, watching Netflix, or listening to podcasts, but it was also during this time that I created my greatest crafted achievement. Every house, every giant building, every perimeter guardpost, every power station and water treatment plant that I constructed pales in comparison to this:
Once the trophy popped, I took out my MIRV-equipped, double-shot fat man and murdered all the doctors living at the Starlight Drive-in with a single volley, then reloaded a save where I hadn’t wasted so many resources.
So, if you’re the kind of player that can craft your own fun with your sadistic and/or spiteful imagination, Fallout 4 might actually be for you. If you actually want the quests, NPCs, and factions to feel meaningful, look elsewhere. Everyone feels hollow. It’s an RPG suffering from a problem I’ve noticed in other games recently. So scared are the devs to create a character that’s annoying that they end up sapping the personality from the characters they do put in. Fallout 4 is the worst of both worlds because Codsworth, Curie, Hancock, McCready, Paladin Danse, X6-88, Piper, Nick Valentine, Strong, Cait, Deacon, and Preston Garvey all feel lifeless and they’re annoying. They bug you at regular intervals about your relationship which is healthy or unhealthy because of the number of locks you picked in their presence, or the number of times you hacked a computer terminal standing next to them, or the number of times you literally put on armor while they were watching. They tell you backstories that are so emotionlessly delivered and so irrelevant to current situations that it makes suspending disbelief nearly impossible. This is further hampered because the moment they decide they “idolize” you, they’ll turn to you for a long talk about your friendship or romance (they’re all bisexual, single, and twenty or thirty-something evidently), even if you’re in the middle of being attacked by swarms of bloodbugs or trying to escape a toxic experimental weapons facility. Uhh, can’t this wait Hancock? We’re kind of in the middle of something. Even if Bethesda fixed those issues, they’d still feel lifeless because of the rigid way the camera squares on people every time it becomes talk-time. Paladin Danse is a crafted intelligence synth? Yeah? You all are! Nick, you’re just spinning in little circles saying the same damn thing over and over again. You’re a malfunctioning robot! You’re all malfunctioning robots! (Except you, Dogmeat. You’re a good boy.)
No one else I encountered was any better than the companions. From small-scale characters like the the guy who gives you the test outside Covenant to large-scale characters like Father, your creepy son, they’re all boring, with motivations that either don’t make sense, aren’t explained, or don’t exist. This leads to uninspiring quests, failures in allegiances to the factions, and a general apathy regarding the fate of The Commonwealth that supposedly you’re supposed to decide. Mostly I felt my character was annoyingly nudgy, inserting himself into everyone’s lives whether they wanted it or not, and then calling himself, “vital” just a couple in-game days after he’d never heard of any of these people or problems. When I progressed to the stage of murdering everyone in X,Y,or Z faction, then I felt like an asshole. I didn’t really understand what anyone in The Railroad, Brotherhood of Steel, Minutemen, or Institute were trying to accomplish. How was I supposed to ethically make the determination that three-quarters of all of them had to go. And by go, I mean turned into ectoplasmic goo after I lit up their faces with a gatling laser gun that makes its targets bleed and burn at once.
BZZT - MY OPTICAL SENSORS APPEAR TO BE MALFUNCTIONING - GLITCH INTERJECTION
Because of the dull quests, my favorite thing to do ended up being reaching the tops of building, looking out at the spectacularly gigantic world, and then jumping off the edge in a suit of power armor so I didn’t take fall damage. Once, by accident, I jumped into the city of Goodneighbor. This caused a load screen where everything loaded correctly. Well, mostly everything. The ground didn’t. It was even funnier than a glitch I encountered where I teleported in and out of The Institute too fast for my eyes to adjust. Uhh… character’s eyes. Imagine someone is shining a bright light into your over-dilated pupil’s. Uhh… character’s pupils.
Fallout 4 is a huge game, and it does include a lot of impressive environments and features. Yet tragically it feels they failed to innovate and improve their formula where it counts. I feel they’ve gotten closer with their new leveling-up, perk, and S.P.E.C.I.A.L. (stats) systems, yet that too has a greater-than-ideal degree of shifty-weirdoness. What’s with Intelligence being linked to exp? It demands putting 10 points in it immediately. Why do they make me dedicate 4 points to armorer, gun nut, blacksmith, and science each to be able to actually utilize all that salvage and upgrade things? It’s frustrating having to take four points in strong back and two in local leader just to stay anything close to sane with regard to loot management.
Somehow though, as I finished up the last of my endurance run-through of this gluttonous game, I found myself most disappointed by the fact that I never felt I was playing in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a world destroyed. It’s not a ravaged land, filled with radiation-engorged creatures and the last dregs of human society. It’s an ugly world, devoid of trees and with illogically constructed shanty-buildings, but society is still there. I know. I killed over fifteen hundred members of it, and somehow, they kept coming up to me, asking me for help painting their walls and tracking down their lost trinkets. Population undented. I don’t know how many people Bethesda will make me kill in the wonky Fallout 5 to actually create this dystopia where everyone is dead. A million? Bring it on. Apparently I have nothing better to do.
