Bethesda Game Studios has a great track record, regarded as one of the more beloved game developers out there. The studio is know for the contagiously successful Elder Scrolls series and Fallout series. Fallout 4 is another entry into the Fallout series, as you may have guessed! It really can just be described as that, another Fallout game. The latest Fallout taking place this time in the Commonwealth of the Boston area, has all in all some improvements, but still remarkably similar to the Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3 and Mojave Wasteland of Fallout New Vegas. This is good and bad at some points, but all in all sticking to the formula seems to work.
Expect the huge open world to explore as with past Bethesda RPG games. That fresh new world feeling you get in RPG games when you come out of the Vault is still there. You can stick to the main quest line and probably beat the game in around 20-30 hours, however you would be missing the true intention and strengths of Fallout. The main story is kind of the main road you take, but all the side quests and dungeons are what makes the game. For instance, while doing a quest for the Minutemen story line (which will lead into the main storyline) I stumbled into the Malden Middle School basement. I thought I’d just go in, check out the loot, then walk out. It turned into Vault 75, a huge area filled with raiders and various rooms with loot. I ended up going through it, and having to rush back to Diamond City to unload and sell loot. These distractions from the main storyline are extremely common, and fun!
These side quests and distractions within the Fallout games are a bit tit for tat as to why the the game tends to be more buggy and flat dialog, or at least the reason people have given in the past. With recent games such as the Witcher 3 holding the bar so high for this level of detail, I’m not sure how much of a blind eye players can give this anymore. There is a lot of lore through the means of terminal entries and such, which is neat but long. I don’t want to read some eight pages of a terminal to figure out what happened to some brewing company. Give more holotapes or actual dialog instead to expand on side stories. There are also some points like with many of the Minutemen quests, where it just turns into “these raiders are hurting us, go kill them!” over and over. The Minutemen quest line in general is just awful and boring.
A large portion of the Minutemen quest itself involves the workshop. You typically go clear out some raider camp and then build a recruitment station to the settlement for the Minutemen. The workshop itself is neat, and I’ve heard some crazy things people built with it. Essentially, it is a build mode to build a town settlement. You build pretty much little wasteland towns and defend them. I just can’t seem to care much for it though. With inventory space being a hot commodity, I don’t want to have to carry around junk to build stuff as well. I would not say it is bad, actually the system works decently well. It was just not something I was into, but could see how someone would like the workshop.
The workshop menu system, compared to the PIP boy, isn’t bad. Inventory management and the PIP boy menu however can be a bit cumbersome. It just doesn’t work well. When I’m trying to sell off loot, it is hard for me to figure out which weapons are which. The names kind of all run together, the way I worked it out was favorite the weapons I use to access with the d-pad in game. Even the ammo is hard to tell which guns go with what ammo, which makes it a task to to restock on ammo. Overall, inventory management is clunky and hard to well…manage.
The last two Fallout games I stopped fairly early on due to not liking the VATs system. Which, wasn’t inherently flawed and well received by others. In Fallout 3 and New Vegas however, the gunplay was practically unplayable. You had to use VATs or you would be awful at shooting. Fallout 4 made some great strides to improving the shooting within the game, making it so now VATs is completely optional. I use it for bugs, since they move around too much, and to track the path I need to be going for the quest (a perk you can buy). In fact, sniping in Fallout 4 had to be some of the most satisfying sniping in a game I’ve played. That money sound whenever you got a instant kill with a headshot was so satisfying. Early on in the game, ammo and caps can be an issue, but towards the middle I found it to be less and less of an issue. This may be because I sniped most the time, which uses less ammo then say a machine gun.
The main storyline and characters was better than most of the side storyline, but still not much of an improvement or better than other games. It lacked a lot of detail or story telling. The characters are for the most part flat, it can be filled with plot holes at points where things just don’t make sense. Overall, the story is a con of the game compared to recent RPGs like the Witcher 3 or the Mass Effect series since Fallout 3 came out. Because of titles such as those, I find it harder and harder to really excuse rather poor story telling in Bethesda’s RPGs, when other studios proved its doable.
In a lot of ways, Fallout is just more Fallout with minor improvements. It can be good and for the most part, I’m not saying Bethesda shouldn’t have changed the formula. However there are just many bugs and problems with Fallout 4 that were also present in Fallout 3, and have been addressed well in other RPGs since Fallout 3 game out nearly a decade ago. Fallout 3 was a high bar set by Bethesda, and Fallout 4 pretty much just met the same bar again where as other series since Fallout 3 have blown past that bar.
