A few thoughts on Fallout 4's Survival Mode

A few months ago, Fallout 4 drew me back in with what was being heralded as an entirely new gameplay experience. Survival mode promised to change the game with new features and additions that would make one of the most immersive games of 2015, even more so. Much like playing the game, it's been awhile since I've written about Fallout 4 but here goes anyway.

If you recall my thoughts on Fallout 4, I heavily praised the exploration and minor details that made the world feel as alive as any non-post-apocalyptic environment. I enjoyed just walking around and finding a cabin lived in by a trader and about seven cats, a baseball stadium retrofitted to serve as the last bastion of hope for many and a symbol of oppression for others, and a once prestigious university now sitting in ruin, as well as many others. Each location tells one of the many small stories of a landscape scarred by nuclear devastation. What makes exploring those and many other areas at will enjoyable is the lack of consequence allowed by quicksaves because if anything happens, the last save can be reloaded effortlessly (unless waiting through the PS4 version's load times counts as effort, which is a sentiment with which I wouldn't disagree). But Fallout's survival mode exchanges that rollicking exploration for a far more tense, effective, and need-based adventure experience. Survival mode turns Fallout 4 from a game about player expression into a game about meaningful player choice. In Vanilla Fallout 4, your narrative choices don't matter because at the end you either nuke The Institute while getting minor "prizes" from whichever faction you sided with or side with The Institute itself (Worth Noting: siding with The Institute does lead to some unintentional hilarity where certain characters will berate you then immediately forget about it). Your ludic choices didn't matter much either because any weapon could do any job done so it was all about how you wanted to tackle a situation and how you wanted to look while doing it. In survival mode, every choice you make about your character matters in a strictly utilitarian sense. You need a few reliable weapons that you can use depending on the situation and despite how cool it looks, a badass Atom Cats leather jacket will do nothing to stop the dangers of the wasteland from putting a quick end to the vault dweller. Lots of games emphasize player choice, but many of them only allow for dialogue choices. This mode puts meaningful player choice at the forefront of gameplay.

In that regard, this new mode makes Fallout 4 one of the best examples of what true player choice is in games. By eliminating quick travel and making saves only possible by sleeping in a bed, each time the player leaves their home of choice there is a very real possibility that they will die and lose everything they worked for that day. Because of this, the player must make meaningful choices about what to bring with them. If spending that day hunting for food, do you bring a set of armor just in case or do you sacrifice that safety in order to carry a few more precious hunks of meat that might last for a few more days? Recent games have made me laugh, cry, and jump out of my seat, but no game has given me the sheer sense of dread, entirely through mechanics, the way Fallout 4's survival mode has. There are even times where I avoided exploring and completing missions because I didn't dare leave the sacred walls of Diamond City in fear that I make progress then die, losing it all. For those who like to get deep into role-playing, survival mode also offers a deepened sense of immersion in playing the game as a regular citizen of Diamond City, or just a crazy person who lives off the earth in their cabin with dozens of cats. Even though survival mode has a ton of benefits, its flaws are so integrated with Fallout 4's base design that I feel survival mode could have been so much more had it been completely redesigned from the ground up.

By being an additional mode to the main game, survival mode comes off as just another difficulty setting. While playing through it, it becomes apparent that it is nothing more than a difficulty setting with some gimmicks; such as hunger, thirst, and various diseases and illnesses. And that is exactly what it is. The world and missions are still designed for the base difficulties and this restrains what survival mode could have been. A few times while exploring, I came across a few raiders and thought I could get the jump on them, so I stealthily attacked, but because Fallout isn't designed to be a stealth game, soon it broke down into a shootout. This is where my biggest issues come to the forefront. The methodical consideration of every move that heightens the tension in survival mode conflicts with Fallout 4's design philosophy as a run and gun action game. This criticism can actually be extended beyond Fallout 4 as most survival difficulties, such as The Last of Us's grounded mode and Metro Last Light's ranger mode, are just harder versions of the base game with no changes outside of limiting the availability of certain items. In order to achieve the best possible results, the game needs to be built from the ground up as a survival game. If Fallout 4 had been built with all the immersive elements of survival mode, as well as world design and enemy placement during missions, specifically for the mode, I have no doubt that it would have been an amazing experience. I feel this way because this series, but not Bethesda, has done it before. But Fallout 4's survival mode was built atop the pre-existing foundation of a game that was more action FPS than the considerate survival RPG that was the original Fallout, and that comparison seems to be the crux of my ramblings. Bethesda seemed to want to capture some of the survival and RPG elements found in original games, but also still appeal to fans of the "shootin' and lootin'" style that defines the third and fourth games, leaving this survival mode feeling frustrating because it could have been so much better. Much like Fallout 4. Thanks for reading.