For all
the years of pestering that long-time fans pelted Bethesda with, and the
enormous gap between Fallout 3 and 4, the announcement and subsequent
release of Fallout 4 seemed to come
out of nowhere. Fallout 3 debuted in October 2008, and once its DLC cycle was
through, fans would have to wait until November 2015 for the next Bethesda
entry in the Fallout series, though
there was no hint about that release date until early 2015, six and a half
years after the last entry. In the
meantime, Obsidian Entertainment released Fallout:
New Vegas in 2010, temporarily whetting everyone’s Fallout appetites, but by the end of the DLC cycle for New Vegas in 2011 with Lonesome Road, we had three and a half
more years of radio silence regarding the series. By the time Fallout 4 was officially announced (and
subsequently showcased at E3), we’d seen countless internet hoaxes and theories
in circulation, and hype was at an all-time high.
When gamers finally took
control of the Sole Survivor from Vault 111 on 11/11, they found the game to be
uniquely polarizing for a Fallout title.
Despite instantly becoming the most successful launch in the history of video
gaming, when people realized what they’d bought, some were disappointed. Some
were downright furious.
Let’s make one thing perfectly
clear: When you buy an RPG, you’re buying it for the story. If you went into
Fallout looking for a sophisticated shooter with mind-blowing enemy
AI that presents a unique tactical challenge with every gunfight, you were
shopping in the wrong section of the games aisle. The
Fallout series began as a turn-based, point-and-click, stat-based
role playing game, and every iteration since then has put more control into the
hands of the player, so let’s keep that in perspective. You don’t buy
Call of Duty for a cerebral plotline,
nor do you buy
Mario Kart for a
realistic physics engine. No one game
can be all things to all people, let’s get that out of the way first.
It
may sound like I’m about to berate
Fallout
4’s detractors, but that’s not true. I wrote all of the above to frame my
absolute surprise that the central plot of
Fallout
4 is one of its weakest features. The first two acts of the game serve as a
series of not-very-clever misdirections and difficult-to-justify plot devices,
all leading towards what I’m sure Bethesda thought was a brilliant twist, which
in my opinion fell rather flat. It felt torn right out of the M. Night Shaymalan
script writing handbook; Once the twist was revealed, the pieces of information
that I’d amassed throughout the first and second acts didn’t fall into place
for that perfectly assembled puzzle that we love in twist endings, but rather
just served to confuse me further. I
stumbled around the start of the third act just trying to make sense of where
the plot had gone, and was still wondering if I believed what I’d been told
despite the game dropping a great many hints that I really shouldn’t be
obsessing over the ambiguities. In game ABOUT ambiguities.
Among the game’s many third-act
sins came the realization that I was being railroaded (no pun intended) by
dialogue options. Given the supposed connection between my character and
another in the game (and carefully wording this to avoid spoilers), I found
myself confused by the interactions between them. Specifically, the thought
constantly going through my head was “Okay if this guy is who he says he is,
why the absolute FUCK is he talking to me like this? I [the female character]
have a god damn LAW DEGREE, killed my way across this entire Wasteland to get
to this point, and a couple of other spoiler-ey factors that you’d think would
earn me a modicum of respect, but this guy is a complete ASSHOLE to me!
Constantly!” Despite this (in my opinion) completely justified indignation I
felt that my character should be experiencing, no dialogue option was ever
offered to allow me to say “Look, buddy, watch your fucking mouth. You might be
the big man in charge around here but I’ve got enough heavy ordinance to level
this entire place, and that’s just what I’ve got ON ME.”
No matter what route you
seem to go, everyone else seems to have a scorched-earth policy when it comes
to political relations with other factions in the Commonwealth. The railroad won’t let you continue on with
them if you’re still allied with the Minutemen. The Brotherhood hate… pretty
much everybody. The Minutemen aren’t on
great terms with the Brotherhood. And the Institute… well… let’s just say it’s
not on working terms with everybody else. I feel like an intelligent diplomat
could have gotten at least a couple of the factions to work together, but
you’re simply not given the option to try and settle the differences with
nuanced approaches- a mistake
New Vegas hadn’t made five years previously.
While I consider these
gripes perfectly valid, I don’t find them surprising. Bethesda has demonstrated
a lack of proficiency with the source material for the
Fallout series, making a series of explained, but canonically
frustrating decisions throughout development. You need look no farther than
Fallout 3 to see the evidence: The inexplicably benevolent, and
uncharacteristically social Brotherhood of Steel sect headed by Elder Lyons in
D.C., A whole generation of mentally deficient Super Mutants, the widespread
proliferation of bolt-action hunting rifles that for some reason shoot .38
pistol ammo, and a slew of other lore-snubbing contributions that assuredly can
be listed off by devotees of the franchise since the beginning.
Fallout
4 is no different. Gone are the G3 and AK-47 styled assault rifles of
Fallout 3, replaced with the most bland
assortment of handmade weapons I’ve ever seen for the lion’s share of the game.
Later, we get the steampunk-esque Assault Rifle, which looks like what you’d
get if you showed an adolescent a picture of an assault rifle and then asked
him to draw you one of his own.
A portion of the
Fallout fanbase now harbors the opinion
that Bethesda’s gone completely off the rails at this point with their
Fallout content, and it’s hard to argue
with that. Unless you’ve just started playing Post
Fallout 3, Bethesda’s entries into the series don’ carry that same
Fallout feel- reminiscent of the world
we’ve come to know and love, but certainly not the same.
Fallout
4 feels more like fanfiction: An artist’s impression of what they think
Fallout was supposed to be, and a
misguided embodiment of everything they thought fans wanted to see, rather like
a
Star Wars prequel. One need look no
further than
Fallout: New Vegas to
arrive at that conclusion, by contrast.
New
Vegas felt much more like the continuation of the established canon, built
upon the historical politics and conflicts depicted throughout the first two
games, its story deeply rooted in its history. Even at its silliest,
New Vegas remained faithful to its roots, and felt like
an honest entry into the series, whereas
Fallout
4 could have easily been a standalone, brand-new IP all on its own with
just a few tweaks. I’m not alone in this, it’s already practically reached meme
status that
Fallout 4 could just be
titled “Blade Runner: The Game”.
I’d be remiss to say that
Fallout 4’s writing fails on
all fronts. I’ve said it before, and
I’ll say it again: the modern
Fallout
games really shine when you get off the beaten path. Wandering the wasteland,
finding hidden caches and carefully constructed vaults and dungeons, each with
their own stories is where you’re going to get your best value.
Fallout
3,4, and even
New Vegas take on a
totally different character altogether when you stop thinking that the story is
about you, and start thinking about it as a series of vignettes that you are
just there to witness, and even contribute to. If you start a new character in
any of those three, I recommend thinking like you had a double major in anthropology
and archaeology, and see how that changes your perspective of the world. You’re
not the One True Hero, you’re Indiana Jones uncovering history for history’s
sake. You’re a historian watching the world destroy and rebuild itself, again,
and again. You’re Mad Max in Fury Road: you’re there, you’re a participant, but
the story is not about you. Fallout then
becomes a collection of short stories about people, living and dead, just
trying to make their way after the death of the world, for better or worse. Some
of
Fallout 4’s most compelling stories
are Companion quests, each one more intriguing, philosophically challenging, or
heartbreaking than the last. The Vaults are often ghost towns, inhabited with
nothing but the artifacts of those that lived and died there, and the story of
their steady decent into madness, centuries in the making. My advice is to walk
out of Vault 111, forget about Shaun, pick a direction, and start walking.
You’d be surprised how much more fun you’ll have in that unstructured play-through
than you were ever going to have in the main storyline.
Besides, the ending of the
main plot just leaves me feeling like we
started
a lot more shit than we finished, and the hurried feel of it, with the lack of
real closure, is a total dick-punch. You’ll be left with the feeling that
you’ve just plunged the Commonwealth into chaos, a necessary wildfire that
would allow its residents to rebuild it anew after a long campaign of
inevitable violence that naturally precedes the formation of a new, unified
nation-state. That would have been an EXCELLENT way for the game to continue,
and framed that way, it feels like we were given only half of the game. While
it pretends that it’s granted you closure, there is still such a long way to go
before the Commonwealth reaches its potential. This leaves me feeling that
Bethesda has sold us the first part of the game, and is going to sell us the
rest of the story in four separate downloadable parts at $15 apiece. That’s not
a great feeling, especially with the excellent DLC cycles I’ve come to expect
from
Fallout 3 and
Vegas, which felt like I was getting
more than my money’s worth, by far.
Graphically, it’s what
we’ve honestly come to expect from Bethesda, especially given that if you went
into college when
Fallout 3 was
released, you could have finished Grad school before
Fallout 4 debuted. Still, the gaming community at large didn’t let
that slide, especially considering that the other Open world RPG behemoth series
(
The Witcher) saw two installments in
shorter order, with remarkably better graphics and a considerably lower amount
of technical glitches. While the studio’s devotees have come to accept
Bethesda’s regular assortment of glitches to be a kind of quaint staple of
their games collection, those of us who remember the days before online content
patching find it discouraging that while so many companies are tightening
quality controls in response to backlash from the gaming community over sloppy
coding, Bethesda can’t seem to iron out the wrinkles in a single-player RPG
that took them seven years to develop, or simply don’t care to. Despite
ditching the ever-flawed C++-based “Gamebryo” engine from
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and
Fallout 3, apparently, Bethesda put little effort into making sure
they didn’t recreate the mistakes of the past.
For how much the pacing,
difficulty, and feel of combat has changed in
Fallout 4, to the point of feeling like real progress, I was
disappointed at Bethesda’s choice to rip their encounter system straight from
the
Borderlands series. I felt myself
experiencing
déjà vu as I watched the
inadequate AI employ tactics halfheartedly coded by what I can only assume were
bleary-eyed developers, the encounter difficulties indicated by enemy title
suffixes and mutating “legendary” enemies. I could almost see the development
process unfold before me as I played, seeing the developers implement the
features from every major release that beat
Fallout
4 to market.
Minecraft’s resource
gathering and building aspects,
Borderlands’
combat (and attitude that beefing up stats somehow convinces us that the
challenge has somehow changed instead of simply scaled),
New Vegas’ expanded item
crafting system,
Mass Effect’s
dialogue wheel, and the repetitiveness
and fetch quests of… well, everything else all paint the image of the dev team
constantly going back to the drawing boards every time a new game release makes
a splash on the industry and spawns a dozen clones. Fallout 4 tries to be
everything, to everyone, and so lacks the focus that could have made a truly
great game. It avoids being the clone of any particular game by instead being a
test-tube baby combining the DNA of every major game release in the last
decade, being a jack of all trades and a master of none, when all it really
needed to be was a good
Fallout game.
Ball’s in your court, Obsidian. Don’t let us down.
Tl;dr:
Fallout 4 is a flawed, but not
horrible entry into the franchise, which falls flat on its focal points, but
rewards motivated explorers as typical in the series. It seems to suffer from
Duke Nukem syndrome, and can’t seem to
decide what kind of game it wants to be. If you don’t already own it, I’d say
wait for Bethesda and its modding community to sort out all the issues and
release the DLC, then buy it as a complete edition in the 2018 Steam Winter sale.
1:59 PM
