The long-awaited sequel to Bethesda’s smash hit post-apocalyptic RPG with a story with less coherence than a five-year-old’s imaginary friend and sort-of sequel to Obsidian’s beloved spin-off is here. How will it stand up to the likes of
The Witcher 3?
Poorly.
Story: As is tradition in Fallout games, your character has a vague-ish past in which some tragedy happens where you’re sent out to prove you’re a man and get yourself involved in some big conflict that mirrors the conflict that blew up the world because war never changes. I honestly feel like Bethesda has lost track of what Fallout’s tagline was supposed to mean. Black Isle’s
Fallout games were fighting over people to repress evil, Obsidian’s
New Vegas was fighting over supplying power to an entire desert, Bethesda’s
Fallout 3 was some unholy combination of the two, and
Fallout 4...just feels anticlimactic. The story, as a concept, I really love. The game opens by showing us glimpses of the world before the bombs fell, which is really a first for a Fallout game. This is actually critical to the plot, as you play as one half of a loving couple who, because of the husband’s veteran status, have unconditional access to the nearby vault, Vault 111. The alarms begin to sound and you and your husband/wife make a mad dash to the vault, just barely making it in. However, while every vault seems innocent, they’re secretly designed to mess with the inhabitants in an attempt to see who would be better suited to fix the world when the radiation faded. Vault 111, fitting in perfectly, turns out to be a cryogenic vault. Your characters are tricked inside and get frozen, only to find yourself unfrozen 200 years later with one dead husband/wife and a missing son. From there you set out on your crusade across the wastes to solve the mystery and find your son. I won’t spoil the big twist because, surprisingly, it’s a really good twist from Bethesda. It really pulled the rug out from under me.
Unfortunately, it’s after this point that the story loses momentum. Throughout your travels, you see people who are paranoid and terrified of “synths.” A synth is a robot that can perfectly mimic a human, based off old-world technology. Surprising when Bethesda remembers their game takes place 200 years after
Fallout 2. Anyway, you meet a bunch of paranoid people who are scared of the synths and their maker The Institute because, as they will tell you, people will disappear and be replaced with synths. Why, I don’t know. The game is also nonlinear, to a point. It’s not quite New Vegas levels (which there is no excuse for), but you DO get to side with one of four factions. I went with the Minutemen, seeing how they wanted to unite the wasteland and rebuild with a people’s republic. The problem is, this doesn’t make a lot of sense, as siding with them will get them involved with the Institute and its destruction, which they have no reason to care about.
Fallout 4 also allowed you to play the past the ending, so the destruction (or not, depending on your choices) of the Institute feels very anticlimactic. All that’s left is to do sidequests and wander a world which you’ve probably seen most of by that point.
The story itself is great, just executed poorly in the third act.
Graphics: I have never played a Bethesda game for the graphics, but
Fallout 4 looks good. The world has lots of foliage, characters and animations look better, and post-processing can give it some extra oomph. However, there’s two problems. First off,
Fallout 4 does not run on a new engine. It uses the same engine
Skyrim used in 2011. So, Bethesda’s Creation engine (which is based off Gamebryo, an even older engine) is effectively five years old. For a game that’s technically been in development for seven years, that just doesn’t sit right. Bethesda’s brand new, AAA game is running on an old renderer on an old engine that can’t handle 32-bit architecture. Second off, Bethesda was in a bad spot with their release time as
The Witcher 3 was still fresh in everyone’s mind. While whether Witcher was downgraded is a topic of debate, but it still looks beautiful.
Fallout 4 still suffers from some ugly textures and blocky meshes. In any case,
Fallout 4’s Commonwealth is Bethesda’s best game world ever. It looks the best and has plenty of entertaining things to find.
Sound:
Fallout 4 was polarizing before release due to the new, fully-voiced protagonist. Every line of dialogue is said by your character and s/he even makes some exclamations and remarks when hacking, lockpicking, and even doing drugs. It’s a nice touch, but when it comes to actual dialogue, the female VA definitely delivers some lines better than the male VA, and vice-versa. For example, there’s a quest in which you must go around, pretending to be a comic book character. The male VA does this pretty well, but the female VA falters. However, she steals the show when you find your son. A lot of the characters and companions also sound distinguished and, in some cases, deliver A+ voice acting. If you want a companion you’ll love to hear talk, stick with Piper.
The soundtrack is scored by Inon Zur, whose past credits include
Fallout 3,
New Vegas, and
Skyrim.
Fallout’s music still sounds like
Fallout, with industrial-sounding percussion and an arrangement based mostly off strings. The radio still relies on swing and other music from the 20s-50s. That just happens to be my favorite genre of music, so I can’t complain. The score, though, I was partial to. In towns and near stores, it started to sound a bit like
Skyrim. Not that I minded, but the feeling of fantasy and adventure felt lost on a game that’s about how messed up the world is. The other thing that irked me about the score was, when I got to the Institute, it started sounding like the soundtrack to
Starbound. Again, not a problem, since I like it, but very out of place. In other parts, the score works really well. Walk around Sanctuary and Red Rocket at night to trigger my favorite part.
Gameplay: This is where I’m very, very, very disappointed in Bethesda. Any
Elder Scrolls player knows that they’ve been dumbing down the RP in their G for a while. In exchange for more expansive worlds, gameplay became shallow. In
Fallout 4, I’ve split gameplay into three different categories: Gunplay, storytelling, and roleplaying. I’ll tackle them one at a time because I have a good amount to say about all of them.
Gunplay has never been better in
Fallout.
New Vegas was a step in the right direction, but
Fallout 4 showed how much Bethesda was prepping for
DOOM. The guns feel tight and easy to aim. There’s actually very little to say about it other than that they’re good. However, this created a problem for me that I’ll touch on in a moment.
I’m sure you’re wondering how storytelling belongs in gameplay and my answer is simply that it’s the core of
Fallout.
Fallout 1 and
2 may have had a single “good” ending and “bad” ending, but the little other bits of the ending that showed how your choices affected every settlement and group of people you did things for.
Fallout: New Vegas, developed by veterans of Black Isle, took this to the next level and made the ending nonlinear. The central conflict can resolve four different ways, and those are each subdivided into three different forms depending on the player’s karma and reputation. These choices are not only cemented by whom you did or did not kill, but your dialogue choices. New Vegas had very rich dialogue and the player character could really say whatever he wanted. It even gave you the rare ability to say “no” to people, something Bethesda can’t quite catch on to.
Speaking of Bethesda, what’s THEIR dialogue system like?
Okay, this is cheating a bit, so let me explain.
Fallout 4’s dialogue system takes after the same one from the likes of
Mass Effect,
Dragon Age, and even
Deus Ex...and does it poorly. Even in
Mass Effect, where you play as an actual character with actual development, you still got the ability to be evil or just a jerk. In
Deus Ex, the dialogue options themselves were truncated, but mousing over them gave a more detailed explanation.
Fallout 4 doesn’t do this, either. Instead, we’re stuck with a lazy, four-option-only dialogue system that turns your character into more of a yes-man than Yes Man. And do you know what the REALLY sad part is?
Deus Ex ALSO had four dialogue choices at a time...and did it better.
Now, how did I get the screenshot? There are mods that show you the full dialogue of your choice, instead of just a basic outline. Here’s what it looks like without the mod.
The picture is low-resolution, but bear with me. These options are all the same thing: Yes. Even the “no” option is yes. The other option is information that you already know. It’s absurd to think about, especially when Bethesda’s last game,
Skyrim, sold more and was received better than
Fallout 4 and used the exact same dialogue system as
Fallout 3 and
New Vegas. I just can’t fathom what the rationale behind this is.
Up next is roleplaying, and this is perhaps my biggest issue with the game. Shallow dialogue options are fine, but at least give me some choice. I think my biggest problem with
Fallout 4 was that I was not allowed to be evil. I was also not allowed to fail quests. Hell, I couldn’t even say no to quests! Every quest also follows a specific formula, which is the problem I had with the really good gunplay: Go to X, kill Y, find/talk to Z. Literally every single quest in the game forces you to kill someone or something. It’s impossible to do a no-kill run. I know that shouldn’t be a requirement for every game, but it shouldn’t be too much to ask from an RPG where the predecessor did all that and more. The game actively railroads you towards violence to the point of three of the four endings involve you blowing up the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. I say three, more like one of two. It just changes based on what faction you liked more. It honestly made me bored. However, there is saving grace. Two quests, while involving killing, break from this formula and are genuinely interesting, funny, and felt like you were accomplishing something other than cleaning out a random raider encampment or school infested with pink ghouls. Those two are The Silver Shroud and The Last Voyage of the USS Constitution. I won’t spoil either of those quests, but they’re the diamonds in the rough.
While it doesn’t fit into my three gameplay categories, I wanted to mention skills. Perks, skills, and traits are now gone. Traits were already gone in
Fallout 3 (and subsequently brought back in
New Vegas) but seeing them gone again makes me think Bethesda just hates giving your character any sort of aliment. Perks and skills are now merged into singular perks that can be upgraded every time you level up. Much like
Skyrim, you take one perk at a time, and every perk has ~3 ranks that make it better. I did like that the perks were tied a little closer to your SPECIAL stats than in previous games, but Bethesda’s idea was to give you a lower amount of points to divide amongst SPECIAL in the beginning and allow you to put one point into a SPECIAL stat as opposed to a perk. In theory, this means that you could give your character perfect 10 stats and, with enough grinding, unlock and max out every single perk. Oh, yeah, I didn’t mention, the game doesn’t end after the climax of the story, like literally every other Fallout game has. You’re free to pursue any side quests and explore any locations you missed during the story and, inevitably, become God due to all your leveling up. Or you could do settlement building, which is so boring, tedious, messy, and undocumented I did not touch it.
I did like the crafting, though. Unfortunately, I did not touch it until about halfway through the game. It’s a good system, though. Too bad it relies on perks and not skills.
Lasting Appeal: If the prospect of the settlement building enthralls you, then there’s a good amount of reason to keep coming back to
Fallout 4, but after the story, you’ve already seen so much of the world that there’s really no reason to keep playing. Remember how, in
Half-Life 2, Ravenholm was such a spooky place but once you went through it, you felt triumphant knowing you’d never have to do it again?
Fallout 4 is the opposite. There’s no triumph, there’s no climax, and the story is so linear that an on-rails shooter feels more spontaneous. It wouldn’t hurt to wait until the modding tools get released to pick up this game. At that point, you’ll probably get some nice features added that make the game a little more lively.
Bottom Line: Fallout 4 is fun and is definitely for you if you enjoyed
Fallout 3. However, if you wanted a
New Vegas 2, you will be extremely disappointed. It’s still fun and the first half of the story is interesting, so if that sways you, pick it up. In the end, it’s more
Fallout.
