My review of Fallout 4

Ultimately I have to give Fallout 4, in its present state, a thumbs down. The running theme is that you have, at every point, removed gameplay from the game. The other theme, that I will return to at the end, is that Bethesda never adds features to its games: you always replace them.

I'm going to try and list aspects of the game which disappointed, as they may be able to be addressed in future updates or games.

1) There is a palpable lack of quest or story hubs in the early game. Whereas in Fallout 3 or Vegas, the opening section took some time and there were people and choices to deal with, in Fallout 4 you are alone in the vault, out of there in moments, no one to talk to, no choices to make. You do not emerge near a "Megaton" equivalent, there are no quests or sidequests or choices or written material of note in the entire early game zones so far as I can tell, or they are well hidden. At launch the game world felt like a shooting gallery that's otherwise empty of writing - the opposite of what I'd regard an RPG. Compared to Fallout 3 and New Vegas, you have removed gameplay from the game.

2) The appropriation of Bioware's dialogue wheel is poorly handled. It does not disguise the feeling that there are few real choices in the game when talking to people, because outcomes are the same. It also hammers home the lack of meaningful choices when talking to the very few people you do interact with. There were at least a few approaches and consequences to how players handled Vault 101 in Fallout 3, but even if player agency in dialogue was only ever an illusion, the illusion does not work in Fallout 4. It feels like you have removed gameplay from the game.

3) Fallout 4 was a fun shooting gallery and village-crafting collect-a-thon at launch. However - on PS4, at least - enemy numbers dropped drastically after an early patch, so upon restarting the game (something I usually do A LOT with RPGs) the gameworld is now even more empty and boring than it was. Where there were 5-6 raiders there are now 2-3, where there were massive swarms of ghouls there are now 0-3. My first approach to Corvega was amazing fun, my second was "where is everybody?" Despite my initial disappointment with the RPG aspects of the game, the combat was at least good and, surprising for a Bethesda game, there were enough enemies to actually make it difficult. Well, for the purpose of hitting a target frame-rate for some noisy fans, (I assume) you patched most of the gameplay out of the game!

4) You have simplified the systems to a point that removes player agency. The worst example I have found is how you have folded the Sneak skill into Sneak related perks, so now it is only possible to improve your ability to sneak by ALSO accepting that your character no longer triggers traps. I want to be able to hide from enemies but I also want to have to play with my eyes open. You have removed gameplay, and player agency, from the game.

5) I liked weapon durability. It forces you to change up your weapons during the course of things. The weapon crafting was a nice, if initially confusing and overwhelming, addition, but it also feels like most of the guns you can make are garbage and I preferred, for once, the simpler pleasure of finding a great gun when you needed it as your SMG was just about burnt out.

6) You've added the settlements collecting and building to the game, which I think is a fine addition, but they are not really additions, they've come at the expense of crafted, written content. Having them mostly bunched in the early game zones and dependant on "radiant" quests, it's really noticeable that there's no Megaton like quest hub. Fallout 3's barren wastes was populated with communities with related quests and choices to make, Megaton, Tenpenny Towers, the Oasis, Republic of Dave, Canterbury Commons, the place with the kids, the place with the teenagers, Rivet City, the slavers city, whatever places I'm forgetting. If there is an equivalent amount of content in Fallout 4 I managed to miss it. I remember The Silver Shroud and Vault 81 as interesting side content.

7) Unfortunately, by the time I got to Diamond City I was so bored of the empty north that I plowed through the main quest line as quickly as I could, because the side content I did find there was stuff like "clear the rubbish out of my pond". It's entirely possible that there's great, fleshed out side-content hidden in that game that I never saw because I was exhausted from the sterility I'd encountered for the first thirty hours.

How to Fix:

With the DLC you could add actual, written story content to the early areas of the game. You might even be able to insert some choice moments, eg why not have a choice you make in the opening even slightly affect the situation when you emerge from the vault? Add an npc to each settlement who has an actual story - like that farm where you had to find the dead daughter's bracelet.

Try to have a twist on things though, like in Oblivion when short side quests often played with tropes (best example I can think of was the "there's rats in my cellar" quest in Anvil I think it was). The farmers daughter could have been kidnapped by the raiders, but when you get there she's actually joined them, and the player can choose to kill her and take back the bracelet and lie, convince her to give the bracelet, take it back and lie, or go back to the farm and tell them the truth. I think this is what people want from a role-playing game! To make choices that affect story, even small stories.

Using Bioware's dumbing-down wheel is fine, if the choices actually do something (or give that illusion). Hire writers.

Patch the enemies back into the game and to hell with the frame rate. Let Digital Foundry stew in their nightmare world of obsessive pixel counting, I want the game to be fun and challenging.

I don't see how you can "fix" the other areas I've addressed because those mechanics are locked in, but something that distresses me about Bethesda game design with Skyrim and Fallout 4 is that you seem to be designing game systems to be marketing tools first and gameplay second. Folding skills and perks together to make a nifty poster is fine I guess, but the direct result is that I have less control over my character build than I used to, and it's resulted in less gameplay and a less satisfying experience.

This theme of replacing features instead of adding was really noticeable in Skyrim too. Eg you add weapon crafting but remove durability, spell making and so on. I can understand a desire to keep away from the dreaded "feature bloat" that gets bandied about, although as an actual player I don't see what the problem is with that in an RPG. What mainstream reviewers deride as feature bloat, in an RPG I'd just see that as making the experience deeper and more interesting to people who like to get stuck right in to simulations.

Overall I feel the trend with Bethesda games is a continual process of dumbing down, of making games less and less than what they were, in order to serve a marketing agenda of "accessible". To a point this may open up a wider market, but it also disappoints the existing player base and can ultimately exhaust an IP, as you remove the original iron from it and puff it up with more and more hot air.

In its current state, I have to give FO4 a thumbs up.

Years from now, many will look upon it as one of the most influential games ever.

What aspects of it do you think will influence future game design?

Just a brief update on the enemy numbers criticism - I just loaded up a save I'd abandoned in the area around Corvega due to no enemies, and this time there were some decent tussles with ghouls, so perhaps the issue was fixed in a more recent patch? I'd have to start again, again, to be sure. Not going to do that before the survival mode update.

this is late as hell lol.

Well opinions are just that dude opinions.

For me Fallout 4 is a really exelent game. Maybe as many other "old" fans need to move away from Fallout.

The opening part of the game was the worst for me too. It's used as an introduction to settlement building I suppose, but the lack of written content was alarming and my interaction with people was limited to the bland Minutemen or vacant Settlers for a good 20 hours. I totally agree that another large dev created hub was needed in this game, preferably in the north, because the settlement creation system isn't sophisticated enough for the game to lean so heavily on it at the moment. Settlers behave more like robots than people, and so there's no stories told or quests given to build any rapport with them or make them interesting. This is the biggest flaw in the settlement system currently, in my opinion - the fun starts and ends with the building process.

Once I got to Diamond City the game did improve for me though. I'm swamped in quests, I've had plenty of intense firefights and I'm finding the settlement building itself to be a great creative outlet, albeit a frustratingly buggy one. I don't have much of an opinion on the quality of quests yet because I'm barely halfway through the game, but there are some interesting side quests for sure. Fallout 4, more than any game I've ever played I think, just has an absolute ton of interesting stuff to do, and that's what's really grabbing me at the moment.

I don't think anolysis is just opinions, actually. I'm clearly not the only person who has a problem with the lack of crafted content in the early game, and developers should be interested to know if people are bored and disappointed by the first twenty-thirty hours of a game. I also went across the map relatively extensively and didn't find some quests there either, but there's some people have spoken of that I missed.


My initial reaction to Fallout 4 is that it is, on many levels, a good game, but it is a terrible Fallout game. There's no reason why the series can't continue to please people who liked the rpg genre while also entertaining whatever young people call whatever this shoot-stuff-collect genre is.

I expect I'll be able to start again and enjoy the game in the new Survival Mode for what it is, eking out an existence and gaining settlements to use as save points. It does not mean that it's not worth putting these disappointments forward now, since Bethesda could fix some of it via DLC and hopefully not make similar choices in future games.