Firstly let’s clarify, there’ll be major spoilers throughout. Everything’s up for grabs, and you can feel free to leave your own thoughts and theories in the comments below.

Still here? Good. So, following the dad-hunting escapades of Fallout 3 and the vault dweller-less exploits of New Vegas, Fallout 4 continued the franchise with one of the most awesome narrative premises yet; the killing of your partner and the kidnapping of your son, all taking place in front of you as you’re stuck in a cryogenic chamber.

The kicker is that you fall back into cryo-sleep, meaning when you do finally emerge and go topside, there’s no telling how much time has passed, and more crucially, how old your son is in this new reality. He could still be an infant, a random shopkeeper next to you or someone on the verge of death themselves. Luckily, Fallout does deliver on this premise in multiple ways, but the core relationship between father and son isn’t one of its highlights, instead there’s a larger web of human/cyborg relations permeating the wasteland, and it’s your job to choose which you’re going to be on.

An average run through the main thread of missions will still clock in at around 50 hours, and when all’s said and done there’s all manner of talking points that fans will be debating for decades to come – alongside one that’ll shake you to your very core…

9. The Introductory Pacing

Begin at the beginning, as they say, and the first time we’ve seen the pre-war world of Fallout in full swing. It’s a veritable cornucopia of timely 1950s references, injected with all the retro-futuristic stylings of things we’re more accustomed to seeing after the bombs drop.

Sleek automobiles roam the streets with utopian Americana churns on, but the problems come in that we only spend a good 10 minutes in this place, before the hurried pacing spurs you out the door and into the nearest Vault.

It all happens rather coincidentally too; a Vault-Tec representative comes to your door pushing to get you signed up, and literal seconds after he’s toddled off, everything goes to hell and you’re being ushered away from your home. Assuredly this is supposed to give your situation a bit more weight and pacing as you just narrowly make it to safety, but on the other hand, why even bother creating this entire chunk of town, if we can’t explore and interact with it more?

You literally end up going from playing with your infant child, to watching him get stolen, your partner getting killed and crackin’ wise with Codsworth in the new world, in space of around 20 minutes. It’s barely enough time to connect with anything, and feels like Bethesda shouting “We know what you guys really want! Here’s the wasteland!” rather than anything that should’ve been more meaningful.

8. Your Happy-Go-Lucky Character & Dialogue Responses

Honestly, for all the flack the new dialogue options have gotten, they get the job done for the most part, and you’ve nearly always got access to a response that suits the situation at hand.

However, the extremely vague-sounding ‘Sarcastic’ label is as unhelpful as it is spurious, being you’ve no idea if that’s going to be a positive or negative thing. In the pursuit of chasing Mass Effect’s on-the-fly third-person conversations, Bethesda have elected to strip back everything into small, all-encompassing choices, which are always delivered with the same lighthearted candour, no matter what the occasion.

Your hero – and I can only speak to the male option – treats everything and everyone like he’s just bumbling from place to place, waving his hands and saying to himself “That’s my wasteland!” – unless you mention your son, of course.

In that case, the mood changes, the lines are delivered with the utmost gravitas and weight. It all goes very serious. Like super, really slow, kinda serious. It’s like an entirely different character comes through for a second, you really feel the emotional weight of a man just on the brink of his sanity, seeing the horrors around him… then oh-ho! It’s back to being cheery and positive again. It’s certainly not as jarring as L.A. Noire’s interrogations, but man, it’s real close.

7. The Fact Your Character Barely Acknowledges The World Around Them

Deathclaws? Not a problem. How about half-irradiated Ghouls and their fairly zombielike appearances? Nope, not a bother. Ghastly Super-Mutants, overgrown rats and whopping great zombie-crabs with a penchant for human flesh? Yeah, not a bother, pass the RadAway… whatever that is.

You see the disconnect? The player is certainly prepared for all sorts of weirdness and strange goings on out on the surface (we’ve played the other games and see the marketing campaigns), but our hero? He or she has just gone from a perfect life of white picket fences (complete with fancy curtains), before losing their family and shooting their way to the nearest outpost.

You’d think they’d be a little… perplexed… at what’s going on? Perhaps an inner monologue whilst walking from place to place, or a cutscene like at the very beginning elaborating on thoughts and clarifying motives?

You do get a line when travelling through the Vault, as your character will comment on the “giant roaches” in front of them, but as for all the far more freakish abominations like Deathclaws or Yao Guai, they’re all taken in stride unless you opt into commenting on them with the NPCs.

So, look lively! Best hop in the Power Armour despite not having any training and man the minigun. Obviously.

6. Meeting The Factions

The game does such a poor job of establishing the various factions, you can easily be forgiven for not even realising who the Minutemen are, or what they stand for. In another fantastic fly-through of exposition, no sooner have you met and talked to Preston Garvey, that he’s offering you the position of ‘General’, saying how he can’t lead his own men anymore (for no reason) and that they need “Someone like you”, despite the version of yourself that he’s seeing only being in existence for a few minutes.

Each other faction goes like this too – fast-tracking from one place to the next. The Brotherhood get one hell of an awesome introduction, only for you to have to piece together what they really stand for from a mix of Paladin Danse’s overblown ideologies and leader Maxson’s sporadic racism. The Railroad you can track down earlier in the game if you know where to look, but following the main story means that like The Institute, they’ll only appear right near the end.

There simply aren’t enough dialogue options available to get a handle on what each faction stands for in the Commonwealth, outside of a basic reading that you could get from a campaign poster, and that leads to the focus on choosing your allegiance falling pretty flat…

5. The Uninformed Late-Game Decisions & Lack Of A Peaceful Option

So you’ve become General of the Minutemen (because even if you say no, you have to if you want more story), journeyed across the Wasteland slaying countless raiders and even met up with your long-lost son (more on him in a minute). The game then starts popping up all sorts of prompts, paraphrasing things like “Doing this will make you a permanent enemy of X”, except without knowing precisely what each faction stands for or plans to do, how are you supposed to weigh things up?

Your Pip-Boy map accounts for these options by saying “Hey, if you want, you can go tell X this new event is going down”, but again, there’s no way to tell what anybody is going to do afterwards, other than scupper your chances at the one ideology you’re probably gunning for at this point anyway: Peace.

Being that you’re the one person all these factions are turning to, surely there should’ve been an option to at least try and put peace on the table, opening a dialogue between the four faction leaders? Instead, you try to negotiate your way around them all, leading to ham-fisted resolutions where the only reaction is to aimlessly run with it until you see the credits.

4. Why Settlements Matter (Or Not)

Back to the newest and most standout game feature; settlements. They were seemingly put in to appeal to the Minecraft or Little Big Planet generation; a sandbox mode that lets you create custom homesteads in whatever shape you fancy. You can build towering structures with a pool tables, bar facilities and suits of power armour nestling in the corner, or you can completely leave it alone – it’s up you.

Story-wise it’s supposed to tie into the idea of you leading the Minutemen and establishing all sorts of viable places for people to seek shelter, but the problem comes with the fact you simply don’t need to. Now, plenty of fans have pointed out that it’s precisely because there’s no reward to this other than itself, that makes it so appealing – but can you honestly say it wouldn’t have felt more natural if Bethesda tiered specific unlocks behind it, or had a story repercussion be directly tied to your HQ?

Plus, do you know which other game had an entirely unnecessary homestead-building mechanic? Assassin’s Creed III. And we all know how well that went down.

3. It Has ‘Mass Effect 3’ Syndrome

Before you’d even gotten to the many issues with Mass Effect 3’s ending, it inherently had a problem in balancing the open-world of side missions and tasks to complete with an Earth back home that was very quickly being decimated by the Reaper invasion.

Now, whilst Fallout 4’s narrative isn’t as weighty as this, there’s not really a whole lot of wiggle room to see what secrets you can find amongst the wasteland when you’re fully aware your infant child is out there fending for themselves. The conceit Bethesda wrote into the script is that “Well, they could be any age”, but it hardly makes you forget about the task at and.

As such, when things like becoming General of the Minutemen or indulging in levelling up your Power Armor start to emerge, it always comes with the reminder that you really should be trying to track your son down first.

The voice actors behind your character reinforce the immense weight of having your partner killed and having to track down this innocent child, but then within seconds you’re off doing something entirely different again. It creates the same same sort of ludonarrative dissonance we had with GTA IV, where Niko would profess to just wanting to retire or give up his life of crime – then be blowing a few hundred gangster’s heads off the next second.

You can argue that complainers should simply mainline the story to get it out of the way, but when the appeal is clearly intended to be in the character (otherwise why voice them?) and the exploration of the world itself, both elements seem completely at odds with one another.

Tying all of your hard construction work to the factions i.e. having the threat of everything being torched to cinders if you annoy the wrong person, would’ve been great, and could’ve helped give you some sort of personal investment in the narrative, outside the “get your son back… eventually” premise.

Speaking of which…

2. Having The Synth Storyline Be anologous To Slavery

Props to Bethesda, they really managed to give such a dark time in human history a new light – albeit in a way that if you scratch just beyond the surface, it can start to fall apart again.

The synthetic beings the Institute are creating are purely for domestic use and to aid the wealthy members within the faction. They’re fully humanoid and lifelike in nature, yet they’re kept performing tasks and running menial jobs, the Institute killing any that exhibit the barest notion of freewill.

The Railroad want to set them free and let them go about their business, the Brotherhood want them wiped from the face of the earth, and the Minutemen… don’t seem hugely bothered by either. Regardless, having to deal with this idea of a burgeoning people emerging and wanting to break free from the shackles of their owners is a powerful thought, one that’s reverberated through time, and one that the game doesn’t quite make a point with.

Obviously the ground rule lies in the fact that the synths fundamentally aren’t human, but disgustingly, that was the same viewpoint many devout racists held towards the end of the 1800s against black people. Perhaps we’ll arrive at a point in time where artificial intelligence does want to be granted amnesty towards a society and this conversation will happen for real, but despite all that, the topic itself as it exists in Fallout 4 will still give you pause for thought.

1. “Because I Know War. War Never Changes” (That Cheesy Ending)

Blink and you might have missed Ron Perlman’s cameo as the anchorman during the opening pre-war segment, but his appearance in this way ends up doing more damage to the overall experience than good.

The “War. War never changes” line is about as well known as being said by Perlman as it is through Fallout alone; the two just go together, and you can’t (or shouldn’t) have one without the other. So, although the opening and ending cutscenes don’t feature Perlman, the script both starts and concludes using this phrase, with varying degrees of applicability.

At the very end of the game, once you’ve barrelled your way through all sorts of forced decisions and rushed plot devices, you’ll get an ending that has a pretty cheesy “Live for today, no matter what the circumstances” sort of vibe.

Your character could’ve delivered this monologue at any point in the story, as it essentially just refers to them getting back on their feet. So, when all of this revolves around back to “Because I know war… war never changes” it ends up being unintentionally humorous, almost parodic, as if Bethesda thought simply slipping that line in there yet again would make fans whoop and cheer regardless.

Did you think Fallout’s story came together well? Or are you in agreement with most of this list? Let us know in the comments!

I felt like a few of those things were deliberate, or not as stark as you describe. The pacing of the introduction was probably meant to make it seem fleeting - you're unceremoniously whisked away from this wonderful neighborhood before you can really take it all in, and then everything just goes to hell. The introduction runs the gamut of emotions at a really fast pace - you go from domestic peace, to panic as the sirens blare and you need to run to the vault, to an eerie calm as you go through the vault into your cryo pod, then you're watching helplessly as your spouse gets killed and your child taken, finally emerging as a stranger to the wasteland. the pacing is meant to give you emotional whiplash, I think, and my first impression was that it was damn effective.

I never felt that the dialog jumped from delightfully cheery to grimdark - you could go from sarcastic to serious pretty quick, sure, but it never felt like a dramatic shift in tone. The jokes you can make in serious conversations, like with Father, are delivered in a tone consistent with the rest of the conversation. Even across different conversations it never felt like a dramatic mood shift.

I can't talk about this all in one go, but I'll say that the lack of a peaceful option is deliberate; there's never a "right" option in the Fallout games, and the point of the "war never changes" theme is that you can't save everyone and have a completely happy ending. Sometimes I think RPGs can benefit from blatantly denying you a choice, and giving your character a chance to respond to that denial... but that's a concept that I haven't given great thought to, so I can't really connect it to anything right now.

I think the only thing I can wholeheartedly agree on, instead of disagreeing or saying "okay, but" is that Ron Perlman should have done the opening and closing monologues. I don't like how we only hear the male monologue at the start of the game, and how it shows specific characters in specific outfits... all in all I just don't think it worked.

I'm not sure what they're saying regarding slavery and the Synths.

OF COURSE it's anologous to slavery.

How could it be anything but?

I mean, it's called the RAILROAD and its based on Bladerunner.

It is article I found. I thought I share it and see you guys think.

Thanks for doing so!

Good points, if confusing in places.

"Scratch the surface, and it falls apart". That's pretty much all of Bethesda's stories in a nutshell

Speaking as an author, you have two choices.

Freedom or story.

You need to sacrifice one for the other.

The balance is always going to be watered down.