Why Fallout 4 Misses the Point

Well, hello there! In this post I will try to explain why Fallout 4 is a pretty big step back for the series, although it also has merits.

To ease everyone into this analysis, I will start with the things they nailed.

For starters, the weapon crafting system is really nice, letting you customise weapons to your preferences with attachments, barrels, grips and many more such things, and the fact that you need items from the junk category, which was, as the name implies, useless clutter, is simply wonderful. This means that no item is truly useless, as it can be dismantled into its components to improve something you actually use. This crafting system also engulfs the apparel of your character, letting you add certain resistances, add pockets for more inventory, and generally making the clothes you wear your own.

Now, the companion system. It is a pretty good implementation of it, individual companions having different likes and dislikes, and generally it is a good idea to experiment with different companions to learn their stories and maybe even make them like you enough to gain perks. If, somehow, you make a companion hate you, they will cease any interaction with your character, locking you out of said benefits of getting to know them.

The shooting is another improved thing from the previous first person games in the series, seeing you can actually shoot without VATS activated. And it actually is a godsend in this game, because you will have to do an inhuman amount of lead and plasma deposits in a lot of unlucky chumps who try to fight you.

Another good thing is how they set up the factions. They are ideologically opposed, so you actually need to choose one to stick with in the end, making the others hate your guts. This is a pretty neat idea, which, although unoriginal, breathes a bit of life into the Commonwealth wasteland (a pretty neat oxymoron). The way they did it, however we'll have to discuss further down this very article in the section about bad decisions.

With the good things out of the way, let us take a look at the stinky part of the game.

I will start this with the biggest blemish of the game: the role play part of RPG is pretty light. Like, close to not being there. This is caused by numerous factors which are actually linked together.

Firstly, the voiced protagonist, which would be fine and dandy, if that didn't mean butchering the dialogue system to fit this change. Voice acting can get expensive, so voicing thousands of lines for one gender of a character would not have cut the deal. In practice, this means that lines get repeated, the dialogue tree is limited to four options at a time, where three are variations on saying yes and the other one being, of course, a "talk to you later about this" affair.

Another problem linked to the voiced protagonist is the backstory of your character. The guy is a veteran and the wife is a lawyer all the time. No room for you to give free reign to your imagination and come up with something tragic or silly. Also, you have a son and the main quest for most of the game is finding and saving said son,which is an inverted take on the Fallout 3 story.

Now, do you remember the SPECIAL system? Attributes, skills, perks, all of them making your character proficient in some areas and defficitary in others. Well, now everything is a perk. Shooting weapons is a perk. Talking is a perk. They turned everything, including attributes, into bloody perks.

The settlement system takes the cake for good ideas gone badly. Remember ye olde Fallout games where you would find little villages or cities with a few interesting NPCs and maybe a few quests? Now, most of the map is filled with empty settlements you have to build up, defend and fill with random settler NPCs. This system would have been great if you only had to take care of one single settlement, and that would be, of course, Sanctuary Hills, which is pretty important for our predefined character.

So, above I mentioned something about the factions being iffy. Yes, the factions pretty much hate each other, but a few of those relationships are really artificial. The Brotherhood of Steel in particular seems pretty weird, because they hate the Railroad for no bloody reason and are genocidal maniacs, because why not. The Railroad is obsessed about saving all synths, even those with criminal inclinations, as evidenced by some early dialogue. The Institute dabble in stupidity, sending synths to replace people to forward their plan of...saving humanity? There are also the Minutemen who are the only people who actively try to help people. Yep, three out of four factions are really stupidly motivated to do what they do, and the fourth is the goody two-shoes which you are forced to join at the beginning of the main questline.

We have talked about some bad design choices so far, but there is one which takes the cake: all quests lead to shootouts with legions of enemies, making sure that you get to use the new and improved gun mechanics they put into the game. To add insult to injury, the trademark Bethesda content padding system is also present, but you might know it as radiant quests. These pieces of crap are randomly generated, in the sense that the quest is exactly the same every time, only the location being different. Preston Garvey is a notorious radiant quest giver, with his settlement fetish.

All in all, this game has more in common with Far Cry than its own legacy, and that is pretty depressing, knowing the rich history of this series. Maybe Bethesda will make a better game next time, or give the rights to the series to someone who actually understands what should be present in these games, but after the Metacritic debacle with Obsidian, I really do not think anyone wants to deal with them from a game development standpoint.

Sources: cover, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

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