It's finally happened: I finished the
main quest in Fallout 4 and can legitimately review it, or something.
Two things to get out of the way first though: 1 – I just could not
wait to finally be done with the bloody thing, and 2 – I will
definitely be coming back to it. I've already written about my
disillusion with the direction the Franchise is going in and now I
get to rant about problems with Fallout 4 specifically. Bethesda
built a really solid shooter for Fallout 4, they just forgot to build
an RPG to go with it.
The dialogue system is shit. It's
disengaging and annoyingly vague, I have to guess at what my
character is gonna blurt out for each option. Not knowing how a
character is going to react to what my character will say to them is
part of the fun but not knowing what the “sarcastic” dialogue
option will bring up is part of the problem. The trouble with this
vagueness is that it has you guessing what the designer means by a
vague phrase like “third degree”, “good guys”, “unbelievable”
to just name a few culprits. The dialogue wasn't by far the only
thing that took me out of the game though. Immersion is a real
problem in Fallout 4 and for every interesting character like Piper
or Valentine, there is a moron wrenching a concrete wall. The single
most memorable and pleasant thing to happen in my 40 hours with the
game was my first visit to Goodneighbour. Upon entering the town, I
got harassed by a local thug whom I scared off only for the mayor to
turn up, tell him off and stab him to death apologising for my
inconvenience. It's good to know that there was at least one person
on the Fallout 4 team that knew what they were doing.
Mechanically the game is more
schizophrenic and Charles Manson – some parts are state-of-the-art
and others barely hang on by cello-tape. The shooting is better than
ever before, the gun modding is solid enough and although there's
only like sixty mods or so, most of them feel like they make an
impact and it's fun to experiment with different combinations.
Collision mapping works solidly, I've never gotten a bullshit
headshot or one that should've landed but didn't, with all of the
shooting my two gripes were the short range of most rifles and WHERE
THE FUCK DO THESE RAIDERS KEEP GETTING MINI NUKES FROM?! I lost two
companions (Danse and Piper) by sending them off to settlements
(Boston Airport and Sanctuary Hills) never to be found again. Certain characters are literally
immortal and I'm not entirely certain what it's dependent on. I
decided to murder everyone in Vault 81 and had Preston turn on me.
Whenever I killed Preston, he simply sat immobile for a minute or so
and then got back up, and there were two other characters who
wouldn't die, presumably ones that had quests for me. Also, children
can't be killed, not sure whether that's just the European version ofthe game or not. I had to re-load previous saves about twenty times because my character got
stuck trying to get into Power Armour. Whenever clicking to get into
Power Armour while facing it, my character would simply continually
walk into the armour without trying to circumnavigate it, pre
venting
me from taking any action whatsoever – just an endless loop of her
head bopping against the chest of the armour. This paired with the
inconsistent nature of the auto-save and my general “cba 2 save”
attitude made for a lot of frustration. 
Speaking of frustration, that's
probably the only thing the game has managed to make me feel. I found
two of the characters vaguely interesting but even then, I didn't
really feel two ways about them. I lost Piper in Sanctuary Hills and
chose to have Nick Valentine follow me for the rest of the game, to
no real consequence except getting a lecture about destroying a
faction that kind of wanted him dead anyway. I thought it'd be funny
to bring the Synth detective to the Institute and to the Brotherhood
of Steel but he wouldn't teleport to the Institute and the
Brotherhood didn't seem too bothered about him. No faction is better
than another, they're all equally daft and vague. The Minutemen just
wanna keep the peace, which is futile because every five minutes
another settler complains about a ghoul or raider problem. The
Brotherhood wants to collect tech and fight anything the deem
unnatural unless the player has befriended it. The Railroad wants to
free Synths, which is as delusional as the Institute makes it seem.
The Institute is basically fascist on the inside, humanitarian on the
outside. Out of the four I sided with Minutemen for the first three
quarters of the game and then eventually went with the Institute
because of loyalty, curiosity and boredom. And at least my boredom
was challenged with a couple of fantastic shootouts against the
Railroad and the Brotherhood but my curiosity wasn't sated nor my
loyalty really paid off in any meaningful way. The Brotherhood
shootout also wouldn't let me actually kill Danse or Maxim for a
while before giving up on them and letting me loot them, oddly
enough. The looking-for-my-baby plot REALLY falls apart about three
quarters of the way in; it goes exactly the way I expected it to go
and then doesn't know what to do with itself and just carries on
meaninglessly like a blind football commentator.
The game can be fun in an emergent kind
of way. There is some merit to wandering the wasteland, finding cool
shit, killing everyone around and robbing or even eating their
corpses. In retrospect I regret running with a 'serious' playthrough,
I imagine if I role-played a “chaotic evil” character, I would've
enjoyed my time with this game a lot more. I LOVE the Glowing Sea, I love the fact it stretches 700 yards beyond the boundaries of the 'box', I love the fact it's so heavily irradiated but still inhabited.
The settlement building and management offers a good break in pace for the rest of the game but I just found it too time-consuming and troublesome, something that could've been solved by quick menus instead of having to walk around placing everything in person in every single settlement when I had bloody twelve of them. I eventually had to choose finishing the story over saving every single settlement every single time; Fallout 4 simply isn't a game where you can do everything.
Fallout 4 is playing cowboys and
Indians with children suffering developmental issues/10
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