For the record, out of all the people on staff that could review Fallout 4, I’m the odds on favorite to dislike it.
After all, I recently spent 2500 words trashing Bethesda Game Studios’ last entry in the franchise, Fallout 3. And that is only part of my complicated relationship with Bethesda’s RPGs. They’re great fun, but their haphazard construction dragged down the games’ capability to tell a compelling story – by the writers or the players. Skyrim was a great example of this; it’s double the size of an already wafer-thin Fallout 3 and the sub-standard narrative design sure didn’t help. In games of that size, story and world matter – it has to feel like a life you live with stories you tell, not excuses for beautiful vistas and addicting RPG mechanics.
So Fallout 4, being a Bethesda developed open-world RPG, should be something I disparage. I should probably think it to be the nadir of AAA open worlds. A game filled with narrative waste paper, bugs, and clunky gameplay. The experience will only salvaged by top RPG mechanics and wondrous visuals, but mattering less than ever before.
But I don’t.
Not only do I adore Fallout 4, I adore it because, of all things, it is the stories that the game tells that save it from bizarre gameplay choices. It is the stories that make it not only one of the best games of the year and a true Fallout game – they make it Bethesda’s best game ever.
So let’s start with the obvious part – Fallout 4 has bugs.
This is a Bethesda Game Studios RPG, so bugs are simply something you expect at this point. In Fallout 4’s defense, I encountered only one complete game crash in my time, as well as no game breaking quest bugs or broken mechanics, all common experiences in prior games. In their place now are a myriad of graphical errors. On Xbox One, I suffered greatly in Fallout 4’s massive downtown Boston area, especially in and around Bunker Hill and South Boston. Here, massive rivers separate sections of the city, the distance causing disastrous frame rate drops and buildings flickering in and out of existence. A massive set piece moment in the main quest was ruined as half the event turned into black pixels in the sky. Subtitles glitch out and lock up conversation windows, by far the most annoying of Fallout 4’s consistent glitches.
Otherwise, the game remains stunningly gorgeous. Characters and enemies have great detail and specific points in the game feel designed just to let the art department show off. It’s truly a sight to behold.
However, again, this is a Bethesda game. You know that there will be bugs – the important thing is what in the game is able to overcome the bugs. In the past, you could rely on Bethesda’s solid RPG mechanics, but here they are perhaps the biggest misstep in an otherwise great gameplay package. The skill points + perks system of previous Fallout games, where individual skills had a 1-100 ranking and perks provided bonuses to them and your base character SPECIAL (strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, luck) stats, is gone. In its place is a system based entirely around perks and SPECIAL skills. Each level up will grant you a single point that you can use to either level up one of your SPECIAL skills (you are given precious few points to start with) or grab a perk from the various SPECIAL subcategories.
This should lead to a more specialized style of playthrough, but the absence of a either a level cap or any type of measure at how good you are at these skills creates a system that feels like its defeating the purpose of the specialization. In addition, this has the chance to create confusion for the player as well. With that being said, however, not that much of that matters. The actual effect of any of the skills on the game outside of combat are negligible. There are no skill checks in conversation to be found in Fallout 4, outside of a massively stripped down “Persuasion” system reliant on your Charisma stat and perks. Your chance of successfully persuading someone has been reduced from a percentage of success or necessary skill point amount to a “yellow/orange/red” system of decreasing odds of success that feels arbitrary (you will fail yellow persuasion checks often even late in the game) and has little effect overall on the plot – it is flavor, really, which is a disappointing turn.
These changes feel especially detrimental given the massive boost Fallout 4’s baseline combat has received. Previous Bethesda games’ combat was wildly uneven, going from incredibly visceral and entertaining to clunky and infuriating within the same fight. The gunplay and melee combat of Fallout 4 feels, in comparison, like a sleek AAA shooter as proper aim-down-sights and faster movement help make the combat feel alive. This life is reflected in Fallout 4’s revamped V.A.T.S targeting system, allowing you to target individual sections of an enemy for precise damage, and is now much more even with the base combat. Rather than stopping time, as in Fallout 3, time merely slows down – your percentage chance of hitting a part of your target changes as the target moves. This change can be frustrating when using V.A.T.S. at close range, but the revamp is otherwise welcome. It creates a much more balanced combat system overall when compared to the V.A.T.S heavy experience of Fallout 3.
Such responsiveness is needed for Fallout 4’s enemies. They move much faster and are far more difficult to defeat than in previous Bethesda games – the game’s legendary enemies will be your bane. Additional responsiveness comes with a button dedicated to throwing a selected grenade or mine, also along the lines of more traditional shooter controls. Combined with the very un-RPG perk system and limited skill use outside of combat, this is perhaps, mechanically, the least RPG game Bethesda has ever made.
On the opposite end of that spectrum is the much anticipated crafting system, which might be the “Most Bethesda Thing Ever”. On a level best described as kind of absurd, you can deconstruct almost every single item you find in the wasteland. You can take the various scrap materials gained and use them to modify every single weapon and armor piece in the game and build entire towns out of the Commonwealth’s dust. This system feels less like a game mechanic and more like a development tool in its ridiculous complexity – a rusted .32 caliber pipe pistol can be elevated to a .50 caliber explosive sniper rifle. A pile of scrap can become a multi-story skyscraper with full electricity and a defense system that would make the Brotherhood of Steel bow to you. There is almost a gleeful lack of focus to it, so free-form it is frightening. Fallout 4 almost makes this system impossible to understand and daunting to use, given the amount of materials the game asks you to acquire, but gives you just enough tutorial to keep from being unusable – though much more would be welcome in the beginning.
Unfortunately, this new system distracts from the Fallout tradition of finding unique legendary weapons in the world. Instead, you get randomly generated crafted weapons off legendary enemy spawns, and you’re allowed to name your own crafted weapons. A nice personal narrative touch, sure, and I love my laser musket “The Lantern,” but there is a slight sense of adventure lost.
This building mechanic, with all its sprawling tendrils, should be the point upon which Fallout 4 breaks. It should be serving nothing other than player interest and a detriment to the rest of the world’s design. It should be the logical conclusion of the worlds of Fallout 3 and Skyrim – the ultimate distraction from world, story, and character.
Instead, something funny has happened – it isn’t one. Fallout 4’s building mechanic has a purpose – both on a plot, character, and thematic level. And this is because the game’s Commonwealth of Massachusetts is an open world that has been constructed with utmost care and consistency, alongside a story that is designed in conjunction with the world and writing that allows characters to matter and make points and feel like people.
From the moment you find yourself in the nuclear wasteland of your own hometown, Fallout 4 establishes itself as a different narrative beast than any Bethesda game prior. From the sacrifice of many dialogue options comes Bethesda’s best writing ever, rivaling all contemporaries in open world games. The dialogue feels alive and cracking with a purpose, lending much more character to the world than the stolid, expressionless statues of the past. In particular, the player character (excellently voiced by Brian Delaney and Courtenay Taylor) is much more alive this time around. If the sacrifice Fallout 4 made was role playing, what is paid in return is an RPG protagonist who feels like a real human being with plenty of details for players to maneuver.
The universal Karma system of prior Bethesda games is gone and shifted to the companions, all of whom are wonderfully interesting and complex. Your actions in the game affect their opinion of you in drastic ways that they will comment on, finally lending real weight to the Karma system. And none of your relationships with them are scripted, leading to wonderful moments of personal storytelling that belong to you and only you. A romantic relationship I developed with one companion hit its apex at a moment so perfect I was sure it must have been planned, but it wasn’t. It was purely of my own creation, something not even BioWare’s famous romances can say.
That attention to character spreads to the game’s factions, loaded with fascinating and compelling NPC characters that react fluidly to your decisions. Their quest lines are long and complicated, and only get more so – to the point that eventually they become in-congruent with each other. Fallout 4’s third act is a plate-spinning ballet act between four potential factions, with lines being drawn by faction leaders that will force you into complicated moral decisions and relationships, all the outcomes of which I have not yet seen. For a developer famous for rather linear main quests, Bethesda allows a large amount of player choice on macro and micro levels, the latter especially compelling.
The reason for the success of the game’s is that, for the first time, Bethesda has developed a world hand in hand with narrative design. Nothing in Bethesda’s grand Commonwealth feels out of place. Every settlement feels like it is there for a specific reason, every character therein serving a purpose. The main quest is a wonderfully designed and written mystery spanning half the Commonwealth in search of the mysterious Institute, and every detail of the world serves the story and its people in some way.
Unlike Fallout 3, Boston’s innate Americana doesn’t feel like surface dressing – when it recreates the Minutemen of the American Revolution, when the game borrows abolitionist imagery, when it evokes the atmosphere of 1900s “Irish Need Not Apply” racism, when it re-purposes essential moments of American history, it does so with purpose and poignancy in order to ask Fallout 4’s key quandaries. Who counts as a person? What is the next fight for human rights? What is the next step of mankind’s relationship with technology? What, indeed, is the future for post-apocalyptic America?
Fallout 4 lets you answer all these questions your way, with your voice. Yes there are still a number of bugs. Yes, more tutorials for building would be nice. Yes, the game is less of a traditional “RPG” than ever before. But the role that Fallout 4 does have you play in the story being told is so compelling and such a blast that not only do I believe it to be my favorite game of 2015, and Bethesda Game Studios’ best game ever, but a truly great Fallout game.
No one is more surprised about that than I am.