Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One (version played)
The real battle in the radioactive wasteland is one of inventory management. Really, it’s been a consistent problem in every Bethesda game, and, whilst not game-breaking, it’s still the most baffling thing to have to raid through upwards of five different menus just to find where I put a roll of duct tape.
Seriously, where did I put that piece of duct tape?
I need it. No, I don’t necessarily
need it, but the settlement I’m building up does. They need to be able to
defend themselves, so I’ve tasked myself with setting up some rudimentary
defences. Ah, there we go, stuck up a new defence tower. Wait, no, I didn’t
mean to move the water pump. Now every one’s going to die of thirst…
Fallout
4’s
biggest new feature is that of settlement building. Like 95% of modern games,
it’s tasked itself with adding crafting mechanics to its litany of other
gameplay elements. Post-Minecraft game
design posits that every big-budget game should have things to build,
regardless of what genre you’re playing. Every game should have its own Lego
set.
Fallout
4 jumps
into this hard. After a brief hour or so it thrusts you into your first
settlement, with the opportunity of rebuilding it. Not only that, the very
story and themes that Fallout 4 plays with are about rebuilding things. If Fallout 3 was about exploring the sorry
state of a post-nuclear world, then Fallout
4 is about making it something better.
It’s baffling then, that this system should be so vague and obtuse, not to mention made all the more frustrating thanks to the game’s cluttered inventory management. For such a major focus of the game, Fallout 4 offers very little explanation of how to manage settlements. It wants you to be excited and to care about rebuilding things but offers you no advice on how to do so, as well as give you the option to ignore it entirely. My first few hours of Fallout 4 were used wrangling this system, trying to understand how it works and what I needed to do to get the most out of it, only to find later on that the benefits were virtually non-existent and my time spent on it little more than a distraction.
When looked at from this angle the game’s story
beats and overall approach begin to make more sense. In Fallout 4 it’s almost impossible to play as a bad guy. In fact,
it’s impossible to be anyone other than the character that Bethesda have
provided you with, complete with half decent voice actor. The dialogue wheel, a
somewhat simplified version of Mass
Effect’s conversation wheel, replaces the typical list of written
responses.
The story this time round sees Bethesda crib ideas
from a number of different places, least of all themselves. Just as Fallout 3 had you traipsing across nuked
out Washington D.C., Fallout 4 has
you doing the same across New England, only this time for your son. As the
story progresses, various factions crawl out of the woodwork similar to Fallout: New Vegas. The Brotherhood of
Steel quickly make their presence felt, rolling in on giant airships, suited up
in power armour, whilst the Railroad keep themselves firmly out of sight,
shuttling away any synthetics they can help into hiding.
It’s here where Fallout
4 begins to stumble a little. Whereas there’s no doubt that the world
itself is impressive, and certainly still the star attraction in a game that
can soak up untold hours, the people that inhabit it can seem like
self-contained chunks of gameplay, rather than all interacting within the same
cohesive world. All of the game’s factions, for instance, rarely come into
conflict with one another, until the game dictates it during the main quest’s
climax.
Oh, we’re told that the Institute (the closest the
game gets to a straight-cut “bad guy” group) has no regards for Synths but we
rarely see that until the final hours of the main storyline. The Brotherhood of
Steel will come rolling in on airships, but they’ll stay politely contained at
the police station for the most part, until you come calling them.
Which, perhaps leads into what’s possibly the
biggest criticism that can be levelled at Fallout
4; it’s barely a role-playing game. Gone are the different character builds
and dialogue options, the very things that allowed you to craft a unique
character. Much like Skyrim, if something could have been
streamlined or removed it has been.
Unlike Fallout
3 and Fallout: New Vegas available
perks are dictated by the “tier” that each of your SPECIAL stats are at. For
example, should your strength be at one you’ll only have the first perk
available on that list, should you have more points invested in that SPECIAL
stat, then more perks deeper down that line are available.
It’s disappointing then, that the perk system seems
so…bland. Like Skyrim there’s little
personality to be had amongst the different abilities on offer. Some are so
downright pointless and situational that they serve no purpose half the time,
whilst generic “good stuff” perks, such as damage resistance and increased
damage output, are so obviously the best options that practically any build is
going to want them.
This is compounded by the game’s approach to quests.
Just as the rest of the game has undergone a streamlined approach, so too has
the missions that you’ll play through. Practically every objective involves
killing things or collecting something. Granted, it’s difficult to keep quests
varied in a game of this scale, but the overall effect is a game where kill
counts reign supreme whilst nuanced storytelling takes a back seat. Only once
during 20+ hours of gameplay did my silver-tongued charmer manage to talk his
way out of a fight.
Rarely in Fallout
4 will a quest spin off in a direction you weren’t expecting; that thrill
of getting swept up in events beyond your control is a thrill that beats
through the heart of almost all of Bethesda’s games. Here, you tick off the
objectives one by one and then collect your reward.
All these slightly mild disappointments are made all
the more frustrating because the game genuinely looks good. Gone are the bland
sludgy browns and faded greens that dominated Fallout 3’s colour palette. This is a vibrant, sometimes colourful
game.
It plays well too. Not perfect, mind, there were
moments when random body parts of fallen enemies gained rudimentary sentience
and began crawling across the floor. In another bizarre moment an important
character suddenly grew elongated limbs; I guess the radioactive wastes were
having a bigger effect on him then I thought.
Yet, jokes aside, it’s a major improvement when the
console version no longer feels like you’re trudging through mud once you
encounter more than two or three enemies on screen. Whether you’re using VATS,
or simply shooting at things in first-person, it feels responsive and tactile
in a way the previous games never managed given the hardware and engine
limitations.
However, when the best thing you can say about Fallout 4 is that it runs well and looks
nice, you can’t help but get a sense that somewhere the heart and soul of the
series has been ripped out. Fallout 4 is
a dense, sometimes fascinating adventure, but one that’s also dominated by
bland watered down gameplay and simplified mechanics. The focus here makes for
a game that’s less “an RPG with shooter elements” than “a shooter with RPG
elements”.
Now I have to go, there’s been an attack on one of
my settlements; they need me to help. Only now, my power armour has gone
missing (it’s now separate from your regular armour and comes with its own
upgrades, which is a neat addition), one of my settlers has taken off with the
whole thing thinking she can use it.
So that’s what I get for building these people a new
home. I give them food, even replace their water pump that I carelessly erased
from existence, only to have them take off with by best bit of kit to go and
kill a few bandits.
Now, where did I put that duct tape...?
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