FALLOUT IV (2015)

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bethesda is a lucky, lucky, lucky games company. like, insanely lucky, and i'm not even discussing the legal wins they've bagged against mohjang, human head, interplay, id--no, i mean they're lucky in that, twenty years ago, they developed a really impressive open world rpg engine. that was morrowind, and morrowind allowed for all sorts of unbelievably cool, innovative ways to maneuver its wide world: every building could be entered, every npc could be killed, every item could be picked up, and everyone could be talked to. not only that, but objects in the world had consistency--you could drop your armor right where you stood in the middle of balmora, leave for many moons, and come back to find it still very much there... exactly as you left it. and many of those npcs wouldn't ever respawn should you kill them--your actions had consequences. and all of this... absolutely all, was contained in a massive world that allowed you to walk from one end to the other without stopping.

and this is why the bethesda of today is lucky. see, on top of all those features morrowind bolstered was an excellent story with excellent, captivating, un-tolkein-like lore. but with every subsequent open world release came the same sort of open world mechanics birthed here with a regression of that writing, and a regression of the whole "rpg" aspect entirely. oblivion was embarrassing, lore wise--you could tell the devs saw lord of the rings in theaters together on a company wide trip, shit their pants, and thought "oh fuck yeah, let's just do that." and credit, many of oblivion's side quests and character writing is actually phenomenal... at the cost of its bland, grinded down lore. fallout 3 and skyrim follow, and they're written as intelligently as a cliff racer--they fly with style and take no more than one hit to fell. but all of this doesn't REALLY matter--i mean, it does if you appreciate good dialogue and engaging storytelling, but the majority of bethesda's players just want to goof off in a consistent open world, and THAT'S why this company's lucky. they can get away with it. they can write honest to god slop and as long as it feels good to yell at a dragon or lop off a raider's head, they'll keep going.

bethesda is insanely lucky.

anyway, that's why fallout 4 is so playable--it's easily the best feeling combat they've ever sharpened. calling on the talents of former destiny devs, bethesda put together guns that feel varied and unique from one another, that feel damned good to shoot and damned good to connect. the basic gameplay loop of wandering around the wasteland killing all sorts of whatever, looting the surroundings, and moving on... is fun. it is, or else i wouldn't have put as many hours into this as i did. that fun does come with the fattest asterisks you can imagine, however: the experience needs mods. not "improves" with mods, no--NEEDS.

you have a game where enemies are almost always these ridiculous sponge tanks that absorb all your .308 rounds despite ostensibly defenseless--half these enemies don't wear proper helmets, and it feels stupid. this isn't a human enemy example, but soon after starting the game (with a mod that thankfully skips the default intro), i wandered over to a mirelurk assaulted town called salem. now, killing these things was somehow near impossible no matter what i did, but there was a sidequest there that involved starting up some stray turrets around the city, and i figured i'd knock it out. so, there i am bobbing and weaving through these infinite health lobsters to get all the sentries online, and.... nothing. they do near nothing. you know why? because, in the infinite wisdom of bethesda's developers, all of the turrets are placed high up, aiming down. why is this a problem? well, have you SEEN a mirelurk? let me refresh your memory: they wear giant fucking crab shells on their back, shielding them from damage. so, the turrets did nothing despite waiting around, trying to lead them in front of gunfire, etc, and i eventually get bored and just snuck off to tell the quest giver the job's done. i trek over, walk in--loading screen--and then every single goddamn mirelurk spawns in there. i did eventually wear them down after a reload and what felt like an hour, and--look, i get it. the game has tough creatures that, realistically, you're meant to come back and fight later, and that's fine, but following the mirelurks was a scuffle with some atom worshippers who wore rags around their head and ate ammunition like it was nothing. you can guess what they did to me. you can also guess why i then installed a mod that rebalances weapons.

and a mod to allow npcs to die, because there are dozens that can't. and a mod to increase the weight limit, because you are incentivized to pick up all sorts of bullshit necessitating trips to home base. and a mod to turn off enemy respawns considering any cleared out dungeon would be repopulated with the same threats just after three days. and a mod to remove harvey from the entire workshop and settlement elements of the game--surprising how less annoying it is to just clear out a camp and press a on the workshop. and that mod i mentioned that skips intro this game leads with and just lets you start with whatever ROLE you want? well i got that one, too, considering this game series used to be ROLE PLAYING. and on that note, there's one more mod i installed: it silences your sociopathic, unrelatable, insane protagonist.

he's bad. i haven't played as female either back in 2015 or now, six years later, but i have to imagine she's just as. the male is voiced by a snot nosed marvel movie zinger slinging psychopath, and this shows up in his very basic self narration, when you select a basic object, when you talk to basically anyone. his tone makes the player seem like he isn't processing anything happening like a real human being--all disjointed and awkward, and his sarcastic quips ripped straight from suicide squad scripts land real weird when you just spent the last twenty minutes banging physics based pots and pans against dead npcs to see if their heads would pop off. the generally agreed on problem is that the protagonist's voice has to fit all sorts of varied player personalities whether they be good samiratans or xbox players, and it ends up fitting neither and none. what's even more mindblowing is how dramatically improved fallout 4's immersion is when you gag yourself from any further one liners. you actually feel like it's you playing, almost. it still hurts to read what the player dialogue actually says and realize you're only ever getting three options that all mean the same thing.

also, this is just completely unrelated to that point, but i want to focus on this last gameplay element before i dive completely back into the writing: fallout 4 has some weird bugs and design decisions, doesn't it? have you ever gotten trapped trying to cook something or repair items? has your pip boy button ever just straight up been disabled? what's with npcs trying to ride elevators and then suddenly shooting up and falling from the sky like god almost let 'em into heaven but decided against it? back in fallout 3, clicking on a terminal just brings up the terminal prompt, but in fallout 4, clicking a terminal means your character performs this awkward intepretative dance as they draw up close to it, and the amount of time this takes seriously varies. i've sat there for a full minute watching my character dance around props and hazards, tin cans foiling my efforts to read the screen, and then watching myself die because an enemy just walked in in the middle of it and opened fire. there's also this door thing where npcs will enter a building ahead of you and, i don't know, hold the doorknob shut or something? seriously, you'll stand there like a dumbass for twenty seconds looking away from and back to the door until it finally highlights back to green. bizarre, but the very worst, most baffling, evil design decision i cannot understand is the fading out of black that follows loading in. like, i have died just quickloading because the time it took to completely fade in was the time it took for a raider to pincushion me. so, what this means is you have to just hit tab as soon as possible to pull up your pipboy until you can actually see the damn game.

okay, ooooone more point before we full on dive into the writing. let's talk graphics and aesthetics. because honestly... fallout 4 is a gorgeous looking game, i'm serious. the full range of an actual color palette paired with a brilliant dynamic lighting system both result in an aesthetic miles ahead of that ugly yellow, green mess that fallout 3 was. hell, i think there's a line some brotherhood member offers poking fun at that, something about how "you should see how the capital wasteland looks". and you should see it and compare, because they've come a long way: the commonwealth bolsters weather patterns filled with intrigue whether it be foggy, orange hued mornings or radiation storms, and when things clear up and the sun can poke out, god if the game isn't standing tall, hands on hips, going "goddamn would you look at my lighting engine". you ever seen people posting webms of f.e.a.r. to show off its lighting? fallout 4 does it too and with a grander scope--the fucking sun. it doesn't always work perfect downtown, but it's still pretty damn dope. now i'm gushing on these graphical points because, with a game doing so much wrong, you may as well praise what's done right. its these textures and carefully colored, carefully rendered environments that really sell the post apocalypse. if it had just happened recently--not two hundred years later.

yeah. back to talking about writing. worldbuilding, specifically, because the world fallout 4 takes place in does not make any sense at all and falls apart under any sort of scrutiny. and this? this is scrutiny. the game has received tons of criticism hammering in this point, but the reason poor worldbuilding strikes so many players wrong is because it ruins the believeability of anywhere you're exploring. you feel baffled entering a human settlement and there's just skeletons everywhere that scavengers seem to just step over like calcium decoration, among all the tin cans and trash as well. in certain untouched locations, this makes sense, while in others, it feels stupid. one infamous example of lore fuckery (in which pete hines made a tweet essentially saying "i don't give a shit and neither do my writers"), there's a pre-war vault full of drugs that emerged only after the apocalypse. dumb, but i'm here to describe that circumstances are even dumber than that. see, this vault is full of gunners, right? they've taken over the vault defenses and set up their own sentries and terminals, so they clearly have been here for awhile, okay? now, what's baffling is that, much of the vault is somehow still untouched, even with gunners themselves actually walking among the corpses and trash. and those very corpses all have drugs in their hands and scattered among them. and you're telling me there's not been a single gunner sweep to collect up all those jets and psychos and other valuables? are they under order to leave things exactly how they are? not likely since nearly every gunner i kill seems to have a drug on them. i get this comes across as nitpicking, but the fact that looking at this scenario with, again, any sort of scrutiny makes the entire dungeon fall apart in believability, kind of makes the whole dungeon exploring aspect suck. like, why even bother trying to piece together the story of what happened when bethesda's writers couldn't even be bothered. so, you just mindlessly clear out the vault of gunners, take your loot, and go.

there's more little things that bother me because they're baffling with no explanation, like how i found a farm of two children with a raider camp no more than twenty steps away. if there was a note there that said "i'm actually a good raider and keeping tabs on these poor kids while i sleep in the rain", i missed it. there's a house near vault 111 where a conspiracy nut locked himself away before the bombs dropped. what's in his vault? a fucking copy of the wasteland survival guide, something the fallout 3 player helped make. there's nuka cola machines all over filled with untouched sodas, every cash register seems to be full of both prewar money and bottlecaps, which is... strange, and unexplained. and vault 81 is accessed by making its owners a deal to give them three fusion cores. oh, you don't actually have to prove you have them or discretely dump em in a dropbox, no they just open right up. hey, don't question these things, just mindlessly clear out enemies, take your loot, and go.

but broadstrokes worldbuilding here, what makes the experience of traversing the wasteland most hollow and theme-park feeling is the actual placement of enemies. let me explain: take a look at fallout new vegas' map, and see how the different factions occupy spaces. you have ncr camps on a logical 'front', with caeser on the other side. for the role of raiders, you have a jail of escaped convicts contained to a circular area originating from their prison. for another role, you have 'fiends' who occupy a large strip of vegas ruins in the west originating from a vault they consider home base. even further west, you've got khans who occupy a very defendable canyon, and ghouls are always in areas that reasonably would be untouched or affected directly by the in-game conflict. what i'm trying to get at is that the enemies you fight, and where you fight them, always make sense. there are good explanations for why you're fighting what you're fighting where you're fighting them, and it makes the world feel... real. now let's look at fallout 4's map: enemy placements are shotgunned against map markers with zero cohesion. bethesda designs the dungeon placements first, and then goes "okay uhh how about raiders here and supermutants here and uhh maybe supermutants here too but uhhh maybe ghouls yeah let's do ghouls here and okay this looks like a good gunner place". it feels asinine, and you wonder how any of these fragmented groups are even able to survive, defend, connect with each other. there's this whole eastern part of the map that's mostly wildlands where you're likely to encounter deathclaws and yau gaoi. cool, and then like, in the middle of it is a raider camp. what the fuck? who are you even raiding, you're the only humans out there! no, what enemies occupy what camps is NOT decided by any sort of logical reasoning and instead, just "we don't want the player to kill raiders in one camp and then encounter more raiders in the next, so we chose the easiest solution" amusement park. this is why people describe these bethesda rpgs as amusement parks. but hey, don't question this, just mindlessly clear out enemies, take your loot, and go.

i keep saying that, and it's because that's the impression i got back in 2015 playing through the assortment of side quests fallout 4 offers with all of them feeling like "go here, shoot, leave" with fat-free window dressing because the substance is never there. this playthrough? i haven't even being doing any, i just go around mindlessly killing and looting like they want me to. hey though, i actually shacked up with a companion i "rescued" from an underground arena--could we have had an interesting sidequest where the player participates in that arena, perhaps forced to, or maybe one where the player searches out new talent to compete for them--no that'd be too interesting. anyway, her character is hilarious, like i can't imagine what whoever wrote her was thinking. she's this scottish tough girl who audibly adores that you don't boss her around (even though, yes i do, i make her open every door and walk infront of gunfire), and she eventually reveals her tragic backstory: for almost eighteen long years, her parents merely tolerated her existence until shipping the poor scot out into slavery on her 18th birthday (for probably, like, 40 caps). eventually, she makes it out and back to her parents' old home, and she kills them both. but the look in their eyes when she pulls the trigger... she feels guilt, and that's why she drinks, that's why she's game to slaughter diamond city villagers alongside me. harrowing. anyway, funniest thing about that story is that the parents waited eighteen years to ship off an extra mouth to feed and protect they ostensibly didn't care for, um... but whatever. this sort of character writing is what all of fallout 4's characters are like. no real depth, no actual thought, just funny wacky marvel personalities with fanfiction.net backstories.

just. nothing makes sense in this game, and bethesda clearly doesn't want you to think too hard about it, right? except, they do. no, they have to, have you seen the absurd amount of notes and terminals and audio diary logs the commonwealth is filled with? bethesda tries, and the best they can do is a skeleton next to a computer with three diary entries. diary one says "i'm so glad i'm not a skeleton", diary two says "uooohhh... i can feel myself becoming a skeleton", and diary three says "i am a skeleton now." bethesda tries, and the best they can do is a ghoul family who dearly miss their two hundred year old child you find no more than 40 feet away from their fucking house. they try. bethesda tries. pete hines doesn't get to hide behind "oooh not interested debating a world with talking mutants" because bethesda tried to flesh out that world of talking mutants--they just did a shitty job. and this'll be the most pretentious thing i say all review, but the reason they did a shitty job is because no one in that writing department has the right influences, and they all look up to the wrong people. you can tell they don't like fallout new vegas and they weren't inspired by fallout new vegas because they make no attempt to break down what made the writing and world of that game work, and i know this because, when bethesda was making fallout 3, they made no attempt to do that with the first two fallouts either.

i could go on, and on, and on but there's little point in hammering in the same points repeatedly as i basically say the same thing over and over again: the writing, worldbuilding, lore, and set design in this game is complete, incompetent ass. this doesn't hold fallout 4 back from being fun, or even good, or really good with the right fat asterisk mods. but it's half baked, it's unfulfilled potential. it could be SO much better. and there's absolutely no pressure at bethesda to address that... because they're lucky. they can write the most embarrassing slop of the entire games industry, and it won't matter, because in 2002 they built a fun open world rpg engine, and they're going to squeeze every last drop out of it--forever.

mark my words. without knowing even a single thing about starfield, two things are certain: it'll probably be fun, and it won't make any sense at all. that's a bethesda open world sized promise.