So I’ve been playing Fallout 4 for a while now. I got way more engaged in it than I thought I would considering that my initial impression of it is that its production values are barely any better than the previous game and there are all kinds of annoying bugs and glitches. But the sheer size of the game and the variety of the environments you can explore really won me over. The settlement construction portion of the game is both frustrating and time consuming but I have to admit that it’s pretty addictive.
As usual with Bethesda’s games the story is nothing special and you can see its big twist coming a mile away. It’s rather amusing that you’re once again a vault dweller chasing after a family member. The main quest actually felt surprisingly short to me, particularly as I sided with the Minutemen and was friendly with all factions except the Institute. The big set-pieces are great but the writing for the quests in general is disappointing as most of them are linear to a fault. Even when they can end in more than one way, they’re often not correctly handled. One example of this is the town of Covenant. You can pick the peaceful route and leave everyone alive. But they’re still go about their usual routines and lock their doors, even locking you inside though of course you can just scrap the doors. Their dialogue is also somewhat bugged, occasionally implying that you’re still investigating the town. I also feel like there are all sorts of missed opportunities. Is it just me or does it feel like there are aren’t enough quests to fully develop the storyline of Diamond City as the biggest city in the Commonwealth?
I do like the streamlined game design that eliminates skills and makes everything focused around attributes and perks. Combat is a lot of fun. I rely heavily on VATS but from what I’ve seen it is in fact possible to play it as an action game. They’ve also improved the animations by leaps and bounds. In my opinion too much of the design is still tied to the old Fallout games, such as the clunkiness of the Pip Boy based user interface for example and it would be great for them to break even more with their legacy. Mods help with that of course but by default the inventory clutter is ridiculous. Dealing with the interface for properly building up a settlement is very time consuming as a result. It doesn’t help that it’s necessary to look up help for so many of the different systems as there is no explanation offered in-game. Another frustration is the long load times every time you transition from an interior space to exterior. Even with an SSD, the transition takes enough that I’m wary about entering small buildings.
My favorite part of the game is still the expansiveness and wealth of detail present in the world. It’s amazing how you can just walk around, find little things to loot and discover bits of story all over the place. The immersion is incredible and like the previous game, it’s easy to get lost in the world. Ironically the breadth and level of detail in the world itself is also a source of frustration. The world is so large and so rich yet it seems like the only meaningful way to interact with it is through violence. I so wish that quests could have more branching paths and that there could be more ways to resolve conflicts. Even skills like lockpicking and hacking mostly only provide more loot. They don’t usually add more options or even alternate paths. The settlement development system helps but it’s all mechanics and no story. It really made me appreciate how Obsidian has a much better handle on writing and story so that the world feels meaningful, not just geographically large.
This lack of choices and of course the way that combat quickly becomes trivial once you get sufficiently powerful makes spending too much time in the game as a single character kind of boring. Strangely the sheer size of the world still makes it appealing to replay. I’ve since completed the main quest but started again with a new characters, playing around with some mods at the same time, and was surprised by having encounters, finding quests and seeing locations that I missed the first time around. It’s a real shame that none of the characters seem very interesting. As usual, this is a Bethesda game that is much more about the world than the story of the characters in it.
Anyway I’ll be writing another post after I have more experience with mods since I finished my first playthrough without any mods at all. It will be some version of Survival Mode since I really like the idea of needing to scrounge for essential supplies to survive. But yeah, almost despite myself I ended up liking this game quite a bit.
