Well, it’s the new year. Which means a half-hearted attempt at a new me. Out with the old and all that. Largely, this means I’m going to have a burst of blogging before falling off the waggon much to my sister-publisher’s disappointment! Because at the very least, I’m good at pattern recognition.

Typically, most people get to navel gazing during this transitional period. And that typically results in examining where we came from and analyzing what got us where we are. Granted, I’m not sure there’s much to be said about 2020 that isn’t still raw in people’s minds. As a year, it was a pretty large shock to the collective unconsciousness and we don’t really need lots of words devoted to how much a global pandemic sucks. So let’s just skip right to the point. 

I was pretty busy during the lockdown with my writing and nephews. Crowded into a household meant that my personal time was whittled down to a minimum. And with most things closed, it’s not like I was popping out to see movies. And with the television dominated by children, I saw little that wasn’t Peppa Pig. There were few games which I was able to finish and almost no boardgames that I could enjoy with everyone bolted inside their homes. 

Thus, I don’t have much to cover for a year in review. 

However, if you’ve been following my sporadic posting, this review shouldn’t come as a surprise. Derek and I finally got around to tackling the much derided Fallout 4. And it was only five years after its release! How fresh!

As such, I’m likely to repeat myself a little here while I recontextualize the game. If you read my early rant on it, you can probably skip a few paragraphs. 

Fallout 4 was the latest main entry for the series made by Bethesda Software. I make no effort to hide my love for Fallout New Vegas, which really got me into the old CRPG franchise. My first game was Bethesda’s own Fallout 3 after they scooped up the intellectual property through Interplay’s bankruptcy. Derek, however, had enjoyed the original two and was thoroughly repulsed by Bethesda’s massive overhaul of the game and its mechanics. I enjoyed it as I was a fan of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls games. And, while a bit reductive, there was something to the criticism of Fallout 3 being Elder Scrolls with guns. 

As such, New Vegas brought back the traditional complexity and narrative focus that old school roleplaying players expected. I found New Vegas excelled at its world building and interesting character writing – Bethesda’s two biggest weaknesses. Bethesda is great at evoking the excitement of exploration with their games but their worlds are a bathtub of soap bubbles. Each little sphere is fun in its own right but there’s a clear demarcation between their little bursts of fun. A dungeon filled with flesh-eating monsters and poison will be literally next door to a village inhabited only by children. Yeah, the village is neat and cute. And certainly the dungeon is challenging and unique. But taken together, there’s no rhyme or reason for the two to cohabitat within proximity to one and another. On the flip side, New Vegas is criticized for having a world that’s really boring punctuated by small moments of interest. But… that’s kind of how the world works. There’s long stretches of road with civilization gathering and centralizing around important hubs of trade and civilization. 

Or, put simply, take a walk outside of any Canadian city and you’ll enter into stretching fields of farmland or sparse woods. Cities are fun. Farms not so much. Whether you want constant amusement from your video games or a sense of verisimilitude is ultimately the decider for style you enjoy. 

Now, Fallout 4 was in a weird position. Critically, Fallout 3 did better. Sales wise, I believe Fallout New Vegas edged into the lead. Fan reception? New Vegas took the cake. Furthermore, Bethesda and Obsidian are two very different developers with very different critical successes. I knew, with the announcement of Fallout 4, we were going to get something closer to Bethesda’s earlier output. I lowered my expectations to meet the reality of the product. This wasn’t going to be a good roleplaying game. But it should be a fun little exploration game. 

I furthermore had the advantage of listening to the community’s reception over the last five years and it has been… rather chilly. Thus, Fallout 4 became a threat between Derek and I. Once a Game of the Year version released, I was going to punish him with the darn thing. But as time went on, I sort of bought into the ironic glee for the game and was starting to look forward to it.

And, to be quite honest, for the first half of my run, I was actually surprised. I liked it. Now it’s been years and years since I’ve played Fallout 3 but I could still feel the improvements to the company’s general output. Were there issues? Of course. I was almost immediately frustrated with the game during its intro. The concept of its beginning was legitimately good. Fallout 4 opens with you in a place that the series has never explored:

The past. 

You and your spouse are getting ready on the morning of the apocalypse. You’re introduced to your family unit. You’re given the opportunity to customize your spouse and yourself. And the game applies its horrific patented melding technology to smush your two people to spawn a melded child for your happy couple. It’s the inverse of what the company did for its prior game wherein you created the child and it teased out two parents and their appearance from there. Your little family unit is then rounded out with a dotting robot butler and the whole package is complete. 

Then you’re treated to an idyllic family morning just moments before the horror of the nuclear apocalypse rains down on your head. You’re saved at the last minute by a sudden enrollment into the local underground shelter, called Vaults, that promises to provide you the facility to ride out the worst of the devastation. 

And it’s not very long before this wonderful setup starts to fall down around itself. 

First, there are some technical issues I had with this beginning. Primary amongst them, is that Bethesda stripped out almost all of the series’ rules systems. For those not in the know, almost all roleplaying games rely upon a system made popular by Dungeons and Dragons that involves various skills, characteristics and special characteristics to make unique adventurers. Fallouts utilized the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system which, outside of renaming a number of the stats, really didn’t deviate too much from the old D&D ruleset. You had various skills meant to represent… well… your skills and these were ranked on a scale of 1 to 100. Your stats (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck) were on a 1 to 10 scale. Personalization came from deciding where your character’s strengths and weaknesses came from. Maybe you’d be a smart and strong athlete who relied on their brawn and smarts to compensate for a rather boorish attitude and the fact that the universe liked to kick the stuffing out of you with constant ill-fortune. Then you had to decide whether you wanted to use those wits and might of yours to sling heavy hammers to crush your opponents or lug around massive gatling guns to turn them into swiss cheese. Or maybe your smarts gave you the aptitude to hack computer terminals and robots while leaving you clueless on how to get through locked doors or the know-how to scrounge for food out in a world that no longer had stocked supermarkets. 

It’s an immensely familiar system for anyone that has played any of the numerous roleplaying games out in the market. And I’m not adverse to creating new systems or exploring other mechanics. However, Fallout 4 completely guts this system and replaces it with… well… practically nothing. I learned, only after finishing the tutorial and progressing past the point of readjusting my character, that the system was entirely pared down to a “perk tree.” Your character was determined solely by a 7 by 10 table with abilities scattered haphazardly amongst them. Each one of your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats had ten levels. And largely these levels opened access to a (generally) five level perk. When you levelled up, you literally got a single “perk point” which could then be placed into your stat column or used to unlock/upgrade a previously purchased perk. 

And that was it. During my time with the game, there was no indication that the game had an upper boundary on how levelled you could be. So, given enough time, literally every character you play is going to be the same. Furthermore, there was such a staggeringly poor explanation of what certain game mechanics did, that I just ignored some stats because I had no idea what a “crit meter” was and I was baffled by which weapons to use because there were only a few weapon perks now split by how fast the weapon shot. Is this laser rifle an automatic weapon or a rifle class weapon? I don’t know. It’s not like the game tells you. Granted, it’s not like it’s that important either since these perks literally just increased damage as the game now incorporated a standard point targeting shooter system. 

Which, give me a second to explain. 

Fallout 1 and 2 were proper isometric RPGs where your character and their party were third person sprites running across your screen. Combat was determined by a turned based system where you would select a target for your character to attack, the type of attack they would perform and then the system would do all the necessary calculations for whether you hit or not and how much damage you would do. Then the next character or enemy would take their turn. It was simulated dice rolls. 

Fallout 3 and New Vegas shifted to a first person perspective that let you run around and point your gun. Yet it still used this older “dice rolling” system where your proficiency with your chosen weapons determined your chance to hit and the damage you did. Which, I confess, would be confusing for new players who aren’t used to CRPGs but maybe have a background in shooters. And there were certainly entertaining moments in New Vegas where you may point your sniper rifle at the whites of your enemy’s eyes only for you to squeeze the trigger and have your shot fly out at a ninety degree angle into the sky. 

So the “gun play” was certainly criticized. Considering Bethesda is a roleplaying game company, the updated gunplay in Fallout 4 is fine. Granted, it kind of makes redundant the series’ one unique mechanic: the VATS system. In the original Fallout games, you could choose how you wanted to attack your opponent when swinging/shooting them. You were able to use your Vault-Assisted Targeting System to choose whether to hit their head, arms, torso or whatever in order to inflict certain negative statuses to your enemy. Cripple a leg and the opponent’s movement would be hobbled. Shoot out an eye to make their accuracy plummet. Or simply blow up the grenade in their hand before they can throw it. This system made the reticle shooting in Fallout 3 and New Vegas kind of… superfluous. The one important element was using the VATS system required depleting your action point bar which is how the game determined the number of actions you would have in the regular turn based system of old. Outside of VATS, your action points were used to sprint. So going into combat in New Vegas was juggling using your action points for positioning and shooting. 

And yet, though Fallout 4 only made some small adjustments to the system, they really just gutted its usefulness. 

So now in Fallout 4 when you aim your gun, your shot flies down the centre of the reticle like a normal shooter. Yet when you enter VATS, your accuracy is now entirely determined by your agility statistic. Furthermore, VATS still sucks up your action point bar. But, unlike the prior games, entering and using VATS no longer “freezes time.” See, in New Vegas, when you activated VATS, the combat paused so you could (oftentimes clumsily) scroll through the various targets and the different limbs you could target before committing to your shots. Now, there was some measure of danger because, after queuing up your attack, the game resumed in a cinematic exchange of gunfire between you and your opponents. So you could be exploded by a rocket while the camera is panning around you as though you’re the last action hero. 

Because I like playing on high difficulties, I found the best use of the VATS system was to determine the position of enemies, especially ones that you may not notice. I would often pop into VATS to get a lay of the land before popping out of it to relocate to better cover (minimizing sightlines) before re-entering VATS to queue up my attacks against isolated individuals. 

However, in Fallout 4, just simply activating VATS put the game into slow motion. So while you’re busy fighting with the interface to choose the right arm of the super mutant in front of you instead of the dumb mutant dog behind a pile of cars to his side, that super mutant is wailing on your face with his nail board until you’re a bloody, slow-motion pulp. Combine this with the fact that your accuracy is also going to take a massive plunge since it is only determined by a skill which otherwise has no gameplay application and there is really no reason for using the VATS system. Thus, you’re only going to use your action points for running around in combat. So your agility really is only important for unlocking requirements for a few perks here or there and nothing else.

Thus, I had to restart to sort out my character’s “upgrade path” and go through that intro again.

Then the game crashed and I had to go through it again.

And this is the real story of Fallout 4. For every improvement Bethesda made to the game, they inexplicably made other aspects worse. I think I mentioned in my prior rant on Fallout 4 that writing wise, the game was massively improved on its companions. But Fallout 3 had some of the most generic companions in the world so anything was an improvement. Yet, the rest of the writing became far worse. But this review has already sprawled on long enough. 

You’ll have to wait for the exciting part two to hear my opinions on the story.