Review
Played on: PlayStation 4, Xbox One X & Xbox Series X
Released: 2015
I absolutely loved Fallout 3, it's probably one of my favourite games on my Xbox 360. To say I was excited for Fallout 4 would've been a bit of an understatement, so when it finally got added to my library I was eager to dig in and play. What seems to be an alarming trend in newly released Bethesda games though, are tons of bugs and bad performance all over the board. The console versions on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 suffered the most.
I decided to wait it out and let the patches roll out before jumping in. A few fixes later and a lucky Christmas sale, which gave me the game plus a season pass for the price of the ordinary game, I was set!
The massive visual upgrade and the magnificent, yet shocking, introduction level further built my excitement up. A lot of people had complained about the visuals, personally I was very impressed the first time I booted it up. Sure, it's not always appealing on details far into the distance, the character animations are stiff and the faces look like an uncanny valley convention. But overall, I really think Bethesda have done a great job. Especially when we consider the huge playing area and the incredible lighting and weather effects.
However, technically we are once again witnessing insane load times between the open world and indoors locations. Which makes entering and exiting buildings a tedious affair. Killing the pace and flow when you're excited about moving on quickly. Witnessing these exact same load times in console versions of Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim, I am further disappointed in the developer for not fixing this jarring issue.
The same goes for the inconsistent framerate, though it's nowhere near the alarmingly low numbers Skyrim reached on tlast gen. Fallout 4 struggles in crowded fights and visually taxing scenes on the PlayStation 4 I'm playing on.
Update: Fallout 4 would recieve many updates through the years after release. I would replay the game on a Xbox One X and later it recieved a current gen patch which allowed for 60fps on a Xbox Series X/S. Allowing newcomers far better performance and improved visuals.
Played on: PlayStation 4, Xbox One X & Xbox Series X
Released: 2015
Released: 2015
I absolutely loved Fallout 3, it's probably one of my favourite games on my Xbox 360. To say I was excited for Fallout 4 would've been a bit of an understatement, so when it finally got added to my library I was eager to dig in and play. What seems to be an alarming trend in newly released Bethesda games though, are tons of bugs and bad performance all over the board. The console versions on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 suffered the most.
I decided to wait it out and let the patches roll out before jumping in. A few fixes later and a lucky Christmas sale, which gave me the game plus a season pass for the price of the ordinary game, I was set!
The massive visual upgrade and the magnificent, yet shocking, introduction level further built my excitement up. A lot of people had complained about the visuals, personally I was very impressed the first time I booted it up. Sure, it's not always appealing on details far into the distance, the character animations are stiff and the faces look like an uncanny valley convention. But overall, I really think Bethesda have done a great job. Especially when we consider the huge playing area and the incredible lighting and weather effects.
However, technically we are once again witnessing insane load times between the open world and indoors locations. Which makes entering and exiting buildings a tedious affair. Killing the pace and flow when you're excited about moving on quickly. Witnessing these exact same load times in console versions of Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim, I am further disappointed in the developer for not fixing this jarring issue.
The same goes for the inconsistent framerate, though it's nowhere near the alarmingly low numbers Skyrim reached on tlast gen. Fallout 4 struggles in crowded fights and visually taxing scenes on the PlayStation 4 I'm playing on.
Update: Fallout 4 would recieve many updates through the years after release. I would replay the game on a Xbox One X and later it recieved a current gen patch which allowed for 60fps on a Xbox Series X/S. Allowing newcomers far better performance and improved visuals.
Fallout 4 does a lot of things right though, crucial details that made Fallout 3 a classic for me. The atmosphere is incredible, depicting the brutal aftermath of society's fall where living and surviving the post-apocalyptic world is the nightmare one would expect it to be. The nasty creatures that have mutated up from the radiation, the anarchy that has risen and the harsh "kill or be killed" mentality of the wasteland.
There's a fascinating, yet disturbing, vision of how our world could have been, or could be if everything is pulled apart. F4 retains this scenario in a great way and sets you in a world built for more powerful consoles to depict this dark futuristic vision. I still love the 1950's inspired setting, forever stuck in the era when the atomic age rose and the a-bombs fell.
Added to further envision this dark future is dynamic lighting and weather. Watching beautiful sunsets or battling it out in pouring, radiated rain makes it even easier to submerge yourself into F4's dismal world. Variation and smaller detailis key, compensating for what isn't a massive open world.
Great atmosphere alone isn't a saviour by itself though, there are numerous elements that brought down my excitement after being initially impressed. Dialogue options seem dumbed down to the point of simply agreeing in various forms when they want to move the story along. Rather than giving you a wide range of directions the dialogue and subsequent plotline can develop into.
This rings very true for the main plotline, which has a constant feeling of forcing the player a certain direction. Then again, Bethesda Softworks strong suit has never been the main story, but rather the side quests and lore you can dig deep into.
At first I disliked the vast amount of bright and colourful indoor environments. Some of them look very modern in comparison to Fallout 3’s dark and dismal world. On the other hand, we're on a new generation entirely of hardware and the amount of detail is heavily increased. It gives Fallout 4 a different visual style overall, loosing some of the creepy darkness and of F3, yet it sports a new visual and interesting direction of it's own. Both are unique and differentiate from each other in a good way.
An annoyance for me was the almost nagging persistence to recruit you into one of the factions that roam the wastelands, a more persistent way of guiding newcomers in general. Joining one leads to side missions and much deeper lore, I just wish they'd let you roam more around by yourself to committing early to one of the factions; the minutemen.
Even worse, this faction is extremely eager to guide the player into the creation mode. Here you can basically build your own little town with buildings, furniture, electric contraptions, beds to increase the population and defence systems. For the early hours of the game, and being a Fallout 3 veteran, the creation mode was totally uninteresting.
I wanted to be alone and far away from NPCs telling me what to do, exploring stuff on my own like the previous Fallout. Yet, over time I learned how to use the creation modes cumbersome menus and awkward building physics. I just wish they'd introduced it at a much later point, and far more optional. It's a tad heavy and complicated to get into, I see the potential but it just comes off as a cumbersome and quirky side job that gets centre attention.
My first playthrough, following much what the game suggested and focusing on the main plot, left with tasks I didn't want to do in a world where the story seemed pre-determined beyond my influence. In a RPG this felt restrictive. Sure, one could argue that a game needs to follow certain paths to end up somewhere with it's story. Just don't make me enter conversations where I basically have the option of saying "yes" in four different ways. There needs to be radically different choices.
As such the plot twists, and in general, the main story never really blew my mind or eagerly caught my attention. Though, I'd argue that the Fallout games are mostly about making your own stories and experiences in the wasteland.
The excitement lies in the smaller details and random encounters you come across built my philosophy for my second run of the game. Where I could handle the creation mode and had settled into the different visuals, fairly small map and begin really appreciating the small details. Ther visually so much to check out and very interesting buildings to explore. They may not be massive numbers of places to visit, but the detail makes up for it.
I came in wanting Fallout 4 to be a prettier Fallout 3, at least the atmospheric experience, but I left with something else. Sure, it has it's fantastic moments and if you have no history with the previous games then it's probably fine to start here. As a whole though, it doesn't quite deliver the hype it built itself up to be.
At times F3 almost felt like a survival horror for me; creepy dark places filled with ghouls that really freaked me out whenever I fared indoors or underground. In F4 everything looks and feels too bright and positive to capture that scary atmosphere, yet it depicts a far more convincing 1950’s vibe and has so much to look at in detail.
That's my visual opinion though, the actual game still has all the gameplay elements F3 offered and perfectly captures the atomic era design. The gun feeling especially, is vastly improved and feels much more like a proper first person shooter than before. The story, however, there's nothing really captivating here and the feeling of making critical choices in dialogues feels bland.
I came into Fallout 4 with mixed feelings, which stayed for my first attempt, but the pleasure of exploring a Fallout came back with my second playthrough and ended up really enjoying myself. Veterans will complain about the more scripted and controlled events, yet maybe it’s easier for newcomers and more casual players to enjoy?! Except the creation mode, which still is just cumbersome.
