Fallout 4 Was a Massive Disappointment

[FrameZ]

I got FO4 on release, just to be hugely disappointed by seeing how much a step back it was as an RPG and that was only in the first hour of playing. Still play it now and then thanks to mods.

[FelixMordou]

Here's where Fallout 4 and 76 get Fallout wrong. Not just wrong, but so exceptionally wrong that I'm amazed more fans aren't pitching a fit.

Both games give the player a nuke.

Now, Fallout 3 did it too, but in a way that was distinctly Fallout. You must directly experience the damage you cause when you detonate the bomb in Megaton. Sure the ham-fisted good/evil karma told you the action was evil, but if you ever went back to Megaton, you saw it first hand.

Fallout 4 does something similar when they force the player into the Glowing Sea. You get to see first hand what damage the nukes caused.

Where Fallout 4 falls flat is when they force you to choose between A: Nuke the Bad Guys(tm) who are probably the best bet at returning to a pre-war way of life and B: Kill two factions and force the Commonwealth to live under "fascist" rule. They spend the entire game doing something so inherently ANTI Fallout, and cap it off with the least Fallout answer. We spend the whole game pining for our pre-war life, which is fine, but the rest of the wasteland also wants that to return. Rather than criticizing the society that CAUSED this mess, they spend the game idolizing it. Then they turn The Ultimate Weapon into a GOOD THING and make the massacre of hundreds of human beings, including children, into a HEROIC(tm) act. They literally made genocide a good thing.

You know, that thing Fallout has always said is bad? Nah guys, if they're some "fascist" group it's fine.

Don't get me wrong, the Institute does some shady stuff. Kidnapping? Definitely not okay. But really, what else did they do? They experimented with FEV on children. Oh boy. Vault-Tec did way worse, but you don't see people doing more than saying "that's messed up". Why was freaking genocide the good ending? What happened to Fallout's trademark gray areas? Nowhere to be found in 4.

[Meteor Mash]

Excellent point. I never thought about that.

[SnarkyJay]

I loved Fallout 3 and New Vegas. I thought they were a fresh interpretation of the world created in the original Fallout games. Yes, they completely changed the gameplay, but I thought they were stories well told, and were fun to play. Something about Fallout 4 felt off. I don't know if the problem was the base building, or the story line, or that it didn't drastically improve on it's predecessors in any meaningful way. Whatever the reason, I got bored about 7 or 8 hours in and just stopped playing. When I played Fallout 3 for the first time, I binged on a daily basis, putting in more than 7 hours a day for days on end. It sucked me in, and I got lost in the world. With Fallout 4, I just felt like I was going through the motions. I liked some of the characters, especially Nick Valentine, but it wasn't enough to keep me invested. I wish this wasn't the case. I was excited about the game and I wanted to love it. Maybe one day, I'll go back to it, and get sucked in. However, this is probably wishful thinking.

[SeanCampbell]

I enjoyed Fallout 4... with an asterisk.

I liked the gameplay well enough. Most of the environments were fun and the lore was good. My biggest gripe was the the story. Specifically the end game options with the various factions. The only one that made any sense was the Brotherhood of Steel storyline, but even that was hampered by just rehashing Liberty Prime. The institute was just ridiculous and the Underground, whatever they were called, didn't make a whole lot of sense. The whole Minutemen storyline felt like a waste of time and I completely ignored all of the settlement stuff. They put a whole lot of effort into that stuff and it just wasn't what I wanted to play.

All that said though, just the moments of discovery, just wandering around the wasteland and coming across completely random locales with the rich histories and all that stuff was just as fun as always.The combat felt decent enough to keep me playing but I did find myself completely ignoring the main storyline as much as I could. That's a rare thing for me.

[Midnight_Mogwai]

I agree with parts of your review, but I must object to the comparative praise of Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. I have played a lot of the Bethesda Fallout games over the years. Leading up to the massive dumpster fire of Fallout 76, I completed all of the 3D games from scratch. Never did I once feel that anything I did actually mattered. Make a wrong choice, and the worst thing that can happen results in a lost bobblehead or quest achievement. The often praised Megaton decision in Fallout 3 is hilariously shallow in terms of how it actually impacts your game should you decide to set off the nuke. Anyone going to question the logic behind building a city around a nuclear weapon? No? Moving on, Fallout 3 plays out the same in the end no matter what you do, because you're playing a scripted game. The choices you make are carefully curated therefore meaningless. A single player video game plays the person that is unaware they are being played, thus we end up with the false concept of player choice. Fallout 3 made better use of space, and Fallout NV did pretty much everything else better than Fallout 3.

Players praise Fallout NV because it offers players multiple ways to handle a multitude of the quests, but the quests still have a finite number of end results. How are you going to get onto the Vegas strip? Do you have the caps? fake ID? Camp? It doesn't matter in the end how you get in because the end result is that you do get in, and you must get in because the critical path will not progress unless you do so.Fallout NV still is a bug riddled mess, I blame Methesda for not allowing enough time in the oven. Player progression through perk choice is meaningless, because and observant player will pretty much always take the most efficient perks. Even if you don't, you can still finish the game regardless, you'll either end up an unstoppable killing machine or you won't, and that is the closest thing you have to a meaningful choice in the game.

Fallout 4 is by and large the best of the 3D Fallout titles because, while it suffers from the same issues as the previous games, the gameplay is massively improved. The perk system is laid out before you from the start, no guesswork is required. The combat mechanics are the smoothest they've been, and VATS no longer seems like a bandage strung over terrible combat mechanics. The game returns to the good level design of Fallout 3, and the DLC actually offers something in the way of interesting storytelling. Sure, the game is painfully bogged down by a base building system nobody asked for, and the settlement system feels painfully half-baked. The only saving grace for this entire franchise, and the reason it remains relevant at all, is the wacky 1950s sci-fi aesthetic. Fallout fans are fans of B-rate science fiction and monster movies at heart. I'm not really convinced that anyone is a fan of what Fallout is and what is represents on its own, which is mediocrity in every respect. With Fallout 76, many people are beginning to realize this, and better spend their time elsewhere.