I remember the Wanderer commercial. That was cool, but not cool enough for me to shell out the money for a machine powerful enough to run Fallout 4. So I forgot about it. Until a few months ago when it showed up on Xbox Game Pass. I downloaded it and played several hours a day until I had gathered all the companions, become General of the Minutemen, destroyed The Institute, and learned to hate Settlers. I used Fast Travel, played on Normal, and didn’t realize there was a whole world of players that considered fast travel cheating, and playing on anything but the hardest setting was not playing at all. So I started my second playthrough, on normal and using fast travel. To hell with all the serious gamers.
I love Fallout 4.
It’s an amazing game. Tons of odds and ends. Great graphics and music. All kinds of insane bugs like cows that hang out on the roof and companions that appear out of thin air. It’s all old news. And that’s the big difference between playing games twenty years ago and playing games now. In the good old days, if you were stuck on a puzzle in a game, you had to think about it, ponder what you missed, think some more, and maybe give up and buy some kind of cheat book. Now, if you run into any kind of problem, the solution is just a YouTube video away. I did my best to avoid spoilers, but I did watch a lot of videos that showed all the things I had missed the first time around.
There are plenty of things I don’t like. Everyone you meet either wants to kill you or wants you to save them. The people that travel with you are desperate and needy and beg you to take them with you. My settlements are just the bare minimum. A few turrets for defense, a few shops to keep them busy, enough beds and water. Among the many odd things in Fallout 4 is the fact that everyone wants water and food, but no one needs a bathroom or sheets for the beds.
The game world is both large and tiny.
You can roam around the place and there’s always some room you missed before or some other small tragedy to discover. But the dozens of locations are right next to each other. Your new settlement is often across the street from a raider settlement, a super mutant settlement, or a radioactive deathtrap. And yet, it’s rarely the bad guys ten feet from your front door that attack or kidnap your settlers, it’s always someone on the other side of the map.
My main gripe about Fallout 4 is that you can’t win, and you can’t clean up the Commonwealth. No matter how many times you Clear an area, the raiders, mutants, ghouls, synths, and whatnots reappear. This also makes the game super easy once you get past level 60 or so. Anything you need to build a wall or repair your power armor is just a few short battles away. Kill twenty or thirty bad guys and sell all the stuff you loot from their bodies. But this brings up another problem. Once you reach level 80 or so, you should have everything in the game worth having. Once you’ve got your Quantum power armor and your Gatling laser, well, anything short of a direct hit with a mini nuke you can shrug off.
I loved the end of Blood and Wine, the Witcher 3 DLC. You end up in a beautiful realm where you can retire from public life in your own private vineyard with the lover of your choice. You can still wander around if you want, but it’s the perfect stopping place. You’ve won.
A lot of Fallout 4 players spend a lot more time in the game world than I did.
I never joined the Institute or the Brotherhood of Steel and have no interest in doing so. I did go back and load a few Mods, mainly ones that change the landscape, add more music, and make everything look better. I also discovered Sim Settlements, a great mod that lets you forget about all that settlement building nonsense.
Fallout 4 was fun and depressing and heartbreaking and everything I could ever ask from a game.
