Fallout 4: What happens when all the choices in an RPG become meaningless. Or, “great, but greatly disappointing”. The exploration of the world was fun (if a bit samey after a while), and it looked great. But nearly everything else felt like a giant step backwards.
I see the poor dialog system and its lack of choice mirrored throughout the game: You pick your answer based on your LARPing, rather than any actual game value. “Should I be…SARCASTIC?” Sure, if you want. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. Just click something.
“Should I build up this settlement? Should I use wood walls or metal? Where should I put these turrets? Are my settlers happy?” Doesn’t matter.
“Who should I take with me?” Every NPC is the same. With nearly no exception, they can all wear the same gear and use the same guns. They can’t die. So dress 'em up however you want them. They’re basically walking lockers. You can take any of them anywhere, including walking right into places and past people committed to killing “their kind” without so much as a rude comment. Don’t think about it, just stroll on until you get that perk, and then dump 'em! None of them get particularly upset (or happy) about anything you do. They’ll never leave, until you tell them to.
“Which faction”? Doesn’t matter. Whichever faction you choose is effectively the same outcome for you in terms of what you do, what you get, and how it affects the world. Bunch o’ people will die, shit will blow up.
The conclusion I come to is the designers figured the best RPG elements would be ones the players LARPed in themselves. There are several side bits of information that other games (including previous Fallouts!) would have used to enrich dialog with the NPCs, whether as part of a quest or just incidentally. Not Fallout 4. You can learn, for example, that a merchant is a spy. Can you confront the merchant about this? Nope.
The story has large logical and emotional holes. It’s pretty garbage. I was incredibly disappointed with the lack of choices and differentiation throughout, but particularly the end game. I particularly resented how every faction choice required the killing of relatively innocent people.
For example, The Institute:
Idiots!
You’re telling me you can create an apparently infinite number of organic machines, but you can’t fix or optimize a nuclear reactor? Jesus, as you keep telling me, I’m “not a scientist”, but I was able to make gas generators and turbines out of trash and debris.
“Why did you wake me up, o wise old man?” “uh, basically to see what happened.” COME ON!
You have the Ultimate Killing Machines (Coursers), but when you need someone killed or an object retrieved, you send…me? The valuable leader of this place?
Oh, and now I’m actually in charge of this place – The Director – but I’m totally unable to actually, you know, DIRECT it?
And your solution to dealing with synths that want to escape isn’t to fix the synths or figure out why, it’s to stop the people who are helping them after they escape? Who pose absolutely no threat to you in your underground bunker filled with killing machines? And why do you even care about synths escaping? I sat in a room and watched you make a new one in about 3 minutes.
All of that, and still no attempt at explaining what the point of creating the synths in the first place is/was, or why it was so important to get them to “gen 3” quality. Slave labor? Helping humanity? Replacing or improving people? It ends up feeling like a ton of resource expenditure for nothing. Literally creating more mouths to feed with no reason behind it.
Also I wanted to shoot “Father” in the head the minute he opened his condescending old mouth.
Or The Railroad:
Fools!
OK, you love the synths. So much that you will kill everyone in the Institute, including some of the other synths?
And then you’ll destroy the Institute, so there are no more synths ever? And so none of the existing ones can be repaired?
You’ve just “doomed” your precious synths to non-existence in some number of years.
Or The Minutemen:
Losers!
Ok, I built you a dozen well-fortified bases, armed and armored its denizens, furnished and decorated your homes, and built up a trade network. Yet you numbskulls can’t improve your own weapons or gear (or even get better ones out of a friggin’ BOX), or manage to fight off a few raiders? MinuteMEN? It’s more like MinuteMAN: Me. I’m the only one that does a damn thing.
You don’t patrol. You don’t look to find other settlements. You just take credit for all my work!
The Minecrafting was fun, but I’d have made it so the settlers collected resources and built their own stuff on their own schedule. Give a few perks if you want to be a Builder or Architect or whatever. Gated “leveling” or improving the Minutemen based on how many settlements you had. Or even kept some further crafting options gated by settlement level. Made “happiness” affect whether villages would defect to a faction or how much they’d produce (in a meaningful way). SOMETHING.
There are so many missed opportunities here, whether beats that could have easily or simply enriched the story, or gameplay tweaks that would have reduced nuisance. As Tom noted, “State of Decay” handled nearly all of this so much better.
Even if I drop the RPG stuff out, the combat is still kinda crummy. Outside of VATS, the shooting is under-developed. Inside of VATS, you quickly become a death machine. It’s entertaining, but it robs combat of any significance.
That said, I’ll probably start again on a harder level!Preformatted text
