Rating: A-
Bethesda Studios game director and executive producer Todd Howard recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards for his incredible contribution to open world gameplay and the gaming industry as a whole. Bethesda is extremely well known for their Elder Scrolls and Fallout series of games, and Fallout 3 is one of my favourite games of all time. Needless to say, I was pretty pumped when their newest game, Fallout 4, was announced in June of last year.
My favourite part of Bethesda games is their role-playing element. I love picking the motivations and actions of my character purely on the basis of what fake attributes I have decided to give them. In the beginning of Fallout 4, the only choice you are given is what sex to be, and your single plot-based motivation is to find your son. An association mysteriously known as “The Institute” kills your lover and kidnaps your son before freezing you in a cryogenic pod, conveniently saving your life from an atomic bomb blast. When you awake, there follows a slew of plot twists and shocking facts about your life and the world around you. The sheer number of twists in the plot isn’t that surprising, considering that you have been frozen for over 100 years.
Fallout 4 is very similar to its predecessor, Fallout 3. Both games are open-world role playing adventure games set in a post-apocalyptic world, and both have a style that combines suburban 1970s America with futuristic technology. Fallout 4 starts off with an amazing animated step by step guide of S.P.E.C.I.A.L.: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. This is the central levelling system in Fallout 4. Each perk is directly tied to the way people treat you in the post-apocalyptic Wasteland, and to how you will be able to explore the game. My go-to is to max out charisma, intelligence and agility, in order to have wider dialogue options. One thing I should clarify: while I LOVE Fallout, I am also very terrible at combat in Fallout. I can’t write much about its immense weapon customization. This is a hugely celebrated part of the franchise, but it is something I never personally explored.
What Bethesda does best is open world gameplay, and Fallout 4 is no exception. You have the freedom to explore outside of the planned storyline and go anywhere you want right from the word go. Fallout 4 is set in the vibrant and colourful environment of Boston, USA. This is a huge difference from the grey, yellow-green swampy tones of its predecessor Fallout 3. As such, exploration is a lot more enticing and rewarding. You can explore from intricate alleys, pathways and tunnels in the heart of Boston, to hydroponic farms run by robots in the wasteland and the barren but breathtaking space of the Glowing Sea where the atom bomb first hit. I was probably a solid 20 hours into playing before I even attempted to follow the story of my character (whom I named Dragonborn, because I’m a goddamn comedian). There is no shortage of stuff to do in Fallout 4: exploring vast spaces, encountering unique monsters, or being led on side missions that range from finding someone’s cat to returning a Deathclaw egg back to its nest.
While the missions were enormous fun, NPCs are a huge part of building an RPG’s universe. Out of the possibly hundreds I met, there were maybe only two or three who really stuck out to me. The rest seemed like lazily written cardboard cutouts. They had no real motivations of their own, and only existed as tools for the player to progress with. If there were a way to be more diplomatic with each faction in the Wasteland, my experience of Fallout 4 would have been a more positive one. I understand that a nuclear post-apocalyptic world is doomed to be inherently savage, but it would have been amazing to explore the world in a truly pacifist mindset. Given the motivations that I had invented for my character in my head, it was impossible to work on both sides of the conflicts destroying the Wasteland. My play through of the game was thus less meaningful than it could have been. Even though Fallout 4 is very impressively made, it was not a very memorable experience overall.