Fallout 4 Review by Mackinley Clevinger, March 6, 2016
I am, at the time of writing this piece, also glancing over the computer screen to watch the progress my settlement is making towards having one-hundred percent happiness, having just played through each of Fallout 4’s endings to keep the Railroad ending as my prime storyline for future playing. I’ve been playing the game for three months since getting it for Christmas, spending most of the winter break marathoning it before becoming busy again and reserving it for my waking hours during the weekends. I am writing this being level 105, having spent over a year in-game and eight and a half days real-time playing it, and I have one thing to say about it: Give me more.
The game is incredibly broad, stuffed to the gills with content and interesting encounters to plumb to their depths; during the ride it is fascinating and engaging as anything, but when it’s over there’s no lasting impact. You rarely feel like you’re making a difference in the world, or doing something with serious connotations; you’re the person who comes along at the end of the story and wraps it up in a pretty little bow for everyone else, before disappearing without seeming to have any real kind of presence or making a choice that changes how you play the game in any significant way.
One of my favorite side-quests was the Cabot House, which introduced so much lore about alien civilizations and a nigh-immortal family with the patriarch suffering from an unknowable ailment. Throughout all of it there are snippets of lore about ancient cities belonging to creatures that were pointedly un-human, and theories about their involvement in our development from the eyes of archaeologists and scientists who saw the world’s atomization as a hindrance to their research efforts and nothing more. It was fascinating, but the quest amounts to a raider group wanting drugs needing killing and you having to choose between releasing a homicidal maniac or kill him, after which it just stops. Centuries of lore, tons of momentum and intrigue, but your involvement stops it dead and leaves all that potential on the floor, ignored and wasted. I loved the tidbits you would learn from snooping around, hoping beyond hope that there would be something awesome at the end of it, but I killed the patriarch, got a kind of cool gun, and that was it.
The stories are engaging, but after I’m done I never think to myself ‘Oh, I should go check in with blank. “because I know from experience that there’s going to be nothing there. Even when there should be, when you’re the leader of a militia or have met a group of enterprising farming robots; it’s a world without innovation, without any drive in its characters to do anything after they’ve made the first step towards something greater. Help a pirate ship of robots blast off towards the sea, only to get stuck in a high-rise along the way? Can’t do anything with that besides watch them idle around the deck. All those companions, thirteen people to learn the stories of and gain their respect? Once that box says they idolize you, that one recurring speech about their personal issue with the world is all you’ll get from them, plot-wise.
Now, I do think the story-telling is superb, from great sweeping motions like the Prydwen showing up to introduce an unexpected element to the Commonwealth to finding a holotape about a teenaged pregnant girl who had run away from an unwelcome home to think things over in a cabin she’d visited as a child. These stories, big and small, are told incredible well, and it’s such a shame when they end despite having so much more room to grow and have an effect on the world they’ve so carefully created. The frustration at not being able to do something to help the girl in her situation because I’d come along two centuries too late really impacted me on an emotional level, but raising an eyebrow and saying ‘that’s it?’ to a quest being over with a story un-fulfilled was nothing more than disappointing.
Again, not saying it’s bad, I’m just aware of how much more it could have been, and I really, badly, want to see it all. I want them to release patches that give the companions more dialogue and conversations, another series of quests to the Minutemen and all the other factions that feel unfulfilled. I want to have more content that will give me more choice in the game’s big decisions besides deciding which two may live and which two must die, especially when you can become the serving head of multiple groups, and yet make no decision in what manner of action these groups should undertake. Now, I’m quite certain I put a spoiler warning before this, but just as a reminder, spoilers. *Ahem* Why is it that. when sympathetic individuals already exist in the Institute, I, as the Director, can’t make them treat the synths as people? Or, because I’m their leader, actually make them do anything besides whatever it was they were doing before I took control? I’m being told by the story that I have ultimate power, that I’m in a position that can actually do something, but when it comes to player-interaction or changing the nature of the game, there’s no real depth to it besides a title and a few different repeated lines from NPC’s.
The story was a fascinating one about what being human means, about oppression of those that are different and have been enslaved, and about how fear of the unknown drives the masses to do horrible things, and I adored it, but at the end of the day I never really made a choice besides which horse to back, and even then the brunt of the game will feel the same regardless of who I chose. Massive organizations moving around, huge power struggles going on, and all this talk about pieces being in motion in the Commonwealth, but nothing I, or anyone else, does anything to change it. This exists on the large and small scale, from being a powerless leader of hundreds to the world still being blasted and grey after two-hundred years of human presence and interaction. I know that an incredible amount of thought and preparation went into this game, but did no one consider that an entrenched group of people might clean up the home their family had lived in for decades, or be capable of doing something besides sitting around twiddling their thumbs until you came along and moved the story forward one step before joining them?
I know that it’s not easy to achieve the level of complexity and depth that I’m calling for here, it took years and hundreds of people to do just this; which is, itself, an amazing game that I don’t think I’ve wasted my time in playing for nearly nine solid-days in total. Fallout 4 is definitely an evolution from previous games, and I am confident that more such steps forward will be taken by the series in future to encapsulate the attention of millions just as this game and its predecessors have, but the shallow nature of its story is still something that is present now which can’t be ignored, which feels like could be fixed by just a little more effort on the tail-end of each of these stories. A few more lines of dialogue from characters to turn a dead-end into the start of something more in the future that could come along as an update or an expansion, or be the basis for something in a future game. Companions that feel more alive than someone spouting the same two or three lines when you bump into them at a settlement, wanting to talk about that outcry of their feelings they’d had three months ago and nothing else. Your own character – so much more alive and organic than before – who still feels like a blank-faced viewer of a world vivid and colorful on the surface but sadly drab beneath that top layer.
On matters besides story, which I’ve focused on because I have a vested interest in storytelling in all forms of media and feel that my main thoughts on Fallout 4 come from that region, I’ve found them to be far more advanced and well-implemented than in games previous, the new perk chart and leveling feeling more natural and versatile than before, and much easier on the eye than a long, boring list you had to spend half an hour reading through. Planned critical hits that you can save for when you need them make you feel more like the action hero that your character is, the ‘one-in-a-million’ shot saved for the big-bad instead of being wasted on a radroach. It helps you be able to tell a smaller story of personal triumph, and build a character that feels more alive and vibrant than the voiceless, faceless one we’ve had before.
The game is, as many before have been, of a slightly more-buggy nature, but given the grand-scale of what they accomplish I can forgive the bugs to an extent, though the occasional crash or enemy stuck in a wall that has made me have to load an older save has been an annoyance that took me out of the moment. It isn’t exactly a well-oiled machine either, with characters often being interrupted mid-dialogue and starting over again from the start, or walking away while they’re talking and you’re trapped in the talking camera-angle. Overall, however, it’s a very impressive display of ingenuity in video games that works fairly well, with the occasional issue that can cause considerable distress.
My thoughts on this game largely dwell on that of the story, big and small, because that is what has stood out to me; the faults therein. When it comes to most of the rest of the game, it has all been excellent. I do attribute the two-hundred and sixty-four Minutemen quests I’ve done to be a story-related gripe, as, logically, being the General of that militia should mean that I order people to go do those quests, not that I go, myself, every time, and that locations with two-dozen turrets need help every other day. That’s not exactly a new gripe among people who have played this game, but I still stand by it as a part of my issues with storytelling. Combat is fun, though the age-old issue of overpowered melee seems to be present still, with there being much variety in gun-play and strategy, my own coming down to a huge sneak multiplier and a very accurate somehow-silenced Gauss Rifle.
I think what might have been interesting to do with the story was not to have your character be someone who influences the world by being asked to, but by being someone who influences it by merely being there. It’s just one of many options to do something of that ilk, but imagine if the entire Commonwealth had been for the Institute’s testing, being reset on occasion and begun anew because, it turns out, everyone is a synth. Every raider, every settler, everyone in the Commonwealth is a synth stuck in the cyclical testing of the Institute, and then you show up, oblivious. The Railroad exists purely to test the Institute against future invaders, and your invitation and subsequent joining of them is the Institute’s usual method of dealing with rogue variables, that first mission with Deacon supposed to result in him killing you before returning to the experimentation, except you do things differently, and survive, either by killing Deacon or talking him out of it. You’ve thrown a wrench in the gears, and the network of synths across the Commonwealth fall out of the Institute’s line because of you, factions rising then and there for you to interact with, the Institute desperately trying to fix things from a distance before, later on, coming to you directly after you’ve had some time interacting with this world you’ve unwittingly created.
I’m not sure it’d be better, or perfect, but that kind of a story, where you can really interact with the world and shape it in quantifiable and noticeable ways, is something that would be nice to see in the future in the Fallout format. I loved this game, just as I loved playing Fallout 3 as well. I only liked New Vegas, never beating it after I got tired of its best aspect to me: the gun variety, which Fallout 4 expounded upon and made bigger and better. The world of New Vegas, the way the people of it interacted (or didn’t) and the emptiness of it always got to me in a way Fallout 3 and 4 didn’t. There weren’t the small stories that made you care, or room for your character to create their own in small ways like I can in the other two.
Fallout 4 was, after I reach 100% Happiness on this settlement, a fantastic game that did so many things right and better than its predecessors which gripped me hard enough to make me not question what I would be doing each weekend for months straight, the interest present despite spending five days of the week busy and unable to play it. It told beautiful stories, big and small, and crafted a new world that I loved to explore and learn more about. It’s only too bad that at the end of my playing, that world seems to be emptier than when I first stepped into it. I had my fun, and I look forward to the next game to be released, but I still can’t shake the knowledge that there was more potential here than there were things done with it.
And would you look at that, I’m a Benevolent Leader at last. With the ending of my time in Fallout 4 until the first DLC comes along, I’m going to close out this piece of writing. War may never change, but the newest installment in the Fallout series certainly has, and for the better. It may still have some of the story issues that are present in any game that’s limited by a lack of resources and time to make perfect, but it’s closer than many others on reaching that point, and overall it is a much stronger and more pleasurable game than many others that exist. I didn’t even get into the design-revolution that was the addition of settlements, but I think by now you know how I feel on this game. Thanks for reading, and have fun with whatever you’re about to go do.