Building a better tomorrow with Bethesda’s latest wasteland epic
Brace yourselves for what’s about to follow: Fallout 4 is an absolute mess. Before reaching for your Fat Man, however, take note: this is as much praise as it is censure. If there’s one thing that sets Bethesda’s role-playing games apart, other than their ridiculous scale, it’s the junk. Every crevice is packed with knick-knacks, all subject to real-time physics and most surplus to requirements, and it’s this confusing sprawl that makes the landscape feel lived in. There’s nothing quite so human, after all, as the ability to generate clutter.
Fallout 4 upholds that tradition and then some. You can’t go five minutes in its exquisitely trashed, 23rd century Boston without tripping over somebody’s idea of treasure: old typewriters and bottles of Nuka Cola squirrelled away under rusting cars, skeletons clutching makeshift rifles in closets, railside ditches full of mutant vegetation. The larger interiors – which range from dusty car factories and military blimps to mouldy subway stations and cargo ships – are crammed with safes, chemical coolers, evidence rooms and pickable pockets. Even the toilets are worth investigating, though many are boobytrapped. Heck, you’ll find things in sacks of rotting meat in Fallout 4 that would qualify as quest rewards in other RPGs.
IN-TRINKET
There’s a familiar downside to this abundance, however, and it’s that you’ll spend most of your time nudging up against your carry limit, weighing the merits of different armour pieces and filling your AI companion’s rucksack with valuable items that aren’t suited to the task at hand. The attention to detail is undoubtedly engrossing – every heap of bones and bric-abrac hints at some long-forgotten misadventure, whether it’s tragic or amusing or somewhere in between – but the sheer quantity of stuff has an overwhelming, desensitising effect.
More importantly, it’s a betrayal of the premise. This isn’t so much a ‘post-apocalyptic survival’ experience as it is a gigantic, radioactive buffet of retro memorabilia. Indeed, many of the missions take you to historic sites and erstwhile tourist spots – you’ll battle mutants for control of a crumbling neo-classical library, and turn a minigun on Raiders who’ve built their nest in the attic of an ancient courthouse.
Compulsive hoarders, of course, will be in their element. If you’re after something a little more stringent, make sure you pick the highest difficulty setting – it not only toughens up foes, but it reduces the effects of radiation meds, raising the stakes when you consume uncooked food. You might also want to make a beeline for the Glowing Sea, a nightmarish region at the edge of the world map, where burrowing Radscorpions and Deathclaws are common sights and salvage is relatively scarce.
SPOILS OF WAR
If Fallout 4 ever feels too much like a loot-’em-up, know that all the junk you amass does have a long-term value – providing, that is, you’re the settler type. This instalment’s defining feature is town-building, which becomes available soon after your character, a resident of one of the famous underground Vaults, leaves his or her refuge in search of a missing loved one. The landscape is dotted with workshops that unlock once you’ve completed a quest, such as wooing (or slaughtering) the locals.
Click on a workshop and you’ll enter a building mode that allows you to dismantle objects for materials, then select and place structures, crops, generators, furniture and defences. Given a decent supply of food, water, bedding and the odd guardpost to stave off raiders, people will then come to live in these new colonies. The more luxurious you make the settlement, the happier the population will be, with jollier citizens being more productive when it comes to creating resources.
The brilliance of this system, assuming you don’t completely ignore it, is how it flavours the otherwise very familiar business of exploration and scavenging. You aren’t just combing bombedout supermarkets and churches for a new breed of laser rifle or some story-related MacGuffin. You’re also on the lookout for hotplates and alarm clocks, because these house the circuitry you need for water purifiers and turrets.
One of my favourite personal objectives involves digging up a complete set of balls and cues for my settlement’s pool table. It doesn’t quite counteract the deflation of having to continually find space in my inventory for slightly better grades of gun, but it’s a step in the right direction.
HALF-ALIVE
Town planners of a more esoteric bent will be delighted by the inclusion of various lightboxes, switches, pressure pads and sound emitters – by yoking these to a terminal, you can program elaborate cosmetic setups such as melodies that play when you enter houses. The depth can’t rival a thoroughbred building sim such as Minecraft, and the asset library strikes a weird balance between alt-’50s kitsch and stylised wastelander scrappiness, but there’s a nice spread of opportunities for the budding theme-park architect. It’s just a shame that the townsfolk aren’t plausible enough to really bring your colonies to life.
You can assign them to crops and stalls, equip them with cast-off weapons and send them to other towns to link up workshop inventories, but they mostly act like zombies, ambling about in a daze. Object placement is also quite unwieldy – the first-person view doesn’t suit intricate building projects, and clipping parts together can be a real headache. Still, the satisfaction when you do chance upon a footsore wanderer knocking back a whiskey in your handbuilt tavern is immense. All Fallout games deal with the collapse of society. But this is the first that lets you start afresh, and while there’s room for improvement, the foundations are sound.
Too bloodthirsty to settle down and try your hand at interior decor? Not to worry, the gunplay has you covered. It’s both intelligent and highimpact, though there are plenty of rough edges (and hilarious glitches). The AI wobbles between competent and dim – enemies have a solid grasp of flanking and will throw grenades to flush you out, but they’ll often forget you were ever there should you escape detection for a moment or two. The same applies to allies, who range from spunky reporters through zealous soldier-boys to your faithful but idiotic hound, Dogmeat. At one point, I talk my way out of a fight only for my associate to then linger stupidly as I leave the area, triggering a battle. Later, the same character causes more frustration by somehow getting stuck in a door, necessitating a through-gritted-teeth reload.
Mercifully, companions are indestructible and will selfrevive once you’ve pacified the area, so hoiking a Molotov cocktail at a surrounded friendly is a perfectly viable strategy when the chips are truly down. It’s a bit of a shambles, all told, but the variety of weapons – modifiable at workbenches with new scopes, stocks, barrels and assorted status effects – and the grisly delight of targeting limbs in V.A.T.S. mode, are more than compensation for the spotty AI.
Engaging V.A.T.S. now slows time rather than stopping it, so there’s more pressure to think quickly. Another consequence of this small but substantial change is that you can delay a V.A.T.S. shot till a moving target is in full view, cackling obscenely as the odds of a hit climb above 50%. The trade-off is that successful accuracy rolls occasionally run awry because the target has inched back into cover. There are times, even, when the game frames an attack as the fatal blow, only for your victim to slip past the bullet, leaving the camera to pivot sheepishly around the spot where a cloud of gore and limbs should be. It’s a definite scratch in the polish, but it’s rare enough to escape with the label of charming gaffe rather than pure irritation.
VALUE ADDED
If all this sounds too fussy and abstract, fear not – you needn’t rely on V.A.T.S. to survive, though the opportunity to single out arms and legs, and thus reduce an enemy’s accuracy or movement speed, isn’t to be sneezed at.
Fallout has never seemed more assured as a first-person shooter. The guns, which range from quaint handfuls of wood and wire to sleek plastic energy weapons, are lovingly modelled and animated. You’ll often use V.A.T.S. and Call of Duty-esque tactics in tandem, of course, but there’s a catch – the same Action Point pool that lets you perform V.A.T.S. attacks is also drained when you sprint, or hold your breath to steady a scope. Is it worth galloping down the flank and rinsing that Synth the old-fashioned way? Or should you try for a slow-mo targeted shot from afar? It’s a great elaboration on the whole of Fallout 3’s already-celebrated approach, at once smart and cinematic.
If the gunplay has evolved, the quest design has lagged behind. Perhaps appropriately, Fallout 4 often feels like a game from the past. It’s not just that the textures and animations look primitive next to, say, Bloodborne – the paths you can take through scenarios are entertaining but ultimately very familiar (and dependent, naturally, on which character stats you choose to improve). Sometimes you’ll sneak through positions, disabling landmines while angling for a backstab. Sometimes you’ll hack terminals to disable turrets or robot defences – some of the old military structures are manned by Protectrons, which can be reprogrammed with different combat behaviours. Sometimes you’ll pick a lock to open up a side-route, getting the drop on the area boss without rousing his minions. And sometimes you’ll win some key NPC around in conversation, skipping the chaos entirely.
RAD MAX
Dialogue paths are just as predictable, though the writing itself has moments of verve – my highlights include the femme fatale robot vendor (hack her terminal for grim yet chuckle-worthy insights on the neighbourhood) and Strong, the Super Mutant on a mission to drink the “milk of human kindness,” based on a somewhat literal reading of Macbeth.
Usually, your contributions to the chinwag come down to the choice between random sarcasm, playing the goody-two-shoes or refusing to take sides. It holds up well enough – there are times when picking the right response can save you a whole heap of trouble – but it can seem backward when placed alongside the more nuanced writing of The Witcher 3, in particular.
The script’s ups and downs aside, Bethesda’s overall approach to open-world narrative could use a rethink. It’s sometimes claimed that the studio’s penchant for text artefacts such as intercepted notes is a lacklustre way to tell a story – you might as well just read a Wiki entry, right? But I don’t think that’s quite fair. There’s no reason why pausing to skim an old diary can’t be compelling, providing this is positioned as a plausible activity in the context, and many of the scraps you’ll dig up in Fallout 4 are certainly worth savouring: the best of them help flesh out your understanding of an area’s history without simply serving as a blurb.
But the exposition is often rather heavy-handed. A fair few of the terminal logs are barefaced hints about the location of tasty items. There are monologues penned by hardened criminals you really can’t imagine any sane individual writing. Sometimes, reading a document will add away point to your map in a way that doesn’t quite add up.
It’s the hallmark, again, of an RPG that hasn’t quite kept up with the march of time. Rather than iterating upon its own, well-worn narrative strategies, Bethesda would do well to heed the lessons of videogames such as The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter, Ether One or the more recent SOMA.
WASTELAND WOES
You could argue that there’s room for another strait-laced genre piece, especially when it’s as huge and opulent as Fallout undoubtedly is. And you’d have a point. For those who fall in love, Fallout 4 is a game fit to spend a nuclear winter with – the Boston wasteland is absolutely saturated with things to do and discover, even for those who resist the temptation to colonise the place. No previous Bethesda RPG comes close in terms of the ability to customise a playstyle.
Execution, however, is important. It matters as much as size, or how many mission options there are. In terms of the blow by blow, Fallout 4’s over-emphasis on loot, technical blemishes, uneven narrative and rote mission design hold back Bethesda’s latest. If only by a little.
VERDICT
A strong return for the franchise, boasting incredible customisation, a fascinating world and brutal yet brainy shooting, slightly tarnished by lacklustre AI and tedious inventory management.