Fallout 4 (2015)

Overall i've spend a lot of hours enjoying Fallout 4. It's a decent open-world action game with satisfying gunplay and character progression. My only problem with the game was with two things:

First one is how much worse of a job Bethesda does with story and world building compared to original Fallout, Fallout 2 and New Vegas. RPG elements in this game are really weak, and lots of things just make no sense. That's the reason i can see why old die-hard Fallout fans hate fourth entry and that is why i try to look at it more like an open-world looter shooter action game, with a bit of RPG elements on top.

Second issue was, again, related to it being made by Bethesda with their offensively terrible engine. Words can't describe how much less enjoyable my experience turned out to be cause of all these game ruining bugs and glitches. There was a whole specter and it's too many to list, starting from quests bugging out and being unable to finish and ending with random extremely long loading times or resolution bugs that give you no choise, but to restart the game/reboot PC. And yes, this is a 2015 game that also got a lot of updates and patches, and it doesn't have a windowed fulscreen option and just can't work properly without fan-made mods and fixes.

P.S. An honorable mention to the Simulacrum quest from the Far Harbor DLC, which has to be the most boring, annoying and redundant quest i've ever witnessed in any videogame ever.

Despite all that, i still managed to beat it and it seems to have positive reviews overall. What can i say, Todd Howard is lucky that Fallout 4 is still fun to play and has plenty of redeeming qualities despite all its flaws.

There's probably very little to say about this game that hasn't already been said, but I played it in 2024 with the new features and performance added for the series X, so I have no complaints about jank or performance or bugginess.

When Fallout 4 was good, it was great. Some of the non-main quest lines were imaginative and fun (Cabot house is one that comes to mind, the future society halloween party). The coolest moment in Fallout 4 for me was Having collected a bunch of eddie winter holotapes and become curious where the story would go and then meeting Nick Valentine and realizing on my own that he was part of the story

Unfortunately it's impossible to tell which quests will have fun environmental story telling and which quests will just be "clear out this nest of raiders/gunners/super mutants/synths", which made a lot of the game start to feel onerous. Particularly with the random "protect this settlement" minuteman quests, or the side fetch quests associated with the the brotherhood.

I did end up giving this 4 stars because once I realized this, I was fine skipping the stuff that seemed boring and just engaging with the fun paths of the game that I found. I'll likely never touch this one again, and I'm sure there's a lot I missed in my one playthrough, but I do think Bethesda got a lot right with Fallout 4 despite what I hear about the rocky launch.

I wanna clarify first thing that there ARE multiple endings, and I have only finished one, but because I have seen a ending, I am going to consider it a soft finish.

Now with that out of the way, Fallout 4 IS my favorite Fallout game. Which I know can get you killed in some places, but I'm not afraid to consider it as such! Obviously its not the best game ever, there's lots of bugs, some missions are boring, the settlement system is not extremely fleshed out other than the building aspect, but where it hits, it hits hard! I think the environment looks phenomenal, and rlly gives me that post-apocalypse feel even more so than the other Fallout entries, and the gameplay, and builds are very fun! One of my favorite parts about the game is simply just getting a shoddy weapon, or power armor, and custom building the way I want. It's very fun unlocking a new perk and being able to change a weapon more and more. Another thing I love is how I feel the companions are humanized. A lot of decisions you make shapes the way that companion sees you, and you can ask them how they feel about things and your relationship with them. Do a bunch of things they like, they'll respect and admire you, make too many bad decisions, and they'll lose respect for you, and in extreme cases, even choose to not travel with you. Which I think is a very cool and interesting mechanic. Overall, I think the gameplay is solid, writing is good, and story is somewhat interesting. So I give Fallout 4 a confident 4 stars!

Got Fallout London working and I'm really loving it. It's my first experience with a total conversion mod for Fallout so wasn't sure what to expect but yeah... it feels like a brand new game. I'm getting some F3 / NV vibes too in the execution which I love.

It's definitely appealing seeing my home country as the setting for the game, the voice acting and intro is spot on for Fallout, the radio stations and ambient music is very fitting with church bells echoing faintly for suspense during dark interior sections.

The props and environments are really detailed too and a standout from the beginning, absolutely adore the ATTA-Boy and terminal re-designs. Looks like the ATTA-Boy is a reverse engineered pip-boy judging from the terminal entries. The UK equivalent of the Nuka Cola beverages are here too and I'm so excited to discover what else has been altered and added to fit the new setting. If the rest of the mod is like this I would not be surprised if we see this being made into a full size official spin-off one day in the distant future, assuming Todd can move away from the whole 'Fallout will only take place in the U.S' stance.

Damn it, the recent next gen update 2 from a few days ago means Fallout 4 on PC is broken again if you use mods, specifically F4SE script extender. You'll need the latest F4SE build. The website seems to have an older build so I used the Nexus page. Think you can use vortex to do the install for you but seeing as I installed the mod manually a few years ago I just did it again and replaced the files myself. All works again now!

If you do it manually make sure you don't copy the 'data' and 'src' folders across in their entirety as this might completely replace your folders which will likely have extra files in if you've been playing and using other mods. Not sure if this is actually an issue, the files might generate themselves when you launch the game, I haven't tested it as I didn't want to risk breaking my game. I went into each folder and copied the files over seperately which only took a few seconds.

I got some Fallout 4 questions for people mroe familiar with the game.

1. I am finding I'm wandering into areas that are far too high level for where I'm at (lvl 13), but very little in the game, even simply following quests, is informing me what areas are too high level. Am I missing something?

2. I am 10 hours in and have not seen a single store or trader. Where they at?

3. I keep running out of ammo, so I'm carrying like 1p guns and cycling through ammo. Can you craft ammo?

4. What is the main quest line? I literally have no idea. I've been following the Minutemen one but that just seems to revolve around the base building mini game.

I was having fun for a long while with this game, but now I'm being pretty aggressively level gated, and I'm not sure why.

Put a good few hours into this one today, and you know what? It's not half bad. Though I say that with the caveat that mods do fix one fundamental problem: The dialogue.

My experience with the PS4 version was thus: I hated the dialogue system, I hated the crafting, I hated the frankly unacceptable game-breaking bugs (like the square explosions and when the game crashed on me twice during the Deathclaw fight at the very start of the game).

I installed exactly two mods for my Xbox version: One to display the full dialogue, not just the truncated snippets that almost never bely the accuracy of the response, and one to improve the readability of the map. These massively improve the experience in a big way. I will say, though, that the limitation to only four dialogue choices at any given time, and the failure to show relevant skill checks in those choices, is a substantial downgrade from those in 3 and New Vegas. The choice to change this was braindead, to be frank.

The crafting isn't amazing, but I no loner despise it. At the time, I saw it as clear trend chasing. And it was. But taken in isolation, the idea of scrapping and rebuilding settlements is cool - even if it's something I'm probably going to ignore completely.

The technical issues are where the biggest improvements come. Quite frankly, the game is rock solid. No crashes, no bugs that I've seen, and overall just a smooth experience. It'll occasionally stutter when I'm passing into a loading zone in the open world, but it barely ever happens. Everything else just works great.

Overall, I'm really enjoying my time with this. I can already tell it's just not as interesting as 3 and NV, but it's also not the garbage fire I thought it was at launch. Will probably wind up finishing it.

Update on the modding situation: I went to continue my gameplay today and F4SE (Fallout 4 Script Extender) finally spat me out the version mismatch error.

F4SE relies on native coding and, second to the creator, it was broken in the same exact way SKSE had been broke back when the Anniversary Edition came out. Luckily it isn't as complicated than that (the Anniversary Edition, while being a stand-alone purchase, also pushed an update on Skyrim: Special Edition that broke everything for a while, even clothing mods).

At this point, I'd advise rolling back for the time being or wait a couple more days since creator ianpatt has already been at work for a pre-release - you can read more about it on the F4SE Mod Page. Second post in the forum details how to downgrade by hand.

If you want to auto-downgrade: Fallout 4 Downgrader and STEAM - Skip Next-Gen update are already out - one downgrades an already updated version, the other prevents your STEAM from downloading the updated version.

I'll post more when I see new updates on the whole thing but as far as I know, only F4SE dependent mods were impacted on top of some overhaul mods that didn't use pre-combines of textures and assets.

Paid $15 to play about 15 hours and the 15-year-old formula is showing its age.

Last played in 2015 on the PS4. Thought it was fine. After watching the show, I decided to grab it on PC with all the DLC and install along with 700+ mods. TLDR - even 4 DLCs and 700 mods cant save what is a very rough experience.

For anyone who still wants to have a go at it, here is what I did with good results:

• Spent $10 to buy the GOTY edition on sale
• Spent $5 to buy NexusMods premium for a month
• Downloaded and installed A StoryWealth mod collection

The very first thing that stuck out to me while playing this game was how big it was. Getting invested was easy with its well-paced quests and a variety of different unique characters. However, it eventually feels like you are not progressing at all. I felt out of ammo every 3 seconds with flies killing me in two shots as my wallet got emptier. The more I leveled up and completed tasks the harder the game became. Other than that, the game was bugged filled; I experienced at least 3-4 bugs or glitches every time I sat down to play and the wait times were painful. Overall the game just felt off for me and the bugs did not help. On the plus side, the story was refreshing and interesting while the side content piqued my interest. It's a mixed bag that ranks right in the middle on its own franchise for me.

imo awful fallout and rpg. many things are a big mess. at the very least I would like this to have gotten some lore down and npcs who dont make one roll eyes second playthrough. these games are getting worse in this regard. Here's the short version have a kid, have a spouse, run into the vault with family wake up in cryosleep to see family killed/kidnapped (does it matter?) go back to sleep. wake up. get cranky. cry a bit. fight a bit. get busy with stupid stuff. become errand boy. forget about family. do a lot of sidequests all over the world for no reason and build up cities out of trash (also for no reason). oh wait reminded of family. get around to finding kidnapped kid. shoot kidnapper. kid is stuck in glass cage. cant find key. wait look at pipboy. oh i killed my kid? he was an old man. Was i really doing sidequests for 60 years LOL thats the game in a nutshell and my playthrough. I think I got overseer'ed and howarded on this one. On the positive side, very phildickian whole nine yards, and the power armor is really cool. and the detail in dungeons is good and wandering around is a hoot. :)

fair to decent bethesda game/engine. Technical messy at times but impressive 'when it works'. Has some of the same old problems always had... BUT some nice whistles. The bad thing is that anyone who plays it for more than a few hours and you will peer through the cracks and see the janks. The worst thing if you've played all these games these flaws become like fingernails on a chalkboard... Play it extensively it can really drive you nuts lol. I had a panic attack level of "'oh my god they are NEVER going the fix jiggly shit" moment. BUT credit must be given for a game engine that can render shrapnel count, shell casings that will stay (and even roll) even when cells are left and returned to, and more. Some of these are things I've NEVER seen in a game... Too bad you have to take the time to mod a lot of things to get best mileage out of it. On the other hand its not very optimized (not just shadows). Strange things can make it chug and hiccup too. Reason being it wasn't designed to do a lot of these things. Also when you enahnce an engine that feels the same as it did pre-oblivion is that and call it great for its effects it is very much lipstick pig praising an iteration of an engine that very much should have been replaced long ago. The net result is it will show its quirks and jangles if you spend time with it, which most reviewers def did not.

These two things are the big crits against the game and not to be taken lightly either. it makes it feel like a massive space hulk of a game. It's size, its design and aesthetic all feel like a jangly metaphor (that feeling that the good neighbor 'problem area' evokes). Between the ancient origins of the underlying engine twirling its way through time and becoming amagalmated with all kinds of stuff it picks up along the way, becoming twisted into some kind of 'lore-friendly' festering foulness to the final-bethesda-form (You scared yet? pseudosteampunk. zombies that arent zombies. No Space Marines Here!) Even though this game is pure heresy (To Fallout, To the RPG, and to the industry for showing that you CAN/SHOULD do business this way) there IS a strange beauty to it all.

But mabye it gets better. what emerges out of the warp. A strange artifact. and a good one... The good things are from the angle that this is in some ways a highly glorified STALKER, (One of the few games i've played that is comparable) with great mods to pick from which I am finding in my second playthrough, the best way to play this game. Good combat mods are things like War of The Commonwealth, rain of brass petals, Ammo Tweaks, Visual Reload and some good ol fashion crazy OP'd Bullet Time! (I also like Plunder as it simply makes junk and scrounging less of a thing and makes containers feel more like the containers they represent. and this helps with those who want to spend less time with it) Grenades and explosion settings are also worth fiddling with as this game can really get nuts with them. There are lots of things to pick from when enhancing combat or mechanics, which really are the games strongest suite thought not for all.

i have not seen a lot of mods out there for fallout 4 that were similiar to some of the things i saw for skyrim that really do enhance the RPG element of it, which I found quite dissapointing as I was actually expecting a bit more in the wake of skyrim's lauding... (Skyrim had lots of New Lands mods, and the truly impressive Interesting NPCS. which is the most professional fan-made mod EVER.. and quite a bit of special and weird content built around roles and things unique to a specific thing a player might be seeking, NV also had a rather wide and good mix of many things)

Fallout 4 does however have atomic radio+Tales. while I just did one side quest of it so far (last night) it is not as massive as interesting NPCS but has a similiar feel so far. It's really cool if you want an RPG out of the game but its a relatively small mod, not a massive overhaul.

Final Note I think the settlements system is one of the most underdeveloped and poorly implemented things bethesda has yet to do. This was the big thing I was looking forward to from the game after coming to grips it was going to fail as an RPG and likely with the story, but this too I am tempted to even call it a disaster, maybe even diabolical. At first I thought it was interesting and spent time with it, by the end I felt like I had wasted my time and regretted it. I've seen several mods do some cool things with it but nothing really feels right, in the end its like a player home you dont really use but work your ass off to get going. (I am in the camp that feels that horse armor, player homes, settlement DLCs and 'fix the jiggly shit VR edition patch' are all basically same scam)

F4 has to be the strongest clashing feelings of love and hate i've had for a game. Its the things that make it bad and the things that make it good. Take one franchise drag it through the trash, take another one and imitate its likeness and other things (The best space marine simulator). Take the engine with its flaws, :rakes nails on chalkboard: now examine god rays, much improved physics, water, spawning system, and many mods that do cool things with it. (like use .38 special rounds in a 357 magnum)

8/10

I think they improved the shooting mechanics but they still feel weird. I hate V.A.T.S. and I always have; I think they should have just polished the combat instead of including that. The quests are meh, the music is decent, the graphics are fine, but the characters are mostly boring as well. I just think that Bethesda needs to step their game up because expansive open worlds are being done all the time now, and in the case of something like The Witcher 3.... better. Take a look at the quests in The Witcher as opposed to those here and it's almost embarrassing.

Still a solid game, though. It serves its purpose mostly.