Fallout 4 (PC)

Developer:

Bethesda

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Release Date:

2015

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Systems:

Win, PS4, Xbox One

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This week month on Super Adventures I'm spoiling the first couple of hours of Fallout 4!

You might be wondering why I'm writing about a complicated modern RPG again when I should know better by now. There's already a hundred reviews, streams and YouTube videos out there about it, so it seems a bit redundant. I have a good reason though: I already played all the others (aside from Fallout Shelter and Brotherhood of Steel) and it seemed wrong to leave it out.

Plus it means I get to mention the drama going on in late 2013 when there were competing teaser sites like thesurvivor2299.com and thepropheteer.com all appearing to be revealing the game's existence, and people were trying to figure out which of them was legit and which were fake (they were all fake).

Thankfully the game actually was being developed in secret, because that's typically what you do when your last game was a huge hit (unless you're Valve). Though it seems weird to me that after all this time this was only Bethesda's second attempt at a Fallout RPG. Obsidian were the ones that made Fallout: New Vegas and I'm curious to see if Bethesda decided to take anything from it. Or take anything away from their last game.

I'll be playing it without any mods, by the way, because I'm not really keen on tweaking my game. I feel like opening the box like that lets some of the magic escape (plus I'd be too tempted to give myself an infinite ammo rocket launcher and fly around on a fire-breathing unicorn or something). Also this means I get to ignore the Creation Club entirely and all of the bullshit that goes along with that!

(Click the screenshots if you want to make them very slightly bigger.)

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Great, my controls aren't working! The game's not making a great first impression here.

Though at least I've got a great new version of the theme to listen to while I figure this out (Youtube link). I was expecting each sequel to sound darker and more dramatic than the last, until they had to bring in the Vikings from the Skyrim theme over to do some more chanting, but they've gone in a different direction here and made it warmer and more hopeful.

Aha, it's defaulted to my Xbox 360 controller and refuses to accept anything else, so I have to turn that off before I get my mouse and keys back. Man It's been seven years since Fallout 3 and Bethesda still haven't figured out how to switch to the device I'm pressing the buttons on yet. They should phone up basically any other developer and ask them they do it already!

I've got a choice of difficulties and they've added a survival mode like in New Vegas. This mode switches off fast travel, only lets you save at beds, makes everything more dangerous, adds hunger and thirst, and is basically there so that some people can say 'This is how Fallout 4 is meant to be played!' Well I hope the kind of folks who say that have enjoyed their self-inflicted misery (no seriously, it's cool that people have the choice now), but there ain't no way I'm ever turning that on.

Whoa, the game has a (skippable) live-action intro! Honestly never saw this coming. I love how live action is sneaking back into games a little these days, except now it's in HD and doesn't have obvious compression artefacts and scanlines. Though it does still make it obvious that the real-time in-game visuals are still far from photoreal. Unless you're playing a racing game.

It was hard to choose which bit of the video to screenshot, but I decided to go with the guy making the proto-Pip-Boy, because I love how it counts as a portable wearable device in this timeline. The intro goes through the history of the Fallout universe, making it real clear that it's not set in the 50s, technology evolved differently here, and it was actually 2077 that things really went to shit. Because war, war never changes.

But the voice over actor has, as they've gotten some new guy to do the opening narration! They didn't get Ron Perlman back! Probably because it's supposed to be the protagonist saying it this time.

Oh shit, it's given me a proper well-lit face editor right at the start and the guy's not even bobbing his head around much. I can even see what they look like when they're talking!

It's got a very modern interface which lets me click and drag parts of the face myself instead of using sliders, so face editors have finally caught up with Super Mario 64. The game's letting me choose a 'type' for each bit of the face, then sculpt it and choose a colour, and it all works far better than Fallout 3's editor does. I'm tempted to test how much control I have by making another Solid Snake clone to sneakily edit into my Super Adventures in Face Editors article... but nah.

There's definitely enough hairstyles, facial hair and skin tones here to keep me happy (no anime hair colours though), and it's even letting me edit the body type this time, but if I try switching my character's sex, it changes character entirely to his wife. So I'm editing two people here at once, then choosing which of them I want to walk away as. Which is cool.

It's kind of off-putting though how the other character keeps commenting on all my changes, saying things like "You have such strong cheekbones!" Can I have a little privacy in the bathroom when I'm doing plastic surgery on myself please?

And then when I quit the editor it turned out that mirrors don't actually work in the game and they were basically staring at a sheet of shiny metal the whole time. Twist ending!

It's got a tiny pre-war prologue! This was right up at the top of my list of things I wanted from a new Fallout game, just above 'not being set in America for a change'. I get that that series has been all about 50s American style, but it'd be nice to see how the rest of the world is doing.

It's so weird to be able to walk around in Fallout's world before the nukes fell though. All the furniture's intact, the food's edible, and the robot's rust-free. There aren't even any skeletons posed to suggest the tragic circumstances of their demise.

It's hard to make a direct comparison with everything clean and tidy like this, but the visuals seem like a real step up from Fallout 3's, and this is with them only set to 'High'. Presumably 'Ultra' makes it look noticeably prettier, but I want my 60 FPS and I can't be bothered to quit the game and go back to the launcher every time I want to tweak a graphics setting, so I'm happy to leave it.

I keep trying to pick up my pristine pre-war possessions so I can sell it all later, but the character's describing it all instead. Out loud. With a voice. Seems that Bethesda's trying something new this time.

A Vault-Tec representative soon appeared at the door, eager to get me to sign up for a place in the Vault 111 nuclear shelter. I'm pretty sure that's what's going on anyway; I missed the start of the conversation due to this new dialogue system.

Instead of choosing my lines from a list, I'm now picking from one of four options mapped to the arrow keys. Trouble is that I set my movement buttons to the arrow keys, so by walking up to say 'hi' I accidentally chose the top option without even seeing what it was. I'm getting the feeling that mouse and keyboard support wasn't  a top priority for Bethesda.

My character's not so worried about the threat of total atomic annihilation, but they've got a baby to think about now so I finally relented and said I'd do the thing to avoid being caught in a 'But thou must' loop (or worse, nuked).

So now he wants me to write my attributes down on the registration form. No need to answer a G.O.A.T. test this time around, I just put in some numbers and I'm done.

I want to be good at shooting things, carrying things and talking, so I should raise strength and charisma first. But I'll also need to be quick and tough, so I'll put some points in agility and endurance too. Though being a badass won't help if I'm blind and unlucky, so I'll stick some points into perception and luck too. Crap now I'm basically at four in everything. Hey didn't Fallout 3 let me have an average of five or six? They've stolen twelve points from me!

Okay I'm going to leave it like that, but put a few extra points into intelligence because it means I get XP faster. And that's the character creation done; it didn't ask me to choose my traits, perks or skills.

I had to go into a bedroom and acknowledge my baby's existence to move the prologue forward, but it seems that doing this has inadvertantly triggered a nuclear strike on cities across the US! Which kind of sucks, as pre-war Fallout is so pretty, with its bright blue sky and healthy trees. Can't we just cancel the apocalypse and leave it like this?

My character's husband grabbed the baby and headed for the vault, but I tried running the other way to cancel the scripted catastrophe. Sadly going anywhere but the vault leads to a premature atomic detonation.

Of course, the nukes go off whatever I do, but it works better for the plot if I'm at the Vault when it happens. Hey, this is just like that time I nuked Megaton for fun in Fallout 3! Except this time I can't immediately quickload and then choose not to.

I'm sure I'm not supposed to be looking directly at the blast like this, and being outdoors right now can't be good for me either, but thankfully the lift started moving before we got incinerated. So I guess we're all stuck living in Vault 111 then.

Man, I thought Fallout 3's prologue took forever to play through, but that only spanned 19 years. It'll be 200 years before they let us out this time.

After all these games it's great to finally see what it was like for the people who took shelter in the Vaults, unaware that they'll never see the outside again. They even gave me a Vault suit to wear!

Though these decontamination pods we're being put into sure look a bit... cryogenic. Climbing into a fridge to avoid a nuke is a bit too Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for my liking, but I suppose it's better than suffering an eternity of looping dialogue.

Once I got my suit on and stepped inside the plot started moving again, and it turns out that they were actually freezing pods. My character woke up an indeterminate amount of time later to see two people who likely shouldn't be here opening her husband's pod, swiping the baby and putting a bullet in him. Those bastards went and fridged the protagonist's love interest while they were both inside fridges! Then they turned the freeze back on while I was in the middle of helplessly hammering away at the window in desperation. Assholes.


POSSIBLY YEARS LATER.

By the time I got out I found that the babysnatchers were long gone and the folks in the other freezers were dead. The computers say they all asphyxiated due to life support failure, which isn't what you want. So now this has become the reverse of Fallout 3, as instead of a teen looking for their father, I'm a parent looking for their child.

So I went off and explored the metal hallways, punching giant mutated insects along the way and checking the old monochrome terminals for the story of what happened to everyone here. So it's been a pretty typical trip through a Vault so far, except for the fact that my character's still talking out loud to herself.

At least I'm able to collect junk now. Plus I found a 10mm pistol and some ammo lying on the Overseer's desk, which I'll soon be putting to good use. My character was a lawyer until 20 minutes ago so she's not exactly combat trained, but violence seems to come to her naturally. She's also able to pick locks, though she won't even attempt to open that Master difficulty lock with a Cryo gun behind it over there. I'm going to need to come back later when I've raised that skill a bit... or however it works in this.

Whoa, it turns out that these ubiquitous computer terminals aren't just good for diaries and door locks, as they've apparently got CPU powerful enough to move animated sprites around a screen! I'm surprised.

Unfortunately, Donkey Kong is not one my character's talents, at least not when I'm the one steering the hero sprite.

I used the Overseer's computer to open the passage to the Vault door, but it turns out that I need a Pip-Boy to get the thing open. Weird how the Vaults in the other games never had this requirement. Then again I've never been without a Pip-Boy before.

So I went off and did another lap around the tiny Vault 111 looking for one single Pip-Boy, with no luck. Because it's actually lying on the floor right under the button and I just didn't notice it. In my defence, I got tired of examining the dead people here when I realised it wasn't ever going to get me any loot.

I sure found a lot of junk lying around though, which I can now search through with my handy handheld computer. It's also keeping track of all the trespasses, assaults and murders carried out by its owner, which probably isn't the kind of stat tracking you want in a device that anyone can check. Plus it says that the date is 2287, which puts this game 210 years after the bombs dropped and 10 years later than Fallout 3. I guess they pushed the date forward to give them the opportunity to bring old characters across.

The Pip-Boy looks exactly as I remember it looking in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, so they haven't gone and changed everything for the hell of it... probably. I'm going to go look through my old Fallout 3 screenshots to compare it.

Fallout 3 (PC)

Wow, okay that's actually very different. For one thing they've flipped all the buttons over so that you can reach them without putting your arm over the screen. It's still got a nice fake monochrome screen effect on it though, they didn't update it for modern players by sticking a smart phone touch screen on it or something stupid like that.

Though you can actually control the Pip-Boy from your smart phone. They even made a limited edition which came with a plastic Pip-Boy shell to stick it in. But my phone doesn't have the RAM to run the app so I'm spared from having to try it out.

With the door opened and my junk collection examined I'm finally ready to step on the lift and see what's left of the world. First though I'm given one last chance to change my name, attributes and appearance, which is cool. I can't choose the character's sex any more though as that option got shot in the head.

Well it's certainly easier to see the wreckage of my house from here now that all the leaves have been burned away. Just looking on the bright side.

That's me by the way. Whenever you see a person with that hairstyle standing right in the middle of the shot looking off into the distance, I've switched to the third person camera mode. Which is actually very solid this time around; feels more like a proper choice and like less like an 'admire your outfit' option.

We're up near Boston for this game, and the Commonwealth is actually surprisingly pretty for a scorched post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's definitely less miserable looking than Fallout 3's Washington D.C. Though I suppose that makes sense as the capital was likely hit harder than anywhere else in the country.

Fallout 3 (PC)

Look at that sickly sky and grey landscape.... man, it's making me nostalgic. I really loved Fallout 3. Well, except for all the times that I hated it.

The HP bar, compass and AP bar have all survived into the sequel (though the AP bar's hiding right now), and there's still no regenerating health, so I'm going to need to find a bed or use a stimpak to get my bar filled up. Or I could eat something, if I don't mind some of my max health getting cut down by radiation poisoning.

My quest marker's pointing to my house right now, so I suppose I might as well go down there. I don't have to though; I can just pick a direction and keep on walking if I feel like it.

I ran into my old robot buddy Codsworth, still looking after the hedges after 210 years of solitude, and HOLY SHIT HE CALLED ME BY MY NAME OUT LOUD! I did not see that coming, especially as I went with 'Kamala' (after a few minutes of struggling to think of a name I gave up and stole Ms. Marvel's). Man, that must have been a shitty day for the actor who had to read out all those hundreds of names, with equal enthusiasm for each. He may not have even been told what he was getting into when he took the job (Bethesda like their secrets).

Out of curiosity I looked up what other names Codsworth recognises and it's a lot. Plus some games go out of their way to filter out swear words from names, but Fallout 4 takes the opposite approach and celebrates your ingenious wit by recognising names like 'Mr Fuckface', 'Mr Assface' and 'Mr Bastard'. Also 'Buffy', 'Riddick', 'Mulder' and a ton more. Which is all very impressive, but I don't get why he keeps calling my character "mum". He's definitely not saying "ma'am", I checked the subtitles.

You can see here how the new speech check system works, with an option in yellow being easier to pass than an option in red. The game's not telling my my chances of success any more, so it's unclear whether if I can eventually persevere through quickloads and stubbornness, or if I need a certain level of charisma to be sufficiently persuasive.

After going inside and grabbing a Grognak the Barbarian comic (permanent +5% damage to my unarmed and melee critical attacks) I followed Codsworth through some houses on a search for my missing child, but he's clearly not here. So the floating butler robot pointed me towards the town of Concord and said I should check there next.

A lot of Bethesda's open world RPGs start the player off near the middle of the world, but here I'm right up in the top left corner of the map. So even if I ignored instructions and turned to walk the other way right now I wouldn't get very far.

Hey I ran into Dogmeat along the way (you can just about make him out under the crosshair to the left. So he's going to be tagging along from now on, barking when there's stuff nearby that I can pick up. I can also order him to inspect this weapons workbench, which doesn't seem like it'll achieve much.

I'm thinking that I might be able to walk over and get some use out of it though.

Hey, this is a brand new feature: weapon and armour modding benches. Fallout 3 had weapon creation workbenches and New Vegas has weapon mods, but this is a more advanced weapon editor that lets me replace components to truly customise my firearms. Though I still can't paint them, so Breach & Clear's gun editor has that over it.

In the olden days of Fallout 3, guns would degrade over time and weapons you found in the world would start off broken and rubbish depending on your character level. I usually hate weapon degradation but this system meant that lower level characters could find decent guns and improve them over time by boosting their repair skill and combining them with other weapons of the same type.

In Fallout 4 the weapon degradation has been removed, so guns stay fresh forever! But I'm still getting guns and improving them over time by boosting my repair skills and combining them with other weapons. The difference is that I'm scrapping the spare guns to get components and then using these pieces to assemble mods. What mods I get to choose from depends on my skills. What this means is that I can take all that junk that I learned to ignore in Fallout 3 and use it to make my stuff better! Though I can't make ammo, weirdly.

It's just a shame that the interface is a bit pants, and I can't remove a mod without constructing another one to replace it, even if I scrap the weapon entirely. Fortunately I can just dump all the mods and junk into the workbench and use it as a stash, so I don't have to be carrying everything on me to start my work.

So it's a pretty good feature, with some flaws, though I think it could've been improved with some Saints Row shop music over the top.

I went around clearing out the garage for junk to fuel my creation engines and discovered that the computer hacking and lock picking minigames are the same as ever. So I'm just going to copy and paste what I've already written about them in earlier games.

"It's pretty much a version of the board game Mastermind, with potential answers hidden in the raw data. I make a guess, it tells me how many letters are right (though not which ones), then I make another guess and so on until I get it right or run out of attempts. To mix things up, clicking on a matching set of brackets will either remove a dud or refill my attempts. As hacking games go, it ain't so bad."

"This is how it works: I turn the screwdriver carefully until the hair clip starts begins to break, then I release the pressure a bit, adjust the angle of the clip, and try again. Eventually I'll get it in generally the right location and the lock will open, or the clip will snap."

It wasn't long before I'd stripped the place bare, so I dumped my junk into my stash and went off down the road to Concord to find out what the sound of ominous distant gunfire is about. I hope it's actually fireworks!

Not fireworks then.

Seems that there's a shoot out going on, with people on the street being sniped by a guy up on the balcony. Trouble is I can't tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are as I'm too far away for the text above their heads to show up. They might all be bad guys or potential allies for all I know.

Oh there you go, V.A.T.S. tells me that they're 'raiders' and the name's in red so I'm good to shoot them.

The V.A.T.S. targeting system has returned, letting my use up my AP/stamina to take a few computer aimed shots. It's a nice way to make the game a bit more accessible for people who want more of an RPG experience than a first person shooter. Though they've changed it so now it doesn't pause the game any more, it just slows things down! Not sure that was a great decision considering it's supposed to be for the people who don't want to have to react quickly.

V.A.T.S. is also turning out to be handy for letting me know where the enemies are, as I'm sure they've gotten better at hiding. In Fallout 3 they used to stand out in the open a lot, but here they're running around, using cover, and turning this into a real fight. Plus one of them set my dog on fire with a Molotov! The dick.

Nice to see that V.A.T.S. still comes with a cinematic kill cam when I pull the trigger! They wouldn't have dared remove it, seeing as it's a screenshot generator for reviews. Which makes it worse that this shot came out kind of crap.

Once the battle was done and the raiders were all dead, I carefully examined their corpses for anything that might help me survive out here. And by that I mean I hit the 'take all' button on each to quickly strip them of everything they had, leaving behind a trail of naked bodies in my wake, just like in the olden days. Though the game now lets me know what a container contains at a glance, and I can loot without bringing up separate looting screen.

My acts of extreme heroism got the attention of balcony guy, who shouted at me to come inside and have a chat. So that's my new quest.

Holy shit the quest icons are animated cartoons now! I love this! This is the best of games. I also like how this looks like I filmed it off a TV with a camera, when I actually used the GeForce overlay on my PC. That's some good filtering.

So I walked over to the building to go inside and my Pip-Boy added the location to my map, awarding me just enough XP to get my first level up!

All the perks are animated too now! Look at all those cartoon Vault Boys living the dream of being a survivor in a harsh post-apocalyptic world!

This is really similar to the perk system in the previous two games, as I get to visit this screen and pick a new upgrade every time I level up. A lot of them are locked right now, but more will become available as I get a higher level and upgrade my attributes. I won't have to worry about any INT requirements for a while after I put so many points into it, but I'm going to use my precious upgrade to stick another point into it for good measure because I don't want to have to think too hard at the moment.

The big difference between this and the system in the old game is that skills are gone! I mean I can still upgrade things like lockpicking, but instead of it being a skill which takes 100 points to max out, now it's a perk with four ranks. This really simplifies things, but it also means that I have to choose between raising an attribute, a skill or a traditional perk each time as they're all together on the same sheet. Plus those old school perks have ranks too now, so I can have a level 4 Bloody Mess perk to really turn people into clouds of red gore.

I've finally found some living humans who don't want me dead!

And then I immediately picked the top reply in the dialogue choices again because it's mapped to the same button I use to walk up to people. I ain't changing my movement keys though, I'm too used to them, so I'm just going to have to be really careful how I approach people with names above their heads from now on. Not that the other people in his group want to chat much. Plus they have creepy faces.

I chose to play as a woman mostly because I was curious about what sort of character she'd be, considering she's basically a 50s housewife dropped into Mad Max. And the answer is... she's pretty much Commander Shepard (even though she's voiced by the actress who played Jack in Mass Effect 2). I am 100% okay about this, it’s just a bit incongruous.

Preston here has a new mission for me. I need to go upstairs, get a suit of power armour, rip a minigun off a crashed vertibird and then scare off the raiders outside with overwhelming firepower. So I just walked back out the way I came in and shot them all with a pistol instead. It was all going well until a bloody deathclaw came out and one-shotted me with his claws of instant death!

I quickloaded and now I'm trying a new strategy, luring the deathclaw over to another group of raiders camping nearby! Maybe they'll chip away its health for me, maybe they'll die and I can steal their stuff, either way I win.

At least that's what I thought until one threw a Molotov at me and got me in one hit. I really need to quit being so stingy with my stimpaks and heal up. Actually I've got a better idea! I'm going off to bed.

After screwing around back at the Red Rocket garage trying to make stuff for a bit I came back to discover that the deathclaw had fallen back into the hole he spawned from, so I just unloaded all my ammo into him while he was helpless until he finally died. Objective complete! Now Preston's group can escape that nice town and come live in my shattered wreck of a street instead.

But it turns out that humans need food and water to survive, so it's my job to get that sorted out for them. My street counts as a settlement now, which means I get to scrap things within its perimeter and use the components to build new stuff for the settlers to use to live. My character might have worked as a lawyer in the world that was, but she's also skilled enough to craft pretty much anything single-handedly as long as she has the parts in her pocket or the workshop stash. Then I have to play hide and seek around the buildings to find a settler to assign to run it.

Annoyingly the parts have to come from this settlement's workshop, so I had to run over to the garage to collected all my junk and haul it back over... slowly, because I was over-encumbered. Now I know where my next few perks are going: carrying capacity and strength.

I feel like I should be building something really impressive and also hilarious to take a screenshot of, but I've got no ideas and I don't really feel like playing The Sims right now when there's a Commonwealth to explore. Plus I'm annoyed that it uses the arrow keys for the construction menu, so I have to go to the menu and manually switch my Xbox controller every time I want to build something (I'm still too stubborn to redefine them).

Oh hang on, I've just remembered something.

I forgot to pick up my power armour from the roof! Fortunately the quest marker remembered where it was because I'd totally forgotten where I was told to go.

In earlier games the power armour worked like clothing, so you'd just leave it on, but now it's like a separate mech with its own HUD and really unflattering damage indicator. It even replaces the Pip-Boy! Trouble is that it requires fuel now, which is used up by just walking around, so I guess I'll take it back to my settlement and then forget I own the thing forever. It'll be handy to have if I ever need to fast travel someplace I'm expecting a tough fight, but it's totally impractical for exploring.

You know what I could really do with though? A merchant. I still haven't found anyone to unload my unwanted stuff onto for bottle caps. Not that there's much left to trade, now that I break junk, guns and armour down for parts. I guess I'll be dealing mostly in whisky and spam.


LATER.

It's taken me a while, but I've finally found a merchant! I was wondering if the bartering system had changed at all between games but it doesn't look like it. Merchants still have a limited amount of caps which recharges every few days, so I can't just unload my loot in one trip and get rich. It's funny how traders still deal in bottlecaps on the opposite side of the country to Fallout 1, though I suppose ammo has no weight either, so I can deal in that as well when the caps run short.

When I met her, the merchant was being harassed by drug dealers so I crept around behind them and shot one in the head for 2x sneak attack damage. The other kill was messier, but the dog helped by pouncing on them. I guess I should've maybe tried talking to them first, as they may have been a peaceful civilized way to resolve it, but the game's been so focused on the shooting so far that I kind of forgot I could do that.

I checked the stats to see if my ‘murders’ count had gone up afterwards and it was still at ‘3’ so I think I’m good. I'm going to be left wondering forever how I could've accidentally killed three innocents already and not realised it, but no one's turned hostile on me so I guess it's no big deal!


LATER, IN A CAR FACTORY.

Now I'm raiding a car factory! It's a job for my buddy Preston as these folks have been harassing a local settlement and he's not keen on that. It took me a while to get here though because the game loves to distract me with new locations on the compass, people in need, distress calls over the radio and buildings to loot.

The front entrance to the factory was protected by a turret so I crept around the back and got up onto the roof. It was an absolute joy to get a chance to make so many headshots kills on people trying to snipe me along the way. Weapon accuracy is spot on, even with a low level character.

But now that I'm indoors I'm playing it more like Doom, running up to people and spraying them at close range, mostly because I can never see the bastards until I'm right on top of them. They love to move around and hide behind walls, and this is a complicated multi-level maze so even the compass radar's not being all that helpful.

And look at this bloody map! I'm grateful they included one at all, but it's not doing much to save me from walking in circles trying to find the next room. Fuck it, I'm fast travelling back to the settlement to overload my junk before I get over-encumbered, I can come back and try this maze again later. Right... where's the way out?

Oh crap.

After running a few more laps of the place I eventually ran into the raider leader and his turrets... and his Protectron robot sitting in its charging bay. With a bit of hacking I was able to activate it and let it do some of the hard work. I've finally solved a problem with slightly less combat than usual!


ELSEWHERE IN THE WASTELAND.

I got distracted by a distress call so now I'm up in the north of the map doing missions for the Brotherhood of Steel, who are in full 'knights in shining armour' mode in this game it seems. So now I'm in the woods trying to shoot a suicidal super mutant before he pulls a Serious Sam, and gets close enough to me to explode. That little skull next to his name means he's a higher level than me and that I'll need to work a little harder to if I want to end this with all my limbs still attached, but that half-empty health bar under it means I've got a chance.

I did get him in the end, just before getting a missile in the face from his friend hiding up on one of the dishes over there in the distance. It's not a game I'd want to play without quicksaves.

You might have noticed that nothing I'm doing seems to involve getting a baby back. That's because it was kind of a dumb motivation to give a protagonist in an open world game, as there's no way that even the most invested player is going to care even 1% as much about this child as the character should. The game's all about having the freedom to do whatever you feel like, the plot's all about being driven to complete just one task, it doesn't mesh.

But I really should go to Diamond City in the ruins of Boston and find someone who can help me.


LATER, IN BOSTON.

I'm getting a lot more use out of explosives than I did in the earlier Fallouts. It's fun to arc a Molotov over into building and cook all the people trying to murder me. Though it's spoiled a little by my dog's eagerness to be exactly where the explosion is.

He can't die in this game though, it's amazing! In Fallout 3 I quickly learned to leave him at home because quickloading each time I saw the "Dogmeat has died." message got old, but in this he only needs to take a breather and a stimpak will bring him right back into the fight.

Another thing that really annoyed me about Fallout 3 was all the walls in Washington D.C., invisible and otherwise. The city was split into different sections accessible through the sewers and there was so much hassle (and loading screens) involved to get around that I eventually just ignored the place entirely. But in Fallout 4 I'm allowed to roam around Boston freely! Thank fuck they put so much RAM in the Xbox One and PS4.

Loading screens are still a pain in the ass though. Every time I fast travel somewhere to go into a building there's loading, and then more loading when I go inside. And I have to get back out before I can fast travel again.

I'm even able to pull a Mirror's Edge and leap between the rooftops, even though all the bloody corpses down there are telling me that I probably shouldn't. That's some nice environmental storytelling there, I'll be down to loot them in a bit.

It seems that they didn't intend for players to go exploring too far up here though, because I leapt across onto Trinity Tower, made my way across a narrow ledge, and fell right through a solid wall.

I loaded my last save, climbed back down to get inside the tower the boring normal way, then pulled a John McClane on some super mutants inside and rescued a new companion! I've finally got a sidekick who can talk. He seems kind of evil though so I'm actually going to leave him here. I don't want him hanging around and judging me whenever I make a moral decision.

Oh damn, I feel like I've wandered into Final Fantasy VII by mistake. I was looking for Diamond City but I've ended up in Wall Market.

They've built Diamond City inside of Fenway Park baseball stadium, which seems like a sensible move to me. It's got fortified walls, open space and plenty of places to sit. Though it does impede the baseball somewhat.

You might be wondering why I'm wearing my sparkly dress out in this weather. Well it wasn't to look at how shiny clothes get in the rain (though it's a nice touch), I'm actually in my Charisma boosting gear to help me pass any speech checks in town. Seems that Charisma's the only thing that matters in conversations this time around and I can get a huge boost just by dressing right, even if my clothes are soaking wet. And I think guys can wear dresses too this time, as clothes don't transform to match the wearer's gender anymore. Good news for the folks who wanted that feature.

Shame I can't have clothing presets set up to quickly toggle between my high defence combat gear and my charm offensive dress. Especially as the armour comes in pieces this time, so I'm swapping around the left arm, right arm, left leg, right left, chest, helmet, glasses, and clothes each time.

Fallout 3 (PC)

Here's Fallout 3's Megaton for comparison. It seems comparable in size and detail, but it's hard to tell for sure in this light. All I'm seeing is just a flat mess of rusty sheet metal. If there's one upgrade that makes Fallout 4 look so much better, it's the lighting. But there's plenty of other upgrades too! Fallout 4 might not be the absolute prettiest game I've ever seen, but it looks great to me.

The music's been fantastic too, and different to what I expected, more upbeat and hopeful. Like here in Diamond City it's become all piano and violins. Here have a YouTube link: Rebuild, Renew. I had to check Wikipedia to see if it was a different composer to the earlier game, but nope it's still Inon Zur.

In Diamond City, I finally started to get a lead on where to find my kid, or a least a lead on where to find a detective. A reporter called Piper's offered to team up and help me out, but I can only have the one sidekick so I'll have to send the dog running back to wait for me at one of my settlements. Later Dogmeat, you actually haven't been a liability to me this time!

For one thing, the dog never walked right in front of me when I was having a conversation!

I have to give the developers points for trying to make the conversations feel more integrated with the gameplay, but when it's possible for NPCs to get in the way while I'm talking or for the other person to walk away and cut off the conversation, then it seems kind of broken. At least I'm getting better at triggering them without accidentally selecting the top option. Not that it matters much most of the time, as it's often asking a question, with the others directions being: YES, NO, or SARCASM.

On the plus side, I think it's awesome how Piper is doing her own thing in this bar. She's chatting to the NPCs, sitting down, and generally displaying signs that she's a person with her own motivations instead being my shadow. It's apparently possible for my character to start a romance with companions now as well, but from her point of view it's only been a day or two since her husband's horrific murder so I'm going to hold back on that for now.


SOON, SOMEWHERE ELSE.

Oh man that was close! I was getting dangerously close to the main plot of the game just then. But then I heard about another Vault and decided to go out hiking to look for it instead. The game isn't about finding a lost child, it's about long walks in the wilderness, shoot outs and the desperate eternal search for more Wonderglue for my weapon mods.

I've heard that the game gets more dangerous the further south you go, but I haven't found anything out here that Piper and I couldn't handle yet... with some effort. I did find myself in a radiation storm though, which came as a bit of a surprise. Radiation storms are a lot like regular storms, except every time the lightning flashes I get hit by radiation, which reduces my max health. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but then again it's not a whole lot of radiation so I don't much care

Looks cool though. I'm impressed by how different the game can look at different times of day and in different weather conditions. Walking around the wasteland has definitely gotten more... atmospheric than in the olden days.

The Vaults are looking prettier too. Seems that the Massachusetts branch of Vault-Tek didn't have the same aversion to paint as the guys down in Washington. And Piper's going around interviewing people now! It's such a small touch but it really makes her seem like an actual character. Plus if I pull a gun she gets back to business.

Not that I'd actually shoot anyone in here. I did reverse-pickpocket a landmine into the Overseer's pocket while she slept, but that was just a gift. Y'know, to thank her for letting me inside. I don't think I've even got the perk needed to blow people up like that. Yet.

Fallout 3 (PC)

Couldn't resist one more comparison shot. Look at all the shadows that aren't there, that's what's really making the graphics look flat.


MUCH MUCH LATER.

Okay, I think I'm ready to turn this off now, I just want to have a walk around the Brotherhood of Steel base first. They're real upstanding guys in this, but I'm getting a bit concerned about their anti-Snatcher views. I might have to ditch them and join the pro-robot faction, if I ever run into them. Moral choices!

I've been one from side of the map to the other now and there's still so much I haven't seen yet. I'm not sure I'll be seeing much more of the Gunners faction though, seeing as I keep stumbling across their bases and wiping them out. So that's a thing you can do at a low level, though it wasn't easy. I also ran into the edge of the world... which was just an invisible wall and message that I couldn't go any further.

Oh shit, did I just see a sailing ship down there? I really am going to stop playing any minute now but I need to check that out first...


CONCLUSION

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I've given the game a few hours now and I think I've played enough to say that Fallout 4... is a lot like Fallout 3.

The negative reviews had me worried that they'd dumbed it down too far, but I don't think that's the case. The dialogue system does feel a bit stripped back though, as it's even more streamlined than Mass Effect's now. There are still decisions to make and factions to side with, it's just that the dialogue options are a bit more 'yes, no, maybe, sarcasm' than you'd want. It doesn't want to let you have fun with its conversations or their consequences. Those sarcasm responses are often a thing of beauty though. The game's got a good sense of humour at times.

Plus it's hard for me to care that there's more focus on the shooting when the shooting's so good. I can live with being Commander Shepard in a Fallout game with combat that's more like Rage. Looking back at my complaints about Fallout 3, my main ones were that the gunplay was sub-standard (with dumb enemies and no aim down sights), the graphics looked kind of dated and flat, and having to use the subways to get around Washington D.C. quickly wore down my good mood. This has all been fixed! Also, there are far fewer impassable walls of debris and you can leap up rocks like some kind of rock jumping prodigy.

It still takes forever to walk anywhere, but the walking speed isn't bad, you can sprint a bit now, and there's more to look at along the way. It's got some surprisingly picturesque scenery, instead of the overcast gloom of D.C. and the barren Nevada desert around New Vegas, and the changing weather conditions keep it interesting. I can imagine some people would be put off the slightly cartoony 50s zeerust style of the architecture and artefacts, but that's been part of the look from the start. The music's taken a bit of a different turn though, as it's more emotional and hopeful. The game's been about rebuilding so far, with a settlement crafting system to let your own hands dirty. If you feel like it.

If you're hoping for a Bethesda game without glitches though it'll disappoint you, as it's got all the weirdness you’d expect from a game this open, like dodgy face animations, characters trying to walk up onto furniture etc. I didn't find it bothered me that much though, aside from the one time my conversation options buggered off in the middle of a crucial confrontation and left me standing there going 'hmm' and 'uhuh' as the conversation camera carried on picking cinematic angles. Plus it was getting hard to overlook the way it liked to crash to desktop, but lowering the decal quality and weapon debris seemed to fix that.

Despite all the flaws and annoyances, I've personally been loving the shit out of the game so far. Could be that I just haven't played it long enough to hate it, I've gotten enough joy out of it to hand it my two highest (and only) accolades. It's very much been more of the same, with weaker conversations, stronger action, and more need for Wonderglue, so I can't help but recommend it.

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Thanks for reading all that, or some of that. Now it's your turn to put some words down. You can leave your opinions on Fallout 4, talk about my site or even have a guess at what the next game will be.