Fallout 4 is a Terrible Game

As I was walking this morning, I saw this Jeep with the Brotherhood of Steel logo on it. Since I will take any opportunity to think about the Fallout series, my mind started drifting over the game's when I landed on how terribly awkward the Brotherhood's introduction in Fallout 4 is.

It starts out well enough- you come across a small, besieged scouting party holed up in a police station in post-apocalyptic Cambridge outside Boston. You help them clear out the ghouls attacking them, then find out they're on a mission to recover some advanced technology they don't want falling into the wrong hands. It all goes well, you shoot your way out from an ambush by the big bads of the game and even get a cool energy gun as a reward. 

Then, just as everything is going so well, you get an offer to join the organization right then and there. 

The first time I played the game, this blew me away and practically killed all my hopes for it. Overly dramatic, no doubt, but it served as a harbinger, a sign of things to come that point to the fatal flaw at the core of Fallout 4. That is, Fallout 4 is an open-world RPG that doesn't want you to engage in its world. 

To catch everybody up, the premise of the game is that your character lived in the time before the nuclear war that annihilated the world. You actually start the game on the day all hell breaks loose, making it into a vault just minutes after the bombs start dropping before you're thrown into a cryogenic freezing chamber. Time passes, until you wake up to venture out into the wasteland to figure out why you've been awoken, who did it, and what's become of the world in the 200 years after the atomic war. 

Your very first mission involves you stumbling across a rag tag group of survivors, besieged by the ne'er-do-wells of the wasteland, who call themselves the Minutemen. You find out that they're the last survivors of a group dedicated to reestablishing a form of democratic society with all that entails in the Commonwealth wasteland. But they were betrayed and set upon by another mercenary group, who annihilated the rest of the Minutemen and let the survivors run into the wild to let the world finish the job. 

This wisp of a group is seeking one last place of refuge, somewhere they can make a home and rebuild. Since you're the main character, you lead them to the ruins of what was once the suburb you lived in with your family and it's here you get introduced to the settlement system. Or, as I like to call it, the mechanic that single handedly strangles the game in its crib. 

I have always, always hated the settlement system. At first, I thought it was because you are bulldozed into doing it- even if you don't want to, you have missions where the direct result is the creation of a settlement that you're now responsible for. Even if you neglect them, it's still an active decision that you have to maintain. The looting, inventory, and upgrading/customization options all either directly incentivize or require you to have at least one bare minimum settlement that can fulfill those functions. 

In a game that's ostensibly about you affecting the world through the choices you make, having a mechanic that requires you to shape the world in one specific way is actively antagonistic to that experience. And for the longest time, I was content to leave it at that. 

But then that little decal sticker led me to a breakthrough. That the system is actually worse than I thought. Because, the reason your induction into all the different factions have to be so divorced from the world the game presents is that the game never intends for you to fully experience the world it takes place in. 

Your settlements don't integrate with the communities in the world. Some individual farms and homesteads come under your protection if you pursue the Minutemen story, but once they do that, they just disappear into the background until they're an objective to protect in the mind-numbingly repetitive quest system. 

It'd be great if, after you've built up your settlement network, you had the opportunity to set up alliances or trade networks with the two main cities in the Boston wasteland. Hell, even if you just had the chance to use your settlements as supply boosts for the Minutemen, or workshops for the Brotherhood, or safe houses as part of the runaway slave network the Railroad runs, they'd be amazing. 

Instead, the settlements become more insular the more advanced they become. Eventually, you can build shops at them, meaning all your gear and loot selling needs will be contained to the settlements, so what's the point going anywhere else?

This leaves nothing for you to invest in the world the game creates or explore it for any other reason than to strip mine it for the raw materials you need to build and upgrade your settlements. 

Which is a goddamn shame when you get right down to it. Fenway Park has been turned into a community called Diamond City where people turned the baseball diamond into a thoroughfare which they built a community around. There's a seedy neighborhood of misfits, criminals, and the desperate called Good Neighbor that should be so much fun to delve into but you get like, three or four quests there. And then you're done forever with the place.

The core of the Fallout games is the wider world they exist in. There's a joy of discovery in wandering around the wasteland, tripping over whatever weird shit is waiting out there for you. And there's plenty here in the game that delivers on that front, too.

One of my absolute favorites, in this or any Fallout game that I've played, involves you creeping up on the Salem Witch Museum. When you get there, you find a few mauled bodies, one of which has recording on them. When you listen to it, you hear the small platoon talk amongst themselves when they hear something following them in the dark. When you go inside the basement door, working your way through the building, all is quiet except a very heavy thump from the floor above you. Then, when you finally get up to the second floor, the lights flicker over all the naked mannequins inside until you finally come face-to-face with the thing that slaughtered the mercenaries.

That, is a Deathclaw. An 8-foot-tall figure of death that's terrified Fallout players for years. And now you have to fight one in a dark, cramped, enclosed space with nowhere to run. It's a great moment, full of tension, atmosphere, with a terrifying and exhilarating climax.

But the game doesn't care. Which is what makes it so incredibly frustrating to play. Bethesda knows what draws people to the Fallout series, knows what makes the game interesting, but in the end decides not to focus on them at all. Instead, they shunt you off into a glorified inventory management mini-game and insist you enjoy it so you won't notice the lack of attention paid to literally every aspect of the world.

There are moments, scattered throughout the story, that almost, almost make the game worthwhile. The Railroad, with its mission to free the androids created solely to be slaves by the Institute is one of the coolest factions in the series. The moment you find out your son is actually in his sixties and is leading the Institute's efforts to swap out real people with identical android copies to extend their influence and destabilize the region, awesome. All your companions have the classic "burn outs need redemption" story lines- save two, who are excellent exceptions to this rule-that are a delight to play through (Kat, Piper, and Nick are my favorites). 

For all that, though, none of those threads are woven together to create a cohesive whole. None of them compound, enhance, or enrich the others. Nothing that happens in the world really matters because you aren't connected to it. Whatever end you choose, the sun comes up on a wasteland that barely even notices the next day and the day after that. And that feeling, that all you've done means nothing, just makes the whole experience feel like a crushing waste of time.