Hi, I’m Hamish Black and this is Writing On Games. First off, hey, I’m back! After
a couple of months of having basically no time whatsoever due to other things in my
life, I see that a bunch of people enjoyed my MGSV video and chose to subscribe based
on that. Thank you so much! It really means a lot to me and was a constant reminder of
why I should make time to do this even if it seems like I totally, totally don’t.
With all of that in mind, I’ve decided to return with an episode on a very hot topic
just now – Fallout 4. I’ll preface this by saying that all of this is just my opinion
– if you disagree, that is totally cool (and encouraged – discourse is a good thing!).
Let’s begin, shall we? Fallout 4 is incredibly interesting in many
ways – it was one of the most hyped games I’ve seen in a long time (with rumours circulating
about its development and reveal for a number of years, and the actual reveal at E3 itself
being one of my most prominent memories of the conference in recent times). The fervour
surrounding this game has been absolutely palpable, and with good reason – Bethesda
over the years have produced some of the most intriguing and enjoyable open-world games
since the genre’s inception. As much as I am not a huge fan of the generic fantasy
aesthetic, their Elder Scrolls series leans into that and embraces it with a gusto that
is hard not to find charming. Fallout, on the other hand, has always struck me as a
masterwork of aesthetic design – the way it merges elements of retro-futuristic science
fiction with 1940-1950 architecture and design philosophies, ultra-advanced technology with
a DIY makeshift industrial flare, all topped off with a dash of McCarthy-era paranoia aligning
perfectly with the tension of survival in the post-apocalypse, it blends these seemingly
oxymoronic elements into a world more cohesive and recognisable than perhaps any other game
universe to date. When you see a Fallout game, you recognise all these elements pilfered
from other media and pop-culture from various time periods, but it all comes together to
make an instantly distinguishable Fallout game. In 2008 when I played Fallout 3 (like
many others, I assume, my first experience with the series) this distinctly universal
yet almost wholly singular aesthetic resonated with me in a way that, dare I say it, has
yet to be matched in its pointedness. That said, that was back in 2008, and since
the most recent iteration’s release it is safe to say that fan reaction has been mixed.
Many people have criticised the game for its numerous and significant technical shortcomings,
its comparatively mediocre quests and writing, but perhaps most importantly its similarity
(to a fault) to a game that was released seven years ago. Now, these are things that to a
certain extent I agree with and I’ll come onto a bit later. What I will say is that
ultimately I did enjoy Fallout 4 a great deal, yet I would be lying if I said I wasn’t
left pretty disappointed by it in a number of ways. Many of these reasons tie into the
general fan reaction that I have mentioned here - most notably that I guess I, perhaps
naively, expected something more from a game this long in development and a formula that
at this point is so well-trodden. After pondering it for a while, however, I came to the conclusion
that perhaps it wasn’t simply the fact that I had played this game several times before
that left me underwhelmed – it was the fact that, in many ways, Bethesda hadn’t quite
managed to nail these previously explored elements as competently as they did in Fallout
3 (or as Obsidian managed with New Vegas). In other words, it’s not just that they
have done exactly what they did before, it’s that it’s just not as effectively pulled
off in Fallout 4. All the elements of a Fallout game are there, but they just don’t fit
together as cohesively or have that same flare as they have done in the past.
The way new features in particular are implemented only serves to highlight this issue. Take
for instance the crafting and settlement building of Fallout 4. This feature, when touted at
Bethesda’s E3 presentation, excited many people as it played into the idea that was
propagated as early as Fallout 3 in the form of mods and the like – that many people
didn’t want to just explore this world, they wanted to create in it. The feature seemed
set to capitalise on a crucial element of post-apocalyptic survival as seen in many
works of fiction on the matter – after everything is destroyed, how does one go about rebuilding
it again? In some ways, the game is successful in taking this idea to its logical conclusion
– the way the game rewards you with resources for scrapping old houses, cars, and other
pre-war remnants gives the system a real scrappy, DIY feel as you recycle anything and everything
in order to create rudimentary living spaces and amenities that are far more suited to
life in the Wasteland. Mechanically, the system is potentially sound. This, however, highlights
what might be my main problem with Fallout 4 – the idea that these elements lack the
thematic cohesion that they might have done were they present in previous Fallout titles.
As I just mentioned, there are elements of the crafting system that do tie in with the
universe and are effective as a result, but they are rendered somewhat meaningless by
the game’s reticence to place any real weight on them. Yes, these systems involve the dynamic
of the post-apocalypse in a way that it hasn’t done before, but why am I being asked to build
these settlements? The idea of destroying your hometown of Sanctuary in order to rebuild
it as something more functional could have been incredibly meaningful thematically, but
this is never presented to the player partially due to the incredibly ineffective tutorialisation
of the feature, and partially because we are never given any time to feel like this place
is any different from the many other meaningless settlements we’re told to liberate. Perhaps
this could have been alleviated by having you build up just the one settlement as opposed
to taking over the wasteland as it were – as it stands, the game feels like it doesn’t
know if it wants to be a game about survival or empire building.
The same thing is exemplified with the Power Armour in this game – almost immediately
you are presented with an old Brotherhood Power Armour suit and are propelled into a
battle with a Deathclaw. For my money, the idea of Power Armour in previous games was
always something that was super exciting to build up to, and it leant the Brotherhood
a sense of intrigue and power that they might not have had if the player was merely able
to wear Power Armour from the outset as they are able to here. This may be down to my inability
to play the game quote-unquote well, but the Deathclaw in previous games felt absolutely
insurmountable at first, but building myself up in terms of weapons and skills allowed
me to come back and feel incredibly satisfied overcoming an obstacle that was once so impossible.
In Fallout 4, like I say, you are given Power Armour and a minigun almost instantly and
are forced to take part in a trivial Deathclaw fight. This moment, as a result, is completely
robbed of any gravity. These issues with pacing bring to light my main issue with the game
– the lack of cohesion between the gameplay elements both old and new. This isn’t simply
a retreading of old ground, it’s a less effective way of doing things. Systems merely
seem placed atop other systems and they all feel disparate as a result. The systems are
there mechanically, but the aesthetic and thematic cohesion I so adored about the old
games has been greatly reduced. This is largely down to the game’s writing,
which by and large is a major step down from previous instalments, which is largely down
to the game’s new dialogue system, for example. In previous Fallout games, the player character
lacked a voice of any kind – the characters you spoke to would say their lines, and then
you would be presented with a list of potential responses, each of which you could see in
full. I’m not sure whether it was simply a result of the introduction of voice actors
for the player characters or merely to reduce the intrusiveness of the user interface, but
now these dialogue options are limited to four and instead of providing you a full account
of what your character will say, gives the player a summarised version, often as short
as one word merely describing the tone in which your character will respond. This causes
many problems – for one, this limits player choice. Not only from a numerical standpoint
(although certainly from that too), the fact that the player could see exactly what they
would say in previous games meant that they could parse the tone of the phrase for themselves.
The nuances of the language came through as the player was presented with every part of
the response up front. In Fallout 4, however, the dialogue becomes an abstracted meta-puzzle
of ‘what summary here might fit in the best with the way I’m trying to roleplay my character?’
It simply creates meaningless guesswork for the player, as often the game does not accurately
represent the tone with which the player character will respond. When presented with options
like ‘Forceful’, for example, the player is not immediately aware if they are going
to merely assert themselves in a conversation or start shouting manically.
Then there’s the ‘Sarcastic’ option – oh the dreaded sarcastic option. This
seems to present itself at almost every opportunity, and often the player is presented with no
information whatsoever as to what words the sarcastic option entails (whether they be
charmingly sarcastic or just plain aggressive), let alone the idea that some of the questions
being asked of the player really don’t warrant a sarcastic response. Why would someone respond
sarcastically to a question regarding the people who took your son?! My point is not
that this option should be removed from the game, or that the dialogue should be made
‘plainer’ in order that the player can better understand what it is they’re saying,
I’m simply saying that this way of presenting dialogue options to the player is incredibly
clunky when compared to previous games. Like I say, it gives the player less options to
work with – before, the tone of the phrase would be apparent from the wording used in
the phrase. The game would respect the player’s intelligence to the point that it would trust
you to be able to parse the tone without the game having to explicitly say what emotion
was being conveyed. This isn’t even to mention the myriad technical
issues with the game – obviously with a game of this scope, some technical hitches
are to be expected, but the fact is that this game plays exactly like Fallout 3 and New
Vegas. That is to say, this game feels like it might fall apart at any minute. Entire
quests hang in the balance as scripting struggles to keep up with the millions of potential
variables on every screen, the AI (both enemy and friendly) is pure jank, and even on my
PC the game ran like total shit. I’m not sure if this was a problem with the fact that
I run an AMD card – an R9290 to be exact – but even after taking the settings down
to medium, the game still suffered from regular stutter and significant frame rate drops.
In 2008 this was more than acceptable – graphics alone do not a compelling game make – but
in 2015 that shit becomes harder and harder to forgive, especially in a year where games
as fully realised and polished as Metal Gear Solid V and The Witcher 3 have been released.
Obviously those games don’t allow you to pick up and move almost everything in the
environment and therefore reduce their variables at any given time exponentially, but if it
came to it I’d rather a streamlined, focused experience if it meant I wouldn’t have to
constantly worry that my game was going to crash constantly.
Ultimately though, I did have fun playing this game. The story, despite its unsatisfactory
ending and general lack of urgency, goes to some interesting places (especially when the
inner workings of the Institute are explored more fully). The aesthetic design I so loved
in previous Fallout games is still present, and makes wandering the Wasteland one more
time as joyous as it ever was. Diamond City feels like a bustling metropolis that despite
its makeshift settlements and ramshackle businesses, at the same time feels like it wouldn’t
be out of place in, for example, Blade Runner – the seedy neon underbelly feeling just
barely masked by a comparatively industrial and flourishing city. The game also embraces
the pre-war/post-war duality in a way it hasn’t done before and despite poor writing in general,
the atmosphere feels stronger for it (having to explain the actual rules of baseball to
someone who seems to be an expert but lacks the pre-war understanding of what the game
actually entails is pretty hilarious). With all of that in mind, it would be easy to say
that this is more Fallout, and therefore any technical shortcomings or slight deviancies
from the thematic elements of the game could be ignored. However, in this writer’s eyes,
it is not simply a case of going back to what made the old games great – there are many
ways in which this game fails to live up to the legacy of its predecessors, and when the
game has so much potential it’s a shame that ultimately I was left with a subtle,
yet palpable sense of disappointment. Perhaps, in this instance, war has changed.
So yeah, that concludes my review/analysis of the gameplay systems present in Fallout
4. I know this may have seemed pretty negative overall but like I say, there are compelling
reasons to play this game. I guess I just expected a bit more from Bethesda at this
stage. This is totally just my opinion, remember – I’d be very interested to hear what
other people thought of it, as the reception I have seen from a fan’s perspective has
seemed incredibly divided (perhaps almost as much as MGSV? Actually nah, let’s not
go crazy here – have you seen the comments on my other videos?!). Anyway, let me know
what you think below and if you feel like subscribing I’d greatly appreciate it. Also,
to those new subscribers who came here off the back of my MGS videos, hello! It’s crazy
to me that anyone would give a shit about what I have to say regarding games, so the
fact that what I’m saying seems to have resonated so positively with so many of you
is pretty invigorating. Anyway, hopefully the gap between this episode and the next
episode won’t be as long as it has been as I’m a little less busy now. Got a lot
of ideas I’m ready to explore and hey, I’d love to have you along for the ride! Thanks
again for watching. I’m Hamish Black and this has been Writing On Games – I’ll
see you next time.