When Fallout 4 was first announced I was beyond excited as many of us were! Fallout 3, New Vegas and the older titles in the series were all fantastic, anything that lets you run around a post-apocalyptic world, wielding a laser pistol whilst wearing a dress is something only dreams are made of. With a wallet full of cash and a heart full of hype, I attended a midnight launch at my local game store. I rushed home installed the game on my PC and for a full month played nothing other than Fallout 4. However, I recently booted up the original Fallout and after arriving at Junktown a few hours in something struck me, “Fallout 4 isn’t an RPG anymore!” I cried in horror. With 120 hours of play time under my belt and having not played the game for a good month or so, the veil of enthusiasm had lifted… Fallout 4 might have evolved as a shooter, but it is certainly devolving as an RPG and I’d like to discuss a few of the reasons why this is the case.
Lack Of A Level Cap
In any great RPG the options are there for you to create, build and customize your own unique character. In a huge game like Fallout this is important as your going to be investing a lot of time and effort into establishing the kind of character you want to play as. Perhaps they like to talk their way out of situations? Perhaps they just let the swing of a lead pipe to the teeth do the talking for them? Either way, in the original Fallout games you were given a set amount of points to invest into characters skills and stats as well as two optional traits and perks every three levels. With the threat of a level cap the player must attempt to optimise where they place their points, stats, traits and perks, in the end this creates a more focused character, someone who can’t necessarily do everything in one playthrough. The greatest characters I’ve ever created have been flawed, they aren’t perfect and that’s what makes them relatable.
In Fallout 4, even though we are offered greater customization options in the form of silly moustaches and mohawks, we feel less connected to our own tailor made character than we do to a pre-crafted blocky Fallout sprite. The lack of a level cap means that I dont need to worry about where the next skill point will go to or what weapons I should be using, im just playing as an amorphous blob of perfection, who is able to do anything he wants at any time. I’ll never forget my first fallout character, a rootin-tootin cowboy sniper known as “Hamish Gray“, my fallout 4 character “generic perfect humanoid number one” on the other hand will be lost in the annals of time.
Speech and the Dialogue Wheel
If were being fair speech has been improved somewhat from Fallout 3 and New Vegas, the fact that your character talks is a nice touch and the removal of the cumbersome text box is a wonderful move! Bethesda however, still don’t quite nail it. In the original Fallout games if you didn’t have a high enough intelligence or charisma for example, certain dialogue options wouldn’t even be available to you, you’d know as much a your own character would at that exact moment which helps you to empathise with their situation further. If you could charm your way into pulling off these speech checks the game wouldn’t tell you which option was best, it forced you to use your understanding of the character you were talking with and their plight to pick the best option at the critical time. Fallout 4 highlights these options in a colour coded traffic light abomination as if to say “this is the best option! Please pick me!“. If you’ve invested no points into charisma or speech perks don’t worry! Just save, reload and try again! Even when I’m playing as a one charisma, arsonist murderer, I still have the option there to sweet talk my way through any situation. so much for roleplaying.
No Morality System
Lets face it, the original karma system sucked. I could blow up Megaton killing all it’s inhabitants, then give water to a beggar until I was considered to be the messiah of the wastelands. This makes absolutely no sense and I’m glad Bethesda saw fit to remove it from the game, but in its place they left us nothing at all. In a choice based RPG we need to have real consequences to our actions that feel like we’ve had a hand in shaping the world. The Witcher 3 did it right, I wouldn’t even make small decisions lightly because I knew somewhere further down the line they would come back to bite me.
Fallout 4 attempts to ask the question of “what is life?“, which is interesting when it comes to the synths and what faction you want to choose but I’d already killed so many people, random bandits with nothing to add to the game other than XP, that I felt the question held no weight at all. In the end I found that I regretted nothing and I’m not sure sure if it was down to poor writing or just the fact that I was desensitised to everything after popping so many raider skulls like they were grapes. There were never any real moral dilemmas, no grey areas and it’s a shame because they came so close with the synth conundrum to giving us a real nuanced story.
U.I and Handholding
I’m really glad they allowed us to change the colour of the Pip boy because I realised that I spent more time looking at that objective marker than the beautiful world Bethesda had built for me. The world is massive, that much is true. Fallout 4 might be difficult to traverse without some kind of map or trail marker but you could seriously just follow that little marker to the end of the Earth, take in none of the scenery or dialogue, smash your way through speech options and beat the game. This defeats the object of an RPG, we want to be engrossed and engaged, not fixated on some little tag in the bottom left corner of the screen. Fallout and Fallout 2, expected the player to find clues in the environment. You had to talk to people and piece together the situation. You needed to take your time in a new area to really get to grips with what was happening around town. You made your way around a beautifully crafted open world, but it was sneakily structured in such a way that it rewarded you for being invested and immersed with its excellent pacing. Fallout 4 just feels a lot like the tired old Far Cry formula; go to A kill X amount of enemies, move to B, then repeat. I found myself systematically clearing out enemy encampments without having understood or cared why I was there or who I was killing, something that was never a problem in the older titles.
Don’t get me wrong the majority of the time I spent in Fallout 4 was great, the game’s a marvel and in a way, it lived up to a lot of the hype. Unfortunately revisiting the original Fallout has made me realise the direction in which series is heading and that kinda stings. It seems Bethesda are catering to the masses, dumbing down the RPG elements to focus on presentation and gunplay which is a real shame. Do you disagree or have an alternative vision of the series future? Let me know in the comments, in the meantime I’ll be dusting off my cowboy boots and reliving the “Hamish Gray” glory days, Yee-haw!
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