Fallout 4

is still my most played game ever and is always a new adventure to loose myself in at 67 years old it keeps my mind active and always trying to anticipate whats next. Highly recommend whole series but 4 will always be my vice to escape real world problems and stressors!

I play mostly Fallout 76, but miss the fun of mods, so I often return to my old favorite Fallout 4, I am 79 years old but still an avid player of the old Fallout series and I highly reccomend this one.

Fallout 4 is the first fallout game i ever finished, and what a rough journey it was to get to that finish line..
So let me start with the fact that i got the GOTY version since i had such high hope for the game, i also did not like the vanilla character creator and one thing led to another & i found myself with like +30 mods ranging from unofficial bug fixes to fan-made story expansions, but as you'll learn later, even mods could not make Fallout 4 the game i hoped it was..
and i also was getting frequent crashes at the very start (even before i modded the game), so that didn't bode well.
I first assumed it was because i maxed out graphics, since the game seemed like it was on the brink of breaking down (this was before installing any mods mind you), so i tried lowering them, but the crashes persisted still. So i cranked up the graphics again, modded the game, made my custom character and tried to push through and see if stability/crashes would get any better, and they did, i had less crashes in the later game than i did in he first 15-20h or so.
So i started doing quests, and i have to admit, the game was just too overwhelming for me at the start, i did not know what stuff to loot, if i was supposed to loot everything or not, and i was bombarded with side quests (that are not marked as such, i hate how quests in this game aren't separated to categories for you to know which is which, even if they may appear to be obvious for some people, even the repeatable "radiant" quests aren't marked as such..), i also missed the hint you get about V.A.T.S system at the start so i did not know what button i had to press until i passed the 20h mark, yup, that's probably on me for not looking it up sooner..
Oh, before i forget, it's also possible to get radiant quests at the very start of the game that require you to go to DLC locations you haven't even unlocked and even if you did, the distance is just not worth it in the slightest, what the duck Bethesda?
I also lost my SSD a while back sadly, so i had to play this on a HDD, and boy oh boy what a mistake that was..
You see, i'm not used to having a loading screen every 5 minutes, and this game is full of them, every building you enter you get a loading screen, sometimes you get a loading screen inside the building itself, when you need to fast travel to somewhere you get slapped with double loading screens, the fast travel one and another to enter the location, and you can't fast travel out of a location until you exit it, this coupled with the loading times majorly hindered my enjoyment of the game..
And since every building is filled with trash to loot, and stupid me wanting to fully experience everything and not wanting to miss any collectibles, terminals or stuff that would trigger side quests i felt the need to check everything, or else i would've probably missed something, and let me tell you this is no way to enjoy the game, it'll have the opposite effect, i believe now that the correct way to play this was to just follow markers and get things done as soon as i could without having to waste hours looking through all the pointless lockers & desks.. etc, don't loot, just do the objective.
Graphics aren't everything, but Fallout 4 doesn't look that great even on the highest settings, which is a shame.
I also faced countless bugs including some game breaking stuff like objectives not triggering, NPCs not doing what they were supposed to do, animations getting stuck, my Pitboy disappearing altogether, the ESC/TAB buttons would stop working randomly until i restart the game, NPCs glitching through geometry and many other bugs.. cmon Bethesda, you can do better than this!
The story itself isn't that great, and the endings, or shall i say the "ending", the ending never changes.. it's sad to say but i actually had more fun playing some of the user created stuff than a lot of the vanilla stuff.
I also found it annoying how companions kept nagging you unless you play the way they like, and had to get a mod to remove the messages you get every time you do something they don't like, it's not something too major but i thought it was worth a mention.
oh yeah, about the game being too overwhelming, so when i first played this i kept having the feeling that maybe it's just not for me & i should drop it and move on, but i kept telling myself it'd get better if i just force myself to push a bit further (and i had to justify getting the GOTY edition somehow), and many many hours later i got used to most systems and i was finally able to shake that feeling and enjoy the game, after that i did a lot of exploring, and tons of side quest, and it was all alright, not great, but not bad either, and that probably sums up how i feel about Fallout 4. It's an alright game, and it has the content to justify the price point, it's just that said content is just "okay" at best with a ton of filler on the side, nothing too exciting, nothing that will wow you, just a bunch of busywork for you to kill time.
I feel like Bethesda was focused more on the quantity rather than the quality and it clearly shows, and i personally have no use for filler and would rather play something 10 times shorter but actually memorable and full of quality content, something that respects my time & doesn't have the need to have me do pointless stuff because content!
About settlements, i got a mod for that, a mod that added an actual decent storyline (Sim Settlements 2), which was pretty good and i highly recommend! said mod also allowed me to make my settlers build their own shit instead of relying on me, so i don't have much to complain about that, but from what i read the vanilla systems are pretty tedious and bad.
So, after 100h or so, after finishing the super underwhelming main quest & feeling robbed of a satisfying conclusion, and after having to deal with all the slow loading screens & all the bugs (minor to game breaking), and having those bugs extend to even the user created quests i just reached my limit, i could not justify spending any more time on it even though i was looking forward to try the 2 major DLCs included in the GOTY game, i just could not keep going any further, i was just done with it all..
So, in conclusion, after all this you might think i hate this game, i don't, and i don't even consider it to be "bad", i certainly wouldn't call it good either, it's with games like this that i wish steam offered a 3rd in-between option for reviews..
If you have countless hours you want to waste on average to below average busywork, if you're looking for an infinitely moddable game, or if you just want a game where you can loot anything not nailed to the ground even if that loot is nothing to talk about, and if you're fine with the famous Bethesda jank and don't mind the frequent bugs than this game is perfect for you, seriously, the content is there if this is what you're looking for, it is worth the price.
BUT, if what you're looking for is a "good" & "engaging" story, a bug free game, something "memorable", than you should totally look elsewhere. 6/10

>Download game
>install hundreds of mods at once without testing them
>I'm actually super smart
>Blindly run LOOT and hope to High Todd Heaven it doesn't crash
>It boots up
>Play for hours and hours
>One day randomly CTDs, corrupts the save files, and refuses to boot again.
>Scream, Cry, Throw Up
10/10 would Bethesda again.

I have a relationship with this game I can only describe as toxic. I was a teenager in the prime of my Bethesda fanboy period when it was announced, and it was probably the most I'd ever been hyped for a game, before and since. I am not a hater of Bethesda's Fallout, even as a fan of the classics and New Vegas being one of my favorite games ever. But my feelings on Fallout 4 are extremely complicated.

When it's good, it's REALLY good. Like the world design. I love exploring the Commonwealth, there's so many cool little details to find, tons of unmarked buildings with whole interior cells that you could miss even on repeat visits to an area, and since junk actually has a purpose in this game, there's way more stuff to get excited for when clearing an area. Also, even though it gets clowned on a lot as of late, I do genuinely enjoy the environmental storytelling Bethesda does. Plus you can call in Vertibird rides for a more immersive fast travel, it's all so cool.

Speaking of cool, the modular weapons and armor? Super cool. I know it's pretty divisive, but I do like the idea of building your weapons and armor up over time. Power Armor actually having a major effect on gameplay rather than just being the de facto "strongest armor" is a change for the better in my opinion.

Settlement building is where my thoughts start becoming more insane, bear with me here. In theory, building up a cool base and managing a network of allied settlements is the coolest thing ever added to a Bethesda game, bar none. I'm the type of guy who loved, LOVED Hearthfire in Skyrim, and the type of guy who loves living out the fantasy of actually having an affect on the world, so it's right up my alley, right? Well, yes, but there's several complications. For one, there's just too many bad settlements. Like, most of them suck unless you're hardcore dedicated to spending hours fixing em up. And because all these areas are designed to be player-built, it means there's almost zero established towns to actually explore. If they had drastically cut down on settlement locations, focusing on quality of buildable areas, and had more actual towns with unique characters and quests (potentially as part of a more story-driven Minutemen questline), I believe the feature would have been better received overall.

Continuing from my point above, the shafting of the Minutemen is by far the thing about this game that drives me up a wall the most. In theory, the Minutemen are the perfect moral player faction: a ragtag group of civilians united under the promise of mutual support for the benefit of everyone. The idea of being able to build a faction from nothing, growing your influence by doing quests and helping people, to being able to rival the Institute and/or the Brotherhood, that rules. Hell, that's basically what the entire structure of New Vegas's back half is. In execution it's just radiant quest after radiant quest, only being story relevant if you fail another faction's questline. Like I started saying in the settlement section, if the game had a bit more focus on the towns outside of the context of settlement building, there'd have been way more opportunity for an actual Minutemen questline, though I could probably spend hours and hours theorizing and planning this hypothetical improved questline, and ultimately it's just not relevant to this review.

As for the other main factions, and the main quest as a whole, I share a lot of the common complaints people have, though I find myself a lot less harsh overall. The Brotherhood being the same chapter as Fallout 3's after reverting to the more detached, for-the-greater-good militaristic ways of the original is a cool way of tying classic and modern incarnations together. The designers obviously loved em, too, as the entire selling point of the faction is how cool all their setpieces are. The Railroad and Institute, having been teased in Fallout 3 as well, both bring interesting stuff to the table, and have enough going for them that you could easily get attached regardless of playstyle. Unfortunately, this is part of the problem. By following the main questline, you're given a good amount of exposure to all three, getting attached to the characters, seeing how their group's views on the main dilemma aren't always so clear-cut or universal, etc. Unfortunately, the game cuts itself short before any kind of nuanced stance or option for a less violent resolution can be explored, and you're forced to pick a side and start mass-murdering the other factions. The perfect example of this is the quest Blind Betrayal, where the outcome could allow for a drastic upset in the Brotherhood against their leadership, but instead the game wants to rush itself to the endgame. It just feels undercooked, and I could probably spend hours and hours complaining about it, but that's for another time.

Far Harbor feels like it was made with the last two paragraphs's complaints in mind. While the story is fairly short, even by DLC standards, it has it all. Establishing influence over time by helping a town? Check. Lots of nuance in its central conflict, with the opportunity to affect how things play out because of it? Check. A highly sympathetic antivillain? Check. Not to mention the fact that the entire DLC's story gives secondary main character status to Nick Valentine, one of the best characters in the entire franchise, fight me. And it's not like the peaceful ending is even necessarily a "Let's hold hands and forget all our troubles" kinda thing, it looks you dead in the eyes and says "Are you willing to commit an undeniably evil act for the greater good?", which I LOVE. There's a reason why everyone gasses it up.

The less I say about Nuka-World, the better. To be totally fair, I was already starting to get burnt out on Fallout 4 as a whole by the time I got to it, but man I just did not enjoy it. I know people had been complaining you couldn't be super evil in the base game, but making the main questline for this only be raider-aligned, with the only "good guy" path involving killing most of the named NPCs in the DLC, was pretty lame. Woulda been a perfect opportunity for say, I dunno, a Minutemen questline for good-aligned characters, but I digress. It sucks, because a Fallout expansion taking place in a Hersheypark/Disney type location is such a strong concept, but every different area just amounts to "Wipe out this reskin of a base-game enemy type and maybe talk to one singular named NPC, maybe." (not to slander Cito, we love Cito).

Before I close out, I should address the elephant in the room: the voiced main character. Do I think it dramatically reduced the amount of dialogue options and likely affected the story overall? Yes, definitely. Do I prefer New Vegas's player dialogue? Absolutely. Do I hate the voiced MC? Not at all. It's honestly a shame Brian Delaney hasn't had many other major roles, outside of being in like every Minions movie, because I ADORE his performance. No disrespect to Courtenay Taylor, she also does a good job as the female MC, but I played the male so his I'm more attached to.

Despite the thousand plus words I spent complaining, I really do enjoy this game, and think it's an improvement over Fallout 3. Sure, the version of this game that exists in my head is a million times better, but as an old man of 24, I've learned to accept that daydreaming ways a game could be improved doesn't do much good unless you start a YouTube channel, and I'm too lazy for that. I'll probably keep playing it well into the future, no matter how mad I get. Like I said at the beginning, my relationship with Fallout 4 is toxic at best.

What kind of cruel joke is it that the day you start a modded playthrough Bethesda decides to roll out a 14gb update that basically destroys all of your mods.
War.. War never changes..

Great Game by any standard. NOTE Must get the Nexus mod Load Accelerator because the load times for walking through doors or fast traveling will lengthen as you play. I was up to 5 minutes per load screen. But with Load Accelerator the load times are in seconds vs minutes without. Easy to install and is quite stable.