It is extremely rare that I find it hard to continue playing a game, yet write anything about it as a review of sorts. Usually it’s simple – I stop playing, I stop caring, I drop the game, end of story. With Fallout 4, however, things are so complicated that I cannot not write at least something.
You see, even going into the game with an extremely open mind, knowing that this has barely anything to do not just with classic Fallout titles, but even the previous two, knowing that the story is crap, that there are countless typical Bethesda issues that never got fixed and never will unless you install countless mods. Just going in with the intention to play a post-apocalypse themed action RPG/FPS with the usual Bethesda “to-do list” design I eventually hit a wall.
It’s shocking, really, that back with Skyrim the studio figured out how to make the rather boring gameplay in the samey looking locations feel fun. There was a certain feeling of reward in just finding a new dungeon, going through it, having it be marked as “cleared” and moving on. It was fun to do the simplest quests with the most basic story and easy to see which ones were just infinitely spawning garbage you could avoid. You could, in a way, “complete” Skyrim and yet at the same time still have stuff to do there if, and only if, you wanted to. I didn’t, but getting to that point was fun.
Fallout 4 removes that feeling entirely. For whatever reason, the game is designed about everything constantly respawning, nothing ever remaining “done”. Which could work in a game where you have other reasons to do things – good story, memorable characters, shifting balance of powers that you’re constantly trying to overcome… Or, at least, locations that don’t look the same. Anything could help. Yet, Fallout 4’s main loop is clearing the locations on the map, which is impossible, because they never stay clear. And you can never know for sure what you have explored and what you have not.
Now, there are people who like this kind of stuff, so good for them. Some people loved Oblivion gates 14 years ago (or Oblivion as a whole), I just found them boring (and the game as a whole). I’m sure there are people who love just wasting time hanging out in the infinitely respawning title like this one as well. Heck, there are people who enjoy Fallout 76 which has even less reasons to ever play it, yet people do, so clearly there can be enough for some. But this is very much not enough for me or anyone who has similar preferences. And it’s a shame – there are lots of cool concepts in this game that are blatant improvements over the previous attempt Bethesda had with the franchise. Yet, they turned their “checklist” gameplay loop into an “infinite checklist” and, honestly I didn’t find that fun at all.