What’s an RPG?
Strip away the tropes and conventions of the genre and there
are two linked characteristics common to all role playing games (RPGs) —
a (hopefully) strong story, and the opportunity to make meaningful
choices that influence how the game’s narrative evolves. Some games play
out the same way but allow the gamer to choose different play styles,
while others allow the player to directly shape the narrative.
Because game assets and development time are both scarce resources,
the best RPGs developers are skilled illusionists. Quest lines,
conversation threads, and plot-specific developments are often woven in
ways that give players enough freedom to explore alternative narratives
while minimizing the amount of overhead required to do so. In Fallout: New Vegas, you can choose to stand with Mr. House, New Vegas, the NCR, or Caesar’s Legion. What you can’t
do is decide that the Mojave is really boring, and you’d really prefer
to see what the Baja Peninsula is like 200 years after the bombs fell.
Fallout New Vegas: A study in brown
RPGs are the only popular game type whose abbreviation tells you nothing about how
you play the title. Every other abbreviation — FPS, RTS, turn-based,
third-person shooter — is designed to explain how the player experiences
the game. All of these game types are potentially compatible with the
label “RPG.”
Where Fallout 4 falls short
Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.
There’s infamous bad blood between fans of the first two Fallout games, which were isometric turn-based titles, and gamers who discovered the series with Fallout 3 / Fallout: New Vegas. I’m one of the latter type — while I’ve been playing PC games since the mid-1980s, Fallout and Fallout 2
didn’t make it on to my radar for whatever reason back when they were
new. My first exposure to the series was with Fallout 3 and while I’ve
tried to dive back into the earlier games, I’ve had trouble switching
back to turn-of-the-century gameplay and UI designs.
I bring this up to make it clear that I’m comparing FO4 to its
immediate predecessors, not kickstarting an ancient debate over the
direction Bethesda took the series.
Fallout 4 has two problems that mutually reinforce
each other. Throughout the first part of the game, the overarching goal
is to find the son stolen from you while you were trapped in cryogenic
stasis. Once you find him, you discover he’s the leader of the evil
Institute, a secretive organization whose artificial humans (called
synths) have been replacing humans in key positions of power for years,
if not several decades.
The Institute
How you play Fallout 4 is largely determined by how you view
synths and the question of artificial consciousness. In theory, this
could have been an amazing plot. One of your companions in
Fallout 4, Nick Valentine, is a synth with the transplanted mind of a
police officer who was killed just before the Great War erupted. He
openly questions whether or not he actually exists, or if he’s just a
shadow, a copy of a man 200 years dead.
One of the factions in the game, the Railroad, passionately believes that synths are people, first and foremost. Most of the other factions see them as a dangerous, evenly deadly, invasion force. The Institute maintains that synths are robots, incapable of any kind of thought.
Fallout 4 presents you with plenty of evidence that the
Institute is wrong, and virtually no data to suggest they might be
right. The game never explains why they believe synths are just
robots, nor why the Institute is replacing human beings with synthetics
in the first place. It’s loosely implied that the Institute believes
human beings can’t be fixed and that the solution is to “redefine”
mankind — one of your companions, X6-88, openly states that things will
be better once all the humans living above ground (the Institute is
below the ruins of the alternate-universe MIT, dubbed the Commonwealth
Institute of Technology) are dead and gone.
The game doesn’t explain why the Institute has been creating Super
Mutants with Fallout’s Forced Evolutionary Virus, why the Institute
believes that communities of humans who survived a nuclear war are going
to roll over and die at some point in the near future. There’s no
discussion on the nature of synth consciousness that would prove the
Institute is correct.
As the player, you encounter various types of synth, with
early models clearly robotic and the later designs indistinguishable
from humans, but you never have the opportunity to question them or
gather data to make an informed decision. The Fallout games use terminal
entries to give you critical backstory and information, but information
on these critical issues is almost entirely missing.
The mastermind behind the Institute, but he calls you Dad.
If you back the Institute, you do so out of perceived
loyalty to your son, a man decades older than you, whom you didn’t raise
and haven’t met. That’s despite the fact that he leads an organization
that’s guilty of mass murder and (arguably) slavery.
The second problem with Fallout 4 is that while you can
choose which faction you side with, the entire game boils down to one of
two, nearly identical endings — the Nuclear Family, or the Nuclear
Option. While the game’s final quests play out somewhat differently
depending on which faction you choose, there are just two endings.
Neither explains anything about what happened to the Commonwealth after
the events of Fallout 4. Your friends, companions, and the settlements
you visited — you find out nothing about how the choices you made will
shape the Wasteland in the future. Mamma Murphy will present you with a
few vague lines of vision if you visit her after the game ends, and
Piper might write a newspaper story. That’s it.
Evolution or abandonment?
Fallout 4 does a lot of things right. The early Deathclaw encounter is fabulous. The gunplay and exploration are both great. Re-imagining Ghouls as fast zombies was a brilliant twist.
Ghouls are less oozy and more leathery in FO4. As zomibe analogs, they’re terrifying for low-level characters.
Often, however, Fallout 4 feels like it doesn’t
quite know what it wants to be. It nails the first-person shooter
aspects better than either FO3 or FNV, but the game suffers from a lack
of focus. It has a settlement mini-game wedged in, despite a poor UI and
limited construction options (I mostly gave up on settlements once I
realized there’s no way to actually build things out of new material. Evidently no one in the Commonwealth actually cares if houses have walls or not).
Some of your companions, like Nick Valentine, Cait,
MacCready, and Curie, have compelling side quests of their own. Others,
like Strong, Preston Garvey, X6-88, and even Codsworth often feel tacked-on. I experimented in Fallout 4
by often taking companions to areas of the Commonwealth I thought
they’d be interested in or have special dialog triggers when visiting.
Mostly, I was disappointed.
Fallout 4’s junk collection and settlement game are meant to give
players an intriguing new way to spend time in-universe, but I found the
endless scrap collecting quickly wears thin — and you’ll need
to collect scrap if you want to tramp around in power armor on a regular
basis. More than anything, it highlights the fact that the FO4 world is
essentially static. No one writes new music. There are few farms and
settlements before you arrive on the scene, and no infrastructure. No
sawmills, no granaries, no glass blowers or potters or independent
craftsman. Culture, such as it is, is frozen in the Pre-war epoch, with a
literal 50s biker gang roaming the southeast Commonwealth.
One
quest in FO4 takes you to this submarine (water effects disabled to
show the sub design, which is why there are upside down boats floating
nearby
Crafting is meant to give you a way to expand your
character, but FO4’s system often highlights its own bizarre nature. To
give you an idea how ridiculous this is, there are craftable recipes in
FO4 that require dirty water. All of the water in the Commonwealth is
dirty by default. Yet you can’t produce dirty water by putting a bucket
under a faucet. I can’t help thinking this is a limit of continuing to
use the same Creation Engine that powered last-gen games — it clearly
wasn’t designed to allow for flexible crafting.
Plenty of games require you to mine or find components for crafting, but Fallout 4
buries you under an absolute avalanche of junk. The longer I played,
the more I found myself wondering how any of this stuff could still
exist, given that settlers apparently required it for all the same
things I did, yet had no means of producing it themselves.
Fallout 4 is gorgeous if you catch it right
FPS games can get away with this kind of flat,
two-dimensional environment because they typically aren’t designed for
depth. As I said in the beginning, all RPGs are illusions — digital
stagecraft, with old terminals and forgotten tomes standing in for the
long-ago characters and events they chronicle. In Fallout 4’s case, the
paint has begun to chip; the 50s shtick and eternal, frozen society in
which everyone has more-or-less forgotten how to make things is wearing
thin.
There are hints of brilliance in Fallout 4’s narrative and
setting. It’s just a shame that they aren’t more than hints. It’s a
great first-person shooter and I’m excited to see what modders can do
with it once the GECK is released, but if this is the direction future
games will take, I’m going to have a hard time getting interested in the
future of the franchise. FO3 and FNV may not have satisfied fans of the
first two games, but they built interesting worlds in their own right. Fallout 4 raises great questions, but then forgets to answer them.
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