TIME EXTEND
Derided by diehards at launch, Bethesda’s RPG has revealed its depths over time
Developer Bethesda Game Studios Publisher Bethesda Softworks Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2015
At launch, in 2015, Fallout 4 arrived like the dropping of a bomb. At the point of impact, it broke records, flattening GTAV’s for the highest number of concurrent players in a Steam game not developed by Valve. And with that bright light hanging in the sky, it took a moment for the sound of dissent to catch up.
Much of that came from the subset of players who considered its predecessor, Fallout: New Vegas, the high point of the series. That game – a rare commission from outside of Bethesda’s own stable of developers – had been distinguished by slow-burn faction stories and choices that meaningfully rewarded skill specialisation.
Five years later, though, Fallout 4 seemed to show an intention to step away from these traits. And indeed from Traits, the characterful modifiers revived from Black Isle’s original Fallout games by New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment (no wonder, given the studios’ entwined histories) but absent here. The logic might have been sound enough, part of an effort to streamline levelling up, at the expense of divergent character customisation. Yet it fuelled a common fan perception: that Bethesda considered this external project something of a two-headed stepchild. An outlier to be corrected for, rather than a model to repeat and be built upon.
Time has shown the flaw in that thinking, with senior Bethesda staffers publicly praising Obsidian’s work, and the publisher selling ‘Vegas’ sign T-shirts on its merch store. And the years have demonstrated Fallout 4’s staying power; along with Skyrim and The Witcher 3, the game forms a bedrock of ageing RPGs that never leave Steam’s most-played list, a position that surely gives the lie to those concerns about streamlining.
At first glance, though, Fallout 4 still comes off as a tacit remake of its numbered predecessor. The revolution really happened in 2008, when Fallout 3 saw Bethesda first get to grips with ballistics, and splice its fantasy RPG formula with immersive-sim DNA, courtesy of Thief II veteran Emil Pagliarulo, who as lead designer was consciously emulating Deus Ex. (“To the point where I knew I was stealing from it wholesale at some points,” he told Rock Paper Shotgun in 2010.)
Fallout 4 offers no comparable leap forward. Indeed, at times, its refusal to move forward can be maddening. Why, when Nightdive’s comparatively tiny System Shock remake team can come up with a whole suite of hacking minigames, are we still engaging with one ’00s-era letter-matching puzzle to crack open every terminal in post-apocalyptic Massachusetts? Where are the advancements in lockpicking, or new tactical options for controlling your companions? Were
