In this way New Vegas reveals its overarching conflict, a small-time faction to cut your teeth on, the recent history of its locale, the ambivalent nature of the NCR, the danger of Caesar’s Legion, and a reputation system to balance between everyone caught in the middle. More and more guards get reassigned to the frontlines until the prisoners seize their opportunity (and, you know, gunpowder) to escape and stake a claim of their own. Especially when the greater faction goes to war with another upstart government, the outright fascist Caesar’s Legion. The NCR expands its influence with prison labor, granting the soon-to-be boomy raiders with explosives for blasting railway lines to the other coast. Said deathsticks were taken from the New California Republic: a blobby, neoliberal government annexing its way east. In the game’s first 45 minutes, you learn they took that name because of the vast gobs of dynamite they lob. The first raiders you encounter are a named crew called the Powder Gangers.
But the last solo Fallout is chock full of such repeatable, repetitive tasks that refill zones with nameless foes for you to shoot and loot.Ĭontrast this to Fallout: New Vegas (a game not made by Bethesda, crucially, but Obsidian Entertainment). Fallout 4 is all about “radiant quests,” which is a fancy way of describing the “go here and kill X enemies” missions you often find in MMOs. Fallout 4 treats raiders like an invasive species of freshwater crab - an endless pain in the ass that magically spawns on its own and out of sight.
Who these bandits are, where they come from, and what they want is basically irrelevant. Very little of that reached your hometown of Boston, apparently, as the land is almost entirely overtaken by disorganized “raiders” when you wake up. Particularly when the United States before the war was a racist, McCarthyist, capitalist nightmare to start. Said games are mostly about how the world picks itself back up after the bombs. The events of the other post-apocalyptic entries - New Vegas and the like - fly past while you’re in cryogenic stasis. If you never played the game (or watched Monster Factory) the intro is this: Your custom character gets locked in a freezer for 200 years while an alternate history North America gets nuked. It’s genuinely jarring - like playing through as a ghost NPCs can see and here, but who isn’t really there. The problem is, having seen that journey to its conclusion, I can finally report the game doesn’t actually give a glowing shit about its own premise. That’s especially true in Fallout 4 - a game that ironically tried to put more emphasis on the player character and their journey through a post-Boston wasteland. The most essential stories feel anything but. They remember nuking Megaton and turning into a werewolf while sculpting lovers out of cheese wheels. They remember joining the Dark Brotherhood or the Thieves Guild. At least as far back as Oblivion and Skyrim, people don’t talk about their central plots. That’s where the meat of these games resides anyway. Just a little slurpy loot goblin licking cakes off ancient tomb walls while scavenging bullets. I prefer to pick a direction and explore, eating any floor trash I find along the way.
Like most people I almost never bother beating Bethesda games. It’s only the second Bethesda Game Studios title I’ve ever “finished,” the other coincidentally being Fallout 3 back in 2008.
Specifically I finished Fallout 4 - the studio’s last single-player stab at the sci-fi series from 2015. I beat the main story quest in a Bethesda game.