The Therapist Gamer

Fallout 4

Fallout 4 is awesome.  It's one of the better games I've ever played, but such is the case with most games developed by Bethesda.  Fallout 4 is a 1st person shooter and RPG, and takes place in post-apocalyptic Boston, Massachusetts.  There is a huge variety of guns, armor, and other items throughout the game, and most things can be modified to suit your tastes.

 

The game starts out in 2077 in an alternate universe where U.S. culture is stuck in the 1950s.  You are visited by a salesman for a company called Vault-Tec.  He sells you a spot in an underground bomb shelter designed to shield its inhabitants from nuclear war and provide everything needed to survive for hundreds of years.  Wouldn't you know it, but the apocalypse starts just a couple of minutes after you buy a spot in the vault.  You and your wife run towards the vault with your son in her arms (you can play as a woman, and the roles are simply switched.  I played as a man, so that's the narrative I've provided).  Just before you go down into the vault, a nuke goes off just miles away.  You get down into the vault just in time with a few other members of your neighborhood.  Everyone is highly agitated and things are chaotic.  Some medical-looking people look you over and tell you to get into a large machine to be checked for any medical issues, and to clean you of radiation.  You climb into the machine, which closes a windowed hatch over you.  You're wife, still holding your son, is facing you in her own machine.  Suddenly, frost accumulates on the screen and you go unconscious.  They've cryogenically frozen you!  

 

In a moment, you open your eyes.  You see a man and scientist approach your wife's cryo-chamber, and it opens up.  After waking up, your wife asks what's going on.  The man demands your son, and your wife protests.  The man then shoots your wife in the head and takes your infant son.  He then closes the cryo-chamber and you and your wife are frozen again and things go black.  A moment later you wake up again.  This time alarms are going off and water is everywhere.  It appears as if the cryo-chambers have broken and you are being released.  There are fires in the vault and it appears that you need to leave in a hurry. You leave the vault and begin your search for your son.  How long have you been frozen?  How long ago was it that your son was stolen?  How can you possibly find him?

 

Needless to say, the story drew me in and I was engaged in it the whole time.  Before long you discover that there are a few different factions in Boston and each has their own interests.  Raiders roam the wasteland and kill anyone for any reason.  The Minutemen profess to fight for the disadvantaged and help out anyone in need.  The Brotherhood of Steel want to rid the wasteland of anything they deem unnatural, including ghouls, mutants, and machines.  The Institute is a secretive, almost mythical organization that supposedly creates machine copies of humans, murders the real human, and then replaces them with the machine.  The Railroad is a group that fights for the rights of Synths - robots who look like humans - and believes all people should be treated the same. 

 

Throughout the game you learn more about each group and ultimately need to side with one to the exclusion of the others.  Each group has things that most would find objectionable and things that are honorable.  For example, the Institute seems completely evil since they secretly kidnap and murder.  However, you eventually learn that the Institute does this for a purpose they believe is noble - they posit that life as it was is over, and that all people will become so irradiated that the human race will go extinct.  But machines are immune to radiation.  They believe that maintaining humanity through machines is the most realistic way to preserve humanity into the distant future.  Each group has such pros and cons.

 

Though I think the story is great, it is one of many well developed aspects of this huge game.  There are dozens, if not hundreds, of quests, and you are welcome to freely explore the wasteland at your leisure.  You might do so in an effort to acquire better guns, armor, and other equipment.  But places like elementary schools aren't loaded with guns and armor, so why go there?  Well, each item in the game can be broken down and salvaged for components.  For example, say you go to a school; you might find pens which you can salvage for springs, lunch trays that you can salvage for aluminum, and tape that you can salvage for adhesive.  You can use the springs to develop new gun parts, the aluminum to make some lightweight armor, and the tape to make just about anything!  This game design feature is, in my opinion, brilliant because it adds value to everything that you do.  In prior Fallout games all you could do with "junk" was launch it out of a special gun; in Fallout 4, everything has a potential use.

 

In addition to building weapons and suits of armor, you can establish settlements that you can design in any way you want.  For example, when you emerge from the vault you can visit your old, destroyed neighborhood.  You can clean things up and establish a base of sorts, complete with fortifications, shops, electric lights, and a jukebox.  All of it can be done to your design, and having lots of supplies increases your options for building.  This is a part of the gameplay I was a bit obsessed with.  It's possible for your settlements to be attacked, but I actually wish this happened a bit more often and in more organic ways.

 

A trademark of the Fallout games is VATS, or Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System.  What this means is that you can play the game like a regular first-person shooter, but you can also press a button which slows time almost to a stop so you can target specific enemies and even parts of the enemy.  Based on your stats, you will see what the odds are that you will be able to hit where you are aiming.  You can't use VATS indefinitely, but it is based on a rechargeable "AP point" system, so you can definitely use it at least once for each encounter.  Even if certain stats aren't great, you can still get critical shots off by using good old-fashioned gaming skills.  Maybe your stats give you a 25% chance of getting a headshot in VATS, but you can always improve your real-life gaming skills to manually get that headshot.

 

Your stats improve for each level you gain, but you also get to pick a perk.  There are probably over 100 perks in 70 categories, and some of them really change the way you might play.  For example, I used a perk which enabled me to shoot through "soft" environmental objects in VATS (I could shoot through a wooden fence, but not a cement wall).  I also invested in learning science skills so I could develop a jetpack and jump up onto buildings.

 

Fallout 4 has an incredible soundtrack (well, I think so).  You have a computer on your wrist that acts as your menu, but it has a built in radio.  There is a classical music station as well as various channels created for gameplay purposes (distress signals, for example), but the real treat is the Diamond City Radio Station.  It plays songs from the 20's to the 60's, and there are a total of 36 songs.  Some of these I grew up listening to (I listened to Oldies), and some are so absurd I simply can't believe they're real songs (even though they are).  All of the songs were chosen because they are related to the Fallout 4 world in some way, so a lot of them have themes of atom bombs, nuclear fallout, the end of the world, etc.  I was inspired to sync each of these songs to appropriate gameplay - a project I grossly underestimated how much work it would take.  I'm proud of the result, though, and believe it is the greatest YouTube soundtrack ever assembled.  You can click that link to get to the playlist, and I've included a few sample videos on this page.

 

There is more that I could say about Fallout 4, such as the companion system or the expansive Power Armor system, but I think I've said enough.  I think most gamers would enjoy this game but people able to invest some time into it will like it all the more.  It's too bad Fallout 5 will probably take another seven years to get released!